Ever since joining the SEC in 2012. the Missouri Tigers have been an unpredictable issue for Tennessee football. Can the Volunteers finally overcome that?
Losing to the Missouri Tigers played a critical role in the last two Tennessee football head coaches losing their jobs. Butch Jones was fired the day after the Vols lost to them in 2017. Derek Dooley was fired a week later after losing to the Vanderbilt Commodores, but the Mizzou loss pretty much made it clear.
Dooley is now, obviously, going against the Vols this week as Missouri’s offensive coordinator, just as Jones went against the Vols as an offensive analyst with the Alabama Crimson Tide last month. But the common thread here is that Missouri has surprisingly had UT’s number since joining the SEC.
Back in 2012, when the Tigers and Texas A&M Aggies both moved into their new home, conventional wisdom was that Missouri would struggle while A&M finally had a competitive advantage over the Texas Longhorns. And the first year, that was largely true, as Texas A&M went 11-2 with Johnny Manziel winning the Heisman while Missouri went 5-7.
However, in the midst of that 5-7 season, they just happened to beat Tennessee football in Knoxville in overtime. And that was just the momentum Gary Pinkel’s team needed to go forward, taking advantage of a down SEC East and winning the division each of the next two years.
All of a sudden, Mizzou, not A&M, was benefitting the most from joining the SEC since they went to the East. In both of those years, meanwhile, they beat a Vols program that was rebuilding under Butch Jones.
Tennessee football finally came around in 2015 and took advantage of a Missouri program falling apart at the end of Pinkel’s tenure. Because the Vols were at their peak under Jones, they were able to reel off two straight as a result.
But with a chance to even the series last year, it went the other way again. As the Vols were collapsing as a program, Mizzou was beginning to arrive again in Barry Odom’s image and behind Drew Lock at quarterback.
The result was a blowout win for the Tigers that, as we said, got Jones fired. So through six games since joining the SEC, Missouri has won four games against the Vols while UT has only won two. But five of those games came with the programs in completely different states.
They were only on a similar playing field in 2012. Well, this year, the two appear to be on a similar playing field again. Mizzou is only one game better than Tennessee football with their record, but the game is at Neyland Stadium. So this is a chance for the Vols to even things up a bit. At some point, they have to turn around what’s happened in this series against the Tigers over the past six years. This losing record is one that simply makes no sense.