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So I'm taking a little bit of a different approach today. Missouri's 2022 sports year is basically over. So rather than come up with ten hypotheticals and hot takes and such, I thought I'd go back and look at the ten biggest stories of the 2021-22 Mizzou sports year. I'm sure some would put them in different order than I would. Some would have only football, some only football and men's hoops, but I'm trying to make it somewhat of a representative list. I'm going to link some of the stories we did on these things in these individual points if you're interested in going back and re-reading anything. So here we go:
1) Desiree Reed-Francois replaces Jim Sterk as athletic director. Most fans probably don't view this as the biggest story because the biggest stories all happen on the field or the court. But there really can't be a bigger story for a college athletic department than the person who runs it changing. Back on July 26, I got a tip that Sterk was stepping down in the middle of the day. We spent about three hours calling everyone we could possibly think of and finally got it confirmed late in the afternoon. Over the next few days, it would become clear that it was less of a resignation and more of a suggestion. I don't really know the exact reasons. Different people will have different points of view. In the end, I think Sterk probably gets too much heat from Missouri fans, but I also think it was a good time for a change. College sports was entering a brand new era and I think Reed-Francois is more modern and adaptable than Sterk probably was.
Reed-Francois (this story on her was probably my favorite I wrote last year) spent most of her first few months watching, learning and figuring things out. There have been a lot of changes. People get used to things a certain way and don't usually like change. There had been a lot of comfort in the Missouri athletic department for a lot of years. Some change has been necessary for quite a while. Sterk made some changes. Reed-Francois is making more. No idea whether they'll work, but just continuing to do the same things Missouri has been doing wasn't the way to go because those things sure haven't been working for most of the last eight years.
2) Cuonzo Martin let go as basketball coach. At the beginning of the year, I really had no thought that this would be Martin's last season. With a brand new roster, I think everyone expected a step back, but he'd gone to two tournaments in four years after taking over one of the worst high major programs in the country and there wasn't any real danger he was going to lose his job. And then the season was just a disaster. In every way. The Tigers were blown out by UMKC and Liberty then looked like they were playing a different sport than Kansas, Illinois and Kentucky. The hand-picked roster of mid-major transfers largely couldn't play at a higher level. The season went off the rails early and never got back on them. But it was more than just the results on the court. Don't get me wrong, those were bad and were the main reason he got fired. But more than that, fans had lost faith he could turn it around. The general feeling was that we'd seen Martin's ceiling and it wasn't high enough. It was time. You could make an argument that he'd done enough in his first four years to have a bad year and get one more shot, but he'd just remade the roster the way he wanted it and it was dreadful. The biggest criticism of Martin had always been that he coached the way Gene Keady coached when he played in the early 1990's. It just doesn't translate now. With everything going on around the game and the way NIL and the portal have changed player acquisition, Missouri needed to get more modern. So Missouri made the move.
3) Ultimately, that move resulted in the hiring of Dennis Gates. Five days after Martin was out, we revised our hot board and in the end, it turned out to be almost completely accurate. I've since learned that Missouri never talked to Jerome Tang. They weren't going to hire an assistant. But the rest of the top five here (Todd Golden, Matt McMahon, Kim English and Gates) all talked to Missouri at least once. At least two of them did so twice. The Tigers ultimately chose Gates, hiring him on March 22nd.
The move was met with skepticism and anger online from most Missouri fans because that's how pretty much every move is initially met. But nationally, most basketball people really liked the hire. And over the next few weeks, Missouri fans grew to like it too. Over about a month, Gates would retain Missouri's best returning player (Kobe Brown) and add eight new faces to the roster. He's not done yet. We expect the ninth new face to join the team later today when Missouri State transfer Isiaih Mosley is expected to announce his decision. He also hired C.Y. Young away from Florida State for $600,000 per year to lead his staff. How good is the team going to be next season? No idea. But Missouri basketball fans once again have hope. And that's a big-time plus.
4) Luther Burden signs with Missouri. Many will think this should be higher. I get it. But ultimately, we're talking about one player and I just can't count that as a bigger impact than a new AD or a new basketball coach. Don't get me wrong: It's the biggest recruiting story at Missouri in five years (hopefully this blue-chipper sees more action than the one five years ago did). Burden committed to Oklahoma in October of 2020 and stuck with the Sooners until August 17. As soon as he opened things up, most believed he was headed to Mizzou. But it wasn't an easy battle. Ultimately it was Georgia that emerged as the Tigers' main competition. By decision day, we thought he was coming to Missouri, but we weren't positive until we had everything set up at the Herbert Hoover Boys and Girls Club to live stream his announcement. Our discussions with people at the event prior to the announcement set our minds at ease that we weren't going to have Missouri fans destroying us for broadcasting his commitment to Georgia. Burden ended up as the No. 4 overall player in the class, the highest-rated recruit Missouri had signed since Dorial Green-Beckham a decade earlier. He was the centerpiece of the No. 15 class in the country for Eli Drinkwitz, the best mark in school history. He enrolled early, looked like a star in spring football and now we wait for him to play an actual game.
5) Days after Burden signed, the question became who will be throwing him the football? The day after Mizzou's loss in the Armed Forces Bowl, Connor Bazelak announced his decision to transfer. That left Brady Cook and Tyler Macon as the only scholarship quarterbacks on the roster for spring ball with four-star commitment Sam Horn coming in the summer. This story unfolded on two fronts. While Cook and Macon were making their bids for the starting job in spring ball, Drinkwitz was burning up the phones and the recruiting trail searching for another quarterback. Missouri looked into Spencer Rattler and Caleb Williams and Casey Thompson and maybe some others. It brought Jayden Daniels and J.T. Daniels and Gerry Bohanon in for visits. It finally ended up signing seventh-year Mississippi State transfer Jack Abraham as a walk-on...at least for now. The why of the great quarterback chase has been debated over and over. Who will win the job? Who knows? That will be determined in August and perhaps beyond. Ultimately the goal is this: Find a guy who can do enough to show progress from a year ago and help bridge the program to 2023 when Horn likely takes over and Drinkwitz's recruiting is the backbone of the program. This season is important, but the one that will likely indicate what direction this thing is ultimately headed in is probably still 15 months away.
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