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No. 21 Missouri vs. No. 15 Alabama preview (0:50)
Check out the notable stats and history between No. 21 Missouri and No. 15 Alabama ahead of their SEC battle in Week 9. (0:50)
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Justin HeckertOct 25, 2024, 08:00 AM ET
EYEWEAR USED TO be a kind of prison until glasses became cool. Around the time jocks who never needed prescriptions began flaunting designer frames as a declaration of style. Which was long after Eli Drinkwitz had been memorialized in pictures from his adolescence, dorked-out in big, round lenses he inherited from his older brother, Jeremy. The head football coach of the Missouri Tigers has been the victim of lousy vision his whole life, and in his early 40s now seems the kind of glasses-wearer who forsakes image in favor of comfort. His current pair being a good example: soft rectangular lenses with practically invisible frames.
Only it turns out that Drink doesn’t like his glasses at all. He doesn’t like how they make him look on the field. He doesn’t like how they make him look in the locker room. He doesn’t like that they feed into a perception straight out of the 1950s that people think he’s a nerd. Even though he has described himself publicly as “a 5-10 dorky white dude” and, in his first year, when the Tigers upset LSU, said aloud, “Let’s be honest, I have no business being a head coach.” Within him seems to be a more ambitious evaluation of himself and what he can achieve, that he can actually take Mizzou somewhere it has never been before in football: to an SEC championship or — also his words — to the College Football Playoff. And maybe his glasses muddle in his appearance the sort of aggression such winning seems to demand.
I LIKE THE guy. When he was introduced nearly five years ago and made his first public appearance with his wife and four daughters at the ceremony in Columbia, Marching Mizzou played the fight song to lead him through a shroud of fake smoke and he walked onto Faurot Field swiveling his head to look around. He stepped in front of the microphone and pulled a visor over his eyes and then took off his glasses, in a little preview of how he would curate his appearance on the sideline. Then he set them onto the podium for a minute before putting them back on so he could see the pages of a prepared speech. He said, “For me, this is the opportunity of a lifetime.” He mentioned Gary Pinkel, Mizzou’s most successful modern coach, who was in the audience. Drink was in such stark physical contrast to him and every other Missouri coach who came before that I — someone who never played football but has worn glasses since kindergarten — told my friends I could get behind what he was doing, before he said a word.
There was some of that outward self-deprecation mingled with the confidence to employ it. He purposefully pronounced the correct “Missour-ee” and then said “MizzurUH,” too, as a nod to the people like my dad who had grown up in the Show Me State yet mispronounced it his entire life. He had not only the semblance of a personality but also a kind of panache (the nickname of Faurot Field is The Zou, and he joked that going anywhere around Columbia with four young daughters, people would get to see the real zoo). He giggled when he slipped up in saying he wanted to “win the Sun Belt … uhh, sorry, the SEC East!” But his elocution was that of someone with an easy way about himself. He barely had a track record as a head coach, but he was 12-1 the previous year at Appalachian State, including wins at South Carolina and North Carolina.
As a Mizzou graduate and native of the Bootheel, I was fascinated by this person, this seemingly new type of coach for a program in need of a risk. And that was before he made fun of Kansas and Arkansas. Before he made fun of Dan Mullen by pulling his hoodie over his head and a light saber from behind the lectern after Mizzou beat the Gators and he said, “May the force be with you” and then took a sip of Diet Coke like a mic drop. That was before Mizzou went 11-2 last season and beat Ohio State in the Cotton Bowl and Drinkwitz became the unapologetic driver of a black-and-gold Maybach with rims.
Last August, the X account CFBTalkDaily asked college football fans to reply to a post with “One word to describe Eli Drinkwitz.” The picture they used showed Drink on the field in the middle of action, staring from under his visor. Some answers: Coach. Aura. Mid. Dork. Leader! Savior. King. Dork but we LOVE him in CoMo, it’s just part of his charm! Different. Smart. Strange.
