COLUMBIA, Mo. — A month before his second season at Missouri ended with a loss to Army in the Armed Forces Bowl, coach Eli Drinkwitz took stock in how far the Tigers had come on his watch. Heading into the regular-season finale, at Arkansas, the Tigers had secured bowl eligibility but fell short of reaching the preseason’s most ambitious projections.
“When the schedule came out, there was a lot of optimism about what we can accomplish and what the expectations for our team were,” Drinkwitz said on Nov. 22, his team on a two-game winning streak and 6-5 overall. “You don’t really know until you play. After Week 1, I kind of had a different sense of maybe what our team was capable of. The disappointment at Boston College was real and like, OK, this is where we’ve got to really work to improve. We just weren’t improving at the rate that we needed to in the middle of the season.
“We faced a lot of different adversity with injuries and people being out. But that’s football. That’s life. And so I think the way our guys are responding has been a positive. You really can’t outperform the culture and the togetherness of the team. I think the best teams play the best together. We’re starting to figure that out as a culture and a program.”
Signs of tangible progress stalled from there, with the loss at Arkansas and the roller coaster ride in Fort Worth, Texas, where Army’s last-second field goal overcame the depleted Tigers’ last-minute touchdown drive. It was a punctuation mark on a season that started slow, picked up pace, then faded late.
One step forward, one step back. Every spark of progress met a wall of adversity. The Tigers’ defense buckled early. The passing game collapsed late. MU rarely played complementary football on offense and defense and exposed enough weaknesses on one side to negate progress by the other. Road losses in two early swing games — against Kentucky and Boston College — left Mizzou scrambling for quality wins. A defensive disaster against Tennessee convinced Drinkwitz to fire first-year D-line coach Jethro Franklin, and while the Tigers handled overmatched North Texas and Vanderbilt in the middle of the schedule, they were no match for Texas A&M and Georgia.
Despite a record-breaking year by All-SEC running back Tyler Badie and steady production in the kicking game, a leg injury to starting quarterback Connor Bazelak turned the offense one-dimensional in the season’s final month.
Drinkwitz arrived with a reputation as an offensive specialist, but by SEC standards, the results were middling, at best. Mizzou finished the year in the SEC’s bottom half in every major offensive category: ninth in yards per game (413.7), ninth in points per game (29.1), eighth in rushing yards (180.2), ninth in passing yards (233.5) and 11th in passer rating (131.1).
Badie sat out the bowl game at Drinkwitz’z urging but still set the team’s single-season rushing record with an SEC-best 1,604 yards. But the team’s shortage of dynamic playmakers and inconsistency at quarterback showed up in losses to deeper and more talented teams.
Defensively, Drinkwitz went outside the box in hiring longtime NFL coach Steve Wilks to run the unit. The transition was bumpier than anyone imagined, though the season’s final month was promising. The Tigers created more turnovers and sacks than 2020, but for the season Mizzou finished 13th or 14th among SEC teams in total defense, scoring defense, rushing defense and pass defense efficiency. The growing pains proved costly.
Drinkwitz’s recruiting wins this fall outshined any success the Tigers had on the field. Ten of the 11 FBS teams Mizzou played qualified for bowl games, but only two of the five the Tigers defeated finished with winning records: Central Michigan (9-4) and South Carolina (7-6). Through two seasons, the Tigers have gone 8-11 against Power 5 teams and beaten just one that finished with a winning record, this year’s South Carolina team.
Drinkwitz faces plenty of unanswered questions heading into his third season, starting with the quarterback competition in the wake of Bazelak’s transfer. Drinkwitz will continue to shop the transfer portal for reinforcements, but a third-year regime will be expected to build traction on the field, too.
“I think there’s a lot of positives going into next season,” kicker Harrison Mevis said in Fort Worth. “I think we’re playing more as a team. We’re recruiting really good. We all believe in the coaches. People are starting to buy in. I think that’s the main thing. It’s only up from here.”
