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EYEWEAR USED TO be a kind of prison until glasses became cool. Around the time jocks who never needed prescriptions began flaunting designer frames as a declaration of style. Which was long after Eli Drinkwitz had been memorialized in pictures from his adolescence, dorked-out in big, round lenses he inherited from his older brother, Jeremy. The head football coach of the Missouri Tigers has been the victim of lousy vision his whole life, and in his early 40s now seems the kind of glasses-wearer who forsakes image in favor of comfort. His current pair being a good example: soft rectangular lenses with practically invisible frames.

Only it turns out that Drink doesn’t like his glasses at all. He doesn’t like how they make him look on the field. He doesn’t like how they make him look in the locker room. He doesn’t like that they feed into a perception straight out of the 1950s that people think he’s a nerd. Even though he has described himself publicly as “a 5-10 dorky white dude” and, in his first year, when the Tigers upset LSU, said aloud, “Let’s be honest, I have no business being a head coach.” Within him seems to be a more ambitious evaluation of himself and what he can achieve, that he can actually take Mizzou somewhere it has never been before in football: to an SEC championship or — also his words — to the College Football Playoff. And maybe his glasses muddle in his appearance the sort of aggression such winning seems to demand.

I LIKE THE guy. When he was introduced nearly five years ago and made his first public appearance with his wife and four daughters at the ceremony in Columbia, Marching Mizzou played the fight song to lead him through a shroud of fake smoke and he walked onto Faurot Field swiveling his head to look around. He stepped in front of the microphone and pulled a visor over his eyes and then took off his glasses, in a little preview of how he would curate his appearance on the sideline. Then he set them onto the podium for a minute before putting them back on so he could see the pages of a prepared speech. He said, “For me, this is the opportunity of a lifetime.” He mentioned Gary Pinkel, Mizzou’s most successful modern coach, who was in the audience. Drink was in such stark physical contrast to him and every other Missouri coach who came before that I — someone who never played football but has worn glasses since kindergarten — told my friends I could get behind what he was doing, before he said a word.

There was some of that outward self-deprecation mingled with the confidence to employ it. He purposefully pronounced the correct “Missour-ee” and then said “MizzurUH,” too, as a nod to the people like my dad who had grown up in the Show Me State yet mispronounced it his entire life. He had not only the semblance of a personality but also a kind of panache (the nickname of Faurot Field is The Zou, and he joked that going anywhere around Columbia with four young daughters, people would get to see the real zoo). He giggled when he slipped up in saying he wanted to “win the Sun Belt … uhh, sorry, the SEC East!” But his elocution was that of someone with an easy way about himself. He barely had a track record as a head coach, but he was 12-1 the previous year at Appalachian State, including wins at South Carolina and North Carolina.

As a Mizzou graduate and native of the Bootheel, I was fascinated by this person, this seemingly new type of coach for a program in need of a risk. And that was before he made fun of Kansas and Arkansas. Before he made fun of Dan Mullen by pulling his hoodie over his head and a light saber from behind the lectern after Mizzou beat the Gators and he said, “May the force be with you” and then took a sip of Diet Coke like a mic drop. That was before Mizzou went 11-2 last season and beat Ohio State in the Cotton Bowl and Drinkwitz became the unapologetic driver of a black-and-gold Maybach with rims.

Last August, the X account CFBTalkDaily asked college football fans to reply to a post with “One word to describe Eli Drinkwitz.” The picture they used showed Drink on the field in the middle of action, staring from under his visor. Some answers: Coach. Aura. Mid. Dork. Leader! Savior. King. Dork but we LOVE him in CoMo, it’s just part of his charm! Different. Smart. Strange.

Drink’s Tigers are 6-1 and wobble at 21 in the AP poll. Early this season the offense has struggled — it was supposed to be one of the best in the SEC, with veteran quarterback Brady Cook throwing to Luther Burden III, touted as one of the top players in college football after catching 86 passes for 1,212 yards and nine touchdowns last season. But then Boston College gave them a scare at home and Vanderbilt took them to OT, and they were defenestrated at Texas A&M, which cost Mizzou dearly in the respect department. The Vanderbilt win certainly looks better now than it did at the time, of course. The Commodores took down Alabama, who lost again last weekend to Tennessee. But the Tide remain firm in the sporting consciousness as a juggernaut, and juggernauts tend to get the benefit of the doubt. If Missouri is to beat them, Burden, who has yet to live up to those lofty expectations (partly because Mizzou has trouble getting him the ball), will have to come alive. Missouri’s defense looks good in statistical departments — ninth in the country in yards allowed and top 10 in both pass and scoring defense — but has given up a bunch of broken and big plays such as a 75-yard TD run to Texas A&M’s Le’Veon Moss that opened the third quarter and essentially buried the game at 31-0. The defense will have to have the type of game it played against Murray State and Buffalo to start the season.

Drink tells me he remembers unfondly when glasses used to be considered a weakness. “That was tough, growing up,” he says. “Those were some bad glasses. I guess I thought they were cool.” A literal magnification of his shortcomings when he was a teenager in west Arkansas, a diminutive linebacker playing football for a team that won two state championships at Alma High School in a town with a population smaller than its 6,200-seat stadium. When the Drinkwitz family crammed itself — two parents and six kids — into a doublewide trailer. When his haircut was doing him no favors, either.

“I think what Coach Drink represents, man, is that you can be who you are,” says Mizzou assistant head coach and cornerbacks coach Al Pogue, who has known Drink since they were in their 20s and in quality control at Auburn under offensive coordinator Gus Malzahn. “And if that person is lighthearted and [can] still be successful? He represents that. It’s OK to be who you are.” He is referring to instances when Drink leads off a team meeting with a dad joke. Or burbles, “That’s what she said” after an innocuous comment in the hallway because he can’t seem to help himself. When he hosts a get-together for coaches every Wednesday night over the fire pit in his backyard over Wendy’s hamburgers as part of a communion. When he tells coaches to come in later if they need to take their kids to school. “That’s something I had to learn. I thought I had to look mean. I thought I had to stand on the sideline always looking like I was angry. But I wasn’t really that person,” Pogue says. “If everyone says, ‘Hey, he is a nerd’ … well, that’s a guy who I want to be like.”

DRINK TAKES HIS glasses off before football games. Everyone calls him Drink, or Coach Drink; it’s what he seems to prefer. When the meetings and preparations end and there is no turning back before kickoff, he suctions contacts onto his eyeballs and stands before his coaches and players. As a head coach who never played college football (though he was class president at Arkansas Tech) he has been subject to scrutiny — if, for example, he doesn’t call a timeout and gets a delay penalty that backs his team up 5 yards against Kansas State at the end of the game, or gets blasted so badly at Texas A&M that it doesn’t even seem he was prepared.

It’s fairly easy to understand why one of the youngest Division I head coaches of an ascending team in the greatest football conference might project himself at his best, at his strongest, at his most commanding, by subtracting a perception of his vulnerability.

Drink has done a lot of celebrating at Missouri without his glasses. His most viral speeches about brotherhood and rallying cries and buzzwords such as “STP: something to prove” have been summoned with the team crowded around him, without the specs. He conducts his postgame news conferences without them. He knelt without them and rolled over onto his back in his droopy white T-shirt and chinos and flapped his arms and legs after Mizzou — with a smothering effort from a defense that lost five starters to the NFL and a huge pass from Cook to Burden in the fourth quarter, beat Ohio State in the Cotton Bowl — and he made angels out of the confetti on the fake green heaven of Jerry Jones’ field.

He goes back to them Sunday morning. For church or breakfast at Cafe Berlin in Columbia with his family, when a new week of football begins. When he is back on the fourth floor of the Mizzou South End Zone complex before anyone else arrives in the morning, with a life-size cardboard cutout of him taking a drink of Diet Coke in the hall, and “SOMETHING TO PROVE” written in gigantic letters down the hallway wall, taking out of his personalized Coach Drink mini-fridge his first of eight or nine 16-ounce Diet Coke bottles for the day.

