On Saturday, I gave you ten thoughts on the Kansas State game. Mondays will generally be reserved for more big picture discussions/thoughts. So here we go.
1) We will start with the one thing coming out of the Kansas State game that has to be recognized. It was awful. No question. Can't happen. That said, it doesn't have to end the season. Every week we lose track of the fact that what a team is one Saturday doesn't necessarily mean the team is that the following Saturday. Texas nearly beat Alabama last week. If they play that way every other week, they'll be 11-1 and in contention for the college football playoff. Missouri looked awful on Saturday. If they play that way every other week, they'll be 3-9. I don't think either one is going to happen. Missouri can be fine and can reach the goals most people set before the season...if Saturday is its worst effort of the season. The problem comes if Saturday is representative of the team Missouri actually is. We'll start to find out whether that's the case in 12 days. I know people hate the "one game doesn't define our season," but it is actually true.
2) Saturday is up there with the worst games in recent memory. It was kind of similar to last year's Tennessee game. But the one it really reminded me of was the 35-3 loss to Purdue in 2017. I went back and found what I wrote after that one.
Tell me I couldn't have changed a few names and written the exact same column this weekend. It's worth noting that I think this Kansas State team is better than that Purdue team, but there are striking similarities. That can be taken as really scary because with the benefit of hindsight we know that Barry Odom ended up being a .500 coach that got fired. It can also be taken as proof of point No. 1 here because that Missouri team ended up making a bowl game (albeit mostly because they played a tissue paper soft schedule in the second half of the season) and then won eight games the following year. Again, I know patience isn't the Internet's thing, but we will only really get the answer three months from now.
3) I don't know when we hit the point that every loss had to mean we talk about firing the head coach, but we've been there for a few years. I said on Saturday night that I wouldn't fire Eli Drinkwitz even if he goes 2-10. That made some people upset. Let me explain.
Drinkwitz has brought in the two most highly rated recruiting classes in school history. If you were to fire him after this year, you're basically saying you wasted those two classes because all of them would be free to transfer and plenty of them would. You have to allow those classes to see the field and see what you have. Firing Drinkwitz in year one of Luther Burden, before Sam Horn and Tavorus Jones and a lot of the rest of those guys have really seen the field would be stupid.
Second, you're not succeeding at a place like Missouri if you just get rid of dudes every three or four years. Gary Pinkel said it over and over. After the 2004 season, a lot of people wanted him gone and were convinced he could never get it done here. He consistently praised Mike Alden for having the patience and the vision to stick with him through some tough times. We've talked a lot about Mark Stoops and Kentucky as a blueprint (and I know people here hate to admit it, but Missouri is a lot closer to Kentucky as a program than it is Georgia, Florida or even Tennessee).
I'm not telling you Missouri should stick with Drinkwitz because I know he's going to be good. I have no idea. If we're honest, I'm probably more skeptical than a lot of you are. But you have to stick with him long enough to find out for sure. Because the most likely path to Mizzou being good is that Drinkwitz is good. If you move on from him after this year (and I'll be honest, it would take some really terrible football for me to even be ready to make the move after next year), you're starting all over. You're at least three years from being good. And you're starting over with what amounts to another dart throw because all coaching hires are dart throws. Any talk of moving on from Drinkwitz already is emotional ranting, not logical thought. Missouri absolutely can't do it. He may be good and he may not be. But you have to wait long enough to let him prove it either way.
4) The most common discussion I've seen is around the play calling. And I'm not going to sit here and tell you I think it was Andy Reid-like. But players make play calls work. And when you have a line that isn't blocking well, a quarterback that isn't throwing well and receivers that are dropping passes, what exactly can you call that is going to work? Again, I understand people who are upset with the play calling. But I think there's as big a problem--maybe bigger--with execution of the plays being called as with the calls themselves. Burden could have had two 75-yard touchdown catches. He was open. Missouri just didn't execute it. That's not play calling. The play call was right. The execution wasn't. The thing is, there's no possible way to convince someone who wants to blame playcalling that they're wrong. Because if you make the argument I'm making here, they just come back with "Well, then the coach better find some plays his players can execute" or "Well, it's the coach's job to get better players that can execute plays." And it is and that's why the coaches are the ones who get fired if they lose games. But no coach has ever gotten fired because he doesn't know how to call plays. They get fired because they have players who can't execute the plays that are called.