Drink’s Tigers are 6-1 and wobble at 21 in the AP poll. Early this season the offense has struggled — it was supposed to be one of the best in the SEC, with veteran quarterback Brady Cook throwing to Luther Burden III, touted as one of the top players in college football after catching 86 passes for 1,212 yards and nine touchdowns last season. But then Boston College gave them a scare at home and Vanderbilt took them to OT, and they were defenestrated at Texas A&M, which cost Mizzou dearly in the respect department. The Vanderbilt win certainly looks better now than it did at the time, of course. The Commodores took down Alabama, who lost again last weekend to Tennessee. But the Tide remain firm in the sporting consciousness as a juggernaut, and juggernauts tend to get the benefit of the doubt. If Missouri is to beat them, Burden, who has yet to live up to those lofty expectations (partly because Mizzou has trouble getting him the ball), will have to come alive. Missouri’s defense looks good in statistical departments — ninth in the country in yards allowed and top 10 in both pass and scoring defense — but has given up a bunch of broken and big plays such as a 75-yard TD run to Texas A&M’s Le’Veon Moss that opened the third quarter and essentially buried the game at 31-0. The defense will have to have the type of game it played against Murray State and Buffalo to start the season.
Drink tells me he remembers unfondly when glasses used to be considered a weakness. “That was tough, growing up,” he says. “Those were some bad glasses. I guess I thought they were cool.” A literal magnification of his shortcomings when he was a teenager in west Arkansas, a diminutive linebacker playing football for a team that won two state championships at Alma High School in a town with a population smaller than its 6,200-seat stadium. When the Drinkwitz family crammed itself — two parents and six kids — into a doublewide trailer. When his haircut was doing him no favors, either.
“I think what Coach Drink represents, man, is that you can be who you are,” says Mizzou assistant head coach and cornerbacks coach Al Pogue, who has known Drink since they were in their 20s and in quality control at Auburn under offensive coordinator Gus Malzahn. “And if that person is lighthearted and [can] still be successful? He represents that. It’s OK to be who you are.” He is referring to instances when Drink leads off a team meeting with a dad joke. Or burbles, “That’s what she said” after an innocuous comment in the hallway because he can’t seem to help himself. When he hosts a get-together for coaches every Wednesday night over the fire pit in his backyard over Wendy’s hamburgers as part of a communion. When he tells coaches to come in later if they need to take their kids to school. “That’s something I had to learn. I thought I had to look mean. I thought I had to stand on the sideline always looking like I was angry. But I wasn’t really that person,” Pogue says. “If everyone says, ‘Hey, he is a nerd’ … well, that’s a guy who I want to be like.”
DRINK TAKES HIS glasses off before football games. Everyone calls him Drink, or Coach Drink; it’s what he seems to prefer. When the meetings and preparations end and there is no turning back before kickoff, he suctions contacts onto his eyeballs and stands before his coaches and players. As a head coach who never played college football (though he was class president at Arkansas Tech) he has been subject to scrutiny — if, for example, he doesn’t call a timeout and gets a delay penalty that backs his team up 5 yards against Kansas State at the end of the game, or gets blasted so badly at Texas A&M that it doesn’t even seem he was prepared.
It’s fairly easy to understand why one of the youngest Division I head coaches of an ascending team in the greatest football conference might project himself at his best, at his strongest, at his most commanding, by subtracting a perception of his vulnerability.
Drink has done a lot of celebrating at Missouri without his glasses. His most viral speeches about brotherhood and rallying cries and buzzwords such as “STP: something to prove” have been summoned with the team crowded around him, without the specs. He conducts his postgame news conferences without them. He knelt without them and rolled over onto his back in his droopy white T-shirt and chinos and flapped his arms and legs after Mizzou — with a smothering effort from a defense that lost five starters to the NFL and a huge pass from Cook to Burden in the fourth quarter, beat Ohio State in the Cotton Bowl — and he made angels out of the confetti on the fake green heaven of Jerry Jones’ field.
He goes back to them Sunday morning. For church or breakfast at Cafe Berlin in Columbia with his family, when a new week of football begins. When he is back on the fourth floor of the Mizzou South End Zone complex before anyone else arrives in the morning, with a life-size cardboard cutout of him taking a drink of Diet Coke in the hall, and “SOMETHING TO PROVE” written in gigantic letters down the hallway wall, taking out of his personalized Coach Drink mini-fridge his first of eight or nine 16-ounce Diet Coke bottles for the day.
