It was right there for Illinois to take Saturday. Down by six points with 58 seconds to play, the Illini had a first down on the Missouri 22-yard line.
The biggest comeback in school history beckoned in front of a frenzied crowd 62,352 at the Edward Jones Dome. But then Eddie McGee floated a wobbling pass toward the goal line, and Missouri’s Cornelius “Pig” Brown intercepted, clinching a 40-34 Mizzou victory in the season opener.
Eddie McGee? Yes, that Eddie McGee, the redshirt freshman from Washington, D.C., who stepped in after sophomore Juice Williams took a couple of hits to the helmet in the same nanosecond in the second quarter and left the game.
“I just threw a bad ball, that’s it,” McGee said.
McGee was as much the reason Illinois had a chance to win as anybody else. He completed 17 of 31 passes for 257 yards with one TD pass and two interceptions.
But he is a freshman who played in his first game, and the mistakes of youth had as much to do with another crushing Illinois loss as anything else.
Illinois turned the ball over five times. Four of the turnovers were McGee’s, and they were killers. Quarterbacks do most of their fumbling while getting sacked, which can be understandable. But McGee fumbled twice trying to pick up extra yardage.
With Missouri leading 7-6, a shanked punt set the Illini up on the Missouri 23, and McGee moved them to the 3. On second down McGee took off up the middle and tried too hard. Instead of tucking the ball away, he tried to reach for the goal line. The ball came out inside the 1, and Brown grabbed it three yards deep in the end zone. He took off for the game-turning play, a 100-yard fumble return, and the Illini trailed 13-6 instead of leading 13-7.
“That’s a 14-point swing,” coach Ron Zook said. “[Offensive coordinator] Mike Locksley has talked to him a thousand times about not reaching.”
McGee, the freshman, forgot.
“Sometimes, in the heat of the moment, you don’t think about the stuff like that,” McGee said, acknowledging that it felt like what it was: his first college game. “The game was really fast. As it moved on it started to slow down.”
There’s no way to know what would have happened had Williams not been hurt. He didn’t return after getting drilled by two Missouri defenders, and Zook said it was because Williams sustained an injury near his eye when his helmet was forced down. Illinois said he was held out of the second half as a “precaution.”
Williams is not a member of the punt coverage team, which allowed Jeremy Maclin’s 66-yard touchdown return that boosted Missouri’s lead to 37-13 with 6:11 left in the third quarter. The 24-point deficit looked insurmountable, and the biggest comebacks in school history were only 20-pointers: against Michigan in ’99 and Syracuse in ’05.
But McGee then directed a 72-yard drive and scored on a 17-yard run for 37-20. His TD pass to Kyle Hudson down the right sideline and Rashard Mendenhall’s 4-yard run pulled the Illini within 37-34.
Missouri added a 32-yard field goal before McGee had one last chance.
“I thought Eddie did well,” Zook said. “You can’t turn the ball over. I know he felt bad, but he hung in there and he kept fighting and competing.”
For him and the rest of his teammates, though, it wasn’t enough.
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tabannon@tribune.com
