'Dream Big': Mizzou football captain Darius Robinson's path to elite defensive end

Canton High School football coach Tim Baechler took Darius Robinson out for dinner with his family to a Brazilian steakhouse.

You get a two-sided coin at that kind of establishment — one side green, the other red. The traffic light system is fairly self-explanatory. Laying the coin green side up means you’re getting more meat. Red means you’re taking a break.

Robinson, now some five years down the line and a defensive end with Mizzou football, wasn’t for turning that coin.

“Man, he could eat,” Baechler said.

That checks out.

Fast forward to the 2023 season, Robinson is a second-year team captain for the Tigers. Missouri’s game against South Carolina at 2:30 p.m. Saturday in Columbia, Missouri, is set to be the 42nd game of his college career. He’s up to 24 tackles, 6.5 for loss, on the season after transitioning to the edge following four years of playing tackle.

There was every chance his time in Columbia was done. The NFL was an option.

But Robinson made a choice to keep his Mizzou coin flipped green.

That was an early win for Missouri in a season that keeps bringing ’em.

'Raw' rookie to D-I starter

Robinson was a little rough around the edges as a player in high school.

Robinson only played basketball as an underclassman at Canton Prep, which didn’t have a football team, in his home state Michigan. That was until his junior year, when Lou Baechler, the son of Tim and a player for Canton High, convinced him to switch.

Back then, the now-MU edge was 80 pounds lighter than his current 6-foot-5, 296-pound frame, so Lou Baechler took Robinson for some winter workouts after he transferred and was teaching him how to bench press.

Robinson's form wasn’t great, Lou Baechler said, but he had some tenacity, loading up plates to get to 185 pounds. Too much, too soon, the bar started dipping and diving from side to side, until — crash, bang — the plates careened completely off the bar and onto the gym floor. The other end went flying down his side.

“I was like, ‘Man, this kid is raw, but he's strong,’” Lou Baechler said. “‘He's gonna turn out to be good.’”

Even on the field, Canton lost its first game with Robinson involved. In the first training after going 0-1, Robinson was still smiling, joking — that’s just who he is, Lou Baechler said.

But his teammate, then in his senior year, wasn’t having it.

Robinson was making rookie mistakes in his rush lanes. He incorrectly hit the B gap three times in a row. Lou Baechler, now frustrated, squared up to his friend. The friends got into a “scuffle.”

Robinson sat out the next game, not for lack of trying.

“His toughness and work ethic was never, ever in question,” Tim Baechler said. “He wanted it. He just had a lot to learn.”

He learned quick.

The one-week kind of quick. Tackles, sacks, you name it — Robinson brought it.

“He went beast mode. He took his own game to a different level,” Lou Baechler said. “We were all shocked. We’re all like, ‘this is what you're supposed to play like.’”

It took him eight weeks to flash the heights that have made him a Southeastern Conference starter and an intriguing NFL prospect, Tim Baechler said, but the coach saw the potential flash on the biggest stage.

Against the state’s No. 1 team, Brighton, in the division championship game, the coach “wanted that quarterback hit.”

Robinson obliged, breaking free from a senior offensive tackle who was Michigan State bound before crashing on top of the QB in the first quarter.

“It was beautiful,” Tim Baechler said. “It set the tone for the whole rest of the game that we are more physical than you guys.”

And look at Robinson now.

Devin Leary felt his weight on top of him twice last Saturday. LSU’s Jayden Daniels and Memphis’ Seth Henigan both have been hit by the edge rusher for sacks.

Missouri coach Eli Drinkwitz has seen the development. Robinson switched from tackle to defensive end over the offseason, partly to show NFL scouts something more.

The Tigers knew it might take a minute to get fully acclimated, but like he did before, he’s reaching new heights now.

“God's gifted him with size, speed, explosiveness,’ Drinkwitz said. … “You were seeing flashes in the K-State game and the Memphis game of him playing at a really high level, and I think the last few games we're seeing that he's becoming a player that we believed he could be.”

The two-time captain

Lou Baechler didn’t answer his phone. As a result, he found Robinson sitting on his bed with a cafeteria tray.

In the summer ahead of his first high school campaign, Robinson was enrolled in summer school to get some credits to meet his transfer criteria. Lou Baechler, meanwhile, was playing summer league baseball. Once they were both done with their obligations that day, their plan was to go work out.

Lo and behold, Lou had missed a few calls from Robinson.

When he went home — an hour-and-a-half walk from Robinson’s school, Lou said — he found the defensive end sitting on his bed, petting his dog, eating his school lunch.

In August, Robinson was voted by his Mizzou teammates as a team captain for the second straight year. He was a team captain for his high school in his senior year, also after a player vote.

“You want to be around the guy,” Lou Baechler said. “Everybody likes Darius.”

There’s plenty of reasons.

Lou Baechler recalls playing 7-on-7 football, and although Robinson was a defensive lineman and didn’t need to show up, he always appeared to watch his teammate.

One day, Baechler got in a tussle with a defensive back. They bellied up and exchanged unpleasantries. But before they could get into it, Robinson had appeared out of the stands and forced his way between the two on the field.

“He's like, ‘there's no way this is going to happen.’ He was just very protective of his buddies,” Lou Baechler said. … “Whether it was someone talking crap on Twitter about a player on our team, he was the first guy to defend them, first guy to get in somebody's face when they're saying things they shouldn't have been saying.”

Returning to CoMo

Robinson knew what he wanted while he was young.

It was printed across a shirt that Lou Baechler remembers Robinson wearing.

“Dream Big,” the shirt challenged.

“He knew when he was young he was gonna be a big D-I player,” Lou Baechler said. “We'd look at him and be like, ‘Darius, these guys are really good. You're obviously huge, but you're really raw right now.’ … And he’d always talk, like, ‘Yeah, I'm gonna play Division I football in the SEC.’

“And I was like, ‘alright man, like I believe it, but you’ve got a long way to go.’ He worked his ass off and got there.”

The next level was something he thought about then, and something he again mulled over in January, when he could have put his name in the NFL Draft.

He decided to return to Mizzou. And after four seasons of .500 or worse ball, this is how he wanted the Tigers to look in his final season.

Missouri is 6-1. The Tigers have sold out three straight home games. They’re ranked No. 20 in the AP Top 25, their highest mark since 2014, long before Robinson arrived — before Robinson was in high school.

Mizzou took down Kentucky in front of a sold out crowd in Lexington, Kentucky. In the aftermath, Robinson was named the Reese’s Senior Bowl Co-Defensive Play of the Week for his two-sack, six-tackle day. He spoke at length about getting six wins and bowl eligibility before a dogfight in November after the game against UK.

Now, Missouri has a chance to do something Saturday against South Carolina that it has never done since Robinson joined the team in 2019.

Win seven games in a season. The Gamecocks (2-4, 1-3) stand between the Tigers and new heights.

Robinson changed his position. He took on a leadership role with the team — again. He put a professional career on hold for a year to show something more.

And as it stands, like they have before, those big dreams are paying off.

“I thought, ‘if I’m going to come back to college, this is what it’s going to look like,’” Robinson said Tuesday. “I’ve been thinking about this since January.”

This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: 'Dream Big': Mizzou captain Darius Robinson's path to elite defensive end