Drinkwitz draws on unconventional past

GET THE INSIDE SCOOP EVERY DAY WITH YOUR PREMIUM SUBSCRIPTION!

The inevitable question arose, and Eliah Drinkwitz was ready. One of the primary storylines surrounding Missouri’s new football coach, whose hire became official Tuesday morning, has been Drinkwitz’s experience, or lack thereof. The 36-year-old been a college head coach for just one season — at Appalachian State. Missouri didn’t just take a gamble by hiring a coach whose ability to recruit and develop a program remains a mystery, the school pushed all its chips to the center of the table by signing Drinkwitz to a six-year deal that will pay him $4 million per season.

So when Drinkwitz fielded questions from reporters during his introductory press conference Tuesday, he had to have known the question was coming. When asked about the adjustments that accompany jumping from the Sun Belt to the SEC, Drinkwitz replied coolly “they ought to try jumping from the head seventh grade coach to the SEC, because that’s where I started.”

Indeed, in 2005, a fresh-out-of-college Drinkwitz found himself coaching both of the seventh-grade teams at Alma middle school in Alma, Arkansas, where he grew up. As recently as a decade ago, he was an assistant at Springdale high school. Few could have predicted his meteoric ascent to becoming a Power Five head coach, Drinkwitz included. But given how far he’s climbed in the profession already, the seemingly large leap from the Sun Belt to the SEC hardly registers for Drinkwitz.

“I attack success,” he said. “I don’t fear failure. I don’t care if it’s Power Five, seventh grade or group of five, leading men is leading men. ... Yeah, it’s going to be different. There’s more cameras. But football is football, people are people, and we’re going to connect to people.”

Drinkwitz began to diverge from the well-worn path for college football coaches as far back as his freshman year of college. Drinkwitz played football through high school but underwent surgery to repair a torn labrum following his senior year. He didn’t have any scholarship offers, so he considered walking on at Arkansas Tech, but doing so would have forced him to forfeit his academic scholarships. So, he gave up the sport and set his sights on becoming a lawyer.

Midway through college, missing football, Drinkwitz changed his mind about his future profession and decided he wanted to teach and coach high schoolers. His first job after graduating came coaching the seventh-grade teams at Alma. He doesn’t remember how the teams fared, he admitted Tuesday, but he took some valuable lessons away from the experience that still hold true in recruiting and developing players at the college level.

“I’ll never forget, coach (Frank) Vines told me my most important job as a head seventh-grade coach was that every player became an eighth-grade player, because you never know how kids develop,” Drinkwitz said. “And it’s that same philosophy with me when you recruit freshmen. You don’t write them off because they’re not exactly what you expected when you recruited them. Players are going to develop.”

The following year, Drinkwitz got an assistant coaching job at Springdale high school, which had become a powerhouse under current Auburn coach Gus Malzahn. Drinkwitz spent four years as the team’s offensive coordinator, from 2006 through 2009. Following the 2009 season, the head coaching job at Springdale came open. Drinkwitz coveted the position. The school hired someone else.

Shortly thereafter, Drinkwitz received a visit from Malzahn. Then Auburn’s offensive coordinator, Malzahn offered Drinkwitz a job as a quality control assistant.

Drinkwitz faced a tough decision. Coaching in college had never been part of his plan, but the opportunity to work at a perennial powerhouse under Malzahn appealed to him. Doing so, however, would be a financial risk. Drinkwitz and his wife, Lindsey, had just given birth to their first daughter. The position at Auburn paid just $15,000 a year, with no benefits. The couple decided the only way they could afford to stay afloat financially would be by selling their home in Arkansas and moving into a cheap apartment.

Lindsey, whose teaching salary helped pay the bills the following year, gave her blessing. Drinkwitz accepted the position. He hasn’t returned to the high school ranks since.

“We were both teachers and sold our house, moved into an apartment and said, it’s in God’s hands,” Drinkwitz said.

During Drinkwitz’s first year at Auburn, the Tigers went 14-0 and won the national title behind the quarterback play of Cam Newton. Drinkwitz joked Tuesday that the season made him think “college football was easy.” He remained on Auburn’s staff in 2011. The following year, when Malzahn got hired as the head coach at Arkansas State, he brought Drinkwitz along as a running backs coach.

