I really want to drive to Columbia next week from St. Louis to go to the game. If they win next week and beat Nebraska, WE'RE TALKING BCS CHAMPIONSHIP.

Slow your roll.

Calm down Rams fan.

Yeah.
But it's just a regional GameDay. I've never seen Mizzou on TV. I'm not even sure what color their unis are!

-Wickedson

If you were a fan of the Rams, you'd see why I'd overreact like that.

Touche.

So your a Mizzou/Rams fan? How is does it feel to have an Sooner for your QoTF? That would be awkward for me.

It's kinda weird, but it's not like he played QB for KU.

Awkward? If the Chiefs had a QB that young and promising, he could be an Al Qaeda grad and I'm not sure it would be awkward.

I see your point, but i dislike the Sooners more for some reason.

The spread will get you 8-4 or 7-5 every year and that coveted berth in the Poulan Weed Eater Bowl.

Problem is that Pinkel is too stubborn to implement some conventional sets into his gimicky spread playbook.

When you see Mizzou lining up in a 5 wide shotgun on 4th and goal from inside the one...you have to know that it's insane.

USDS, one of Mizzou's earlier opponent, defeated Air Force today.

The spread is only good for 8-4/7-5, huh?

Or 12 wins and a half away from playing for a national title?

Or 30 wins over a three-year period? Or the best five-year period in school history?

The spread has taken Missouri to the point where 8-4 is the minimal expectation. It certainly looks like Pinkel has Mizzou poised for more than 8-4/7-5 this season as well, with 10 wins - and possibly more - pretty easily within sight.

And Missouri doesn't always line up in five wide in short-yardage situations, especially inside the goal line. Today, for example, on the fumbled snap.

Like I said, I'd like to see them be a little more multiple. They did use ace-back sets a little last year and have used Gabbert in some sneak situations. But the spread offense has brought Missouri a greater run of offensive success than the school ever endured under a more traditional or power-oriented scheme.

The spread works against lesser teams. Like I said, it'll get you to 7 or 8 wins and not much else.

Against the big boys like Texas and Oklahoma...it has never failed to come up short. 12 wins and a half away from a national title??? You mean when they choked against the Sooners and gimmicked thier way into the Cotton Bowl? Isn't that the game where they ran a silly-assed trick play on the first play of the game, blew it and set the tone for thier eventual loss?

Yeah...they ran under center today on goal to go...and look what happened..

The spread sucks and they should chuck it.

Would you prefer us take a bunch of 3 star athletes and line up in the pro-set against teams that are physically superior to us across the board?

Or would you like to go into the homes of skill position recruits in Texas and tell them "yeah, we do the same thing everyone else in the country does, but we do it in a program with 1/2 the financial backing of the major national powerhouses"?

Yeah, it'd be great to be able to line up 5 guys that weigh 325 lbs and run like gazelles. It'd be fantastic to just blow teams off the ball and impose our will on them.

But just exactly how do you go about doing that? This isn't Texas. It isn't Alabama and it isn't Oklahoma. Hell, it isn't even Nebraska. We're the University of Missouri. Until we're considered among the national elite, we have to do things differently than they do to win.

If that means a non-traditional offense, so be it. That offense attracts scores of athletes to the school that wouldn't have given us a second thought without it. That offense is why we will have no worse than a four-star quarterback for the duration of Pinkel's tenure. This offense allows us to take two-star WRs and make them some of the best TEs in the country.

Pinkel's offense is our best chance to win with the tools we have. I don't believe Yost runs it efficiently (Christensen did), but that's an execution issue more than a philosophical flaw.

Ask Texas Tech how much they enjoy that conventional offense that Tuberville brought with him. Tech has many of the same disadvantages we have. It's in a very similar situation to MU. When Leach was there, they used that offense to be greater than the sum of their parts. Now that Tuberville is there, they're an also-ran.

While I disagree with how Yost uses it - the spread offense is the right fit for this program at this time.

You're right.

Bring in Tuberville.

You're a moron.

Right. 7 or 8 wins only. Except for all the times it has produced more than that.

The 07 championship game was tied at halftime. A key holding call on LT Tyler Luellen (moved Mizzou out of FG position on the drive to open the second half) and a tipped interception turned the momentum and OU wore Missouri's defense down in the second half.

But yes, Missouri should chuck the thing responsible for its most stable and successful period since Dan Devine was on the sideline.

Revise? Tweak? Of course. But chucking it? That makes no sense.

