The mortal brotherhood that can’t be killed

Nov 21, 2024 | Uncategorized

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Missouri head coach Eli Drinkwitz consoles Missouri quarterback Brady Cook (12) as they leave the field after the end of a game against Alabama on Saturday, Oct. 26, 2024, at Bryant-Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa, Ala. (CAL TOBIAS/ROCK M NATION)

Even though Mizzou football hasn’t lived up to expectations set by many this season (including itself), what the Tigers have built internally has still helped them make good kinds of history.

Eli Drinkwitz was one step ahead.

Leading up to Mizzou’s contest with Georgia last season, Drinkwitz said the following before a game that featured SEC title implications — the winner of this game between the 7-1 Tigers and 8-0 Bulldogs would control their own destiny to Atlanta.

“There’s gonna be two different narratives. The narrative is gonna be that, if we lost, the season’s over, and there’s nothing left to play for because of what was at stake in the game, which we know is not true,” Drinkwitz said. “And if we win, we’re gonna be assumed that we’re gonna win the East, which is not true because we still have three games left versus SEC opponents. Regardless of the outcome of the game, the job of the media and social media is to create narratives. Our job is to ignore them and try to be 1-0.”

Over a year later, Mizzou’s quest to go 1-0 against South Carolina was looking bleak. Through 20 minutes in Columbia East, its slim College Football Playoff hopes had seemingly be thrown all the way into the Atlantic Ocean.

Offensively, the Tigers kept getting stonewalled in scoring territory, settling for three field goal attempts (two of which were converted) inside of the Gamecock 40-yard line. Defensively, Mizzou forced a turnover on downs, and Dreyden Norwood picked off LaNorris Sellers on an overthrow by the redshirt freshman. But miscommunications and poor tackling directly led to three South Carolina touchdowns, putting the home team up 21-6. To end the half, the Tigers failed to even attempt a Hail Mary because Brady Cook dropped the ball and tripped over himself.

But just like it had so many times before since last season, Mizzou conjured up a Herculean comeback effort, going on a 16-0 scoring run in the third and fourth quarters to take a 22-21 lead. The energy throughout the Garnet & Black faithful at Williams-Brice Stadium had gone from elatedly positive to shockingly negative. This was an atmosphere that swallowed up Texas A&M two weeks prior and ate then-No. 5 Tennessee alive during a 63-38 Gamecock smackdown in 2022. Now, the home fans had turned on its once-beloved men in black, booing them after they’d been flattened by Mizzou’s rushing attack on defense and were stopped on fourth down twice offensively.

“We ran outside zone to the right like 50 times,” quarterback Brady Cook said, “and they couldn’t stop it.”

After South Carolina re-took the lead with just over five minutes left in regulation, MU saw all-time players make an all-time play. On fourth-and-five with under 90 seconds remaining, Luther Burden III made a one-handed catch on a fade route, stopped on a dime, sent UofSC defensive back Jalen Kilgore flying out of bounds and scored what felt like the game-winning touchdown … until South Carolina marched down the field and scored the actual game-winner with 15 seconds left, a flip pass to Rocket Sanders that saw the Arkansas transfer bounce off of would-be tacklers like a pinball.

“It’s never over,” Cook said when he was asked if he felt like the game was over after Burden’s touchdown. “You celebrate it, and you’re pumped up, and you enjoy it. But it’s never over in college football.”

It was a soul-crushing defeat that effectively eliminated Mizzou’s hopes of competing for a national championship, an explicit goal of head coach Eli Drinkwitz and many others heading into 2024. While blue bloods like Alabama and new bloods like Indiana jockey for a spot in the newly expanded College Football Playoff, Mizzou will be left out, relegated to a bowl game that will likely be in either Florida, Texas or Tennessee. The general feeling amongst the MU fanbase seems to be disappointment for dreams that won’t be achieved; in a sense, the campaign feels over.

I will now call a written timeout. Let’s look at the bigger picture.

Last season, I wrote a column after Mizzou fell to Georgia explaining that the season wasn’t “over” like many seemed to think at the time, with supporting evidence including Drinkwitz’s quote from the top of this piece. The loss not only knocked the Tigers out of SEC title contention, but CFP contention as well. This time around, the advent of an expanded Playoff afforded teams like Mizzou, who’d tripped up multiple times, a larger margin for error and thus a greater sense of hope. Any remnants of that hope were vanquished last Saturday, invoking a sense of premature conclusion to what was supposed to be an all-time Mizzou season.

Counter-argument: the fact that the Tigers are 7-3 this season and 18-5 in their last 23 games (and could easily have a better record) is completely ridiculous. Entering Saturday, Mizzou was 8-0 in one-possession games since the start of 2023. Across college football, that is not normal. Some teams, like Nebraska, have unintentionally forged identities of not being able to win one-score games (the ‘Huskers have lost 38 one-possession games since 2017, which is an outlier. But even the graph below that only shows the past two seasons has NU below the average).


