Missouri State lost 34-24 at No. 22 SMU on Saturday, but it led 10-0 in the first quarter, on a Yousef Obeid field goal and cornerback Joel Boamah's 60-yard interception return of a Kevin Jennings pass, the program's first defensive touchdown as an FBS member.
The number that matters is seven. Missouri State allowed seven sacks after allowing only two total across the season's first three games, and Casey Woods put it on the personnel across from his tackles. "The type of players, the type of edge players they have, you couldn't scheme for one side or the other." That is a coach describing a talent gap, not a broken plan. Whether Missouri State fans should believe him is the whole question of the next two weeks.
What the bye week is actually for
The Bears are idle this week, so the thing to track is Skyler Locklear's shoulder. He was 15 of 19 for 102 yards and a touchdown before a sack knocked him out late, and Henry Belin IV finished the last two drives 7 of 15 with a touchdown and an interception.
Belin is not an emergency walk-on; he made two career starts at Duke and completed 46 of 82 passes for 540 yards and five touchdowns there before transferring in. Woods hired Cala specifically for that up-tempo, quarterback-development background. Tempo and a quarterback learning on the fly behind a line that just gave up seven sacks are not the version of this offense anybody drew up in January.
Receiver Jmariyae Robinson and linebacker Jashawn Cooper did not travel to Dallas for a matter Woods called "handled internally as a team," and both are expected back.
The part that was real
Don't let the sack total bury the defense. Jack Curtis' unit held SMU to 128 rushing yards, including 98 on 23 carries by Kendrick Raphael. Jared Lloyd made 13 tackles, his third double-digit game, and is at 46 for the season. The pass rush is still thin, one sack, three tackles for loss, and Boamah's pick-six came from the secondary rather than the front seven.
Why the opener carries so much
Missouri State fell to 1-3 and opens Conference USA play Oct. 8 at Western Kentucky, which is also 1-3. Nothing that happened in September counts in the league standings.
This is the first season Missouri State is fully eligible for the Conference USA Championship Game, and a good eight-game league run can actually end somewhere. The simulations are not sentimental about it. The Bears project for roughly 3.6 conference wins, with about a 6% chance of reaching the title game and 1% of winning it. Western Kentucky is close to a coin flip at 51%. That number assumes a quarterback.
Woods took this job as a first-time head coach after four years as SMU's offensive coordinator, which made Saturday a homecoming and made the seven sacks a particularly unpleasant way to be welcomed back. He has eight straight conference games to show the offense he was hired to build can survive contact. The full week-by-week picture is at the interactive guide, and the forecasting details are in the methodology.