“I tell people all the time, ‘Don’t let the glasses fool you,'” he says. “I think sometimes, for me, I’m perceived either more nerdy than I really am, or maybe not as masculine. And I think I’m just trying to make sure when I’m out there proving a point, I want people to really understand me, you know? It’s kinda like Superman. He had to take his glasses off to get after people.”
HE’S WEARING THEM in the evening. He sidles down the stairwell from the private room of donors at Chicken N Pickle, a Mizzou-friendly restaurant on the banks of the Missouri River in the St. Louis suburb of St. Charles, where he has been taking pictures with fans all evening and glad-handing for help with Every True Tiger, the branding and NIL agency of Mizzou athletics, and a new $250 million addition to the football stadium that will enclose the North End Zone and hopefully entomb the program’s tortured past there. Hundreds of fans have gathered to hear him speak publicly for the first time since beating Ohio State in the Cotton Bowl, where he trumpeted a war cry on the victor’s stage, “We’re not blue bloods, we’re a dirty, hardworking brotherhood … M-I-Z!”
On this night, Drink could pass as a fan in the restaurant, so it’s hard to spot him at first. His brown hair is combed to the side and his long-sleeve shirt is tucked into black chinos as he stands off in the corner at various points, constantly checking his phone. He lacks any kind of security buffer or coterie to lead him through the crowd of Bud Light drinkers and nachos eaters, of kids with plush hats with tiger tails dangling from the ears shaking pom-poms, of Truman the Tiger standing by the side of a stage giving a curtsy to the coach, of older men and women in various shades of black and gold as hopeful for 2024 as for any season in the past. The dimples embedded into Drinkwitz’s freshly shaved face make him look younger than 41, the face of this now-relevant but historically misbegotten team.
Twice in my lifetime, in 2007 and 2013, Missouri was a half away from the national championship game. This was under Pinkel, the stoic former tight end who seemed to withhold any sense of humor but made up for his lack of personality by taking Missouri all the way to No. 1. But the Tigers lost in the 2007 Big 12 championship game when Sam Bradford and Oklahoma pulled away in the second half after a Chase Daniel interception, and in the 2013 SEC title showdown Malzahn and what seemed like an Auburn team of destiny road-graded Mizzou in the fourth quarter, for which I was, sadly, present. Both those nights spun endlessly nowhere after the final whistle for a childhood fan, for a native of the state, someone who understood the precedent of finally seeing the team at the threshold but unable to cross. Walking back to a car under a black sky that might as well have let history whisper through: Missouri wasn’t and isn’t going to ever get there.
Now, though, Drink is asking everyone to believe. The Tigers just went 11-2; why not? With him on stage are three players, Burden, safety Marvin Burks and a new transfer cornerback from Clemson, Toriano Pride Jr. Drink cracks a joke about their 40 times not being good enough. He believes the Tigers should be as talented on offense as anyone in the country. They did have to replace Cody Schrader, a walk-on running back who led the SEC in rushing in 2023 and was the best story in college football, and did so by signing two of the most sought-after senior running backs, Nate Noel and Marcus Carroll, from the transfer portal. Cook, a senior, should be a top SEC quarterback again if healthy. Drink tells the fans there’s no better wide receiver room in America, with Burden; Theo Wease Jr., a transfer from Oklahoma; and Mookie Cooper and Marquis Johnson. A look at the schedule and one figures: 11-1? Possible. Or 10-2 at the worst.
Drink floats atop all the morbid backstory exuding an enthusiastic charm and the temperament of someone christened as a winner, of someone whose salary will rise to $9 million next season and, at least for a while, make him bulletproof. He greets the crowd before him outside in plastic chairs and stands on a makeshift stage outside the restaurant, a few weeks before the team will be announced just outside the preseason top 10.
“I been coming to these events for four years,” he says. “I remember coming here and telling people all the things we believed we could do. We believed we could recruit elite players and we believed we could win at the biggest stage … and we’re not satisfied with where we’re at, we feel like we just realized our potential. Now it’s about continuing to push, but in order to do that, we need you.”
