Mizzou Football Presser Notes: Alabama

Oct 22, 2024 | Uncategorized

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Missouri head coach Eli Drinkwitz reacts to Auburn scoring a touchdown in the third quarter of a game on Saturday, Oct. 19, 2024, at Faurot Field in Columbia. (CAL TOBIAS/ROCK M NATION)

What Eli Drinkwitz, Luther Burden III, Marcus Bryant and Johnny Walker Jr. had to say leading up to MU’s trip to Tuscaloosa.

Mizzou football is heading into arguably its most important regular season game in recent memory.

A win in its trip to face No. 15 Alabama on the road could rocket MU back towards College Football Playoff contention. While the Crimson Tide look far from the force they usually were under Nick Saban, they still present a tough task for the Tigers, who haven’t defeated the mighty Tide since 1975.

Here’s what the Tigers had to say before heading South:

Eli Drinkwitz | Head coach

On Auburn: “Really proud of our team and how they stuck together.”

On defending Jalen Milroe and Ryan Williams: “You have to kind of pick your poison. If you double-team freshman wide receiver Ryan Williams, who’s 17 years old, then you leave yourself hat down on the quarterback.”

On Alabama’s defensive line: “Them and Texas A&M’s defensive line are the two best that we’ve seen so far.”

On Brady Cook being at practice: “I anticipate that he will be out at practice, but that’s why I’m not letting the media at practice, so they all can’t worry about what he’s doing or not doing at practice.”

On why he believes toughness is the No. 1 trait of an elite quarterback: “You have to have both mental and physical toughness. You have to be physically tough to be able to stand in there and take the hits. I mean, golly, Drew Pyne’s first four plays, he got rocked. Wasn’t really anything wrong with the calls or wrong with the offensive line. That’s the nature of the game. Obviously, Brady did too. So you have to be physically tough, and you’re relying on everybody else to do their job, and everybody’s not always going to do their job to the best. They’re going to try, but it’s not always going to be executed. And defenses got plays that are better than your scheme. So you’re going to have to physically take hits, and then you got to be mentally tough, because no matter what thrown at you, you’re expected on this play to perform at the highest level, and you’ve got to do that…A quarterback position, there’s 78 plays. Within the play, he’s got 10, 12, 15 different decisions that he has to make. And so to be that mentally tough for that much of a game and to perform at an elite level, I think it’s really, really challenging.”

On if Cook would’ve been able to come back in the game had Mizzou been on the road: “We’re not able to get over to MU Health, and we’re not able to get the MRI, and we’re not able to get that read in a timely manner. That’s the one time I was very thankful that the game lasted three and a half hours.”

On the task of Mizzou’s defensive line: “We’re going to have to do a really good job of stopping the run, and anytime you commit more people to doing that, they’re leaving one-on-ones or voids in your zone coverage. So it’s a real challenge. And then you add on top of it, if you rush four, and (Milroe) gets vertical in his escape, then you got real problems.”

On Luther Burden III bouncing back from a muffed punt: “He was disappointed in that decision. We all were. Probably more on me than anything. I should have had an automatic fair catch on it, and he was trying to make a play with the frustrations of the day, but you can’t do that. You have to play within the play, and you can’t afford something that’s not there. But yeah, he responded. Everybody understood what he was trying to do. Don’t condone it, but we understood it. So it was about just focusing on this play for the fourth quarter. And obviously the fourth quarter, the biggest moments, that third down and fourth down were huge.”

On remaining level-headed amidst a ruckus road environment: “Our confidence comes from your preparation. I told those guys, don’t wish for it to be Saturday. They should focus on having the best Toughness Tuesday that you can have, because then you’ll know on Saturday you’re ready to play. And so that for us is really going to be the confidence that we have. What kind of practice do we have today? Can we piece together the details and practice today so that we can perform on Saturday?

“We can’t play over-analyzing every situation. We can’t have too many checks on both sides of the ball. We can’t have too many what-ifs, we can’t have, if they do this, and we’re going to do this, and if they do this, if they motion to this, we’re going to check to this. Or if they show us this coverage, we’re going to check to this. We gotta go out there and play football.”

On the offensive line’s performance against Auburn: “I thought we had our best day running the inside zone. I thought we were pretty square, pushed vertical. Obviously, we had some a gap integrity issues and protections. Gave up the sack on a sim(ulated) pressure that we actually picked up, but we just didn’t finish. So we got to do a better job in our a gap identification on pressures, and got to sustain blocks longer. They got elite line. They always have, and I assume that they always will with the way that they recruit, but they’ve got elite players, great pass rushers, big, physical guys that can stone you at the point of attack. I think their linebackers are really good. I think it might be the best set of linebackers played this year from a physicality standpoint.”

