The Revue: We’ve got a very sad team, but we love them!

Oct 29, 2024 | Uncategorized

Written By

The Elephant (Tru)Man

I LOVE MIZZOU FOOTBALL WHY DOES IT WANT TO HURT ME

Mizzou is hurting. Figuratively and literally.

It’s been a grueling first eight weeks of the season for our Tigers. They’ve battled themselves to six wins, putting them into position to finish what would be a relatively special year for this program.

But like past breakthrough years, 2023 looks like it will stand distinct from the season that followed. Despite entering the 2024 campaign with their eyes on a potential College Football Playoff berth, Mizzou’s shutout loss to Alabama likely puts them on the outside looking in no matter what happens moving forward. Having been outscored by a total of 75-10 in the two most difficult games on their schedule, the Tigers likely won’t have a marquee win to boost their resume above others on the committee’s list.

For a team with such high expectations, that hurts. And the bye week will offer them a lot of time to stew on that.

It will also offer them plenty of time to rest their weary bones, ankles, wrists, hands, backs, hamstrings and whatever else seems to be ailing the Tigers. Lord knows they need it.

The Revue

An Idiot
The Elephant (Tru)Man!

I’ll admit, this is a strange choice, even for The Revue.

I always try to have at least 5 to 8 percent of a justifiable tie-in when I write this column. Like last week, The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience and the win over Auburn? I’ll admit, it’s not super buttoned up. Comparing one of the great Mizzou wins of the Eli Drinkwitz era to a little-watched Netflix short in which Andy Samberg Sterling K. Brown dresses up like Sia? Sure, it doesn’t make sense, but I still have the five percent connection because of that one, “chemical sciences,” joke.

This week? We’re moving through multiple layers of concepts to see if we can get to that five percent collectively. Stay with me. Or don’t. Either way, you’ve been warned.

So I love David Lynch’s The Elephant Man. It’s truthfully one of the most astonishing collisions of human cruelty and kindness ever distilled into film, and sometimes I’ll think, unprompted, that I’m glad it exists. I also don’t think it’s ever been invoked in a college football blog, don’t fact check me. You know, for obvious reasons. I love The Elephant Man, even if the feeling I get from watching it is almost entirely opposed to the feeling I want to get from college football.

You know what else I love? Mizzou Football. And even though I don’t love the circumstances of this game or this season, I still do love this team. I have to! It’s an extension of my fandom. I hope they win the rest of their games 1,000,000 to nothing, even if they have played some pretty breathtakingly disappointing football this year. I love this Mizzou Football team, even if watching them sometimes feels more like dental surgery.

I also believe, like The Elephant Man is to Lynch, that the 2024 Mizzou Football Tigers have a chance to be this program’s under-appreciated masterpiece (OK, maybe that last word is working overtime.) They came into the season with a ton of expectation and the biggest “budget” they’d ever had in their career… and just managed to be “pretty good” rather than “great.” They wouldn’t be the first team to fall into that category, and they’re certainly not in bad company with 2008 and 2014. But what came after can almost never surpass that which came before. (Is this the point where The Elephant Man comparison falls apart completely?)

If you understand what I’m saying… good! Because I don’t know that I do anymore. Anyway, The Elephant Man and Mizzou Football 2024 both make me sad, and I love them.

★☆☆☆☆ for the loss over Alabama, ★★★★★ for The Elephant Man, a haunting and delightful film that made me want to stare into a dark corner for an age and a day

Watchability Meter

I feel like the Watchability Meter is really drawing the short straw this year. In all of the games where Mizzou has played really well this season, it’s been against a cupcake team off of whom not a lot of joy could be gleaned. And the other games they won? Well, Boston College was kind of a slog, Vanderbilt made me want to head butt a porcupine and Auburn just about shot my aortic muscle through my chest cavity. Not exactly a recipe for watchability!

