With the completion of Mizzou’s first half (ish) of the 2026 season, I felt like it would be a good time to take a look at how the Tigers’ offense and defense ranks nationally. And not just in your standard stats like total rushing yards or whatever.

No.

We’re going deeper.

Here’s what I got for you after seven games. We start this week with the offense:

After six years of an efficiency-based run-oriented offense, Missouri is now an explosive-based pass-oriented offense (that still runs a lot). The overall success rate of 40.7% is THE worst of the Drinkwitz era but the explosiveness number is one of the best (topped only by ‘23). They give up a lot of havoc plays and can’t reliably score lots of points once they cross the opponent’s 40, but at least they are Top 20 in turnover margin!

By the way, last year’s offense (at this moment in the schedule) ranked 26th in points per scoring opportunity with 5.35 points per trip.

At this time last year Missouri’s rushing success rate was 54.9% and ranked 9th in the country. Now look at it. However, on the flip side, at this time last year Missouri’s yards per successful rush was 10.6 which was 38th and now…oh, wait, it also got worse. So the numbers are telling me that Missouri’s is somehow less efficienct, and more reliant on explosive plays, but actually decreased the amount of yards gained when they are successful? That’s not a good trade!

If we had run these numbers two weeks ago - aka before the Ole Miss and A&M games - it would have looked a lot more impressive. Alas, we have what we have. Austin Simmons has managed to improve the 20+ yard plays by over 13% compared to last year, as well as cut the sack rate from 6.7% to 3.4% (obviously the line plays a part in that as well, but still). Mizzou will have overall offensive success off of the left arm of Simmons, and given the struggles of the run game, anything gained there is a bonus to what the passing game can do.

Success rates measure efficiency and, as you might have heard, Mizzou is not an efficient outfit this year. Fairly explosive in passing downs, but that’s the only notable good thing here. At this point last year Missouri ranked 12th, 66th, 8th, and 26th respectively in these categories.

2025’s offense hidden power was converting 3rd downs, mostly thanks to Ahmad Hardy burrowing his way through a bunch of tackles and still getting whatever yards needed. That is not the case this year. Last year at this time Missouri ranked 2nd in overall 3rd-down conversion rate and now ranks (not nice!) 69th. In case you want to rub the salt further in the wound, the conversion rate at this time last was 61.6%, and now it’s 41.0%.

When I ran these numbers for this year and compared it to “this time last year”, it was the game right before Beau Pribula was injured against Vanderbilt. We all still were not huge fans of the predictable, plodding nature of that offense that could not throw for beans, but it was an effective offense that played well with it’s dynamite, Top 10 Defense.

Now? The run game is so much worse, the passing game hasn’t improved enough to offset it, 3rd-down conversion are way down, and the points per scoring opportunity has dropped by nearly a full point per trip.

It’s not great. And there is time to improve, much like there was time for Missouri to fall apart offensively last year once Beau Pribula was carted off the field.

Next, we’ll take a look at Missouri’s defense to see where they stack up nationally.