I think most agree that this year’s schedule is a lot harder than the last. Playing against 2 teams that played for the National Championship last year and a lot of the other hard games are on the road. But I think this schedule might help the team this year more than it did last year. Now let me tell you why.
Something that people do complain about during Pinkel’s career was that we had some large cupcakes in September. Why not schedule this power 5, why not schedule this tougher opponent. I think GP had the right mindset when he came into Mizzou that this program wasn’t ready for a tough non-con. He set up the schedule to allow his team time to figure things out in September. It paid off for him. Later in his career, he started setting up bigger match up (note, probably wasn’t on purpose as they had to move conference and scheduling got screwed up).
Anyways, what I am trying to get at is that while this year’s schedule is hard…it is setting up to be stepping stones for this team. You start off with FCS team, next week is against a lower tier FBS team. Then you get into a power 5 non-con team who is on the right track, still isn’t a hard power 5. Then finally you face off against Georgia. While not ideal and it would have been nice to face Memphis or Vanderbilt in week 4, it still gives you time to adjust, fix, and get ready for Georgia. Mizzou didn’t have that luxury the past two years. Odom first game as Head Coach was against a really good West Virginia that year (went 10-3) and then last year went up against a good South Carolina team the 2nd week in which they were awful on defense the week prior (which they played pretty well for 2 quarters until that kick return changed all the momentum). That game killed a lot of confidence and mindset that...well you saw the next week in how they played against Purdue.
Each week will give this team some confidence leading up to Georgia. While I don’t know if they’ll be 3-0 going into the game, I think they have a good chance to really improve and build upon the next week to get to their max potential than they did the past few years. Look at 2010 for example, we almost lost to San Diego St. (which turned out to be a good football team by the end of it)…you think we would have won against OU if they had played them on the 3rd game of the season. Probably not. They got 6 games to gain confidence in themselves before facing off OU. While we don’t have that luxury this year, it is still better than the previous 2 years.
IS IT SATURDAY YET?! Longest 4 days of my life.
Something that people do complain about during Pinkel’s career was that we had some large cupcakes in September. Why not schedule this power 5, why not schedule this tougher opponent. I think GP had the right mindset when he came into Mizzou that this program wasn’t ready for a tough non-con. He set up the schedule to allow his team time to figure things out in September. It paid off for him. Later in his career, he started setting up bigger match up (note, probably wasn’t on purpose as they had to move conference and scheduling got screwed up).
Anyways, what I am trying to get at is that while this year’s schedule is hard…it is setting up to be stepping stones for this team. You start off with FCS team, next week is against a lower tier FBS team. Then you get into a power 5 non-con team who is on the right track, still isn’t a hard power 5. Then finally you face off against Georgia. While not ideal and it would have been nice to face Memphis or Vanderbilt in week 4, it still gives you time to adjust, fix, and get ready for Georgia. Mizzou didn’t have that luxury the past two years. Odom first game as Head Coach was against a really good West Virginia that year (went 10-3) and then last year went up against a good South Carolina team the 2nd week in which they were awful on defense the week prior (which they played pretty well for 2 quarters until that kick return changed all the momentum). That game killed a lot of confidence and mindset that...well you saw the next week in how they played against Purdue.
Each week will give this team some confidence leading up to Georgia. While I don’t know if they’ll be 3-0 going into the game, I think they have a good chance to really improve and build upon the next week to get to their max potential than they did the past few years. Look at 2010 for example, we almost lost to San Diego St. (which turned out to be a good football team by the end of it)…you think we would have won against OU if they had played them on the 3rd game of the season. Probably not. They got 6 games to gain confidence in themselves before facing off OU. While we don’t have that luxury this year, it is still better than the previous 2 years.
IS IT SATURDAY YET?! Longest 4 days of my life.
