Every week, PowerMizzou.com publisher Gabe DeArmond answers questions from Tiger fans in the mailbag. This format allows for a more expansive answer than a message board post. Keep your eye out each week to submit your question for the mailbag or send them to powermizzou@gmail.com. On to this week's inquiries.
DrunkTruman asks: You’ve talked about how if you were in charge of a tournament lock program that you’d skip the conference tournament all together. Has there been any discussion of that in the SEC or elsewhere to your knowledge?
GD: Not to my knowledge. And I probably wouldn't do it now if I was the only one. But I really wouldn't have an issue with bowing out early. Missouri is about to make its second NCAA Tournament in eight years. The last thing you want is to miss that chance because your guys get contact traced after playing a team that wasn't being diligent because they had nothing to play for. If I'm the Tigers, I'm okay if I'm done on Friday night. You want to beat Georgia. And I get it, as competitors, you're trying to win every game. But I don't think this team needs to be playing all week long. I never really think there's a lot of value in winning the conference tournament unless you have to. I think it even less when every game you're playing potentially exposes you to something that will threaten the rest of your season.
Dustin16 asks: 1) If you had to guess which couple of position groups will be our team’s strong points next season, which would you guess them to be?2) Do you think that over the course of time we will ever see the number of transfers go down? It obviously seems like it’s getting more and more prevalent, but I feel eventually it might set in that there isn’t always opportunities on the other side of transferring with the sheer number of players in the portal.3) Any recent TV recommendations?
GD: 1) I think you feel pretty good about the quarterback position. You've got a guy who was the SEC freshman of the year coming back and you would think he will get better. I also think the Tigers will be fine at running back and could be surprisingly good on the defensive line.
2) These things are cyclical. We'll probably see the transfers settle down at some point when kids realize that if they choose to transfer, there's a decent chance they're ending up somewhere that isn't as good.
3) We just finished a Netflix series called "Behind Her Eyes." It's pretty messed up and takes a minute to get going, but it's only six episodes so you can do it in two or three days.
EastCampusLegend asks: The open practices would suggest Drink and staff have no problem pulling the curtain back. Are we getting more or less access than other programs? Is it uncommon for coaches to have their teams operate more in the shadows like Odom did?
GD: From what I'm told, we have a lot more access than pretty much any other SEC program does this spring (to be fair, most of them haven't started yet). But the two open practices are really the only difference between now and the last few years. I think Odom gets a bad rep for access that he doesn't deserve. Missouri fans thought it was bad because a lot of you were used to the pre-2012 days when Gary Pinkel let us watch every practice during spring and fall camp and write whatever we wanted. But that changed in Pinkel's last three or four seasons. Odom let us go to the first 45 minutes or so of every practice. We couldn't write about the specifics of practice, though we could use what we saw to frame questions afterwards. It's the same now, other than those two days the public can watch and they can hardly tell us we can't write about practice when they're letting fans in. So, yes, the access is about the best we can hope for at this point and it's a little bit more than it was over the last few years. But it's not THAT different. The major difference is you're more excited to read about football than you were two years ago.
