Talkin’ season is officially upon us. The annual SEC Media Days will start Monday in Atlanta, and Missouri head coach Eli Drinkwitz will be one of three coaches from the league who address reporters on the opening day. PowerMizzou will be on hand to provide full coverage.
While much of the discussion will undoubtedly revolve around conference realignment (for the second year in a row), Drinkwitz can also expect to answer several questions about the state of his own program. Here are five topics we expect to be addressed by the third-year coach on Monday.
1. Where does the quarterback competition stand, and when does a starter need to be identified?
The biggest question mark around the 2022 Missouri team continues to be the quarterback position. Following the departure of Connor Bazelak to the transfer portal, Drinkwitz brought three transfers with Power Five starting experience to campus for visits, but all committed elsewhere. Eventually, the Tigers landed on Jack Abraham, a seventh-year senior who last played a college game in October of 2020 for Southern Mississippi. Abraham will compete with Brady Cook and Tyler Macon, who each started one game a season ago, as well as true freshman Sam Horn.
Given that fall camp hasn’t yet kicked off, we wouldn’t expect Drinkwitz to have much of an update about who is leading the quarterback competition. But it will be interesting to hear whether he has a deadline to select someone who will work with the first-team offense — even if he doesn’t name the starter publicly. Plus, there could be some news that impacts Horn by the time he takes the podium. The first round of the MLB Draft is scheduled for Sunday night. While Horn, a pitching prospect who is expected to hear his name called at some point during the draft, is not widely expected to be taken in the first round, the coincidence of the draft and Media Days should allow for an opportunity to ask Drinkwitz about his confidence level that Horn will stick with his plan to play college football at Missouri rather than jump straight to professional baseball.
2. How much will be asked of the Tiger defense?
Quarterback isn’t the only position on offense where Missouri is dealing with uncertainty. The Tigers will also have to replace All-American running back Tyler Badie, their entire tight end room and at least one starter on the offensive line.
As a result, there will likely be some pressure on the defense to pull its weight, especially early in the season. But what are the realistic expectations for a unit that struggled mightily for much of last season?
Missouri finished 2021 ranked No. 124 out of 130 FBS teams against the run, No. 106 in total defense and No. 113 in scoring defense. While the unit played better down the stretch, defensive meltdowns played major roles in early losses at Kentucky and Boston College as well as a blowout loss to Tennessee.
Can the defense avoid another slow start to this season? During spring practices, players said the issues stemmed in part from struggling to grasp the new scheme implemented a season ago by former defensive coordinator Steve Wilks. While Wilks’ replacement, Blake Baker, has said he’ll try to keep as much cohesion as possible from last season, there are a lot of new faces on the defensive side of the ball, both among the players and the staff. How good can the new-look unit be, and how good does the team need it to be? With defensive end Isaiah McGuire and safety Martez Manuel representing two of the Tigers’ player delegates to Media Days, we should start to get a sense of what to expect from the unit.
3. How does Drinkwitz correct the road struggles?
One troublesome trend during Drinkwitz’s first two seasons at Missouri has been the team’s record on the road. The Tigers have gone 2-7 away from Faurot Field during that span.
With two of the team’s first four matchups of this season coming on the road, it would be an ideal time for Drinkwitz to reverse the trend. Missouri plays at Kansas State in Week Two and at Auburn in Week Four. Both represent opponents that should have somewhat similar levels of talent but difficult places to play. If the team could win at least one of the two games and enter its back-to-back matchups with Georgia and Florida at 3-1, it would likely do wonders for the fan energy around the program. On the flip side, recent history suggests that losing both of those games could sap support and result in another season where the team hovers around 45,000 fans in the stands for home games.
4. Where does the program stand in the rebuild?
A year ago, between his colorful anecdotes and playful jabs at other coaches in the league, Drinkwitz preached patience for Missouri fans, saying it was going to take a few years to build programs like Georgia and Florida. Since then, it feels like the urgency has been picked up a notch. Lane Kiffin and Sam Pittman, hired in the same year as Drinkwitz, both won at least nine games last season. During the offseason, Missouri added 16 players from either the transfer portal or the junior college ranks. In Drinkwitz’s third year in Columbia, the only holdovers from Barry Odom’s teams are ones he has chosen to keep around.
So, what are fair expectations for Missouri fans at this point in Drinkwitz’s tenure? We wouldn’t expect him to offer a win-loss record, but how he responds could be telling.
5. One year in, how does Missouri stack up in terms of NIL?
Aside from conference realignment, the buzziest topic of conversation in college football continues to be name, image and likeness. The NCAA first cleared the way for players to profit from NIL last July. In the year since, a pair of collectives — Advancing Missouri Athletes and Horns Down Shop — have signed Tiger players to NIL deals, and the state legislature has amended its NIL law to allow Drinkwitz and other athletic department personnel to communicate with the collectives about which players receive what payments.
Drinkwitz has noted in the past that all of the rumors around NIL payments, few of them verifiable, have made it difficult to gauge know how much NIL money is actually being shelled out at other schools. But it wouldn’t be an offseason press conference in 2022 if the coach weren’t asked about NIL and how he feels the Tigers measure up to the other programs in the SEC.
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