The Missouri defense feels good about the 2018 version of itself coming out of fall camp.
“Our mentality’s completely different,” sophomore cornerback Adam Sparks said. “Last year people were okay with getting beat in one on one’s or seven on sevens. Now, you get beat, you cannot get beat for the rest of practice. We’re all for each other now. We don’t let each other hang our head down. We’re going to pick each other up.”
The guys on the other side of the ball have been impressed too.
“It’s like a confidence,” offensive guard Kevin Pendleton said. “Cale (Garrett)’s out there yelling, screaming, getting guys around. The secondary’s communicating with the linebackers. D-Line, it’s like they’re in sync with their backers. Terry (Beckner) will fill one gap and Cale’s right behind him in the next gap. You can’t take a play off.
“It’s like they’re getting their swagger back. It’s been exciting to see.”
But it’s August. It’s the month for optimism. Rewind a year. Missouri felt pretty good about itself then too.
That optimism lasted exactly six minutes and 45 seconds. After the Tiger offense scored on its very first play of the 2017 season, it took Missouri State 6:28 to march 65 yards in 12 plays and tie the score.
Missouri scored again. Missouri State scored again in three plays. Missouri scored again. Missouri State scored again. It was 21-20 Bears at the end of a quarter and alarm bells were ringing from Watson, Mo. all the way down to the Boot Heel.
“As bad as it seemed on the field, it was that bad on video,” head coach Barry Odom said after that game. “If you're going to be an average to good defense, and then not even talking about going beyond there, but just playing good, solid defensive football, you have to eliminate explosive plays.”
The Tigers started the season’s second quarter with two stops, but had given up 35 points to the Bears by halftime. That they were never in real danger of losing the game didn’t even matter. The final tallies were 21 first downs, 43 points and 492 yards for a Missouri State team that would be shut out and total 118 yards against North Dakota State the following week. The Bears would top their totals against the Tigers just once all season long, in a 59-20 demolition of hapless Indiana State. The Sycamores didn’t win a game last season.
“We were pretty confident,” defensive tackle Terry Beckner Jr. said. “Once the season came along, it just went that way.”
“We saw what they were like in practice and saw what they were like in camp and everybody was expecting great things,” Pendleton said.
“That first game, we had some guys that weren’t used to it. Practicing and playing a game are two totally different things,” wide receiver Emanuel Hall said. “I think the practice habits weren’t there and that affected them later in the game.”
As they say, a football player is like a teabag. You never know what you’ve got until you put it in hot water. Missouri’s defense wilted in that heat a season ago.
This summer, Terez Hall gathered the Tiger defense to rewatch that Missouri State game. Players were covering their eyes and turning away from the screen in horror. By this time, nobody wants to talk about last year, but as Missouri prepares to face Tennessee-Martin in the opener, it’s in the back of everyone’s minds.
“Any day any team can be beat,” Beckner said. “It don’t matter how much talent you’ve got on that team, who worked the hardest. On that day, whoever put in the work that day is going to come out with it.”
Eight days after that debacle against Missouri State, Odom would fire defensive coordinator DeMontie Cross. Odom took over many of the duties himself, though the second half of the season saw Ryan Walters assume many of the play-calling duties. This offseason, Walters was promoted to the full-time job and Odom said the new coordinator will hold play-calling duties this season.
“I’ll help with the game plan through the week, help as much as I can, stay out of the way as much as I can but also provide assistance when he needs it,” Odom said. “We’ve been together for a long time, similar thinking and we’ll be a better football team with that approach.”
Missouri did improve in the second half of last season. After giving up 253 points (42.2 per game) in the first six games, the Tigers gave up just 161 in the final seven contests (23 per game). The yardage went down from 498.7 to 371.6 and first downs from 22.5 to 18.8.
More than half of those points in the final seven games came in the regular season finale against Arkansas and the bowl game against Texas (a contest where the defense actually played well and held the Longhorns under 300 yards, but was helpless thanks to an offense that did nothing all night outside of a long touchdown pass on the first play of the second half).
“They played their tails off,” Pendleton said of the Texas Bowl. “They kept us in the game as much as they could.”
The Tigers—outside of the play caller and adding linebackers coach Vernon Hargreaves to the staff—haven’t made sweeping changes. The look of the defense isn’t significantly different than a year ago. But there are subtle differences.
“I would just say we’re really close as a defense. The communication’s gotten a lot better,” senior linebacker Brandon Lee said. “Everybody’s doing their job and they’re understanding that the defense comes together as 1/11th, almost like a puzzle. I always like to look at it as a puzzle and you can’t complete a puzzle without a piece.”
Sparks has added about 15 pounds after playing at 168 a year ago. Christian Holmes has returned from injury. Beckner is coming off his first healthy offseason and Walter Palmore is in better shape than he’s ever been. Garrett, Hall and Lee bring as much experience as any linebacking corps in the conference.
The question is whether those changes and some confidence built in the second half of last year will translate into immediate results as Missouri starts the 2018 campaign.
“You never know -- the element of unknown going into the first game on exactly what you’re going to see,” Odom said. “You got your game plan, and things change a little bit going into the first game. You have studied all offseason on what you get and the changes, the movement of the chess match once the game starts, there’s a lot of different things that we are anticipating. Until you get out and let the game unfold, you don’t know exactly what you’re going to see.”
That quote came from week one in 2017. It’s applicable once again. Missouri fans didn’t like what they saw a year ago. They’ll get their first peek at what they hope are major improvements in seven days.
