Eleven years ago, Mizzou got a reality check. Or so we thought.

The Tigers went 5-7 in their first season in the SEC. After 7 consecutive seasons without a losing record in Big 12 play, a 2-6 mark against SEC competition was seen by outsiders as a “you’re not in the Big 12 anymore” season. Mizzou was then picked to finish 6th in the East in 2013, ahead of a Kentucky team fresh off an 0-8 season in SEC play.

We all know what happened after that. Mizzou ripped off an East title, finished 12-2 and earned the third top-5 finish in the AP Poll in program history. A flash in the pan, that was not. A year later, Mizzou was picked to finish 4th in the East … and it became the first team to repeat as East champs in the expanded version of the SEC.

Fast forward 9 years later. Mizzou is on the brink of potentially another top-5 finish after being picked to finish 6th in the East.

Fast forward to next July when Mizzou, in an expanded SEC without divisions, will likely not be picked to finish among the top half of the conference. The narrative for many will be “yeah, 2023 was impressive, but a reality check is coming.”

Here’s a question — what makes us so sure of that?

Mizzou played with every team on that schedule in 2023. It lost to the Heisman Trophy winner after blowing a lead in the middle of the 4th quarter, and it had a chance to take the lead at 2-time defending champ Georgia in the middle of the 4th quarter. That’s partially why the selection committee made Mizzou the top 10-win team in its final rankings.

Yeah, you know this. What you don’t know is whether this can be sustained.

There are layers to that. It’s not just as simple as saying “well, Luther Burden III is coming back” or “recruit (X) is signing in December.” An optimistic projection like “Brady Cook will be a top-5 quarterback in the country next year” won’t determine Mizzou’s staying power in the new version of the SEC, and neither will hoping that every walk-on offer via a pleading booster over cocktails turns into Cody Schrader.

To understand why this could be sustainable, one must understand why 2023 happened in the first place. Three big-picture developments were pivotal.

Eli Drinkwitz made the correct decision to hire an offensive play-caller. It didn’t matter to him that a month after he got a raise and an extension — that beefed up buyout also raised some eyebrows — he decided that 3 years of calling plays as the head coach didn’t yield what he’d hoped for. Instead of operating like an un-fireable coach like Jimbo Fisher did for too long before he finally hired an offensive play-caller, Drinkwitz admitted he needed help.

He got it. Kirby Moore was one of the best hires of the offseason.

Keeping him for 2024 was huge, though at some point, Moore’s success will lead to his next opportunity. He’s in his early-30s and perhaps he could be running his own program by this time next year. If and when that happens, the macro decision by Drinkwitz to hire a young, innovative offensive play-caller should be a move he repeats.

If you’re hiring the right coordinators, you’re winning a ton of games … and probably hiring a ton of coordinators. Go ask Nick Saban about that.

Drinkwitz is 2-for-3 on defensive coordinator hires. Retaining Ryan Walters, even though he only stayed that first season, was crucial. Steve Wilks? Big swing and a miss. But his successor, Blake Baker, has been incredibly successful. The 2023 foundation was established in 2022 when that defense completely flipped the switch. It also helps that Baker has Texas roots, which has quietly been an extremely successful recruiting ground for Mizzou during the 21st century (Nick Bolton, Chase Daniel, Michael Sam and Sean Weatherspoon are just a few of the under-recruited guys from the state of Texas).

Speaking of recruiting, that’s another part of this model for Mizzou’s staying power in the SEC. The NIL laws in the state of Missouri changed the game. In June 2022, state legislators signed Missouri House Bill 417, which states that high school players can make money off NIL as soon as they sign with an in-state school. Texas took another year to sign that bill into law.

That impacted someone like Missouri native and No. 4 overall recruit in the 2024 class Williams Nwaneri “a little bit.”

Contrary to what the aforementioned Fisher tried to tell us, there’s nothing wrong if NIL impacts a decision. It’s not an indictment on a coach or a program to say that it was factored into the recruiting process, especially at a place like Mizzou that struggles to get national respect.

In the “adapt or die” world of the changing landscape of the sport, Drinkwitz is adapting.

That could applied to the transfer portal, as well, and not just with someone like Schrader rising through the Division II ranks to become a star at Mizzou. But continuing to make moves like landing coveted Georgia State transfer running back Marcus Carroll will be pivotal. Drinkwitz also needs to continue to pursue guys like Theo Wease and Mookie Cooper, who were buried on the depth charts at powerhouse programs (Oklahoma and Ohio State), but were able to carve out significant complementary roles at Mizzou.

There are very few programs that can sustain success without getting several portal hits in each cycle. So far, Mizzou has been extremely successful with guys like Wease and Ty’Ron Hopper. It also hasn’t been devastated by portal departures in the way that some other SEC programs have. Last year’s biggest portal loss was leading receiver Dominic Lovett, but that allowed Burden to shift to playing his more natural position in the slot, where he became one of the nation’s top receivers.

Is it realistic to think that Drinkwitz will always replace his biggest portal loss with an All-American? No, but it’s sort of like the revolving door of coordinators. In this era, nobody is immune to personnel movement. It’s about the ones who can build the best response plan who’ll survive.

Sustainability was the model of the 2023 Mizzou team. It entered the season ranked No. 2 in FBS in Bill Connelly’s percentage of returning production metric. That’s why skeptics like myself should’ve recognized that improvement — especially if it could stay healthy on the offensive line — was imminent instead of projecting Mizzou to go 6-6.

But there’s a difference between improvement and sustainability. Drinkwitz has made considerable steps in the past couple of seasons to show that he has the right approach as the CEO of the program. That’ll be at the core of every successful program in the 2020s.

In the 2010s, Mizzou couldn’t sustain success after winning those division titles in 2013-14. It had some great individual talent (Bolton, Drew Lock, Charles Harris, etc.), but it took until 2023 for the program to finally get over the hump. There’s no guarantee that this is the new norm. Go watch last year’s national runner-up, TCU, in the postseason. Or don’t because TCU went 5-7 this season.

Some will expect the Tigers to fall back to earth. But maybe winning 8-9 games on a more consistent basis can actually happen in the new SEC.

Contrary to what you might hear once this memorable 2023 run concludes, the path is there.