Drinkwitz's staff started to take shape years ago at Auburn
A little more than nine years ago Curtis Luper was coaching the running backs at Auburn. The Tigers’ offensive coordinator, Gus Malzahn, was one of those play callers who liked to do his job from the sidelines. So Luper was the lone full-time offensive assistant up in the booth overseeing the field.
“I can remember after the first game coach (Gene) Chizik asked, ‘Do you need any help up there?’” Luper recalled this week. “I’m like, ‘No, I have enough help.’”
Luper’s help consisted of three quality control assistants: Erik Link, Casey Woods and Eliah Drinkwitz.
“Each one of us had a very specific assignment and coach Malzahn was adamant that we were all there to try to help us win football games and to do our job the very best that we could and we were all focused on doing that,” Drinkwitz said. “We weren’t there to watch the game, we were there to watch our assignments.”
Very well, apparently, as the Tigers, led by Cam Newton, won the national championship. Link would leave Auburn after that season for his first full-time assistant position at Montana State. Drinkwitz and Woods would stay through 2011 before moving on to Arkansas State. Luper moved to TCU a year after that.
“I think when you’re in the entry level position, I think there’s always a dream,” Woods said. “When you’re sitting around with your buddies and man if there’s just one day that we can get together and work together again, how fun would that be? There’s been a number of jokes over the course of the years and we’ve got little group text messages where we go back and forth, who’s winning the race?”
The “race” is the one to be a head coach. Drinkwitz won it, getting the job at Appalachian State when Scott Satterfield left for Louisville after the 2018 season. Drinkwitz won 12 games and the Sun Belt Championship in his first season in Boone, NC. Within about 36 hours, he had been named as Barry Odom’s replacement at Missouri. Before that even happened, he’d heard from Curtis Luper.
“As his process went along this year, which was very fast, I shot him a text,” Luper recalled. “‘If you get that one, if you get THAT one,’ he knew which one I was talking about, I said I’d definitely be interested. He said no, no, and I said yeah. That’s how it started.”
“Coach Luper does an outstanding job of coaching but was a dynamic recruiter in Dallas,” Drinkwitz said. “I know in the past the Dallas metro area has been a huge part of Mizzou’s success, especially under coach (Gary) Pinkel and I wanted to tap into that again and so needed somebody with that expertise.”
Drinkwitz would name Luper as his running backs coach. Prior to that, he would hire Link, who was with him at Appalachian State, as his special teams coordinator and pluck Woods from UAB as the tight ends coach and recruiting coordinator.
“He and I, in fact, talked about a job last year at Appalachian State,” Woods said. “The timing of it wasn’t right so he got the job here on Monday and called me on Wednesday and offered me the job. About 35 minutes later I told my boss in Birmingham and I was on a flight on Friday at lunchtime.
“Southeastern Conference. Easy. Eli Drinkwitz. Easy. Chance to play at the top level. Easy. It was a no-brainer when I had an opportunity to come here. I was on the first plane out of Birmingham.”
The decision for Link wasn’t much tougher.
“He’s an outstanding football coach, a great teacher,” Link said. “He’s great at building relationships with players. Probably more importantly and more than anything else he’s a great man, a great husband, a great father and at the end of the day my values align with his values.”
Drinkwitz’s staff has plenty of roots that go back to Auburn. But those aren’t the only connections. He held on to three assistants from Odom’s staff, brought D.J. Smith and Charlie Harbison with him from Appalachian State and then harkened back to his time at Arkansas State for a key offensive addition in Bush Hamdan, who had just been let go as the offensive coordinator at Washington after Chris Petersen’s retirement.
“I met Eli in 2013,” Hamdan said. “(He) and I were both co-coordinators at Arkansas State. He was probably one of the only guys on staff I did not know which was a really, really unique experience. We came from very, very different backgrounds, if you will, in the coaching profession. He’s just a guy that it didn’t take long for me to realize how much of a star he really was. Really fed off his knowledge and his personality.”
Drinkwitz is just a few years older than Hamdan, but he’s made a strong impression on the Boise State product even though their paths crossed for just that one season.
“Coach Drinkwitz has been a huge mentor of mine through the years,” Hamdan said. “I think this profession is always about people and you certainly as an assistant have a handful of guys that you’d love to work for and he’s certainly one of them.”
The final spot on the staff went to Marcus Johnson, who was let go as part of Joe Moorhead’s staff at Mississippi State. He is the lone coach on the staff who did not have ties to Drinkwitz or Mizzou prior to being hired. He said it was Drinkwitz that sold him on Mizzou.
“I heard from coach Drink and several other programs and it happened pretty fast,” Johnson said. “The first contact, it happened the next day. I had some opportunities, but this one here was one I was excited about and I’m looking forward to.
“He’s a young innovative coach, an up and coming coach, he’s done some really good things from an offensive standpoint. To me, in this profession, you better continue to learn and grow, not become complacent.”
The Missouri coaching staff was put together across the country, stretching from Boone, North Carolina to Seattle, Washington. But the roots of it were planted in the press box at Jordan-Hare Stadium in Auburn nearly a decade ago.
“There’s always people that you want to work with but timing in college football is so weird and unique. It just happened that the timing for us to get back together worked out,” Drinkwitz said. “It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey. We’re just privileged to be on the journey together at this moment in time.”