COLUMBIA, Mo. — Back to the Commonwealth it is. But this time, the Minutemen will be the visitors.
No. 20 Missouri will host Massachusetts at 6:30 p.m. Saturday, the return leg of a nonconference series that saw the Tigers play in the unconventional setting of Amherst’s foliage last season.
This time, the game will be played against the backdrop of Mizzou’s homecoming festivities. The 17th consecutive sellout crowd at Memorial Stadium will likely be watching a beatdown.
MU, 4-0 this season and 1-0 against Southeastern Conference opposition, holds just about every advantage possible over 0-3 UMass. The Minutemen have lost to Iowa, Temple and FCS program Bryant this season.
There are a couple of differences between this squad and the Massachusetts team Mizzou beat 45-3 last season.
For one, UMass has since joined the Mid-American Conference, where it’ll soon be playing league games on Tuesday and Wednesday nights to fill the midweek void in the football schedule.
The Minutemen also have a new head coach: Joe Harasmyiak. He’s in from Rutgers, where he was the defensive coordinator, with past stops as an assistant at Minnesota and head coach at Maine.
“I think Coach Harasymiak’s culture is really starting to take shape,” Missouri coach Eli Drinkwitz said. “You can tell they’re improving in each game.”
UMass has used three different quarterbacks this season but seems to have settled on redshirt freshman A.J. Hairston. He was a three-star recruit out of Pompano Beach, Florida, and worked his way into snaps late last season.
After two more experienced quarterbacks struggled for the Minutemen early this season, they’ve switched over to Hairston, whom Drinkwitz called “the better player on tape.”
Almost all of Massachusetts’ passing volume goes to Jacquon Gibson, who has 24 receptions for 258 yards. Nobody else on the UMass roster has more than five catches.
Mike Bajakian, the Minutemen’s offensive coordinator, has called plays for power conference programs and worked as an assistant in the NFL.
Still, UMass is a program still trying to get itself off the ground and into college football relevance, which should not challenge Missouri.
What’s with the drop kicks?
Keen observers of Missouri’s kickoffs against South Carolina might have noticed that those plays looked a little bit different. Mizzou punter Connor Weselman, not kickoff specialist Oliver Robbins, was booting the ball down the field.
And he wasn’t kicking off the tee, either. Instead, Weselman was dropping the ball to the turf and kicking it, a rare and difficult — but legal — alternative to the traditional kickoff.
The Tigers did it for a couple of reasons. First, they felt vulnerable against the Gamecocks’ high-powered kickoff return unit.
“With Connor’s ability to drop kick, we could actually line up and dictate a kick away from their return,” Drinkwitz said. “So we knew where the return was going, and then he was able to kick it opposite, which allowed us to have a better coverage scheme. We knew that we weren’t going to give up a big return at that point.”
It was a bit of a surprise to the coaching staff that Weselman, a transfer from Stanford, could pull off drop kicks. He brought it up in a special teams briefing about what South Carolina might deploy last week, and coaches had him try it during a practice walkthrough. After it went well, they decided to give it a go during the game.
The schematic advantage helped contain the Gamecocks’ return unit, and there was one other appealing factor to switching to drop kicks for a game.
“I’d never seen anybody do it before,” Drinkwitz said, “so there’s that to it, too.”
Flagg leaves program
Mizzou safety Caleb Flagg has left the football program after deciding to redshirt the 2025 season, Drinkwitz said Tuesday.
Flagg evidently made the decision to preserve this season of eligibility, which he’ll now use at another school after finding himself unsatisfied with his path to playing time at MU. He was low on the depth chart at the Tigers’ hybrid safety position and only played defensive snaps during blowout wins against Central Arkansas and Louisiana.
He transferred to Missouri in 2024 from Houston Christian, arriving alongside his older brother, Corey Flagg Jr. Caleb saw the field in 11 games last season, making 20 tackles, but was recruited over in the portal this offseason.
Players doing what Flagg did and choosing to pull the plug on a season in which they’re not happy with their role has become more common in the transfer portal era.
“We wish him the best,” Drinkwitz said. “With that being said, we do have a lot of safeties on the back end.”
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Eli Hoff | Post-Dispatch
Mizzou athletics beat writer
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