“I tell people all the time, ‘Don’t let the glasses fool you,'” he says. “I think sometimes, for me, I’m perceived either more nerdy than I really am, or maybe not as masculine. And I think I’m just trying to make sure when I’m out there proving a point, I want people to really understand me, you know? It’s kinda like Superman. He had to take his glasses off to get after people.”

HE’S WEARING THEM in the evening. He sidles down the stairwell from the private room of donors at Chicken N Pickle, a Mizzou-friendly restaurant on the banks of the Missouri River in the St. Louis suburb of St. Charles, where he has been taking pictures with fans all evening and glad-handing for help with Every True Tiger, the branding and NIL agency of Mizzou athletics, and a new $250 million addition to the football stadium that will enclose the North End Zone and hopefully entomb the program’s tortured past there. Hundreds of fans have gathered to hear him speak publicly for the first time since beating Ohio State in the Cotton Bowl, where he trumpeted a war cry on the victor’s stage, “We’re not blue bloods, we’re a dirty, hardworking brotherhood … M-I-Z!”

On this night, Drink could pass as a fan in the restaurant, so it’s hard to spot him at first. His brown hair is combed to the side and his long-sleeve shirt is tucked into black chinos as he stands off in the corner at various points, constantly checking his phone. He lacks any kind of security buffer or coterie to lead him through the crowd of Bud Light drinkers and nachos eaters, of kids with plush hats with tiger tails dangling from the ears shaking pom-poms, of Truman the Tiger standing by the side of a stage giving a curtsy to the coach, of older men and women in various shades of black and gold as hopeful for 2024 as for any season in the past. The dimples embedded into Drinkwitz’s freshly shaved face make him look younger than 41, the face of this now-relevant but historically misbegotten team.

Twice in my lifetime, in 2007 and 2013, Missouri was a half away from the national championship game. This was under Pinkel, the stoic former tight end who seemed to withhold any sense of humor but made up for his lack of personality by taking Missouri all the way to No. 1. But the Tigers lost in the 2007 Big 12 championship game when Sam Bradford and Oklahoma pulled away in the second half after a Chase Daniel interception, and in the 2013 SEC title showdown Malzahn and what seemed like an Auburn team of destiny road-graded Mizzou in the fourth quarter, for which I was, sadly, present. Both those nights spun endlessly nowhere after the final whistle for a childhood fan, for a native of the state, someone who understood the precedent of finally seeing the team at the threshold but unable to cross. Walking back to a car under a black sky that might as well have let history whisper through: Missouri wasn’t and isn’t going to ever get there.

Now, though, Drink is asking everyone to believe. The Tigers just went 11-2; why not? With him on stage are three players, Burden, safety Marvin Burks and a new transfer cornerback from Clemson, Toriano Pride Jr. Drink cracks a joke about their 40 times not being good enough. He believes the Tigers should be as talented on offense as anyone in the country. They did have to replace Cody Schrader, a walk-on running back who led the SEC in rushing in 2023 and was the best story in college football, and did so by signing two of the most sought-after senior running backs, Nate Noel and Marcus Carroll, from the transfer portal. Cook, a senior, should be a top SEC quarterback again if healthy. Drink tells the fans there’s no better wide receiver room in America, with Burden; Theo Wease Jr., a transfer from Oklahoma; and Mookie Cooper and Marquis Johnson. A look at the schedule and one figures: 11-1? Possible. Or 10-2 at the worst.

Drink floats atop all the morbid backstory exuding an enthusiastic charm and the temperament of someone christened as a winner, of someone whose salary will rise to $9 million next season and, at least for a while, make him bulletproof. He greets the crowd before him outside in plastic chairs and stands on a makeshift stage outside the restaurant, a few weeks before the team will be announced just outside the preseason top 10.

“I been coming to these events for four years,” he says. “I remember coming here and telling people all the things we believed we could do. We believed we could recruit elite players and we believed we could win at the biggest stage … and we’re not satisfied with where we’re at, we feel like we just realized our potential. Now it’s about continuing to push, but in order to do that, we need you.”

An older man named Rob stands up in the crowd and asks for the microphone.

“Coach, I live in Moscow Mills, Missouri,” he says, “and I’ve been a Tiger fan for a long time. Three years in my lifetime we flirted with being No. 1. The first time I remember was 1969 — we lost a heartbreaker in the Orange Bowl to Penn State. In 2007, we had a magical season with Chase Daniel and then 2013, that first SEC East championship. My question for you is, after each one of those seasons, expectations were sky-high for the following year. And we had good seasons the next year but fell short. Tell me why this season is going to be different … how are we going to take that next step and not fall back just a little bit?”

Drink is caught off guard by how deep and kind of unsettling this is. How tortured an ask. Though he has been the coach at Missouri going on five years, it is unclear if even now he fully understands the embedded self-hatred of Tigers fans, whose expectations, despite the winning, are that fate will intervene no matter his preparations and things will always go wrong.

“Well, I mean that’s the toughest question I’ve been asked in a while,” he says. “Um … there’s no way to know or predict what the future is going to be. I think our team is still extremely hungry. We want to win an SEC championship. We had six players drafted. Those guys were really good players. But if you look at the competitive depth on our team, we should be a more talented team this year. It’s really going to come down to the mindset of the coaches and players and I, and are they really hungry to reestablish their own identity? All I know is, the only thing that matters to us is being better today than we were yesterday. If you can do that continuously …” He might not always look the part, but all these gathered people are looking at him as the head football coach. And he sounds like a head football coach, relying on old-school phrases in the hope of winning people over. He trails off. The crowd applauds him.

“YOU’RE NOT A jock, Coach,” I say to him. Which is meant as a compliment, an affirmation of one of the ways he has described himself. Drink is on one of the morning walks he takes every weekday before practice begins, when he collects his thoughts and makes phone calls to donors and recruits, when he slips away for 40 minutes to an hour by himself. The compliment is a pledge of allegiance, me describing myself and pointing at my own glasses, the fact I, too, have always had to wear them; have always looked for ways to put them aside; have gone to lengths, even as a child, to hide that my vision was bad by either pretending to see the board or sitting in the front of the class. That I can’t wear contacts because of sensitivity, that I still take them off half the time my wife and I post pictures on Instagram because removing my glasses is a part of my life. There are four days before the 2024 season begins at home against Murray State, and he’s tracking his steps on an app and wearing a white safari hat that shades his face and the top of his head and the whistle around his neck. We follow his usual path from the auxiliary staircase of the South End Zone football complex past the indoor football training facility and down the walkway with huge painted tiger paws up the hill to the basketball arena. The light stands atop Faurot Field disappear behind us into pretty woodlands and a trail veined with cracked gravel and littered with leaves, chippering birds getting louder and the sound of the cars on Providence Road softening into a kind of faraway purr.

Drink does not like what I said, though. He shakes his head and says, “Well, all right,” and then, “Ah, OK,” but it is clear he does not want to be identified this way, that we are not on the same page. No matter what he has said about himself in public he will not be a member of my made-up club. “I’m a better athlete than you expect, but that’s OK,” he says, hardened by the comment and quieted by it, like it’s a lazy perpetuation of the image he has been up against since he was a senior in high school getting good grades and playing football and having to prove to people by force that the guy pictured in his yearbook wasn’t who he actually is, wasn’t all he is.

“I am probably more like Mike McDaniel than Dan Campbell,” he says. “I quit caring what people say. [Shutting people up] used to be a big motivation for me. And carrying this chip on my shoulder. But now I’ve come to realize that’s never going to quiet anybody. The only thing you have to prove is to the people who believed in you.”

I want to tell him I’m one of those people who believed, who believe. But he has me on the other side of the ledger at the moment. And from there, the “big motivation” seems like it’s not all the way in the past tense.

He walks past the quiet softball field and soccer field and over the covered bridge that leads back to the football complex where he and players enter on Saturdays before the games. Drink is the fourth of six children. He shared a room in the trailer with two brothers (his three sisters shared another) and was picked on by them. He rotated sleeping on different levels of a bunk bed at his brothers’ command.

