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COLUMBIA, Mo. — Missouri’s football coaches have been in study hall.

While players spend hours in the weight room and running up and down the Faurot Field bleachers, coaches have leaned into their own developmental regimens, too. These informal courses of study just tend to involve more numbers — in stats and Rolodexes.

Along with recruiting and some family time, this is the time of year when Mizzou coaches — particularly head coach Eli Drinkwitz and his two coordinators — conduct their own studies into schematic tweaks they might want to make in time for the 2025 season. It’s part retrospective on 2024, part idea generation, part co-opting what works for other teams.

“The first thing you do is evaluate what you’re doing and try to find people that are doing what you’re doing, similar to what you’re doing — but better,” defensive coordinator Corey Batoon said.

Such a process could be particularly useful for Batoon, for whom 2024 was his first season as the Tigers’ defensive playcaller. He declined to offer specifics of what defensive ideas he’s explored this offseason but suggested some of it comes down to verbiage and the process of installing schemes during the preseason.

“Maybe it’s not a big, wholesale discussion but maybe there’s a way that (other teams are) teaching something,” Batoon said. “How are they verbalizing something?”

On the offensive side of the ball, MU’s priorities are clearer.

“There were some things that we were not good at — straight up,” Drinkwitz said in April. “Yards after catch was not good. Pass efficiency was high but yards per attempt was not good.”

Those were areas that showed the offensive regression Mizzou suffered in 2024. Overall receiving yards after the catch dropped to 1,482 (5.9 per reception) in 2024 from 1,665 (6.7 per reception) in 2023, according to Pro Football Focus.

Missouri’s yards per passing attempt declined even more steeply, from nine in 2023 to 7.2 in 2024.

There will be plenty of inherent change to the Tigers offense with a new starting quarterback and only three of the eight players who were targeted 15 or more times last season returning, but Drinkwitz wants the passing scheme to improve regardless of who’s out on the field.

So it’s a point of study for Drinkwitz and Kirby Moore, MU’s offensive coordinator.

“There’s some things in the pass game we’ve got to get cleaned up, and we’re really looking into that,” Drinkwitz said. “We’ve got to be more explosive, vertically, down the field. We’ve got to figure that out.”

In a macro sense, Moore’s study will be similar to one he conducted a year ago. Ahead of the 2024 season, Missouri’s emphasis was red zone offense — and how to avoid settling for short field goals inside the 20-yard line. During that process, Moore homed in on his 3rd-and-goal playcalling.

He’d felt it was needed after finding it understandably difficult to adjust to any significant degree during his first season calling plays.

“Sometimes it’s hard to see the forest through the trees during the season, and the stuff that you’re doing, you’re staying with it,” Moore told the Post-Dispatch last summer. “It was looking at all those different concepts, NFL, college — going to try and implement some of those things and see if it fits our personnel.”

To get these ideas, coaches have turned to their connections in the industry, including those at the professional level.

“That’s a big part of what we do on the daily in regards to professional development: calling people,” Batoon said, “whether it be NFL teams — we’ve had coaches go out and sit in on OTAs.”

Once fall camp convenes in less than two months, Mizzou coaches will bring back what they learned from observing those NFL practices and talking with other college coaches and put it to the test.

“You’re always, constantly, looking for that edge schematically,” Batoon said.