Has Mizzou football plateaued just outside elite? Loss to Texas A&M tells a story

Merely a month ago, Mizzou football was 5-0 and ranked 14th entering the defining span of the season — with three of four games against top-10 teams.

Win just one of those, and, wow, MU would be entering the final four-game stretch in contention for the 12-team College Football Playoff.

Lose all three, and the 22nd-ranked Tigers would be relegated back to the outside looking in and recalibrating their sense of purpose for what remains.

Which is exactly where Mizzou (6-3) was left after a 38-17 drubbing by third-ranked Texas A&M (9-0) on Saturday at Faurot Field.

While coach Eli Drinkwitz and players didn’t directly address what was effectively a CFP elimination loss, the notion was implied when Drinkwitz spoke to the scene in the postgame locker room.

“Devastated …” he said. “That’s one of the toughest locker rooms I’ve been in, because we all believed that we were going to win.”

As he went on for a good 1 minute, 20 seconds, he added, “You’ve got to pick yourself back up, you’ve got to put your guts back in, and you’ve got to find something else to fight for.”

No doubt Drinkwitz’s track record suggests Mizzou will muster just that in the weeks to come.

When MU was KO’d by its third loss (to South Carolina) late last season, it regrouped to win its last three games — including over Iowa in the Music City Bowl — to finish 10-3. And Mizzou won its last four in 2023 on the way to finishing 11-2.

Heck, maybe he’ll still rally the team to a third straight 10-win season for the first time in school history.

Nevertheless, this day made for an exasperating reminder.

For all the strides Mizzou has made under Drinkwitz, for all his recruiting successes and the promising foundation he’s established, the program remains stranded just on the verge of the elite.

With the loss Saturday, Drinkwitz is 1-10 vs. teams in the Associated Press top 10, 7-17 vs. overall ranked teams and 24-23 in Southeastern Conference play.

Now, he’s also 44-27 overall at Mizzou, so when he wins three more games here only Gary Pinkel (118), Don Faurot (100) and Dan Devine (92) will have won more at MU.

I believe he gets what it takes, and I think Mizzou will be better off if he doesn’t get ensnared in what is sure to be a berserk coaching carousel after this season of high-profile firings.

Even considering MU is down to a true freshman as its third quarterback of the season, though, this loss Saturday was a step backward from what Mizzou had demonstrated up to now.

The Tigers gave then-No. 8 Alabama about all it could handle in a 27-24 loss, and they came within inches of a last-play touchdown in a 17-10 loss at then-No. 10 Vanderbilt.

And then … this.

A&M outgained MU 464-284 as the Tigers were straitjacketed by their sheer inability to get the passing game going: Making his first career start in the wake of Beau Pribula’s ankle injury at Vanderbilt, Matt Zollers went 7-for-22 passing for 77 yards.

You could point to any number of moments that put the game away for A&M, including a 57-yard run by Rueben Owens II to make it 31-10 and Owens’ 11-yard TD run after the Tigers had cut it to 31-17 to give themselves a flickering chance with 6:45 left.

But Drinkwitz was right when he repeatedly took the blame for a couple key plays that transformed the game when it still was taking shape.

And maybe that makes an important common thread between MU’s narrow losses and this one.

While it should be a heartening thing that Mizzou has ample talent to be in the thick of these marquee matchups, it’s not enough to make up for lapses like the ones that cost the Tigers those other games and the sort that undid them Saturday.

Even though it was relatively early in the game, the most pivotal, and controllable, sequence unfolded late in the first half with A&M leading 7-0.

Mizzou needed a certain strategic clarity after taking over at its own 17 with 1:57 and two timeouts left. Instead, the Tigers’ clock management was somewhere between curious and conflicted — and led to a gaffe that changed the trajectory of the game.

Initially planning to drain the clock and reset at halftime with A&M kicking off to open the second half, MU ran twice. That seemed a wise approach considering how Zollers had struggled in a half he’d finish with only three completions in 13 attempts — and just one for a gain of more than a yard.

But after those two runs, Mizzou called a timeout with 1:27 left, facing third-and-6 at its 23.

A&M still had three timeouts, after all, and MU didn’t want to play into that.

Then an Aggies offside and a 16-yard run by Jamal Roberts gave the Tigers a first down at the Mizzou 42 with 1:17 to go in the half.

Next thing you know, Mizzou took to the air with back-to-back incompletions.

Facing third-and-10 approaching a minute left in the half, Zollers dropped back ... only for A&M’s Daymion Sanford to barge through right at him.

“I should have said, ‘Throw a screen,’ instead,” Drinkwitz lamented.

Sanford jarred the ball loose as Zollers was loading up to pass, and the ball caromed to A&M’s Dalton Brooks virtually in stride behind Zollers. He took it 26 yards to the MU 2. Two plays later, it was 14-0 Aggies with 20 seconds left in the half.

That didn’t put the game out of reach. But it sure altered the complexion and made what happened next insurmountable: The Tigers went three-and-out to open the second half, and A&M promptly drove 68 yards on four plays to make it 21-0.

The end of the half and a subsequent A&M fake punt that enabled a field goal weighed on Drinkwitz afterward, enough so that he brought them up immediately.

“The players fought and fought and fought and gave us every chance in the world,” he said. “And, you know, just poorly done by me.”

There’s more to it than that, of course.

But it’s all part of a key theme going forward.

With such a slim margin for error, much has been in Mizzou’s reach only to elude its grasp.

It’s a tantalizing dynamic, really, leaving MU fans perpetually wondering what it might take to finally make up that difference … next season, yet again.

Vahe Gregorian

The Kansas City Star

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Vahe Gregorian has been a sports columnist for The Kansas City Star since 2013 after 25 years at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He has covered a wide spectrum of sports, including 10 Olympics. Vahe was an English major at the University of Pennsylvania and earned his master’s degree at Mizzou.