Paul Finebaum apparently didn’t believe it, so he asked Missouri coach Eli Drinkwitz again if he really believed Missouri could beat LSU, a team Finebaum referred to as one of the “gold standards of the SEC.”

Drinkwitz didn’t blink or flinch. He simply said yes.

“You live up or down to your expectations, period. No offense, I’m a 5-foot-10 dorky white dude, that has no business being a college football coach,” Drinkwitz said. “The reality of it is, we have high expectations and high goals, and you meet them. If you set the standard that players and coaches will meet that standard, and that’s really what you have to do especially when you’re trying to change a culture and establish a championship mindset.”

There is a big difference between hoping for something, and expecting something, the coach said on “The Paul Finebaum Show” on Monday as Missouri still enjoyed the win over LSU and digested the postponement news of the Vanderbilt game. Missouri’s next opponent is now Florida.

“You can’t hope for anything,” Drinkwitz said. “When you hope for something, you hope somebody else screws it up. You’re hoping that they mess up. When you set a standard and expectation, you work towards it every single day. For us, it’s about working towards that goal. Set your standard of performance, this is how I’m going to perform. This is what our expectation. Everybody’s in the SEC’s talented, every single team is talented. The difference between the top of the league and the bottom of the league in talent is going to be that much. It’s about how do these units function together as a team. That’s really where we have to continue to improve, is how do we perform better as a team.”