51ºÚÁÏ

COLUMBIA, Mo. — The backdrop and surroundings for Missouri’s 2025 football season will be a work in progress. The Tigers will play at Faurot Field through a north end zone renovation this year, a project with a nine-figure price tag that’s meant to boost the stability of the football program and athletics department.

In front of steel beams, packed earth and towering cranes, Mizzou will be participating in an on-field sustainability test.

After just 17 wins in Eli Drinkwitz’s first four years in Columbia, MU won 11 games in Year 4, then 10 in Year 5. At 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Year 6 kicks off against Central Arkansas (TV: SEC Network; radio: 550-AM KTRS, locally) with a broad question for Drinkwitz and his program:

Can Missouri stay on this track?

Doing so, in terms of Mizzou history, would look like parallel parking a train. Never before have the Tigers assembled three consecutive 10-win seasons, which means Drinkwitz will need to unlock a new kind of maneuverability to keep MU in the top half of an ultra-competitive Southeastern Conference.

“We want to do something that’s never been done before at the University of Missouri,� Drinkwitz said earlier this year, “and that’s win an SEC championship, participate in the playoff and/or be the first team in school history to have three 10-win seasons in a row. That’s a challenge. It’s going to be hard, but we embrace it.�

Meeting the challenge is a roster that looks quite different from the teams that combined for 21 wins across the 2023 and 2024 campaigns. Gone are core players like Brady Cook, Luther Burden III, Theo Wease Jr. and Johnny Walker Jr.

In their stead, the Tigers will have a new starting quarterback, with Thursday’s opener set to decide whether Penn State transfer Beau Pribula or returning two-sport athlete Sam Horn earns the QB1 mantle. Pribula entered camp as the favorite to win the job and is expected, per an ESPN report, to play the entire first half against Central Arkansas, which more or less makes the starting gig his to lose.

Kevin Coleman Jr., once a St. Mary’s star, will be MU’s No. 3-adorned slot receiver, having transferred in from Mississippi State. At the risk of overdoing locomotive metaphors, the hype train for new tailback Ahmad Hardy left the station months ago. Damon Wilson II, the highest-ranked edge rusher available during the offseason transfer portal cycle, arrived from Georgia to anchor the Tigers’ best position group.

The list of promising newcomers could continue. Starting middle linebacker Josiah Trotter was a freshman All-American at West Virginia. Starting safety Jalen Catalon was once an All-SEC defensive back at Arkansas. Starting left guard Dominick Giudice has already earned the title of “glue of the offensive line.�

And that leaves off returners like Cayden Green, a preseason All-American — albeit at left guard, not where he’ll start the season, which is at left tackle. And tight end Brett Norfleet, who is finally healthy and prepared for a bigger role in the offense. And wideouts like Marquis Johnson and Joshua Manning, who enter their third seasons with much higher expectations than before.

“This is the deepest team we’ve had,� Drinkwitz said.

Depth, however, is not without questions.

Letting the quarterback competition — to whatever degree it still is one — linger into the season naturally breeds some uncertainty. As Drinkwitz has pointed out, that structure turned out well in 2023. But it didn’t exactly produce immediate confidence in Cook, so repeatability is not guaranteed.

The Tigers reshuffled their offensive line late in fall camp, including the aforementioned shift of Green from his preferred left guard spot out to left tackle. The O-line tweaks put fourth-year lineman Curtis Peagler, who has just 36 career snaps, in position to start at right guard.

And on special teams, MU will need kicker Blake Craig to turn a big leg into more consistency from intermediate range, plus a punter who was benched at Stanford during the 2023 season and hasn’t punted since to find his form.

Little to none of that should be an issue against a Central Arkansas team that Mizzou is favored to beat by more than five touchdowns. But Kansas, looming on the horizon as the Tigers’ Week 2 opponent, will be a stiffer test. And this broader uncertainty is what kept Missouri out of preseason top 25 lists despite the success of the past two seasons.

Backing the notion that MU could stay in 10-win territory — and by doing so, push for a spot in the 12-team College Football Playoff — is the SEC’s most favorable schedule.

Aside from the Border War matchup with KU, the Tigers have three other highly winnable nonconference games: Central Arkansas, Louisiana and UMass, all at home. The three teams Mizzou lost to last season — Texas A&M, Alabama and South Carolina — come to Columbia this time, which means no hostile six-figure crowds against the first two teams on that list.

Missouri’s most difficult matchups will be at Auburn and at Oklahoma, two games that narrowly went MU’s way on home soil. Continuing to win so many one-score games, the fickle contests in which Mizzou is 10-1 over the past two years, adds to the sustainability challenge.

But ranked or not, the Tigers’ 2025 season will begin with optimism and an edge: that what Missouri has shown over the past two seasons is not just set to continue but set to become the standard under Drinkwitz.

Fans seem to be on board. Thursday will be the 13th consecutive sellout of Memorial Stadium, a streak guaranteed to reach at least 15 because Mizzou’s second and third home games of the season have already sold out.

For the second straight year, MU sold its entire allotment of season tickets, which is more than 40,000, including student tickets. That came despite an increase in season ticket prices for 2025, which shows the demand to see the football program coming alive in Columbia.

“(We’ve) been asking a lot of our people,� athletics director Laird Veatch said, “... and they have responded, which we are obviously very appreciative of. It really shows that they believe in what we’re trying to accomplish together.