‘Drinkwitz unsure after 18 days’: Inside Mizzou coach’s most important choice
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Coach Drinkwitz enters 2025 with MU’s deepest roster, despite 39 new players.
- Quarterback decision between Pribula and Horn remains unresolved after camp.
- Drinkwitz emphasizes one quarterback leader as critical to Mizzou’s success.
Entering his sixth season at Mizzou, coach Eli Drinkwitz is enjoying what he calls his deepest roster — which is saying something for a program that went 21-5 overall and 11-5 in Southeastern Conference play the last two seasons.
His team just emerged through what he considers his harshest training camp, including a day last week where the goal was “let’s see if we can break ‘em.”
“We couldn’t …” he said at his camp wrap-up news conference Tuesday. “They chewed it up and spit it out pretty easily. I was very impressed with that.”
He doesn’t anticipate “one guy on our roster” being unavailable because of injury when MU opens the season Aug. 28 against visiting FCS foe Central Arkansas.
And he already considers every starting position but one solidified.
Good stuff.
Trouble is, that one open job remains the biggest story and question mark for MU.
Because it’s the most pivotal role in football — and a void all the more pronounced in the wake of the departure of an ideal leader like Brady Cook (39 career starts).
No wonder the contest for the starting quarterback role between Penn State transfer Beau Pribula and Sam Horn, coming off Tommy John surgery, is foremost on the mind of Drinkwitz.
Playful as he might be about it.
So here were his first words Tuesday after some general comments:
“So with that,” he said, “I’ll take the first question on the quarterback.”
That ever-hovering matter is why, when he said a decision would be made in the next 24 hours, he joked with reporters about crafting a headline “to get yourself more likes” on social media.
Asked what the headline should be, he deadpanned, “Drinkwitz unsure after 18 days.”
He even joked, I thought, that the decision both keeps him up at night and wakes him in the morning.
But when I asked in a chat after the news conference to clarify whether he was kidding, he didn’t hesitate and even doubled-down.
Heck, he said, he even thinks about it when he wakes up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
However much more there is to go in this process or that he knows and isn’t yet inclined to share, it’s undoubtedly MU’s most weighty issue as it seeks a third straight 10-plus-victory season for the first time in program history.
Amid the flux of losing 15 starters and bringing in 39 new players, the Tigers face plenty of other questions.
So many, in fact, that they were picked 12th in the SEC by media members who cover the conference a year after MU began the season ranked 11th in the nation and went 10-3.
But no variable is going to loom larger than this decision.
Or at least how it ultimately plays out as the season progresses.
While Drinkwitz in the news conference suggested he was on the verge of choosing one, he sure seemed to leave room for each to play even as he dismissed a question about that being a hypothetical.
When I asked him afterward if he was saying he would largely play one guy right away, he balked.
“I don’t know all that. I think we’ll decide in the next 24 hours what the next step in the quarterback competition is,” he said. “Maybe there’s a clear cut. Maybe there’s more work to do. So we’ll find out.”
So good luck parsing this all out in the days to come.
Whether it’s one or the other or a hybrid to start the season, though, don’t doubt what Drinkwitz wants.
To end the gridlock.
Nice as it might be to keep getting two guys ready, creating some versatility and perhaps some strategic advantage by keeping it unclear …
“We want one guy to be the guy,” he said.
Not that it can’t work otherwise through the course of a season. Between individual development and injuries, things can sure shift.
See Avery Johnson and Will Howard at K-State and Jalon Daniels and Jason Bean at Kansas.
But those dynamics were exceptional circumstances.
And it’s not what you’d design for a position that requires constant growth, adaptation and rhythm that only game experiences can provide.
And a position that in a perfect world embodies the most singular leader on a football team.
That’s optimally a one-man job ... and one that influences everything else.
“I think now more than ever … quarterback’s what makes the game come alive,” Drinkwitz said. “So you’ve got to have the right fit there.”
When I asked him if he viewed the quarterback as an extension of himself on the field, Drinkwitz reckoned they’re more an extension of offensive coordinator Kirby Moore.
Then again, he said, smiling, “but ultimately the head coach’s career is tied to the success of the quarterback.”
No doubt this season is, too … no matter how much else MU might have in place.
This story was originally published August 19, 2025 at 6:29 PM.