2024 Missouri Football Opponent Previews: Massachusetts Minutemen (2024)

Welcome back to Rock M Nation’s annual opponent preview series of the upcoming season. Each week we will break down one opponent from the schedule in chronological order. Given that rosters are ever fluid - and this is done by a hobbyist rather than a pro - there could be some errors in history and current roster makeup. All mistakes are done on purpose and with ill intent because I don’t like you or your team.

Catch up on previous 2024 opponent previews!

Murray State

Buffalo

Boston College

Vanderbilt

Massachusetts isn’t the worst FBS program in the history of college football. But that’s mostly because they’ve only been an FBS program for 12 seasons.

However, have they been the worst FBS program of the past 12 years? Yeah, they probably have.

In seven of those twelve seasons they finished as the worst team in SP+. They’ve won 1, 1, 3, 3, 2, 4, 4, 1, 0, 1, 1, and 3 games in those 12 years respectively.

They’ve never beaten a team from a power conference. Their only FBS wins since making the leap up are as follows:

• Akron (x2)
• Miami (Ohio)
• Kent State
• Eastern Michigan (x2)
• Ball State
• FIU (x2)
• Buffalo
• Georgia Southern
• Appalachian State
• BYU
• Charlotte
• Connecticut (x2)
• Liberty
• New Mexico State
• Army

Oh! And they’ve lost to an FCS team as an FBS team four times.

But it didn’t have to be this way! UMass started playing college football in 1879 and had their first undefeated season in the same year. They won four conference championships under coach Bob Pickett, won a National Championship with Mark Whipple, and were frequent participants in the FCS Playoff, ruining several dynastic runs for FCS stalwarts New Hampshire, Maine, and Delaware.

Most of the coaches who wound up at Amherst managed to challenge for championships and playoff appearances which helped them land bigger jobs. Even former Missouri coach Bob Stull led the Minutemen to 7 wins which helped launch his career.

Despite the reliably excellent position they were in at the FCS level, the UMass leadership yearned for more and decided to make the jump to the FBS level...and all the magic promptly died.

Even with playing a softer MAC schedule, Charley Molnar struggled through two 1-win campaigns and was promptly fired while the MAC decided to cut UMass from their conference ranks for, essentially, being super bad. Mark Whipple was brought back to reignite the magic that he found in the late 90s/early aughts but, in the second go-around, Whip’s best effort lead to a lone 4-win season and he chose to step down. Florida State OC Walt Bell was hired to salvage the build that Whipple started but Bell’s teams backslid to the familiar 1- and 2-win territory, included multiple losses to FCS teams that caused his in-season termination.

So then UMass once again dipped back into the nostalgia bag and brought back their former head coach from the 80s, Don Brown, to try and resuscitate the dying Minuteman football program. Known as a hard-nosed defensive guru who was the mastermind of those terrifying Michigan defenses of the late 2010s, Brown was thought to bring back discipline and a competitive edge that had been missing over the past...oh, 20ish years, I guess?

Brown won one game in his first year. Then, last year, he did this:

From a quality standpoint UMass technically took a step back from ‘22 to ‘23. But, the win total increased threefold! Which is undeniably good!

However, their win against New Mexico State was incredibly lucky (postgame win expectancy: 33%) which offset an unlucky loss against New Mexico (63% PGWE). They played excellent ball against an Army team in an offensive crisis and had a dominating 10-point win against something called Merrimack. Otherwise, it was just a ton of lopsided losses across the board.

I tend to frown on nostalgia-related hires, where schools bring some ancient former head coach in his twilight years back into the fold because he lead them to glory in the 80s/90s and knew how to operate the palace half a generation ago (see: Mack Brown, North Carolina). But winning at football in the northeast is hard if you’re in the FBS ranks as the natural talent is rare and tends to be vacuumed up by Penn State and Ohio State...or any power program with a semblance of success and a decent scouting department. Young coaches have had careers crater after failing to revive a UMass program whose best years were in FCS, so a lot of the talented up and comers don’t even take the call for the interview, let alone seriously consider the job. So, until things improve, the old coach on the decline seems to be their only move that is reasonable for the Minutemen.

It just goes to show that making a move for increased TV revenue can undercut all the culture and support built on winning championships and playoff games at the lower level. And unless your infrastructure and natural advantages are geared towards recruiting or luring talented transfers, it might be best to kick ass at the lower levels for multiple decades and earn your mark at being the best at the FCS level and become folk legends (hello North Dakota State!)

Coaching Staff

Photo by Sam Wasson/Getty Images

Don Brown - 3rd Year - 4-20

Don Brown is 68 years old. He’s been coaching football since before my parents even met. He’s a northeast native who graduated from Norwich, coached at multiple Ivy League schools, then made a name for himself by crafting incredible defenses at schools that usually didn’t have that, such as Maryland, Connecticut, and Boston College. He rose to national prominence once Jim Harbaugh platformed Brown’s aggressive 4-3 scheme, but was fired after the 2-4 COVID season where his defense fell to an “unacceptable” level of 36th in SP+. And after a brief rehab stint on Jedd Fisch’s rebuild of Arizona, Brown decided to come back to his second head coaching spot and try again at making the Minuteman football team relevant.

