One victory that may have helped Eli Drinkwitz land the Missouri job came last season in Williams-Brice Stadium, the site of this week’s game for his Missouri Tigers.

Drinkwitz, as Appalachian State’s coach last season, led the Mountaineers to a 20-15 victory over Will Muschamp’s Gamecocks. At his Tuesday press conference, Drinkwitz was asked about the game, and what it meant.

“Obviously for me I thought it was more about our team, and I haven’t really thought about it for me personally,” Drinkwitz said. “But for our team, we had a lot of guys on our team from South Carolina who were under-recruited and we just tried to demonstrate that team football could win and our commitment to each other and our commitment to playing hard every single play was good enough to win football.”

Drinkwitz then smiled and said he sent a picture of one of his offensive linemen from last year of him, “getting after one of their defensive linemen, and just brought a lot of good memories back.”

“It was a tremendous job by our defensive players, we had to hold on at the end,” Drinkwitz said. “It was fun to go into an away game, App State, underdog, to an SEC school and get a win. Everybody loves an underdog story, that was one of those where it was you against everybody and you found a way to get it done. So it was a lot of fun and something I’ll always remember, those bus rides back to App from UNC and from South Carolina were the shortest four and a half, five hour bus rides of my life. They were a lot of fun.”

In September last season, App State won at UNC, 34-31.

Last year’s Missouri win over South Carolina snapped a three-game losing streak for the Tigers in the series.