An older man named Rob stands up in the crowd and asks for the microphone.
“Coach, I live in Moscow Mills, Missouri,” he says, “and I’ve been a Tiger fan for a long time. Three years in my lifetime we flirted with being No. 1. The first time I remember was 1969 — we lost a heartbreaker in the Orange Bowl to Penn State. In 2007, we had a magical season with Chase Daniel and then 2013, that first SEC East championship. My question for you is, after each one of those seasons, expectations were sky-high for the following year. And we had good seasons the next year but fell short. Tell me why this season is going to be different … how are we going to take that next step and not fall back just a little bit?”
Drink is caught off guard by how deep and kind of unsettling this is. How tortured an ask. Though he has been the coach at Missouri going on five years, it is unclear if even now he fully understands the embedded self-hatred of Tigers fans, whose expectations, despite the winning, are that fate will intervene no matter his preparations and things will always go wrong.
“Well, I mean that’s the toughest question I’ve been asked in a while,” he says. “Um … there’s no way to know or predict what the future is going to be. I think our team is still extremely hungry. We want to win an SEC championship. We had six players drafted. Those guys were really good players. But if you look at the competitive depth on our team, we should be a more talented team this year. It’s really going to come down to the mindset of the coaches and players and I, and are they really hungry to reestablish their own identity? All I know is, the only thing that matters to us is being better today than we were yesterday. If you can do that continuously …” He might not always look the part, but all these gathered people are looking at him as the head football coach. And he sounds like a head football coach, relying on old-school phrases in the hope of winning people over. He trails off. The crowd applauds him.
“YOU’RE NOT A jock, Coach,” I say to him. Which is meant as a compliment, an affirmation of one of the ways he has described himself. Drink is on one of the morning walks he takes every weekday before practice begins, when he collects his thoughts and makes phone calls to donors and recruits, when he slips away for 40 minutes to an hour by himself. The compliment is a pledge of allegiance, me describing myself and pointing at my own glasses, the fact I, too, have always had to wear them; have always looked for ways to put them aside; have gone to lengths, even as a child, to hide that my vision was bad by either pretending to see the board or sitting in the front of the class. That I can’t wear contacts because of sensitivity, that I still take them off half the time my wife and I post pictures on Instagram because removing my glasses is a part of my life. There are four days before the 2024 season begins at home against Murray State, and he’s tracking his steps on an app and wearing a white safari hat that shades his face and the top of his head and the whistle around his neck. We follow his usual path from the auxiliary staircase of the South End Zone football complex past the indoor football training facility and down the walkway with huge painted tiger paws up the hill to the basketball arena. The light stands atop Faurot Field disappear behind us into pretty woodlands and a trail veined with cracked gravel and littered with leaves, chippering birds getting louder and the sound of the cars on Providence Road softening into a kind of faraway purr.
Drink does not like what I said, though. He shakes his head and says, “Well, all right,” and then, “Ah, OK,” but it is clear he does not want to be identified this way, that we are not on the same page. No matter what he has said about himself in public he will not be a member of my made-up club. “I’m a better athlete than you expect, but that’s OK,” he says, hardened by the comment and quieted by it, like it’s a lazy perpetuation of the image he has been up against since he was a senior in high school getting good grades and playing football and having to prove to people by force that the guy pictured in his yearbook wasn’t who he actually is, wasn’t all he is.
“I am probably more like Mike McDaniel than Dan Campbell,” he says. “I quit caring what people say. [Shutting people up] used to be a big motivation for me. And carrying this chip on my shoulder. But now I’ve come to realize that’s never going to quiet anybody. The only thing you have to prove is to the people who believed in you.”
I want to tell him I’m one of those people who believed, who believe. But he has me on the other side of the ledger at the moment. And from there, the “big motivation” seems like it’s not all the way in the past tense.
He walks past the quiet softball field and soccer field and over the covered bridge that leads back to the football complex where he and players enter on Saturdays before the games. Drink is the fourth of six children. He shared a room in the trailer with two brothers (his three sisters shared another) and was picked on by them. He rotated sleeping on different levels of a bunk bed at his brothers’ command.
