Mizzou players spoke to reporters Sunday afternoon for the first time since they learned that offensive coordinator Josh Heupel and offensive line coach Glen Elarbee were leaving to the take jobs at Central Florida.
Head coach Barry Odom was not pleased with the way Elarbee left, and neither were some of his offensive linemen. Both Kevin Pendleton and Paul Adams confirmed that Elarbee didn’t talk to any of his players before departing for Orlando.
“It was a tough pill to swallow,” Adams said. “It’s still hard right now. I’ve said it before, but I just have a lot of questions why (he left). I still don’t really know why. … We were supposed to meet at 2:15 (on Friday), and he usually is in there by at least 2 o’clock, and when I saw Odom show up, I was like, ‘Something’s up.’ And then he said it and and there was kind of a hysterical laugh like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ But I don’t know. It is what it is.”
Pendleton added: “It was his decision, and you know, Coach Odom let us know about it. There’s two sides to every story I guess; it would have been nice to hear his. But he’s on to his own thing, and we’re going to keep going with what we have here. But there’s a way things should be done. He’s off to do what he wants. Good for him and best of luck to him."
With Elarbee’s departure, offensive analyst Jon Cooper has taken over the offensive line coach position on an interim basis. Cooper starred at Oklahoma from 2005-08, and played 13 career games with the Minnesota Vikings and Tennessee Titans before retiring ahead of the 2012 NFL season. He spent three years as an offensive graduate assistant under Heupel at Oklahoma before coming to Mizzou in 2016.
Both Pendleton and Adams said they were impressed by how Cooper has taken to coaching the unit, with Adams praising his ability to teach technique.
“He really he has helped us technique-wise these last couple days,” Adams said. “I think that’s something that we lacked a lot of. The past few years or so, we’ve just been taught to hit somebody and run your feet as hard as you can for the longest period of time. That can only get you so far. I think that’s been huge for a bunch of us. We kind of lost that technique toward the end of the season. We were just trying to get someone from Point A to Point B and kind of lost the technique, so it was nice get that back and still keep that kind of mentality.”
Moore not happy, but excited to go home
Senior wide receiver J’Mon Moore, the Tigers’ leading receiver this year, was visibly displeased with Heupel’s decision, too.
“I don’t even want to answer that question,” Moore said when asked about Heupel’s departure. “It’s kind of like a slap in the face to me. The type of person that I know Coach Heupel is, that didn’t make sense to me. It’s definitely motivation for us to go out there and do our thing because at the end of the day, it’s us out there playing anyways, so we’re making the plays. But it is what it is.”
When asked if Heupel talked to players before he left, Moore quipped, “It’s whatever. Nope.”
Something Moore was happy talk to about was his impending return to his home town of Houston for the Texas Bowl on Dec. 27. For Moore, there really isn’t a better way end his career than a game in front of his friends and family.
“Lit … it’s lit,” Moore said. “I’ll have all my people there and be there with my teammates, show them how we do it in the city. It’s my last game, and that’s a crazy finale. My story is going to be I left Houston to come to Missouri and then came back to Houston to play my last game. It’s doesn’t get much better than that.”
He won’t get the chance to play against any friends on the Texas roster, though. He said both of the players he knew well on the roster are either no longer on the team or won’t be playing in the game. That doesn’t temper his excitement to play one of the teams he watched as a kid.
“But it’s kind of cool being able to play against UT after watching them growing up,” Moore said. “It’s going to be a good game.”
Lock adds QB coach to his resume
With Heupel — who also served as the quarterbacks coach — not coaching Mizzou in the bowl game, Drew Lock has been promoted to be the de facto QB coach for the next few weeks. Tight ends coach Joe Jon Finley will work partially in the quarterbacks room, but Lock said most of the responsibilities falls on he and the other quarterbacks.
“I’ve coached, you know, little kids’ camps,” Lock said. “But this is nothing like a little kids’ camp out here. You’ve got to try to adapt to what they’re thinking. The easy part about it is Huep had on such a ‘this, this and this’ that we’re really all on the same page. There’s not one guys that’s fallen behind, and there’s not one guy that’s miles ahead of everybody else. We’re all pretty straightened out.”
Lock has continued to talk to Heupel, who promised to help him all the way through his decision of whether to return for his senior season or enter the NFL Draft.
"He honored his promise to me, so that means a lot," Lock said.
Heupel's departure, though, won't have much of an impact on whether Lock is back in a Mizzou uniform next year, though.
"At the beginning, it was all kind of (people saying), 'Heupel left, Drew's leaving now,'" Lock said. "But really, I'm on the same course of making a decision. It wasn't a huge factor in my decision."
So now, we wait.
