Head coach Kalen DeBoer is a younger and newer face on the Alabama sideline after Nick Saban retired at 72 years old, but this week he’ll face off against an even spryer and more youthful coach.
At 42, Missouri’s Eli Drinkwitz is among the youngest head coaches in college football. In fact, with 112 head coaches older than him, he is in the bottom 20% in the age category.
To go further, he is in the top 10 youngest coaches in the Power Four and is the second-youngest in the SEC behind Mississippi State’s Jeff Lebby. He finds himself in the same category and age range as CFB wunderkinder like 39-year-old Dan Lanning at Oregon, 34-year-old Kenny Dillingham at Arizona State, 39-year-old Marcus Freeman at Notre Dame and 42-year-old Lincoln Riley at USC. All of whom have made College Football Playoff appearances and brought perennial success to their programs.
Drinkwitz’s path is emblematic of a trend in college football that favors younger head coaches. Bucking the standard trend of long, wait-your-turn processes to land jobs at big programs — Saban waited 22 years between his first grad assistant job and his head gig at Michigan State — Drinkwitz became an SEC head coach in 2019 at just 36 years old.
It isn’t necessarily that there have never been young head coaches, but rather that success across the board and subsequent trust from schools hiring new coaches is arguably higher now than ever.
One could make the case that the college game is being influenced by the “Sean McVay effect” that has heavily run through the NFL. After McVay was hired at 30 years old in 2017 by the Los Angeles Rams and took the team to the Super Bowl in his second year, the notion of a younger, fresher and more unique head coach became more attractive.
“In a league where grizzled veterans had long been the coaching archetype, the Rams’ decision to hire a 30-year-old drew plenty of skepticism,” USA Today writer Tom Schad wrote this year about the effect. “But it also proved to be inspired … It was the start, or at least the key inflection point, of a dramatic shift in hiring.”
In the college ranks, since 2017 we’ve seen Riley make three College Football Playoff appearances at Oklahoma before turning 38. Freeman has a national championship appearance before 40. Even without such drastic success, Drinkwitz has used his tenure to maintain Missouri’s spot in the upper echelon of the SEC and the country as a whole.
His has been an interestingly direct and Group of Five-oriented path. He began as a high school coordinator, where his success translated into a quality control job at Auburn, and then he spent several seasons across Boise State and Arkansas State. He spent one year as offensive coordinator at ACC school NC State before going back to the Group of Five as head coach at Appalachian State.
After one 12-1 season with wins at South Carolina and North Carolina, suddenly Drinkwitz was a head man in the SEC.
He definitely fits the young and unique personality criteria. After upsetting LSU in his first year, he said he was “5-10 dorky white dude” who had “no business being a head coach.” In 2021, he celebrated a win over Florida by wearing a Star Wars costume, striking back at then-Gators coach Dan Mullen after he used a similar celebration the previous year.
At the same time, Drinkwitz has gone through personal evolution. While a young phenom like Riley has fallen into consistent criticism for his flashy offensive playstyle yet mediocre defense, Drinkwitz demonstrated maturation in 2023 after a 17-19 start to his tenure by relenting play-calling duties and bringing in OC Kirby Moore. The Tigers have gone 26-5 since.
What Saturday’s matchup in Columbia will look like is unclear, as last year Alabama took a resounding 34-0 victory. This season, the No. 8 Crimson Tide is only a 3-point favorite over the No. 14 Tigers.
Given Missouri’s competitive stature of the last two years, such a lopsided game seems like an outlier. Whether Alabama wins or falls on the road, Drinkwitz’s track record suggests that when kickoff arrives Saturday morning, his team will be prepared.
