New Central Michigan Football Coach Matt Drinkall Set to Lead the Chippewas His Way

Emily Van Buskirk | Jan 2, 2025

Army football offensive line coach Matt Drinkall during practice on July 30, 2024. / Patrick Oehler/Poughkeepsie Journal / USA TODAY NETWORK

Don’t let the description of “first-time DI head coach” fool you - Matt Drinkall knows ball.

The new head coach of the Central Michigan Chippewas has spent the last 21 years perfecting his craft from various vantage points - from high school position coach, to Division III head coach, to Division I co-offensive coordinator. 

Drinkall is an innovator, a mad scheme scientist. He orchestrated a 2013 St. Ambrose (NAIA) offense that ranked fourth in the nation in scoring (44.2 points per game), total offense (505.9 yards per game) and passing (326.3 yards per game). He took a wayward 2014 Kansas Wesleyan football program from 2-9 in his first year to 10-1 in his seceond, all as the second-youngest head coach in college football (at the time of hiring). Drinkall led the Coyotes to a No. 4 national ranking at the end of the 2018 season (a program best) before being hired away by Army.

And while Division I football was always the plan, Drinkall knew that the long road would yield the best results.

“The coaching profession is so scary to begin with,” admitted Drinkall. “I played at Iowa and coached at Northern Illinois, so I’ve been in Division I but I made a decision in my early 20’s to go down in level because that would allow me to go up in title…when you come up through high school, you get to experiment and do things your own way. That was my favorite part about coaching at Kansas Wesleyan, I could try all this stuff out and if I liked it, I could work at it.”

The best advice Drinkall ever got was from his last conversation with Iowa head coach Kirk Ferentz in Iowa City. His former coach told him there were two ways to make it in the coaching world - you either have to know the right people and spend all your time talking, like a college football car salesman, which Ferentz noted would work for a while until people eventually figured you out. The other way, the path Drinkall inevitably chose, involved getting somewhere that let you coach, coaching your tail off, and having faith that someone would eventually notice. 

“It was great advice,” Drinkall admitted. “But you don’t want to hear it when you are 20 from a guy who’s making like five million a year. But he was right.”

So Drinkall spent the next two decades experimenting - utilizing the no-huddle, power-spread offense, racking up school and conference records for points and yards per game, developing players like Eric Williamson, Demarco Prewitt and Bryson Daily. 

When Drinkall arrived at West Point, he wasted no time implementing his innovation into Army’s offense. He helped the Black Knights transition from a traditional triple-option offense into a more dynamic power rushing attack. He developed the offensive line, he helped create a successful passing game, was 81-56 with three bowl game appearances and captured the Commander-In-Chief’s Trophy three times while also defeating Navy in 2020, 2022 and 2023.

His body of work at West Point speaks for itself.

“I want to emphasize how good of an Offensive Line Coach and leader Mike Viti is at Army,” expressed Drinkall. “Learning from Jeff Monken and Viti really helped my growth there as well as strength coach Conor Hughes and special teams coordinator Sean Saturino - they all had a huge impact on me in different ways.”

He calls Viti and Hughes “emotional masterminds” when it comes to motivation and creative problem solving. e plans to take Hughes’ philosophy with him to Mount Pleasant.  

“Never change the standard,” Drinkall relayed. “There is an amount of work required and a way it must be done. The work never changes, but the method of delivery must.”

As Drinkall turns to the future of Central Michigan football, he is excited to get back to his midwestern, blue-collar roots. 

“Central Michigan is a tough area which is exactly how I plan to build the program,” the Iowa native shared. “Our GM, Ayden Opfer is the best kept secret in college football, he’s a rock star in the making. And I look forward to developing our players' tool boxes and skills so that they can handle setbacks, adversity and disappointment and loss. The three skills we plan on building around are intelligence, resiliency and toughness."

Drinkall has already been productive building out his staff, hiring former Eastern Washington play-caller Jim Chapin as his OC and fellow ex-Army coach Sean Cronin to command his defense. He is also assistants like Chrisitan Dukes and Sheldon Croney Jr. a space to grow as coaches.

It isn't just coaches he’s offering up opportunities to. Drinkall has always been a “fit guy,” even if it means turning away talent. 

“The most important thing to make any scheme go is human resource acquisition - you have to have the players who can do these things and you have to have coaches who can coach these things,” said Drinkall. “People lose sight of that all the time. What you do matters very little, how you do it is the absolute paramount thing to your success.”

He’s an enthusiast for missing puzzle pieces, an RPO opportunist, and a lover of the toughest position known to man.

How Drinkall will run the program isn’t going to be for everyone, with an emphasis on total personal development in every aspect of life, a violent style of play and the best coach/player relationships in all of football. He’s even signing a fullback to a scholarship.

(Been waiting a long time to do this)

🚨ATTENTION ALL FULLBACKS!🚨

Central Michigan Football is looking to sign a Fullback to a scholarship!

No better day to get the word out than on Mike Alstott’s birthday!

Reply to this post with your film if interested. pic.twitter.com/mpw54jlnct

— Matthew Drinkall (@DrinkallCoach) December 21, 2024

“If I get fired for not winning enough games, then I’ll get fired knowing we did it in a way that made the players better people, and they developed knowledge, skills and abilities that will help them for the rest of their lives,” proclaimed the fullback afficianado.

Drinkall can always go back to lining fields before games, four-hour bus rides home and sharing half a Dominos pizza with the backup quarterback. He will probably always be a high school head coach dressed in D1 clothing. Those experiences and the people he learned from laid the foundation for the kind of coach and person he is today.

“There are some new aspects of college football that are insane to navigate,” admitted Drinkall. “But as much as things change, other things stay the same. The players feeling truly loved, cared about, and respected will never go away. The better we are at that, the bigger difference we can make. That's the goal.”

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