GD: I was surprised when I discovered the extra value meal did not debut until 1991. I guess until I was 15 years old we were just out here living like savages ordering a quarter pounder, fries and a Coke and paying for it all separately. It really is a genius idea. Frequently if I go to a drive-thru, I don't really want a drink. But when I do the math, I find the drink is really only costing me like a dime or in some cases it's actually cheaper to get the whole thing and throw the drink away so you get the drink. I've got to imagine it also speeds up the drive-thru experience because the morons that pull in and somehow don't really know what that fast-food restaurant has on the menu can now just say "Give me a No. 7" instead of studying the board for five minutes like they're selecting the next franchise quarterback. I'm not going to pretend to have thought for very long about the biggest changes in American food history, but that's got to be up there.

As far as a McRib, I don't think I've ever had one at McDonald's. My fraternity house would have them once every couple of weeks for lunch and dump some onions and pickles on them and they were pretty serviceable, at least for a college kid who didn't really spend much time thinking about exactly what in the hell he was putting in his body. But if you've ordered chicken nuggets from a fast food restaurant, I don't think you have any right to turn your nose up at a McRib.

GD: There's a reason I opted out of it. You guys don't care. Fans could not possibly care any less how easy or hard our job is to do. They want to see the product, they don't care about the process. I want to be clear that Dave tweeted what he did for a simple reason: A lot of people who read his stories were probably going to be interested in the quarterback story and the team's comments about it, possibly even comments from the quarterbacks themselves. That's a quick way for him to tell people, "Hey, we're not going to have any comments from the players about the quarterbacks because we didn't get to talk to them." You can agree or disagree with him tweeting it, but that's the logic. And I want to be clear that none of what I'm about to write is either judging Dave or directed at him. He does as good a job as anyone I know covering any beat.

As far as the access we've gotten, it was very good during fall camp and has become more and more restricted as the season has gone on. That doesn't surprise me. Access at Missouri is probably about average for what it is across the country during the season. Some places it's better, some it's worse. I'm not going to pretend it doesn't frustrate me at times. All of us have frustrations about our jobs at times. There have been times in the past I've complained about access publicly, but in the last few years I've decided it's not worth it because most people don't care and the ones who do care are just going to say "Good. The media is stupid and just trying to stir up crap and I hope they never let you talk to any of them!" And then some of them will go on rants about their perceived view of your political leanings. (I find it ironic that people who are following us for information on the team they like would prefer that we are able to get less information, but whatever).

The main part of this I've come to realize is that there's a disconnect between what media wants fans to want and what fans actually want. Most people get into this because they want to tell stories and provide insight that most fans can't get in other ways. First of all, a lot of fans can get a lot of that information more easily now. All of the players and coaches have social media accounts, the teams all have their own media arms, etc. Every game is on TV. Every press conference is pretty much streamed or immediately posted in its entirety on Twitter or Instagram. The fans no longer need us to tell them what happened or how it happened or even what the people involved thought about it happening. The fans want to know "What's it mean and who deserves the credit or the blame for it?" The job now is much more to analyze and provide informed opinion than it is to report what has happened. Some media has fully made that change, some has gone part of the way and some simply refuses to embrace the fact that the job has changed completely.

There is.a part of access that I think teams misunderstand and that it would benefit them to understand better. We have to write stories. Every single day. Whether someone from our site talks to zero players or 20 players, we are still going to have a story about Mizzou football pretty much every day. The more access we have, the more interviews we do, the better understanding we have of their viewpoint and the more educated our stories and our analysis is going to be. But even if you give me none of that, I'm still writing about Mizzou. The stories most coaches hate are the ones that say "Here's my analysis of what happened" and "here's what I think this means." But the fewer players and coaches they provide to talk to us about what happened, the more of those stories they get. So by limiting access, they're actually encouraging us to do more of the types of stories they hate.

Again, I think overall Drinkwitz provides decent access. It's not the best ever, but it's far from the worst. The days of Gary Pinkel letting us talk to any player we want and watch every play of every practice are gone and they're not coming back. We can lament that all we want, but we still have to change with the times and continue to find ways to do our jobs and provide coverage that fans find worth their time and their money. Whoever they provide us to talk to, we'll talk to. But I'll do my job regardless.