Commentary: Tigers take a risk with Drinkwitz hire
The term home run hire is thrown around a lot in every coaching search. It’s a really stupid term for many reasons. Before we get to judging Missouri’s hire of Eliah Drinkwitz — the two parties have reached an agreement, though nothing has been signed and he Drinkwitz's hire has to be approved by the Board of Curators — we should say that there’s no point to judge a hire on day one because none of us has any idea how it’s going to turn out. Great hires go badly and poor hires go well all the time. We don’t know.
Okay, enough of that. Let’s get to the judgment part.
Most aren’t going to view Missouri’s hire of Drinkwitz from Appalachian State as a home run. It’s not a sure thing. It has the potential to be really good. There’s also a whole lot of unknown. Seriously, could I be any more non-committal?
I like the hire. I don’t love it. But I like that Missouri’s being a little unconventional. My biggest worry throughout the coaching search was that Mizzou was going to do the safe thing. And it sure looked that way for a while. Blake Anderson was the definition of safe to me. He’s going to be decent (he’s had a winning record in each of his six seasons as a head coach). He’s probably not going to be great (he’s never won ten games in a season and has only won nine once).
Drinkwitz isn’t safe. He’s viewed as an elite offensive mind and a great play caller. But he’s been a head coach for one season. He went 12-1 at Appalachian State this season. It was the most wins in school history. But he didn’t build that program. Scott Satterfield built it and then went to Louisville and laid a heck of a foundation there. Satterfield IS a really good head coach. Drinkwitz MIGHT BE a really good head coach. Not only has Drinkwitz never recruited at a Power Five level as a head coach; we haven’t even really seen much of what he’s recruited at the Group of Five level.
But that doesn’t have to be a negative. I said from the start of this thing that Missouri wasn’t very likely to be able to hire a guy who had already proven he was a successful Power Five level coach. It was going to have to find the guy it thought would be a successful Power Five level coach. It’s what happened with Gary Pinkel 20 years ago. Pinkel’s hire wasn’t universally greeted with excitement. But he led the renaissance of Mizzou football. He raised the bar and the expectations in Columbia. In the end, what he did made Barry Odom’s job that much harder. Because people came to think that what Pinkel did at Missouri was the rule instead of the exception. If you look at the last 50 years, that just wasn’t the case. Odom wasn’t terrible. But he wasn’t nearly as good as Pinkel. There are multiple reasons he got fired, but that was most definitely one of them.
Drinkwitz could be the next Odom. Heck, he could be worse than Odom. He took over a pre-built program and used another guy’s players to be really good. But Drinkwitz offers potential and hope that he’s got a bright future.
The issue I—and apparently some members of the Board of Curators and Missouri’s administration—had with the initial list of finalists (Anderson, Skip Holtz, Jeff Monken) was that I’d already seen what they could do. It was fine. Anderson won an average of 7.5 games per season and never had a loser. Holtz had a winning record at three of his four stops and has won 143 games. Monken has had five ten-win seasons. On the surface he was the best of the three…until you recognized that he was going to have to change what he had done offensively for literally his entire coaching career.
Monken, Holtz and Anderson (and some of the other names mentioned—I’m looking at you, Willie Fritz and Jim McElwain) were okay. But they were established. We knew what they were. The chances that they were going to be significantly better than that weren’t great.
The argument for hiring any of them was going to be simple: They’ve won at places that are harder to win than Missouri. If they can do what they’ve done where they’ve done it, imagine what they can do at a place with more resources and support.
You know what that sounds like? The argument Missouri gave us all when it hired Frank Haith. How’d that end up?
It’s often said that good is the enemy of great. The idea is that if you’re happy with being pretty good, you don’t have much chance to go a level beyond that. That’s kind of the way I viewed the initial list of candidates. They’re all good coaches. I don’t think any of them would necessarily have been disastrous. I just don’t see anything there that would tell me great was in play and that I—or the fanbase—should be really excited about it.
Drinkwitz at least brings the potential of great. He was great this year at App State. He’s been around great at Auburn and Boise State. But the variance of expectation will be wide with Drinkwitz. There’s no way to know what to expect because we simply haven’t seen enough to draw logical conclusions.
If you shoot for great, you also bring terrible into play. But if you don’t even shoot for great, you have no chance to get there. Missouri shot. For that, it has my attention.