COLUMBIA, Mo. — Eli Drinkwitz could be a writer.
At face value, this is a silly thought to have. Drinkwitz is the head coach of a Southeastern Conference football team, after all, which doesn’t seem like the kind of job that is conducive to having a lot of time for writing. Are there any $9 million a year writing jobs out there, anyway?
But at times, there’s a narrative, almost literary quality to Missouri’s coach, whose fifth season with the program begins at 7 p.m. Thursday with the 2024 opener against Murray State.
There’s something thematic about Drinkwitz’s team. His most memorable moments since taking the gig in 2020 haven’t been play calls — they’ve been words.
Like the ones he said live on national television after the Tigers’ signature Cotton Bowl win last season: “I think tonight was a testament to a wilderness brotherhood.â€
Sit with that line for a moment. There’s a rhythm to those words. Subtle consonance, a gentle meter. And, more broadly, it was what those of us in the writing business call parallel structure: when a narrative element appears at both the beginning and the ending of the story.
In the immediate run-up to the Cotton Bowl, Mizzou held a team chapel session. It was voluntary, as those things are, but nonetheless well attended. Almost every player was there.
The chaplain who presided over chapel that night brought up those words: wilderness brotherhood.
The six syllables struck Drinkwitz and stuck with him. He thought about them the night before the game. And during pregame warm-ups, too.
The stadium felt different during the hour leading up to kickoff against Ohio State from any point in the week before, when Mizzou had practiced in the nearly vacant stadium for familiarity’s sake. The jumbotron of all jumbotrons overhead seemed more imposing.
A miniaturized indoor blimp flew lazy circles around the perimeter of the stands. There were football celebrities from Urban Meyer to Pat McAfee to Chase Daniel on the sidelines. The chatter and cheers of fans who’d traveled to Arlington, Texas, from Columbia and Columbus sounded different, too.
“It just hit me,†Drinkwitz told the Post-Dispatch.
What hit him were words, the ones he delivered to his team in the locker room before the Cotton Bowl.
With his white long-sleeve shirt rolled up to his forearms and pacing purposefully along a locker room wall, Drinkwitz called players into one segment of the locker room. He took off his white visor and held it by its brim.
“It’s a hell of a stage out there,†he said. “Want you to look at the person next to you and tell them, ‘You earned it.’â€
Those words rebounded back at him from his players.
“You earned it through a lot of hard work,†Drinkwitz continued. “You earned it through up-downs. You earned it in the wilderness. You earned it when your brother was late and you had to fight for the brotherhood. You earned it on the bleachers. You earned the opportunity to be here today, to show the world who we were. They call them ‘blue bloods’ ...â€
Here, he paused for a breath, his voice on the verge of breaking.
“Because they’ve been given everything their entire lives. They ain’t us. We’re wilderness forged. Forged in the toughness. Their time’s over. It’s our time. It’s your time. It’s showtime. You show the world who we really are.â€
Missouri football coach Eli Drinkwitz yells during the Cotton Bowl, which Mizzou won, beating Ohio State 14-3, on Friday, Dec. 29, 2023, at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas.
‘Turn everything upside down’
One year and 110 days earlier, showing the world who the Tigers really were hadn’t been a pleasant experience.
Missouri walked away from a 40-12 drubbing at Kansas State on Sept. 10, 2022, forlorn and at least a little bit surprised.
“There was almost an arrogance to our team,†Drinkwitz said. “W±ð thought we were better than we were. And then when it came to being in a dogfight, we didn’t really end up fighting back the way we needed to. And I think that kind of shook us.â€
Mizzou’s lone touchdown came on the last play of the game, once the result had long since been settled and K-State fans were booing the visitors’ insistence on scoring some consolation points. Shiny new freshman wideout Luther Burden III barely had any chances to catch the ball. Quarterback Brady Cook was hurt, benched and reinstated over the course of that game.
