Jeffersonian ideals: Gator Bowl means something extra to Mizzou football, Virginia

The University of Missouri and University of Virginia have always been closely connected.

UVA was founded in 1819 by former U.S. president Thomas Jefferson. Twenty years later, Mizzou was founded as the first public university in the territory acquired in the Louisiana Purchase, a deal with France that was orchestrated by … Thomas Jefferson.

When Mizzou was redesigning its quad after the Academic Hall caught fire in 1892, it modeled it after Virginia’s: a large rectangle surrounded by academic buildings along with a massive domed building at the top of the rectangle. The visionary for UVA’s quad? Jefferson, whose original headstone and statue are on the west side of Mizzou’s quad.

Oh, and MU is located 30 minutes away from Jefferson City, the state capital named after … good guess.

Nearly 200 years after Jefferson’s death, Mizzou and Virginia’s football teams will meet in the Gator Bowl on Saturday at 6:30 p.m. in Jacksonville, Florida.

Other than connections to Jefferson, the two universities haven’t had much to do with one another, especially in athletics. They’ve never been in the same conference, and their teams have barely played each other.

Football, men’s basketball, women’s basketball, baseball, softball, volleyball, wrestling and women’s tennis have combined for just 13 all-time matchups. In football, the Tigers and Cavaliers have played just once, all the way back in 1973.

But as the two teams prepare to play each other in the Gator Bowl, it’s worth pointing out their paths to Duval County are eerily similar.

A convergence of ascending programs

Mizzou’s elevation to national relevance has lasted longer than Virginia’s.

After tallying the second-fewest points in the SEC’s preseason media poll two years ago, the Tigers won 11 games for the first time since 2014 and finished in the AP top 10 for just the third time since 1970. They had a season-altering win over a top-15 opponent early in the season (Kansas State), in which their fans rushed the field after a game-winning play.

Two weeks later, MU checked in at No. 23 in the AP Top 25, the first time it had made the rankings since 2019.

While Mizzou hasn’t been able to recapture the magic of that season, the Tigers proved that 2023 wasn’t a massive outlier. Should they win the Gator Bowl, they’ll have won at least nine games in three straight seasons for the first time in program history.

What 2023 was to Mizzou is a little bit like what this season was for Virginia: an unexpected breakthrough for a program that hasn’t spent much time in college football’s upper echelon. After being picked to finish 14th in the ACC’s preseason media poll, the Hoos won 10 games for just the second time in program history.

They had a season-altering win over a top-15 opponent early in the season (Florida State) in which their fans rushed the field after a game-winning play. UVA checked in at No. 24 in the following week’s AP Top 25, the first time it had made the rankings since … 2019.

Both teams have also lived on the edge of late and won games in wild fashion. This season, the Hoos played in seven games decided by one possession. Four of them came in consecutive games: after beating Florida State in overtime, Virginia beat Louisville in overtime with the help of two defensive touchdowns, then beat Washington State on a safety late in the fourth quarter, then beat North Carolina in overtime by stopping a potential game-winning two-point conversion inches from the goal line.

Over the past three seasons, Mizzou is 11-3 in one-possession games. Some of those wins have come in mind-boggling manner, such as a 61-yard buzzer-beating field goal, a recently discharged hospital patient leading the Tigers to victory on homecoming and a last-minute fumble return for a touchdown.

On the other hand, both teams have been stung in one-possession games, too. Virginia lost to NC State by four points and Wake Forest by seven this season. While Virginia won the first three overtime contests it played this season, it couldn’t win the most important one.

In the ACC Championship against 7-5 Duke, the Blue Devils beat the Hoos 27-20 in overtime, knocking Virginia out of an assured spot in the College Football Playoff as the fourth-highest-ranked conference champion in the FBS.

“It almost seemed like (UVA fans) were waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the season to come crashing down in some weird way,” said Greg Madia, a Virginia football beat writer for the Charlottesville Daily Progress.

That’s because the Hoos tended to lose late in the season after starting hot, souring potentially awesome campaigns (which have been few and far between in Charlottesville, Virginia).

Knocking on the door of greatness, yet never quite getting in.

Mizzou hasn’t collapsed at the end of the season like that recently, but it has fallen just short of glory in another aspect. The Tigers have been within one win of competing for the BCS National Championship twice (2007, 2013) and within one win of an assured national title (1960) once. Mizzou lost all three games.

So naturally, the two teams will play at EverBank Stadium, home of the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars who, in their 31 years of existence, have lost all three conference championships they’ve played in.

Knocking on the door of greatness, yet never quite getting in.

Despite the heartbreak, the Tigers and Hoos elevating themselves into national prominence is the product of a bigger picture. They’re benefactors of college football’s new era, where the ability to pay players through NIL and revenue sharing as well as the transfer portal becoming a more viable avenue for roster-building has spread out talent like never before.

Top-end talent is still concentrated toward the Ohio States and Georgias of college football, but it’s trickled down to the Mizzous and Virginias, too.

