Establishing relationships will be key for new Mizzou A.D. Mack Rhoades

Mack Rhoades will be introduced Tuesday as the University of Missouri’s new athletic director, and he appears to bring many fine things to the job.

He’s managed the pandemonium of realignment, helping Houston land comfortably in the American Athletic Conference, and he’s known as a forward-thinker willing to make bold moves.

Rhoades, 49, especially seems to be an astute fundraiser, everyone says, particularly considering he helped raise more than $100 million for capital campaigns for the University of Houston the last five years.

Those are fundamental prerequisites to the job, of course, especially in the ongoing arms-race era of college athletics. And under Rhoades’ soon-to-depart predecessor, Mike Alden, the school went from stone-age facilities to state-of-the-art.

It can’t slack up now with various key projects to be concluded and plenty ahead if it wants to stay afloat in the Southeastern Conference.

So all of this surely formed the rationale for MU chancellor R. Bowen Loftin saying in a release Monday that MU had “found the right fit at the right time to take Mizzou Athletics to even greater heights.”

Only time can tell on that.

But if it’s to prove true, how Rhoades will fit has less to do with any specific tasks or philosophies right now than it does more elemental matters:

His accessibility and ability to cultivate relationships with all constituents, from boosters to colleagues to coaches and anyone else who touches the program.

This was always an odd gap in the game of Alden, who is perceived by many as too distant to truly engage.

That can make it tough for people to know where they stand with him (see: Missouri basketball coaches). And it tends to make a number of donors feel unappreciated.

For all Alden has done for Mizzou, and he indeed shepherded the most transformative period in MU athletics history, that remoteness also has been part of MU’s struggles with public perception.

There were many such episodes in his tenure, but maybe one was the most telling and crucial from which to learn.

With the tragedy of Sasha Menu Courey’s story about to break on ESPN’s “Outside The Lines” and an impending crisis to manage just over a year ago, Alden honored a previous commitment to be in Florida as president of the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics.

In his absence but certainly under his watch, his department contrived a tone-deaf email campaign in response to the distressing report about the convoluted circumstances surrounding the suicide of the swimmer and that she had been allegedly sexually assaulted by a MU athlete.

In the vacuum, MU appeared aloof when it needed simply to be visible and empathetic.

In the vacuum — six days later — University of Missouri System president Tim Wolfe was forced to seize that role.

If he was meddling, as some believed, it was only because Alden had been fiddling.

The bigger point was that Wolfe instantly conjured just the right pitch.

“Words probably don’t adequately express ... my sympathy and prayers and thoughts (that) go out to Sasha Menu Courey, her family, her friends and her teammates,” Wolfe began that day. “It’s unfortunately a tragic situation that’s kind of personal to me since I’m a parent of a female freshman student-athlete myself.”

Had Alden said the same sorts of things days before, it might have minimized the outrage over ESPN’s report — which was disturbing in many ways but speckled with leaps of cause and effect.

Alden later acknowledged finding a way might have made a difference … although he still insisted he had had no chance to be available in that span.

None of this means Alden didn’t actually care, of course, and none of it means Mizzou isn’t better off for Alden’s work — including hiring Gary Pinkel as football coach.

But it does mean that there’s been something missing that “the right fit” would recognize and reconcile.

By all accounts, it’s not something that will be a chore for Rhoades. Colleagues, people who worked for him and MU insiders gush about his warmth, his consensus-building style, personability and … willingness to relate.

“Some people might looks at bricks and mortar, but I would tell you I think it’s the relationships Mack has in this industry among coaches and administrators …” said Hunter Yurachek, a Houston administrator who also worked with Rhoades when he was A.D. at Akron.

“You can look at the football stadium we built at the University of Akron and the football stadium we built here, but I think he would tell you it’s the relationships he’s built at each and every stop — not only within the athletic department, but also with the donors and the fan base.”

He’ll soon have some tangible issues to speak to, of course.

But his first order of business best be to develop the relationships that could not only sustain MU sports but elevate it to another tier both in stature and perception.

This story was originally published March 9, 2015 at 9:51 PM with the headline "Establishing relationships will be key for new Mizzou A.D. Mack Rhoades."