Mizzou embraced the grind as Drinkwitz made his hardest camp yet

Coming off consecutive seasons with double-digit wins, the Missouri Tigers have high expectations for 2025.

But coach Eliah Drinkwitz knew he had to really challenge his team if the Tigers were going to get over the hump and reach their loftiest goals for the season.

“By a measuring stick, this was the hardest camp that we’ve had since we’ve been here,” Drinkwitz said. “Combination of heat, good-on-good periods, number of periods, number of live-tackling situations. And I think our guys really responded really, really well.”

Drinkwitz put the team through 18 days of what was intentionally the hardest fall camp of his tenure in Columbia. Let alone the multiple heat waves that rolled through mid-Missouri during August.

And the guys who have been around the team for years agree this camp was the toughest one yet.

“Yeah, this was the toughest camp I’ve been a part of, this was my fifth one,” Missouri graduate safety Daylan Carnell said. “So this’s definitely been the toughest camp. He made it hard on purpose. So, I mean, I guess that’s good for the team. Went through a little bit of hard stuff together as a team and stuff like that, but he definitely made it hard for us, but we all got through it, and I feel like it made us better as a team.”

Carnell said those improvements as a team come from players knowing that their teammates will push through with them. He said Drinkwitz would intentionally put the defense in bad situations just to see how the players would respond.

“And I feel like we responded well, a lot of the times,” Carnell said.

Newcomer perspective

Carnell has the experience of prior Drinkwitz camps. But transfer safety Jalen Catalon has the unique experience of participating in fall camp at Arkansas, Texas and UNLV across the past six seasons. And he agreed, this was the toughest one he participated in.

Though for a slightly different reason.

“I mean, they’re all hard in their own ways,” Catalon said. “But I think this one was tougher, not necessarily just because of the grind, but because of knowing this one’s my last one. So, you know, every single day kind of just built up more knowing things my last fall camp. So honestly, yes, it was hard, but I enjoyed and I attacked every day, in my opinion, just because I knew it was my last one, and I felt like team did, too. You know, Coach Drink made that known that we did, and I felt like we did as offense and defense. So I was happy to see that.”

An extra challenge

Catalon said one day stood out specifically in the final week of camp. It was a two-a-day where the Tigers went directly from a workout into a practice.

“Just try and test the mental and just try and test us, make sure we can realize, as men and as people, that we can go farther than what our minds, our bodies tell us, you know,” Catalon said. 

And the seventh-year safety said the Tigers rose to the challenge. Drinkwitz said the plan was to try to break his team, to see if he could push them past their limit. But the coach failed in that goal.

“It was a cool moment, because we saw everybody kind of ask for more, and everybody was kind of huddled around each other and really just wanted to see each other be great and just encouraging everybody,” Catalon said. “And I think we saw the growth in that day as well. So I was happy that he had us do that, and had a challenge like that for us, you know, because I think we all stood up to it.”

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