His older brother Jeremy, the president of a hospital system in Southwest Missouri, calls him at least once a week and attends pretty much every home game. “He’s always been blind as a bat,” Jeremy says. “In all candor, we didn’t have much money, so those were the glasses given to him. Dad was a teacher and mom stayed home and took care of the kids. That’s why they were as big as his face when he took pictures. One of the funniest stories is that Mom once accidentally left him at the eye doctor. She had to take alllll these kids to school. She went and dropped him off before school, took everybody else, forgot to come back and get him.”

I ask him about Drink now, about what he sees in him. Jeremy keeps it simple. “I ask for his opinion about how to lead,” he says. “How do you motivate? How do you inspire people around you?”

ASK MALZAHN ABOUT Eli Drinkwitz and it’s like he’s talking about himself. Drink is his guy, shaped out of clay under Malzahn’s intense work schedule. He doesn’t get too deep about anything different about Drink, of course; why would he? “Well, he is unique … it’s hard to explain, it works to his advantage,” Malzahn says. But he wants to talk about Drink as a young linebacker in high school: “He’d knock your head off now. Knock your stinkin’ head off. He has those glasses and looks a certain way, don’t let the kinda whatever you call it, don’t let that kid you.” He wants to talk about him as someone willing to “grind” for $13,000 a year in the labyrinths of quality control, someone who never recoiled from the slog of watching film, as it was his job after every Auburn game to break down the tape through the eyes of an opponent, to self-scout the team and present a report to Malzahn as though Drink were the defensive coordinator. In their first year together, Auburn won the national title. Yes, Malzahn wants to talk about Drink’s leadership and communication skills, to tell me that Drink possesses an imperceptible gift of being able to be smart about football but also relate to anyone, that everyone at Auburn from the secretary to the equipment people knew him and liked him. A nerd? Hell no. Malzahn called Drink and Casey Woods, now the offensive coordinator at SMU, the Ryan Brothers, in homage to Rex and Rob. “That dude is a worker,” Malzahn says. “He’s earned everything to get where he’s at. At Arkansas State he’d get there at 6 in the morning and wouldn’t leave ’til midnight. He wouldn’t flinch. He gets crap done.”

This is kind of the way Cook wants to talk about Drink, too. In the irrevocable terms of what they’ve been through together, their relationship linked in that Drink will always be the coach who stuck by the player last season and even this one, when Cook was booed at home games and went on to be one of the best quarterbacks in the SEC. Cook being a Missouri kid, a St. Louisan who dreamed about playing for Mizzou when he was a child going to games, who last week brought Drink’s voice to quiver in the postgame news conference when he was injured early against Auburn and then returned from the hospital in the third quarter to lead Mizzou to 6-1. “What can I tell you about Drink?” Cook asks. “Like, he’s goofy and he has humor. But he’s cutthroat at the same time. He represents Missouri with a chip on his shoulder, a little swag. I used to think of him more of like as a nerd, kind of like that. That idea, ‘Ah, OK, this guy is really smart and has glasses but he’s probably not, like, swaggy.’ As time has gone on, it’s changed.”

Drink’s old coach in high school, Frank Vines, who led the Alma Airedales for more than 30 years and was a three-time state champion, now watches every Missouri game from the rocking chair in the living room of his house back in Alma. “I’m getting old and went through a lot of kids,” he says. “Eli was not a great athlete. But he was very smart, very dedicated, and those are the two things I think that have kind of stood out in his life. On our team he was like having a coach out on the field.”

Watching Drink now prowl the sidelines is watching someone with his own style but who exhibits an amalgamation of what he has learned at various stops: Arkansas State, Auburn, North Carolina State, App State. The intense game-planning in his office and rigorous schedule of watching film like Malzahn, even late at night with his feet propped up on the couch, at home, with his daughters. Vines was a yeller, a tough guy, “the bad guy,” he says to me, “I didn’t baby anybody around,” and that is one thing Drink must have decided he didn’t want to be; he doesn’t scream at players often, and at one point, as a student, he told Vines to his face that he didn’t like the way he said “Goddamn,” using the Lord’s name in vain. Drink, for example, sits quietly in the head chair of the staff meeting going around the room and letting position coaches talk about their observations, much more in the style of a listener than a dictator.

Zac Thomas, Drink’s quarterback for one glorious season at Appalachian State, laments what they could have done with an even better team had Drink not left for Missouri in 2019. “He does a really good job of relating to players,” Thomas says. “He’s one of the first coaches I had in that level where you could come to him with problems, he was a sounding board. The way he goes about himself, cracking jokes — yes, football is an intense game, and you go through a lot of hardships, but you also have to be able to have the laughter, bring joy to the locker room. He brings people on cookouts, paintball, skiing trips, fun activities, he does ways to reward you to keep you going. He’s not the coolest coach on the face of the planet, but he knows what he’s good at.”

VINCE LOMBARDI WORE glasses. The game of football actually seems built on those horned rims and the sport he was able to see through them that no one else could. A company in New York now sells replica frames called Vince, describing this era as an eyewear renaissance and the throwback of his championship look. Woody Hayes wore them, too, in a different way, a brutalist accentuation of the black hat yanked over his ears and his shoulders bursting through his button-up jacket, his eyes magnified through those lenses and the insatiable temper nearly popping them right out of his skull. Jim Harbaugh wears glasses like a Siberian prison wears the snow. Supposedly, he says, to honor three people: Hayes, Michael Douglas in “Falling Down,” and Malcolm X.

Drink is in his office, wearing glasses. His tennis shoes are propped up on a velvet couch. The view through his office window is of the north end zone of the stadium and a clear and inviolable sky. When the season began, the Tigers were picked by plenty of people to make the first-ever 12-team playoff; so many pundits picked them that it honestly seemed to diehard Missouri followers like a bad harbinger. Mizzou has never once been able to follow up a great season with an even better one. He shows me the customized Cuban cigar humidor in black and gold that he received as a gift for winning the Cotton Bowl. Some texts from the Chief, singer Eric Church himself, a big fan of Drink. The Cotton Bowl ring and football from the game on a stand. A dozen other trinkets from last season’s run, an actual Cotton Bowl throw rug, and this giant framed picture right outside his door that shows him wearing sunglasses and the microphone headset thing extending in front of his mouth as he stares off into the distance with a hard-won frown, as if he were Nick Saban.

The entire office wall is made of glass. The view is of the sky and the stadium bleachers and the goalposts and the grass berm and Mizzou’s “Rock M.” Beyond that Providence Road and the University Hospital, the brick dorms with the windows open, a view all the way toward the columns at Jesse Hall and the most underrated campus in the SEC. By the window, to preview this same view of the future, Drink has a poster board of what the north end zone will look like in two years. Multiple levels of luxury suites rising several stories above a shrunken Rock M, an expanded concourse, thousands of people milling about the unfamiliar edifice, new seats where most of the grass used to be. I tell Drink, who didn’t grow up in Missouri but whose parents took him to Branson a few times, that when I look out there, I don’t exactly see what he does: sunshine, sure, but there are darker implications. I look out there and see Charles Johnson pushing with the ball one more time on “fifth down” from the 1, and Colorado “winning” the national title though he still didn’t cross the goal line. I see Matt Davison in the cool night air from my vantage point in the bleachers as a 17-year-old shocked that Mizzou was about to beat No. 1 Nebraska, Davison’s gloved hands cradling a deflected pass from Scott Frost off the foot of a Husker receiver named Shevin Wiggins with no time left in regulation, as the fans begin to storm the field at Faurot but then have to pull back in stupor as the most dominant team of the 1990s miraculously ties the game and then goes on to beat the Tigers in overtime. This is known as the Flea Kicker. Drink doesn’t see the field goal attempt, like I do, hook right in double overtime to ruin an undefeated season against South Carolina in 2013. He doesn’t understand the bodies that are buried and how deep they go, and thankfully he doesn’t care. Last year, Harrison Mevis drilled a 61-yard field goal into that end zone and Mizzou beat Kansas State.

