Eli Drinkwitz delivered his opening remarks on early signing day, then said the quiet part out loud.
“This used to be a really big day, man,” the Missouri football coach said Wednesday afternoon. “What happened?”
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementIt was a joke. Sorta. Kinda.
Not really.
Drinkwitz knows very well what happened. He talked about it at great length later in his signing day press conference. The importance of high school recruiting isn’t what it used to be, or has been “de-emphasized,” as he put it.
The instant-fix nature of the transfer portal dealt a significant blow to the value placed on 18-year-old projects.
The value of name, image and likeness deals made it less likely that the top recruits will stick around for more than 12 months without starting roles — 24, if you’re lucky.
Revenue sharing and its limited budget to put together rosters changed the landscape even more.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementIt was still a decent day for Missouri football. The Tigers signed 19 players in the Class of 2026, losing a couple of commitments to late flips but still putting together more or less what Drinkwitz expects. He said Wednesday that 18- to 22-player classes will be the Tigers’ modus operandi under the current rules of the sport.
Mizzou’s 19-player 2026 signing class checks in somewhere between the No. 34 and No. 25 nationally ranked class, depending on where your recruiting updates come from. If you go with the lenient end of that scale, the Tigers have four top-25 classes in the past five years.
In the 20 years before Drinkwitz arrived, the Tigers only had two of those in 20 recruiting cycles.
It’s another solid class.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementEven as the way it was assembled was different.
The first change and most apparent change is who the Tigers are taking and when they take them.
More than half of Mizzou’s 2026 class signed after Sept. 1, or essentially in the past three months. That’s quite late. There’s a reason. It didn’t come together by accident.
“When you're investing money in a product, you want to see that product’s senior tape,” Drinkwitz said. “You want to see the most recent film. Because, can you imagine if the NFL drafted its players a year before they signed? … Think about that: Quarterbacks in the SEC, (if) they were drafted in June last year, then played their senior years and then went and signed to their NFL teams? Everybody would be shocked. So why would we do that? That's not how we operate.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisement“ … We'll take June commitments. Absolutely. But we're going to reevaluate your senior tape before we send you the offer that you can finalize from your financials, because we want to make sure that you're really all who you say you were. And that's how we're going to operate moving forward.”
Nov 29, 2025; Fayetteville, Arkansas, USA; Missouri Tigers head coach Eli Drinkwitz greets players and staff as they enter the locker room prior to the game against the Arkansas Razorbacks at Donald W. Reynolds Razorback Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Nelson Chenault-Imagn ImagesThere’s a bigger reason not to want to waste a scholarship right now, too.
For starters, SEC teams only get 85 of them in the revenue-sharing era — a perhaps shortsighted move the conference made to comply with anticipated house settlement regulations that subsequently have the conference at a 20-player dearth compared to its conference peers.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAnd there’s a bigger reason.
Drinkwitz alluded to it in the quote above. There’s no monetary wiggle room when it comes to rev-sharing.
The Tigers hired Gaurav Verma as a ‘Director of Football Strategy and Finance’ in the summer. The timing of that move is not coincidental. Revenue-sharing — the ruling that allows universities to directly pay athletes up to $20.5 million in distributed revenue — went into effect July 1. SEC teams, to add scholarships, agreed to a $18 million cap this year. Football is likely to get about $13.5 million of that revenue at most schools.
Now, there’s math involved. Verma’s job is to plan for all the nuances of that cap.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementHow much do you pay any given recruit? If you want to give a player more funds, that money gets siphoned from somewhere else. Sure, third-party NIL still exists. But most deals must now go through a clearinghouse, which is far from guaranteed. Revenue-sharing is the for-sure outlet to pay players.
It’s a balancing act. Like balancing a checkbook, Drinkwitz said.
“I don't think there's an awareness nationally, or with agencies, or parents, that the previous style of NIL, pass-the-hat fundraising, renegotiate, ‘OK, well, we'll go call a booster and find a little bit more money to answer that.’ That's not possible anymore,” Drinkwitz said. “You have a rev-share amount. You have a third-party NIL that is potentially there, but not guaranteed. And so you have a budget.
“ … If I change this number, then it's going to have to come from here. And I think that's a new reality.”
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementA keen eye will notice that Missouri only has one top-100 recruit this year. There are headliners, just not in the vein of five-star commits like Luther Burden III in 2022 or Williams Nwaneri in 2024.
Mizzou only has one top-100 recruit in the group, which is Johnnie “DJ” Jones, a four-star offensive tackle from Venice, Florida.
Well, those recruits are getting expensive. And the transfer portal, where the bulk of most serious, competitive teams’ starting core will come from, isn’t open yet. It opens Jan. 2 and remains open for a shorter-than-before two weeks through Jan. 16. Money needs to be saved.
Drinkwitz anticipates that this will be the busiest portal period yet, which is good for teams looking to reload. His reasoning? Players might think they can “create leverage” within the current revenue-sharing model.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementIt’s all different. And constantly evolving.
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That has meant a slightly different recruiting model for Mizzou; a somewhat different approach.
But it hasn’t meant abandoning the preps altogether.
“We always have to have a foundation of guys that we want to recruit and develop that become players for us,” Drinkwitz said. … “That's always going to be a key piece to what we want to do. And I feel like we still have those pieces moving up, and then it's — OK, how do I go in the portal and either A: replace people who are wanting to leave; or B: replace people, or fill in gaps that maybe we weren't as right on in their development, or their development is slowed or not been as fast as we anticipated.”
This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: How Missouri football, Eli Drinkwitz approached 2026 high school class
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