Are you really predicting only 1-2 more wins this year?

The spread shotgun is a problem, because the running game is getting devoured. I enjoy the fact that we spread the field out, but we need to be using an ace package at least 30 percent of the time. Otherwise, our running plays take too long to develop, and the more athletically talented back 7 can blow up the bubble screens too easily.

You can't succeed when you run Jet Sweeps and Bubble Screens on 70 percent of your plays.

The running game isn't getting devoured. Colorado was the only game where our running backs were not effective. We had a few games where we did not run enough, but even in those games we got yards on the ground, when we actually ran the ball. The running game was effective today.

When we averaged 2 yards a carry? What the hell are you smoking?

A&M had the fifth ranked run defense in the country going into this game. Gabbert's five carries for -22 yards also is factored into that yards per carry average. Our run game was effective when we were actually trying to score.

LOL

Our running backs averaged just under 4 ypc. They averaged over 4 ypc for the first three quarters.

That's my opinion. Serious revision of the offensive playbook is required.

Looking at the schedule, I'm thinking 9-3.

MU will make a nice move in the polls this week. AP had us at 21. Ranked teams that lost:

24. Oregon State
23. Air Force (Lost to San Diego St.)
22. Florida
19. Nevada
12. Arkansas
10. South Carolina
5. Nebraska
1. Ohio State


Obviously, we aren't going to jump all of those teams that were ranked ahead of us, but we will jump Nevada, Arkansas, and South Carolina for sure. I'm curious as to how far Nebraska falls. It's not like they have racked up a bunch of wins against strong teams.

I could see Mizzou around 17 in the AP and 14 or 15 in the coaches where we could leapfrog Florida State.

The play calling was vastly improved today with a couple of glaring exceptions. If you take away that 4th down call, there isn't too much to bitch about. I said very early on that I was glad that we weren't throwing to Moe on every play. When we stretched the field, it opened up the underneath passes.

I'm really starting to think (instead of just hope) that Yost has been holding back a lot in anticipation of this stretch of games. There were holes for our backs. These guys are pretty inexperienced. There is a lot of room to improve. It sounds simple to put in a goal line package or two, but it takes a lot of practice time for plays that might get used less than 5 times per game. Numbers wise, we're not bad in short-yardage. It just looks ugly.

Some side notes:

All of the backs are averaging 5 YPC or more, and the true running game (read: Not Gabbert) was pretty effective yesterday. That said, I agree that a more downhill approach would be beneficial. I don't know if I'd want to go to that as much as 30 percent of the time, but even adopting a pistol set and narrowing the splits a little more would create some new opportunities in the running game.

For some reason, Gabbert doesn't take the short-yardage sack. It seems like all of his sacks are of the 10-plus yards variety.

We saw a lot more than bubble screens yesterday. Missouri was working the middle of the field much more often with slants and curls and posts than it previously had been. We're deep enough in the season now that they can start running a lot of misdirection off of the bubble screen (which creates really favorable matchups to the opposite side). Nice to see that progression in playcalling. Especially getting the ball to Jackson, who probably is the most explosive WR.

I've been tracking the Missouri run defense, and it's amazing how much the two Hillman runs vs. SDSU have skewed the whole thing. Those two runs:

1) Take Missouri's average yards yielded per carry up around 4.5 (subtracting sacks). Without them, the average is around 3.7.
2) Are right at 20 percent of the total rushing yardage surrendered by the Tigers this season
3) Apparently were a turning point for the run defense. Since the SDSU game, Missouri has held every opponent at least .5 yards under its season average per rushing attempt (subtracting sacks from equation). The Tigers held the strong run game of Colorado almost a full yard under its average per carry, and limited aTm to .75 less than its average.

These were my thoughts as well after yesterday's game. Hopefully I'm not giving Yost too much credit though.

Our offense was night and day yesterday compared to the CU game. Gabbert was incredible.

I've been thinking that as well. Hopefully that is the case.

Rumor is that Mizzou will be top 10 in the BCS...we'll see this evening!

Anything is possible, but that would be a monster jump. I see us around 15ish.

6th in Sagarin

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/sagarin/fbt10.htm

EDIT: They're 9th in the Sagarin rating (ELO_Chess) the BCS uses.

#11 in the BCS poll. Half of the Big XII is in the top 22.

What is the "RB" poll? MU is ranked 5th, 5th, 2nd, 9th, and 6th in the other polls, but they are unranked in the RB poll? WTF is that about?

SOS really helps with the BCS.