Here's what Mizzou football coach Eli Drinkwitz said about conference realignment

Mizzou football coach Eli Drinkwitz took a beat and then made up his mind.

“All right,” he said, “I’m gonna say it.”

After Missouri’s practice Saturday, he was asked for his thoughts on the news that shook college athletics over the past couple of days — the shakeup that will see all but four Pac-12 teams leave for the Big Ten and Big 12.

He didn’t focus his answer on the sport he coaches.

“Football will be fine,” he said.

Instead, he spent the next three minutes questioning the seeming lack of communication between facilitators of conference realignment and the larger student-athlete body, particularly those competing in non-revenue sports such as softball and baseball.

“Look, my question is, did we count the cost? I'm not talking about a financial cost, I'm talking about, did we count the costs for the student-athletes involved in this decision? What cost is it to those student-athletes? We're talking about a football decision they based off football. But what about softball and baseball, who have to travel across the country? Did we ask about the cost of them?

“Do we know what the number one indicator (or) symptom or cause of mental health is? It’s lack of rest and sleep. Traveling in those baseball, softball games, you know, those people they travel commercial, they get done playing at four, they gotta go to the airport, they come back, it's three or four in the morning, they gotta go to class. I mean, did we ask any of them?”

Oregon and Washington will move the Big Ten for the 2024 season, creating a potential coast-to-coast matchup — across all sports — with the likes of Rutgers in Piscataway, New Jersey. Arizona State, Arizona and Utah are following Colorado to the Big 12, which will put the desert schools as UCF in Orlando, Florida.

Gone was the cautious head coach who filibustered SEC media days in July by listing his entire roster, determined not to produce a soundbite that could, well, bite him.

On Saturday, he again took his time — 2 minutes, 50 seconds of it — to answer, but used it on this occasion to rattle off a list of questions he has surrounding mass realignment.

Drinkwitz’s hit on several topics.

Name, image and likeness — namely revenue sharing — was one.

“I don't worry at all about the game (football). The game is going to be strong and football is going to be fine. We'll all figure it out. But did we consider the people that we are entrusted with, did we consider the student-athlete? Because then we’re asking them to go out on their own and get NIL. We didn't say we're going to revenue share. We're not saying they're getting a piece of it. So that's the thing that's bothering me right now in this whole situation is — we keep trying to limit what the student-athlete can do.”

The gulf between legislators attempting to limit movement of student-athletes between schools in the transfer portal without similar rules applying to coaches — or even, now, universities — was another.

“I thought the portal was closed,” Drinkwitz said. “Oh, that's just for the student-athletes. The adults in the room get to do whatever they want, apparently.”

The potential for families to watch their student-athlete children to play in person was a third.

“I saw on Twitter several student-athletes talking about one of the reasons they chose their school was so that their parents didn't have to travel,” he said. “They chose a local school so that they could be regionally associated to their parents to watch them play and not have to travel. Did we ask them if they wanted to travel from the East Coast to the West Coast? Man, you know, I love the game. But every game that I coach, I look up in the stands and find my family. I make sure they can be there, because that's what I'm doing this for. And you're talking about volleyball, baseball, softball, track. I mean, all those other sports man, they don't get — they're not fortunate to travel like the way we do football.”

What this means for the Southeastern Conference, potential super conferences and the greater future of college football?

You can miss Drinkwitz with that.

“I don't worry at all about the game (football). The game is going to be strong and football is going to be fine. We'll all figure it out,” he said. … “Football will be fine. Instead, we count the cost of the collateral damage of everybody else, I don't know. Only time will tell but that is my biggest — like, looking at 24 hours after saying, ‘did we really think about that?’ I don’t think we did.”

This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: Here's what Mizzou football coach Eli Drinkwitz said about conference realignment