Monday Media Notebook
SEEING THE WHOLE FIELD
Much has been made of Missouri’s offense being geared toward Drew Lock only reading half the field. There is some truth to that. On certain snaps, that’s absolutely the approach.
“There's a lot of things that go into that,” Barry Odom said. “In some cases that is right, we’re working just one side of the field or the middle. Then there’s times that both sides are hot. Within a call, there’s going to be two or three different checks that we’ve got out of it to get what we think can be a positive play for it.”
But Lock said on Monday that is probably only about half of the offensive calls.
“There is full field reads in our offense and we are running some, so it’s not necessarily half-field reads throughout the whole game,” Lock said. “All teams do this when they’re operating with tempo, they’re going to single down as far as what read would be on this play and what read would not be on this play just to make it easier so you’re not back there thinking about a million things at once. We run a steady balance of both.
“It’s just kind of a week by week thing.”
His interception deep down the right sideline was one of those full-field read plays. While Lock threw into coverage looking for Dimetrios Mason, J’Mon Moore was running uncovered down the left side.
“The call had a couple different options and they rotated the safeties one way and the read he got didn’t take him to the right spot,” Odom said. “We had an option there to the left that would have probably been a positive play. That’s one you’d like to have back. We didn’t get it.”
RELATED: MEDIA DAY VIDEO | MORE FROM ODOM | SATURDAY POST-GAME VIDEO
LOOKING FOR LINEBACKER HELP
Defensively, Missouri felt there was improvement on Saturday, albeit it not enough. Players are settling back in to last year’s defensive scheme. The Tigers continue to battle injuries, specifically at linebacker. They were exacerbated Saturday when Cale Garrett was disqualified for targeting on South Carolina’s second defensive series.
“It’s just next man up,” Brandon Lee said. “Cale went down, unfortunately. I feel that he tried to pull up on it so I don’t feel it’s the best call. Everybody just has to step up. Next guy up was probably Jacob Trump and (Eric) Beisel ended up taking all the snaps at MIKE this week and he did a heck of a job.”
With all three starters from just two weeks ago out, it fell primarily to Beisel and Lee to make the defensive calls.
“Beisel’s a little bit more talkative to the field side and I’m more talkative to the boundary side,” Lee said. “Last year I played MIKE so I’ve done it before and it’s not necessarily different for me to set the front.”
Senior Donavin Newsom played sparingly on Saturday, trying to battle through a thigh contusion and strained quad. Odom got emotional in the post-game press conference talking about Newsom.
“Donavin Newsom,” Odom said before pausing to collect his emotions for a full ten seconds. “He’s giving us everything he’s got.
“He is a senior that’s poured everything he’s got into this. And I hate it for him because he wanted like everything tonight to go make a difference and physically couldn’t do it.
“It breaks me a little bit to think about that guy.”
The senior from Parkway North said he had heard about the coach’s comments earlier on Monday, but hadn’t read or seen them.
“He’s somebody I definitely look up to,” Newsom said of Odom. “Kind of like a role model in my life, somebody I want to be like when I get older.”
Odom talked on Monday of battling injuries during his own senior season. It is something the player and coach have talked about.
“We talked about it last year when he was my position coach,” Newsom said. “He just said you’ve got to fight through it. What’s gonna happen is gonna happen.”
EYE TOWARD THE FUTURE
With three games left, Missouri is almost certainly going to be home for bowl season (it’s possible a 5-7 team could qualify with an APR exception, but the chances of Missouri getting to that point aren’t strong). While the team is talking of finishing out this year strong, we asked some to take a brief look to next year.
“You never like to talk about the next season during a season,” Lock said. “But we are pretty young on the offensive side of the ball. Nothing beats experience and a lot of guys are getting a lot of playing time. Some people that didn't necessarily think they would be playing are playing this year.”
The Tigers will lose both starting cornerbacks in seniors Aarion Penton and John Gibson. So who’s left there to fill the void?
“Next year we’ll have Logan Cheadle coming back and we’ll have true freshmen like DeMarkus Acy and Christian Holmes who are probably going to step up and be key roles in next year’s defense,” Gibson said. “They should be good in the future. They’ll be draft picks out of Mizzou.”
At defensive tackle, Rickey Hatley and Josh Augusta will exhaust their eligibility and Terry Beckner Jr. will be coming back from his second knee surgery in as many years.
“They got AJ (Logan) coming back for his senior season, Markell (Utsey). I think they’ll be pretty good,” Hatley said. “I don’t even know, those are the only guys that we got there that I know of. I think they’ll be pretty good though. Markell, he’s always asking questions, I’ll be helping him after practice and stuff so he’ll be pretty good.”
THE PROTEST: ONE YEAR LATER
A year ago Monday, the Missouri football team announced its intention to boycott team activities, joining a campus protest by the group, ConcernedStudent1950. The following day brought the now famous tweet from Gary Pinkel’s personal account featuring a team photo and the caption "The Mizzou Family stands as one. We are united. We are behind our players. #ConcernedStudent1950 GP”
On Monday, some of the Tiger players were asked to look back on the events of last November with a year to reflect. Here are some of their comments:
Charles Harris: “I have to say a mixture between being proud and also being confident. And just being a risk-taker. Taking a risk in terms of the whole team seeing if we’ll all be in it together or split apart.”
Rickey Hatley: “It showed everybody that everybody’s got a voice so you should stand up for what’s right. If you feel like it’s wrong, you’ve got a voice to try to stand up and try to change something.”
Any regrets?
“No, not at all,” Harris said.
“No regrets for me at all,” Gibson said. “It was the right thing to do at the time. If it happened again, I’d do it again.”
GAME DAY UPDATES
Saturday’s game against Vanderbilt will kick off at 2:30 and will be on the SEC Network. The Tigers’ November 19th game in Knoxville, TN will kick at the same time and was selected as the SEC’s national game on CBS for the week.