His older brother Jeremy, the president of a hospital system in Southwest Missouri, calls him at least once a week and attends pretty much every home game. “He’s always been blind as a bat,” Jeremy says. “In all candor, we didn’t have much money, so those were the glasses given to him. Dad was a teacher and mom stayed home and took care of the kids. That’s why they were as big as his face when he took pictures. One of the funniest stories is that Mom once accidentally left him at the eye doctor. She had to take alllll these kids to school. She went and dropped him off before school, took everybody else, forgot to come back and get him.”
I ask him about Drink now, about what he sees in him. Jeremy keeps it simple. “I ask for his opinion about how to lead,” he says. “How do you motivate? How do you inspire people around you?”
ASK MALZAHN ABOUT Eli Drinkwitz and it’s like he’s talking about himself. Drink is his guy, shaped out of clay under Malzahn’s intense work schedule. He doesn’t get too deep about anything different about Drink, of course; why would he? “Well, he is unique … it’s hard to explain, it works to his advantage,” Malzahn says. But he wants to talk about Drink as a young linebacker in high school: “He’d knock your head off now. Knock your stinkin’ head off. He has those glasses and looks a certain way, don’t let the kinda whatever you call it, don’t let that kid you.” He wants to talk about him as someone willing to “grind” for $13,000 a year in the labyrinths of quality control, someone who never recoiled from the slog of watching film, as it was his job after every Auburn game to break down the tape through the eyes of an opponent, to self-scout the team and present a report to Malzahn as though Drink were the defensive coordinator. In their first year together, Auburn won the national title. Yes, Malzahn wants to talk about Drink’s leadership and communication skills, to tell me that Drink possesses an imperceptible gift of being able to be smart about football but also relate to anyone, that everyone at Auburn from the secretary to the equipment people knew him and liked him. A nerd? Hell no. Malzahn called Drink and Casey Woods, now the offensive coordinator at SMU, the Ryan Brothers, in homage to Rex and Rob. “That dude is a worker,” Malzahn says. “He’s earned everything to get where he’s at. At Arkansas State he’d get there at 6 in the morning and wouldn’t leave ’til midnight. He wouldn’t flinch. He gets crap done.”
This is kind of the way Cook wants to talk about Drink, too. In the irrevocable terms of what they’ve been through together, their relationship linked in that Drink will always be the coach who stuck by the player last season and even this one, when Cook was booed at home games and went on to be one of the best quarterbacks in the SEC. Cook being a Missouri kid, a St. Louisan who dreamed about playing for Mizzou when he was a child going to games, who last week brought Drink’s voice to quiver in the postgame news conference when he was injured early against Auburn and then returned from the hospital in the third quarter to lead Mizzou to 6-1. “What can I tell you about Drink?” Cook asks. “Like, he’s goofy and he has humor. But he’s cutthroat at the same time. He represents Missouri with a chip on his shoulder, a little swag. I used to think of him more of like as a nerd, kind of like that. That idea, ‘Ah, OK, this guy is really smart and has glasses but he’s probably not, like, swaggy.’ As time has gone on, it’s changed.”
Drink’s old coach in high school, Frank Vines, who led the Alma Airedales for more than 30 years and was a three-time state champion, now watches every Missouri game from the rocking chair in the living room of his house back in Alma. “I’m getting old and went through a lot of kids,” he says. “Eli was not a great athlete. But he was very smart, very dedicated, and those are the two things I think that have kind of stood out in his life. On our team he was like having a coach out on the field.”
Watching Drink now prowl the sidelines is watching someone with his own style but who exhibits an amalgamation of what he has learned at various stops: Arkansas State, Auburn, North Carolina State, App State. The intense game-planning in his office and rigorous schedule of watching film like Malzahn, even late at night with his feet propped up on the couch, at home, with his daughters. Vines was a yeller, a tough guy, “the bad guy,” he says to me, “I didn’t baby anybody around,” and that is one thing Drink must have decided he didn’t want to be; he doesn’t scream at players often, and at one point, as a student, he told Vines to his face that he didn’t like the way he said “Goddamn,” using the Lord’s name in vain. Drink, for example, sits quietly in the head chair of the staff meeting going around the room and letting position coaches talk about their observations, much more in the style of a listener than a dictator.
