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1) This is the one we've been pointing to for nine months. Missouri has played a couple of dress rehearsals. They haven't exactly gone as smoothly as you'd have liked, but the Tigers got through them without falling down, ripping the costume, breaking their legs and having to call on the understudy. They've made it to opening week 2023.
The season, in all reality, starts on Saturday at 11 am against the Kansas State Wildcats. K-State comes in ranked 15th in the country having outscored SEMO and Troy by a combined score of 87-13. The Cats have handled their business. Here's an interesting note involving this one:
It's tough to really overstate how big this one is for Missouri. There are a million reasons. First of all, it really does seem like the separator between a good season and a really good season. Missouri can still have a good season if it loses to Kansas State. It is very difficult to imagine the Tigers being able to put something together that would be considered really good or great if they lose to the Wildcats.
Just as much as that, though, let's be honest about it. Kansas State embarrassed Missouri last year. There was so much talk of renewing a rivalry and conference pride and taking the next step. And K-State treated the Tigers like they've treated SEMO and Troy this season. Mizzou trailed 40-6 before taking five plays from the two-yard line to score on an untimed down. The game had been built up as a measuring stick and Missouri didn't even register on the scale. They were outclassed by the Cats in every way. And then K-State went on to have the season Missouri fans have been hoping to have for eight years. So, yeah, this one means a little more this time around.
"This is a big week," quarterback Brady Cook said after the Middle Tennessee State game on Saturday night. "For me it starts right after this interview. This team wants this one a lot. We're gonna prepare our butts off, we're gonna clean up whatever happened out there tonight. But yeah this is a big one. We're hungry for this one."
The fans are going to be putting the entire season on Saturday. If Missouri can get things going and pull out a win over the Wildcats, the first two weeks are forgotten, Mizzou is 3-0 with a great chance at 5-0 and this board is going to be full of talk about the train speeding down the tracks. If not, we're going to endure another week of hot board talk and looking forward to hoops. There will be very little in between. It's the biggest game Missouri has played since the last time it played K-State. If the Tigers can win, future games become bigger. If not, it's a slog to see if you can find a way to scratch out seven wins and claim at least a small step forward.
2) There's certainly a bad taste Missouri is looking to erase this week. After week one, there was a fair amount of skepticism and negativity after a win over South Dakota. The Tigers won easily, but weren't as dominant as people hoped. But there were also plenty of people who saw the opening win as simply taking care of business and moving on. There's far less of that this week. Very few people are optimistic coming out of Saturday.
What struck me is that the head coach seemed a lot closer to the feelings of all of us after the 23-19 win over the Blue Raiders. Eli Drinkwitz is interesting to cover because you're honestly never quite sure how he's going to react after a game. He's surprised me multiple times over three years. Sometimes after a win he's pretty critical of his team and not handing out the praise you'd expect. Sometimes after a loss, he can get snarky and a little combative. I thought there was a chance we'd see that on Saturday night in the post-game press conference. I knew most of the questions weren't going to be of a real positive nature and I thought there was a chance we'd get some one-liners and a general attitude of "Geez, we're 2-0, I don't think you guys understand how hard it is to win." That's not what we got.
Drinkwitz generally seemed to share the attitude of the fanbase and the media: That wasn't good enough and we have to figure it out in a hurry. To be honest, to me, he seemed a little beaten down. It's a dangerous game to try to read into body language or get in the mind of someone that you don't really know outside of this transactional business relationship. But Drinkwitz looked and sounded to me like a guy that expected to have a team that's better than what it's shown in the first two weeks. There was genuine optimism around fall camp. The vibe I got was that if they had the offensive line figured out, Mizzou thought it had a chance to get that big step forward springboard season. And the feeling to me was that they were fairly confident they had the offensive line figured out satisfactorily.
And then Saturday night happened. Drinkwitz wasn't sarcastic, he wasn't firing off barbs at anyone asking critical questions. He was pretty blunt. I asked him "Every coach says it's better to work on things after a win. Going into a game a lot of people have been pointing to, how close do you feel like you to what you want and getting this figured out."
His answer starts at the 8:05 mark in the video above with what I can only describe as an exasperated sigh. "Umm, I think there's a lot of things to work on. I mean I'm pleased with some of the numbers, right? We're 7 of 13 on third downs, we didn't have a turnover, we're 3/3 scoring in the red zone. But there's just so much to work on. Lack of explosiveness offensively, the short yardage debacles, missed extra point, it was tipped, poor protection. And then defensively, things we gotta work on. We'll hear it all week, which is probably fine. We just need to control what we can control, which is improving and preparing for a really good K-State team. Big 12 champs coming into our stadium."
That's a coach who understands why he's going to be taking heat this week and why his team is. It's a coach who I think agrees the criticisms are warranted. The sigh said as much as the words. But the words said a lot too. A coach that feels good about where his team's at doesn't use the word debacle. Drinkwitz isn't giving up like a lot of the fans might be, but he isn't denying the problems and pretending what we've seen out of his team the first two weeks is good enough either.
3) The biggest problem, in my mind, is that Missouri seems to have lost the edge it played and coached with when Drinkwitz started. I wrote about that on Saturday night. The 2020 team played with a chip on its shoulder and took great pride in proving a lot of people wrong. This year's team has spent the whole year telling us that's what it was going to do. They even installed a team motto of "Something to Prove," indicating they knew they had doubters and they were going to go show those doubters why they were wrong. But they're not playing like a team with something to prove. They're playing like a team that isn't very sure of itself, at least in 2/3 of the game (I still think the defense has measured up to expectations).
Sometimes when you follow a team really closely, when you're there every single day and it's your focus all the time, you have a tendency to get tunnel vision. You focus on the negatives with the team you follow without realizing that a whole lot of teams have bumps in the road. In other words, you're more critical of the team you follow every day than you would be of one you watch from afar. And while I'll admit that's a possibility, I don't think it's happening here.
This morning, I was listening to the weekend recap edition of The Solid Verbal, one of my favorite college football podcasts. They didn't spend much time talking about Mizzou/Middle Tennessee because why would they? But here were Dan Rubenstein's comments on the Tigers: "Does Eli Drinkwitz just go to recruits living rooms and say, 'I'm going to level with you, I'm scared of everything?' He just seems terrified. The number of times it's fourth and 1 from the other team's 48, cool, who are you playing? Middle Tennessee. Better punt it! Let's not go crazy! It's a very strange way to coach football. I feel bad about saying that Mizzou's offense will be interesting and fun and a little bit dangerous this year."
"They play scared."
"Middle Tennessee didn't do anything on offense against this team and it was a close game. That's tough."
Look, it would be great if I could look back two days after this game and say "You know what? I was a little unfair. I went in on them too hard because I see them every day and I held them to an expectation that was maybe a little unfair without looking at the rest of the college football landscape." Comments like this from national people tell me I didn't do that. They tell me my assessment was 100% fair and, at least right now, on target. It's gotta change.
