From out of chaos, Missouri at least wins the day with new coach Eliah Drinkwitz
Depending on your interpretation of events and who was telling you what, only four days ago University of Missouri athletic director Jim Sterk either was facing a coup or just being given a cue.
One way or another, though, the initial list of candidates to replace Barry Odom as football coach that Sterk informally floated to MU administrators and a few members of the University of Missouri System Board of Curators had been vigorously (and appropriately) rejected.
That left a distinct impression that Sterk’s ouster of Odom had been half-baked, more reckless than bold, more about making a change than knowing where he was going with it.
For me, it conjured an image of a basketball player burying his head and going hard to the hoop with no real notion of what he planned to do with the ball … and about to be stranded in mid-air.
As it happens, though, an alert coach or teammate (or two) called a last-ditch timeout and reset for a better play.
“Sometimes there’s going to be a difference of opinions; sometimes you’ve got to course-correct. No big deal,” said curator Darryl Chatman, speaking in general terms about the dynamics. “That’s what people do who love an institution.”
And that’s how a day after the search was engulfed in chaos, MU on Saturday came to fix its gaze on Appalachian State coach Eliah Drinkwitz — who was introduced as Missouri’s coach Tuesday.
“It’s a competitive market out there,” Sterk said, “but we got our guy.”
Well, not unless there was a diabolically engineered scheme to make Drinkwitz more appealing than he may been before the leak of the less-galvanizing likes of Blake Anderson of Arkansas State, Skip Holtz of SMU, Jeff Monken of Army and Jay Norvell of Nevada
But never mind that he wasn’t initially at the top of MU’s list, or apparently even on its radar most of the first week of MU’s search in the wake of Odom being fired Nov. 30.
After all, that didn’t matter to him when it came to courting his wife, Lindsey.
“I wasn’t her first choice …,” Drinkwitz said after the news conference, smiling, “So I just kept working.”
Just like an infinite amount of toil now awaits the 36-year-old Drinkwitz, who repeatedly referred to his need for coffee.
He’ll want it by the gallon as he enters into the equivalent of “speed-dating” with recruits and earning the trust of players and fans and hiring a staff and trying to implement his 10-day, 15-day, 20-day, 30-day and 90-day plans to be ready for whatever next season might hold realistically.
Or otherwise.
“Well, I don’t live in realistic expectations,” he said. “I shoot for the moon.”
Which he may or may not be able to deliver but perhaps is the essence of the reason he’s here.
In firing Odom after he’d gone 25-25 in four seasons and guided his teams to bowl eligibility the last three years despite constraints at the beginning and end, MU declared that it wasn’t going to abide by what it considered mediocrity — even from a True Son.
There’s a thin line, of course, between fine teams and exciting ones and decent teams and bad ones. And the downside to a risk like this is that a whiff can mean a spiral into the abyss.
But as little-known as Drinkwitz might have been before the last few days, say this for the course-correction:
MU found a young, smart, charismatic, offensive-minded, energetic man with an SEC pedigree (at Auburn) and key influences along the way, such as Bryan Harsin at Boise State and Gene Chizik at Auburn and Guz Malzahn at Arkansas State and Auburn.
Asked about making such a leap in levels of coaching, Drinkwitz said Malzahn has “been a great mentor to me, and he knows what he’s doing.” Then he casually added, “And so do I.”
Drinkwitz is here just days after his Appalachian State team finished 12-1 in his lone season as a head coach at the collegiate level — a season so fresh in his mind that he defaulted to saying MU’s goal is “to win the Sun Belt — sorry, to win the SEC East.”
That was one of his few glitches on a day that also included a strange exchange when he was asked about his relationship with New England coach Bill Belichick. After a pause, he said, “He’s absolutely influenced my career.” When asked how, he hesitated again and said, “He just has.”
Otherwise, though, he was illuminating and compelling.
And his preparation and understanding of his audience showed in such moments as pledging to batten down the state’s recruits, acknowledging that some say Missouri, some say Missourah. He also had a nod to former Tiger coach Gary Pinkel, whom he’d met in Columbia in 2009 when he was still coaching at the high school level in Arkansas.
“The path has been shown,” he said, noting MU’s two SEC divisional championships under Pinkel. “We’ve just got to figure out how to replicate that.”
Pinkel was in attendance and seemed to be taken with Drinkwitz, and they spoke shortly after the interview sessions. If that seems like a minor point, it’s not.
There was a puzzling disconnect between Pinkel and Odom, who for one reason or another seemed to distance himself from Pinkel and the program he had been a part of. And Drinkwitz doubtless knows he’ll need every force surrounding the program, Pinkel included, to be with him for this to succeed.
That said, Drinkwitz also had the class and presence of mind to share his respect for Odom, who had been quoted on Appalachian State’s website giving a testimonial to Drinkwitz.
“I think Barry’s a great man and have nothing negative to say about the program or what the state of the program is,” he said. “I just know that this is a business and sometimes things change, and there’s opportunities. And so, I don’t know what was done in the past. I don’t know if it was right or wrong.
“I just know what we’re going to do is … going to be different.”
It will, from a no-huddle offense coordinated by the head coach to an emphasis on special teams that were vulnerable last year to a defense he vows will stop the run and “confuse, harass and hit the quarterback.”
So the honeymoon begins with a news conference won and imaginations captured. That’s all we know now, and, really, it’s all we’re going to know for a while as he gets his program implemented.
Even Drinkwitz knows talk is cheap. For that matter, so are ideas.
“Everybody’s got ideas; ideas are not the problem,” he said. “Execution is the problem. Ideas are everywhere. Execution is not. We’ve got to execute the ideas and the vision that we have, all pushing (in) the same direction.”
Speaking of which, he’ll certainly have to win over a team that loved Odom before he can win a game. That was something he began trying to do Monday night by shaking the hands of every player who was able to attend a meeting and telling them, “You didn’t choose me, I chose you … and I’m going to work 365 days a year to (earn) your trust and respect.”
With Mizzou having fired six of its last seven football coaches, it’s hard not to think about that even as MU president Mun Choi said, “Coach, this is your new home. Get used to it. You’re going to be here a long time.”
But a long time starts with a day, and then another day. And after a whirlwind courtship, Drinkwitz won this one, for MU and Sterk and himself, by enough of a margin that it was easy to look toward the future instead of the pecularities of the recent past.
They got their guy, after all, and now the story begins anew.
This story was originally published December 10, 2019 at 5:58 PM.