Terez Hall's phone was ringing almost non-stop the night before national signing day.
He, like countless other football recruits, was getting calls at the eleventh hour from programs who wanted his talents. Missouri head coach Barry Odom laughed a few weeks ago remembering the final push to land the linebacker, now a junior.
Hall's recruitment push picked up after Missouri offered him, he said, and his relationship with Odom and Gary Pinkel sold him.
Still, family members tried to convince him to go to Georgia, and the Bulldogs kept calling.
"I had to stop answering," Hall said. "I put my phone in airplane mode."
Missouri's thankful he chose them. Hall has played well for the Tigers so far this season, and set career-highs at Kentucky in tackles (12) and tackles for loss (2.5). Hall leads Missouri in both categories, and has 6.5 tackles for loss on the year.
The Bulldogs will give him plenty of opportunities to add to those numbers tonight.
A junior out of Lithonia, Ga., an Atlanta suburb, Hall said he's spoken with his parents, siblings, aunts and uncles, coaches and teachers back home in Georgia about Missouri's upcoming matchup against the Bulldogs."I've been looking forward to it," Hall said. "It's the only opportunity I can get to see them. That's the most important thing, they're going to come and support me, because I barely get to see my folks. To be able to go out and do what I love, and for them to come support me, that's a big experience for me."
Missouri-Georgia kicks off at 6:30 p.m. on the SEC Network.
The Tigers' 41-26 win against a top-10 Georgia team in 2013 was, in many ways, the moment its football team made its presence known in the Southeastern Conference.
The Tigers had conference wins against Kentucky and Tennessee in 2012, and the win against the Volunteers had come in four overtimes at Neyland Stadium. But at 5-0 and facing a seventh-ranked Bulldogs team that had already beaten two other top-10 opponents on the year, No. 25 Missouri faced down a conference powerhouse and 90,000 home fans and won. That win was a huge step forward not just in legitimacy but also toward consecutive SEC East titles. After all, Missouri hadn't won an away matchup against a top-10 opponent in 32 years.
Things are different now.
The Tigers (1-4, 0-3 SEC) are still going on the road again to face No. 4 Georgia (6-0, 3-0 SEC) with a high-powered offense. Georgia was still favored by a touchdown on that early afternoon four years ago. It's 30 points this time around.
And no wonder. Despite showing marked improvement on offense against Kentucky, Missouri's defense doesn't seem capable of stopping anyone consistently. It let the Wildcats a team that hadn't broken 360 yards or 27 points in five games - put up 486 and 40.
Odom compared the season to a marathon Monday, touching on the difficulty and length of both.
"There's a high percentage of people who sign up to run a marathon that never finish it," he said. "The people that are running the marathon, the number or the percentage of people that quit, human nature sets in around mile marker 20, human nature tells you it's really really hard, and a lot of people drop out.
"They realize they've done a lot of work, they've gotten to that point. You can see the finish line, now you've got to go take it, you've got to get there. That's where we're at."
Trying to run the ball against Georgia will probably feel like a marathon, even though the Bulldogs will not have inside linebacker Natrez Patrick, who is serving a suspension for a marijuana arrest, or defensive tackle Trenton Thompson, who is out indefinitely with a knee injury.
Georgia, meanwhile, will run the ball often. Jake Fromm is throwing just under 18 passes a game on average for the Bulldogs for 150 yards. He's far more likely to hand off to Nick Chubb or Sony Michel, the conference's first and 10th leading rushers, respectively, by yardage.
Damarea Crockett and Ish Witter aren't far behind. Crockett's seventh and Witter's 15th, but Chubb and Michel combine for nearly 270 yards on the ground per game. Kirby Smart may even elect to hold Fromm on the sideline in favor of an extra blocker and snap the ball out of the Wildcat to one of his talented backs, a play he's run a few times this season.
Drew Lock was stellar in the first half against the Bulldogs a year ago and lackluster in the second half. Missouri's pass game and Georgia's pass defense will be good tests for one another.
"I thought we played a good game," he said of Kentucky, "but you need to play a great game to get the whole job done. We have a lot of positive things we can build on. Went back and watched it with the wide receivers again, and I think we're going to be even more on the same page this week, go down and hopefully play our A game."
One area Missouri could stand to improve on, both offensively and defensively, is in red zone efficiency. The Tigers have failed to score at all on three of 15 tries inside an opponent's 20-yard line, and that 80 percent success rate is tied for 84th in the nation and 10th in the SEC. Defensively, the Tigers are tied for 127th and last in the SEC, allowing opponents to come away with points 95 percent of the time they reach Missouri's 20.
Georgia is one of six teams that has scored on every one of its red zone possessions this season, and its defense gives up points 75 percent of the time inside the 20, tied for 31st nationally.
Related media:
Missouri Tigers Football Podcast [Georgia preview, Oct. 14, 2017]