Gary Pinkel transformed Mizzou football program

Gary Pinkel’s momentous football coaching career at the University of Missouri has been characterized by remarkable reversals of fortune. That’s most easily demonstrated in his record, 117-71 in 15 seasons with a program that had been 63-122-5 in the previous 17.

But what’s most revealing is the mortar of how he put it together for MU, which plays Brigham Young at 6:30 p.m. Saturday at Arrowhead Stadium.

For a man who almost unfailingly professed to never change, everything that ultimately has happened in his tenure reflected the willingness to reinvent himself.

From overcoming his penchant for staying planted and loyalty to Toledo to take the Mizzou job after the 2000 season … to overhauling his offense and refining his cranky approach to media and fans in 2005 with the program teetering … to moving closer to his team in the wake of the death of Aaron O’Neal and in other phases since … to rebounding from a DUI arrest in 2011 … to resuscitating his program after its dud first year in the Southeastern Conference to win the last two SEC Eastern Division titles.

“I watched him evolve,” former MU athletic director Mike Alden said by phone Friday night, noting how Pinkel went from rigid disciplinarian to someone who welcome the counsel of his seniors and could dance in the locker room as he became “OK with making himself vulnerable.”

Every time the program was at a seeming crossroads, Pinkel navigated it back to prosperity.

That’s how he became the coach with the most career victories at Missouri, twice taking his team within a win of playing for a national title and producing seven first-round NFL Draft picks after MU had manufactured 12 in the previous 64 years combined.

Every time you thought the football program had grown stale or plateaued on his watch, Pinkel emphatically reminded us that you can never count it out under his watch.

Until this Friday the 13th, when he capped a chaotic week marked by racial strife at MU with another dizzying turn when he announced he would retire at the end of the season as he contends with non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

In a release from the school, Pinkel, 63, said he had been diagnosed in May and received multiple treatments immediately thereafter and wanted to keep coaching as long as he had the right energy.

But he reassessed after a PET scan on Oct. 26, he said, and determined the next day that this would be his last year coaching.

“I still feel good physically,” he said, “but I decided that I want to focus on enjoying my remaining years with my family and friends and also have proper time to battle the disease and give full attention to that.”

Pinkel long has contended he wouldn’t be coaching forever, playfully remarking when Bill Snyder returned to Kansas State at age 69 that he hopes “somebody comes and takes me out” if he did that.

But the sad circumstances and timing are jarring.

That’s less because MU is a mere 4-5 and sputtering offensively this season than because of the unrest in Columbia in the wake of a boycott by African-American football players that quite apparently expedited the downfall of University of Missouri System president Tim Wolfe about 36 hours later.

Pinkel became embroiled in the process when he swiftly embraced the stance of the players, who were acting in sympathy with the hunger strike of Jonathan Butler that called for the ouster of Wolfe.

“The Mizzou Family stands as one. We are united. We are behind our players,” Pinkel had posted on his Twitter account.

That appeared with a picture of what appeared to be most of the team and coaches with an additional hashtag nod to Concerned Student 1950, the activist group so named for the first year African-Americans were admitted to MU.

But that gesture took a curious and disappointing turn when Pinkel disavowed the reference to the student group in an interview with Kevin Kietzman on WHB (810 AM) and pinned that on the staff member who posts to his Twitter account.

It’s not known and maybe never will be what role all of this played in Pinkel’s decision to make the announcement on Friday.

And the ramifications of the controversy won’t be fully understood for years in the context of both the university itself and the football program’s ongoing ability to recruit.

The imminent question now is how to replace Pinkel, whose 190 career wins at Toledo and MU stands as the 19th-most in major-college history.

A fine case can be made for continuity with current staff members.

But the other side of Pinkel’s success is that MU, once seen as a hibernating giant of a program just waiting to be awakened, has become a perennial winner now.

So it represents an entirely different sort of job than the one Pinkel inherited. And despite the current turmoil, the job will be appealing — perhaps particularly so for an African-American candidate.

Meanwhile, an X-factor is new athletic director Mack Rhoades, who will be making his first hire at MU after coming from Houston.

Whoever steps in, though, isn’t likely to be able to replicate the success of Pinkel, whose MU legacy also includes graduating 97 percent of its seniors the last five years.

Now there a new sort of comeback challenge awaits Pinkel.

He always has been a driven man, acutely motivated by the circumstances of a childhood in which his older sister Kathy and younger brother Greg suffered from a disease (hereditary spastic paraplegia) that relegated them to wheelchairs as it skipped over him.

As he funnels that conviction in a new direction, even with MU at a new sort of crossroads, Pinkel will leave it much better than he found it.

Even if no one would have wanted it to end the way it has.

But one day they surely will build a statue of Pinkel … even if they can’t replicate the stuff inside that made it happen.

This story was originally published November 13, 2015 at 8:50 PM with the headline "Gary Pinkel transformed Mizzou football program."