COLUMBIA, Mo. - This one is going to sting for a while.
Missouri head coach Barry Odom said as much following Saturday's 43-29 loss to No. 2 Georgia at Faurot Field.
"It stings, because we feel like we gave the game away," Missouri offensive lineman Kevin Pendleton said.
There's evidence to support that claim.
The Tigers (3-1, 0-1 Southeastern Conference) played as good a game on defense as they ever have against a ranked opponent under Odom, and a top-5 one at that. But three first-half turnovers by Missouri's offense, including a fumble returned for a touchdown on the team's first offensive drive, and a blocked punt the Bulldogs also turned into seven points, was the margin in a game in which neither offense looked comfortable throwing the ball.
"We spotted them 14 points," Odom said.
Instead of a passing attack, the run game did the grunt work for the Tigers, who rushed for 172 yards on 37 carries. Georgia gained 185 yards on 40 carries for an identical 4.6 yards per carry.
Missouri's offensive line gave up two sacks but provided stout run blocking for Damarea Crockett, Larry Rountree III and Tyler Badie. All three, along with quarterback Drew Lock, finished with rushing touchdowns, the first time Georgia has given up a rushing score since last season's College Football Playoff Semifinal against Oklahoma.
Lock finished 23-for-48 for 221 yards, no touchdowns through the air, an interception and a lost fumble, the first time since Missouri's 2017 game against Purdue the team finished without a passing touchdown. His counterpart Jake Fromm was asked to pass less: he completed 13-of-23 passes for 260 yards and three touchdowns and only really started throwing after the Bulldogs' run game weakened the Tigers' help in the secondary.
Georgia's secondary relied on a cover-2 Missouri took a few shots at without any luck, and cornerback Deandre Baker shadowed Emanuel Hall. Hall didn't catch a pass in the game, and just seven of Lock's completed passes went to wide receivers: four to Johnathon Johnson for 51 yards and three to Nate Brown for 35 yards. Albert Okwuegbunam was Missouri's leading receiver with nine receptions for 81 yards.
Lock's interception went off Johnson's hands, and Okwuegbunam surrendered the fumble Tyson Campbell ran back 64 yards.
It stings. And not just the loss: Odom said after the game Hall, Brown and Johnson were all banged up to varying degrees, and while he didn't say to what extent, he did say "Those guys showed me some things this week on the way that they went and approached and still fought through some things with that. I can't say that we would have done that last year, and I know we wouldn't have done it two years ago."
He later clarified it was not just the receiving corps that had showed him fight.
"Not just the receivers. I'm saying the resolve of our football team."
"There were a lot of things where this game could have gone really bad, really fast, but we handled it," Pendleton said. "We were mature about it.
"It's a sense of toughness, and also a sense of care, a sense of pride. Guys care about everybody in the locker room. Everybody's willing to put it all out there for their brother. Guys are going to battle through a nick and a bruise because we care about each other and we know, we know what we have in that locker room. Once we get it clicking, it's going to be dangerous."
There's evidence to support that as well.
With 5:45 left in the second quarter, Missouri's snap to punter Corey Fatony went wide right, outside of the protection group and to the same side Georgia brought unblocked pressure, and resulted in an 8-yard touchdown that put the Bulldogs up 20-7.
Missouri's previous possession had ended with a fumble Georgia returned to the Missouri 7-yard line. But the defense held, giving up four yards in three plays, and the Bulldogs settled for a 21-yard field goal. The blocked punt felt like the dam breaking.
But it held, and the scoring deluge surrendered in the 2017 game against Auburn, for instance, never arrived.
Georgia started the third quarter with a touchdown pass, and down 27-7 just out of the halftime break, Missouri kept fighting. The Tigers were outscored by a single point in the second half.
Missouri turned in a performance about equal to the No. 2 team in the country Saturday. The difference? Georgia had the advantage in turnovers, in field position and in special teams - though the Tigers blocked a field goal for the first time since 2013 - and just about every break that could have gone against the Tigers did.
Tucker McCann's 41-yard field goal that would have made the score 7-3 Bulldogs in the first quarter was called wide right by the officials, but the television broadcast showed angles that suggested a different result. Odom was more upset the play that resulted in Okwuegbunam's fumble was not blown dead because of forward progress, a non-reviewable decision, but stopped short of criticizing the officials.
"There's a lot of times out there that there's not a whistle," Odom said. "They don't end the play with a whistle. On that, was the forward progress stopped or not, that's the call they made and we've got to live with it."
Even stranger was a Georgia touchdown in the third quarter, a play in which Jeremiah Holloman appeared to drop the ball before crossing the plane after beating a Missouri defender in one-on-one coverage down the sideline. Defensive back Christian Holmes, who previously ended the Bulldogs' first drive of the game with an interception, picked up the ball in the end zone and ran it back.
Odom showed the players a similar play Georgia made against South Carolina: Deandre Baker dropped a pick-six short of the end zone, but a Georgia defender fell on the ball to secure the score. Holmes remembered that play from the week's film preparation and scooped the ball up, but an official review did not overturn the initial call on the field of a touchdown.
"That was big," Holmes said.
He added he felt the ball was live because the official hesitated to pick it up and he beat the ref to the ball. "I saw in his face that he didn't know either," Holmes said.
"It was clear as day he threw it out," Missouri linebacker Terez Hall said. "It wasn't even close. A lot of times, you've got to roll with the punches. We gotta get better. We gotta make that tackle so it won't result in stuff like that."
Chalk it up to the lack of pylon cameras, or to the North end zone curse.
That score put Georgia ahead 33-14 after the Bulldogs failed to convert a 2-point try. Missouri kept fighting and responded by marching the ball 60 yards in nine plays and 2:08, capped off by a 3-yard rush by Badie and added 2-point conversion from Lock to Okwuegbunam to get within 11 points, 33-22, late in the third quarter.
"Everything's clicking," said Badie, a freshman who finished with 50 yards rushing on 11 carries and 29 more yards on two receptions. "We just need to put our pieces together, put the puzzle together as a team, as a unit, and we'll be good."
As Missouri's offense came on and found a scoring rhythm in the second half, the defense, which had been frustrating Georgia all afternoon, faded. The Tigers had missed their shot.
"It's one that we gotta carry this feeling through the rest of the year so that we can't let this happen again," Pendleton said. "I've said it multiple times, we've got special things in the locker room. Defense played their tails off, offense started moving the ball in the second half, we've just got to be able to do it at the same time, and together."
Missouri will use its bye week to get healthy before travelling to South Carolina. Hall, Johnson and Brown could all use the recovery time, as could Cam Hilton, who broke his thumb in the Purdue game and played off and on Saturday with a hard cast on his right hand and forearm.
The Gamecocks (2-1, 1-1 SEC) defeated Vanderbilt 37-14 on Saturday.