Mizzou’s new football coach calls time leading 7th-graders ‘best job in the country’
One of the most unlikely coaching rises in college football started early each Arkansas morning, before school, a recent college graduate coaching eighth-graders at Alma Middle School.
Then teaching a class on Arkansas history.
Then another class.
Then seventh-grade practice.
Then a drive to the high school during lunch to coach ninth-grade football.
Then a drive back to the middle school for another history class.
Then a drive back to the high school to coach more football. Three nights a week he coached games, and two more days he spent scouting different levels of the game.
Eliah Drinkwitz, now Missouri’s head football coach and preparing for his first season in the SEC, remembers all of this with a laugh and a smile you can almost hear through the phone.
“I had the best job in the country,” he said. “It had to be up there with anybody else’s, I’ll tell you that.”
Early dreams
The 2005 Alma Middle School Airedales ran Power I.
Lots of Iso, a waggle throwback every once in a while and a reverse that Drinkwitz came up with. He even invented a form of no-huddle or, at least, as close to no huddle as seventh-graders with no headsets could get — they’d send the receiver in with two plays, instead of one, each originating from the same formation.
“Where he is and what he’s accomplished is far beyond anything we ever talked about,” said Jason Reeves, who coached with Drinkwitz at Alma that year. “But here’s the thing: Work ethic separates people.”
Drinkwitz dreamed of being a head high school coach, and that’s as far as his dream could see. That seemed like enough. That seemed like everything. That first job paid more than he expected, enough that he replaced the 1992 Honda Accord he’d driven since he turned 16 with a used Toyota 4Runner. He needed it to haul equipment.
He was 22 and exploding with energy that transferred to history class.
“Lot of teachers, they just go and do their lesson plan and they’re really boring,” said Jason Hensley, who took history from and played linebacker for Drinkwitz. “But he was always happy, it seemed like, and as a seventh-grader at the time I was like, ‘I hate school,’ you know? But he made it fun to go.”
The core of who Drinkwitz is now began to form that fall. Not the surface stuff. He would learn offense from Gus Malzahn, first at Springdale High and later at Auburn. Drinkwitz later added formations and different concepts he learned from Bryan Harsin at Boise State and has continued to make the scheme his own through stops at North Carolina State and Appalachian State.
So, no, the Airedales’ offense in 2005 looked nothing like Mizzou’s will look in 2020. Of course not.
But the important stuff underneath? That’s when Drinkwitz began to find out who he is as a coach, and what’s important to him. And it’s all still inside of him.
1. Development: Make sure a seventh-grade football player becomes an eighth-grade football player. These days, he wants to make sure freshmen become sophomores.
2. Discipline: horseplay in the pre-game locker room meant pushups right there on the tile floor. These days, Drinkwitz still demands the right behavior, on the field and off.
3. Togetherness: Alma seventh-grade defenders who didn’t get to the ball fast enough had to do ‘up-downs,’ which their coach did in unison with them. These days, his college players run after practice for committing turnovers ... and their coach runs with them.
Same ol’ Eli
This past fall, as Drinkwitz led App State to a 13-1 record and No. 20 final regular-season ranking, Hensley made a habit of watching his old coach’s Monday news conferences.
He saw the same guy, still talking about humility, still taking blame for what went wrong and pushing credit for what went right to his players. He heard the same words, listened to the same emphases, saw the same face, the same glasses, the same hair.
“I think it might be a little thinner now,” he said. “But it was just, like, ‘This is unbelievable. That’s my seventh-grade football coach and now he’s a head Division I football coach.’”
One more connection between now and back then. Humility. Maybe this is simply the DNA of a coach who started at the lowest level of organized school football, but Drinkwitz has said he prioritizes low ego and high output from his coaches.
Austin McCourt, one of four quarterbacks for Drinkwitz’s seventh-grade teams, remembers the bus ride to the first scrimmage that year. His body filled with anxiety. The coach called him to the front of the bus, and McCourt figured they’d go over the game plan.
They talked nothing about football. It was all about humility, Drinkwitz putting himself on McCourt’s level by saying the coach and quarterback each needed to be humble as examples for everyone else.
“I just remember that word (humility), because he used it a lot,” McCourt said.
Drinkwitz might be the only Division I coach in the country to start out with seventh-graders. Malzahn is often looked at as a trailblazer of sorts, but he started with high schoolers.
Drinkwitz and Malzahn are forever connected, of course, because Malzahn gave Drinkwitz his break into college coaching as an entry-level assistant at Auburn. The way they met is an interesting story, too.
It happened in 1998, during Drinkwitz’s freshman year at Alma High. His varsity team won the state championship, and his coach was selected for a state all-star game. Drinkwitz went along as a manager, and Malzahn was the team’s offensive coordinator.
That means the relationship that would eventually lead Drinkwitz beyond his wildest coaching dreams and an eventual multimillion-dollar salary was first forged when he was 15 years old.
There’s a lesson in there, too. An important one. Drinkwitz is asked all the time for advice on making it from high school coaching to college, and he knows some are asking about which camps to work, or which coaches to call on, but he thinks that’s all wrong.
He never judged his career by the destination, but instead focused on the journey. That can sound trite or oversimplified, but Drinkwitz swears it’s how he’s lived his life. He didn’t get from there to here by manipulating a path. He did it by working, obsessing about every day — to the point that he thought coaching seventh-graders was the best job in the country.
“I remind myself now, all the time: This is the dream, it’s all the dream,” he said. “Waking up on four hours’ sleep, the whole thing is the dream. Not just the paycheck, not just the position, but the work you have to put in, the stress you put in, the hard times. That’s all the dream. Changing the diaper at 5 in the morning before the championship game, that’s the dream, too. That’s all part of it.”