Hang around the Missouri football team—particularly the defense—long enough and you’re bound to hear this edict: “Do your 1/11th.” The message is simple: A defense has 11 players. All 11 need to do their jobs. If all 11 do their jobs, the defense is going to work.
“It’s true in every scheme,” outside linebacker Joey Burkett said. “It’s just a little different (now) than previous years and it really takes everybody.”
“I feel like that’s more the case with this (scheme),” defensive tackle A.J. Logan said.
READ MORE FROM BARRY ODOM'S PRESS CONFERENCE ON MONDAY
The common phrases for Missouri’s scheme this year under new defensive coordinator DeMontie Cross have been “gap control” and “read and react.” Logan puts it simply: “With last year’s system, with every play, we could get upfield. We could make mistakes, we just had to be disruptive. This year we need to stay in our gap. If everybody stays in their gap and does their job, it works out perfectly.”
It sounds simple enough: Do your job. The problem is that it takes just one person not doing his for the defense to break down. And too often this year, that’s what has happened to Missouri.
“Do your job. Don’t try to do too much,” head coach Barry Odom said. “I think there were times the other night (against LSU) that we were trying to do a little too much individually. Let’s play our 1/11th. Do your job and get the other ten guys around you doing it.”
Missouri had a bye this past weekend. The last impression the Tigers left defensively was 634 yards (more than LSU had ever piled up in an SEC game), 418 of them on the ground in a 42-7 blowout loss that really wasn’t even as close as that lopsided score.
The problem, the Tigers say, wasn’t as simple as someone not doing his job. It was that everybody was trying to do more than his job.
“Sometimes you get in a situation where you feel as if you have to make every single play,” middle linebacker Michael Scherer said. “So you go outside of what you’re supposed to do to make those plays.”
“I see a lot of that,” defensive tackle Rickey Hatley said. “D-Line sometimes, you know you’ve got to be in your gap, but when you’re trying to make plays, then you’re in somebody else’s gap then you’ve got two guys in the same gap and the running back creases for a touchdown or a big run. That’s a lot of the problem I see.”
Last year, Mizzou gave up 302 yards and 16.2 points per game. Opponents managed just 3.29 yards per carry and 4.32 yards per offensive play. This season, the Tigers are giving up 7.2 more points and 119 more yards every game. On every rush, opponents are averaging 4.5 yards and on every play, they’re averaging 5.2. That’s nearly a full extra yard every single time the opposition snaps the ball.
This has led to plenty of armchair diagnoses. Everyone has a theory about what’s wrong. And make no mistake, Missouri’s defensive players have heard those theories.
“I think a lot of things about this. I obviously see a lot of it. It’s impossible not to,” Scherer said. “One, people think they know what we’re trying to do and really they’re so far off that you can’t even pay attention to it. A lot of people think they know what we’re doing, but they have no clue. So when they are trying to say ‘you should do this, this and this,’ well, you’re not even close.”
What everyone knows is that the scheme has changed. So if the defense was good last year and it’s not as good this year, the scheme must be the culprit. Right?
“Some guys aren’t as welcoming of change as some others,” Scherer said. “One, you have to develop a trust in it. You have to develop a trust in your teammates that you can all do it together and then you have to believe in it and go out and do it.
“We have to put the time in during the week to learn what we’re supposed to do and know what we’re supposed to do on Saturday so we don’t have to think about it. I think there’s a lot of things going on and then it also comes down to trust. You have to trust in the system and you have to trust in the guys that are out there with you that they’re going to make plays. I think where we go wrong sometimes is some guys may not trust it and do a different thing than they’re supposed to do. Then there’s also, I run into it, where I don’t maybe trust sometimes when I should and I try to do way too much, more than I should. The same thing with other guys where that gets you out of position.”
“Learning something new, going from a basic defense to a harder defense, a whole different scheme,” Hatley said. “We’ll be in the right spots, the players just got to make the tackles. D-Line got to be in their gaps more, DB’s need to cover longer. The scheme works, we’ve just got to do it more and apply it. Study more.”
All the Missouri defensive players that spoke on Monday spoke about players needing to spend more time to devote themselves to learning the calls and the scheme. With an extra week off, the defense held a meeting with Cross to talk about some of the issues.
"It’s no secret that we’re not playing well and that people on defense aren’t happy with the way we’re playing," Scherer said. "So we got in a room and sat down and talked about it and said, ‘This is what we need to do. If you’re feeling this way, you need to stop. If you’re doing this, you need to help other guys do the same thing.’
"He wanted to know how we felt. We wanted to know how he could contribute to help us play better. He’s not a my way or the highway (coach). He’s listening to us. He’s taking opinions from us."
“It was a well needed meeting to meet with coach Cross to see what had been going on the first couple of games, see what we can do from here on out,” Hatley said. “Just tell guys to watch more film, study their plays more, then we can trust the scheme. Cause it ain’t gonna change now. It’s too late. Just trust the scheme.”
There’s that word again: Trust. Another word popped up a lot on Monday afternoon too: Simplify.
“He keeps on simplifying it. It seems like every week he’s making the calls shorter just to help the D-line out,” Hatley said. “The linebackers used to give us the calls, but now we’ve got to make calls ourselves too so that’s the big change right there. Guys need to take more ownership, learn the plays by themselves, then we trust everybody is on the same page and it will work faster.”
“I think can maybe we do some things with the game plan to simplify it and make it easier for us? Yes,” Scherer said. “But we have to go out there and do it. We have to put the time in during the week to learn what we’re supposed to do and know what we’re supposed to do on Saturday so we don’t have to think about it.”
The scheme can work. Missouri has seen it work. Against Georgia, the Tigers held Nick Chubb to 63 yards on 19 carries. He had never had fewer yards in a game in which he had 12 or more carries. Even West Virginia, while piling up yardage, only scored 26 points. It can work. So what was the difference?
“We did our jobs and trusted each other,” Scherer said. “I think when we have energy on defense and when we go and play what you’ve seen in the past and it looks like guys are out there having fun and making plays and Charles (Harris) is getting sacks, everybody was having fun and we’re good. When we lose that, we’re not very good.”
Odom pointed to third down defense, and a failure to get off the field, as a problem. Hatley identified missed tackles. But in the end, it kept coming back to the same thing: Do your job.
“Everybody do their job,” Hatley said. “1/11th. Then the whole thing will work.”
"I’ve seen us play good football. I’ve seen us do it. We’ve got to do it on a consistent basis," Odom said. "Let's play our 1/11th."
Missouri’s next chance comes Saturday afternoon against Florida. The Tigers and Gators kick off at 4 p.m. Eastern time in Gainesville.
