When college coaches talk about the big picture, they almost always speak in construction terms. They lay foundations and build programs. But the analogy only goes so far. Other than the actual brick-and-mortar facilities erected on the coach’s watch, the rest is ephemeral, an empire built on sand.
This occurred to me Saturday, as Missouri, a team that posted double-digit win totals in five of the previous 10 years, surrendered to Purdue, a team coming off six straight losing seasons. A usually good, occasionally great Missouri program for most of Gary Pinkel’s tenure has deteriorated in three years to a rubble pile of ineptitude and ennui.
Pinkel has to take some of the blame for the playmaker-free roster he left, but Barry Odom hasn’t inspired confidence that this is a temporary problem he’ll be able to fix. He has been the IT guy whose solution is to ask if you’ve tried restarting.
Mid-September is quite early for a team to be as uninterested as the Tigers were against the Boilermakers last week. There will be plenty of games, as soon as the one tomorrow against Auburn, in which Missouri will be less talented than its opponent, but that was not the case against Purdue. The 35-3 loss was explicable only if you acknowledge that the opponent gave a damn and the Tigers did not.
The first warning sign that this team might have some mental weakness in addition to its other flaws came the week before against South Carolina. When Deebo Samuel scored two touchdowns in a 30-second span, giving the Gamecocks a 14-10 second-quarter lead, Missouri was done.
Remember watching the video from the night Odom was hired, when the players went bonkers, mobbing him and chanting his name. If they gang-tackled like that on the field, they wouldn’t rank 102nd nationally in total defense.
They haven’t seemed nearly so excited to play for Odom since. I don’t think it’s a matter of him being too mean or too nice — he is neither — but rather that he is getting the substitute teacher treatment. He has to prove to the players he knows what he’s doing, can fix problems and generally has this situation under control before he will get their respect.
To this point, the only construction Odom has done is to dig a deeper hole for himself.
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The Purdue game had several troubling sequences: the four consecutive penalties on one offensive series; the continued inability of anyone on the roster to catch a punt cleanly on the rare occasions someone even attempts to catch a punt; the regression of an offense with 10 returning starters that refuses to use the middle of the field in the passing game.
Those mistakes were some combination of player and coach error, but one glaring mistake was solely on Odom. With 20 seconds left in the second quarter, he called the first of his three allotted timeouts of the first half. On the next play, Drew Lock completed a pass to Dimetrios Mason, who gained 17 yards to the Purdue 12-yard line before being tackled inbounds. With 12 seconds left, the obvious thing to do was call a timeout. That would have allowed the Tigers to take two more shots at a touchdown and still preserve the final timeout to stop the clock and set up a field goal if someone was tackled short of the end zone.
Odom did not call a timeout. He even had some time to think about it, because time was stopped while the officials moved the ball to the hash mark before restarting the clock. Seconds ticked away unnecessarily before the snap. Lock threw an incompletion that stopped the clock with four seconds left. Only then, when Odom had no choice but to send Tucker McCann out for a field goal on second down, did the coach call his second timeout. An unforced coaching error cost Missouri one more chance at a touchdown.
Why Odom didn’t use his timeouts? Some possible answers:
--Thought he could redeem them at TGI Fridays for half-price appetizers.
--Planned to convert them to pink slips for defensive assistants.
--Uncomfortable with messing around with time, because what happens if he accidentally prevents his parents from ever meeting?
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Missouri held a players-only meeting Monday, which at least demonstrated the Tigers’ willingness to show up at the football facility on their day off. I am skeptical that it is a sign of anything more significant than that.
The title of this column is “What Just Happened,” but allow me to take a peek one day into the future and make a prediction.
The Tigers will put forth a spirited effort against Auburn, lose a reasonably close game and then declare that if they play that inspired for the rest of the season, they will be fine.
Bonus prediction: They won’t play that inspired for the rest of the season and won’t be fine.
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I guess I won’t have Waltz to kick around anymore. When the third quarter ended Saturday, it was time for the weekly appearance of the deeply unpopular new inflatable mascot. The quarter break came and went, and no Waltz.
I can’t help but feel a little responsible for the mascot’s demise, as I used this space to suggest Waltz was a complete hack. Not that anyone was arguing the other side, but still, Waltz probably had a family to feed with some little blimps that had gone to school bragging that their old man was going to be flopping around in front of sellout crowds all year long.
So, Waltz, if you’re reading, I’m sorry. I probably shouldn’t have compared your dance moves to a seizure. I thought I did show some restraint, though, by not making any Hindenburg jokes.