“Mizzou was a challenger brand,” he tells me. Of course, he knows it doesn’t have the cachet of Alabama, or even somewhere like Florida. Which is why he took the job thinking the state had untapped potential given the talent that St. Louis and Kansas City regularly produce but that usually goes elsewhere. NIL and Drinkwitz are changing this. He has signed three top-25 classes in his Missouri tenure and kept several of the state’s best players (and some best nationally) home, including five-star recruits such as Burden and Williams Nwaneri. The cachet thing still proves true, though, when the Tigers drop in the polls three times after victories against Boston College, Vanderbilt and Auburn. It will take forever to be seen as Alabama’s worthy opponent, even if they beat the Tide on Saturday.

“We wanted to create story and space because if you’re not a blue blood it’s hard to get written about or recognized,” Drink says. “But now we’re to the point where we’re there, and it needs to be a lot less about me and a lot more about Brady Cook and Luther and Theo Wease. Those guys are way more important to this than I am. But it took a little of me putting myself out there to get noticed. But now that they notice and know who we are, it doesn’t need to be about me. I was a lot more active on social media. When I was at SEC media days, I was a lot wittier and a lot further and willing to take shots at other people, maybe more antagonizing; this year’s approach to media days was much more calculated.” No one at Mizzou has ever spent so much time on his image or being mischievous. The Star Wars thing he did with Mullen. Taking a jab at Tennessee’s Josh Heupel by calling a timeout last year at the end of the game against Tennessee, the game well in hand. Heupel is known for running up the score and kicking onside kicks against lesser teams, and when the Tennessee kicker missed against Missouri, Drink deadpanned after, “We stand on business, Josh.” About the only opposing coach Drink has never been willing to tweak is Saban.

“I tried to avoid doing anything that would create a narrative or create a viral moment, because I wanted the focus to be on the team and the players. As great as Saban is, when he retired, they replaced him in 48 hours. And the story was no longer about him and Alabama, it was about who’s next. No matter how good you are, you’re always replaceable.”

I’D RATHER HAVE a nerd as a coach. I’d rather have this guy who cannonballs off the diving board into the backyard swimming pool at his daughters’ command. I’d rather have someone who is openly self-referential than some other kind of coach, or the idea of some other kind of coach. I’d rather have this guy who drives his daughters in the back of a golf cart through the neighborhood to the Phillips 66 to get them ice cream or cinnamon buns or Andy’s Frozen Custard. Who takes them fly-fishing in Montana and wears the little safari-style hat. This guy who once sang “Livin’ on a Prayer” in public at a Mexican resort. As someone posted on X in November, “He may be a nerd, but he’s our nerd.” At this point, after all, no one has led Mizzou all the way. Not Don Faurot, the immortal coach in statue outside the stadium and for whom it is still named. Not Dan Devine, who had an 11-win season six decades ago, walking the old sideline in a suit and tie and top hat before he went to coach the Packers. Not Pinkel. So why not this person? This history major; this occasional strummer of guitars (he has two in his office) and smoker of Cuban cigars; this lover of Wendy’s hamburgers, this doer of dishes on weeknights when he comes home from football, this guy who somehow managed to get his daughters into Taylor Swift concerts this year and last, who gets them coffee now when he takes them to school. This guy who makes opposing fans boil over simply because he is a singularity in the game. I’d really rather him change nothing about himself at all — nothing about the way he looks, about the way he speaks, about the way he seems to have gotten under Heupel’s skin. Look at him. Look at his aura. Mizzou has never had anyone like him.

THE PLAYERS GATHER around him. The light is heavy outside. The turf of the practice field steams. He has been watching from a distance and standing behind a machine that sends footballs into the air to mimic a punt. He has a microphone that he talks through and huge speakers on the side of the field project his voice so players in every position group can hear him. Earlier in the day, the first time they saw him he ran into the team meeting room with his arms waving in the air, clapping to get the team going, shouting expletives when talking about getting the football into the air against Murray State. But then later out on the turf, the players put their hands on each other’s shoulders as he speaks to them, lost in the group except for the sound of his voice. And to be fair to him, from a distance, in the middle of the field with the players and his staff, in a white hoodie in the noonday sun, nothing really stands out about him. He looks like any other coach. Except for two red indentions on the sides of his nose where his glasses used to be.

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    ESPN Staff Writer

      • MLB writer and analyst for ESPN.com
      • Former NBA writer and analyst for ESPN.com
      • Been with ESPN since 2013

  • David Schoenfield

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    David Schoenfield

    ESPN Senior Writer

    • Covers MLB for ESPN.com
    • Former deputy editor of Page 2
    • Been with ESPN.com since 1995

Nov 16, 2025, 09:56 PM ET

It’s hot stove season! The 2025-26 MLB offseason is officially here, and we have you covered with grades and analysis for every major signing and trade this winter.

Whether it’s a big-money free agent signing that changes the course of your team’s future or a blockbuster trade, we’ll weigh in with what it all means for next season and beyond.

ESPN MLB experts Bradford Doolittle and David Schoenfield will evaluate each move as it happens, so follow along here — this story will continue to be updated. Check back in for the freshest analysis through the start of spring training.

Related links: Tracker | Top 50 free agents

The deal: Five years

Grade: A-

If there was an award for free agent prediction most to likely come true, Josh Naylor returning to the Seattle Mariners would have been the front-runner, so it’s hardly a surprise that this is the first significant signing of the offseason (pending a physical). As soon as the Mariners’ season ended with that heartbreaking loss in Game 7 of the ALCS, the front office made it clear that re-signing Naylor was its top priority. Such public vocalizations at that level are rare — and the Mariners backed them up with a five-year contract.

It’s easy to understand why they wanted Naylor back. The Mariners have been searching for a long-term solution at first base for, oh, going on 20 years — really, since they traded John Olerud in 2004. Ty France gave them a couple solid seasons in 2021 and 2022, but since 2005 only the Pirates’ first basemen have produced a lower OPS than Seattle’s.

Naylor, meanwhile, came over at the trade deadline from Arizona and provided a huge spark down the stretch, hitting .299/.341/.490 with nine home runs and 33 RBIs in 54 games, good for 2.2 WAR. Including his time with the Diamondbacks, he finished at .295/.353/.462 with 20 home runs in 2025. Given the pitcher-friendly nature of T-Mobile Park, it’s not easy to attract free agent hitters to Seattle, but Naylor spoke about how he loves hitting there. The numbers back that up: In 43 career games at T-Mobile, he has hit .304 and slugged .534.

Importantly for a Seattle lineup that is heavy on strikeouts, Naylor is a high-contact hitter in the middle of the order; he finished with the 17th-best strikeout rate among qualified hitters in 2025. Naylor’s entire game is a bit of an oxymoron. He ranks in just the seventh percentile in chase rate but still had a nearly league-average walk rate (46th percentile) with an excellent contact rate. He can’t run (third percentile!) but stole 30 bases in 32 attempts, including 19-for-19 after joining the Mariners. He doesn’t look like he’d be quick in the field, but his Statcast defensive metrics have been above average in each of the past four seasons.

He’s not a star — 3.1 WAR in 2025 was a career high — but he’s a safe, predictable player to bank on for the next few years. This deal runs through his age-33 season, so maybe there’s some risk at the end of the contract, but for a team with World Series aspirations in 2026, the Mariners needed to bring Naylor back. The front office will be happy with this signing and so will Mariners fans. — David Schoenfield

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Sources: Naylor, Mariners reunite on 5-year deal

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November 17, 2025

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Sources: Naylor, Mariners reunite on 5-year deal

First baseman Josh Naylor and the Seattle Mariners are in agreement on a five-year contract, sources told ESPN on Sunday, reuniting one of the best free agent bats available with the team that made re-signing him its top offseason priority.

Acquired at the trade deadline by the Mariners, the 28-year-old Naylor made an immediate impact offensively, defensively and on the basepaths, solidifying a position that had been a weakness for Seattle.