Zac Thomas, Drink’s quarterback for one glorious season at Appalachian State, laments what they could have done with an even better team had Drink not left for Missouri in 2019. “He does a really good job of relating to players,” Thomas says. “He’s one of the first coaches I had in that level where you could come to him with problems, he was a sounding board. The way he goes about himself, cracking jokes — yes, football is an intense game, and you go through a lot of hardships, but you also have to be able to have the laughter, bring joy to the locker room. He brings people on cookouts, paintball, skiing trips, fun activities, he does ways to reward you to keep you going. He’s not the coolest coach on the face of the planet, but he knows what he’s good at.”
VINCE LOMBARDI WORE glasses. The game of football actually seems built on those horned rims and the sport he was able to see through them that no one else could. A company in New York now sells replica frames called Vince, describing this era as an eyewear renaissance and the throwback of his championship look. Woody Hayes wore them, too, in a different way, a brutalist accentuation of the black hat yanked over his ears and his shoulders bursting through his button-up jacket, his eyes magnified through those lenses and the insatiable temper nearly popping them right out of his skull. Jim Harbaugh wears glasses like a Siberian prison wears the snow. Supposedly, he says, to honor three people: Hayes, Michael Douglas in “Falling Down,” and Malcolm X.
Drink is in his office, wearing glasses. His tennis shoes are propped up on a velvet couch. The view through his office window is of the north end zone of the stadium and a clear and inviolable sky. When the season began, the Tigers were picked by plenty of people to make the first-ever 12-team playoff; so many pundits picked them that it honestly seemed to diehard Missouri followers like a bad harbinger. Mizzou has never once been able to follow up a great season with an even better one. He shows me the customized Cuban cigar humidor in black and gold that he received as a gift for winning the Cotton Bowl. Some texts from the Chief, singer Eric Church himself, a big fan of Drink. The Cotton Bowl ring and football from the game on a stand. A dozen other trinkets from last season’s run, an actual Cotton Bowl throw rug, and this giant framed picture right outside his door that shows him wearing sunglasses and the microphone headset thing extending in front of his mouth as he stares off into the distance with a hard-won frown, as if he were Nick Saban.
The entire office wall is made of glass. The view is of the sky and the stadium bleachers and the goalposts and the grass berm and Mizzou’s “Rock M.” Beyond that Providence Road and the University Hospital, the brick dorms with the windows open, a view all the way toward the columns at Jesse Hall and the most underrated campus in the SEC. By the window, to preview this same view of the future, Drink has a poster board of what the north end zone will look like in two years. Multiple levels of luxury suites rising several stories above a shrunken Rock M, an expanded concourse, thousands of people milling about the unfamiliar edifice, new seats where most of the grass used to be. I tell Drink, who didn’t grow up in Missouri but whose parents took him to Branson a few times, that when I look out there, I don’t exactly see what he does: sunshine, sure, but there are darker implications. I look out there and see Charles Johnson pushing with the ball one more time on “fifth down” from the 1, and Colorado “winning” the national title though he still didn’t cross the goal line. I see Matt Davison in the cool night air from my vantage point in the bleachers as a 17-year-old shocked that Mizzou was about to beat No. 1 Nebraska, Davison’s gloved hands cradling a deflected pass from Scott Frost off the foot of a Husker receiver named Shevin Wiggins with no time left in regulation, as the fans begin to storm the field at Faurot but then have to pull back in stupor as the most dominant team of the 1990s miraculously ties the game and then goes on to beat the Tigers in overtime. This is known as the Flea Kicker. Drink doesn’t see the field goal attempt, like I do, hook right in double overtime to ruin an undefeated season against South Carolina in 2013. He doesn’t understand the bodies that are buried and how deep they go, and thankfully he doesn’t care. Last year, Harrison Mevis drilled a 61-yard field goal into that end zone and Mizzou beat Kansas State.
