Why Missouri coach Eli Drinkwitz says ‘college football is sick’ right now
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Coaches warn the college football system is sick as transfer portal, NIL create chaos.
- Multiple programs decline bowl invites, signaling weakened bowl relevance.
- Drinkwitz calls for rules, enforcement or bargaining to restore order.
For most of the last century and plenty of this one, bowl games were literally and figuratively the coin of the realm in college football.
Even as their number proliferated well beyond the few and the proud long centered around New Year’s Day and players began to opt out, “bowl eligibility” was widely considered not just a reward but a (perhaps-exaggerated) distinction to a season.
And now … this.
Some 10 (and perhaps more?) schools this year declined bowl invitations once largely considered too prestigious to pass up and stressed as essential to program-building through exposure for recruiting and a month of extra practice, etc.
While there are varied reasons for those decisions made by schools including Kansas and Kansas State, all reflect an increasingly distressing state of flux and chaos in college sports and football in particular.
Sure, the advent of the 12-team College Football Playoff undoubtedly has diluted the significance of the rest of the bowl system as we’ve known it and figures to further jeopardize its future.
Whether that part of this is to really be mourned is its own topic.
But the broader reasons for it are symptomatic of why Mizzou coach Eli Drinkwitz said coaches around the country are “trying to sound warning bells” about where this is all going in the wilderness of the transfer portal and Name, Image and Likeness era.
“The system that we’re in is really sick right now. College football is sick,” the ever-thought-provoking coach said at a news conference on Tuesday as he prepares the No. 25 Tigers (8-4) to play 21st-ranked Virginia on Dec. 27 in the Gator Bowl. “(There are) signs that this thing’s really cracking moving forward. We need to get some things under control.”
We’ll come back to why Drinkwitz remains a bowl proponent as he strives to appreciate the present with an eye to the future — including the search for a new offensive coordinator after Kirby Moore’s departure to become the head coach at Washington State.
As for the warning bells, Drinkwitz was responding directly to a question I’d asked him about how coaches view the reluctance of some schools to sign the participation agreement created by the College Sports Commission to enforce third-party NIL deals that go beyond the revenue-sharing settlement reached last summer.
To him, the effect echoes the disarray MU athletic director Laird Veatch and Kansas State AD Gene Taylor pointed to in recent interviews:
Rules without consequences, or even proper guidelines attached, aren’t rules so much as pylons to move around and circumvent.
That means when it comes to honoring what the participation agreement seeks to establish, yes, but even more fundamentally in what increasingly feels like a vacuum.
For instance, Drinkwitz said, players on his roster are being tampered with at “the highest levels” since there seems to be no punishment for calling players who haven’t entered the portal.
“We’ve worked around the system and then tried to create that as a system,” he said, “instead of creating a functioning way moving forward and making sure that it works for everybody.”
Just what that would look like is a matter for a panel discussion or multi-story project. You know it’s a vast topic when you hear coaches like Drinkwitz speaking of the prospect of collective bargaining or antitrust legislation.
The sort of stuff that makes you wonder if some day before long college sports will morph into business spinoffs of universities per se.
For Drinkwitz’s part, he still believes in the original call to the work: the student-athlete experience and the win-win prospects within that.
Yes, he was irked by what apparently were several players planning to enter the transfer portal despite another year remaining on their NIL contract. While those are subject to buyouts, he punctuated the point by saying “right now, there are perceived rules, and then we’ll figure out what are the real rules moving forward.”
More generally, though, he said he loves that players are getting paid even as he frets over graduation rates and what the system is condoning.
“What is their life going to look like after five years of college athletics? Is it going to be better because they participate in college athletics, or could they be in a tougher situation?” he said. “... A lot of us got into college athletics because we wanted to help the young men grow and develop, and I think we’re still doing that mission. But it’s getting really hard.”
Alluding to the words of former Alabama coach Nick Saban that players should be working to create value for themselves, Drinkwitz added that he didn’t so much mean value toward the NFL but through a degree.
“We’ve lost that aspect of it,” he said.
Reiterating that their earning capacity in college now is “awesome,” he added, “How many (players) are in a better position because they played football, but they’ve transferred four times? And that’s just the system that we’ve created. Not all freedom is good freedom.”
Within that, the focus now is first on retaining players. So much so that he said “we’d love to talk to you” if you are a third-party NIL donor willing to help out with keeping running back Jamal Roberts on the team in tandem with All-American Ahmad Hardy.
Then there’s signing a freshman class and, yes, looking toward recruiting players in the portal during the Jan. 2-Jan. 15 window.
All while soon starting the process of replacing Moore with what evidently will be an experienced play-caller since Drinkwitz reckons the SEC is more suited to coaches with “battle scars” than any who might need “training wheels.”
Put it all together, and no wonder Drinkwitz likes to remind people that what the contemporary coach is “being asked to do has never been done before in the history of college football, ever.”
Just the same, Drinkwitz still embraces that history in the form of the bowl.
While some other schools have disdained it, particularly because of coaching searches and roster turnover and perhaps over financial costs that make bowls a wash or worse on the payday, Drinkwitz and MU don’t want to surrender the present to the future.
Modern as he is, he went almost romantically old-school on the point about a game in which a win also would be MU’s 30th in three seasons — tying the program best set under Gary Pinkel.
“I think there’s always an assumption … when you’re a younger player, that there’s going to be more games,” he said. “And as you get older, you realize that that’s not the case.
“And playing football out in the backyard is not like playing in Faurot Field. It’s not like playing it with your brothers. It’s not like putting a helmet on. You’ve got a 44-year-old who decided to give it one more try this past weekend, because that’s how much he missed it in Philip Rivers (with the Indianapolis Colts).
“And I think if you asked any of our college players who maybe thought they were going to get a chance to play in the pros (and didn’t), if you could give them one more game, they’d always take it. Always.”
Even if it’s been “devalued” for others, Drinkwitz was right when he said bowls haven’t been diminished in terms of television and gambling’s ever-surging need for content.
So it’s an “awesome opportunity,” he said.
Even with everything else swirling around it.
“Now, there’s some things we’ve got to clean up from a calendar standpoint,” he said. “But that would be like me yelling at the clouds.”
Clouds that hover nonetheless.