The five-year deal, which is pending a physical, is the first major signing of baseball’s offseason and adds Naylor to a strong Seattle core that helped the Mariners reach Game 7 of the American League Championship Series. He joins AL MVP runner-up Cal Raleigh, star center fielder Julio Rodriguez and a deep Mariners rotation as they look to reach the first World Series in franchise history.

With his high motor and infectious energy, Naylor immediately found a home in Seattle. In 54 games with the Mariners, Naylor hit .299/.341/.490 with nine home runs, 33 RBIs and 19 stolen bases in 19 attempts. A solid-average defender at first base, he helped the Mariners win their first division title since 2001 and then hit .340 with three home runs in 12 postseason games.

Combined with 93 games with the Arizona Diamondbacks this season, the left-handed Naylor hit .295/.353/.462 with 20 home runs, 92 RBIs and a career-high 3.1 WAR. An aggressive hitter with excellent contact skills, Naylor ranked in the top 20 in lowest strikeout rate among qualified batters.

The most shocking part to Naylor’s season: He was 30-for-32 in stolen-base attempts despite registering as one of the slowest runners in the majors, ranking in just the third percentile in sprint speed. Naylor would often get a walking lead off first base and was perfect in stolen-base attempts with Seattle, even as teams became more aware of his tactics.

The Diamondbacks had acquired Naylor last offseason from the Cleveland Guardians, where Naylor hit 31 home runs in 2024 and made the All-Star team. Over his seven-year career, Naylor has hit .269/.329/.447 with 104 home runs, 435 RBIs and 55 steals, appearing in four postseasons.

Originally drafted in the first round as the No. 12 pick by the Miami Marlins in 2015 out of Mississauga, Canada, Naylor is the oldest of three baseball-playing brothers: Bo Naylor, drafted No. 29 in 2018, is a catcher with the Guardians, and younger brother, Myles, was the No. 39 pick in 2023 and is a third baseman in the Athletics‘ system.

ESPN’s David Schoenfield contributed to this report.

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Connelly’s 25 favorite games: How they went down and what they mean

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November 16, 2025

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Connelly's 25 favorite games: How they went down and what they mean

  • Bill ConnellyNov 16, 2025, 06:15 PM ET

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      Bill Connelly is a writer for ESPN. He covers college football, soccer and tennis. He has been at ESPN since 2019.

In Week 12, college football said, “You’re going to miss me when I’m gone.” The results were consequential enough: No. 4 Alabama went down at home in the funkiest fashion imaginable, No. 5 Georgia pulled off a statement win and plenty of aspiring College Football Playoff contenders — No. 3 Texas A&M, No. 16 Georgia Tech, No. 17 USC, No. 18 Michigan — narrowly avoided disaster.

But really, this was one of the best college football weekends of the season because the college football itself was just so damn good. Tuesday night’s MACtion was incredible. We got beautiful ACC nonsense Friday night. The noon and 3:30 p.m. ET shifts gave us a number of heart-stoppers, and while Saturday evening wasn’t particularly dramatic, we still got a rush-off between Missouri’s Ahmad Hardy (300 yards and 3 touchdowns against Mississippi State) and Ole Miss’ Kewan Lacy (224 yards and 3 touchdowns against Florida) and an angry, late statement of intent from BYU. Meanwhile, the smaller-school ranks gave us countless overtimes, comebacks and surprises, plus some last-minute playoff berths.

In this column, we have a longstanding policy: If a week is just so good that you want to relive it game by game, then we relive it game by game! With stops to explore different playoff and conference title odds, here are my 25 favorite games from one of my favorite weekends of the season.

My 25 favorite games of Week 12

1. No. 3 Texas A&M 31, South Carolina 30. We’ll start with the obvious one. At halftime, after probably the worst half of Marcel Reed‘s life, I looked up what the worst-ever home loss was for a top-three team against an unranked opponent. Best I could tell, it was a tie between No. 2 Iowa’s 24-7 loss to Purdue in 2021 and No. 2 Auburn’s 27-10 loss to Arkansas in 2006. Since the score was 30-3 South Carolina at the time, this felt awfully relevant.

Reed had misfired nonstop in the first half, going a shocking 6-for-19 with 2 interceptions and 2 sacks. Almost anytime he delivered a semi-accurate ball, his receivers dropped it. A&M was unbeaten and obviously had a mulligan to give in this one, but it was fair to wonder if the Aggies might drop quite a bit in the playoff rankings, enough to make fans nervous heading into their season ender against Texas.

Some relevant second-half stats:

Total yards: A&M 371 (9.8 per play), SC 76 (2.9)

Success rate*: A&M 65.8%, South Carolina 23.1%

Marcel Reed: 16-for-20 for 298 yards and three touchdowns

SC’s LaNorris Sellers: 6-for-11 for 63 yards and four sacks (net yards in 15 pass attempts: 39)

(* Success rate: How frequently an offense is gaining 50% of necessary yardage on first down, 70% on second and 100% on third or fourth.)

A&M won the second half 28-0, and the Aggies only made things interesting after a fumbled, goal-to-go trick play kept them from going up 38-30 late. South Carolina had a chance to drive for a shocking game-winning field goal, but that would have required Sellers to stay upright. He was sacked twice, and the Gamecocks turned the ball over on downs.

I’ve been referencing Playoff Tiers quite a bit lately — it’s my way of separating teams into groups with similar playoff odds (combining the Allstate Playoff Predictor’s odds with odds derived from SP+). Now that A&M has avoided disaster, Tier 1 is pretty much set.

CFP Tier 1 odds: Ohio State 99.9%, Indiana 99.9%, Texas A&M 99.9%.

While we’re at it, the five teams in Tier 2 are also in excellent shape.

CFP Tier 2 odds: Texas Tech 94.9%, Georgia 94.8%, Ole Miss 94.0%, Oregon 88.4%, Notre Dame 78.2%

There’s still some maneuverability here but not much. And honestly, considering Notre Dame is a projected favorite of at least 31 points in each of its final two games (Syracuse and Stanford), I don’t see how the Irish are under about 95%.

2. Kent State 42, Akron 35 (OT). Last Tuesday was my favorite day of MACtion in quite some time. We’ll get to Western Michigan’s win over Ohio below, but Kent State and Akron played an all-timer for the Wagon Wheel.

Kent State took a 35-17 lead early in the fourth quarter, thanks in part to four Dru DeShields touchdown passes — including a 89-yarder to big-play man Da’Realyst Clark (who also has two kick return scores and a touchdown pass) — but you don’t give up the Wagon Wheel without a fight! Akron scored, recovered a perfect, chip-shot onside kick, kicked a field goal, recovered a fumble and tied the game on a 13-yard Ben Finley-to-Israel Polk touchdown and 2-point conversion.

And then, after all that, DeShields found Ardell Banks for a 25-yard touchdown on the first play of overtime, Akron went four-and-out, and the Golden Flashes won anyway.

The win somehow kept bowl hopes alive for Kent State, which is an incredible thing to say considering the Golden Flashes went 0-12 last season with one of the worst FBS teams of the 21st century, then fired head coach Kenni Burns in mid-April. They have bounced back in a way that should encourage UMass fans, if nothing else — the Minutemen are on pace for an 0-12 record with nearly the same awful SP+ rating that Kent State had last season. At 4-6, the Golden Flashes probably won’t win their final two games to get to six wins (SP+ gives them a 7.8% chance of beating both Central Michigan and Northern Illinois), but SP+ didn’t think they would win four games either! Damn the computers! Go Flashes!

3. FCS: No. 11 Harvard 45, Penn 43. Harvard had to take this one twice. The unbeaten Crimson, darlings of the SP+ ratings, trailed 27-14 late in the first half but used a 21-0 run to take control and led 42-33 with less than four minutes remaining. But Penn charged back, scoring a short touchdown, forcing a three-and-out and taking a shocking lead on a 30-yard field goal with just 22 seconds left. That was just enough time for Jaden Craig (390 yards and 3 TDs on the day) to complete three passes and for Kieran Corr to knock in a 53-yard field goal at the buzzer.

