Take everything you saw on a football field in Amherst, MA on Saturday, October 11th and throw it away.
Keep the win. That's important. That's real and worth it.
Nothing else was, though.
UMass is, essentially, an FCS team that's in Year 13 of its multi-year process of becoming an FBS team. Missouri still has Playoff aspirations.
The NCAA would have you believe that these two teams are the same. Clearly they are not.
Whether you want to find long-term positives or long-term negatives from those 60 minutes, just save yourself the trouble and ignore them. This game was out of reach 10 minutes into the 1st Quarter and was never in any sort of limbo as to the outcome.
Here's the advanced box score:
Missouri was quite literally better than UMass in every aspect.
The passing game wasn't as efficient as I would have liked; thus concludes the one real offensive complaint I had about Brady Cook and friends. Cook finished with a 73% completion percentage and a 53% success rate, which is his second highest completion rate of the year and third-best success rate on the year. Outside of that Luther looked like he was playing against 6th graders, the running game had its best success rate since the Buffalo game (and without Nate Noel!), and a bunch of backups got to get in the field and play. Hard to argue with any of the results here.
...unless you're one of those weirdos who were losing their minds in the game thread on Saturday. What the heck was up with that?
I set the goal at a lofty 50% success rate on the ground and, even with two bizarre Drew Pyne screwups, Mizzou still breezed past this goal by 3%.
Winner: Missouri
I was being cheeky with this one but, wouldn't you know it, Brady Cook fulfilled this deliverable. Twice!
Winner: Missouri
UMass was, and is, very bad so I pushed this goal to be at least 8 scoring opportunities and finish with more than 5 points per opportunity. Mizzou finished with exactly 8 scoring opportunities and 5.6 points per opportunity. Well done boys.
Winner: Missouri
When Nick Rodriguez is drafted first overall in the NFL Draft and mentions the three Butkus Awards he won in his time at Mizzou, you can proudly nod and tell the person nearest to you at that moment, "ya know, the first game where he led the team in tackles was UMass!".
21.4% success rate running the ball, 33.3% success rate passing the ball, 2-14 on 3rd-downs, 4.5 yards per play, 1.0 points per scoring opportunity...yeah this offense stunk.
Winner: Missouri
Winning "the little things" usually helps you keep games close but, in this case, just highlighted the gulf of talent and competency between these two teams. Mizzou benefited from nearly a +13 in field position and +3 in yards per play.
Also, for the third straight game, Mizzou managed to have fewer penalties than its opponent, earning fewer penalties (and yards) in the A&M game and UMass game combined than they had against Boston College alone.
With Nate Noel held out for safety precautions, Marcus Carroll was free to catch up on their personal 1st down race, gaining five over the course of the game and planting him one ahead of Noel for the year. Cook throwing it to Burden was also a handy 1st-down conversion machine on the day, plus the younger running backs managed to get their names back up on the board.
It was cool to see some younger guys get in on the action and have this one comfortably put away early, but for the most part the W is the only real thing to take away from this game. Nothing done during the course of this game gave you any insight of foresight to predict how the rest of the year will go. So don't sweat anything about this game.
If you do want to get a better idea of what this team can be, this week's matchup against Auburn is the key. The bad guy tigers from the plains have struggled against P4 competition but have played well enough - particularly on defense - to be in the 3-4 win range rather than their current two.
Gear up: the first chance to change the narrative of the season and determine the viability of the season's goals occurs this week.