On this final Monday of 2022, I am presented with two choices for you fine readers. It's a good news/bad news situation. We're going to be about half and half. So which do I deliver first? I subscribe to the George Costanza theory of life. Always leave em wanting more
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So what's that mean for you? It means the bad news comes first.
1) Missouri lost 27-17 to Wake Forest on Friday night in the Gasparilla Bowl. On one hand, I am not qualified to speak specifically on this game because I saw the first ten minutes and the last three. On the other hand, I am perfectly qualified to speak specifically on this game because I have seen it about six other times this season even if I didn't see this one in particular. The Missouri team you guys saw on Friday was representative of the Missouri team we watched in 2022. The defense was pretty good to very good until it was just so obvious that the offense couldn't hold up its end of the bargain and the defense broke.
Some might argue with the defense's level of excellence in that game, but without three starters, Missouri held Wake Forest 32 yards below its season passing average, 63 yards below its season average for total yardage and nine eight points below its season average. That's good enough for me to call it excellent.
The offense? The Tigers were 15 yards below their passing average, 53 below their rushing average, a touchdown below their scoring average against a Wake defense that finished the season 91st in total yards allowed and 84th in points allowed. So...not good enough. Which is exactly what
Eli Drinkwitz said after the game.
2) I'm not particuarly concerned about the Gasparilla Bowl in and of itself. Missing four starters, Missouri was a one-point underdog and was in a three-point game with five minutes to play. The Demon Deacons made a play to win the game and the Tigers didn't. It's another one in the "almost good enough" category and there have been plenty of those this year. We really only learned one thing in this game: No matter the bowl game, fans still care about the outcome. If your team plays, you want your team to win. I'm not going to say Missouri didn't care about this game. But four starters (plus the punter) opted not to play and
Trajan Jeffcoat missed the game with a mystery injury. There has been the usual angst after a loss, just as there was after the Armed Forces Bowl loss last season. I'm not saying that angst is misguided, just that the fans put far more importance on this specific game than the teams do (this is not a Missouri thing). It hurts a little more and lingers a little longer because it's the last game and rather than having a chance to erase it in seven days, you now have to wait eight months.
3) The real issue is this: I don't know any more about Missouri's program overall than I knew 12 months ago. I said all offseason and all year, what I wanted was proof that this thing was going in the right direction. Heck, I'd have even taken proof that it wasn't. Instead, what we got was the worst case scenario. We don't have proof of either one. We are three full years into this thing. Eli Drinkwitz took over a program that was 30-32 overall and 17-30 against Power Five competition in the five years before he got here. In the three years he's been the coach, Mizzou is 17-19 overall and 11-18 against Power Five competition. The winning percentage is slightly worse overall and slightly better against Power Five teams under Drinkwitz. But no person who is being rational can tell you they have a strong sense for whether this is a better team and a better program than the five that preceded Drinkwitz's tenure. There are arguments to be made both ways and we'll make them each in the next two points. But we don't know. If you are being honest, what you see is the same listless wandering. A few good signs, some pretty bad ones and a program that is a little worse than .500 overall and wins about 1/3 of its games against peer competition over an eight-year period. We're three years in and I can't tell you if I think Drinkwitz will succeed or fail with any more confidence than I could have on the day he was hired. That's a frustrating place to be.
4) I told you I was going to leave you with the good news, so let's start with the argument that Missouri isn't progressing enough first. In three years, we've seen nothing better than average quarterback play. At best. Most would probably argue it's been below average. Drinkwitz was hired for his offensive mind and the offense has gotten progressively worse during his tenure. If we're being truthful about it, the only things that have been good about his offense in three years (by good I mean better than average) are two running backs that he was left by the last coaching staff. The offensive line is a mess and has gone backwards. The tight end position might as well not exist on this roster. The receivers look like they have a lot of potential but if you don't have a quarterback that can get them the ball or a line that can give him time to do so or a dominant running game that defenses have to scheme to stop which makes it easier to throw the ball, it doesn't really matter how good the receivers are. And I'm not sure we actually know they're good yet.
The optimists are going to argue "We probably should have been 8-4" and could have been 11-2 with a couple of bounces here and there" (even the optimists won't argue Missouri should have beaten Tennessee or Kansas State). I would counter that Arkansas and Vanderbilt were one play away from beating Missouri so they were also just a couple of bounces here and there from being 4-8 and not even in a bowl game. So "we should have been" just isn't an argument that matters to me.
The main argument in favor of Drinkwitz is hope. That comes in the form of recruiting rankings. It may be accurate and like I said, I'll get to the positive side of things in a minute. But recruiting rankings cease to matter once the players are on campus. The first two classes were 19th and 12th overall, but so far haven't performed as such or been able to do enough to bring the overall performance of the team up from the classes that averaged 44.6 over the five years before he got here (that's assigning the 2020 class to pre-Drinkwitz, which is something you can make an argument for either way).
If you say that each roster is made up primarily of four recruiting classes, here is the average rank of the roster in each season under Drinkwitz
2020: 44
2021: 36.5
2022: 31
The 2023 four-year average as of today (Mizzou is 32nd) will be 29.2. So the talent is improving on paper. There are two issues with this:
It may be improving on paper, but it isn't improving on the field. Missouri's record is the same this year as it was last year and worse than it was two years ago (against a tougher schedule that included no non-conference games). So while the recruiting is theoretically improving, the product on the field is actually regressing, at least in terms of wins and losses.
The second issue is this: If your team isn't winning more games, your recruiting isn't actually better. Recruiting rankings are a decent guideline. But they are not the gospel. Every day on this site someone brings up the fact that Drinkwitz is a better recruiter than
Gary Pinkel. But he isn't. Because Pinkel won 61.8% of his games overall and 52.9% of them in conference games. I don't care if RIvals said he had good players or not. He won at a rate that was much higher than the 20 years before him at Mizzou and has been much higher than the seven years since. You can rank his classes wherever you want, but if you use recruiting rankings to deem the competence of the recruiter, then you should just hire Rivals/247/on3 personnel to coach your team. Just like Pinkel proved that you can be better than the recruiting rankings say you are, it's possible to be worse than your recruiting rankings are. The fear is that Drinkwitz is the latter. Again, it's not proven yet, but you have to acknowledge it is certainly possible.
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