Missouri players pose with the trophy after defeating Iowa to win the TransPerfect Music City Bowl on Monday, Dec. 30, 2024, at Nissan Stadium in Nashville, Tenn.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Missouri’s final game of the 2024 season was like so many of the past two years.
It was a win, first and foremost — Monday’s Music City Bowl victory over Iowa was the Tigers’ 21st of the past two seasons. But it also came in a one-possession game, the type of contest that Mizzou has won 10 of 11 times in that span. MU’s performance wasn’t perfect, but it was enough.
Is that what Missouri football is now?
Gritty performances from individual players, in-game improvements that give the team just enough juice to get past their opponents and one or two big plays — in the case of the Music City Bowl, a 56-yard field goal and a fourth-and-1 stop — have frequently been the hallmarks of Eli Drinkwitz’s wins in his fourth and fifth seasons in Columbia.
He has now won the most games through five seasons of any Mizzou coach, with 38, breaking a tie with Dan Devine. The bowl win gave the Tigers back-to-back 10-win seasons for the third-time in program history.
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They got there with one of the best recruits in program history in Luther Burden III, a stubborn starting quarterback in Brady Cook and developmental success stories like Johnny Walker Jr., who recorded two sacks in the bowl game despite playing through a fairly severe meniscus injury.
“When these guys showed up, it wasn’t this way,” Drinkwitz said. “It was really, really tough. Then there was people leaving left and right, and I’m sure these guys had doubts, but they stayed and they fought shoulder-to-shoulder every day to get to where we’re at.”
A bowl win made for a touching farewell to Cook, Walker and the rest of Missouri’s seniors.
The turn of the calendar to 2025 begs a question that will be answered in the next 365 days: Is Mizzou’s status sustainable?
It’s a question that will be answered both inside and outside the locker room. The Tigers will need to replace the players who’ve spearheaded the recent turnaround — only three starters from the breakout 2023 team will still be around for the 2025 campaign.
The departure of a heralded leader like Cook in particular could have an effect.
“I hope we left behind a great brotherhood,” Walker said. “(In) years before, I’m going to be real, it was toxic. We had to get rid of those players. Now I just hope the guys know what a winning team is and to continue with the success.”
“To piggyback off that, I would just say a sustainable culture,” Cook said of what he hopes he’s left in Columbia.
That a college team is graduating its most experienced players and exporting talent to the NFL is, of course, by design. That’s what is supposed to happen. The continuity comes, in theory, from coaching staffs.
Cook is placing his faith in Drinkwitz to remain a steady steward of the Missouri program.
“Coach Drink built it — let’s be real,” Cook said. “The one thing I’ll say about Coach Drink is he brings the right people into this building. I’ve seen it. From when we got here in 2020 to right now, the people he’s moved out and the people he’s brought in, it’s unbelievable. Every single person that comes in our building has the same goal, the same mission, the same mindset — and that’s been the difference.”
Drinkwitz’s task at the moment — and for the past few weeks, really, given that December looks like the center of a Venn diagram between two seasons — is to settle the personnel component for 2025.
There will be some younger players stepping into bigger roles, such as wideouts Marquis Johnson and Joshua Manning. There will be transfer portal additions who likely join the team right at the top of the depth chart, including quarterback Beau Pribula and wide receiver Kevin Coleman Jr. And there will be players with relatively untapped potential due for leaps this offseason, like left guard Cayden Green and cornerback Toriano Pride Jr.
“The underclassmen, man, they now know what it looks like, but they owe it to them every single day to keep fighting for the legacy that these guys built,” Drinkwitz said. “I think it’s the third time in school history to have back-to-back 10-win seasons. They’ve put us on a launching pad to keep going.”
That’s what makes the sustainability question an open one, even if it may be bursting the MU bubble a bit: The Tigers have never had back-to-back-to-back 10-win seasons. The third time has yet to be the charm.
And there’s the off-field sustainability question facing more college athletic departments than just Mizzou. The price of competition and monetary landscape is expected to change in a major way in 2025 with the arrival of revenue-sharing through a legal settlement. It’s fair to wonder what that means for the name, image, likeness compensation advantage that a timely Missouri law gave MU a couple of years ago.
Add a $250 million renovation to Memorial Stadium — now underway — to that and there’s a fiscal pressure to this year in Missouri football, too.
In this case, that pressure came from the diamond of a two-season run for the Tigers, and it’s what will define their next 12 months.
“Our board, our athletic director, our boosters are all in right now on Mizzou football because of these young men,” Drinkwitz said. “They’re tearing down the north end zone because of these guys. You saw the fans tonight, again, showing up in Mizzouville for us. It’s awesome right now what we’ve got going. It’s up to these guys and ourselves, our coaches to work our butts off every single day not to let them down, and we’re going to.”
