Ten Thoughts for Monday Morning
1) Missouri wrapped up fall camp on Saturday night. The easiest way for you to make sure you know everything that is going on is to read my recap of the open practice from Saturday night and Mitchell's camp wrap up from this morning that details both what we learned and what we didn't.At this point, the only positions we aren't extremely confident in who starts are cornerback, defensive tackle and slot receiver. We think we know pretty much every other position on the field.
2) Let's run through the injury situations real quickly. There are four that we know of that are of varying degrees.
Tyler Badie did not participate in most of the open practice after walking off the field with trainers. We haven't gotten any sort of update. Our initial inclination is that the injury isn't anything too serious, but that's more guesswork than anything at this point. We should find out more this week. I'd expect Missouri to be cautious with this one. They can win in week one with Elijah Young, Dawson Downing and others getting carries. They'd obviously be in much better shape at Kentucky with Badie fully healthy.
Kyran Montgomery is out for the season with a torn ACL and a dented bone fracture (which admittedly sounds quite terrible). Let's first get it out of the way that you never want to see anybody lose a season to an injury in fall camp. That much is obvious. But from a team standpoint, if it's going to happen, a freshman on the defensive line is probably about the best spot it could happen to Missouri. There were no signs that Montgomery was in the two-deep (right now we'd put the top four DEs as Trajan Jeffcoat, Isaiah McGuire, Chris Turner and Johnny Walker). Beyond that, you've got Jatorian Hansford and Arden Walker who were getting second-team reps at times on Saturday night. That's six defensive ends. Could Montgomery have cracked that rotation? Sure. But now, he redshirts and there's no debate. It's not the worst thing in the world (again, while stating up front you don't want a season-ending injury for anyone).
Mookie Cooper is out with a lower leg injury. That took place in Missouri's first scrimmage, which is now about 11 days ago. Eli Drinkwitz said at the time he was hopeful Cooper would be ready to go for game week. We'll get an update hopefully at some point this week. It's not catastrophic if Cooper isn't available for the Central Michigan game, but if he can play, you'd like him to get on the field for the first time in two years before you go to Kentucky for the SEC opener. Our guess is that even if Cooper is ready to play against CMU, Barrett Banister will get the start at this point.
JaMori Maclin has a broken forearm. The latest we heard on him was the same as Cooper: Hopeful he'll be back for game week. That seems a little optimistic to me, but I'm not a doctor. Missouri has seven or eight receivers we're pretty confident will see the field so from a depth standpoint, the Tigers are still fine. This is more of a concern from Maclin's side, losing valuable practice time and chances to turn heads in a room that's gotten a bit crowded.
The only other situation we're going to monitor this week (we get to see practice on Tuesday and have interview opportunities Tuesday and Wednesday) is that of Daniel Parker. He was not at the open practice on Saturday. We were told he was sick. That's a word that can mean different things these days. Is he sick like Connor Bazelak was sick or is he SICK? We don't know. Hopefully we'll get an update tomorrow or Wednesday.
3) Here are the true freshmen we expect to see the field this year.
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