And while Brown did get UMass to the quarterfinals and championships of the FCS Playoff, that was also 18 years ago at this point and a lot has changed since then, to say the least. The man certainly knows how to craft a defense but building a team is a whole different beast, especially now, and its unclear if Brown will be able to steer UMass out of the skid or simply be the tread-water hire for the next guy who gets a shot at the job.

Assistant Staff

Shane Montgomery - Offensive Coordinator: Here’s what Shane Montgomery is really good at: making sure that already-great offenses don’t fall off a cliff in regression. At Miami (Ohio) he inherited Ben Roethlisberger and managed to put him in position to be one of the very few 1st Round picks from a MAC school. And at James Madison Montgomery managed to keep the Dukes’ offense at a comparable pace thanks to future NFL quarterback Ben DiNucci being the signal caller.

What Shane Montgomery isn’t very good at is making an offense better. Even with Terrell Owens on the roster he made it one year as an OC at UT-Chattanooga, and failed to stay at the job for longer than two years at terrible Akron, Charlotte, and Buffalo teams. And now Don Brown is asking him to bring creativity and effectiveness to one of the most consistently bad offenses in the country that definitely does not have a future NFL quarterback on the roster? Yeah, ok.

Keith Dudzinski - Defensive Coordinator: Dudzinski has worked with Brown at several stops before, including UMass the first time, Maryland, Michigan, and Arizona. The guy is pretty familiar with what Brown wants and how to call it but has yet to show any noticeable improvement in his first go around as defensive coordinator for the Minutemen.

Ben Albert - Special Teams Coordinator

Damian Mincey - Running Backs

Matt Zanellato - Wide Receivers

Matt Layman - Tight Ends

Alex Miller - Offensive Line

Steven Daniels, Jr. - Defensive Line

Mike McCray - Outside Linebackers

Michael Livingston - Defensive Backs

Roster Movement

As you can imagine, a bad Independent 3-9 team lost a lot of guys to the transfer portal. There were a few that I would consider “transferred up” - Kay-Ron Lynch-Adams to Michigan State, Greg Derosiers to Memphis, Nahji Logan to Indiana - but the vast majority of these guys dropped down to the FCS level. Again, some of that is a big “yikes” in that you lost 22 players from last year’s roster that went from 1 win to 3 wins. Then again, losing a bunch of FCS-caliber players when you play at the FBS is...not a big deal? Maybe? Hopefully?

Meanwhile, Brown and friends tried to import an entire damn team via the portal, adding 27 players to replace the 22 that they lost. And whether it’s power conference castoffs, lower level FBS journeymen, or FCS climbers, the key for UMass’ transfer additions seems to be “competition at the positions that count”.

What do I mean by that? Well...five proven wide receivers, three tight ends, and seven experienced corners added speaks to the staff trying to beef up the passing game on both sides of the ball, the aspect of the modern game that’s most indicative of success. At the same time, adding six offensive linemen and three defensive linemen is clearly a “throw numbers at the problem”, especially when those guys are coming in from all levels (including former Kansas City prep standout Etinosa Reuben). However, those linemen are very inexperienced: only one of the offensive lineman added has started and none had more than 500 snaps of experience last year, where as none of the defensive linemen added had more the 100 snaps of experience in 2023. Building lines via portal is not something that has been shown to work, especially if those guys have been backups for their career. But UMass needs guys and it seems they were able to gather enough out of the discount bin to assemble something they liked.

Meanwhile, if you were ever curious what the 128th-best recruiting class looks like...well, there ya go.

UMass seemed to have focused most of their scholarships on transfers while giving a cursory effort to the high school ranks. The class wound up being a miss-mash of 2-star guys from all corners of the country but with a similar theme as their portal activity: passing game and lines.

Offense

The good news is that UMass’ offense under Steve Casula improved drastically from ‘22 to ‘23. By 31 spots in SP+, to be exact! The bad news, then, is that the offense was so bad in ‘22 that improving 31 spots still kept them in the 100s ranks of offense last year.

The ground game was the strength, ranking 66th in efficiency and a surprising 21st in explosiveness. That rushing competence was assisted by a line that ranked 52nd in opportunity rate and Top 5 in blown-block percentage. But, as mentioned previously, those running backs that made it happen transferred to power-conference schools and the offensive line lost three of their five starters, leaving a quarterback who loves the deep ball a little too much and a receiving corps unequipped to deliver on said deep balls. If the Minutemen hit on every single linemen and receiver they brought in, maybe you could see this unit rise to a Top 75 level. But that’s an absurd ask for a reward that is only relatively worth it...and oh yeah the new offensive coordinator kind of stinks.

Quarterback

Photo by Sam Wasson/Getty Images

Taisun Phommachanh has had an interesting career so far. A high 4-star out of the same high school that gave us Trevor Lawrence, Phommachanh began his career (like Lawrence) at Clemson. After three years of being unable to obtain the starting position he transferred to Georgia Tech where he threw the ball five times in two games and promptly transferred again.

