Why Eli Drinkwitz Ran Up the Score on Kansas and Called Their Hype Video ‘Bullcrap’
Missouri beat Kansas 38-21 on Friday night in Lawrence, the first meeting between the schools there since 2005. Then Eli Drinkwitz walked to the podium and torched the entire production.
The issue was a hype video Kansas released the day before the game. It reached back to the Bleeding Kansas era, positioning abolitionist John Brown as the avatar for Kansas and pro-slavery guerrilla leader William Quantrill as the avatar for Missouri. The framing was right versus wrong, for a football game.
Drinkwitz was not interested in playing along.
What He Actually Said
“I was disappointed in the rivalry, the turn that it took today,” Drinkwitz said. “Everybody’s got complicated pasts. To make that an icon was bizarre to me. I’m just glad that this whole right versus wrong bullcrap that was started just got settled on a football field, because it’s a football game.”
Then he explained the end of the game, where Missouri kept throwing at the end zone in the final minute with the result long decided.
“I was embarrassed for them, to be honest, and that’s why I tried to embarrass them at the end.”
He was not done there either. Drinkwitz posted on X afterward: “Man! Yall are weird….. Winners WIN!!!”
He Is Right, and Kansas Should Have Known Better
A rivalry video is supposed to get people fired up about a football game. Reaching for 1860s violence and casting your opponent’s fan base as the side of slavery is a choice that a communications department should have caught before it went live.
College football marketing has gotten aggressive over the last decade and most of it is harmless. This crossed into territory where the only possible outcomes were a bad news cycle or an opposing coach handing you 17 points and a lecture. Kansas got both.
Drinkwitz’s point about complicated pasts is the cleanest way anyone has framed it. Border-state history from that period is ugly on every side of every line. Turning it into a pregame graphic flattens something that deserves more care than a social media post can give it.
The Scoreboard Was the Response
Running up the score in the last minute is normally the kind of thing that gets a coach criticized all week. In this case, Drinkwitz told everyone exactly why he did it and dared anyone to argue.
That is a defensible position. If your opponent spends the week framing the game as a moral referendum, you are allowed to answer on the field and make the answer emphatic. Kansas set the terms. Missouri met them.
The sharpest part of the whole thing was Drinkwitz’s closing logic. It was a football game the entire time. Kansas is the one who tried to make it something else, and then lost by 17 in their own stadium.
No Rematch for a While
Here is the cruelest detail for Kansas. These two are not scheduled to play again until 2031.
So the Jayhawks made their statement, lost the game, got publicly dressed down by the winning coach, and now have to sit with it for five years. There is no quick rematch to change the story, no next-season revenge game to point toward.
Missouri walked out of Lawrence with the win and the moral high ground, which is a hard combination to pull off in a rivalry game. Kansas handed them both.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
