"It was ridiculous, just ridiculous," Missouri defensive line coach Craig Kuligowski said of the Coulter hype. "The kid, it would have never mattered what he did. He could have had 44 sacks this year and it wouldn’t have lived up to the expectations. I told him to forget about all that."

"It was very unfair," Baston said. "I thought it was talk that he didn’t want and didn’t ask for. But he did a good job of dealing with it."

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Coulter sensed the inflated expectations when he came to Columbia - he joined the team during voluntary 7-on-7 sessions - and worried if his new teammates resented his sudden fame, especially Missouri’s returning starters at defensive end, seniors Tommy Chavis and Stryker Sulak.

"Before I even stepped into the program and got to meet my teammates, the media had already made me into this great player," Coulter said. "Stryker and Chavis had been here for years and been through all the training that I hadn’t even been through yet. With all the hard work they’ve put in, for me to come into the program and everybody looking at me as the person who’s going to take their positions, it kind of made things hard. I had to earn their friendship, earn their trust over time by showing that I wasn’t self-centered."