The Missouri football team is still two weeks from its season-opener against Tennessee-Martin, but the team only has to wait a day to play under the lights on Faurot Field.
The Tigers will hold their second and final scrimmage of fall camp Saturday evening. While the scrimmage is not open to media members and a normal game day crowd will not pack the stands, the coaching staff said Friday that the scrimmage will be important for multiple reasons — primarily, giving players an early taste of the game day routine.
“Scrimmages are always important because it is a little indicator of what game day’s going to look like,” offensive coordinator Derek Dooley said. “Some guys tend to elevate their game a little bit, and when they do, you have to kind of take heed to that. When there’s little issues that show up, you have to plug the leak.”
Throughout camp, the coaching staff has emphasized that virtually every spot on the depth chart is an open competition — that just because a player started last season, he isn’t guaranteed a starting spot this year. However, after two weeks of practices, head coach Barry Odom said the depth chart has begun to take shape. He believes he has an idea of who most of the starters will be, but the scrimmage will help determine which player wins a close position battle, as well as which backups will be first in line to rotate into games. It will also help determine which true freshmen are in line to see significant playing time this year, and which are more likely to redshirt.
Defensive coordinator Ryan Walters said that, while the staff may have an idea of who it wants on the top two lines of the depth chart, scrimmages provide an indicator of whether those players can transfer the ability they’ve shown in a normal practice to a game day setting.
“Any time you have live reps, that’s the best evaluator,” Walters said. “(Players) know the scheme, they know the call, and like I’ve been saying from the start, the guys that execute the cleanest and the most consistently are going to be the guys that are out there for most of the reps on game day.”
Odom said the players involved in position battles or likely to see the field in a backup capacity will receive more playing time Saturday than those who have secured their spots atop the depth chart. He used sophomore safety Tyree Gillespie, who could be pushing Cam Hilton for the starting free safety spot, as an example.
“He’s shown great flashes,” Odom said of Gillespie. “He’s just one example of the evaluation that we’ve got to get in as close to a game situation as we can for him in a number of different roles and kind of see how he responds.”
More broadly than determining the winners of various position battles, Dooley said the scrimmage will also help Missouri pinpoint its strengths and solidify its identity. That will be especially important for the offense. Dooley has adjusted the scheme since taking over for Josh Heupel, and scrimmages provide an opportunity to put his changes into practice. For instance, quarterback Drew Lock said the team's first scrimmage convinced him that the offense will be able to sustain drives, while still having the ability to play at a high tempo.
Basically, Dooley said, after he threw a lot of new plays and concepts at the offense this offseason, Saturday’s scrimmage will help identify which of those plays the team can turn to at important moments during the season.
“It’s one thing to add a lot, and the a lot piece is really to have a menu of plays, so (against) all these teams you play during the course of the year, you pull this one, you pull that one,” Dooley said. “But you have to have an identity, and you have to have things you hang your hat on, and that’s kind of where we’re headed right now.”
