When Missouri hired Eli Drinkwitz in December of 2019 the general consensus was that the Tigers were bringing in an aggressive offensive-minded whiz kid. He was 36 years old, had rocketed through the coaching ranks despite never having played college football. He was an outside the box hire, not traditional and certainly willing to take a risk.
Ten months later, in the third game of his career, Drinkwitz put all those things on display in a 45-41 win over defending national champion LSU. Granted, the 2020 LSU team was a shadow of the 2019 team. But Mizzou went toe to toe with one of the brand names of college football with its swashbuckling, trash-talking coach. He was dialing up flea flickers on offense. He called a fake punt. He kept his timeouts in his pocket and trusted a defense that had given up 479 yards and 41 points to make a goal line stand to win the game.
That guy went on to go 5-5 against an all-SEC schedule and spent most of the offseason ridiculing all of us—rightfully so—who had picked him to go 3-7 or 2-8.
Where did that guy go? Because he’s not coaching Missouri anymore.
Sure, Drinkwitz can still make a headline with some of his quotes. His press conferences might go viral—sometimes deservedly, other times not—on social media. But where’s the young gun that showed us all those guts in year one? Where’s the guy that, to use former wide receiver Dominic Lovett’s favorite phrase, “dropped his nuts” during the course of a game? Where’s the guy that we saw against LSU when his quarterback threw for 406 yards, a number no Missouri quarterback has come anywhere close to matching since?
The guy we thought Missouri hired because he was bold and exciting now coaches one of the least adventurous and most risk-averse teams in college football.
Never has it been more evident than the fourth quarter on Saturday night in a 23-19 win over Middle Tennessee State. The Tigers led 23-10. They sat on the Blue Raiders’ 44-yard line facing fourth down. They officially needed a yard to extend the drive, but it was closer to two feet. Brady Cook and the offense stayed on the field asking for a play, wanting to prolong the drive and salt the game away.
Drinkwitz sent Riley Williams and the punt team on to the field.
Let’s get two things straight: First, Drinkwitz defended the decision after the game and what he said makes some sense. Second, this isn’t second-guessing. I didn’t like the decision when it was made and I don’t like it two hours later while I’m writing this.
Here’s what Drinkwitz said when asked about the decision: “Up 13, punt the ball, our defense had been playing pretty good defense. Up 13, if they’ve got to go 83 yards if they get the ball on the 17, which they did, their chances of scoring are a lot less than the 50, so I think that’s the right play every time.”
Like I said, what Drinkwitz said isn’t way out there. He’s right. It’s harder to get 83 yards than 56. His defense is clearly the better part of his team. You trust them more than you trust the offense. In addition, his offensive line had done its best Swiss cheese impression much of the night and had committed some costly penalties. A lot of coaches with a 13-point lead would have done exactly what Drinkwitz did. You can disagree with it, but you can’t say it was stupid.
But I didn’t like it. You know what’s harder than going 83 yards to score? Scoring when you don’t have the ball. There were 10 minutes and 27 seconds left in the game when the Blue Raiders took possession. If you can get two feet, you’re going to bleed at least another couple of minutes off of that. Even if you don’t get points out of it, you’ve knocked another two minutes off the clock and MTSU has to score two touchdowns in the final nine minutes to beat you. Worst case scenario, you don’t get two feet and MTSU takes over at the 44. It took the Blue Raiders exactly four plays to get back to their own 46 anyway. And then they covered the next 54 and scored a touchdown to make it 23-17.
"We always want to stay out there on the field and go for it,” Cook said diplomatically. “We believe in ourselves, but at the end of the day coach makes the decisions.”
I agree with him. Not necessarily because I believe Missouri would have gotten that yard. You’d like to think so, but having confidence in this Missouri offense hasn’t exactly been an easy thing to do for the last two years and two games. More because I think if you can’t get two feet—or can’t protect a 13-point lead in the final ten minutes—against a team that got run off the field 56-7 by Alabama the week before then the likelihood you’re going to play for anything meaningful later in the season isn’t all that high anyway.
Ultimately, Drinkwitz and Missouri won the game. Perhaps it’s unfair to base an entire column after that happened around the idea that the coach is too conservative. But it’s been a pattern ever since that 2020 season. Missouri is rarely daring and pushing the envelope. It’s happened, most notably going for two to beat Florida at home rather than settling for a tie and overtime and then showing up at the postgame press conference with a light saber to dance on Dan Mullen’s coaching grave. The last part might have been a little over the top, but it sure wasn’t safe or boring.
But most of the things we’ve watched over the last couple of years have usually been safe and have almost always been boring. The swagger and the bravado may sometimes exist in press conferences, but it hardly ever seems to show its face during the games.
To be fair to Drinkwitz, I don’t think this is the way he wants to do it. He’s spent most of the last two summers telling us the Tigers have to be more aggressive, have to push the envelope, have to throw the ball downfield, have to find some explosive plays. And then he’s gone out and coached a whole bunch of rock fights, hoping to land one more than he absorbs. But I don’t think he plans to do it. I don’t think he spends the entire offseason lying to us.
He tells us the team he wants to have. Then he coaches the one he does have. And the one he does have simply hasn’t looked equipped to be aggressive and exciting. The last couple versions of the Tigers have scratched and clawed their way to six wins and minor bowl games despite offenses that mostly dink and dunk and bubble screen and jet sweep their way to somewhere around 20 points and hope that’s good enough to ask the defense to deliver a win. It happened again on Saturday. The Tigers ran the ball 46 times and threw it just 19.
“No, that wasn’t the game plan,” Drinkwitz said.
But as the night unfolded, it’s what they had to do. Or at least what Drinkwitz felt they had to do. And, again, it worked. But the problem is, when you play that way, the margin for error is nearly non-existent. The defense has to be nearly perfect. The special teams can’t keep leaving points on the field. The offense has to quit committing penalties. Because when you can’t score much, it just takes one play to beat you. As much as everyone wanted to talk about Missouri being two plays from 8-4 a year ago, nobody wanted to acknowledge they were two plays from 4-8.
How close is this team to breaking through? Drinkwitz sighed when I asked him that.
"I think there’s a lot of things to work on," he said. "There’s just so much to work on. Lack of explosiveness offensively, the short yardage debacles, missed extra point...
"We'll hear it all week and that's probably fine."
Until we see evidence to the contrary, this is what Mizzou football is and who Drinkwitz is. No longer do the Tigers have a brash young coach who throws caution to the wind roaming the sidelines. Instead, they have a fourth-year coach leaning on his defense to be nearly perfect to bail out a struggling offense that is trying to figure out things on the fly and a special teams unit that is more often costly than beneficial. Either those issues will be ironed out and Missouri will take the step forward we’ve all been waiting to see for the last eight years or they won’t and the Tigers will be trying to be just a little more accurate than their opposition in yet another series of knockdown, drag out rock fights, hoping that they win enough that Drinkwitz can come back and try finally to field the team he wants to in year five.
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