Published on Show Me Mizzou Aug. 27, 2024
Story by Mark Godich, BJ ’79
The offense was sputtering, and the legion of Mizzou fans who had made the trek to Texas for the 2023 Cotton Bowl Classic was growing restless. C’mon, Brady. What are you doing?
Brady would be Brady Cook, the once-maligned Tiger quarterback. Mizzou trailed Ohio State 3-0 after three quarters, and nothing was going right. Not for the offense, anyway. Yet from the time he was named the offensive coordinator in early 2023, Kirby Moore had embedded six simple words in Cook’s mind: Don’t make a bad play worse.
So, for much of the game, Cook followed his coach’s orders. He took sacks. He scrambled for a couple of yards here and there. He threw the ball away when nobody was open. (And nobody was open.) Then, as he had done all season, he went to work. Deep in his own territory, he completed a third-down slant pass to blanketed wideout Theo Wease Jr. Cook scrambled 15 yards for another first down, then connected with Marquis Johnson for a 50-yard gain. On the first play of the fourth quarter, Cody Schrader capped an eight-play, 95-yard drive with a seven-yard touchdown run.
On their next possession, Cook took the Tigers 91 yards in 13 plays. He jump-started the drive with a pinpoint 31-yard sideline pass to Wease and capped it with a laser into a ridiculously tight window to Luther Burden III for a seven-yard touchdown.
According to ESPN, teams had been 0-112 over the past two seasons when entering the fourth quarter scoreless. So much for that. The Tigers won, 14-3. Cook was named offensive MVP of the game, and Mizzou celebrated an 11-2 season and a No. 8 national ranking.
“I grew up watching Mizzou”
Nobody outside the locker room saw the 2023 season coming. But as Cook prepares for his final year, expectations in Columbia are sky-high. Mizzou is popping up in the top 10 of most preseason rankings, and with the college football playoff expanding to a dozen teams, you don’t have to be a math major to complete the calculation.
As remarkable as the Tigers’ sudden rise has been, Cook’s ascension to elite college quarterback has been even more astounding. He committed to Missouri early in his junior season at Chaminade Prep School in suburban St. Louis, and when Eli Drinkwitz replaced Barry Odom as head coach in late 2019, Cook stuck by his pledge. No surprise, because he always wanted to be a Tiger.
“I grew up watching Mizzou,” Cook says. “It was the first team I ever really paid attention to, learned to love. My mom went here for physical therapy school. My uncle went here.”
Drinkwitz saw a quarterback who would need time to grow into the job. “I thought he was a potential developmental kid,” he says from his spacious office overlooking Faurot Field. “He’s a young man who fell in love with the process and continues to work to be a great player. There was never a situation where we thought he wasn’t good enough to play football here. We just didn’t know what his ceiling could be.”
So eager was Cook to be a Tiger that he planned to enroll early. One problem: Chaminade didn’t allow early graduations. So he found a loophole. He got his GED, and that, coupled with a high GPA, got him on campus early.
After spending the better part of two seasons as a backup, Cook finally got his shot, first splitting time under center against No. 1 Georgia and its vaunted defense and then getting his first start against Army in the 2021 Armed Forces Bowl.
“His preparation was elite that week,” Drinkwitz says of a game Mizzou lost on a last-second field goal. “He’s always been a really tough competitor. He led a drive at the end of the game to take the lead. He has the components of a good quarterback: calmness, steady, preparation. He made great decisions that didn’t put us in jeopardy.”
“I trusted my gut”
To no one’s surprise, Cook was named the starter in 2022. Drinkwitz made the decision early in camp because he believed Cook had separated himself from the other quarterbacks and that it was important to establish continuity. But in the second game of the season, during a road drubbing against Kansas State, Cook tore the labrum in his throwing shoulder. Nobody outside the coaching staff and Cook’s family was informed about the injury.
“We had several discussions throughout the season about it,” Drinkwitz says. “The medical team didn’t believe there was any way the injury could become worse. It was not a frontal tear. It was a post-labral tear in the back of the shoulder.”
The guy who had always dreamed of being the starting quarterback at Mizzou had a decision to make: Shut it down or soldier on. “It was tough on me mentally,” Cook says. “At practice, it was really taxing on the body to rep the plays and get the throws in.”
Cook made a lot of bad plays worse in 2022. He threw interceptions and pick-sixes, fumbled on sacks, produced too many three-and-outs and directed an offense that was inconsistent at best. He was criticized for his lack of arm strength and his inability to throw the deep ball. Surely, the critics surmised, there had to be a better option in the quarterback room.
