['Hamas' Jenkins]

Yesterday's loss was a small piece, but when looking at how it coalesces with all the other pieces a pretty predictable pattern emerges.

Look at Pinkel's recruiting.

What are they great at? Getting underrated/overlooked prospects with athletic gifts and molding them into valuable football players.

What can they not do? Lock down the borders of the state and win real recruiting battles on a consistent basis against top level schools.

2015 Class: Alex Ofodile, Carlos Davis, Khalil Davis, and Hale Hentges. All top level players, all going out of state to play. The excuse for losing the Davis twins was that their uncle played at Nebraska, but Ofodile, who's ****ing dad plays at Missouri, cannot forge a strong enough tie with the program to recruit. Hentges will go to Alabama to sit the bench rather than play at Missouri, despite the fact that the program has begun using its TE in a traditional sense

2014 Class: Brian Wallace goes to Arkansas despite being a Missouri lean through the entire process because their coach can convince him that they are better at producing NFL linemen. Roderick Johnson ends up going to Florida State. Missouri gets two of the top ten players in the state and three of the top 15. Arkansas gets as many in the top 15 and top 10 despite losing a billion games.

2013 Class: Ezekiel Elliot, whose dad is literally crying for him to go to Missouri, goes to tOSU

Just like our recruiting, which relies on the failures of others, we can sneak up on teams and beat them when they are decimated by injury, but we can never go toe-to-toe with a legitimate top level team and beat them.

Pinkel can beat a paper tiger Kansas team and Oklahoma once in a decade with the aid of a KO return and a 70 yard interception return, but he can't hold a 17 point lead against South Carolina at home, or stop the biggest rape in Atlanta since Sherman's march toward the sea as soon as he faces another team with its full complement.

If you want a team that can go .500 in a decent conference by feasting on bottom feeders of the league and put up an 8-4 schedule because of non-con cupcakes, then Pinkel's your man. But if you demand a level of accountability for failures on the field or an ability to compete with, and occasionally beat, an elite team, then look somewhere else.

Pinkel needs ridiculous luck to put up a strong record, just like how our defense needs it to masquerade as anything other than a shit show.

The media and fans make the mistake of calling defenses that need to force a lot of turnovers opportunistic. They really should just call them bad. Without turnovers, Steckel can't get his defense off the field because he can't teach them proper technique, he can't scheme, and he can't bring in enough athletes on the back seven to actually draw a ****ing line in the sand.

Yeah, Pinkel is a better coach than Larry Smith. But Larry Smith isn't the only other option. He did a good job of building the foundation of the program, but he's not good enough, and he's never been good enough, to take the next step.

But yet again, the fans are paralyzed by a fear of failure over what might happen if we bring in another Smith rather than motivated by a desire to succeed, wherein we might actually try and improve the quality of the program.