Throughout his seven-year tenure at Mizzou, Eli Drinkwitz has had a few pretty obvious bugaboos hanging over his visor-ed head. He has struggled to beat ranked opponents, specifically ones who finish the season with winning records, and he could not get past Mike Elko and Texas A&M.
Both became recurring questions whenever the Tigers approached a big game, or at least a game against the Aggies, which tend to be big by default. These kinds of narratives are easy to keep alive and awfully difficult
to shake, especially from drive-by national media who don’t really care about context behind the numbers.
Halfway through the 2025 season, consider those two monkeys officially off his back.
First came the 45-17 demolition of No. 8 Florida, a win that was about as emphatic a statement as Mizzou could make. That was followed quickly by the Tigers’ smothering of Texas A&M, 27-6, ending Drinkwitz’s 0-3 run against Elko-coached Aggie teams (he was the DC for A&M when Drinkwitz lost to them in 2021.) Jamal Roberts ran for 222 yards, the defense held Texas A&M to 216 total yards, and Mizzou controlled the game from start to finish.
Two weeks, two major hurdles cleared; Drinkwitz finally has a signature win over a top-10 opponent in the regular season and he finally has a win over a coach and program that had consistently gotten the better of him.
Shedding those monkeys matters not only to Drinkwitz, but to the conversation around this Mizzou program. The question is no longer whether Drinkwitz can beat a highly ranked team or whether he can find a way to solve Elko. He has done both, and the Tigers are 5-1 with a chance to keep building something meaningful in the second half of the season.
But there is still another monkey on Drinkwitz’s back, and this one might be the hardest to shake: He needs a big road win.
Entering this week, Drinkwitz’s road record at Mizzou stands at 11-18 overall and 9-17 against SEC opponents. Neither number is particularly flattering for a coach entering his seventh season, especially when so much of the program’s progress has been measured by its ability to compete with the league’s best.
The conference road record comes with an even more troubling footnote: Drinkwitz has just one road win against an SEC team that finished the season with a winning record. That would be the distant 2022 victory over South Carolina. The Gamecocks were ranked No. 25 at the time and finished 8-5, making that game both his lone win over a winning SEC team on the road and his only ranked road victory.
There have been some road wins since then, of course, but beating struggling Arkansas or Vanderbilt teams is different from walking into a hostile stadium and taking down a team with legitimate ambitions of competing for an SEC title.
That is the next step for the Mizzou program and the opportunity arrives Saturday in Oxford. Ole Miss is coming off a get-right performance against Vanderbilt, blasting the Commodores 52-17 after a rough loss to Florida. The Rebels have the talent to make a serious run in the SEC, and the College Football Playoffs for that matter, and playing them at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium is a considerably different proposition than facing them in Columbia.
There are plenty of individual storylines to follow, too. Austin Simmons, Cayden Lee and Chris Graves Jr. will return to Oxford, where each has a connection to the Ole Miss program. The matchup also features former Tiger Kewan Lacy, who has emerged as a star running back and will be looking to make his former team pay for letting him get away.
Those are fun angles, but they are secondary to the larger question facing Drinkwitz: Can Mizzou win a big game on the road?
The Tigers have the personnel to do it. The defense has shown it can dictate terms against talented opponents, while the running game has become a legitimate big-play threat behind Roberts and the best passing game thus far in the Drinkwitz tenure.
The formula to win against the Rebels is not so different from the one that worked against Texas A&M. Mizzou controlled the line of scrimmage, leaned on its running back and made life miserable for the opposing offense. The challenge is taking that same identity into Oxford, where the crowd, the atmosphere and the quality of the opponent will make every mistake more costly.
There is a reason road wins against good SEC teams are so difficult to come by. The margin for error shrinks, momentum can swing quickly, and a couple of missed opportunities can turn a competitive game into a long afternoon. Mizzou has experienced that side of the equation plenty of times during Drinkwitz’s tenure.
Beating Florida at home was a statement and finally getting past Texas A&M was a breakthrough of sorts. Beating a top-10 Ole Miss team in Oxford would be something else entirely. It would be proof that Mizzou can carry its best football into someone else’s stadium and beat a really good team on its own turf.
That is the sort of win that changes expectations. It would give the Tigers a result to point to when the conversation turns to whether they belong among the SEC’s upper tier, and it would remove the most glaring blemish left on Drinkwitz’s résumé.
The two biggest monkeys are gone. Nobody needs to pretend otherwise, and Drinkwitz deserves credit for finally getting those wins. However, the third one is still there, waiting in Oxford, and it is the one that will most directly launch Mizzou into the upper echelon of SEC programs in 2026. The Tigers have the talent to knock it off his back Saturday. They just have to get it done.
