Interim AD Wren Baker doesn’t intend to be a mere placeholder for Mizzou

Expect more pillow fights in the immediate future within the Missouri athletics department.

That’s not a flimsy metaphor for the chaotic state of affairs in Columbia.

It’s a reality of the Wren Baker era, which was ushered in Wednesday when he was appointed interim athletic director in the wake of Mack Rhoades’ sudden departure for Baylor.

“When I come home at night, my daughters (Addisyn, 5, and Reagan, 21 months) want to pillow fight, which is kind of a tradition I started,” Baker said. “No matter how many shots to the head I’ve taken at work, when I get home they’re going to give me a few more.”

It’s probably a good thing Baker can take a beating, because the seat he has inherited — even if it winds up being temporary — has been scorching hot in recent years.

Mizzou has dealt with an unprecedented run of high-profile issues, many that cast the school and its athletics program in a negative light.

Here’s an incomplete list: Frank Haith’s abrupt departure for Tulsa, the botched Sasha Menu-Courey investigation, an NCAA probe into men’s basketball infractions, the football team’s boycott and a player protest by the softball team.

Baker, who said he learned Tuesday that Rhoades would be leaving for Baylor, isn’t ignorant of the challenges the Tigers face as an athletic department.

“Unfortunately, once that spotlight’s on you, it doesn’t leave you easily,” he said. “When you have some things happen like we have, all of a sudden every blemish is magnified.”

The latest blemish finds Missouri — which has hired new basketball, football and baseball coaches since April 2014 — in the market for an athletic director for the second time in 18 months.

Worse yet, Baker steps into a campuswide power vacuum.

Baker, who was hired in May 2015 as Rhoades’ second-in-command, reports to an interim chancellor, Hank Foley, who reports to an interim University of Missouri system president, Michael Middleton.

Mizzou has yet to find full-time replacements for former president Tim Wolfe and former chancellor R. Bowen Loftin, who both resigned amid protests in November after the football team’s boycott brought national attention.

It’s unclear what the hiring priority for those positions will be, though the search for a new president and chancellor obviously had an eight-month head start.

Nevertheless, Baker has no intention of being a placeholder.

“One thing I’m not made for is to sit in neutral or tread water,” he said. “I want to keep advancing forward. We had some key initiatives that we’ve been working on over the last 14 months that Mack started the ball rolling and developing.”

Projects like the Mizzou Made curriculum, an extension of the Total Person Program that trades on the social-media presence stoked by former football coach Gary Pinkel, and improvements at Memorial Stadium or the Mizzou Athletic Training Complex remain paramount.

Baker — a native of Valliant, a town of 800 in southeast Oklahoma — has some experience leading an athletic department. He restarted the athletic department at Rogers State in Claremore, Okla., and was that school’s first athletic director.

Baker then spent two years at Northwest Missouri State as athletic director before becoming the deputy athletic director at Memphis in 2013, a job he held until Rhoades offered a position at Mizzou and provided his first experience with a Power Five athletic department.

He doesn’t necessarily consider this interim period as an audition, but Baker made no secret he’s interested in shedding the interim tag and remaining in Columbia. And he might have a puncher’s chance if Mizzou’s significant challenges tamp down outside interest in the job.

“If you’re asking Wren Baker, I think it’s a great AD’s job, and anybody would be crazy to not be interested in it,” he said. “I think somebody’s going to be really, really lucky when they get to be the director of athletics at Missouri.”

Among other pressing priorities, Baker said he needs to get caught up to speed on where the university’s Title IX office stands with its investigation into alleged verbal abuse of players by softball coach Ehren Earleywine.

“I don’t have an answer for what that timeline looks like, but I do want to get it done as quickly as possible,” he said.

This story was originally published July 15, 2016 at 7:01 PM with the headline "Interim AD Wren Baker doesn’t intend to be a mere placeholder for Mizzou."