How Brady Cook turned doubt — yours and his — into Mizzou’s best start in a decade

Three days into the lone bye week on the Missouri football schedule, quarterback Brady Cook is perched on a tall chair and staring into the lens of a camera that will broadcast the ensuing conversation to a national audience.

ESPN’s SEC Network is on the other end, and Cook has been kind enough to allow a newspaper columnist, yours truly, to sit in the room and tag along before our own chat.

On the way to these interviews, Cook used his time on an elevator to scroll through his phone, which lately has been very much like the program he captains:

Buzzing.

Too many texts to return them all, he says, but he won’t ignore the close friends and family who stood by him before the attention got like this.

“They were my outlet,” Cook says. “Definitely.”

He’ll expand on that soon, but first, he shares a story from a night earlier. He stopped by Hy-Vee, a local supermarket, for an anticipated brief trip that instead turned into a lengthy stay. Several fans recognized him, which came with requests for selfies.

Wasn’t always like this, he notes. But today? You want to know what it’s like being the quarterback for a Missouri team that will take a 7-1 record and the freshly-printed No. 12 playoff ranking into Athens, Georgia, this weekend?

“It’s incredible. It’s everything I could’ve hoped for,” Cook says. “I just really enjoy playing with the team we have. It’s a lot of fun right now.”

We’re going to harp on that phrase — right now — because it is not only part of the Brady Cook story. It is the Brady Cook story.

In a vacuum, Cook is one of the best quarterbacks in the very best conference in America. He’s third in the SEC in yards, touchdowns and quarterback passer rating.

The grading system from Pro Football Focus likes him even more than the prototypical numbers — they have Cook as one of college football’s top-10 passers. They grade him third in the nation in a category they term “big-time throws.”

This would be a neat story on its own — a St. Louis-area kid who grew up a hardcore Mizzou fan develops into the quarterback who leads the Tigers to their most intriguing season in nearly a decade. Who can’t find the appeal in that?

But it’s not on its own. If we’re being honest, in the era where football players elect to trade jerseys more frequently before the NFL than they do once in it, you can’t help but wonder if most 20-somethings would’ve left by now.

Cook’s history has been at least partially documented along the way— fighting for the job once, twice, three times. Booed by a fan base, even if he didn’t really hear it. Tweeted at incessantly, and he did see some of those.

And on the other side of it, better than ever.

Cook is a different player in 2023, to be sure. We’ve learned that. (Hey, it turns out when you don’t have a torn labrum in your throwing shoulder, you throw a prettier ball. Who knew?)

But what we’ve learned about most through it all: The person. That’s a favorite talking point of his coach, Eliah Drinkwitz, who says, “I got no questions about his determination.” Drinkwitz mentions leadership, work ethic and all the other traits you’d like to see in your quarterback.

But I’ll add one more: He’s still here.

It’s been a bumpy enough ride that few would have blamed Cook if at some point he had decided, you know what, to hell with this. And last Christmas, he did have that discussion his family. Briefly.

“He’s a very loyal kid, but he’s also very, very meticulous — a perfectionist,” his mom, Amy Cook, says. “And I just think it was always in his heart to finish it. To figure it out.”

It’s been the childhood dream since grade school, when Cook punched a dent into his bedroom wall after watching a Mizzou basketball game. But at some point we have to acknowledge it’s more than clinging to that. Because the bumps in the road turned that dream into a “nightmare,” for a portion of last season, as his mom put it. And he stuck around anyway.

Over the course of a 20-minute interview, Cook answers every last question, and he’s smart enough to know that many of them will be about his past. To his credit, he’s refreshingly candid on it, not once attempting to change the subject.

Why?

“I think it’s made everything now just a little bit sweeter,” he says.

Let’s talk about it then.

In 2021, Cook had been led to believe he’d earn his first college start. The night before the game, Drinkwitz told him that, no, he was instead going with Tyler Macon. “That was tough,” Cook admits.

The next offseason, after Mizzou shopped for quarterbacks, Cook won the job, only to suffer the torn labrum early in the season. It affected his throwing motion, forced him to spend time in the training room he preferred to use watching film and caused issues with muscles overcompensating for what his shoulder could no longer do.

But here’s the rub: When you spend your life with one single goal in mind, and you finally reach it, you try to downplay all the reasons you shouldn’t be out there.

“Anything I could do, I was going to play,” he says. “I mean, I’d just won the job.”

Or, as Drinkwitz put it, “He never stinkin’ flinched.”

That should’ve been the first sign of what might come next. But if there was outside pessimism about Cook returning as the starter — and believe me, there was plenty — it derives from what fans saw the bulk of last year.

What Cook lived the bulk of last year.

If we can tap into that candor, the pessimism got to him. Bothered him. He felt the outside noise, even if he couldn’t be sure whether it was a vocal majority or a loud minority. Heck, at some point it wasn’t just on the outside anymore. It was in his own head.

He made a point to unfollow social media accounts that had anything to do with Mizzou football, but he admits he wasn’t perfect. When some of your own think their team can or should do better than its current starting quarterback, the quarterback tends to find out.

“When you see stuff like that, you start to think it’s real,” Cook says. “You start to have self-doubt.”

As in whether or not you were good enough to play in the SEC?

“Absolutely,” he says. “You start to wonder, ‘Maybe I don’t belong.’”

That’s the backdrop for 7-1. The backdrop for the player PFF rates as one of the best at his position. The backdrop for the unquestioned leader of Missouri’s highest college football playoff ranking in program history.

Doubt.

Yours.

And his.

And who can’t find the appeal in that?

The threads in the journey actually trace back to high school, when coaches and players would tweet at him that he wasn’t good enough to Division I football, an uncomfortable reality that just as uncomfortably served as preparation for what awaited at Mizzou.

Maybe that’s part of the reason he’s come through everything better. Because he’s spent his football life consumed with people questioning his ability to, well, do what he’s doing. Which came only after one more quarterback competition this fall. Before this breakout season, he was asked to beat out a transfer and the allure of a rising sophomore. The may-the-best-man-win competition ended where it started:

Cook.

It was so obvious that just might not be the popular choice that after the first game of the season, Drinkwitz defended it despite not really even being pressed that strongly on it.

“I’m not gonna let any of ya’ll decide. I’m not gonna let public perception decide,” Drinkwitz said then. “I’ll be honest: None of ya’ll’s opinions matter.”

This year, Cook has absorbed a saying with that same sentiment: Just us.

The Missouri football facility is littered with catch phrases, but the one illustrating an us-against-the-world mentality as lured Cook. How could it not? It’s the defining characteristic of his time in Columbia.

And for the moment, that battle has a clear winner.

“I’ve spent this year,” Cook says, “trying to prove to them that I belong.”

And maybe himself too.