Voice of the Fantlebury: Same ol', same ol'
You’ve got to believe me — I really wanted to write about something else this week.
Literally, anything else.
I wanted to look at Nick Bolton’s stellar season and how he’s quickly becoming Missouri’s next star defender (and having a performance overshadowed by a disappointing season, a la Kentrell Brothers in 2015). But that’s a beat writer-type story, and those days are behind me.
I even thought about writing about basketball, but Gabe’s inability to tell me the channel number for CBS Sports on my cable provider rendered that goal moot.
So, back to square one. And square one, unfortunately, is the spiral this football season has taken.
I went into the game Saturday with no expectation that Missouri would play Georgia close or pull off an upset. Some may call that attitude defeatist. And, yes, the game started six hours into a 12-hour day babysitting my 10-month old twin niece and nephew, so needless to say I was already feeling a bit defeated by then.
But, since 2016, if Missouri loses a game, it tends to lose by a lot. So when the Tigers are going up against a top-ten team — well, you see where I’m going.
Barry Odom has lost 23 games in his almost four seasons as Missouri’s coach. In that time, his teams’ average margin of defeat has been 16.5 points (a negative-380 point differential in 23 games). In Gary Pinkel’s first 23 losses (2001-2004), Missouri’s average margin of defeat was 15.96 points.
Yeah, those numbers are pretty close. No, I don’t think that’s a good thing. We’ve effectively hit the reset button on the program after Missouri’s rise from 2006 through 2014. Maybe that was inevitable after the tumultuous 2015 season. But, nearly four full seasons later, we’re seeing the same trend: A lack of consistency, perplexing losses and non-competitive performances in the biggest games.
Let’s put this in context. It’s hard to pick a point margin that would clearly indicate an uncompetitive loss. Missouri lost by 14 points to Georgia in 2018; anyone that watched that game wouldn’t call it uncompetitive, though. But, let’s just stick with that two-touchdown mark as a barometer of a generally uncompetitive game for the sake of this exercise.
Since 2016, here’s how many two-touchdown losses each SEC East team has suffered:
Georgia — 4
Florida — 10
Kentucky — 10
South Carolina — 11
Missouri — 14
Tennessee — 14
Vanderbilt — 17
Two of those teams have undergone coaching changes since the 2016 season (Florida and Tennessee). Will Muschamp at South Carolina was hired the same year as Odom; he also has to face Clemson every year. Vanderbilt may soon be undergoing a coaching search; until a recent resurgence, it looked like Tennessee would be doing the same.
Pinkel lost 12 games by two touchdowns or more in his first four seasons.
I get it. We can pick and choose any stat we want to prove our point. And maybe I don’t have a point so much as a feeling — a feeling that Missouri’s fanbase is quickly falling back into apathy. Amid all the inconsistency over the last few seasons, the only thing that’s been consistent is Missouri’s performance in its toughest games. An unranked team is not often going to beat a ranked team; an unranked team beating a top-ten team is even less likely.
What Pinkel had after that was a group of players led by Chase Daniel that included the likes of Martin Rucker, Chase Coffman, Tony Temple, Jeremy Maclin, Lorenzo Williams and more. Does Odom have that? We don't know yet. If he does, maybe we see another resurgence. But the other thing Pinkel had was a track record of having done it before. Odom doesn't have that either. Everyone gets a start somewhere. Maybe Odom's is around the corner. But there is increasing skepticism among the fanbase they should believe it is.
But bring me back the days when Missouri playing ranked teams close was a legitimate hope going in. Because, outside of Florida last year (a great win, but seemingly more and more of an aberration), the fanbase knows what to expect when Missouri plays its toughest opponents. We've seen it before. And it's not all that fun.