“I played like a frickin’ crazy man in a lot of ways,” Cook says. “I didn’t care what happened to my body, especially with the torn labrum. I was like, whatever happens, happens. I’m going to get the surgery anyway.”
But under no circumstance was he going to surrender the job, not after he had worked so hard to get it. Stories are rampant of the injured player who sits for a week or two and never sees the field again. So he played on, bum shoulder and all. A 6-7 season ended with another loss in a bowl game, and Cook underwent surgery. However fleeting, thoughts of transferring crossed his mind.
“I felt almost banished by Mizzou,” he says. “I felt like the fans and the program didn’t want me here. Am I wanted here? I trusted my gut.”
Enter Moore. In his first four seasons in Columbia, Drinkwitz had worn many hats: head coach, offensive coordinator, play-caller. Admittedly too many. He brought in Moore, a 31-year-old assistant who most recently was the offensive coordinator at Fresno State.
“It was an important part of our growth as a program,” Drinkwitz says, “to allow me to do some other things and to bring in a fresh set of eyes, a fresh connection to Brady, and to generate more offensive firepower. It’s been good for both of them. Kirby has brought in a new challenge, and Brady likes to be challenged.”
As he weighed the job, Moore pored over every game from the 2022 season and dissected Cook’s every throw. He saw the expected speed bumps in a young quarterback, but he also saw flashes. “After conversing with a few people and then getting to Columbia, the thing that stood out is that Brady Cook is a genuine person you’re going to love being around,” Moore says. “He’s a student of the game. His care factor is through the roof.”
The two clicked at once.
Because of the surgery, Cook was relegated to a spectator’s role during spring ball, but he was an attentive pupil. He stood 20 yards behind the offense as plays unfolded, asked countless questions and took notes studiously. Flashing forward, Moore recalls days during the season when before grabbing lunch in advance of the daily quarterbacks meeting, he would stick his head in the meeting room to find a solitary figure. It was Cook, getting a head start on the day’s assignment.
For his part, Cook downplays the notion of being a student of the game. He relishes the note-taking, the film work, the mental preparation. “You have to be,” he says. “I treat it just like a class, probably more intense than a class over on campus.” He pauses to chuckle at his choice of words, but you get the sense he isn’t joking.
“There was no stutter, no shake”
Asked to name a turning point in the 2023 season, to a man Tiger players and coaches are quick to cite the Week 3 win over Kansas State. Drinkwitz talks about the tremendous resolve the Tigers showed in a game that featured six lead changes. More specifically, everyone mentions the SEC-record last-play: a 61-yard field goal from Harrison Mevis.
Cook then rewinds to the start of the game, after the Wildcats had taken the ball down the field on the opening possession. They had methodically driven 75 yards in 11 plays and scored a touchdown on a deflected pass that easily could have been intercepted. Remember the beating K-State had inflicted on the Tigers a year earlier? Was it going to be another one of those days? Faurot Field was sold out for the first time in five years, yet a spectator could already feel the air come out of the building.
Cook, however, quickly took the Tigers back down the field, where he needed only six plays to cover 75 yards. The touchdown came on a 46-yard pass to Burden. Operating in a relatively clean pocket, Cook showed some nifty footwork and delivered a tight spiral to Burden, who had spun the cornerback around and never broke stride. From snap to score, it was an offensive coordinator’s dream sequence. Cook, it turns out, could throw the deep ball.
“Throws like that, you remember them, you keep them in your memory bank, and then you can replicate them because you have the confidence,” Cook says.
Drinkwitz adds, “Everybody believed in his ability after that. He had to make a subtle slide in the pocket with a free runner coming at him, but he identified the coverage and had to make a good throw so Luther could go get it.”
Cook threw for a career-high 356 yards that day, and his passing stats continued to be jaw-dropping from there: 341 yards against Memphis, 395 against Vanderbilt, 411 against LSU, 275 against Tennessee (on a mere 18 completions with a 75 percent completion rate). Along the way, he wrote his name into the SEC record book by attempting 366 passes with nary an interception in a streak that had begun the previous season.
And then there was the home finale against Florida. Certainly you’ve heard about fourth-and-17! Under the lights at another sold-out Faurot Field and before a national TV audience, the Tigers walked into a dogfight they hadn’t expected as they were two wins from securing their first New Year’s Six bowl invitation. Mizzou trailed, 31-30, and was facing fourth-and-forever at its own 33 when Drinkwitz called timeout with
38 seconds left.
Despite the dire situation, there was no panic on the sideline, only a resolve and a belief that this game wasn’t going to end after the next snap. Position coaches went over a key or two with their respective players. As the players huddled, Wease and center Connor Tollison sensed a relaxed calm among their teammates. It started with the quarterback.
