The injury bug has already hit Missouri, so you might as well find a way to laugh it off

Does anyone else every get commercial jingles stuck in their heads? It’s got to be a fairly normal sensation.

I find a particular issue that flits through my head day in and day out is the repurposing of commercial jingles to fit my current circumstances. For instance, when Mitchell Forde’s tweet about Kelly Bryant and Albert Okwuegbunam hit the timeline yesterday, I couldn’t stop hearing the Liberty Mutual Insurance song.

“Injuries, injuries, in-juries. In-juries!”

It was stupid and hellish, and made me want to smash my head into a wall. The whole point of marketing jingles is that they’re shallow, easy melodies that worm their way into your brain with no possibility of getting out.

Still, the absurdity of the moment helped me digest the potentially devastating news that I would’ve otherwise been processing. We’ve spent a whole summer discussing the most important components to a potentially special Missouri football season, and with one tweet, we were faced with the possibility of losing two of — if not the — most important aspects of this year’s team. That was all before we found out Jordan Elliott also left practice with an injury. What a day!

Fortunately, it seems like things are OK, at least if you’re inclined to believe coachspeak.

There doesn’t seem to be any reason to mistrust Coach Odom — by all accounts these were minor injuries to important players, and taking them out of practice could have been entirely precautionary. They’ll likely miss the rest of the week (maybe even next), but the chances of them missing significant game time isn’t great.

However, this is what I was talking about last Friday when camp opened up. The beginning of camp represents a high point in hope, a point that will almost certainly never be topped outside of the special seasons that come once in a blue moon. All it takes is an awkward step or an overly aggressive freshman trying to make his way onto the two-deep and, oh damn, we end up 7-5, how did that happen?

The point is, bad things are going to happen this football season. Players are going to miss games you really don’t think Missouri can win without them. Some receiver is going to drop a wide-open touchdown in the fourth quarter of a tight game and, dear lord in heaven, you’ll want to bargain the souls of several family members to punish them for it. The stakes will get higher, and we’ll all get tenser. So goes the absurd lives of sports fans.

But for now, the stakes are still pretty low. Injuries will probably remain minor, with plenty of time to heal before the real meat-and-potatoes of the season comes around. Drops will be met with grunts from coaches as opposed to the scorn of one thousand greasy thumbs online.

This writer’s advice is to find a way to laugh through the tense moments while you can. Watch some Netflix. Read about the 30-50 feral hogs running through some poor man’s yard. Or maybe even just make up a stupid song in your head. It’s better than working yourself up into a frenzy over something you have no control over.