Harvard has now clinched a share of the Ivy League title, and while their SP+ rating fell a bit, the Crimson are still as proven as anyone in the non-North Dakota State category.

Current FCS SP+ top 10
1. North Dakota State (11-0): 34.7
2. Tarleton State (10-1): 27.0
3. Harvard (9-0): 25.8
4. Lehigh (11-0): 24.7
5. Montana State (9-2): 24.2
6. Montana (11-0): 22.3
7. North Dakota (7-4): 20.8
8. Tennessee Tech (10-1): 20.1
9. Stephen F. Austin (9-2): 20.0
10. Mercer (9-1): 20.0

There’s a 3.5-point drop-off to No. 11 Rhode Island, but at least nine teams will be able to talk themselves into a potential national title game run, at least if they don’t land on NDSU’s side of the 24-team bracket. And even with its defense struggling Saturday, Harvard is among those contenders.

4. No. 11 Oklahoma 23, No. 4 Alabama 21. South Carolina over A&M would have been a massive upset. This one was still pretty big, though. It was familiar, too.

One of my go-to measures is what I call Postgame Win Expectancy (PGWE). It takes a look at the predictive stats a game produces — the stuff that eventually feeds into SP+ — tosses them into the air and says, “With these stats, Team A could have expected to win this game X% of the time.” By PGWE, Alabama’s loss to Vanderbilt last season was the least likely defeat of the season.

Against the Commodores, Bama had a comfortable success rate advantage (55.6% to 42.7%) with bigger big plays (yards per play: Bama 8.8, Vandy 5.6), fewer negative plays, more goal-to-go situations, you name it. Vandy won with perfectly timed bursts and turnovers that included a perfectly deflected pick-six into the arms of Randon Fontenette. Based on the game’s stats, Bama would have won 98.5% of the time. But with a 1.5% chance, the Commodores won. Combined with a late egg-laying at Oklahoma, it contributed to the Tide falling short of the CFP.

Against Oklahoma on Saturday, Bama produced a massive success rate advantage (46.7% to 27.5%) with fewer negative plays and, despite a massive field position disadvantage, more goal-to-go situations and the same number of red zone trips. The Tide’s PGWE against the Sooners: 95.2%. OU was going to need defensive heroics (such as an 87-yard Eli Bowen pick-six) and special teams explosions (such as a 42-yard Isaac Sategna III punt return and a tipped field goal before halftime) to win this one. Guess what they got?

Thanks to an earlier run of ranked wins, the two-loss Tide are still comfortable in this year’s playoff hunt – they’ll probably have to suffer an Iron Bowl defeat to an interim-coached Auburn team to fall out of contention (and nothing wild and unexpected has ever happened in the Iron Bowl before). But with the loss, they fall from Tier 2 to Tier 3 in my playoff tiers. In addition to the top two ACC contenders and one-loss BYU, they’re joined in Tier 3 by the team that just beat them.

CFP Tier 3 odds: Alabama 58.6%, BYU 50.2%, Oklahoma 41.7%, Virginia 41.7%, Georgia Tech 36.6%

Combined with Georgia’s comfortable win over Texas, Bama’s SEC title odds took a bit of a hit too.

SEC title odds, per SP+: Georgia 33.0%, Texas A&M 31.5%, Alabama 30.0%, Ole Miss 5.4%

I’m guessing Bama fans have seen their team win enough SEC titles through the years to get a little spoiled – they’re probably more interested in CFP odds. Still, this remains an interesting race.

5. Division II: Lenoir-Rhyne 48, Catawba 46. On a beautiful, 67-degree fall day in Hickory, North Carolina, 4,987 fans saw the home team blow an enormous lead and win anyway. Lenoir-Rhyne went up 42-12 with 4:29 left in the third quarter, then watched Catawba unleash a 34-0 run over the following 18 minutes. Amari McArthur’s 87-yard catch and run (!) made it 46-42 Catawba with 1:14 left, but Khamoni Robinson completed four passes, then charged 13 yards into the end zone with six seconds remaining.

6. No. 16 Georgia Tech 36, Boston College 34. After last week’s chaos, Georgia Tech and Virginia entered Week 12 atop the ACC hierarchy. Virginia played maybe its best game of the year in a surprisingly easy 34-17 win over Duke in Durham, but Tech thought long and hard about going ker-splat in this one.

BC, which played good ball in losses to Louisville and Notre Dame before face-planting last week against SMU, brought its A-game back in this one. Despite yet another ridiculous day from Tech’s Haynes King — 371 passing yards, 61 non-sack rushing yards — the Yellow Jackets found themselves trailing 28-17 heading into the fourth quarter. Jordan Allen‘s 54-yard score gave Tech the lead, but Turbo Richard responded with a 43-yard burst to make it 34-33 Eagles. BC missed the 2-point conversion, however, and that loomed large when King drove the Jackets 68 yards in four minutes and set up Aidan Birr’s chip-shot field goal for the win.

Virginia and Georgia Tech boast the best title odds at the moment, but both still have work to do.

ACC title odds, per SP+: Virginia 41.3%, Georgia Tech 27.1%, SMU 17.2%, Miami 6.1%, Pitt 5.2%, Duke 3.0%

Virginia, 6-1 in conference play, can clinch a spot in the ACC championship game with a rivalry win over Virginia Tech in two weeks (projected win probability, per SP+: 88%), while 6-1 Tech has a trickier game against Pitt next week (55%). Pitt, 5-1, likely has to beat both Georgia Tech and Miami (15%) to have a shot, and SMU, 5-1 without playing either Virginia or GT, has to beat Louisville and Cal (44%) to remain in the mix. Miami lurks at 4-2 — the Hurricanes don’t have a great shot of sneaking in, but they’ll be the favorites if they get to Charlotte.

7. Division III: Merchant Marine 39, Coast Guard 38. “College GameDay” at Pitt was pretty fun, but if I were in charge of locations — and it’s probably good that I’m not! — I would have sent Rece and the guys to … Fenway Park. That’s where the 8,966 in attendance for the Secretaries’ Cup saw maybe the most back-and-forth game of the weekend. Neither team led by more than five in the second half, and after Harrison Hensley gave Coast Guard the lead with 6:52 remaining, Merchant Marine quarterback Bubba Mustain scored from 7 yards out with just 20 seconds left to give the Mariners the win.

Mustain on the day: 46 carries for 274 yards and 3 touchdowns, plus 6-for-8 passing for 150 yards and another 2 scores. Goodness! Give him an honorary 10 points in my Heisman of the Week section below.

8. No. 18 Michigan 24, Northwestern 22. This one changed in a blink. Jordan Marshall scored with 41 seconds left in the third quarter to give Michigan a 21-9 lead, and Northwestern’s offense, which gained 181 yards in three quarters, didn’t seem capable of a comeback. But Preston Stone capped a 75-yard drive with a short touchdown, and Braden Turner returned an interception to Michigan’s 6. Caleb Komolafe gave the Wildcats a sudden lead, and Michigan turned the ball over on its next two possessions as well. But the Wolverines got one last shot and took advantage. Bryce Underwood completed a third-down pass to Andrew Marsh, then ran for another first down, and Dominic Zvada‘s 31-yard field goal at the buzzer saved the day.

Michigan’s playoff odds aren’t great because the Wolverines will almost certainly need to beat top-ranked Ohio State again to get there — as if that could ever happen — but they’re still alive, and they’re still part of …

CFP Tier 4 odds: Utah 29.9%, USC 17.8%, Miami 15.5%, Vanderbilt 13.8%, SMU 10.0%, Michigan 7.6%. (Technically Pitt still has a chance at 3.9% too.)

At most, only one team will likely get in from this tier, and with only games against Kansas State and Kansas remaining (odds of winning both, per SP+: 68%), Utah is in solid shape even (or especially?) if the Utes miss the Big 12 championship game. But USC, Miami and Michigan all remain in the hunt, and both the Trojans and Wolverines had to pull off comebacks Saturday.

