COLUMBIA | There are some who won’t be satisfied with the answers given to the questions posed.
There are probably some who wouldn’t be too pleased that the questions were posed in the first place.
But when it comes to Missouri losing four of its last five games — including, of all things, to Baylor 40-32 last Saturday — the resurrected bottom-line reaction of Missouri coach Gary Pinkel leads to such consternation.
“I accept that responsibility,” Pinkel said in his weekly media conference on Monday afternoon.
“I’m responsible for that,” Pinkel said later.
“Our fans have a better expectation level than what they’re seeing,” Pinkel said on still another occasion. “They should. That’s my job. I deserve to be criticized for it.”
Once upon a time, this was the standard response for disappointments that cropped up as Pinkel tried to build a winning football program out of decades of mediocrity.
Seldom were those discouraging words heard the last two seasons because, no matter how soundly Missouri was beaten by Oklahoma in the Big 12 championship game, at least the Tigers got there.
They won the Big 12 North Division two straight years. They won the Cotton Bowl. They won the Alamo Bowl.
That, however, didn’t change how Pinkel — and, frankly, the staff he has trained — reacts to adversity.
So Pinkel blamed himself, and likely hoped that would take care of the public discussion as he turned back to the more important, and more private, task of fixing what he saw as needing fixing with this team.
A question regarding what exactly Pinkel thought needed to be fixed produced the following response midway through Pinkel’s Monday media gathering.
“What do you want fixed?” Pinkel said. “In reference to what?”
The second-half lack of scoring. Start there.
“You counsel players,” he said. “You stop practice. You say, ‘This is the second half. This is the fourth quarter.’ ”
A sort of role-playing in practice.
“But obviously, we’re not doing a good enough job,” Pinkel added.
Everything seems so obvious to Gary Pinkel. And a lot of it was against Baylor.
“The bottom line is you can’t take sacks, you can’t drop footballs, you can’t have penalties,” Pinkel said. “You can’t have critical errors that hurt yourself. And we did a lot of that offensively in the second half.”
There were also a lot of missed tackles on defense. Seventeen, by Pinkel’s count.
Yes, he admitted, the defense that made up for Missouri’s offensive swoon in the second half at Colorado was mystifying in its inability to stop Baylor in either half.
“It looked,” Pinkel said, “like two different defenses. But I’m responsible for it. So I take it. I have to deal with that.”
Frankly, a lot of coaches and some players at Missouri are good at taking blame for this, that and everything.
Even when, in the case of sophomore quarterback Blaine Gabbert, the self-blame game seems largely unjustified or at least mitigated by this being his first season as a starter.
Rookie defensive coordinator Dave Steckel said it was his job “to be able to put the players in a better position.”
That, at least, sounded like a solution.
Don’t ask players to do what they cannot do. Ask them to do what they can do. And build a game plan from there.
One of those players, defensive back Kevin Rutland, said: “I direct it right at myself. Most players do. We’re playing this game. It’s our fault. It’s up to us. We play football.”
To reach Mike DeArmond, send e-mail to mdearmond@kcstar.com
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