Missouri abandoned its running game early despite trailing by just three points in the third quarter.
It’s something Missouri coach Gary Pinkel is fond of saying: football games in the Big 12 Conference are almost always close.
Both teams will have tough moments. The team that wins is usually the team that responds to them better.
For a team coached by a man that understands that, the Tigers’ 13-3 loss to Kansas on Saturday was a mystery.
The Jayhawks were supposed to be a mere stepping stone on the way to a showdown with Colorado. When Kansas took a lead in the second quarter, held it and gave every indication that Missouri would have to work for a win, the Tigers didn’t respond well. There was no sense of calm on the sideline.
“(There were) people just bickering, doing stuff that’s not helpful and positive and motivating,” senior safety Jason Simpson said. “And I’m trying to get on them, ‘Get your heads up.’
“I mean, it’s not like we haven’t been there. We’ve been in that situation almost every single game. We’ve been coming back in fourth-quarter games, like, all year, so it really wasn’t panic mode.”
The Tigers, however, acted like it was. The signs of panic were there as soon as the early third quarter, when the Jayhawks’ lead was merely 6-3. The Tigers, whose staple is their running game, threw the ball on four of five plays of one possession, gaining only five yards and one first down.
“From a certain standpoint, we kind of got a little too frustrated,” quarterback Brad Smith said. “We got a little bit out of our rhythm. You’re still down three, 10 points at a time and we can score that pretty quickly. But I think we kind of let it get to us a little bit and when things aren’t working, we need to settle down and play our game.”
Later, after Kansas scored to make it 13-3, the Tigers started throwing downfield nearly every play, abandoning offensive consistency in search of a big play that might have swung momentum.
“We might of lost it at the end,” wide reciever Brad Ekwerekwu said. “That’s just humanistic ... it comes to a point where you just kind of look at your surroundings and you kind of realize what’s going on.”
Things likely won’t get any easier this week. The Tigers, who are in second place in the Big 12’s North Division, play first-place Colorado at 2:30 p.m. Saturday in Boulder, Colo. Chances are, more tough situations will arise.
“With failure, it’s only failure if you don’t learn anything,” Ekwerekwu said. “We can take that experience, that feeling, that actual moment in the game and if we visit that again ... we’ll know how to act rather than giving up or getting frustrated.”
Whether it was frustration, panic or simply lack of execution, it’s an attitude the Tigers (5-3, 3-2 Big 12) can’t afford to repeat in Boulder. Pinkel said mistakes, such as penalties and an errant snap that resulted in a 21-yard loss, fostered that attitude by putting the Tigers’ offense in bad situations.
He said, or at least hoped, that those miscues were an aberration.
“We had some sacks that got us into long-yardage situations and we had the snap over the head that got us into a long-yardage situation,” he said. “So it was not, I would suggest, normal. It’s the most penalties I’ve ever had.”
Either way, No. 25 Colorado (6-2, 4-1) probably will be even less forgiving than Kansas. That means the Tigers will need to remember Pinkel’s mantra more than ever: things will go wrong, but with a strong counter, victory can still be had.
“You can’t expect things to go well every time,” Smith said. “But if we go out there and we can just fight through it ... we can draw from this experience and be patient and the plays will come.”