MU has prime-time troubles

The first stars of “Saturday Night Live” were known as the “not ready for prime-time players.”

After Saturday’s loss at home to Oklahoma, the Missouri football team might bear a similar moniker.

“I just don’t think we were as well-prepared as we should have been,” tight end Chase Coffman said after the game.

When asked if it was possible if the team was caught looking ahead, Coffman said he wasn’t sure.

“I don’t know, maybe,” he said.

Lorenzo Williams disagreed with Coffman, though.

“No, I don’t think so at all. I think we were really prepared for the game,” Williams said. “But you can’t make mistakes, and that’s pretty much what happened today.”

Before Saturday, the talk around Columbia was that games against Oklahoma and Nebraska were the best chance for the Tigers to forge an identity and claim a spot among the top teams in the country.

Instead, the Tigers looked like a team that wasn’t used to important games, especially compared with the big-game experience of Oklahoma. But the Tigers didn’t agree with that notion.

“I’m never nervous about anything,” safety David Overstreet said. “I don’t care who we’re playing. Nobody scares me. I always say nerves are nothing. We just have to stop making mistakes that we shouldn’t be making if we want to be a good team.”

Missouri’s game at 11 a.m. Saturday in Lincoln, Neb., is in all likelihood the last chance for the Tigers to distance themselves from a label as a good team, but one not ready for greatness. A mid-level bowl will become increasingly likely if the Tigers exhibit the same sloppiness they did against the Sooners.

Still, the importance of the game against Nebraska doesn’t change.

Despite Missouri’s loss and Nebraska’s loss to Oklahoma State, it will still be a battle for first place in the Big 12 North.

The teams will enter the game tied for first in the division, with the winner technically taking a two-game lead because the first tiebreaker is the head-to-head result. Kansas State is also a game behind Missouri and Nebraska in the North standings, but has already lost to the Tigers and the Cornhuskers, putting the Wildcats an additional game behind.

“But the good thing is we put ourselves in a position early on in the season,” Chase Daniel said. “Going into Lincoln, the North is going to be a fight.”

The bottom line is if Missouri wins its next three games, it will be playing for the Big 12 Conference Championship in Kansas City. Lose in Lincoln, as the Tigers have done in every game there since 1978, and they will need serious help to play in Kansas City.

“It’s not going to be about Nebraska,” Gary Pinkel said. “It’s going to be about how we play.”

RANKINGS: Missouri fell out of the top-25 of the Associated Press poll, but barely remained in the coaches’ poll, checking it at No. 25. Nebraska was ranked No. 20 in both polls before Saturday, and is not ranked in either poll this week.

BOWL WATCH: Earlier this week, the Big 12 announced the selection order for the bowls the conference is tied-in with. The Big 12 has eight bowl slots guaranteed, but the conference is partnered with nine bowls. The arrangement with the Gator Bowl is that a Big 12 team is selected twice over a four-year period. The order the bowls will have in selecting Big 12 teams is: BCS, Cotton, Holiday, Gator (when it selects a Big 12 team), Alamo, Sun (when the Gator does not select a Big 12 team), Insight, Independence, Texas.