“You can hear it in his voice, see it in his eyes,” Tollison says. “There was no stutter, no shake.”
Cook called the predicament “business as usual. We had our play dialed up. It was a concept I had repped since freshman year.”
The play call was “Dig,” and the ball was designed to go to Wease. Burden would run down the middle of the field and clear a spot for Wease to get open just beyond the first-down marker. The Gators rolled out a coverage so soft that Wease called it “weird,” so Burden instinctively cut off his route, stopping in front of Wease. Cook delivered a strike, and Burden turned and darted upfield with an assist from Wease, who had screened a couple of defenders. The play went for 27 yards. There were three playmakers making a play.
As clutch as that throw was, the next two completions were arguably better: an 11-yard pass to Mekhi Miller that momentarily stopped the clock and a 16-yard sideline dime to Mookie Cooper that turned a long field-goal attempt into a game-winning chip shot for Mevis. That throw spoke to the maturation of Cook, who during the game-winning drive against Kansas State had failed to connect on the same kind of pattern.
“Being in a similar situation with no timeouts, and seeing the field, and not just taking the quickest throw,” Moore says of a lesson learned. “The cornerback ends up sitting. It was really good ball placement, and Mookie was aware of the sideline.”
When it was over, Cook headed directly to the east side of Faurot. He had celebrated in front of the students before, but this time he celebrated with them, a football player standing among classmates, the moment captured by an image that went viral. An oft-criticized quarterback was at long last exalted, his legacy secure. Just as it is for Brad Smith and Chase Daniel and Blaine Gabbert and James Franklin and Drew Lock before him. Who saw that coming?
“I’m glad I stuck it out”
Mizzou’s BMOC remains the same modest guy who GED’d his way to Columbia in early 2020, although understandably much more confident in what he can do and where he can take this team. (Confidence is one of his go-to words.) He has packed on a few pounds in anticipation of the hits he knows are coming. He’s fully aware he needs to be smart when he tucks the ball and takes off.
“We like to use the phrase self-preservation,” Moore says. “There’s a certain awareness to the quarterback run game. It’s just as much him as it is me and being aware of that.”
Ever the good wingman, Tollison sees in Cook a leader who has grown into and embraced the role. “It hasn’t always been sunshine and rainbows for either of us,” he says, “but I think through a lot of adversity we’ve gotten to a place we want to be. He’s the same guy. There’s no sense of cocky. If anything, his leadership has grown even more.
Drinkwitz is quick to caution that every year is different, and that a spectacular season has no bearing on the season that follows it, no matter how loaded the roster might be. “From the outside, there are going to be all kinds of expectations and pressure on what this team can be,” he says. “From the inside, it’s about us creating our own identity of what we want to be and how we build that.”
One thing is clear: This is Cook’s team. During a half-hour conversation, he is sitting in a lounge overlooking the field at the Stephens Indoor Facility. There is a buzz below, the sound of whistles shrieking and the occasional shout from teammates going through end-of-the-school-year testing. He speaks with measured, dare we say, confidence.
“I’m glad I stuck it out,” he says matter-of-factly.
Nevertheless, he will remain under the microscope — not that he needs to be reminded. It comes with the territory when you play the most scrutinized position in sports.
But at this point, do you really want to bet against Brady Cook?
Mizzou Football 2024: 5 players to watch
Nine months ago, quarterback Brady Cook led the Tigers to an 11-2 season and a victory over Ohio State at the Goodyear Cotton Bowl Classic in Arlington, Texas. The winning year earned Coach Eli Drinkwitz a contract extension through 2028 and a busy offseason exploring the transfer portal. With expectations sky high for 2024, let’s look at some potential breakout players.
1: Luther Burden III
The second-team All-America wide receiver was all that and a bag of Old Vienna Honey BBQ Red Hot Riplets — his namesake NIL-enabled potato chips — in 2023. After he racked up 1,212 receiving yards and nine touchdowns last season, Mizzou fans are salivating for an encore.
2: Marquis Johnson
The speedy wideout caught only 13 passes as a freshman, but he made them count by averaging 29.5 yards per reception. His big plays sparked rallies in victories over Kentucky and Ohio State.
3: Brett Norfleet
At 6-foot-7-inches, the sophomore tight end is an enormous target who has the athleticism to hurdle potential tacklers who go low.
4: Cam’Ron Johnson
The senior earned second-team All-SEC honors at right guard last year. He’s one of three returning starters on the offensive line.
5: Daylan Carnell
The junior safety is an agent of chaos all over the field. Last season, he registered three sacks, broke up eight passes, forced two fumbles and returned an interception for a touchdown.
— Joe Walljasper, BJ ’92
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