Eli Drinkwitz reminisces on his national championship season with Auburn football
Eli Drinkwitz was Auburn football's quality control coach for two years. One of those years was the 2010 national championship season, so with his Missouri Tigers hosting AU in Week 8, it was the object of his reminiscing.
"Obviously, when I went there, I thought coaching college football was easy," Drinkwitz said (h/t On SI). "You just get the two best players (Cam Newton and Nick Fairley) in college football and you put them on your team and you win."
In particular, Cam Newton's leadership stuck out to Drinkwitz, who'd go on to be an RB coach at Arkansas State and a QB coach at Boise State and NC State. Certainly, working with a dynamic dual-threat Heisman winner like Newton and a 1,000+-yard RB in Michael Dyer helped him acquire hirable experience.
Drinkwitz credited Gus Malzahn, Gene Chizik, and Ted Roof by name for helping him build a foundation he's been able to parlay into a successful career as an SEC head coach.
"I thought Cam Newton was one of the best leaders that I've ever seen in a locker room. We faced a lot of adversity, he faced a lot of personal adversity ... but he stayed steady.
"As far as building a team, I thought Coach [Gene] Chizik, Coach [Ted] Roof, Coach [Gus] Malzahn, as coordinators really did a nice job working together. Low ego, high output approach and a lot of the foundational stuff that we do in our program now I learned from Coach Chizik and Coach Malzahn."
2010 Auburn football team launched several coaching careers
Chizik didn't last long after the title season and Roof never became a head coach again. But Malzahn took over the reins of the Tigers, Drinkwitz took the long road to becoming an SEC head coach himself, and several players have become coaches.
Captians Kodi Burns, Josh Bynes, and Zac Etheridge are all position coaches right now in the NFL/FBS level. Ryan Pugh and Trovon Reed are also positional coaches at the Division I level. Barrett Trotter is a high school coach at Bayside Academy in Daphne, Alabama.