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Mizzou’s aiming for multiplicity on defense and complication on offense. Cross your fingers.

Here are today’s Mizzou Links.

By Bill Connelly Updated
NCAA Football: Missouri at Arkansas Nelson Chenault-USA TODAY Sports

The theme for Mizzou’s spring football session this year has been ... enhancement, maybe? Like turning a deep threat into an everything receiver?

The intermediate routes: the slants, the curls, the breaks over the middle; all of the routes in the playbook that require precise route running and catching ability, which [Emanuel] Hall supposedly hasn’t had in the past. They’ve now become a part of his arsenal, and the senior has established himself as anything but a one-dimensional deep threat.

”Every time he makes a play that maybe I wouldn’t have seen out of him in the past, I let him know,” Lock said. “You’re going to see a different Emanuel next fall. You’re going to see a competitive ball catcher, a great route runner.”

Or making the Mizzou defense crazy-multiple?

“It’s beneficial to have the amount of guys coming back that we do to build off what we did well toward the end of the year,” [defensive coordinator Ryan Walters] said after Tuesday’s practice on Faurot Field. [...]

They’ll do that, Odom and Walter hope, by becoming a more diverse defense capable of playing with more personnel packages on the field. ... Odom ran a 3-4 defense during his three seasons as defensive coordinator at Memphis (three linemen, four linebackers) but stuck with Gary Pinkel’s 4-3 base system when he returned to Mizzou as coordinator in 2015. The last two years he’s mixed in some other packages while recruiting versatile defenders to give opponents multiple looks. Jordan Elliott, a 325-pound transfer from Texas, and 295-pound sophomore Akial Byers, have played both end and tackle this spring to give the Tigers more power off the corner.

I’ll repeat what I said on Sunday: Adding looks and skills is how you definitively take a step forward as a program. Or it’s how you overload the circuits and slow your team down. But the former sounds a lot more fun, so we’ll go with that.

NCAA Football: Missouri at Georgia
Emanuel Hall celebrates with friends
Dale Zanine-USA TODAY Sports

Yesterday at Rock M

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