We’ve graded out the whole football coaching staff so now it’s time to focus on the head man himself. How does Eli Drinkwitz grade out for his 2024 performance?
It’s report card season for the Mizzou coaching staff and, at long last, it’s time to evaluate the job of the head man, Eli Drinkwitz. I’ve already evaluated Drinkwitz’s entire staff, from the coordinators on down to the individual assistants. You can read those here:
- Corey Batoon Report Card
- Defensive Staff Report Card
- Kirby Moore Report Card
- Offensive Staff Report Card
I’ve already dived into the specific stats in detail for both the offensive and defensive sides of the ball and how they correlate to each assistant coach’s overall report card grade. I’m not going to get into on-field statistics in Eli Drinkwitz’s evaluation for a couple reasons: a) I’ve already done that and you probably don’t want to read it again (just read the other report cards) and b) the job of an SEC head coach has changed dramatically in the last decade. While head coaches are ultimately responsible for how their team plays each week, they are not as involved (or at least Drinkwitz isn’t as involved) in the day-to-day nitty gritty scheming and game-planning that they perhaps were in past years.
The role of a Power 4 head coach is now much more of a CEO type overseer of all aspects of the program rather than a boots-on-the-ground-scheme-up-a-sick-play-call-on-third-and-four type role that many played in the past. Some head coaches still do that to some extent, but that isn’t Drinkwitz’s current role at Mizzou so that’s not what he’ll be graded on here. Ultimately, I broke Drinkwitz’s responsibilities into three different categories: recruiting, culture building, and on-field success. Looking at the job holistically, those are the three areas where an SEC head coach will either succeed and thrive or fail and live the buyout life. Keep in mind that these grades aren’t based on Drinkwitz’s entire tenure at Mizzou, but rather his performance in the last year.
Recruiting
If there is one head coaching responsibility that Eli Drinkwitz has excelled at more than any other Mizzou head coach in program history, it is undoubtedly recruiting. Mizzou has had excellent culture builders as well as coaches who have won a lot of games and finished seasons ranked high nationally. However, no Mizzou coach has found a way to consistently pull in high-end talent not just from Missouri, but from across the country, in the way that Eli Drinkwitz has in his five years in Columbia.
Let’s take a look at his high school recruiting the last two years as per the 247sports composite rankings:
- 2024: 20th nationally with an average recruit composite rating of 89.35
- 2025: 20th nationally with an average recruit composite rating of 90.96
Comparing those numbers to Barry Odom’s final class the year before he was fired and Gary Pinkel’s final class before he retired:
- 2019: 38th nationally with an average recruit composite rating of 86.55
- 2015: 26th nationally with an average recruit composite rating of 86.44
All of Drinkwitz’s classes has been far and away better than any class Odom recruited. Pinkel’s last class was perhaps his best-rated at Mizzou, as his team was coming off two straight SEC East championships. Drinkwitz is regularly surpassing that level of recruiting even when his team finishes .500 in the regular season.
In modern college football, recruiting the transfer portal is just about as important as recruiting the high school ranks, and Drinkwitz is excelling in that area as well:
- 2024: 14th nationally with an average transfer recruit composite rating of 88.93
- 2025: 6th nationally with an average transfer recruit composite rating of 88.12
Eli Drinkwitz has positioned the Mizzou football program as a desirable place for top-end talent to play. While he broke even nationally from a high school recruiting perspective from last year to this year, he has more than exceeded expectations with his incoming transfer portal class. Certainly NIL money has much to do with his success, but raising that money and gaining interest from fans and businesses to support his program is a massive recruiting win for Drinkwitz in its own right and he deserves credit for that.
Grade: A
Photo by Scott Winters/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
Culture building
Building a positive culture within a program is vital for the long-term health and success of any Power 4 program. However, evaluating any team culture from the outside looking in is, at best, a squishy process. As any good sociologist will tell you, looking at how humans live and work with one another, and how leaders foster positive interactions, must be done qualitatively. It’s a far cry from the type of black-and-white quantitative analysis in which those in sports and sports journalists usually find themselves working.
As the coach of Mizzou football, Drinkwitz has had a learning curve of his own when it comes to culture building. As Brady Cook discussed toward the end of his senior season, and as Eli Drinkwitz himself admitted in the past year, the culture of the Tiger locker room was in dire straights early in Drinkwitz’s tenure. The first two years were met with .500 play on the field and internal in-fighting and a host of bad apples left over from a roster that struggled with it’s own poor culture under the previous regime.
While it’s unclear from the outside looking in who or what ultimately sparked the turnaround in the culture, two main mantras emerged from the Tiger locker room prior to and during the 2023 campaign: Something To Prove and playing for the Brotherhood. Something to Prove was more of an outward facing motivational campaign Drinkwitz instituted to push his players to succeed on the field. It was successful enough in 2023 that Drinkwitz carried the same mantra into 2024 with mixed results. Whether or not he recycles it yet again for 2025 is still up in the air, but regardless, the mantra effectively united his locker room under one banner and one cause.
Likewise, building the Brotherhood, as Drinkwitz and his players refer to it, is a more internally facing culture-building project. The Brotherhood refers to the players within the locker room and their efforts to individually honor and uphold the standards the program holds dear. Judging by how often and how positively every Tiger player has discussed the Brotherhood since 2023, this effort has had excellent success in what it set out to do: establish and uphold standards of the program.
While the culture Drinkwitz has built hasn’t always been on solid ground, the last two years have shown that he has been able to find firm standing in the locker room and among his coaching staff and currently has everyone pulling in the same direction. Note: Winning also helps.
Grade: A
Photo by Jeffrey Vest/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
On-field success
Entering the 2023 season, Eli Drinkwitz not only had something to prove, he needed to prove to his fan base that his team could win on the field. At the time, he sat at 17-19 with three consecutive .500 regular seasons under his belt. We all know how 2023 turned out so I won’t rehash that here, but few, if any, Power 4 head coaches changed their standing nationally in one season as much as Drinkwitz did.
Entering 2024, all eyes were on the Tigers as Mizzou entered the year with a borderline top 10 ranking and sky-high expectations paired with a (relatively) navigable schedule that had the Tigers set up to win 10 regular season games and perhaps earn a trip to Mizzou’s first playoffs. While the Tigers did win all their home games, including the most anticipated game of the year versus Oklahoma, they dropped their three toughest away games in a trend that has plagued Drinkwitz’s entire tenure in Columbia.
Finishing the season strong with a win over Arkansas as well as a bowl win helped salvage the Tigers season, though the “what ifs” that followed after the last-second loss to South Carolina will follow this program for a while (or at least until they break through and make the playoffs.) That said, the Tigers program has only won 10 games 10 times in it’s history. Winning 10 games in the SEC should never be scoffed at or looked down upon by Mizzou fans. We’ve seen decades of misery so take the good results when they come, and any year that the Tigers win 10 games is a good year.
Grade: B+
Final Grade
Despite a fairly rough first three years on the field in Columbia, it’s safe to say that Drinkwitz has had the best first five years of any Mizzou head coach in the modern era. Beyond that, with his continued success on the recruiting trail and building culture internally, he has positioned his program for long-term success in an outrageously difficult conference at a university with sparing, at best, historical achievement.
While his final grade for 2024 is an evaluation of the job he did in 2024 alone, it is impossible (and foolish) not to apply appropriate context to his overall grade. That said, Eli Drinkwitz passes his 2024 test with flying colors. Here’s to see if he can parlay it into even more success in 2025 and beyond.