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1) Gonna be a heavy dose of football here for obvious reasons, but let's hit on both hoops programs first. The men got a good win at Temple on Saturday. It doesn't erase Charleston Southern, but it makes up for one of the three opportunities they lost early in the season. They're neither as bad as people thought they were last week or probably as good as people think they are today. Good win, they should get another one against Southern Illinois Sunday and then it's on to the Braggin' Rights game.
On the women's side, hoo boy. Robin Pingeton's team lost to UMKC. We had Pingeton on our podcast before the season and she took exception to people who were saying this is a rebuilding year. Well, those people were right.
2) The question about the football hire all along that I thought would determine what kind of hire this was was "Would you have fired Barry Odom to hire this guy?" I'll give that a solid maybe this morning. I can't say for sure I think Missouri has a better coach than it did two weeks ago. It might. There's a chance. But there's no way you can say that for sure. Eliah Drinkwitz has coached 13 games in his career. It's fantastic that he's won 12 of them. But there's just not enough sample size to say without a doubt that Drinkwitz is an upgrade. We won't probably know for sure until he is two to three years into this thing. At least. But there's no way for sure you can say they're better at head coach right now than they were two weeks ago. Of course, there's also no way to say for sure they're worse.
3) In a weird way, all the stuff that happened last week makes Drinkwitz look better. A lot of people probably like him more than they would have last week simply because he's not Blake Anderson, Skip Holtz or Jeff Monken. He's a better hire than those guys in my opinion. I don't think the leak helped Missouri at all, but I think it helped Drinkwitz in terms of public perception. No hire is going to be unanimously greeted positively, but more people are probably excited about his hire today than they would have been before they knew what they found out on Thursday.
4) That said, the leak was a dreadfully bad look for Missouri. I don't think it's probably unusual for an AD to come back to a few members of the board and a few donors and say "Here are three guys I'm looking at. What do you think and what do you think the fans would think?" And I don't really think it's probably that unusual for the response to be "I'm not sure those are guys that are going to get our fanbase excited. Maybe we should go talk to a few more people before we get moving on this." So the issue isn't that it happened. The issue is that somebody made it public that it happened. There are only two possible reasons it was made public:
A) Someone was trying to make Jim Sterk look bad
B) Someone is not intelligent enough to understand that making that stuff public was going to make Jim Sterk look bad
There are no other reasons for that leak at all. If I'm at Missouri, I'm trying to find out who the leak was. And whatever position he or she is in, I'm making sure that he or she is no longer in that position as soon as possible. Because leak didn't just make Sterk look bad. It made Missouri look bad. And dysfunctional. And incompetent. And I'd be willing to bet it cost them money.
5) If I'm Drinkwitz's agent, I milked Missouri for a whole lot of guaranteed money. Obviously that's his job to begin with. But given that Mizzou just fired an alum who had a 21-17 record over his last three seasons (which isn't great but isn't awful and probably doesn't usually get you fired) and given that there are obviously members of the board and/or administration that have less than full support for the athletic director, and given that you gave a basketball coach a fully guaranteed contract, I'd have told Missouri "six years, 20 million, every penny of it guaranteed if you fire me before then and we can start to talk." There are two parts to this:
A) What's the annual salary? Honestly I think it has to be more than you were paying Barry Odom. That's the going rate. You fire a guy, you expect to pay the next guy more. Missouri already has a reputation of doing things on the cheap with the fanbase. It already was among the lowest paid jobs in its conference. Nothing about Drinkwitz's resume necessarily says he should make $3.3 million a year, but if you pay him less than Odom was making aren't you saying "We fired a guy to replace him with a guy that we don't think is worth as much?" And if that's the case, what's that say?
B) What's the guarantee? Again, if I'm his agent, I want it all guaranteed. Odom had the lowest buyout in the SEC by quite a bit. When you take a job, you have to look at the best case scenario, but you also have to look at the worst case scenario. What happens if I get two and a half years in and they fire me? It has happened in this league, you know. So given that's always possible, I want to know going in I'm making $20 million. That's whether I finish the contract or they fire me after game one.
Side note here, Drinkwitz's buyout from Appalachian State is $1.7 million ($425,000 a year for four years).
6) What does this hire mean for the current staff? I'd assume it means a couple of guys might have a chance to stay. Drinkwitz is coming from a place that it seems pretty unlikely he's going to bring everyone. That's not an SEC staff if you just transplant it as a whole entity probably. I would think since he's an offensive coach, the defensive guys would have a better chance to stay (Brick Haley for example). He will probably be more likely to keep the offensive guys.
