COLUMBIA, Mo. — By the standards of the late, great basketball coach John Wooden, Missouri football is in for the most authentic kind of test on Saturday.

“The truest test of a man’s character,” goes one of Wooden’s more famous quotes, “is what he does when no one is watching.”

It’s not that no one will watch the No. 25 Tigers (2-0) host the Louisiana Ragin’ Cajuns (1-1) of the Sun Belt Conference. The game sold out during the preseason, and Mizzou fans are feeling quite bullish about their team through two weeks of the season.

But with kickoff time moved up three hours to noon Saturday and the game being streamed on ESPN+/SEC Network+, the audience won’t be anything like it was for last weekend’s border war, when MU and archrival Kansas played the most-watched game on ESPN2 in three

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