5) So what's the issue? Well, the question about Drinkwitz remains the same as it has been for the last two years. I've said this a million times: We don't know if Drinkwitz is capable of building a program. He's never done it. He took over a ready-made program at Appalachian State that was built by guys before him. He did a really nice job keeping it on track and even having it pick up speed in his one year, but he did it with another guy's players. He's never had to build something from the ground up. That doesn't mean he can't do it. It just means he hasn't done it before.
I've thought a lot about this over the last six years. What Gary Pinkel was really good at is all the stuff we never see. In terms of recruiting rankings, Pinkel was okay. I think he was a fine game day coach, but not an elite game day coach. And those are the two things that most of us judge a coach on (along with the actual record, obviously) because they're the tangible things we see every day. But they're a small fraction of the actual job of the head coach. Just as important, and probably more important, can he put together a competent cohesive staff? Does that staff like working for him? Can he build a locker room, getting 100 guys to mostly get along and pull in the same direction? Can he manage all those egos to the point where players are more concerned about we than me? Can he build a culture? Does he have a plan every day and can he stick to it even when things are getting tough and people outside his organization don't think he knows what he's doing? The answer to every one of those questions for Gary Pinkel was yes. The answer to at least one--and probably more--of those questions for basically every other Missouri coach in the last 40 years has been no. I don't know what the answers are for Drinkwitz. But the answers to those questions for Drinkwitz are much more important than "Did he call the wrong play on 2nd and 8 in the third quarter?"
None of that stuff is fun to talk about because we're not in the locker room or in meetings or around the players and coaches every day so we can't answer them. But that's the stuff that is going to determine if Drinkwitz succeeds or fails here.
1) We will start with the one thing coming out of the Kansas State game that has to be recognized. It was awful. No question. Can't happen. That said, it doesn't have to end the season. Every week we lose track of the fact that what a team is one Saturday doesn't necessarily mean the team is that the following Saturday. Texas nearly beat Alabama last week. If they play that way every other week, they'll be 11-1 and in contention for the college football playoff. Missouri looked awful on Saturday. If they play that way every other week, they'll be 3-9. I don't think either one is going to happen. Missouri can be fine and can reach the goals most people set before the season...if Saturday is its worst effort of the season. The problem comes if Saturday is representative of the team Missouri actually is. We'll start to find out whether that's the case in 12 days. I know people hate the "one game doesn't define our season," but it is actually true.
2) Saturday is up there with the worst games in recent memory. It was kind of similar to last year's Tennessee game. But the one it really reminded me of was the 35-3 loss to Purdue in 2017. I went back and found what I wrote after that one.
Tell me I couldn't have changed a few names and written the exact same column this weekend. It's worth noting that I think this Kansas State team is better than that Purdue team, but there are striking similarities. That can be taken as really scary because with the benefit of hindsight we know that Barry Odom ended up being a .500 coach that got fired. It can also be taken as proof of point No. 1 here because that Missouri team ended up making a bowl game (albeit mostly because they played a tissue paper soft schedule in the second half of the season) and then won eight games the following year. Again, I know patience isn't the Internet's thing, but we will only really get the answer three months from now.
3) I don't know when we hit the point that every loss had to mean we talk about firing the head coach, but we've been there for a few years. I said on Saturday night that I wouldn't fire Eli Drinkwitz even if he goes 2-10. That made some people upset. Let me explain.
Drinkwitz has brought in the two most highly rated recruiting classes in school history. If you were to fire him after this year, you're basically saying you wasted those two classes because all of them would be free to transfer and plenty of them would. You have to allow those classes to see the field and see what you have. Firing Drinkwitz in year one of Luther Burden, before Sam Horn and Tavorus Jones and a lot of the rest of those guys have really seen the field would be stupid.