Money talked, and they listened

In June, Eli Hoff of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that Mizzou spent roughly $31.7 million on NIL from July 1, 2024, to June 17 of this year, most of which went to football. At Virginia, Madia called UVA’s NIL situation “really good”.

“They’re spending exactly what a Power Four team with aspirations of winning should be spending,” he said.

The investment has shown up on the field. Both schools have been extremely active in the transfer portal over the past few seasons, and it’s yielded positive results. Each team’s leading passer, leading rusher and leading receiver is from the portal. Same for multiple starters along the offensive line, the leading tackler, tackles-for-loss leader and interceptions leader.

The programs have also received a handful of private donations that have funded massive structural projects. Since December 2024, Virginia athletics has received four major private donations.

At Mizzou, such donations have spurred the creation of the Stephens Indoor Practice Facility and ongoing renovations to the north end zone. Even with the immense progress MU has made in recent years, the program is still looking for more.

Coach Eli Drinkwitz said in November that he wanted more investment from Missouri’s Fortune 500 companies, a notion that Mizzou athletic director Laird Veatch seconded.

“I would say there’s a real open-mindedness and momentum there, but it takes time,” Veatch said. “I feel really good about our progress, but we’re getting to a point where we need more and more of those folks to see the wisdom in that and step up and partner in bigger and bigger ways.”

In September 2018, the UVA athletic department announced a master plan to both renovate existing athletic facilities and build new ones. They called the project … wait for it … the “Master Plan,” which includes three phases. Phase I and Phase II, which have both been completed, involved the construction of a new football operations center, as well as two natural grass practice fields.

“If you don’t invest, you don’t really have an opportunity to compete, because that’s what the landscape requires and demands,” UVA coach Tony Elliott said. “It doesn’t matter if you like it or not. It is what it is, and I’m just grateful that folks believe enough in this staff and these players to invest. And hopefully, this (season) is kind of an indication of what’s possible.”

Some of these efforts were catalyzed by the fact that both athletic departments felt like they were behind their conference peers in certain aspects. When Virginia’s Master Plan was unveiled, one part stated that every other ACC team had renovated or built new football support facilities since the McCue Center, which housed Virginia’s football operations, opened at UVA in 1991.

In December 2024, Mizzou athletics unveiled an initiative titled “Will to Win” in which it wrote that MU was behind many of its SEC counterparts in revenue, and because that revenue had to be shared with the student-athletes, the department needed more of it to keep swimming in the deep end with college football’s powerhouses.

The new landscape has turned losers into winners. Indiana, which had never won 10 games in a season until last year, is the No. 1 team in the country, quarterbacked by the Heisman Trophy winner (Fernando Mendoza). Vanderbilt, the SEC’s eternal doormat, won 10 games in 2025 and is quarterbacked by the Heisman Trophy runner-up (Diego Pavia).

Texas Tech, which hadn’t won an outright conference title since 1955 and had never finished in the top 10 of the final AP poll before this season, dominated the Big 12 and is a legitimate national-title contender.

For Mizzou and Virginia, the money-fueled success appears to be sustainable, at least in the near future. The Tigers have sustained success over the past two seasons following their breakthrough in 2023, and the Hoos now have a blueprint to work from going forward, at least according to Madia.

“I think now that some of those donors have seen the success, it’s going to continue to work in Virginia’s favor,” he said. “I know that the money is going to keep coming in, as long as (Virginia is) going to keep winning.”

When the two teams meet in Jacksonville, they’ll represent something greater than themselves.

Making the Gator Bowl mean more

The value of bowl games has become a hot topic lately, and a few programs have opted out of competing in them this season. Kansas State and Iowa State did so, and each program was fined $500,000 by the Big 12. Notre Dame declined to compete in the Pop-Tarts Bowl against BYU after getting left out of the College Football Playoff.

But the two teams competing in the Gator Bowl will have a lot to play for. Mizzou has a chance at unprecedented success, and while Virginia has rarely been this good, it’s also a chance for a senior class that’s been through tragedy to end those careers on a positive note.

In 2022, three Virginia football players — Devin Chandler, Lavel Davis Jr. and D’Sean Perry — were shot and killed by former UVA walk-on Christopher Darnell Jones Jr., who opened fire on a charter bus that had gotten back to campus after a class field trip to Washington, D.C.

Virginia, which still had two regular season games remaining, canceled both of them after the shooting deaths.

“Because of what it’s been through the last half decade, I think it’s an important milestone,” Madia said of UVA playing in the Gator Bowl. “I think the players are still really, really excited by getting to go to the Gator Bowl and be in Jacksonville for a few days after some really tumultuous seasons.”

As of Wednesday, no players from Mizzou or Virginia have opted out of the Gator Bowl.

From a broader perspective, this game means something. These teams represent the leveling of the playing field in college athletics, even if it remains a little slanted.

The Gator Bowl isn’t where MU and UVA expected to end up before the season, but the fact that they’re here is a testament to what’s possible nowadays with the right buy-in.

Copyright 2025 Columbia Missourian

This story was originally published December 26, 2025 at 11:44 AM with the headline "Jeffersonian ideals: Gator Bowl means something extra to Mizzou football, Virginia."