Missouri football opens its 2021 season against Central Michigan at Faurot Field this afternoon, and much like a track runner — a strong start out of the blocks would set the tone for the race that is the 12-game regular season.
Just how important is it for the Tigers to start the season 1-0? While football teams are like the stock market in the sense that past performance doesn’t guarantee future success, program history tells a lot about what a Week 1 victory over the Chippewas would mean for the Tigers moving into fall.
Recent History
The Tigers rarely play against Power Five, much less Group of Five, schools to open up their season. But even when Missouri starts out with a Football Bowl Subdivision program, the outcome hasn’t always been in its favor.
The Tigers are 7-3 in their last 10 season openers against FBS opponents, with four of those seven wins coming against Illinois in the Arch Rivalry contest. Missouri is 0-3 in its most recent season openers against FBS programs. In fact, the Tigers’ most recent season-opening win against an FBS opponent happened a decade ago against Miami (Ohio) in the program’s final campaign in the Big 12 Conference.
Central Michigan is the third-straight FBS opponent that Missouri will open up a season with. The last two resulted in losses, as 2019 commenced with a high-scoring road loss against Wyoming and 2020 kicked off with a lopsided loss against eventual national champion Alabama.
Winning the first game often indicates whether or not the Tigers will finish the season with a winning record. Missouri turned in 12 winning seasons after winning its opener since 2000. However, given that Missouri has mostly faced FCS programs in its season openers, the Tigers won their first contest and finished with a losing record five times in that same span.
The last time Missouri opened a season with a loss and rebounded for a winning season came back in 1974, when Al Onofrio’s team entered the season ranked No. 18, lost to Ole Miss in the opener and finished the year 7-4.
Importance in being ranked
Missouri has shown throughout its program history that a loss does not completely set the tone for the season.
The Tigers have finished their season ranked on 18 occasions, just a shade over 20% of the years since the Associated Press began publishing their weekly poll in 1936. In five of those seasons, Missouri started off on the wrong foot.
However, recent history does not favor the Tigers coming back to a ranked status after an opening weekend defeat. The last 10 teams to finish ranked began their respective campaigns in victorious fashion.
One would need to travel back to 1968 to find the last time Missouri finished ranked after commencing the season with an 0-1 record. Coach Dan Devine and his team roared back after dropping its season opener against this year’s Week 2 opponent, Kentucky, with seven straight wins and an emphatic victory over Alabama in the Gator Bowl to cap off the year at No. 9.
In Devine’s 13-year tenure in Columbia, he orchestrated three in-season turnarounds from 0-1 to ranked in under a decade. In 1965, the Tigers rallied from another loss against Kentucky to finish No. 6 and a Sugar Bowl victory over another current SEC East foe, Florida. Before that, Missouri eked into the No. 18 spot to end the year despite a 6-5 record.
Missouri accomplished the feat twice under Don Faurot’s guise in the 1940s, with one coming in 1941, when the team allowed a meager 3.9 points per game, and in 1949.
So while the last half-century doesn’t suggest much hope for the Tigers, two of the best coaches in program history show that a rough start doesn’t always signify a rough end.
Home sweet home
Aside from last year’s drubbing against No. 2 Alabama, Missouri often gets off to a hot start at home. The Tigers entered 2020 on a 14-game winning streak in home openers. In the last 30 years, Missouri is 23-7 in their home openers, with most of the losses coming in the doldrums of the 1990s.
But since then, the FCS has had its fair share of Missouri home openers, and the Tigers haven’t lost a game to a D-IAA school. A good way to measure how good Missouri is to start the year at home is to look at its first home game of the year against FBS opponents. The Tigers’ first opponent of the year comes from the FBS program as the Chippewas come from the Mid-American Conference.
With this metric, Missouri is still pretty close to its overall 30-year record with a respectable 20-10 record against their initial FBS foe at Faurot.
Averages from last decade of season-openers
Given that Missouri plays mostly FCS schools in its season openers, the averages heavily favor the Tigers. Last year, Missouri outscored their opponents by an average of 37.8 points per game with a substantial 483.6 yards per game versus 20.2 points allowed per game.
Missouri started the same quarterback for the first game as it did for their last game 6 out of the last 10 seasons, but the Tigers had nothing to play for in their last game on two occasions.
Will Missouri stay on the course of history, or will coach Eli Drinkwitz write a new page on Saturday? Only time will tell.
Edited by Kyle Pinnell | kpinnell@themaneater.com
