A Sour Pinkel
What would you give a first-year football coach who gets whipped at home in his debut by something called Bowling Green and then loses four of the last five games of a 4-7 campaign — with the final loss an embarrassing 55-7 beating at Michigan State? If you’re Mike Alden, Missouri’s snappily attired athletic director, you hand coach Gary Pinkel a two-year extension of his lucrative five-year contract.
Some Mizzou fans are ready to hand Pinkel the keys to the Arch after the Tigers’ 33-20 upset over unranked Illinois. Alden and those success-starved fans need to remember the state’s motto. Missouri is the Show-Me State, not the Settle for Mediocre and Maybe We’ll Get Lucky State. Pinkel looks like a football coach. He also grumbles gruffly like a football coach and stares threateningly into the lens of a camera like a football coach. All of this is really important stuff if you’re looking for somebody to play the Dan Devine role in Rudy, but it doesn’t mean squat if you’re trying to beat Nebraska, Kansas State and Colorado every autumn.
What’s happened to the Mizzou football program over the past seventeen years isn’t a movie. It’s a soap opera without a leading man. The Tigers have fashioned just two winning seasons during that time — and they were puny winning seasons at that. In 1997, MU finished 7-5 and lost to Colorado State in the Plymouth Holiday Bowl. The next season, the Tigers posted an 8-4 mark and beat West Virginia in the Insight.com Bowl. That’s it. That’s Tiger football at its finest for an entire generation of MU fans. Quite frankly, that bites big hairy buttocks.
By adding two years to Pinkel’s contract after such a forgettable first season, Alden looks more desperate than a horny frat boy at 2 a.m. Why add two years to an unproven coach’s contract that already has him locked in until 2005?
Pinkel bristles at anyone calling him an untested or unproven coach. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch recently reported that a female Missouri fan approached Pinkel and asked him if the Tigers were going to have a winning season in 2002. Pinkel later told the Post-Dispatch reporter that he didn’t appreciate the fan’s question. “That’s insulting to me,” Pinkel said. “I’ve had two losing seasons in 24 years of coaching. For anybody to ask me that … I realize we’re building a program here, but … I just am not going to start thinking like that.”
Instead of giving Pinkel a two-year extension, Alden needs to slap him with a reality check. Pinkel fashioned a very glossy 50-18-1 overall record at Toledo, but the quality of competition he faced as head coach there for ten years was not impressive. Toledo plays in the Mid-American Conference, which is as similar to the Big 12 as Pinkel is to Knute Rockne — or even Warren Powers, the last Mizzou coach to finish his tenure in Columbia with a winning record.
Alden is adamant that Pinkel is the guy. “Gary has shown from day one that he has a detailed plan to turn our football program around,” Alden says. “This is a way to show that he has everyone’s full support to do just that.”
There is something ridiculous about showering a new coach like Pinkel with a deal that the state of Missouri might still be paying off long after he’s fired — which is what happened when Alden fired Pinkel’s predecessor, Larry Smith, with three years left on his contract.
If a first-year Missouri journalism professor were rewarded in like manner, he or she could crank out a classroom full of illiterates after the first semester and expect to be awarded tenure.
Pinkel might be the guy who finally delivers Mizzou football fans what they have long craved, but it doesn’t make sense to extend his contract until he proves he can do more than sneer.