7) I'm most interested to see if he's going to hire an offensive coordinator. He doesn't have one at Appalachian State. He calls the plays. Will he keep doing that here? Will he hire an OC but will it be more a figurehead and Drinkwitz will still be in charge? Drinkwitz also doesn't have a designated quarterbacks coach (I assume that's him too). Can you be a QB coach/OC/Head Coach in the SEC? Is Missouri comfortable with that? I don't know. Will be interesting to see.
8) The big story going forward is who stays and who goes on the current roster. Albert Okwuegbunam and Jordan Elliott are gone to the NFL. That won't change. Trystan Colon-Castillo says he's declaring. I can't remember if he's allowed to change his mind if he would want to. There will be other transfers. I don't specifically know who, but there will be some. On the recruiting front, Kevon Billingsley has said he's staying. Brady Cook will stay. I'd be willing to bet Will Norris, Jalen Logan-Redding and Jay Maclin will too, but I don't really know that at all. Cooper Davis grew up a Mizzou fan and I would think will stick around. The rest of the commit list is probably a little more up for grabs. Javian Hester visited UCLA last weekend, but I'm not sure what his status is.
9) Some of the recruiting stuff may come into focus this weekend. I know that the goal is to get every committed kid on campus. I would imagine they'd also like to get the kids who have opened things back up since the coaching change, though I'm not sure if they want to come. There is a rule in place that allows players who have already taken an official visit to Mizzou to take another one after the coaching change that doesn't count against their five visits. So it's not like Mizzou is going to be asking kids to spend their own money to come in. We'll do our best to find out throughout the week who will be in town, who's staying committed, who isn't, etc. We'll get that information posted as soon as we get it, but as we go through the week, we'll also compile all of it in the Chamber on Friday morning.
10) I don't have a lot of reading recommendations for you this week. I haven't read anything. I've been a little occupied. Instead, I leave you with my favorite tweet of the week, which is Mizzou related:
Good for Drew and for the Lock family. As I said on Twitter, can you imagine how cool it would be to see your son winning games as an NFL quarterback? One of my favorite things about this job is seeing players I first got to know when they were 16 year olds succeed and live out their dreams. In some instances, I get to know their families a little bit too and that was the case with the Locks. What a great couple of weeks for them. But, sorry, I hope next Sunday is one day they don't enjoy all that much.
1) Gonna be a heavy dose of football here for obvious reasons, but let's hit on both hoops programs first. The men got a good win at Temple on Saturday. It doesn't erase Charleston Southern, but it makes up for one of the three opportunities they lost early in the season. They're neither as bad as people thought they were last week or probably as good as people think they are today. Good win, they should get another one against Southern Illinois Sunday and then it's on to the Braggin' Rights game.
On the women's side, hoo boy. Robin Pingeton's team lost to UMKC. We had Pingeton on our podcast before the season and she took exception to people who were saying this is a rebuilding year. Well, those people were right.
2) The question about the football hire all along that I thought would determine what kind of hire this was was "Would you have fired Barry Odom to hire this guy?" I'll give that a solid maybe this morning. I can't say for sure I think Missouri has a better coach than it did two weeks ago. It might. There's a chance. But there's no way you can say that for sure. Eliah Drinkwitz has coached 13 games in his career. It's fantastic that he's won 12 of them. But there's just not enough sample size to say without a doubt that Drinkwitz is an upgrade. We won't probably know for sure until he is two to three years into this thing. At least. But there's no way for sure you can say they're better at head coach right now than they were two weeks ago. Of course, there's also no way to say for sure they're worse.
3) In a weird way, all the stuff that happened last week makes Drinkwitz look better. A lot of people probably like him more than they would have last week simply because he's not Blake Anderson, Skip Holtz or Jeff Monken. He's a better hire than those guys in my opinion. I don't think the leak helped Missouri at all, but I think it helped Drinkwitz in terms of public perception. No hire is going to be unanimously greeted positively, but more people are probably excited about his hire today than they would have been before they knew what they found out on Thursday.
4) That said, the leak was a dreadfully bad look for Missouri. I don't think it's probably unusual for an AD to come back to a few members of the board and a few donors and say "Here are three guys I'm looking at. What do you think and what do you think the fans would think?" And I don't really think it's probably that unusual for the response to be "I'm not sure those are guys that are going to get our fanbase excited. Maybe we should go talk to a few more people before we get moving on this." So the issue isn't that it happened. The issue is that somebody made it public that it happened. There are only two possible reasons it was made public:
A) Someone was trying to make Jim Sterk look bad
B) Someone is not intelligent enough to understand that making that stuff public was going to make Jim Sterk look bad
There are no other reasons for that leak at all. If I'm at Missouri, I'm trying to find out who the leak was. And whatever position he or she is in, I'm making sure that he or she is no longer in that position as soon as possible. Because leak didn't just make Sterk look bad. It made Missouri look bad. And dysfunctional. And incompetent. And I'd be willing to bet it cost them money.