I do have to give some credit to Mizzou’s defense, which made the first half of this game salvageable despite the offense’s ineptitude. Obviously the latter half of that equation is due to Brady Cook’s quickly deteriorating joint and cartilage stability, so I can’t count that against the team too much. This wasn’t the dreary affair that Texas A&M was, especially if you turned it off after a half like I did! So I’ll give the team a mulligan for the second half and award them 2.5 short straws for the valiant effort in quarters one and two.

Don’t ask me why this has a different-colored background than ever other meter this season (it’s because I was high while I made it)

Disrespectful Play Index

Folks, we have a first for the Disrespectful Play Index. It’s not Luther Burden getting recognized. It’s not Brady Cook getting recognized. It’s not an offensive player of any kind getting recognized.

We’ve got a disrespectful sack to discuss.

I know what you’re thinking. “Josh, Mizzou just got their doors blown off, you can’t possibly be ready to talk shit 72 hours after losing by five scores.” That’s where you’d be wrong. Disrespect doesn’t back down in the face of embarrassment. On the contrary, the DPI ramps things up. We only quit when Mizzou quits. And despite getting their nose caved in like Longlegs from the movie Longlegs, Mizzou did not quit. Johnny Walker, Jr. especially did not quit. And for that, we absolutely must pay respects.

As a reminder, here’s the scale we’re grading with:

Category 1: How difficult/impressive was the play? (0-20)

Category 2: How hard did the defense try? (0-20)

Category 3: How much did his teammates help? (0-5)

Category 4: What did the player do immediately afterward? (0-20)

Category 5: How did everyone not involved react? (0-15)

Category 6: Is there a backstory/context to consider? (0-20)

And here’s the play in question:

Category 1: How difficult/impressive was the play?

Ah, back when hope was youthful, when the cruelties of life had not yet smacked us in the face

Back in 2020, when Johnny Walker, Jr. was a senior in high school, 247 Sports rated him as the 1,253rd best player in the country, the 84th best outside linebacker (??) and the 166th best player in Florida. And that’s just the composite! 247’s rankings had him even lower than that. That’s good enough to be a projectional three-star commitment, the type of guy that has made his bread and butter at Mizzou since recruiting has been an industry.

No. 57 on Alabama, redshirt sophomore Elijah Pritchett, has a much different story. Coming out of Columbus, Ga., in 2022, Pritchett was a consensus five-star talent, ranking as the 37th best player overall, the 5th best offensive tackle and the fifth best player in the state of Georgia. The rankings back up his play: as a redshirt freshman, Pritchett played in all 14 games under Nick Saban and has seen significantly more snaps on the line this year under Kalen DeBoer.

I use these metrics because it’s hard to measure the difficulty of a 1-on-1 matchup in the trenches. A lot of it comes down to skill and how well each player performs on any given play. And that can only be quantifiable, in my mind, by recruiting metrics. By recruiting metrics, Elijah Pritchett should have Johnny Walker, Jr. on his ass most of the time. By on-field performance, though, Johnny Walker, Jr. put Elijah Pritchett in the dustbin. 18/20

Category 2: How hard did the defense try?

JOHNNY WALKER HIT HIM WITH THE “OPE LEMME JUST SNEAK PAST YA THERE”

Again, I’m not sure this is an effort problem on Pritchett’s part. His initial burst is good and he gives JWJ plenty of respect and cushion. Walker just… eviscerates him. He does appear to dip his right shoulder a little bit on the bend, giving him some leverage under Pritchett’s reach. But the story of this play is that Walker is simply too fast for Pritchett to account for. And that’s mighty impressive if you ask me. 19/20

Category 3: How much did his teammates help?

A sack is not always a solo venture, but this one happened to be. In case you had any doubts, I want you to take a look at this screen grab, captured at the moment of contact between Johnny Walker, Jr. and Jalen Milroe:

JWJ, K.O.

