FAYETTEVILLE - Missouri’s run game has become the kind of problem that forces a defensive coordinator to stop, breathe and walk through every detail out loud.
That happened Tuesday with Arkansas DC Ron Roberts, who spent nearly two minutes unpacking why the Tigers’ wide zone is so hard to bottle up. Roberts usually keeps his answers short.
Not this time. Missouri’s bread-and-butter run, the one that has powered the Tigers through the Eli Drinkwitz era, earned a full breakdown.
From Tyler Badie to Cody Schrader to Ahmad Hardy to Jamal Roberts, Missouri has kept feeding backs into a system that keeps producing clean yardage. And this season, the machine is still rolling. Roberts called the play “almost like the triple option concept,” and explained that Missouri is forcing defenses to react all over the front.
"It's almost like the triple option concept," Roberts said Tuesday. "You're trying to, obviously, [know] where they're going to start the read in the B-gap area and they're going to take it.
So it's just stringing it out. If you run to the sidelines, they're going to pop a hole.
They're cutting the backside, which we just don't see much in today's football. Whether you got 4i [or] 3 technique in there, they run it a couple different ways, because they'll do it out of one back and they'll do it with a tight end.
"Obviously, with a tight end, they get different schemes based off who they're miking. They're miking the front side in.
They're trying to double the nose back to the backside backer. There's multiple plays within one play, so they get good at running it...you got to be careful with movement.
If you're doing any type of stunt and stuff like that, people think it's great. But when you move, it's a lot easier to get overtaken.
"It works best with a downhill runner, too. A guy [who] sticks his foot into the ground and gets downhill.
I think the consistency on their part makes it a little different because you don't see it all the time... I think their O-line does a really good job working together."
"Probably went way too long on that, didn't I?," he joked.
The reason Roberts kept talking is simple: Missouri has made this thing work against just about everybody. The Tigers have run for 867 yards in seven games and are averaging 5.2 yards per carry. That’s exactly why Arkansas’ defense, which ranks 13th of 16 SEC teams against the run, has to be sharp on Sunday.
The challenge is even starker when you look at what happened to Missouri in a previous outing. Ole Miss, which owns the conference’s worst run defense and ranks 94th nationally, held Roberts to 39 yards on 20 carries. That was his season low, and it dropped his average to just under two yards per attempt.
For Arkansas, the ripple effect reaches beyond the front seven. Roberts said the secondary’s work in run support will matter hugely on Saturday, something he already flagged before the Tennessee game on Oct. 10.
"That goes back to simple things about getting your eyes in the right spot, seeing your keys, know where you got to snap it to your secondary read," Roberts said. "But doing it on a consistent basis.
So I think they're all getting better with it every week every time we do it. Is it where we want it?
No. We got to keep getting better.
"Need to make sure we do some tackling on open field. We got to tackle better [in the] open field. You like to see some of that showing up."
Last year, Missouri gashed Arkansas for 322 rushing yards at 5.6 yards a pop, and Roberts accounted for 100 of those yards himself. With the No. 23 Tigers coming in, Arkansas’ best path to an upset starts with one thing: finding a way to slow down the stretch play that has defined Missouri’s offense.
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