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1) It's possible you've heard that Mizzou hired a new athletic director on Sunday night. Desiree Reed-Francois comes from UNLV. She'll be approved by the Board of Curators on Tuesday and Missouri will have a press conference shortly after, most likely on Wednesday. First, let's talk about the process, then we'll talk about the hire.
Reed-Francois' name came up very quickly. Pete Thamel mentioned her as a candidate right off the bat. It made sense, but her name is also one that has come up for a lot of Power Five openings in the last couple years. But over the next few days, it was a name that definitely kept appearing. We had her on our updated board at the beginning of last week and Dave Matter was mentioning her as a possibility pretty early as well. The only other names that seemed to gain consistent traction throughout the process were Wren Baker at North Texas, Laird Veatch at Memphis and Brian White at Florida Atlantic. We are extremely confident that Missouri reached out to all three during the process. From what I'm told (and it's been reported by our Memphis site as well), Veatch also interviewed with Mizzou over the weekend. I am confident that Baker and White did not. Whether that was their choice or Missouri's I can't say for sure.
The one thing we can confidently say is that Reed-Francois was in the top group throughout the process. I haven't gotten any feedback on her interview, but since Missouri hired her, it obviously went well and the committee felt there was no need to talk to anyone else. Obviously on Wednesday, they'll tell us that Reed-Francois was the only person offered the job and the only person they wanted. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not, but it really doesn't matter. Missouri started out talking about hiring a sitting Power Five AD with experience in the SEC. I'm sure they gauged the interest of some that fit that category. But the reality is, very few of those people are going to be looking to move. The more realistic candidate pool all along was Group of Five ADs that were ready to make the jump. Missouri found one and it found one that has been a part of athletic departments in three different Power Five conferences (PAC-12, ACC, SEC).
2) So, is this a good hire? Two things have to be said off the top: First, on paper, yes, it looks good. Second, none of us really knows.
Hiring an athletic director is similar to hiring a coach: You do all the homework you can. You talk to all the people you can. You break it down from a million different angles. And then you take a leap of faith. The best example I can give you is Mack Rhoads. He was a very good AD at Houston. He is a very good AD at Baylor. He was a very not good AD at Missouri. Rhoads is a good athletic director. It absolutely did not work here. Sometimes you make a good hire that doesn't work (which, in the end, means it was a bad hire). Sometimes you make a hire that most people don't like and it works (which, in the end, means it was a good hire). So everybody's going to have an opinion this morning and none of them really mean much of anything. I don't know if Reed-Francois will be good here. Neither do any of you. Neither do the people that hired her.
Ultimately, whether she's good will depend on her ability to put good people in charge of the programs at Missouri. She's not going to have to make a major hire in her first couple of years in all likelihood. Eli Drinkwitz is as secure as any football coach in America at this point in time. He's going to be here for a while. Ultimately, Reed-Francois' tenure will be very much judged on what happens with Drinkwitz. If he is as good as many believe he is right now, can she keep him? If he isn't as good as many believe he is right now, can she find the right person to replace him when that time comes? Cuonzo Martin is going to be the coach here for a bare minimum of two years (and that was likely true unless Missouri just hired someone that Martin didn't get along with at all, which isn't the case here). Larissa Anderson and Brian Smith and Joshua Taylor and Andrew Grevers are set for a while. There are two sports I see Reed-Francois potentially needing to make a decision on in the next two years: Baseball and women's basketball. It's a big season for those programs, even more so now that there's a new athletic director. Reed-Francois made changes in both of those sports at UNLV. We ran down how every team did during her tenure in Vegas this morning.
I've heard a lot during this process: The number one goal has to be to hire somebody who can raise money. While that's true on the surface, I don't know exactly what that means. The truth is, EVERYBODY raises money. Most of the people on Missouri's list set fundraising records at the schools they were at. Heck, Jim Sterk set fundraising records twice in the last four years, including setting it last year in the midst of a worldwide pandemic, and Missouri ushered him out the door. The money simply increases all the time in college sports. Everyone raises more money now than they did ten years ago. Yes, I'm sure there are ways and programs some ADs find to do it better than others. But mostly, it depends on the success of your teams. If your teams are headed in the right direction and are successful and have momentum, you will have more interest from fans, which means more donations and better fundraising. If your teams are not doing well, fewer people are interested and fewer people will give money. So the idea "we need a good fundraiser" is, in my mind, overstated. You need someone who hires the right coaches and puts as many Mizzou teams as possible in a position to be successful. That will lead to good fundraising.
3) So what are the biggest jobs facing Reed-Francois in Columbia? I mentioned baseball and women's hoops. I think she'll need to get an indoor facility for the softball team to keep Larissa Anderson happy pretty quickly. Beyond that, it's having a good relationship with Eli Drinkwitz and making sure he feels like he's got everything he needs here. It's continuing to build on the current level of enthusiasm for the football team. It's helping Missouri's coaches and players and fans navigate the name, image and likeness stuff and making sure Mizzou can take full advantage of it. So there's no shortage of things she'll need to dive right into.
4) We'll finish up on the new AD with a couple of interesting things about her background. As we told you last night, her son, Jackson Francois, is going to be a journalism student starting in 2022 and plans to walk on to the basketball team. This was already happening before Missouri even had a job opening so the two aren't connected (although I'm sure it probably made Reed-Francois that much more interested when the job did open). I can't tell you anything about him as a player, other than he was on the Bishop Gorman JV as a sophomore. I know his walking on to the basketball team was one of the main topics of discussion last night, but from everything I can tell, the kid wants to go to journalism school and that's the main reason he's probably coming to Mizzou. I don't think Missouri is getting a major impact player here or anything.
Another thing I discovered while doing some research on Reed-Francois last night is the story of her brother, Roman Reed. Reed was a middle linebacker who had hopes of playing in the NFL. In her introductory press conference at UNLV, Reed-Francois said growing up that Roman was going to play in the NFL and she was going to be his lawyer. On September 10, 1994, Roman dove to make a tackle and broke his neck. The doctors told him he would be paralyzed from the shoulders down for the rest of his life. Roman went on to earn his degree from Cal and for the last 13 years has been the Executive Director of the Stanford Partnership for Spinal Cord Injury and Repair and has raised millions of dollars for research of spinal cord injuries over the years. Pretty interesting story and one I'm hoping to be able to research and do something on in the near future.