5) If I'm Drinkwitz's agent, I milked Missouri for a whole lot of guaranteed money. Obviously that's his job to begin with. But given that Mizzou just fired an alum who had a 21-17 record over his last three seasons (which isn't great but isn't awful and probably doesn't usually get you fired) and given that there are obviously members of the board and/or administration that have less than full support for the athletic director, and given that you gave a basketball coach a fully guaranteed contract, I'd have told Missouri "six years, 20 million, every penny of it guaranteed if you fire me before then and we can start to talk." There are two parts to this:
A) What's the annual salary? Honestly I think it has to be more than you were paying Barry Odom. That's the going rate. You fire a guy, you expect to pay the next guy more. Missouri already has a reputation of doing things on the cheap with the fanbase. It already was among the lowest paid jobs in its conference. Nothing about Drinkwitz's resume necessarily says he should make $3.3 million a year, but if you pay him less than Odom was making aren't you saying "We fired a guy to replace him with a guy that we don't think is worth as much?" And if that's the case, what's that say?
B) What's the guarantee? Again, if I'm his agent, I want it all guaranteed. Odom had the lowest buyout in the SEC by quite a bit. When you take a job, you have to look at the best case scenario, but you also have to look at the worst case scenario. What happens if I get two and a half years in and they fire me? It has happened in this league, you know. So given that's always possible, I want to know going in I'm making $20 million. That's whether I finish the contract or they fire me after game one.
Side note here, Drinkwitz's buyout from Appalachian State is $1.7 million ($425,000 a year for four years).
6) What does this hire mean for the current staff? I'd assume it means a couple of guys might have a chance to stay. Drinkwitz is coming from a place that it seems pretty unlikely he's going to bring everyone. That's not an SEC staff if you just transplant it as a whole entity probably. I would think since he's an offensive coach, the defensive guys would have a better chance to stay (Brick Haley for example). He will probably be more likely to keep the offensive guys.
7) I'm most interested to see if he's going to hire an offensive coordinator. He doesn't have one at Appalachian State. He calls the plays. Will he keep doing that here? Will he hire an OC but will it be more a figurehead and Drinkwitz will still be in charge? Drinkwitz also doesn't have a designated quarterbacks coach (I assume that's him too). Can you be a QB coach/OC/Head Coach in the SEC? Is Missouri comfortable with that? I don't know. Will be interesting to see.
8) The big story going forward is who stays and who goes on the current roster. Albert Okwuegbunam and Jordan Elliott are gone to the NFL. That won't change. Trystan Colon-Castillo says he's declaring. I can't remember if he's allowed to change his mind if he would want to. There will be other transfers. I don't specifically know who, but there will be some. On the recruiting front, Kevon Billingsley has said he's staying. Brady Cook will stay. I'd be willing to bet Will Norris, Jalen Logan-Redding and Jay Maclin will too, but I don't really know that at all. Cooper Davis grew up a Mizzou fan and I would think will stick around. The rest of the commit list is probably a little more up for grabs. Javian Hester visited UCLA last weekend, but I'm not sure what his status is.
9) Some of the recruiting stuff may come into focus this weekend. I know that the goal is to get every committed kid on campus. I would imagine they'd also like to get the kids who have opened things back up since the coaching change, though I'm not sure if they want to come. There is a rule in place that allows players who have already taken an official visit to Mizzou to take another one after the coaching change that doesn't count against their five visits. So it's not like Mizzou is going to be asking kids to spend their own money to come in. We'll do our best to find out throughout the week who will be in town, who's staying committed, who isn't, etc. We'll get that information posted as soon as we get it, but as we go through the week, we'll also compile all of it in the Chamber on Friday morning.
10) I don't have a lot of reading recommendations for you this week. I haven't read anything. I've been a little occupied. Instead, I leave you with my favorite tweet of the week, which is Mizzou related:
Good for Drew and for the Lock family. As I said on Twitter, can you imagine how cool it would be to see your son winning games as an NFL quarterback? One of my favorite things about this job is seeing players I first got to know when they were 16 year olds succeed and live out their dreams. In some instances, I get to know their families a little bit too and that was the case with the Locks. What a great couple of weeks for them. But, sorry, I hope next Sunday is one day they don't enjoy all that much.
