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COLUMBIA, Mo. — A narrative, to a football coach, is only useful until it becomes counterproductive. There are few things more bitter-tasting in that profession than something that is counterproductive.

The return of the Border War seemed to cross into that territory for Missouri coach Eli Drinkwitz just a few minutes after noon on Tuesday.

For months — really, years, since the 2020 announcement that Mizzou and Kansas would once again play each other in football this season — the rivalry served a grandiose purpose. Fans have anticipated Saturday’s 2:30 p.m. clash between the Tigers and Jayhawks (TV: ESPN2; radio: KTRS 550-AM locally) for quite some time. Tickets for the game sold out before they were even available to the general public.

The rivalry between MU and KU served not as bulletin board but rather chalkboard material this summer, when Drinkwitz brought in guest speakers to teach his players why this game means so incredibly much.

There will be other big games deeper into Missouri’s 2025 season. In two weeks, a clash with South Carolina looks like a possible bellwether for how both programs will stack up in the Southeastern Conference this year. A vulnerable Alabama team comes to CoMo just two weeks after that.

But ask a Mizzou fan whether they’d rather go 11-1 with a loss to the Jayhawks or do much worse on the whole but thump KU and they’ll probably need some time to think it over. Even in a conference where every game supposedly means more, this game means the most.

“Our guys understand that,� Drinkwitz said Tuesday.

Now, he’s trying to get them to set that pressure aside, which is the point where the high stakes of the Border War bordered on unhelpful.

“The issue is,� Drinkwitz continued, “are we going to be able to execute? Are we gonna be so focused on the crowd, doing this (he made the universal ‘get loud’ gesture with his arms), that we forget it ain’t about that?

“It’s about hands inside. It’s about executing your assignments, about having eyes on your keys. It’s about communicating the formation adjustments. It’s about offense, making sure that we’re all on the same page, on identifying the fronts that they’re going to be in. That’s going to be way more important than whether we had a guest speaker tell us about 1854 or 1960 (when) they played an ineligible player. OK, great. Perfect. Let’s make sure we’ve got a rip/liz call.�

To briefly translate the football speak: “Rip/liz� is a variation of a Cover 3 defense pioneered by Nick Saban and Bill Belichick when they were with the Cleveland Browns in the early 1990s. It involves rotating safeties to head off the seam routes that are the Achilles heel of a Cover 3 shell and will later be relevant to this story.

The bottom line: The elements of Saturday’s game that are great for fans — think “Mr. Brightside,� contumely hurled in the parking lots, the anger only unsheathed when that school from the west comes to town — are not so great for the players. Or at least are a slippery slope.

“There’s a fine line between over-hyping and getting so emotional that you don’t have poise and control,� Drinkwitz said. “You want to have energy. You don’t want to be emotional.�

“Poise and control,� said out loud, sounds a lot like poison control, which is one metaphor for what he’s been doing this week. Mitigate the degree to which the rivalry seeps into the locker room, make it feel as familiar as possible. If that’s even possible.

“You love playing in big games,� starting quarterback Beau Pribula said. “That’s why you play. That’s why you want to come to schools like Mizzou. … But at the same time, you gotta have the same process. The same process as it was for Central Arkansas is the same process we’ll have for KU.�

Maybe that mentality will erode once the Tigers take the field or absorb the clamor of the crowd or feel the crunch of their shoulder pads sinking into Jayhawk blue and red.

The hope, from the MU side of things, is that the tunnel vision that comes with a critical football game will at some point take over — either by nature or necessity.

“Like I tell the team all the time: The pregame speech isn’t gonna execute in the fourth quarter,� Drinkwitz said. “So it’s all good for ‘SEC Now’ and to put it out there, and the mini movie’s gonna capture it, but at the end of the day, man, in a two-minute drive or on the swing eight or money downs, ain’t nobody thinking about ‘Coach Drink said this’ or ‘This guest speaker said this.’ �

So the mental prep for the Border War’s return has been an exercise in nuance, in asking college-age athletes with undeveloped frontal lobes to comprehend two things and set one of them aside.

Here’s where rip/liz coverage comes back in. It’s a perfect metaphor.

There are a lot of moving parts to it: namely, the idea of establishing a dividing line through the defense. Where that line is depends on where the ball is placed, and cornerbacks need to have a precise feel for when they cross it so they know where there is safety help available and where they’re on an island. Safeties need to read when a route is going vertical versus tucking underneath.

A rip/liz call is, in one sense, a matter of compartmentalizing and reacting appropriately.

Like playing in the Border War.

“We’ve got our hands full,� Drinkwitz said, “between understanding the rivalry and the intensity of the game, and understanding that the game is played on the field.