9. Division II: Tiffin 23, No. 8 Findlay 21. It wasn’t the most prolific game of the day, but Tiffin and Findlay managed to pack in eight lead changes, including five in the second half and two in the last minute. Findlay appeared to have kept its unbeaten record intact with a Jayden Farmer touchdown with 53 seconds remaining but despite getting pinned at its 6-yard line after a penalty on the ensuing kickoff, Tiffin drove 94 yards in nine plays, and on the final play of the game Alex Johnson found Jaedyn McKinstry for a 13-yard, game-winning score.

10. UNLV 29, Utah State 26 (2OT). Oof. With a chance to secure bowl eligibility, Utah State set up a 44-yard field goal for Tanner Rinker at the buzzer in regulation, but he missed it. And after UNLV missed a field goal itself in overtime, Rinker got a look at a 41-yarder for the win. Missed it too. He finally knocked one in to start the second OT, but UNLV’s Kayden McGee raced 25 yards on the next snap, and UNLV moved to 8-2. The Rebels have an excellent chance of finishing with double-digit wins for the second time in three years (and only the third time in 50).

11 and 12. East Carolina 31, Memphis 27; Navy 41, No. 24 South Florida 38.

Make it three one-score losses for Memphis in 2025. On Senior Day in Greenville, the Tigers led at halftime thanks in part to an 84-yard Sutton Smith touchdown run, but Katin Houser and Payton Mangrum connected for a 31-yard score with 1:08 left, and Mike Wright Jr. picked off Brendon Lewis‘ last-second heave to secure the win and move ECU to 5-1 in American Conference play and keep its slight conference title hopes alive.

Earlier Saturday, Navy took an early lead on USF and somehow made it hold up. The Midshipmen rushed for 338 yards and led 14-3 after one quarter, and while USF cut the deficit to one score on five occasions, the Midshipmen responded with a score of their own four times and recovered a late onside kick to finish off the upset.

USF’s loss was an eliminator in the race for the Group of 5’s playoff race, which, according to the combined playoff odds used above, basically give the Sun Belt’s James Madison the best shot of reaching the CFP.

CFP Tier (Group of) 5 odds: James Madison 40.3%, North Texas 30.4%, Tulane 10.8%

The American Conference still has the best chance of producing the CFP’s representative, be it North Texas, Tulane or a longer shot, but JMU is the single most likely team.

13. Clemson 20, No. 20 Louisville 19. Clemson fumbled the ball on third-and-goal from the 1, recovered it, then fumbled again on fourth down. Louisville committed three fourth-quarter personal fouls (it felt like about 12) and missed a potential go-ahead field goal. Clemson muffed a punt snap. Louisville missed another field goal.

I guess games don’t always have to be good to be good. This one was tense, gripping and all sorts of sloppy — as sloppy as the win probability chart, in fact.

With the loss, Louisville no longer has a role to play in the ACC race.

14. Arizona State 25, West Virginia 23. Still hoping to snag bowl eligibility at 4-6, West Virginia did so many things right in this one. The Mountaineers limited ASU quarterback Jeff Sims to 81 rushing yards — he had 228 his last time out — and scored on second-half touchdown passes of 75 yards (from Scotty Fox Jr. to Jeff Weimer) and 90 yards (Fox to Cyncir Bowers) to take a 23-22 lead into the final minutes. But Jesus Gomez‘s 49-yard field goal gave ASU a 2-point advantage, and Fox was out of magic. He was picked off by Keith Abney II near midfield. Ballgame.

15. FCS: Valparaiso 32, Stetson 31 (OT). You know how coaches will sometimes talk about having one 2-point play they’re particularly confident in? Valpo came up with a pretty good solution for that: Make every 2-point play your best! Down 24-0 late in the third quarter, the Beacons surged back with three touchdowns and three 2-pointers — the last of which came with just one second left in regulation — and when they got the ball second in OT and scored to get within a point, what did they do? Go for two and make it, of course!

16. Division III: No. 25 Franklin & Marshall 29, No. 3 Johns Hopkins 28. What’s better than beating a mighty rival to secure your first-ever Division III playoff berth? Doing it in overtime after coming back from 21 points down!

November is peak “players storm the end zone in celebration after an historic touchdown” month. Love it.

17. Western Michigan 17, Ohio 13. This game was a little more controlled than Kent State-Akron, but this Tuesday nighter was just as tense and more important in the MAC standings. Every score gave a team the lead, and Ohio finished a 17-play, 10-minute drive with a short Sieh Bangura touchdown to build a 13-10 advantage early in the fourth quarter. Just three plays later, following a 71-yard catch and run by Tailique Williams, Jalen Buckley scored to make it 17-13. Three stops later, WMU was in sole possession of first place in the MAC. The Broncos are 5-1 with five teams tied at 4-2.

18. Sam Houston 26, Delaware 23. Sam Houston went on a 26-0 run to seize control, but Delaware scored two touchdowns and recovered an onside kick. But Nate Reed‘s late 36-yard field goal attempt failed. SHSU has won two in a row after an 0-8 start.

19. No. 17 USC 26, No. 21 Iowa 21. First half: Iowa averages 6.8 yards per play while building a 21-10 halftime lead. Second half: The Hawkeyes go scoreless with a turnover and turnover on downs, and Jayden Maiava leads the Trojans to a comeback win that saves their CFP hopes (and sends “College GameDay” back to Eugene for this week’s USC-Oregon game).

20. Division II: No. 6 Central Washington 19, No. 24 Western Oregon 17. Down 17-3 heading into the fourth quarter, CWU scored twice to get within four points, and with the Lone Star Conference title on the line, Kennedy McGill found Logan Brady for a 13-yard score as time expired.

21. Division II: West Liberty 68, Wheeling 67. The most ridiculous track meet of the day was in West Liberty, West Virginia. The game began with a 100-yard kick return score and never calmed down for a second. WLU’s Hunter Patterson had a 62-yard TD catch and a 68-yard TD run in the third quarter alone, and after Wheeling erased a 10-point, fourth-quarter deficit to take the lead, Osama Hurst caught a short touchdown with eight seconds left for the win.

22. Division II: West Texas A&M 45, Angelo State 44. West Texas A&M told WLU, “Game-winning score with eight seconds left? We can cut two seconds off of that!” Angelo State led 37-17 in the third quarter, but the Rams scored 28 points in the final 20 minutes, and Zach Phipps caught the game-winner with six seconds remaining. Division II has been ridiculously fun the last couple of weeks. Can’t wait for the playoffs.

23. FCS: No. 22 South Dakota 53, No. 23 Southern Illinois 51 (5OT). Can I interest you in a five-overtime marathon with playoff stakes? South Dakota moved to 8-4, but it took forever. The Yotes had to erase a 31-14 third-quarter deficit, then watch SIU send the game to OT with a late field goal. But Larenzo Fenner‘s two-point catch in the fifth OT made the difference.

24. NAIA: No. 20 Georgetown College 34, No. 10 Campbellsville 32. Trailing 34-13 with nine minutes remaining, Campbellsville scored three times, but Jett Engle’s 2-point conversion pass with 26 seconds remaining failed. Georgetown needed this one to keep NAIA playoff hopes alive and juuuuuust barely got it.

25. FCS: Elon 31, Campbell 24. We end with one more smaller-school finish. Elon watched a 17-3 halftime lead turn into a 24-17 fourth-quarter deficit, but Landen Clark‘s 19-yard scramble on fourth-and-8 tied the game with 2:50 left. The Phoenix got the ball back at their 5 with about a minute left — play for overtime, right? Nope! Go deep to Isaiah Fuhrmann instead!

I’d say that silenced the home crowd.

This week in SP+

The SP+ rankings have been updated for the week. Let’s take a look at the teams that saw the biggest change in their overall ratings. (Note: We’re looking at ratings, not rankings.)

