NASHVILLE – It takes a special team and group of players to win games the way the Missouri Tigers did game after game. Regardless of which side of the ball was on the field or which players were playing, Missouri displayed a clutch factor late in games like no other.

Watching linebacker Corey Flagg and safety Daylan Carnell seal the deal for the Missouri Tigers with a miraculous fourth-down tackle to win another one-score game wasn’t surprising. The Tigers made plays like the fourth and one tackle all season on both sides of the ball to ensure victories, featuring 30-yard touchdown runs, a scoop and score touchdown and more.

The Tigers made these clutch plays all season long. Those very plays helped Missouri win six one-score games, including its win over Iowa in the Music City Bowl. There was no finer way to conclude a 10-2 season chock-full of adversity with another hard-fought win and that’s exactly what Eli Drinkwitz’s team did.

There’s plenty one could attribute to Missouri’s consistent grittiness and ability to fight back but, unsurprisingly, Drinkwitz found and rolled with words from well-known philosopher Henry David Thoreau. To say the least, there might not be more applicable words for this exact team.

“All endeavors call for the ability to tramp the last mile, shape the last plan, endure the last hour’s toil,” Thoreau said. “The fight-to-the-finish spirit is the one characteristic we must possess if we are to face the future as finishers.”

Those words from Thoreau were instilled into his team, giving the Tigers another motto to play by. It definitely applies to more than just football and there’s no doubt it applied to Missouri’s bowl game victory.

“There are a lot of people that start things in life, but they don’t finish,” Drinkwitz said. “If you’re going to be a person of significance, if you’re going to be the best at whatever you do, you have to have a finisher.”

Being able to finish close games in the fourth quarter, at this point, is a staple for the Missouri Tigers. A win over the Hawkeyes in the late stages of the game gave the Tigers its sixth one-score victory of the season. More in this game than others, finding a way to win was drastically important.

“It’s just something that we talk about start fast, finish strong all the time as one of those things that’s important in our program, and I just felt like these seniors had come this far,” Drinkwitz said. “We just needed to finish. Boy, they did in the fourth quarter today.”

Missouri’s ability to win games in the same close manner over and over again goes beyond playmaking and physical traits, to an extent. Drinkwitz commonly speaks about belief as a common factor throughout the locker room. That belief is at its highest when the Tigers find themselves in dire need scenarios at the end of games, most of which ended as wins.

“I think it’s belief in each other, belief in what we’re doing,” Drinkwitz said. “We prepare really hard for these moments.”

There are no doubts that the Tigers had full faith in quarterback Brady Cook against the Hawkeyes. In arguably his best performance of the season to close out his career, Cook threw for 287 yards and two touchdowns, adding 54 yards on the ground. He did whatever was necessary for the Tigers to win today, the last game and just about every game he played in a Missouri uniform.

“I think there’s always belief in our quarterback and Brady [Cook] because you look back a couple of years ago and maybe it didn’t go our way, but he never flinched,” Drinkwitz said. “He never changed. Just kept trying. He kept going back out there.”

On the field, the Tigers made the necessary plays down the stretch in order to win this game. It’s no secret that Drinkwitz drills the “elite edge” concept into his players and that message remained the same against Iowa. The ability to be more physical and tougher than its opponents in the fourth quarter is a choir Drinkwitz preached to all season long.

“We truly believe in faster, stronger, tougher than you in the fourth quarter,” Drinkwitz said. 

Cook wasn’t the only player on the field with belief thrown in his direction. Pass rusher Johnny Walker Jr., played his most disruptive game of the season, proving to be old reliable for Drinkwitz when a big play was needed.

“Then you flip it on the other side of the ball, you look at a guy like Johnny Walker,” Drinkwitz said. “You have to get to the quarterback, man, just call Johnny. He’ll get there.”

This Missouri Tigers team surely gave its fanbase 10 entertaining, stressful and memorable games that will not be forgotten, with a roster that did everything they could to ensure the final result wasn’t defeat.

Sure this team was talented, skilled, poised and whatever other adjectives you could use for a good football team. The belief they had in one another, however, to tramp the last mile and fight to the finish in six gritty wins, will be what’s remembered about this team.