“After that K-State game,†Cook said, “I was not in a good spot — physically, mentally, with the team.â€
Drinkwitz, at that time still the offensive play-caller, was insistent of two things after depressive rain delays and defeat:
“I’m responsible for this team. Everything that happens to this football team is my fault.â€
And:
“Brady’s our quarterback.â€
Kansas State quarterback Adrian Martinez gets past Missouri defensive back Jaylon Carlies for a touchdown during the first half Saturday, Sept. 10, 2022, in Manhattan, Kansas.
After an austere bowl game loss to Wake Forest capped off the 2022 season, Drinkwitz wrote in his journal that some of those things needed to change.
“W±ð got to turn everything upside down,†he wrote.
That meant hiring offensive coordinator Kirby Moore, a concrete way of relinquishing responsibility for offensive play calls, and declaring Cook’s job up for grabs. To coaches on the Missouri staff, it was Drinkwitz acknowledging the demands and limitations of his job.
“Usually everybody becomes a head coach because of success they’ve had in another position, right?†special teams coordinator Erik Link said. “Whether it’s as a coordinator, as a position coach, whatever the case may be. You’re bringing that expertise to the table as a head football coach, but there’s so many different hats you have to wear.â€
To Mizzou players, it was their coach holding himself to one of the expectations he had for them: embracing their role on the team, whatever that looked like.
“Coach Drink, he got a lot more consistent with the standard,†wide receiver Mookie Cooper said.
And it was something that changed Drinkwitz’s persona.
“I’ve just seen him, I guess, get more comfortable,†Burden said. “I feel like when I first got here, he was kind of tense. Because he’s not the offensive coordinator, he’s more comfortable in just being the head coach. He ain’t got all the pressure on ‘You got to make the right call, then you got to worry about the defense.’ He could just be a head coach.â€
‘Turned the table on our relationship’
After the famous Sept. 16, 2023, 61-yard walk-off field goal victory that exorcised Missouri’s K-State demons and set in motion a special campaign, Drinkwitz switched up his rhetoric.
As a sort of precedent for how he would approach his pregame speech at the Cotton Bowl, he’d been chewing on an idea for some time before feeling compelled to put it into words.
He’d noticed what was, to him, a sickening side effect of the quarterback competition he’d felt was so necessary to find success. Cook, after retaining his starting job, had been booed by MU fans.
“That pissed me off,†Drinkwitz said just minutes after the field goal and field storming. “He went out and played his butt off for that team. They need to get behind him. That’s bullcrap. That should never happen.â€
Missouri head coach Eliah Drinkwitz talks with quarterback Brady Cook during the team's spring game on Saturday, March 19, 2022, in Columbia, Mo.
Choosing a scathing tone and such illustrative words was an almost instinctual decision for Drinkwitz.
“Look, you won the game so you might as well make sure that people know,†he thought. “I was never going to have more credibility at that point with the team and with the fan base than after that win, so I figured I’d use it. I was hopeful that the fans and the students would respond.â€
He executed the transition from compelled to compelling. That upset of a ranked K-State squad was pivotal for last year’s Missouri team, perhaps for no player more than Cook, the subject of the boos and forceful backing. Drinkwitz’s words may have mattered to him more than the win did.
“The respect I gained for him right then and there, immediately I was like, ‘wow, this coach has my back,’†Cook said. “I think that turned the table on our relationship. From there, we were in it together. We were gonna go do something special last year. I knew he had my back, right?â€
‘Unbelievable to witness’
This is a story about culture building and the role that Drinkwitz has played in crafting the atmosphere within the Missouri football program.
Credit for that kind of thing tends to flow back and forth between coaches and players like sand in an hourglass, with each group eager to attest that the other is foundational in constructing the right kind of locker room. Who’s to say they’re wrong? Both have roles to play.
But Drinkwitz’s seems outsized — or at a minimum, notable.
“It starts with him,†wide receivers coach Jacob Peeler said.
“Coach Drink, from Day 1, has preached culture,†cornerbacks coach Al Pogue said.
