Why Is Missouri Playing at UMass?

Saturday brings one of the unlikeliest college football games on the schedule in 2024. Missouri, a College Football Playoff hopeful that has been in the top 10 of the AP poll for most of the season, travels to Amherst, Massachusetts, to face the University of Massachusetts. The Tigers will be just the second Power 4 program to face the Minutemen on campus at McGuirk Alumni Stadium. (UMass hosted Boston College in 2021, and the Minutemen have hosted a handful of others 90 miles away at Gillette Stadium, home of the NFL’s New England Patriots.)

How does a matchup like this happen? It’s a combination of college football’s bizarre scheduling practices, which force teams to arrange games many years in advance, and the personal relationships formed between administrators and programs.

For UMass-Missouri, the point person is Nick Joos, a former associate athletics director for the Minutemen who worked in the program’s media relations office from 2000-03. After a lengthy tenure at Baylor, Joos landed at Missouri in 2017, where he worked on football scheduling. Joos, who has since left Mizzou for a job at Iowa State, reached out to UMass about bringing the Minutemen in for a “guarantee game” — a one-off matchup often called a “buy game” in which the road team receives a healthy payment — and the discussions evolved from there.

“Nick saw that we had some openings in future schedules and initially had called to see if we would be interested in a guarantee game, but they just weren’t going to offer enough from a financial standpoint for us to be able to pull the trigger,” recalled UMass athletic director Ryan Bamford. “He asked about what we call a two-for-one, where we would go to them twice and they’d come to us once with some financial considerations. And we’re actually playing Mississippi State this year as the back end of a two-for-one. So I just said, ’Nick, I’m sideways on the schedule in terms of those two-for-ones. I just have too many away dates … Let me pitch you on — would you come and play here?’“

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Joos asked about moving the game to Gillette, but Bamford held firm on keeping all home games in Amherst. Ultimately the two sides agreed to a home-and-home, with the return game in Columbia, Missouri, coming in 2025. Missouri was coming off an 8-5 season under coach Barry Odom when the series was scheduled in January 2019, a far cry from 2023, when the Tigers went 11-2 with a win over Ohio State in the Cotton Bowl.

“When you looked at it back then, it wasn’t like you were getting an Alabama or Georgia to come, but still a good SEC opponent,” said Bamford. “When they had the good year last year and I knew they would have most of their guys back and I was like, ’Oh boy, this is going to be a little bit more challenging than we anticipated years ago.’”

Mizzou’s 2023 jump to the top of the FBS adds clear advantages for a UMass program that has yet to really gain a foothold after moving up to FBS more than a decade ago. The game will be broadcast on ESPN2 — the first Minutemen home game on either ESPN or ESPN2 since the FBS move. Bamford expects McGuirk Alumni Stadium to be near its listed capacity of 17,000, as ticket sales for this game have been going strong since the preseason.

With the television exposure and ticket sales, it would be understandable for UMass to pursue more opportunities like this in the future. However, with the program heading to the MAC in 2025 after nine years as an FBS independent, Bamford is looking to build a more traditional Group of 5 schedule, with nonconference games against FCS and fellow G5 opponents, regional opponents like UConn and an annual guarantee game at a Power 4 foe.

The rigors of independent scheduling, and some bad luck in terms of opponents peaking at the right time, led to UMass facing one of the most difficult G5 schedules in the country this year. The Minutemen primarily faced future MAC opponents in the first half of the season, and many of those teams are now contending for the top of the conference: Eastern Michigan, Toledo and Northern Illinois among them. Missouri kicks off a second-half slate that also features SEC road trips to Mississippi State and Georgia as well as a home game against Conference USA frontrunner Liberty.

Joining the MAC presents a tradeoff, but one that is well worth it for Bamford.

“This is a really challenging schedule, and we’re excited to not only get into a league, have a chance to play for a championship, have those bowl alliances, all those types of things, but really just to play eight familiar games against similarly resourced programs. Every year we’re having to play a new set of opponents. … We’re going to play Buffalo every year now. We know that. Here’s what they do. Here’s, here’s how we can prepare for that within a week. I think some strengths to that and there’s been certainly some unbelievable challenges with being an independent. The scheduling has been right at the top of the list.”

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UMass will join the MAC as a full member entering next season, but the league is not entirely new to the Minutemen. The program played as an affiliate member in football from 2012-15, its first four years in FBS, before opting for independence. As the sport continues to change and independence becomes more difficult for smaller programs due to expanding conference schedules and constant realignment, Bamford calls the MAC’s stability key for his school.

“I think as we try to invest in our football program and other sports, I think that was a really important piece of the calculus that were doing around: How do we get in with similar-profile institutions, invest and have a chance to not have membership spinning and turning and moving all around us?” Bamford said. “And, you know, they are by far the most stable. That was a key ingredient for us.”

The last MAC stint didn’t go particularly well for the Minutemen, as they made their transition to FBS football. The program went 8-40 under Charley Molnar and Mark Whipple, with a 7-25 MAC record during the stretch. Things got marginally better after leaving the conference, with Whipple’s consecutive 4-8 records in 2017 and ’18 representing a high-water mark for the program in the FBS.

When the Minutemen left the MAC, Bamford says the program was near the bottom of the league in terms of coaching resources, including factors such as salaries, size of support staff and spending on equipment and travel. Now, he believes UMass will compete with successful programs like Toledo at the top of the MAC in those categories, bolstering their ability to compete for conference championships.

Today, many Minutemen players are transfers from Power 4 programs looking for an opportunity to compete, and UMass will no longer have to answer questions about conference title and bowl opportunities.

“We’re getting more kids that just, they want to play. And a lot of them were at Power 4 institutions,” said Bamford. “They come down … and they’re getting recruited by a lot of the same institutions in the MAC. So we’re going head-to-head with them and that they’re, they’ve been selling that against us for 10 years, saying, ‘You don’t want to go to UMass, you’re not going to be able to play for a championship. What bowl are you going to go to if you get bowl eligible?’ And so now they can’t use that against us anymore. I think that’ll be an advantage in the recruiting process.”

The chance to welcome talents like Brady Cook, Luther Burden III and Theo Wease Jr. to Amherst is exciting for a program like UMass, and Bamford admits that Oct. 12 has been circled on the calendar for a long time. But the opportunity for UMass to have a stable conference it can call home, with regular games against peer programs starting in 2025? That is the foundation on which the Minutemen program can build lasting success.

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