He easily had his best year at UMass last year but barely threw for 1,500 yards with a dreadful 5.0 ANY/A, thanks mostly in part to a 1:1 TD/INT ratio and taking 19 sacks with an offensive line that ranked in the Top 25 in pressures allowed. He’s not super mobile and loves to wait to take a deep shot so he’s probably not the best equipped to lead an underdog offense to glory. Akron transfer Ryan Jankowski could also be in play here but, regardless of who wins the job, they need to hope the ground game can stay strong and a few of the transfer receivers give them some skilled options to throw to.

Running Backs

Photo by Chris McDill/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

With the transfer of Kay’Ron Lynch-Adams and Greg Desrosiers, UMass’ leading returning rusher is quarterback Taisun Phommachanh and his 166 yards on 29 carries. The only returning running back from last year’s squad was the little-used Jalen John, and even the transfer they brought in - C.J. Hester of Western Michigan - had a mere 29 carries and 124 yards last year. The ground game was the key to the (very little) offensive success and now it’s essentially starting over from scratch.

Receivers

Photo by Michael Chang/Getty Images

Ok, take a knee for this one:

• As a team, UMass threw 348 passes last year and had 212 completions.
• One player - Anthony Simpson - accounted for 28% of those targets (98 total), 27% of the catches (57), 31% of the total yards (792), and 79% of the passing touchdowns (11).
• None of the tight ends were targeted in the passing game, two receivers graduated, and four others transferred out meaning Anthony Simpson is the only returning guy who caught a pass for UMass in 2023.

Now, Simpson is accompanied by some prolific receivers acquired via portal, including Duquesne’s Keshawn Brown. But even with that experience as players there’s very little experience this group has with these quarterbacks. We’ll see how much of a difference that makes, especially if the quarterback battle is a true competition throughout fall camp.

Offensive Line

As previously stated UMass is losing three of their starting five offensive linemen, returning their starting right tackle, center, and backup guard. They acquired six offensive linemen through the portal but only one has more than 180 snaps of experience, and that guy is jumping up to FBS from Ivy League middleweight Columbia. It’s a big risk to take multiple swings at “couldn’t see the field but was pretty good coming out of high school” but, frankly, if you’re in the position UMass is in, you take what you can get and hope the numbers work out. There’s good size and potential here but hoping that it all clicks at a rate to see zero drop off from last year’s decent-at-best running game? That’s a big ask.

Defense

When a school hires Don Brown that school is probably assuming the defense won’t be the problem, given Browns’ prolific ability to deploy kick ass defenses in the most odd northeastern schools imaginable.

But that hasn’t been the case so far in Amherst. Browns’ first Minuteman defense ranked 107th while last year’s group ranked 123rd, giving up at least 30 points in nine of their twelve games last year.

The problem starts up front, where the defensive line and linebackers that barely eclipse a 5% havoc rate allowed a rushing success rate of 52% (130th) with an 8.5% sack rate (89th). The passing defense was somehow a strength ranking 81st in the country but still allowing a 41% success rate through the air. They gave up nearly 5 points per scoring opportunity, managed a paltry 20% 3-and-out rate, and were some of the worst defenses in both standard downs (128th) and passing downs (122nd). And that was with decent turnover luck (+0.6)!

Brown’s answer was to import an FCS all-star roster of cornerbacks, hailing from such college football stalwarts as Dartmouth, Bryant, West Liberty, Sacred Heart, and Tennessee State. He supplemented them with two power conference linemen - each on their second transfer, mind you - and a prolific defensive tackle named Tim Grant-Randall who was a one-man wrecking crew on the interior of an Eastern Michigan defensive line. Adding standout Ivy League linebacker Macklin Ayers is a net positive as well.

Even if this defense makes a massive leap similar to last year’s offense, that still puts them in the 100s rank as far as quality. That can get you far when going up against a schedule littered with MAC foes and two FCS opponents, and maybe that’s the only goal that they need to shoot for in this year...and subsequent seasons.

So what does it all mean?

Playing three SEC teams in the same year is not great for the “W” column but I’m sure it’ll help the program find funding for further building, as well as providing some payment for the two FCS teams they somehow fenagled to get on the schedule in the same year. Outside of that, a MAC-heavy rotation means that UMass isn’t that far from 5 or 6 wins...but also just as far as going back to 1- or 2-wins in a flash. It’s not a program that has many natural advantages or history and, frankly, is a prime candidate to be the second school ever to transition back down to the FCS. And the first school who did that - Idaho - is already back in the FCS Playoffs so how bad of a move can it really be?

For Missouri, this might as well be a second FCS game on their schedule. Why Jim Sterk signed this deal as a home-and-home is an odd one, and his follow up of doing the same with Miami (Ohio) makes no sense for a team of Mizzou’s caliber.

But here we are, playing this game in Amherst anyway. If this is anything less than a blowout by the 3rd quarter than something has gone terribly wrong. Maybe the offense sneaks up for a while and maybe the blood transfusion on defense gives UMass some life and makes things complicated for a quarter or two. But Mizzou’s offense should be too good, and the talent on defense so much more prolific, that this should be a tidy, easy win in a four-game slate that is (likely) the toughest stretch of the 2024 season.