You see those blurred pixels at the end of Pritchett’s reach? That’s Milroe’s head, vibrating like a tuning fork. I’m not one to celebrate on-field violence a la “Jacked Up” but that’s an absolutely ferocious hit, the kind that only a blind-side DE can deliver. Except he wasn’t on the blind side, making it all the more ridiculous. I never do this, but I’m giving JWJ extra points for a solo disrespect mission with aplomb. 7/5

Category 4: What did the player do immediately afterward?

“Makes me clap my hands, makes me wanna dance and… STOMP!”

As far as sack celebrations go, JWJ doesn’t have anything particularly memorable in his bag, and it’s not as if he’d have been able to break it out on second down anyway. Still, I appreciate that he erupts from the pocket with a vicious stomp. That’s the sort of sack that gets you noticed by NFL scouts, and JWJ knows it. He probably could’ve celebrated even harder, if you’re asking me. But I’m just a blogger. 13/20

Category 5: How did everyone not involved react?

Pretty standard transition to third down on everyone else’s part. Walker gets a few “atta boys” from his teammates, but everyone gets back in position relatively quickly. The only real knock on his score here. 6/15

Category 6: Is there a backstory/context to consider?

OK, here’s where I want to address what I think makes this play a rich mine of disrespect. This was Johnny Walker, Jr.’s second sack of the game. Pretty good output, in my opinion! The thing you wouldn’t know just from this clip, however, is that this sack came one drive after Walker’s first… and he was on the opposite side of the field. Just a few minutes prior, Walker pulled the exact same move on Alabama starting left tackle Kaydn Proctor. You remember, the guy that caused the huge stir in the transfer portal when he left Alabama, committed to Iowa, almost immediately decommited from Iowa and returned to ‘Bama? Yeah, well Walker dipped Proctor a few minutes before simply switching sides and dusting his partner on the right hand side of the line.

That, to me, is beautiful. When you just finished pantsing one of the most celebrated offensive lineman in the country, what do you do? Do you revel in that moment? Or do you simply walk a few feet to your left and do the exact same thing to his homie? Johnny Walker, Jr. chose the latter, and I’m so grateful. It was a revelatory moment in an otherwise ass game, and gave me something genuinely fun to write about here. 20/20

Johnny Walker, Jr.’s second sack against Alabama was 83 percent disrespectful to Elijah Pritchett, Alabama football and the jester gods that cursed Brady Cook’s arms and legs.

Superlatives and Awards

Best Prospective NIL Deal

Is there a business that provides the service of running as fast as you can into a brick wall? Because it sort of feels like that’s what Johnny Walker, Jr. was up to for most of the game.That’s not an insult, by any means. You read the DPI, you know how I feel about the way he performed. But the defense eventually broke under constant strain, and I have to imagine the defensive line didn’t much look forward to cracking skulls with a bunch of former NFLers down by multiple touchdowns.

Someone get either (a) St. Louis Demolition Company or (b) College Hunks Hauling Junk (real company, I just found it online!) and tell them JWJ, Kristian Williams, Zion Young and Co. will come run through some loose drywall on camera. That should at least feel satisfying to those poor linemen.

The Tim Robinson Award for Best “I Think You Should Leave” Moment

I have to say, playing Alabama down Brady Cook, Nate Noel and Mookie Cooper felt a lot like being suffocated. And isn’t that just what Alabama does to you? Slowly turns the screw, letting you think you’ll have a chance, until they eventually wear you down and start stomping you with the strength of, well, an elephant?

Reminds me a lot of “Supermarket Sweep!”

He just saw an X-Ray of Brady Cook’s ankle and right hand!

This one, unfortunately, is not online, so only the real heads are going to be able to keep with me here… or you could go watch it on Netflix (Season 3, Episode 2.) “Supermarket Sweep,” is a note-perfect distillation of what playing Alabama feels like: a bright, cheerful, optimistic opportunity to go on TV and potentially do something really cool and memorable… until you realized that Jesus, Allah and Joseph Smith all corroborated to make you look silly in front of all your friends and family. When Tim Robinson is seizing, drooling and, most importantly, not breathing, I felt that.

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