Columbia, Mo. ? It was another day of carnage for college football’s elite class, another wild and crazy Saturday afternoon when the Top 25 rankers were getting reshuffled like a deck of cards.
Virginia Tech already had lost a few days ago, but now one by one the Mizzou players could take a quick glance up at the colorful end-zone scoreboards that hovered over Faurot Field and see a few more members of the collegiate high and mighty taking a tumble.
Florida beaten.
South Florida upset.
Southern Cal bagged, too.
These staggered big shots at least were knocked off by other nationally ranked teams. But the 13th-ranked Tigers were dealing with a different breed of opposition – 1-7 Iowa State – and who knew this was the day that the meek Cyclones decided they wanted to inherit the Earth?
The Tigers were nearing halftime barely leading Iowa State by 17-14, and this was just about the time when certain reflex actions were supposed to take place in Mizzou country.
The fans were supposed to get queasy.
The football team was supposed to find a way to lose this game.
That, of course, was old Mizzou talking to you. But by now we’re all starting to get the point that this really is a new Mizzou.
New Mizzou is a program that has apparently reached its maturity. New Mizzou is a senior-led team that finds ways to win. New Mizzou is a team that has learned from its frustrating past and now dares to believe it can go to some rather impressive places, turn some long-overdue corners and refuse to fall back on old and agonizing habits.
Missouri 42, Iowa State 28.
“Our kids know how to win these games now,” said a matter-of-fact coach Gary Pinkel. “We’ve been there. We’ve done it enough that we certainly were tested, and we handled it pretty good.”
This was the kind of game that every cynical and angst-ridden Mizzou fan was waiting for after the Tigers got off to their impressive 5-0 start this season. This was the sort of game that history told us the Tigers would lose, because, over the past five years, it’s painfully documented that they lose games they shouldn’t, and those games always take them on late-season collapses that turn promising seasons into disappointing ones.
This is a football team that over the previous four seasons has gotten off to a combined record of 20-4 to begin the season, yet followed that with 8-17 tumbles. There was the 5-1 start in 2003 that was followed up by a 3-4 finish. There was the 4-1 start the next season and the 1-5 finish. In ’05, the Tigers started 5-2 and finished 2-3, and last year’s 6-0 start ended with a 2-5 drop-off.
So now this year’s Tigers burst out of the blocks at 5-0, lost a competitive contest to highly ranked Oklahoma on the road, then came back last week with a stunning, 41-10 shellacking of Texas Tech.
And now along comes 1-7 Iowa State.
Come on, tell me at least six or seven times in that first half you didn’t start channeling the most negative, ill-fated, Cubs fan-like gloom and doom?
But the Tigers seem to be showing us that they’ve finally shed those negative vibes. Harsh failure will do that to you, and good, mature teams learn from those mistakes and grow from them.
And now it’s time to pay close attention to what lies ahead for Mizzou, and I know this is hard to absorb because, well, when was the last time you took the Tigers seriously?