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COLUMBIA, Mo. — For the second straight season, Eli Drinkwitz is making an educated guess ahead of a key Southeastern Conference football game. He thinks he knows which quarterback No. 23 Missouri will face against South Carolina this weekend.

His guess — which has a logic to it — is that the Gamecocks (2-1, 0-1 SEC) will trot out starter LaNorris Sellers for Saturday’s 6 p.m. kickoff, despite uncertainty around his availability.

“I anticipate LaNorris to play,� Drinkwitz said Tuesday.

The sixth-year Mizzou coach is either going to be perfectly correct or entirely wrong. At the moment, it’s unclear which he’ll be.

Sellers left South Carolina’s thumping at the hands of Vanderbilt with an injury last Saturday. The Gamecocks’ redshirt sophomore signal-caller, who was named the SEC’s freshman of the year in 2024, took a hard hit to his ribs, and the talk out of Columbia, S.C., is that he may have a concussion.

South Carolina coach Shane Beamer has not confirmed the nature of Sellers’ injury nor shed any insight into his chances of playing for the Mayor’s Cup against the Tigers.

“We have an injury report for SEC games that we release on Wednesday nights,� was all Beamer with local media. He’d said on Sunday that he was “optimistic� about Sellers, but even that doesn’t clarify much.

As per Beamer’s deflection, the SEC is once again releasing “availability reports� on the days immediately leading up to each conference game. Listing players as out, doubtful, questionable or probable, those reports come out around 7 p.m. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, with a final report 90 minutes before kickoff Saturday.

While those reports will provide a marginal degree of transparency into Sellers’ health, it wouldn’t be surprising — and would arguably be the proper tactical strategy — if Beamer lists Sellers as questionable all week and then as a true game-time decision for Saturday.

In the meantime, Mizzou will prepare as if Sellers — who torched the Tigers for 353 passing yards and five touchdowns in his best game of the ’24 campaign — will play. Should he not, Luke Doty would step in as the Gamecocks’ backup. And MU feels confident it can handle Doty even with a week spent focused on Sellers.

“I don’t think their scheme is going to change (if it’s Doty, not Sellers),� Drinkwitz said. “He’s not LaNorris, but he’s a very good, capable player. There’s not two stylistic differences in the way that quarterback position is going to be played, so for us, we’re going to anticipate LaNorris will play and then we’ll adjust if he does not.�

There’s logic to that, but there’s also an old scab to pick at here.

The start of this story is almost identical to one from early October 2024, when Drinkwitz confidently prepped his team for the wrong quarterback ahead of a shellacking at Texas A&M.

At the time, he expected the Aggies to stick with Marcel Reed — their present-day starter — who’d stepped in with Connor Weigman hurt. Instead, Weigman wound up playing and completed more than 80% of his passes against a hapless MU defense.

The situations between A&M last year and South Carolina this year are not the same. Reed and Weigman did not run as similar an offense as, perhaps, Sellers and Doty could. Prepping for the more talented quarterback also seems like a wise tack.

But note the line drawn in the sand now, and get ready to scour injury reports as the week goes.

South Carolina game sells out

Saturday’s game between the Tigers and Gamecocks will officially be a sellout, MU’s athletics department announced Tuesday morning. The game will be televised nationally on ESPN and broadcast locally over the radio on 550 AM KTRS, and will now be watched by a capacity crowd of 57,321 inside Faurot Field.

That’ll be the 16th consecutive sellout for a Missouri home football game, a run dating back to 2023.

Should the Tigers sell out their Sept. 27 homecoming game against UMass — now a 6:30 p.m. start, carried on ESPNU — that streak will reach 18 in a row because their Oct. 12 game against Alabama has already sold out.