Spring Preview Part 1: Coach Pinkel Q&A

The Missouri Tigers enter spring practice in 2008 in a different situation than any other Mizzou team has faced in ages – they are now the hunted. The Tigers are coming off a magical 2007 season that saw them win a school-record 12 games, claim the school’s first-ever Big 12 Conference North Division championship, win MU’s first New Year’s Day bowl game since 1966, earn the first number one ranking since 1960, and finish with its highest-ever final ranking in the Associated Press top-25 (fourth).

Add to the fact that Head Coach Gary Pinkel and his squad returns 16 starters from a year ago (with 10 from one of the nation’s most improved defenses in 2007), including consensus first-team All-American all-purpose man Jeremy Maclin, as well as Heisman Trophy finalist quarterback Chase Daniel, and it’s easy to see why expectations are going to be through the roof.

The mantra going into the 2007 season was getting to the next level. Now that the Tigers reached that step, the next challenge is staying there, and that will be a focus of the team’s leadership and direction in 2008.

Head Coach Gary Pinkel gave his thoughts on the upcoming spring period, and what his squad will need to do to maintain what they achieved a year ago...

MU: Coach, what are some general things you try to focus on getting out of a spring practice period?

PINKEL: “Every spring what you do is you have a few specific goals. One is to develop your personnel on offense and defense, get players in the right positions and be able to find out those who are ready to play at this level and those who are close, and those who need more work. So, we’ll identify the personnel at all positions that are ready to play and then work on raising the standard of the players that aren’t quite there yet, to get them in the position to play. That’s really what we try to do in spring ball with our personnel.

“Another key thing we try to do is establish the depth by the end of the spring. We arrange the depth for personnel everywhere.

“The third thing is from a player standpoint, all of them will be stronger, faster and quicker through our off-season training program. Now, what we want to do is to continue to develop the fundamentals of all the positions. That’s how the player gets better, he gets stronger, faster and quicker, and then every day he works on his fundamentals at his position to improve to get better.”

MU: Any changes or tweaks you might be considering on either side of the ball at this point?

PINKEL: “We go through a full analysis of it, anything we want to try different. We’re not going to do a major overhaul of anything, there might be a few adjustments we make to help make ourselves better. All of our coaches have been out and looking around, there might be a few things, blitzes, a few coverage things we want to do defensively. Offensively there might be a few adjustments we want to make to make ourselves better. We’ll analyze our scheme on offense, defense and kicking schemes.”

MU: What are some areas that you’ll be interested in watching most closely during the spring?

PINKEL: “I think the offensive line is the obvious place to start. I don’t want to overuse the word ‘concern,’ because you go through this all of the time with graduation, but we have to replace two starters (Adam Spieker and Tyler Luellen) and two reserves (Monte Wyrick and Chris Tipton) on the depth, so that means we have to replace four of 10 players – that’s almost half of your offensive line depth you’re replacing. That being said, I think there are some good athletes there. Bottom line is, the reason you win is because you do the right things up front, and that’s our challenge this spring to get that done as a staff.”

MU: Spring is usually a time to try some position changes, any of those in store this year?

PINKEL: “There’s a few that we’ll look at. The big one is that we’re going to move Earl Goldsmith to wide receiver. He’ll also get work once a week at running back, we know he’s good enough to play running back, but certainly we want to use him in other ways. This will allow us throughout the season next year to play him at tailback or at receiver, whatever the needs are. We’ll wait week-by-week to see where he will fit best given the circumstances. He’s good enough to play at either position in this league. This also allows us to utilize his abilities, he’s real excited about this change, and this really helps us depth-wise, no question.

“La’Roderick Thomas is moving to receiver after playing as a defensive back last year. He’s a player that we think is going to do real well there. We worked him at wide receiver during bowl practices, and we could see him there, we really think he can help us. He’s got good quickness, speed and hands. That will help us depth-wise.

“A couple other changes for now include moving Austin Wuebbels from defensive line to offensive line, and then of course moving Michael Keck to defensive end. He actually moved there during the season last year, but that is different from where he started out when he first got here.”

MU: Coming off such a wildly successful 2007 season, what are the primary challenges you and your staff faces with such a highly-anticipated 2008 season ahead?

PINKEL: “I said going into last season that we all want to play at a high level, but we hadn’t done that yet, and to stay tuned, we’ll find out. I’d like to think that we made progress there, and we did. I think the consistency of play, the players taking every game one game at a time, being better at finishing games, being better playing on the road, being better at high-level games, going the month of November being undefeated -- those were areas where we took big steps last year. All of those that we analyzed and looked at a year ago, those were the things we had to do to win at a high level. We hadn’t done that consistently, and our players really responded with the leadership we had on the team.

“This year, the challenge is to focus every day on doing everything right, and working every single day so you can get better as a student and as a football player, putting great effort into your studies and your classes. And do the same thing as a football player, you have to lift weights, and every rep you do, every time you work on your fundamentals, you’re doing that to get better. That’s the approach here, the other approach is to get our young players up to understanding the work ethic and the commitment that it takes to get those guys up to that level. Right now they’re not, and that’s typical.

“The reality of it, is it’s based on a commitment to hard work and a great attitude, and that’s what we have to instill in the young players, and that’s our job to get that done.

“Redeveloping the leadership and chemistry on our team is really important. Just because you had that one year, it doesn’t automatically happen the next year, it doesn’t just carry over. You still have to work at it, and we’re constantly working on developing those things. I feel very good about our senior leaders.

“Can you win at a high level a couple years in a row now? That’s the question, and again, we’ll see. You go back to work and start all over again.

“People ask about the expectation level. I was asked before last year how we would handle the expectations of being picked to win the North and I said we’ll see how we handle it. I thought we would handle it well and I think the results show that we did. It was pressure-packed, we were in basically an elimination situation the last six weeks of the season, and we handled it.

“I think you learn from that and that carries over a little bit. I think there will probably be some pre-season rankings come out where we’ll be pretty high. I saw our team deal with rankings like you want a mature team to do last year, for the first time. In the past, it was kind of overwhelming, we kind of embraced it. I think last year we kind of broke down that barrier of it not being such a big deal, just more of welcoming it and accepting it for what it is and moving on to the next thing at hand. Hopefully going through that experience last year will carry over to this year and if we’re way up in the rankings, we use that the right way. I feel good that we’re in a spot to do just that.”

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