Power Outage

The Missouri Tigers football squad is an extremely fragile team. They have shown a penchant for getting big first-half leads, only to lose (or not find) that killer instinct that good teams use to put opponents away. When one bad thing goes wrong, it simply snowballs: The Tigers take a 14-0 lead in dominant fashion against Troy University – then they retreat into a shell and lost the game 24-4; 17-0 first half lead for the Tigers against Oklahoma State, the Cowboys drive the length of the field in less than a minute before the end of the first half for a TD- they end up winning 20-17; against Kansas State this past weekend, the Tigers take a 21-0 lead only to see the Wildcats score their first TD late in the first half. KSU wins the game 35-24.

Jason Whitlock of the KC Star has this column on the Tigers. Bryan Burwell of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has this column on the subject. Joe Walljasper of the Columbia Daily-Tribune has these thoughts.

I traveled to Columbia to see the KSU game this past weekend. Last year when I attended the Nebraska-Missouri game, there was an electricity surrounding the event. Those of us in the crowd knew NU was beatable and we knew we had a team that could do it. It had been 25 years since James Wilder ran crazy against the Huskers and it had been 30 years since the Tigers beat the Huskers at home. We smelled an upset. The Tigers were down 24-14 going into the 4th quarter, and after a 27 point outburst, the goalposts came down.

This weekend when I walked into Faurot Field and got to my seat, there was no electricity in the crowd. We were not pumped up although the Tigers had a shot at beating KSU for the first time in 12 years. When the Tigers got up by 21, the crowd was *not* abuzz. It was a very strange feeling - the crowd knew the lead was not safe.

And it wasn’t.

Momentum in sports? The Tigers have none.