It’s worth noting that Drinkwitz’s efforts in this realm do date back to the start of his tenure. While handing over the playsheet was part of MU’s transformation from middling to contending, leaning more into culture-building wasn’t necessarily a factor.
“That would probably be saying that I didn’t do that before, and that was clearly something that we did,†Drinkwitz said, before a joke: “Obviously, I wasn’t spending enough time play designing.â€
Few players can provide proof of concept for Drinkwitz’s cultural command like Cook. One of a handful of players to have stuck around since the head coach’s first season at Mizzou, he’s gone through his own rollercoaster of faith with Drinkwitz that was exemplified so clearly by those two games against Kansas State.
“W±ð came in together in 2020 to a completely mixed-up locker room with people that committed to a different coach, people that played for a different coach and all that,†Cook said. “Somehow, him being able to bring in the building coaches or players that complement us, fit the culture, shaping this into his team and shaping this into a winning culture, it’s been unbelievable to witness all of it.â€
‘The truth of a cliché’
Something to prove.
It’s both intentional and somewhat miraculous that it’s taken until this point to get to those three words because they’re everywhere around Mizzou football: on the massive TV screen just inside the team facility doors, splashed onto the end of team videos, inserted into too many press conference questions, embedded in the psyche of players and coaches alike.
There simultaneously seems to be nothing to it and everything to it. After all, how many times can one phrase be said before it becomes a cliché? If there is such a threshold, surely Missouri has crossed it by now.
Maybe that’s the wrong way to think about it.
“When you sense the truth of a cliché, you can say you’ve learned something,†the great French writer Emmanuel Carrère once said. And you can’t say that Mizzou having something to prove isn’t true.
“When you look back and look at the players on our team last year — and the coaching staff — we all had a common theme of having to prove who we were and having some serious disappointments in our careers or life,†Drinkwitz said.
And that’s why it works as a motto, right? Because it’s true?
“Yeah. That’s the bottom line,†Drinkwitz said. “W±ð all feel two different things about it. We all feel like there’s a lot left to prove because we’ve been discounted. But there’s also a lot to prove to the people who believe in us, who’ve given us an opportunity. There’s a lot of motivation in both sides of that.â€
It’s also why a chaplain painting the spiritual portrait of a wilderness brotherhood — and Drinkwitz drawing upon that in his pregame address — was so profoundly effective and affective at the Cotton Bowl.
Missouri football coach Eli Drinkwitz celebrates with quarterback Brady Cook as he holds the offensive MVP trophy after Mizzou beat Ohio State University in the Cotton Bowl at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas on Friday, Dec. 29, 2023.
Missouri football coach Eli Drinkwitz celebrates with quarterback Brady Cook as he holds the offensive MVP trophy after Mizzou beat Ohio State University in the Cotton Bowl at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas on Friday, Dec. 29, 2023.
“I feel like it resonated with what we were going through and how we have a chip on our shoulder at all times,†defensive tackle Kristian Williams said.
“It resonated with our team just because our team’s been in the ‘wilderness,’†Cook said. “W±ð’ve been through adversity. We’ve been at the bottom together.â€
“That pregame speech was the pregame speech of everything, combined, that whole season,†defensive end Johnny Walker Jr. said. “I felt like it was everything that we went through that year and all the adversity. That was a moment we were all waiting for.â€
And a moment they remember dearly. Every Mizzou player asked about Drinkwitz’s pre-Cotton Bowl speech smiled when hearing the words “wilderness brotherhood†and thinking of their coach’s voice pressing against the limit of breaking within his emotional delivery.
That’s the narrative firepower of a wilderness brotherhood with something to prove, of Drinkwitz’s own messaging. He’s synthesized a locker room full of successes and failures, victories and disappointments and — risk of cliché be damned — found a truthful theme.
Which makes him a writer, right?
“I mean, I write stuff down,†Drinkwitz said. “But no, I’m not a writer.â€
