Missouri just walked into the same trap Kentucky football paid millions to escape

Kentucky fans don’t get to play the “innocent bystander” card very often in SEC contract drama, but this time, they absolutely can.

Missouri just handed Eli Drinkwitz a new contract amendment that feels awfully familiar in Lexington: a bigger staff pool and automatic extensions triggered by a very reachable win total. The Tigers bumped his assistant pool from $12 million to $16 million and attached a one-year extension plus $200,000 raise anytime Mizzou wins eight or more regular-season games.

If you’re a Kentucky fan, that sounds a lot like a rerun, because it is.

Back in 2017, Mark Stoops’ amended deal included automatic extensions based on win totals. Hit 7–9 wins, you got another year tacked on. Hit 10 or more, you got two. Each extra year came with a built-in raise. It rewarded progress, sure but it also created a perverse incentive: schedule as soft as possible in the non-conference, get to your magic number, and the contract takes care of itself.

Kentucky eventually removed that language in a 2022 extension, but the habits were already formed. Now, post-Stoops and with Will Stein taking over, the Wildcats are living with the bill from a decade of “just good enough” being built into the paperwork.

Missouri just signed up for the same roller coaster.

Why 8 wins is a dangerous line in the sand

On paper, eight regular-season wins sounds ambitious. In practice, in a 12-game slate with 3 non-conference spots you can soften, it’s not hard to see how a coach can hover between 8–9 wins for years without ever breaking through.

If the contract tells you “hit this bar and you’re safe,” most coaches will do exactly that. It doesn’t mean Drinkwitz will game the system, but it absolutely shapes incentives.

There’s less urgency to take big scheduling swings. Why add a marquee home-and-home if you can lock in security with three buy games and one power-conference non-con road trip you hope to steal? There’s also a built-in justification for plateau seasons. Go 8–4 enough times, and the contract is basically telling fans, “this is success.”

Plus, it makes it harder for an AD to pull the plug if things go stale. You’re not just firing a coach, you’re going to war with a contract you helped design and potentially have a massive buyout because of the extensions.

Kentucky lived this. Stoops did some very real, very impressive rebuilding, and he’ll always deserve credit for that. But by the end, the “hit seven, keep your job, cash the raise” model had sucked the urgency out of the program. It took a 41–0 humiliation at Louisville and back-to-back losing seasons for Kentucky to finally hit reset.

Why Kentucky football sees red flags in Missouri's Eli Drinkwitz deal

From Lexington’s perspective, the red flag isn’t that Missouri rewarded a coach who just put together back-to-back strong seasons. It’s the structure.

Kentucky knows how quickly “protecting success” can turn into “protecting a plateau.” Once you embed a win total into the contract, you’ve essentially hard-coded your expectations. Mizzou just told Drinkwitz, in writing, that 8–4 with a bowl is not a problem to solve, it’s a threshold to clear.

Maybe this works out perfectly. Maybe Missouri uses the extra stability and $16 million staff pool to level up, not settle in. Maybe 8 wins is just a baseline and not a finish line.

But if you’ve spent the last decade watching Kentucky fight to move beyond 7 win seasons only to end up paying one of the largest buyouts in SEC history to start over, you’re allowed to squint at Columbia and think, “we’ve seen this movie.”

Kentucky’s warning to Missouri would be simple: make sure your contract language matches your ambitions. Otherwise, that “little” 8-win clause you’re celebrating today might be the same one you’re trying to escape from five years down the road.

Good luck Mizzou.