Moving up

Here are the five teams that saw their ratings rise the most this week:

Nevada: up 4.6 adjusted points per game (ranking rose from 128th to 121st)

Texas Tech: up 3.6 points (from fourth to third)

UConn: up 3.2 points (from 58th to 47th)

Texas State: up 3.0 points (from 98th to 80th)

Virginia: up 3.0 points (from 43rd to 34th)

It’s hard for a team near the top of the ratings to gain a ton of points this late in the year, but Texas Tech’s performance against UCF was so resounding that the Red Raiders nearly rose more than anyone else this week.

Here are some of the key stats if we filter out garbage time:

Yards per play: Tech 8.6 (41 snaps), UCF 2.1 (34 snaps)

Success rate: Tech 68.3%, UCF 23.5%

Yards per successful play: Tech 12.0, UCF 6.8

Pct. of plays gaining 20+ yards: Tech 12.2%, UCF 0.0%

Pct. of plays gaining zero or fewer: Tech 19.5%, UCF 38.2%

Red zone trips: Tech 7, UCF 1

Red zone TD rate: Tech 57.1%, UCF 0.0%

UCF’s one decent non-garbage time drive ended in a David Bailey sack of Tayven Jackson on fourth down. The Red Raiders did whatever they wanted. They probably aren’t as good as Ohio State — I’m resigning myself to the Buckeyes being a hefty title favorite at this point — but I’d put them on even ground, at worst, against anyone else in the country.

Moving down

Here are the five teams whose ratings fell the most:

Louisiana Tech: down 3.4 adjusted points per game (ranking fell from 69th to 76th)

Southern Miss: down 3.3 points (from 73rd to 86th)

NC State: down 3.0 (from 57th to 68th)

UCF: down 2.9 points (from 55th to 67th)

Purdue: down 2.9 points (from 84th to 96th)

It’s my own fault, I realize, but with the way quarterback CJ Bailey had been playing, I thought NC State might be able to make Miami sweat a little bit Saturday. I knew the Wolfpack defense would probably get hit pretty hard, but I thought it was fair to assume Bailey would manage to throw for more than 120 yards (with two picks) or Hollywood Smothers would manage more than minus-2 yards in seven carries in a 41-7 loss. Complete domination by Miami, complete implosion by the Pack.

Who won the Heisman this week?

I am once again awarding the Heisman every single week of the season and doling out weekly points, F1-style (in this case, 10 points for first place, 9 for second and so on). How will this Heisman race play out, and how different will the result be from the actual Heisman voting?

Here is this week’s Heisman top 10:

1. Ahmad Hardy, Missouri (25 carries for 300 yards and 3 touchdowns against Mississippi State).

2. Kewan Lacy, Ole Miss (28 carries for 224 yards and 3 touchdowns against Florida).

3. Dante Moore, Oregon (27-for-30 passing for 306 yards and 2 touchdowns, plus 16 non-sack rushing yards against Minnesota).

4. Fernando Mendoza, Indiana (22-for-24 passing for 299 yards and 4 touchdowns against Wisconsin).

5. Gunner Stockton, Georgia (24-for-29 passing for 229 yards, 4 TDs and 1 INT, plus 33 non-sack rushing yards and a touchdown against Texas).

6. Haynes King, Georgia Tech (26-for-34 passing for 371 yards and a touchdown, plus 61 non-sack rushing yards against Boston College).

7. OJ Arnold, Georgia Southern (21 carries for 267 yards and 2 touchdowns, plus 53 receiving yards and a touchdown against Coastal Carolina).

8. Marcel Reed, Texas A&M (22-for-39 passing for 439 yards, 3 TDs and 2 INTs, plus 31 non-sack rushing yards against South Carolina).

9. Caleb Hawkins, North Texas (27 carries for 189 yards and 5 touchdowns, plus 21 receiving yards against UAB).

10. Carlos Del Rio-Wilson, Marshall (22-for-27 passing for 321 yards and 3 touchdowns, plus 102 non-sack rushing yards against Georgia State).

One of my favorite things early in the season was the prominence of YAC, yards after contact, and the way it was driving some early-season success. Mizzou’s Ahmad Hardy was at the center of that and generated some momentary Heisman buzz before an October funk — three games, 207 total rushing yards, 3.7 per carry — put an end to that. But after a 109-yard performance in a loss against Texas A&M last week, Hardy put together his hardest-running performance of the season Saturday night.

Meanwhile, the guy he more or less replaced in the Mizzou lineup — sophomore Kewan Lacy, who transferred to Ole Miss last winter — had himself quite the evening as well, allowing the Rebels to control the ball and avoid an upset in a funky game against Florida.

Hardy and Lacy managed to overshadow some pretty awesome passing performances from Big Ten QBs Mendoza and Moore (who went a combined 49-for-54) and a pair of Georgia-based QBs (Stockton and King) who should put on a heck of a show against each other in a couple of weeks. And I even had to squeeze Marcel Reed onto the list despite his playing the worst first half of his life against South Carolina. Throwing for 298 yards in the second half can cure a lot of ailments; more guys should try that.

Honorable mention:

• Kaytron Allen, Penn State (25 carries for 181 yards and 2 touchdowns, plus 10 receiving yards against Michigan State).

• Bear Bachmeier, BYU (23-for-33 passing for 296 yards and a touchdown, plus 59 non-sack rushing yards and a touchdown against TCU).

• Jeremiyah Love, Notre Dame (23 carries for 147 yards and a touchdown, plus 20 receiving yards against Pitt).

• Jordan Kwiatkowski, Central Michigan (9 tackles, 1 TFL, 1 forced fumble, 1 pass breakup and a pick-six against Buffalo).

• Andrew Marsh, Michigan (12 catches for 189 yards against Northwestern).

• Toriano Pride Jr., Missouri (three tackles, 1.5 TFLs, a pick-six, a 62-yard fumble return and a pass breakup against Mississippi State)

• Jordon Simmons, Georgia State (19 carries for 164 yards and a touchdown, plus 64 receiving yards against Marshall).

• Marcel Williams, Akron (14 catches for 206 yards and 2 touchdowns against Kent State).

Through 12 weeks, here are your points leaders, once again with ties broken by total points from the last four weeks:

1. Julian Sayin, Ohio State: 29 points (13 in the last four weeks)
2. Ty Simpson, Alabama: 29 points (zero)
3. Taylen Green, Arkansas: 27 points
4. Fernando Mendoza, Indiana: 26 points
5. Trinidad Chambliss, Ole Miss: 25 points (10 in the last four weeks)
6. Gunner Stockton, Georgia: 25 points (six)
7. Diego Pavia, Vanderbilt: 24 points
8. Demond Williams Jr., Washington: 21 points
9. Haynes King, Georgia Tech: 18 points
10. Luke Altmyer, Illinois: 16 points

Sayin took the lead in the points race last week but had a pretty forgettable evening against UCLA, allowing for Mendoza and Stockton to make up ground.

Of course, this race isn’t in charge of who gets the Heisman, and if conventional wisdom is any indication, it’s Sayin (+225 Heisman odds, per ESPN BET) who must make up ground on Mendoza (-125). I wrote last week that I’m not really a fan of that — Mendoza charged ahead after barely beating a Penn State team Sayin had just torched the week before — but barring some last-minute chaos (something the Big Ten doesn’t seem interested in producing), we’ll get a Sayin-Mendoza showdown in Indianapolis for the Big Ten championship game, and potentially the Heisman, in three more weeks. That could make the choice pretty easy, one way or the other.

The midweek playlist

Miami (Ohio) at Buffalo (Wednesday, 7 p.m., ESPN2). You should always watch MACtion just in case; lord knows I wasn’t telling you to watch Kent State-Akron last week, but you missed out if you didn’t. But the most important game of this week’s batch is in Buffalo, where two of five teams with two conference losses face off. (You should definitely dual-screen that one with Central Michigan-Kent State — the Golden Flashes still have a slight chance of reaching bowl eligibility, though CMU is hot.)

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