Eli Drinkwitz offered an extremely honest take about where Missouri stands with its NIL budget. The Tigers coach made it clear that the current numbers aren’t large enough to compete with the best of the best in the SEC.

In a recent press conference, Drinkwitz pushed for more companies based in Missouri to get involved with the school’s NIL effort. He made the argument that there are likely plenty of Tigers alumni employed there and it could be a mutually beneficial partnership.

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“I believe it’s 11 Fortune 500 companies in the state, which is fourth largest among the SEC footprint, and we’ve got to continue to develop the relationships with those companies and get those companies to invest in our athletes, whether we’re talking about football, basketball, women’s basketball, softball, women’s soccer, wrestling, volleyball, baseball,” Drinkwitz exlpained. “We need their support. We are the institution of this state. We provide those companies with a lot of workers, so it would be awesome if we got to see some reciprocal investments in that.

“…The No. 1 way to get through NIL GO is a Fortune 500 company. If a Fortune 500 company does an NIL contract with a student athlete, it’s automatically guaranteed to go through. It’s approved because of the fidiciary responsibility that Fortune 500 company has to shareholders. So if we want to get more and more opportunities for our student athletes, then that’s something that we need to lean into. So I’m always going to be pushing and trying to create whatever advantages we can at Missouri in the NIL space.”

According to On3’s Team NIL rankings, Missouri has an average of $88,000 per player. That ranks them 10th in the SEC behind several other big-name schools like Texas, Alabama and Georgia.

Eli Drinkwitz knows that in order to compete, those NIL numbers will have to be more comparable to the top schools in the conference. He’s already doing a solid job as is and has the Tigers with a 7-3 (3-3 SEC) record, but knows they could climb to even greater heights with more resources.

“If you want better results, you’ve got to get better players,” he said. “We got great players right now, but you can always use more. I saw on Twitter somebody said we’ve got to keep Donovan (Olugbode) and Matt (Zollers). Well, that’s wishful thinking (without NIL). You’ve got to offer them the same amount of money that other people are. That’s the reality. There’s teams that we’re playing with larger NIL budgets than we have. That doesn’t mean we’re not doing the absolute best we can. It doesn’t mean that we haven’t put together a really, really good football team and there’s a lot of people helping us. But more is still more.

“Until there’s a cap on it, don’t we want every advantage that we can possibly get? Again, not complaining, not pointing out issues. Just pointing out what the playing field is that we’re in. There’s teams that have umlimited support as far as NIL goes and we want to beat those teams and feel like we can’t beat those teams.”