At 11 years old, Matt Zollers' arm made a youth baseball team reevaluate its safety measures.
Long before he stepped on Missouri football's campus as the Tigers ' future quarterback, Zollers was a righty pitcher with a loose cannon.
Ryan Freed, who is three years Zollers' senior and, as it so turned out, the senior quarterback who Zollers wound up splitting series with at Spring-Ford High as a freshman, went to watch his younger brother play in a baseball tournament.
Zollers was the starting pitcher and teammates with Freed's younger sibling. Zollers threw hard, but he was unrefined.
He wound up for a pitch, and Freed recalls the zip; the rip straight out of the release that the hopes of an SEC football team now hang on.
"He threw the ball so hard and hit the kid, and he broke the kid's nose," Freed said. "The next day, they all came back with facemasks on their helmets."
Ouch.
"Obviously, he felt terrible for doing that," Freed added, "but we were all like, 'wow.' Like, that arm talent is ridiculous."
Fast forward about eight years — and, we hope, one healed nose — and we're talking about Zollers, 19, in a similar fashion.
He's talented but fresh. He's got a big arm, but it's unrefined.
Now, he has center stage.
The true freshman quarterback will start his first game for Missouri football on Saturday, Nov. 8, against Texas A&M on Faurot Field in Columbia, as injuries have decimated the experience at the top of MU's QB depth chart. Zollers is a former top-100 prospect who Eli Drinkwitz has called the future of the program at quarterback, but he wasn't meant to be in this position this early.
MU quarterback Sam Horn was ruled out for the season back in Week 1 with a fractured tibia in his right leg, which he sustained on his first snap of the season.
That officially ended a competition with Penn State transfer Beau Pribula, who took over for eight games as a starter but went down in the Tigers' most recent game, Oct. 25 against Vanderbilt, with a "non-fractured dislocated ankle" that has ruled him out indefinitely.
So, the rookie grabs the reins.
Now, don't fret quite yet. Dropping down to QB3 isn't the death sentence that it could be for the Tigers.
"The number-one talent that Matt has is his arm," MU coach Eli Drinkwitz said Tuesday. "I mean, I think the way the ball jumps off his hand, I think we all can see it. He's got a really good arm."
Yeah, Coach. There's a now-college-aged kid from Pennsylvania screaming "no kidding" at that one.
We don't need any proof of spiral.
The question — the one that will help determine how Missouri's 2025 season finishes — will be whether Zollers is ready to be an SEC quarterback.
Zollers has 90 snaps as a college player — almost entirely in mop-up duty in nonconference play. He provided a jolt at Vanderbilt, but there were freshman errors over his nearly two quarters of play in a rescue attempt.
So, let's head back to Freed and Spring-Ford High, where Zollers cut his teeth.
He lived through a remarkable parallel to his current situation in CoMo.
Chad Brubaker had never split reps at quarterback, but he had to make an exception.
Brubaker was the Spring-Ford High coach when Zollers arrived on the scene. The coach brought him up to the freshman team while he was in eighth grade. As a freshman, he was bumped up to varsity. Not unprecedented, but both rare decisions for Brubaker.
Freed — who is now a student assistant coach at East Stroudsburg — was Brubaker's senior quarterback at Spring-Ford, but the Rams fell well behind in a game against their archrivals with the senior in the game. Brubaker was loyal to the players in his program who had stuck with it for years, but the topic had been broached, and the coach decided it was time.
Zollers got called up, and the ninth-grader brought Spring-Ford back within touching distance of a comeback win on a big stage. Brubaker made the call: They ran a two-QB system for the remainder of his freshman season.
Zollers went on to throw for 6,116 yards and 70 touchdowns at the school, even while missing most of his senior year with a gruesome injury.
But, in the early days, Zollers was 14 and still learning. There were miscues along the way. Mind you, the miscues didn't always matter.
"He came in late against our rival. He didn't know what to do with protections at all," Freed said. "He was still learning the offense. It was like his fifth week, and he slid the pass protection the wrong way and let one of their middle linebackers come right — clean, untouched — right down the A-gap. As soon as I heard him from the sideline call what he was calling, I was like, 'Holy s—t, this is gonna be terrible.'"
But …
"And then somehow he got away from it and made a play and got a first down," Freed said. "Like, that encapsulates him and his ability in general."
If they were in a screenplay, you'd accuse the parallels of being too on the nose.
History, as it has turned out, is rhyming for Zollers.
The good news: The tale is one of hope.
Zollers was talented but imperfect then and is likely to be a work-in-progress now.
But he had it.
That is, in Freed's mind, Zollers' strength.
Brubaker calls it not getting "too high or too low." Freed has known Zollers through the Mizzou QB's older brother, Pitt defensive lineman Zach, and his own younger brother, who grew up playing on the same sports teams as Zollers. Freed has a different descriptor that you only get away with if you're a friend.
Freed tried to attend one of Mizzou's coaching camps this summer. He arranged to stay with Zollers, who signed up to pick him up from the airport in St. Louis.
Freed landed. He called the quarterback from the arrivals section.
Zollers had forgotten. He was, instead, back in Pennsylvania at his high school graduation.
"He's always been an airhead, kind of, but not in a bad way. More of the way where he's just so laid back about everything," Freed said. "That helped him a lot. When he's playing, and when he's starting as a true freshman against top-10 teams in the country, you can tell he doesn't look very rattled."
That will get put to the test Saturday.
Texas A&M hasn't been kind to opponents this season. The No. 3-ranked Aggies boast the nation's top-ranked third-down defense and lead the SEC in sacks and QB pressures per game. They're one of the SEC's most complete teams.
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Zollers was impressive against Vanderbilt, keeping the Tigers in the game after Pribula went down. But as much as the Commodores have improved and are part of the national conversation, Texas A&M shapes up to be a different animal altogether.
Amid the marvelous scrambles and on-target tosses in Nashville, there were freshman mistakes, like the bungled mesh-point handoff with Jamal Roberts that resulted in a turnover and, ultimately, the scoring drive that sealed the game for Vandy.
Mizzou (6-2, 2-2 SEC) is trying not to make the moment too big. Drinkwitz has repeatedly called Zollers the future of the program, but that's no longer a far-off, room-to-develop date. The future arrives Saturday, and the season, to a degree, does rest on a rookie's shoulders.
"I think it's important for us not to put too high of expectations on Matt. He does not have to win this game by himself. He's got a really good core of players around him," Drinkwitz said. … "He just needs to be himself, and we're excited for the opportunity."
Will he be ready?
There's a broken nose that says the arm is real.
There's a high school coach who saw a freshman thrive.
And there's an old teammate who knows what Matt Zollers can do under pressure.
It's Zollers' time. The future is here.
"He knew with Sam (Horn) being a senior and Beau (Pribula) being a junior that he would have had to be heads and shoulders above them to get the nod right away," Brubaker said. "And you know, I asked him, … 'where do you objectively think you are?' He said, coming out of spring practice, he made mistakes that he shouldn't have been making, and (Pribula and Horn) knew the offense better.
"When I talked to him at the end of summer, before he was leaving, he said, 'I've got it now.'"
This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: Can freshman quarterback Matt Zollers save Missouri football season?
