Luther Burden III was everything Mizzou needed him to be

Dec 2, 2024 | Uncategorized

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Goodyear Cotton Bowl - Missouri v Ohio State
Photo by Sam Hodde/Getty Images

The star wide receiver came to Mizzou at the perfect time to make a lasting impact.

It’s an image I see every time I look up Luther Burden’s name in our photo library here at Rock M Nation. And it’s one I never get tired of gazing over.

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October 19, 2021, will now and forever be one of the great days in Mizzou Football history. It can’t be considered one of the “best” — thankfully, Mizzou has had enough great moments to relegate it to the second tier. But depending on how things evolve in Columbia beyond December 2, 2024, it has a chance to be one of the most impactful.

Luther Burden III was a Mizzou Tiger for 1,140 days. When he arrived, the Tigers had spent the previous three seasons languishing at .500 and hadn’t won a bowl game in seven seasons. Eli Drinkwitz turned some heads with his big mouth and flashy social media use, but the arguably the best thing he’d done since taking over the program was go 5-5 during the cursed COVID season.

It would be a mistake to undersell it: Mizzou needed Luther Burden III.

Burden, who will enter the 2025 NFL Draft and not play in Mizzou’s upcoming bowl game, leaves the program with numbers that belie the impact he had during his three seasons as a Tiger. He’s tied for fifth in all-time receiving touchdowns, sixth in all-time receiving yards, and third for single-season receiving yards. But apart from a scattering of various Top 10 placements on various statistical lists, his name won’t sit high in Mizzou’s record books.

However, it was evident from Day One that Burden was the type of electric player Tiger fans hadn’t seen in black and gold since Jeremy Maclin. In his first game against Louisiana Tech, Burden only logged six touches for 43 total yards… and yet scored two touchdowns. From the very first time the ball was in his hands, he was a gold-tinged lightning rod, ready to strike. And over time he evolved into a booming thunderbolt of a player, his impact leaving waves of defenders and highlights.

He was everything we hoped he’d be when he threw away the Georgia and Alabama hats that night in October 2021. But he was also a little bit more.

It’s often said of great football quarterbacks that they make the players around them better. I rarely hear it uttered about non-quarterbacks, in fact. Make no mistake, it applies to Luther Burden III as well.

  • Brady Cook, so often maligned for who he wasn’t rather than who he was, developed the type of QB-WR rapport with Burden that we’ve seen maybe once or twice in Mizzou history… and used the threat of that rapport to turn himself into something more than the game manager everyone assumed him to be.
  • Theo Wease, Jr., a former five-star recruit himself, used Burden’s dynamism and workmanlike dedication to become the Yin to Burden’s Yang, reviving his college career in the process.
  • Mookie Cooper, a local blue-chip recruit crushed under the burden of expectation, escaped the spotlight so swiftly to Burden and developed into one of the great possession receivers Mizzou has ever had.
  • Cody Schrader, another workhorse talent from Missouri, walked onto Mizzou’s team and ran his way to Heisman votes while opposing defenses were so concentrated on stopping Burden (which they often failed to do anyway.)

And as if the direct contributions and floor-raising ability weren’t enough, Burden proved to be the type of star player who showed up in the biggest moments of Mizzou’s biggest games. Need a big performance to upset a ranked Kansas State? Burden’s got you for 117 yards and two touchdowns. Need to convert a 4th and 17 in the dying minutes of a must-win game? Don’t worry, he’s open. Need a touchdown to ice a bowl game against Ohio State? He’ll make the catch and put down the silencer. Need something to happen to avoid an upset loss to Vanderbilt at home? Guess who will be there? It’s appropriate that Mizzou’s goodbye message to Burden on social media was captioned, “We called and you answered… every time.” That’s who Luther Burden III was; he was the guy who delivered when you needed him, and also when you really needed him.

It’s difficult to sort through legacies without a few years of context to consider. We wouldn’t have seen Chase Daniel or Jeremy Maclin as program-defining players had Mizzou reverted to the middle-of-the-road Big 12 program they were beforehand. We wouldn’t have thought of L’Damian Washington, Henry Josey, Markus Golden or others as landscape-shifters if Mizzou hadn’t gone back to competing near the top of the SEC over the past few years. It’s hard to predict where Mizzou Football will go in the years following Luther Burden’s career, but it’s not hard to see a world where his game-breaking ability and winning legacy drives Mizzou to the next level of college football relevance.

There will be no replacing Luther Burden III. We may look to the next blue-chip wideout recruit or the underclassmen who play a lot like him over the next few years. But it might be a long time before we see another player who impacts the program the way Burden did.

And as much as it is practical for on-field success, replacing him isn’t really the point, is it? Luther Burden III had the drive, the personality, and the ability to be one of those generational figures that takes a program and lifts it to another level. You can’t replace them because they’re one-of-a-kind, each filling a different role at a different point in time.

In a new era of NIL mega-deals and expanding playoffs, Mizzou needed someone to lift them to national relevance. Specifically, they needed Luther Burden III.

Three years later, it’s easy to see why.

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