Drinkwitz credits Malzahn with instilling the foundation of his current up-tempo, spread offense. However, he points to the 2013 season, when Malzahn left to become the head coach at Auburn and Bryan Harsin took over at Arkansas State, as a seminal moment in his coaching development. Harsin promoted Drinkwitz to co-offensive coordinator, then brought Drinkwitz along when he got the head coaching job at Boise State the following year. There, Drinkwitz coached tight ends in 2014 and served as the offensive coordinator in 2015. His offense ranked No. 15 nationally in both yardage and scoring, and Drinkwitz got hired as the offensive coordinator at North Carolina State, where he spent the following three seasons.

“We were able to blend our offensive identities, the philosophy of no-huddle attack, with multiple personnel shifts, motions, pro-style concepts,” Drinkwitz said of his time with Harsin. “And that's really where this offense began to take root and became my own.”

Drinkwitz’s offensive acumen has been the driving force in his ascent up the coaching ladder. In his final season at NC State, the Wolfpack ranked 16th nationally in total offense and 22nd in scoring. This season, with Drinkwitz gone, the Wolfpack slid to 87th in total offense and 106th in scoring.

Drinkwitz said he will continue to call his own plays and coordinate the offense at Missouri, as he did at Appalachian State last season. He vowed that his teams will be “fun to watch.”

“We're going to base out of the no huddle, we're going to be quarterback-driven,” he said. “We're going to be able to have a dominant downhill run game and a vertical passing game. We're going to execute well under pressure.”

While Drinkwitz’s decision to accept the quality control position at Auburn had the greatest impact — and posed the greatest financial risk — on his coaching career, he might owe his current position more to landing the head coaching job at Appalachian State a year ago. Drinkwitz took over a loaded roster left behind by Scott Satterfield, who replaced Bobby Petrino at Louisville, and led the Mountaineers to a 12-1 record and second consecutive Sun Belt championship. The team currently sits at No. 20 in the College Football Playoff top 25.

Drinkwitz said he learned a lot during his first year as a head coach: how to construct a roster, assemble a coaching staff and lead an entire program. He also had to navigate the delicate process of keeping committed prospects in the fold and adding new recruits to a class with just days remaining before the early signing period, something he has already begun to attempt again this year. He quipped that, due to his first year as a head coach, “I only have about eight haircuts yet until I go completely bald.”

But perhaps more importantly, his success at Appalachian State gave others the same confidence Drinkwitz has always had in his own coaching abilities. He proved that his success running an offense translates to an entire organization. Asked how he’s more prepared for the Missouri job that he would have been a year ago, Drinkwitz grinned and said, “well, I probably wouldn’t have gotten the same contract value.”

“I’d probably be a little bit overwhelmed right now,” he continued. “And right now I just don’t feel that way. I feel comfortable and calm and, I’d say, I feel steady.”

Some may have viewed Drinkwitz’s unconventional rise through the coaching ranks and his relative lack of college football experience as a negative. Missouri athletics director Jim Sterk, however, believes Drinkwitz’s background sets him apart, in a good way.

“When you start to dig into his background, I love that he was a high school coach,” Sterk said. “I love that he was quality control at Auburn, those steps along the way. Everywhere that he's been, he's been a winner and made the place better, and everyone we talked to, that was the common theme.”

Drinkwitz admitted that he hasn’t yet taken time to reflect on his unlikely journey from coaching seventh-graders to the Missouri Tigers. He’s too consumed with relocating his family (he and Lindsey recently had their fourth daughter) and assembling a signing class for that. But he said he still employs lessons that he learned as a middle school and high school coach every day, such as how to relate to players or teach new concepts. And after finding success in each of his past transitions, from high school assistant to college quality control assistant to offensive coordinator to head coach, he has no reason to believe this latest challenge will end any differently.

“No matter where my family and I have been in coaching, we've been able to rise to the occasion, to compete, to do it better than it's ever been done before,” Drinkwitz said. “And so when we surround ourselves with the right people, when the players and I get on the same page about what our mission is going to be moving forward, I have no doubts that we’ll be successful at all.”