AMHERST, Mass. — Missouri needed the tonic of wildness.
Reeling from last week’s collapse, the No. 21 Tigers trekked into the Massachusetts woodlands, seeking that phrase coined by the writer Henry David Thoreau as he took up residence along Walden Pond 75 miles east of Amherst. Surrounded by foliage and only a smattering of fans, they might have found it.
Sandwiched between two Southeastern Conference games and played in front of a fraction of the crowds that those matchups draw, Saturday’s 45-3 novelty nonconference victory over Massachusetts could wind up being a small dose of a needed tonic.