By just a few votes, the Missouri football missed out on opening the season in the Associated Press Top 25. The Tigers, coming off an 8-5 campaign, earned the most AP poll points among teams that didn’t finish in the Top 25 of the preseason poll. With 117 poll points, Missouri came in just behind No. 25 Stanford with 141 points.
Missouri last appeared in the AP preseason top 25 in 2015, checking in at No. 24. That season, Gary Pinkel’s last coaching the Tigers, came unraveled after a 3-0 start and ended with a 5-7 record. Here’s some promising poll trivia for Mizzou: The team’s two best seasons this century began outside of the AP poll, both 2007 and 2013, when the Tigers won 12 games, reached their conference championship game and played in January bowl games.