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COLUMBIA, Mo. — Missouri is in for some whiplash.

Last Saturday, the Tigers played in front of nearly 100,000 fans at Texas A&M’s Kyle Field, the fourth-biggest college football stadium by capacity in the nation. This week, they’ll play in the fifth-smallest in the Football Bowl Subdivision.

Facing Massachusetts on the road is an odd bit of scheduling for a Southeastern Conference team, and taking the field at 17,000-seat McGuirk Alumni Stadium will show why. The stadium squeaks just above the NCAA’s requirement of 15,000 seats for an FBS school. Massachusetts added permanent lights to the stadium in 2008 and a video board in 2009.

“Excited to get an opportunity to go to Amherst,” Mizzou coach Eli Drinkwitz said. “It’ll be an opportunity for us to play in a stadium that’s unique for us, an opportunity to play in an area of the country that most of us have not been. I think it’ll be a cool experience.”

It will also be an unprecedented one. The official attendance for Mizzou’s game at Texas A&M was 97,049. Given Massachusetts’ 17,000-capacity stadium, there will be a difference of at least 80,000 fans between the back-to-back games. Box score records show that, dating back to 1960, the Tigers have never experienced a change greater than 62,000 fans in back-to-back road games.

That mark was set in 2015, when Missouri played at Georgia in front of 92,746 people and then faced Vanderbilt on the road with a crowd of 31,128.

Pandemic-affected 2020 season aside, the last time MU played a game in front of 17,000 or fewer fans was a 1964 game at Kansas State, according to statistician Tom Orf’s box score records.

Missouri is making the trip this weekend because of a 2018 contract between MU and UMass to play a two-game home-and-home series of football games. The schools agreed to play in 2024 in Amherst and 2025 in Columbia.

Jim Sterk was Mizzou’s athletics director at the time. When he agreed to the series with the Minutemen, the games were six years from actually being played.

There seemed to be an expectation — outside the athletics department, anyway — that Missouri would back out of the game and instead opt for a home nonconference game. Former athletics director Desiree Reed-Francois did that ahead of the Tigers’ 2022 season, which was supposed to begin with a game at Middle Tennessee State in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

Unenthused with MU playing a game there, the athletics department paid MTSU $800,000 to buy out the scheduled game and then found a different opponent.

Reed-Francois did so again in 2023, paying $750,000 to pull the Tigers out of a one-off road game at Miami of Ohio in 2025.

That kind of cancellation clause is common in nonconference game scheduling contracts, and there is one in the agreement between Mizzou and Massachusetts: Either school could back out of a game by paying the other $1 million in liquidated damages, according to a copy of the contract obtained by the Post-Dispatch through an open records request.

But MU never pursued that route, so the football team will trek up to Amherst.

Because the series is a home-and-home, there won’t be any exchange of money — known as a guarantee in contract-speak — as a bonus for one school playing each other.

According to the contract, the visiting team in each Amherst and Columbia will receive 500 complimentary tickets and be able to sell another 3,000 to its fans. The visitors are also allowed to bring their band, cheerleaders and mascot if they so choose. At least one hour before the game, the 100 free copies of the game program must be delivered to the visiting team’s dressing room.

The home teams retain revenue and broadcasting rights, though the latter won’t have much effect on the game’s visibility: Massachusetts is an FBS independent, but ESPN2 will nonetheless carry Saturday’s game.

The Minutemen are 1-5 this season, having beaten only Central Connecticut State, a Football Championship Subdivision team. They do have a common opponent with the Tigers, though. Buffalo, which lost 38-0 to Missouri, beat Massachusetts 34-3.

Quarterback Taisun Phommachanh is the most notable of the Minutemen.

“He’s playing, like I said, his best ball,” Drinkwitz said. “Accurate thrower — very good. I think he’s their leading rusher also, so he’s a dual-threat quarterback.”

He’s right: Phommachanh has thrown for 1,280 yards, seven touchdowns and three interceptions for a 57.5% completion percentage, adding 253 yards and a score on the ground.

Phommachanh began his collegiate career back at Clemson in 2019, where he appeared in 13 games over three seasons. While battling injuries, he transferred to Georgia Tech for the 2022 season but threw just five passes there. Phommachanh wound up starting at Massachusetts last season.

His preferred target has been another experienced player: wideout Jakobie Keeney-James, who spent five seasons at Eastern Washington before transferring to Massachusetts. Keeney-James has 24 catches for 493 yards and three touchdowns, a hefty 20.5 yards per reception.

With Mizzou working on a change at one of its cornerback positions, corralling the Minutemen’s leading wide receiver will be a priority.

“Obviously, we want to play aggressive,” Drinkwitz said. “But we also can’t bite on double moves, and that’s going to be part of the game plan this week — I guarantee it.”