Eli Drinkwitz Duffs It, Stoops Busts Kirby's Chops at SEC Spring Meetings

The SEC Spring Meetings serve as an interruption for the brief vacation time college football coaches take each year. Despite the high stakes of this year’s meetings — a new scheduling format — coaches are still not completely clocked back into work. That makes for more moments of levity and less polished prose.

Of all people, Mark Stoops gave the SEC coaches and gathered members of the media in Sandestin a good chuckle on Tuesday. The Kentucky head coach is not known for his wisecracks, but a line he likes to use landed at the perfect time.

In the midst of scheduling talk, Kirby Smart argued that his Georgia football team is at a disadvantage if they play further into the postseason because they are unable to attack the recruiting trail at the same time as their SEC peers.

Stoops interjected, “There’s no crying on the yacht.”

It took that line for Kirby to realize that his peers have no pity for him. “Well, if you are playing, you are getting free advertisement and that’s probably a good thing,” said Smart.

Stoops got him. It would be nice to see him get Kirby in October too.

Eli Drinkwitz Inserts Foot Into Mouth

Missouri head football coach Eli Drinkwitz treats appearances with the media as performance art. At times, he’s been applauded. Folks got a good laugh when he brought a light saber to a presser, poking fun at Dan Mullen after Mizzou beat Florida. His best work was last fall when he went on a lengthy rant about the negative side effects of the transfer portal, reflecting the ills of this generation.

“We are such a instant gratification era, including myself…I’m not putting this on anybody, it’s the entire world we live in,” Drinkwitz said in a clip that went viral in November.

“We are trying to skip the step of adversity, and growth, and you can never skip that in life. You are always going to have to face it.”

Since the Facebook commenters finally had an SEC coach willing to say “what’s wrong with kids these days,” Drinkwitz assumed the role of moral compass for the league. Well, it smacked him in the face today. In a well-meaning conversation about the perils of NIL, Drinkwitz came off looking like a dingus.

“We’re giving guys, 18-, 19-, 20-, 21-, 22-year-olds, life-changing money. People are making more money in NIL than my brother-in-law who’s a pediatrician who saves lives. And we kind of do it cavalier, and we think that there’s not going to be any side effects or there’s not going to be issues. There’s information out there. There’s bad actors out there always trying to make a dollar. They’re involved in running around campuses trying to gather information.”

Eli Drinkwitz, via Dave Matter of the St. Louis Dispatch

Is he wrong? Probably not. However, it’s awfully hypocritical for a guy who signed a contract extension worth more than $6 million annually to criticize the value we are placing on the sport of college football relative to medical professionals.

SEC Coaches Non-Committal on New Schedule

The SEC schedule is all anybody wants to talk about at the SEC Spring Meetings, except for the head coaches. In the debate of 8vs9 home games, few took a public stance on one side or the other.

Kirby Smart described it as the “most overrated conversation ever had.” Why? “Four years you’ll play everybody, home and away,” Smart said.

I guess he kind of has a point. As On3’s Jesse Simonton reports, Hugh Freeze was unwilling to stick his neck out there in his first year at Auburn. Lane Kiffin said it was hardly even a conversation point on Tuesday, with NIL and the transfer portal taking precedence.

There was one coach was happy to stand in front of a microphone and take a stand by sharing a carefully prepared quip. In a shocking turn of events, Eli Drinkwitz tried to steal the headlines at SEC Spring Meetings.

“I’m a history teacher by trade and every time I come to these meetings I’m blown away that the 13 colonies actually formed a union,” Missouri head coach Eli Drinkwitz said. 

“We can’t agree on an eight- or nine-game schedule, how did we come together to defeat the British?”

Wow. What a performance. I’ll be back for the matinee.