The word “extraordinary” can be used casually, to the point that the word loses its heft and its force.
The past week for Missouri football was truly extraordinary… and it’s not even over.
A chaotic and bewildering week ends for Missouri with the Tigers’ game against BYU on Saturday night in Arrowhead Stadium. The dramatic events surrounding a program and a college campus have created non-stop news the past several days. Friday, the leader of the program — the man who brought it back to the mountaintop — resigned in order to devote full attention to his health and holistic wellness.
Just one week after Minnesota coach Jerry Kill had to step away from football at the age of 54, in a tearful and much sadder set of circumstances, Missouri coach Gary Pinkel called it a career at age 63 in order to fully subdue lymphoma, which he says he’s managing well.
In the short term, many will note and remember that Pinkel’s final act as a head coach was to support the players on his team who boycotted playing until internal changes were made at the university. For a lot of people, that might remain the lasting image of who and what Pinkel was. Plenty of reasonable people can (and will, and already have chosen to) debate the nobility of Pinkel’s actions there, but we come today to offer an appraisal of Pinkel’s career as a football coach, specifically at Missouri.
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As Pinkel steps down in Columbia — a month after another coach, Steve Spurrier, also stepped down in Columbia (South Carolina) — we’re confronted with yet another coaching vacancy, but that discussion can wait until next week. What kind of program will the new coach inherit in “CoMo”?
A much stronger one, thanks to Pinkel, who — it is instructive to note — did well enough in his third season on the job to buy himself time for the longer haul.
Indeed, the starting point for an assessment of Pinkel’s career at Missouri lies in his 2003 season. After a pair of losing campaigns in 2001 and 2002, Pinkel needed to show — to himself and everyone who cared about the program — that progress was real and not just a hoped-for goal, never to be attained. Winning eight games and making the Independence Bowl enabled Pinkel and his players to breathe. The ship was sailing in the right direction. That’s all Pinkel needed to continue without worry that he wouldn’t be able to finish what he started.
The 2004 season ended at 5-6, but it was a season which came on the heels of a forward step. Programs, in a building phase, don’t immediately stack together winning seasons — not automatically, at any rate. Following one strong season with another doesn’t come naturally at a place where winning had been a very occasional reality. When Pinkel took over the program in 2001, Mizzou had reached just two bowl games the previous 17 seasons. The last truly fertile period in the program’s existence was a six-year period from 1978 through 1983. Warren Powers coached the Tigers to five bowl games in that span; remember, bowls weren’t nearly as easy to make in those days.
After the 2004 season — the necessary “learning year” within a larger context of evolution and growth — the true build accelerated in CoMo. Pinkel made bowl games in 2005 and 2006, and with a seasoned Chase Daniel at quarterback in 2007, the Tigers’ turbo-charged offense fueled the program’s ascent. A win over Kansas — in a game which matched a pair of top-five-ranked teams (what a time to be alive!) — marked the highlight of that 2007 season. Missouri stood just one win from an appearance in the 2008 BCS National Championship Game. Merely getting that far marked a titanic accomplishment for Pinkel.
Whereas the 2007 West Virginia team must forever live with losing at home to a bad Pittsburgh team — it’s the loss Rich Rodriguez will never shake as long as he coaches — Missouri lost to the school which dominated the Big 12 in the first decade of the 21st century, the University of Oklahoma. Missouri didn’t so much “blow it”; the Tigers merely fell short against an accomplished opponent which was still enjoying its heyday. The fact that Oklahoma (with Nebraska) towered over Missouri for decades in the old Big Eight Conference might have added to the sting of that loss, but the Sooners were simply better.
That Missouri came so close to national championship glory was, itself, a remarkable accomplishment.
In capturing the fullness of Pinkel’s achievements at Missouri, the truly gleaming fact at the center of his legacy is that Pinkel climbed to the highest reaches of the sport a second time… after being knocked down.
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Under quarterback Blaine Gabbert — the successor to Daniel — Missouri continued to post strong results through 2010, but in 2011 and especially 2012, the program encountered a few potholes. The 2011 season did not live up to the new standards set from 2007 through 2010. The 2012 season was a fall-off-the-cliff 5-7 disaster.
The key detail worth bringing up is that the 2012 season was Missouri’s first season in the SEC. The crowing which came from the rest of the league — hell, even VANDERBILT won nine games and went to a bowl in 2012! — when Missouri stumbled in its first SEC voyage was deafening. The Tigers were laughed off the stage just one year into their SEC existence.
