Fired MU coach Barry Odom was as much a victim of circumstance as any of his own flaws
Anyone who loves sports knows that fortunes can be fickle and fleeting and unforgiving.
So it is that just weeks after his team was 5-1 and had won for the ninth time in 11 games over two seasons, Barry Odom on Saturday was fired as the University of Missouri football coach because of a baffling cave-in over the second half of the season.
“As a program, we had tremendous momentum coming into the 2019 season with the opening of the new south end zone facility as well as other strategic investments in our football program,” athletic director Jim Sterk said in a statement. “However, we lost a great deal of that energy during the last half of the season. This decision was difficult to make but was necessary.”
Purely pragmatic as it was, alas, it’s hard to fault Sterk for the decision.
Not with MU ostensibly the definition of mediocrity in terms of Odom’s 25-25 four-year record. And with fan frustration over mounting losses and a maddening number of penalties manifesting itself in antipathy on social media and apathy otherwise: The announced crowd for the Tigers’ home finale against Tennessee last week was 49,348, a tally that didn’t meet the eye test.
It’s hard to fault Odom when an athletic department whose budget is near the bottom of the Southeastern Conference is in dire need of a football program that generates revenue and excitement and faith.
All of that became hard to muster with counteracting events such as the exasperating Wyoming loss to open the season and the team being discombobulated and seemingly outmatched against the likes of Vanderbilt and Kentucky.
It’s the athletic director’s prerogative and responsibility to make hard changes, and one man’s patience is another’s negligence. So good on Sterk for acting when he saw fit.
But the truth is that this decision is only as good as what’s to follow, a challenge that Sterk evidently embraces but that now will put the onus on him in a new way.
Best of luck: With the sole exception of Gary Pinkel, Odom is the sixth coach fired among seven hired by MU in the half-century since Dan Devine left after the 1970 season to coach the Green Bay Packers.
And the truth is that whatever is to come doesn’t make this moment any less of a shame.
Pardon us if we save hope for the future for later.
Because a good man and his staff and their families were purged in less than the amount of time than he might have enjoyed if the AD who’d hired him still were at MU —and in three years’ less time than it took predecessor Pinkel to win in double-digits.
Obligatory as the change might seem, it comes with an asterisk and incomplete grade on Odom.
For all that he might have done better, he’s still a casualty of the times and the SEC arms race after 18 years at MU that included eight as a coach (2009-11, 2015-19), six in an administrative capacity (2003-08) and four as a student-athlete (1996-99).
“If you’re gonna hire a True Son Mizzou through and through guy GIVE HIM TIME,” former Tiger Lucas Vincent posted on Twitter. “Couldn’t even get a full cycle of players through the program and move forward with his guys.”
Or as former Tiger Sean Weatherspoon put it in a tweet, “Sterk getting his own hire is fine. But the odds are it won’t change overnight. Before ‘05, when was the last time Mizzou had bowl game success? Now it seems as if we EXPECT to go to the SEC title game and a Post NYD bowl. We ain’t Bama! Wake up! It (ain’t) easy folks!”
It especially wasn’t easy for Odom, who took over at a crossroads of chaos and confusion after the 2015 season.
Pinkel, the man who remarkably made the program relevant again after decades of dormancy, abruptly had retired as he was contending with lymphoma.
Alienating many longtime supporters that very week, with ongoing implications in recruiting and donations and attendance, MU players had entered into a campus protest against racism and threatened to boycott a game.
Mack Rhoades, the athletic director who hired Odom, left before he coached his first game, part of a bizarre state of flux across the board in the school’s administration.
This was a foundation of quicksand. Or maybe it was more like cement shoes, a fine complement to the straitjacket the program had wrapped around it in Odom’s last year.
The nonsensical NCAA sanctions handed out in January over a rogue tutor led to a cloud hovering over the program (in baseball and softball as well), not to mention players and staff who had nothing to do with it. Recruiting sanctions hurt, and will keep hurting.
But nothing stood out more tangibly than the postseason ban that kept MU from playing in a bowl game after it beat Arkansas on Friday — a ban upheld after an appeal rejected only last week that cost the school perhaps $10 million in shared Southeastern Conference bowl revenue.
Surely exacerbated by that added financial twist, Odom lost his job Saturday morning.
Despite having a better record than Pinkel did after four seasons (25-25 to 22-25) and navigating the NCAA mess masterfully — no players transferred away — and going 21-17 his last three seasons and seeming to enjoy the same love from his players as he exited that he did when they swarmed him the day he was hired.
“You have had a tremendous impact on my life way beyond football,” senior linebacker Cale Garrett, who missed most of the season with an injury, wrote on Twitter. He was speaking for many.
It’s natural for MU to want more and better for and from its football program than it got from the coach who had just one losing season in four but whose final season was a regression.
Odom had flaws and made mistakes, of course. And it’s hard to know how to reconcile what happened after that 5-1 start this season.
But he also stood for everything MU should want in its coach and might have delivered in more time — a fifth year that once would have seemed reasonable for someone running a program honorably with at least a modicum of success and promising recruiting.
Maybe he wouldn’t have delivered more, of course.
But we’ll never know now after his fortunes suddenly plummeted these last two months.
All of which made Saturday an empty day. Even as MU seeks to find that elusive person who could do it better within the financial constraints around the program — and with time being of the essence as it is.