Second, you're not succeeding at a place like Missouri if you just get rid of dudes every three or four years. Gary Pinkel said it over and over. After the 2004 season, a lot of people wanted him gone and were convinced he could never get it done here. He consistently praised Mike Alden for having the patience and the vision to stick with him through some tough times. We've talked a lot about Mark Stoops and Kentucky as a blueprint (and I know people here hate to admit it, but Missouri is a lot closer to Kentucky as a program than it is Georgia, Florida or even Tennessee).
I'm not telling you Missouri should stick with Drinkwitz because I know he's going to be good. I have no idea. If we're honest, I'm probably more skeptical than a lot of you are. But you have to stick with him long enough to find out for sure. Because the most likely path to Mizzou being good is that Drinkwitz is good. If you move on from him after this year (and I'll be honest, it would take some really terrible football for me to even be ready to make the move after next year), you're starting all over. You're at least three years from being good. And you're starting over with what amounts to another dart throw because all coaching hires are dart throws. Any talk of moving on from Drinkwitz already is emotional ranting, not logical thought. Missouri absolutely can't do it. He may be good and he may not be. But you have to wait long enough to let him prove it either way.
4) The most common discussion I've seen is around the play calling. And I'm not going to sit here and tell you I think it was Andy Reid-like. But players make play calls work. And when you have a line that isn't blocking well, a quarterback that isn't throwing well and receivers that are dropping passes, what exactly can you call that is going to work? Again, I understand people who are upset with the play calling. But I think there's as big a problem--maybe bigger--with execution of the plays being called as with the calls themselves. Burden could have had two 75-yard touchdown catches. He was open. Missouri just didn't execute it. That's not play calling. The play call was right. The execution wasn't. The thing is, there's no possible way to convince someone who wants to blame playcalling that they're wrong. Because if you make the argument I'm making here, they just come back with "Well, then the coach better find some plays his players can execute" or "Well, it's the coach's job to get better players that can execute plays." And it is and that's why the coaches are the ones who get fired if they lose games. But no coach has ever gotten fired because he doesn't know how to call plays. They get fired because they have players who can't execute the plays that are called.
5) So what's the issue? Well, the question about Drinkwitz remains the same as it has been for the last two years. I've said this a million times: We don't know if Drinkwitz is capable of building a program. He's never done it. He took over a ready-made program at Appalachian State that was built by guys before him. He did a really nice job keeping it on track and even having it pick up speed in his one year, but he did it with another guy's players. He's never had to build something from the ground up. That doesn't mean he can't do it. It just means he hasn't done it before.
I've thought a lot about this over the last six years. What Gary Pinkel was really good at is all the stuff we never see. In terms of recruiting rankings, Pinkel was okay. I think he was a fine game day coach, but not an elite game day coach. And those are the two things that most of us judge a coach on (along with the actual record, obviously) because they're the tangible things we see every day. But they're a small fraction of the actual job of the head coach. Just as important, and probably more important, can he put together a competent cohesive staff? Does that staff like working for him? Can he build a locker room, getting 100 guys to mostly get along and pull in the same direction? Can he manage all those egos to the point where players are more concerned about we than me? Can he build a culture? Does he have a plan every day and can he stick to it even when things are getting tough and people outside his organization don't think he knows what he's doing? The answer to every one of those questions for Gary Pinkel was yes. The answer to at least one--and probably more--of those questions for basically every other Missouri coach in the last 40 years has been no. I don't know what the answers are for Drinkwitz. But the answers to those questions for Drinkwitz are much more important than "Did he call the wrong play on 2nd and 8 in the third quarter?"
None of that stuff is fun to talk about because we're not in the locker room or in meetings or around the players and coaches every day so we can't answer them. But that's the stuff that is going to determine if Drinkwitz succeeds or fails here.
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