“Mizzou was a challenger brand,” he tells me. Of course, he knows it doesn’t have the cachet of Alabama, or even somewhere like Florida. Which is why he took the job thinking the state had untapped potential given the talent that St. Louis and Kansas City regularly produce but that usually goes elsewhere. NIL and Drinkwitz are changing this. He has signed three top-25 classes in his Missouri tenure and kept several of the state’s best players (and some best nationally) home, including five-star recruits such as Burden and Williams Nwaneri. The cachet thing still proves true, though, when the Tigers drop in the polls three times after victories against Boston College, Vanderbilt and Auburn. It will take forever to be seen as Alabama’s worthy opponent, even if they beat the Tide on Saturday.
“We wanted to create story and space because if you’re not a blue blood it’s hard to get written about or recognized,” Drink says. “But now we’re to the point where we’re there, and it needs to be a lot less about me and a lot more about Brady Cook and Luther and Theo Wease. Those guys are way more important to this than I am. But it took a little of me putting myself out there to get noticed. But now that they notice and know who we are, it doesn’t need to be about me. I was a lot more active on social media. When I was at SEC media days, I was a lot wittier and a lot further and willing to take shots at other people, maybe more antagonizing; this year’s approach to media days was much more calculated.” No one at Mizzou has ever spent so much time on his image or being mischievous. The Star Wars thing he did with Mullen. Taking a jab at Tennessee’s Josh Heupel by calling a timeout last year at the end of the game against Tennessee, the game well in hand. Heupel is known for running up the score and kicking onside kicks against lesser teams, and when the Tennessee kicker missed against Missouri, Drink deadpanned after, “We stand on business, Josh.” About the only opposing coach Drink has never been willing to tweak is Saban.
“I tried to avoid doing anything that would create a narrative or create a viral moment, because I wanted the focus to be on the team and the players. As great as Saban is, when he retired, they replaced him in 48 hours. And the story was no longer about him and Alabama, it was about who’s next. No matter how good you are, you’re always replaceable.”
I’D RATHER HAVE a nerd as a coach. I’d rather have this guy who cannonballs off the diving board into the backyard swimming pool at his daughters’ command. I’d rather have someone who is openly self-referential than some other kind of coach, or the idea of some other kind of coach. I’d rather have this guy who drives his daughters in the back of a golf cart through the neighborhood to the Phillips 66 to get them ice cream or cinnamon buns or Andy’s Frozen Custard. Who takes them fly-fishing in Montana and wears the little safari-style hat. This guy who once sang “Livin’ on a Prayer” in public at a Mexican resort. As someone posted on X in November, “He may be a nerd, but he’s our nerd.” At this point, after all, no one has led Mizzou all the way. Not Don Faurot, the immortal coach in statue outside the stadium and for whom it is still named. Not Dan Devine, who had an 11-win season six decades ago, walking the old sideline in a suit and tie and top hat before he went to coach the Packers. Not Pinkel. So why not this person? This history major; this occasional strummer of guitars (he has two in his office) and smoker of Cuban cigars; this lover of Wendy’s hamburgers, this doer of dishes on weeknights when he comes home from football, this guy who somehow managed to get his daughters into Taylor Swift concerts this year and last, who gets them coffee now when he takes them to school. This guy who makes opposing fans boil over simply because he is a singularity in the game. I’d really rather him change nothing about himself at all — nothing about the way he looks, about the way he speaks, about the way he seems to have gotten under Heupel’s skin. Look at him. Look at his aura. Mizzou has never had anyone like him.
THE PLAYERS GATHER around him. The light is heavy outside. The turf of the practice field steams. He has been watching from a distance and standing behind a machine that sends footballs into the air to mimic a punt. He has a microphone that he talks through and huge speakers on the side of the field project his voice so players in every position group can hear him. Earlier in the day, the first time they saw him he ran into the team meeting room with his arms waving in the air, clapping to get the team going, shouting expletives when talking about getting the football into the air against Murray State. But then later out on the turf, the players put their hands on each other’s shoulders as he speaks to them, lost in the group except for the sound of his voice. And to be fair to him, from a distance, in the middle of the field with the players and his staff, in a white hoodie in the noonday sun, nothing really stands out about him. He looks like any other coach. Except for two red indentions on the sides of his nose where his glasses used to be.
