Missouri head coach Eliah Drinkwitz bans his own staffer from practice (for a week)

No. 9 Missouri visits No. 25 Texas A&M on Saturday (noon ET, ABC). In a week without an Alabama-Georgia (last week) or an Ohio State-Oregon (next week), Tigers-Aggies is, by default, the biggest. GameDay will be in Berkeley for No. 8 Miami at Cal, No. 4 Tennessee at Arkansas gets the ABC prime time slot, but Mizzou-A&M is the only ranked matchup of Week 6.

But that's not the only hook to be found in this game.

Texas A&M's starting quarterback is Marcel Reed. A redshirt freshman from Nashville's Montgomery Bell Academy, Reed came in for injured incumbent Conner Weigman during A&M's win over McNeese and he, nor the Aggies, have looked back since. In three starts, Reed has hit 38-of-68 throws for 514 yards with six touchdowns and no picks while rushing for another 187 yards and two scores.

Weigman is healthy again and listed as a co-starter on A&M's depth chart, but Mizzou head coach Eliah Drinkwitz isn't buying it. "That's just semantics in my opinion," Drinkwitz said. "They're 3-0 and they've clearly have a different offensive identity with this guy as the quarterback. They've developed an offense that fits around his system that's a lot different than the first game of the year."

The identity of "this guy" is important, because he happen to be the brother of Mizzou's assistant director of on-campus recruiting Briah Reed.

And Drinkwitz is taking that connection very, very seriously. 

Drink mentioned the connection, which he was unaware of until Reed led A&M to victory at Florida, and then said, "so she's not allowed at practice this week." The line was delivered with a smile and then not mentioned again, so one would be forgiven in assuming the Mizzou head coach was being sarcastic.

But, no. He brought it up again in his turn on the SEC coaches teleconference Wednesday, with more specificity this time.

Think about this from Briah Reed's perspective. Let's safely assume she loves her brother and wishes him well on Saturday. Let's also assume she values her job as Mizzou's assistant director of on-campus recruiting and would like to continue doing it, as a step toward furthering her ultimate career goal.

Given those two safe assumptions, does she love her brother enough to sabotage her own career? Wait, that's not the right question. Let's drill down further: Is her brother winning this specific game on Saturday important enough for Briah Reed to commit career suicide? 

If Briah Reed provided practice intelligence to the opposition's starting quarterback, her career in college football is over that very instant, and deservedly so. That much goes without saying. 

And now her head coach just volunteered to the world -- then confirmed when asked 24 hours later -- that he trusts her so little that he think she would do just that if he didn't preemptively stop her by banning her from practice? And what about meetings? Is she allowed in coaches offices this week? Is she allowed to see who's spending more time than usual in the training room? Where does the subterfuge end?

Or maybe Drinkwitz was being charitable. Perhaps he assumed Texas A&M's coaches would task Marcel with calling Briah to glean information from her, and by banning her from practice, he was protecting her from being put in between her family and her employer.

But if that was the case -- and let's be honest, we're several floors to deep here -- Drink just blew Briah's cover to feed the Aggies false information.

"Briah does an excellent job here, and we're very fortunate for her to be on our staff," Drinkwitz said Tuesday.

As always, stay tuned to The Scoop for the latest.