The book closed on the Missouri men’s basketball season with a disappointing thud. What could have been a deep tournament run instead ended swiftly and painfully, bringing an early start to the fully football-focused portion of my offseason.
We got our first taste of off-season brain candy recently, when ESPN’s Bill Connelly — the founder of this very website — dropped his first batch of 2025 season projections. Connelly invented SP+, an all-encompassing predictive team metric that has gone mainstream, much like DVOA for NFL teams or KenPom ratings in college hoops.
Three key factors go into SP+ projections (which will be updated twice more before toe meets leather):
—the past three years of results, to influence stability,
—recruiting and transfer rankings, to evaluate overall talent level,
—-and most importantly, returning production, to determine proven college football contributions.
Mizzou checks in at 15th in the country for 2025 preseason SP+, at 15.7 — this measures the Tigers as slightly more than two touchdowns better than an average college football team. Last time out we took a deep dive into the key players that shaped Mizzou’s returning production figures. This week we will take a deep dive into what that number means for the Tigers in the landscape of college football and their 12-game schedule.
Mizzou’s schedule breaks neatly into four categories. First up are the three layups, a pair of non-conference home games the Tigers will be favored to win by about 28 points and one by about 20. Central Arkansas is the annual FCS Labor Day weekend sacrificial lamb, and UMass won’t be projected to be much better. Louisiana is a Sun Belt program with some juice in recent history, but they are replacing a ton of defensive production and need a new quarterback.
The second group is a quartet of games that SP+ believes the Tigers should win:
—senior Day at home against Mississippi State (back of the napkin projection: Mizzou -17)
—at Vanderbilt (-13)
—at Arkansas (-6)
—Border War revival against Kansas (-14).
The home finale against the Bulldogs should be easy for the Tigers; Jeff Lebby is continuing to build his high-octane offense but the defensive talent has cratered at that program. His team checks in at exactly 0.0 points better than the average FBS program in SP+. The system thinks the Tigers will be favored by about a touchdown against Arkansas, a program searching for consistency and identity. The numbers like the Tigers to take care of business in Nashville, too, but that is a feisty team led by the king of feisty quarterbacks, Diego Pavia. Despite almost a two-touchdown advantage in this system for Mizzou, a win will have to be earned that day. The Commodores (54th in SP+) took Mizzou to two overtimes last year and now rank 8th in the country in returning production.
The fourth game that SP+ thinks Mizzou should win is the biggie. It’s 2023 Kansas State and 2024 Oklahoma times a billion. Lance Leipold’s Kansas program (49th) no longer resides in the FBS outhouse, but it is still far away from where ten win SEC programs live, in terms of roster quality. A dynamic and veteran quarterback like Jalon Daniels can close that two-touchdown gap in a hurry, but the Jayhawks will bring a thin and generous defense to town. Unless Mizzou’s staff completely whiffed on every element of the offensive makeover, Mizzou should be well positioned to win their biggest home game since… 2013? 2010? 2003?
The next grouping is where Mizzou’s season will be won or lost: four toss-up games in God’s Own Conference. Look at the back-of-the-napkin projected spreads:
—hosting Texas A&M (Mizzou +2)
—hosting South Carolina (Mizzou -2)
—at Oklahoma (pick ‘em)
—at Auburn (Mizzou -1)
All four are revenge spots for the home team. Texas A&M has a marginal advantage over Mizzou in SP+ (ranked 12th at 18.5), and the Tigers have a LOT of points to close the gap from last season’s result. The other three were all nip-and-tuck affairs last year, all of which swung in the home team’s favor. Mizzou should be white hot for revenge against a South Carolina team that returns all-America caliber quarterback LaNorris Sellers and edge Dylan Stewart but not much else. The games at Oklahoma and Auburn will be difficult if those programs are finally putting it together under Brent Venables and Hugh Freeze, respectively, but on the other hand, the Tigers have a chance to fan the flames of a pair of famously hot seats.
The last game remaining is the only one where the Tigers should lose. Mizzou’s last of six straight home games is a date with Alabama, the #2 team in preseason SP+ and a program that makes a habit of displaying how far ahead of Mizzou it is in every meeting since 2012. This game usually goes poorly for Mizzou; they will probably be an underdog of about ten points, even at home. SP+ is built to measure team efficiency and roster construction in broad strokes. It can not account for the things that could lead into a momentous Missouri upset, like the extra bye week for Drinkwitz and staff to prepare, the unsettled quarterback situations, or the internal pressure cooker that is building in Alabama.
Mizzou’s schedule is favorable, with only one game as big underdogs, and multiple chances to score some of the best home wins in modern program history. A winning pedigree and a roster rebuilt with veterans is well-regarded by SP+ as a team that should compete in the upper-middle class of the SEC.
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