Eli Drinkwitz didn’t just leave Lawrence with a win Saturday night. He left with a full postgame victory lap queued up on his phone.
Missouri beat Kansas 38-21 in the Border War, the last installment of the rivalry for the next five years, and Drinkwitz spent the night making sure everybody knew exactly how the result landed. After coaching the Tigers to back-to-back rivalry wins, he stepped in before any postgame tensions could spill over on the field, handled his press conference, and made it clear he was bothered by the Jayhawks’ pregame social media buildup. Then came the online response.
His first shot was aimed at a video of Kansas players punching a dummy dressed in a Missouri uniform.
“How’d that work out when we punched back,” Mizzou’s head coach wrote on X/Twitter, along with the hashtag “Winner’s Win.”
Drinkwitz wasn’t done there. He also replied to a Jack Settleman post - Settleman is the founder of Snapback Sports - that featured the “It Is That Deep” Kansas hype video, the one that drew attention before kickoff for its blunt Civil War references tied to the rivalry. That video played inside KU’s stadium before the game, and Drinkwitz used the moment to poke at the ending.
“Hey Jack!? How’d that hype video end!?”
Drinkwitz wrote on X. “Cause (I) didn’t see y’all take the goalpost!?
Was that supposed to happen??”
Settleman had posted before the game that KU fans were going to win and take the goalposts to nearby Potter Lake.
Drinkwitz tagged Settleman again in a third post, this time alongside NFL running back Melvin Gordon, and kept the joke rolling with another reference to the goalposts, adding “guess nobody (is) gonna help them.
He also got in one more post, replying to the official University of Kansas account after it wrote, “There's right and wrong. There's Kansas and Missouri.”
That was the full night: win the game, keep things from getting too heated, say his piece in the media, then head to X and let the rivalry do the rest.
Mizzou has now beaten Kansas in consecutive games since the rivalry returned last season. The two teams are not scheduled to play football again until 2031.
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For a matchup that always carries extra edge, Woodyards sequence was exactly the kind of jolt Missouri needed to separate itself in a game that had been dead even at the break. With Kansas already on the wrong side of that momentum swing, the Tigers now have to carry the same defensive energy forward into next weeks meeting with Troy. [Read more 🡒]
Eli Drinkwitz Just Raised The Stakes In Mizzous Kansas Rivalry
The buildup to Missouris latest meeting with Kansas was already tense, but a pregame video from the Jayhawks added another layer to the rivalry when it referenced the series Civil War roots. Missouri coach Eli Drinkwitz pushed back hard on that choice, calling it inappropriate and especially out of place on 9/11, when the tone around the game carried extra weight beyond the usual border bragging rights.
Missouri then answered on the field with a 38-21 win, its second straight in the revived series. Drinkwitz made clear afterward that he was disappointed by the video and left open a bigger question about what comes next, signaling that the future of the rivalry may be just as unsettled as the emotions around this latest chapter. [Read more 🡒]
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The Tigers still had to work for it before taking control in the second half, but the payoff was obvious for a program and fan base that had waited a long time for this road result. Beating Kansas on its field does more than add a line to the record book, and Missouri now has a fresh reminder of what it looks like when the rivalry swings its way. [Read more 🡒]