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Mizzou Spoils SEC Tradition In Conference Title Game

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For the second straight year, the Missouri Tigers will play for the Southeastern Conference football championship. They’ll play Alabama, the top-ranked team in the nation, at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta starting at 3 p.m. Saturday afternoon.

Since leaving the Big 12 for the SEC, the Missouri Tigers have stepped up the caliber of their play. But the rest of the SEC wasn’t quite ready for them.

This season’s outlook didn’t appear promising against Georgia in October. There weren’t too many bright spots for Missouri football fans that day. The Tigers couldn’t get anything going offensively and turned the ball over five times.

Georgia handed the Tigers a 34-0 spanking, the first time since 2002 any team kept MU scoreless. Only two games earlier in a non-conference game, lowly Indiana defeated the Tigers. It looked like last year’s trip to the SEC title game for Mizzou was perhaps a rarity.

Shane Ray, a junior defensive lineman from Bishop Miege High School, said the Tigers heard the doubters.

“Everyone. Media, outside people. Anyone outside the team. Essentially, they felt Mizzou was playing for respect, which we were, but we felt respect is intangible,” said Ray. “You can take that and give that away, but you can’t take away a championship.”

Then a funny thing happened after that loss to Georgia: The Tigers didn’t lose another regular season game.

Now they’re in a position to win a conference championship, something MU hasn’t accomplished since sharing the Big Eight title with Nebraska in 1969.

Since Mizzou switched from the Big 12 to the SEC, Tigers coach Gary Pinkel felt all along the Tigers needed to raise their level of play.

“The Big 12 was a great league, okay? Obviously when they lost four teams it changed a little bit, but it still has some great, great teams in it,” said Pinkel. “My only comment is that there’s more. We have 14 teams and there’s more high level teams in this league. That’s no disrespect. That’s just being honest.”

Of all the major college teams that bolted for different conferences three and four years ago, no school has enjoyed better football success in its new conference than Missouri.

CBS Sports college football writer Dennis Dodd points out that Missouri’s overall record the last two years has caught SEC fans off-guard.

“I don’t think people realize that Missouri and Alabama have the same records in the SEC the last two years. The best record at 14-2. They’re playing Saturday,” said Dodd. “That shows how far they’ve come. Since they’ve been in the league, they have the third best record of any team in the SEC. It is pretty amazing.”

Joe Anaskevic is one those SEC fans. He lives in Greenville, S.C. As a Vanderbilt alum, Anaskevic had a tough time dealing with Missouri beating his team while attending the game last year in Nashville.

“It’s a little bit different because everybody has grown up watching Missouri play Big Eight football and Kansas and Oklahoma,” said Anaskevic during halftime of last year’s game. “When you see a bunch of Missouri people in Nashville for the football game, it’s a little bit unusual.”

After losing to Vanderbilt the first year MU played in the SEC, the Tigers have beaten Vandy the last two years. They’ve also beaten other traditional SEC schools like Florida and Tennessee. Evan Boehm, an offensive linemen from Lee’s Summit, said he had to pinch himself when the Tigers reached the SEC championship game last year.

“You know you kind of get lost in the atmosphere of it and how cool it is,” Said Boehm. “I played in an SEC championship game before I played in a bowl game. That’s kind of weird to think about, but at the same time it’s an awe kind of moment when you run out of the tunnel for the first time and see it packed.”

The only piece of unfinished business as an SEC upstart is winning the conference title game. Mizzou played in two Big 12 title games along with last year’s SEC contest. They’ve yet to win one.

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Sports have an economic and social impact on our community and, as a sports reporter, I go beyond the scores and statistics. I also bring the human element to the sports figures who have a hand in shaping the future of not only their respective teams but our town. Reach me at gregechlin@aol.com.
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