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1) By the end of the day today, I expect Missouri's hiring of Dennis Gates will be a formality. At this point, we are waiting on the Board of Curators to put out a notice that they are holding a meeting. We expect that notice to go out some time on Monday with the meeting being held on Tuesday. Once that meeting is called, it's going to happen. As I told someone over the weekend, at most schools I would tell you this was 100% done. At Missouri I will say it's about 98% done simply because I have seen the Curators take over the process multiple times before. But I do not expect that to happen. I fully expect them to rubber stamp Gates' hiring. Once the notice goes out, it's a foregone conclusion.
2) Everyone is welcome to his own opinion. I will not change anyone's opinion. My opinion is that once Mizzou was down to Gates, Todd Golden, Kim English and Matt McMahon (and I am pretty confident these were the four "finalists" and I'll do my search postmortem at some point this week after the Gates hiring is official), to me, there wasn't much difference. They were basically all the same candidate. There were things to really like, things to question, a lot of potential but no sure thing. If you preferred one of the other three to Gates, that's your prerogative. You might be right and you might not be. I said once Mizzou got down to these four, I wasn't going to stomp my feet regardless of which one they hired. I personally viewed Gates, English and Golden as very similar and probably would have put Gates and English a half-tick above Golden. I would have had McMahon fourth on that list. But that's just my personal opinion. Everyone else can have his own.
3) There's a pretty good chance we're going to get to compare three of these four up close and personal. Obviously Florida hired Golden. McMahon's name is in the mix at LSU. I think he could still be a candidate at South Carolina, but I'm not sure which way that one's going. So that's three of the four finalists quite possibly coaching in the SEC next year.
This shows that Missouri's list wasn't some bottom feeding, this program sucks so we can't hire anybody good list. This is the candidate pool non-blueblood high-major programs were looking at this year. The Dana Altman talk was fun for about 24 hours and the Chris Holtmann speculation for about half that, but no hire like that was ever realistic in my opinion. I'm not saying Missouri (or Eddie Fogler on behalf of Missouri) never asked about the possibility. I'm just saying it wasn't realistic. And those bashing Missouri's administration for hiring a guy from Cleveland State would do themselves well to look around and see who the other SEC programs are hiring. They're fairly similar. Georgia might have hired a "more proven" coach, but it did so because the school at which Mike White proved himself didn't really have much interest in seeing more proof of what he is.
You can dislike the Gates hire if you want, but if you're angry Missouri hired a mid-major coach and that shouldn't be happening, you just don't really have a handle on the reality of hiring a new coach at 90% of the schools in the country.
4) Gates, Golden and McMahon (if he ends up in the SEC) are obviously going to long be compared to each other. But there's another comparison that's going to forever be made here and that's Gates to Kim English. At this point, it's pretty safe to say English will be the coach at George Mason next year. How long he stays there remains to be seen. Based on not only logic, but also conversations I've had over the last week, this coaching search was almost certainly Missouri's only chance to hire Kim English (unless Gates leaves Missouri in the next 24 months which seems unlikely). By the time Gates is either good enough to make a move on his own or bad enough to get fired, the same is going to be true of English at Mason. The next time Missouri is looking for a coach, English either will have been good enough that he's gotten a job that will probably keep him from taking the Missouri job or bad enough that Missouri wouldn't consider him.
FOMO isn't a reason to hire someone if you don't believe he is the best candidate so I'm not arguing Missouri should have hired English. I very well might have simply because I don't think there was a significant difference between him, Golden and Gates, but as I said, I'm not going to say Missouri made a big mistake by any means. But the interesting thing to follow will be whether or not English becomes Mizzou's version of Brad Underwood. Underwood is a K-State alum and he coached there through 2012. When Frank Martin left for South Carolina, Underwood went with him, spent one year in Columbia and then became a head coach. The next coaching search Kansas State had came nine years later, by which time Underwood had a significantly better job. The Cats tried, but it seems they were unable to lure him from Illinois back to his alma mater.
The concern here is that English follows a similar career path. I'm not saying he's going to. And, again, I'm not saying you hire a guy you don't believe to be the best candidate for the job simply because you don't think you'll have another chance. But I can guarantee you that Missouri fans are going to forever compare Dennis Gates to Kim English. It will be interesting to follow. Whether Missouri's decision ends up being right or wrong won't be known for quite a few years.
5) Missouri played a spring football game this weekend. And I mean it was actually a spring football GAME. They lined up and played actual football in a format we could all understand! Hallelujah! I'm not kidding. Thank you, Eli Drinkwitz, for finally making the spring game make sense. I don't think they gave away a whole bunch of secrets as to what we're going to see next fall. The offensive and defensive schemes were pretty basic. We didn't see a whole lot of blitzing or any trick plays. But we saw actual football. And that's fun.
