Mizzou Fall Camp Practice Notebook: August 7

With exactly three weeks remaining until the Missouri Tigers' season opener, the team hit the practice field again Thursday morning.

The session of Thursday's practice that was open to the media was much lighter than Wednesday's, but here's MissouriOnSI's takeaways, notes and video from the practice.

Notes

Offense

• Through all of the practices so far, Marquis Johnson's route running looks much quicker and crisp than before. Whether or not he can win with more than just his speed will be crucial to establishing himself in the offense this season.

• Running back rotation on receiver drills continues to be in this order: Jamal Roberts, Tavorus Jones, Marquise Davis, Ahmad Hardy.

• After being overthrown on the previous rep on an out route, true freshman wide receiver Damarion Fowlkes did a nice job bouncing back on the next rep, losing his footing at first, but re-establishing himself in order to stretch his arms out and drag his toes near the sideline to make the catch.

• Usually wide receivers coach Jacob Peeler is fiery enough on his own for the receivers, but head coach Eli Drinkwitz was pretty vocal to them Thursday too. He yelled at them to "have some awareness" after a few drops when running a route near the sideline.
  
  Drinkwitz has overall been tough on the wide receivers so far in camp, saying earlier in the week that only Johnson, Joshua Manning, Kevin Coleman Jr. and Xavier Loyd had been consistently getting open and catching passes.

Defense

• Order of depth chart for off-ball linebackers on one drill: Josiah Trotter, Khalil Jacobs, Nicholas Rodriguez, Triston Newson. Interested to see how the spot at WILL is split up between the last three there. Even though Newson is the most experienced, all three have undeniably earned some sort of role.

• Northern Illinois transfer safety Santana Banner made a good catch on a drill where safeties tracked a ball to the corner of the end-zone, but safeties coach Jacob Yoro coached him up afterward on needing to take a higher angle backward to track the ball better.

Previous practice notebooks: July 28 | July 29 | July 30 | August 1 | August 2 | August 3 | August 6

Video