There isn’t a singular source behind these elite success levels amidst adversity, but if one thing could shoulder most of the responsibility, it could be the “brotherhood” that Drinkwitz and other members of the program reference so often as the driving force behind achieving success and rebounding from defeat.

One of the literal definitions of a brotherhood according to Merriam-Webster is “an association (such as a labor union or monastic society) for a particular purpose”. The idea is centered around practicing unselfishness in pursuit of group success over individual success. When executed correctly, a brotherhood produces positive feelings; one of them is resilience, which has grown stronger within the program with every conquering of odds. The Tigers believe in themselves when they’re down because they keep coming back.

“The message going on in the locker room always is ‘we’ve been here before’,” defensive end Johnny Walker Jr. said. “Our head coach does a great job of keeping us motivated.”

Helping to foster that environment is Cook, who’s fought through injury since he suffered a high ankle sprain against Auburn Oct. 19. It required an in-game trip to the hospital, but it also created one of the more iconic moments in recent Mizzou football history, as Cook returned and spearheaded a comeback victory. Leading up to MU’s contest against South Carolina, Drinkwitz said that Cook couldn’t fully snap his right wrist, which he’d injured against Alabama. However, Cook made the start and played admirably, completing 21 of 31 passes for 237 yards and a touchdown.

“They’re tough guys, man,” Drinkwitz said. “This brotherhood’s not for soft people.”

Mizzou’s 10 games this season have featured five games that were non-competitive for the majority of the 60 minutes: Murray State, Buffalo, Texas A&M, UMass and Alabama. One of the other five games, Vanderbilt, saw Mizzou emerge victorious in a dogfight that was back-and-forth the whole way. The other four? The Tigers overcame immense odds by shaking off rough starts and turning into a different team in the latter stages of a game.

“Winning and losing has to matter to you, but you have to be quick to move on,” Drinkwitz said. “Learn the lesson, leave the event.”

The brotherhood has also captivated young players like defensive back Trajen Greco who hadn’t experienced the valleys of pre-2023 Mizzou football. Greco’s visit last season was when Mizzou improbably defeated Florida to save its New Year’s Six bowl hopes, highlighted by a fourth-and-17 completion to Burden where a turnover on downs would’ve effectively sealed an upset victory for the Gators.

“It’s something like I’ve never seen before,” Greco said. “They just never fold. They always have each other’s backs, and they just go out there and execute.”

The brotherhood has also helped the Tigers redefine a program whose history has been filled with finding ways to lose games instead of win them.

Sure, the Tigers had prosperous history against South Carolina after falling behind, staging legendary comebacks in 2005 and 2014. But many of Mizzou’s most nationally known moments have come from it discovering new ways to fall flat on its face. There are a lot of fanbases across sports that will say “only INSERT TEAM could do this” after their team doesn’t succeed or “this is so INSERT TEAM to lose this game”. But those are common saying because most teams don’t end the season with a championship; almost everyone finds a way to lose in the end. Mizzou, on the other hand, has actually been on the wrong end of crazy in-game moments and has also never won a national championship, making cynicism amongst its fanbase understandable. It was only a couple of years ago that Mizzou went 2-4 in one-possession games, which included a dumbfounding missed field goal, a shocking goal-line fumble and a game-changing penalty that enacted a rule change the following offseason.

The feelings also stem from experiencing consistent mediocrity, which is a big part of why this season is far from “over”. The Tigers have finished a season with at least nine wins just seven times, with just two of them happening before the 21st century (1960, 1969). From 2015-22, Mizzou registered all but one season winning between 4-7 games, including the first three years of Drinkwitz’s tenure. When the Tigers got off to a flying start in 2023, it was clear that the players who’d endured frustratingly middling seasons, like Darius Robinson, felt relieved of not being mired in averageness.

“Last year (against) Arkansas, we were fighting for our lives out there just to go to a bowl game,” Robinson said after Mizzou beat Kentucky, moving it to 6-1.

“My whole career, it’s been one-and-this, two-and-this, three-and-this,” Robinson said. “The opportunity to be 7-1 is beyond a blessing.”

The ball has rarely bounced Mizzou’s way, and yet, it’s has forged an identity on the ball bouncing its way. Now, it has a chance to register back-to-back 10-win seasons for just the second time in program history (2013 and 2014) with wins over Mississippi State, Arkansas and whoever the Tigers play in a bowl game. There have been many flaws that’ve plagued MU on the gridiron this season, especially last Saturday — shoddy tackling, poor stickiness in pass coverage and an inability to register touchdowns in scoring territory to name a few.

But one of the most effective band-aids for on-field struggles is a culture that exceeds traditional positivity. Mizzou has shown it this season, keeping it in the Playoff discussion until mid-November, going against what history says should be happening to this school and setting the program up for future success — even if their cuts prove to be too fatal.

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