On attacking Alabama’s offensive line: “We’re gonna try Dan Lanning’s approach and play 12. Add an extra rusher, see if anybody notices. Yeah, play football. I mean, there’s no magic to this.”

On evaluating offensive performance despite injuries to starters: “It’s hard to go back and evaluate a lot of that. You can evaluate some individual performances, but just because of the nature of the injuries…I mean, first drive, you lose your starting running back, your starting quarterback. Second driving, you lose your starting tight end, you’re already down a couple of wide receivers. At that point, it’s just about figuring out how you put enough patches on it to win the game. Ultimately, I think the great reminder for me is it’s about winning the football game and not getting caught up with the outside noise and measurements of everybody’s team. It’s about playing on Saturday and finding a way to win that game and not worrying about what the criticisms, are you going to drop in the polls, all that stuff. None of that matters. At the end of the day, you play to win the game, and if you win, you figure out why you did. If you lose, you figure out why you didn’t. Keep going to work, and getting caught up in what people’s opinions are about our football team is a waste of time, and I don’t care. I really don’t. I don’t care what anybody says about our team. Our team is our team. It’s who we got. I love those guys. We’re trying like heck every day to get a little bit better, to try to go win on Saturdays.”

On being 7-0 in one-score games since last season: “We need to be in those because we’re not good when we get blown out.”

On if he’s learned anything that he didn’t during the preseason: “I didn’t know how they would gel. I didn’t know how hard they would play with each other and for each other. I didn’t know if they would be able to bounce back from adversity. You can add talent to a roster into a culture, but until you get tested, you really don’t know what you got. And I think you know that was a real positive for us after A&M and being tested and seeing kind of what we had.”

Luther Burden III | Wide receiver

On what Drinkwitz told the team about mentality: “He’s basically just preached that we just need to focus on us.”

On rebounding from his muffed punt against Auburn: “I feel like I gotta just start putting put my team in the better position. Happy to learn from it. I was just thinking next play. The game wasn’t over. There’s a lot of time left.”

On remaining upright even with no targets until late in the first half: “Don’t press. Just let the game come to me.”

On what Brady Cook showed him on Saturday: “I feel like he just really showed everybody what I already knew. I knew he was a dog.”

Marcus Bryant | Offensive lineman

On how the offensive line has improved throughout the season: “I think we’re really physical up front. We are playing with one set of eyes. I feel like we’re getting better and better each week just playing with one set of eyes.”

On getting acclimated to Mizzou’s culture: “Over here, it’s really easy, because the brotherhood in the locker room, it feels like you’ve been here for years.”

On Brady Cook: “He’s a fighter. He’ll fight every single play.”

On what Cook told him when he returned from the hospital: “He came up to the whole (offensive) line and was dapping us up and was like ‘we’re not losing this game’.”

On lessons learned from playing at Texas A&M: “Just stay calm. Keep fighting. No matter what the circumstances is, good or bad, just stay mellow.”

Johnny Walker Jr. | Defensive end

On the defensive line’s success against Auburn: “It was all about eliminating thinking.”

On Zion Young: “Zion is a tremendous player, and like I said, eliminate thinking for all of us makes us play faster.”

On what “eliminating thinking” means: “D-lineman don’t think. I would say really just cutting down the play sheet, letting us get calls we’re comfortable with and just letting us play free.”

On Jalen Milroe: “Tremendous player. Twitchy athlete.”

On maintaining good gap integrity against Alabama: “One pass rush with bad integrity could be a touchdown.”

On limiting explosive plays as a defensive lineman: “Get pressure on the quarterback. Having good lane integrity, locking down on our gaps, I feel like that will limit explosive plays.”

On Brady Cook’s return: “I was actually sitting down and I seen number 12 run by, but I didn’t think it was Brady. I thought it was Dreyden Norwood. I’m like, where’s Drey going? But then I heard the crowd start cheering, I said, there’s no way Brady’s back out here because it was unbelievable to me. I can’t believe he came back out. The crowd got pumped. We got pumped. It was like a movie. I mean, it was, it was an unreal experience. I’ve never seen nothing like that football in before. Leaving the hospital, coming back to the field. That’s crazy to me.”

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