In many ways, Pinkel was starting all over. New conference, new expectations. Georgia was a stronger program at the time. Florida had just made the 2013 Sugar Bowl against Louisville. South Carolina was in the midst of the best three-year stretch in program history under Spurrier.
Missouri was screwed… at least in the eyes of most SEC observers.
Then came 2013.
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It’s not as though the 2013 Missouri football team had it easy. Veteran quarterback James Franklin got injured at Georgia, and the Tigers had to piece together the quarterback spot in the second half of that game. Maty Mauk provided stability, and a trick-play pass from Bud Sasser helped the Tigers conquer the Hedges (and the Bulldogs).
That day marked the beginning of a second revival for Pinkel. The Don James disciple didn’t resurrect Missouri football once; he did it twice, and that’s probably the best argument in support of the claim that Pinkel is Mizzou’s greatest football coach ever.
Even though the 2013 team lost a heartbreaker to South Carolina — a game which had all the markings of a classic “almost but not quite” Missouri failure — the win over Georgia have Pinkel’s pupils a resilience they never lost. Missouri shrugged off the defeat at the hands of South Carolina to win pressure-packed November clashes against Ole Miss (on the road) and reigning Heisman Trophy winner Johnny Manziel (and Texas A&M). The Tigers finished 7-1, and because South Carolina was upset at Tennessee, that was enough to win the SEC East.
The crowing from the rest of the SEC — so loud you needed earplugs to drown it out at the start of the 2013 season — abruptly ended. The Tigers once again put themselves in position to play for the national title, especially since Michigan State knocked off Ohio State in the Big Ten Championship Game. Michigan State and Stanford might have had their own arguments to make, but Missouri would have been in the conversation had it defeated Auburn. The Tigers — as in 2007 — fell short in a conference title game, but again, the mere fact they were in that position was remarkable… at least when seen through the lens of where the program stood when that season began.
What Pinkel had achieved in 2007, he achieved again in 2013, and when he repeated as SEC East champion in 2014, it was a final powerful statement of the resilience he instilled in his program. Yes, Missouri has stumbled in 2015, but the Tigers are not viewed as a laughingstock in the SEC, and that’s Gary Pinkel’s doing more than anyone else.
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In the history of Missouri football, only one man stands alongside Pinkel as a creator of similar accomplishments. Dan Devine brought the school three Orange Bowl berths (with one victory) and a Sugar Bowl championship in the 1960s (and the 1959 season). Devine had previously begun to build the Arizona State program before arriving in Columbia, and on the other side of his 13 seasons with Mizzou, Devine proved to be a successful steward of the Notre Dame program left to him by Ara Parseghian. Devine won the 1977 national championship and the 1979 Cotton Bowl (“The Chicken Soup Game,” also known as Joe Montana’s first iconic moment in the American sports fan’s imagination) before leading the Irish to the 1981 Sugar Bowl and a date against Herschel Walker and Georgia.
Devine is the greatest football coach who ever coached at Missouri. That much is clear. Gary Pinkel, however, has an argument to make: He could very legitimately be the most important football coach Missouri has ever employed. That importance comes from ushering the Tigers into the SEC era and making the program attractive to the next head coach. That importance also flows from rebuilding his program not once, but twice — not just as the inheritor of a mess, but as someone who needed to fix his own problems at the end of 2012.
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Gary Pinkel, as mentioned above, was a disciple of Don James. The legendary coach at the University of Washington died in the middle of Missouri’s 2013 season, precisely when Pinkel was engineering the second rebirth of his program.
It is very much worth noting that James inherited a Washington program (in 1975) which had largely become stagnant over the previous 10 years. Pinkel was a position coach and then offensive coordinator for the Huskies as they grew and then consolidated that growth over the course of the 1980s. Pinkel knew what it meant — and what it looked like — to inherit a stagnant situation and turn it into a place of creativity, fertility, and progress.
Pinkel’s career paid tribute to Don James in the best possible way — it followed the same path on a number of levels. It brought a rich and illustrious chapter to a school which needed to remember what success looked like.
The first resurrection of Missouri football, from 2007 through 2010, would have been more than enough for many men to achieve. It’s the second resurrection of Missouri, in 2013 and 2014, which cements Gary Pinkel’s place in CoMo, and in the larger history of college football.