FAYETTEVILLE — If you've watched Missouri football if the Eli Drinkwitz era, you've undoubtedly become accustomed to watching the Tigers run their bread and butter offensive play time after time.

With the likes of Tyler Badie, Cody Schrader, Ahmad Hardy and Jamal Roberts toting the rock, Mizzou's wide zone play has been a consistent source of positive yardage for the Tigers, and that's still the case this year. Needless to say, stopping the run will be an emphasis for defensive coordinator Ron Roberts and the Arkansas defense this week.

Stopping the wide zone play in particular is so important for the Razorbacks this week that Roberts, who usually answers questions from the media in a succinct manner, took nearly two minutes explaining its intricacies.

"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."

Roberts then apologized for his lengthy answer.

"Probably went way too long on that, didn't I?," he joked.

What Missouri has done to opposing defense is no laughing matter. Roberts has run for 867 yards through seven games and is averaging a whopping 5.2 yards a carry. Arkansas' run defense, which is 13th of 16 teams in the SEC, will have to be stellar if the Hogs are to have a chance to win on Sunday.

With that said, the worst run defense in the conference and the 94th-best in the country in Ole Miss held Roberts to 39 yards on 20 carries, a season-low average of just under two yards a pop.

Perhaps the biggest factor in whether or not Arkansas sufficiently stops Missouri's wide zone is the how the secondary plays the run. Roberts said prior to Arkansas' matchup with Tennessee on Oct. 10 that the secondary would have to get better in run support moving forward, and the veteran DC said Tuesday that how the secondary does against the run will be "huge" on Saturday.

"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."

Missouri ran for 322 yards on 5.6 yards a carry against the Hogs last year, with Roberts making up for 100 of those yards. If Arkansas is going to pull off the upset and topple the No. 23 Tigers on Saturday, stopping Mizzou's patented stretch play will be paramount.

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