How does Missouri football keep improving, move on from Florida success?
When he went to shake Jon Sumrall’s hand after Saturday’s game, Missouri football coach Eli Drinkwitz said he had a message for the first-year Florida coach, who had just experienced his first loss with the Gators.
“You gotta have a bounce back factor,” Drinkwitz said he told Sumrall after the Tigers sealed a 45-17 win in Columbia. “That’s life in this league. Every team's got really good players and really good coaches and really good schemes. And if you're not on your A-game, then things can happen.”
That’s been the tale of the tape in the SEC this year. Only a select few teams in the league are turning the page to the second weekend of October without a wound.
Take a look at this chain of events from the first handful of weeks of conference play.
Alabama beat Mississippi State. The Bulldogs beat Mizzou. The Tigers beat Florida. The Gators beat Ole Miss. The Rebels beat LSU, which beat Texas A&M, which is now on its way to Columbia for a matchup Saturday, Oct. 10 at Memorial Stadium. That’s a lot of highs and a near-equal number of lows.
As the season heads into just Week 6, the halfway mark of the year, all but three teams in the league — ‘Bama, Georgia and Texas — have a conference loss already.
Pick your theory for the early season parity. There are plenty to choose from and no one right answer. It could be NIL and the transfer portal leveling the playing field. Maybe it’s the meaty middle of what looks like the nation’s best top-to-bottom conference demonstrating its depth. Perhaps some teams just need time and patience to put the pieces together and reach their potential.
Whatever the theory, it’s looking like no small job to string back-to-back wins together.
So, the question now: How will the great separate from the good?
Who can survive more often that they’re slain?
“The best teams are always getting better,” Drinkwitz said Tuesday. “The best teams are never satisfied with the previous week's performance. The best teams are going to Tuesday practice hungry. … Average teams just get through practice. Great teams utilize practice to find ways to improve.”
Mizzou (4-1, 1-1 SEC) had its best day of the season Saturday; its best day in quite a few seasons. The Tigers gored the Gators, claiming their first win over a top-10 ranked SEC team in the AP poll since 2013 to bounce back from a disappointing loss at Mississippi State.
That's the type of high that’s been hard to come by in Columbia recently.
And the type of high that teams, if the early evidence in SEC is anything to go by, need to move past quickly.
“It's human nature. People, once they get success, some people tend to calm down after that,” MU safety Santana Banner said. “But I don't think that's really our mindset here. Especially this week, we’ve got something we want to prove. Especially how the game ended up last year, I don't think anybody's complacent with that.”
That’s the prescient point from Banner. Look who’s next.
Texas A&M.
Those Aggies. Texas A&M (3-2, 1-2) has struggled so far in 2026 with a home loss to Kentucky and a blowout defeat at LSU. Like Banner said, Missouri knows better than to underestimate what’s coming.
Mizzou’s last two games against the Aggies have both ended in multi-score losses — 31 points in 2024 and 21 points in Columbia last year. This has been a puzzle the Tigers haven’t come particularly close to solving.
The Tigers showed, at their best, that they have the pieces in place to make a run.
But making a run means moving on.
“I think putting things to bed whenever you have success, honestly," Mizzou quarterback Austin Simmons. "(We) watched the (Florida) film yesterday. We had our little intro to Texas A&M this week. I think just watching last week's film and just putting it to bed, just focusing on this new opponent, that's pretty much it. Just going and flipping the page.”
Mizzou pulled itself out of a hole and has a chance to reach the second half of its season still in the mix.
Before it gets to its idle week later this month, it gets Texas A&M and Ole Miss. That’s two preseason top-10 teams that have shown some vulnerabilities.
But remember how the early portion of this year has gone.
Mizzou is a prime example that an early defeat doesn’t have to equal the end. There also are plenty of case studies in the league of big wins followed by a quick return to Earth.
Texas A&M, a team that had preseason College Football Playoff aspirations this preseason, is more than capable of making Mizzou join that crew.
If the Tigers can avoid a comedown, all the opportunity in the world is in front of them.
Avoiding the bounce backs is where the great will separate from the good.
“The only thing we can control is the process, the plans we put in place in order to play a game at the right level,” Drinkwitz said. “I think it's got to be a focus on improvement, and that's really all we talked about last week was, ‘how can we get better? What are those things that we must improve?’
… “It's all about improving from week to week, and it's just a matter of how focused you are on making sure that gets done.”
This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: How does Missouri football keep improving, move on from Florida success?
