by Gary Pinkel
We headed to Nebraska the next week without Damien, our leading rusher. We decided to pull the redshirt off our freshman running back, Tony Temple. The trip began ominously when our plane skidded off the runway in Columbia the day before the game. We had to delay our flight until Saturday morning and made it to Lincoln just a few hours before kickoff. Things only got worse during the game. We couldn’t run the ball and after just a few carries Temple hurt his Achilles tendon. We lost 24–3.
When things are going badly like that, you try to stay positive. You can’t just start screaming at people. The players had to see me under control.
But away from the team, I lost my cool with the media a few times that year. We had a couple new beat writers that I let get on my nerves. We were struggling, and I felt they were overanalyzing me. I got edgy a few times and fired back at them. After the Nebraska game, I cut off my postgame radio interview with Chris Gervino, our sideline reporter and a local sports anchor. People were angry I snapped at him—my boss, Mike Alden, included. They were right to be upset. I later apologized to Chris.
During the season, Don James called me from Washington, which was rare for him. He had a friend in St. Louis who had read about some of the tension I had with the media. He read Don some stories over the phone.
He said to me, “Gary, you getting a little frustrated with the media?”
I told him, “Yeah. I’ve got these two young writers covering the team who…”
I barely got to finish my sentence.
“Gary,” he said, “remember when things are going well you give all the credit to everyone else. When things are going bad, you take all the blame. You don’t need to get into it with the media. Right or wrong, you don’t need these problems. You can be completely right in your mind, but they’ll always have the last say. When things go bad, take the heat and get back to work and make things better.”
That was brilliant advice that I needed to hear.
Things didn’t get better on the field. We lost the next two weeks, both at home, against Kansas State and Kansas. That took us out of bowl contention. Our program was steadily making progress our first three years and then we had this setback. Suddenly I had three losing seasons in four years. We won at Iowa State in overtime to close the season, but the year was still nothing short of a disappointment. From nationally ranked to staying home for bowl season. But I still believed in what we were doing.
After the final game, I met with Mike Alden at Lakota Coffee Company, my regular morning stop for coffee where I meet with some close friends. We had to evaluate the season. Mike wanted to analyze the situation but without micromanaging. He asked open-ended questions about the program’s direction and our leadership. That was his way of asking if I needed to make staff changes. I could sense Mike was feeling some pressure. His hand-picked football coach had three losing seasons in his first four years. But in my mind, I was thinking, Are you kidding me, Mike? Is Missouri going to do what it’s always done? When things get tough, Missouri fires the head coach and brings in the next guy. It had been the cycle for decades. I told Mike, “I will not make a change unless it’s a necessity, unless it’s the right thing to do for our team. I’m not firing a guy to take the heat off the head coach and the athletic director. I’m not making staff changes just to make changes. I see it happen all over the country, and I’m not going to do it.”
These were good coaches. They were good coaches at Toledo, and they were good coaches the year before when we went to a bowl.
Mike was fine with my decision. I think he wanted me to make some changes, and I didn’t have a problem with him asking me about making changes. That’s his job. I also think he wanted to see how I reacted to the topic. Was I truly confident in this staff? If he sensed I was indecisive about making changes, maybe he would have pressed me harder. He didn’t say I should hire this guy or that guy.
When I sensed people wanted change, I heard the same concerns we faced when we first came from Toledo. “You’ve got these Mid-American Conference coaches, and they’ll never win in the Big 12.”
Sometimes the right thing to do is fire an assistant. I made changes at Toledo. Some of Nick Saban’s coaches weren’t right for the plans I had. But this was different.
I told Mike when he first hired me that there would come a time when the pressure would rise and I would need his support. This was never going to be an easy job. We made it harder with a rough 2004. But like he promised, Mike supported me. The staff stayed intact.
Back at Lakota, Mike Alden said he especially didn’t like the way I snapped at Chris Gervino after the Nebraska game. “Chris is a good guy, Gary,” he told me. “People like him. My grandparents like him. You can’t snap at Chris like that.” He was right.
At that point, I told myself I’d never let a writer or someone in the media get me to lose my poise. I think I was pretty good with that the rest of my career.
Mike was always concerned about public image with every coach in our program and would always give suggestions on how I could improve in that area. I had great respect for Mike and appreciated that support.
Mizzou vs. Oklahoma
October 23, 2010 Columbia, Missouri
For our 2010 homecoming game, we hosted Oklahoma, the No. 1 team in the BCS standings. We were winless in six tries against the Sooners. That had to change.
Team Meeting Thursday, October 21, 3:30 pm
“The strength of the team is its power when it plays as a fist. We have talked about what makes up the fist: trust, enthusiasm, work ethic, pride, and collective responsibility. The new component today is will, the will to win. This team has a tremendous amount of will. It showed up at our toughest moments this year. Oklahoma is coming to the Zou for the first time since 2006, and they have no respect for us. The media has no respect for Gary Pinkel. The media has no respect for this coaching staff. The media has no respect for you. Bob Stoops has no respect for Gary Pinkel. Bob Stoops has no respect for this coaching staff. Bob Stoops has no respect for you. Oklahoma players have no respect for Gary Pinkel. Oklahoma players have no respect for this coaching staff. Oklahoma players have no respect for you. Men, it’s time that changes.
“To the Missouri football family: There comes a time when you have to make a statement about who you are and what you are about. The time is now. It’s time to draw a line on the field and say in order to get across you’re going to have to destroy me. You’re not coming across this line because this is my team, because this is my city, this is my university, and this is my stadium. This is THE ZOU and WE ARE MIZZOU!
“Have fun Saturday at 7:10 kicking Oklahoma’s ass.”
Final: Mizzou 36, Oklahoma 27
Gahn McGaffie’s game-opening kickoff return touchdown would set the tone for one of the biggest home wins in Mizzou history. We trailed in the fourth quarter, but Blaine Gabbert’s touchdown pass to Jerrell Jackson rallied our team. Blaine had one of the best games of his career and passed for 308 yards.
6. Mizzou: Competing for Championships
We do what we do. I’ve said that a few times over the years. It drove Mike Alden crazy. Sometimes he’d cringe when he heard me say it. It probably bothered the fans, too.
We do what we do because it works. This program I installed at Missouri was the same program Don James ran at Kent State and Washington. It was the same program I installed at Toledo. We have infrastructure. We have a daily process that is about attention to detail. That process applies to every part of the program and everyone who works in our organization. We had meticulous schedules and standards for everything: recruiting, practicing, academics, lifting, running, traveling, coaching. Everything operated according to a precise schedule that was mapped out to the minute every day, every week, every month. How meticulous? We had a daily schedule for the content that we tacked on the team bulletin board in the locker room. It was the graduate assistants’ job to post the righ
t information at the right time of day every day. The staple on the bulletin board had to be at a precise angle so the sheet of paper wouldn’t tear. We left no stone unturned. Our stones were completely turned. And we didn’t deviate from the plan.
But “we do what we do” doesn’t mean we don’t evaluate and don’t change. We constantly analyzed and evaluated everything we did, and if we decided something needed to adjust, we made adjustments.
After the 2004 season, I explained to our players that we had to brush ourselves off. If you go to a bowl one season you’re expected to go to a bowl the next season. If you don’t, it feels awful. And it should feel awful.
As coaches, we see other coaches fired all the time. Sustained success in this sport is so difficult. When things go bad, it’s tempting to scrap what you’re doing and change your identity, change your process. But just like I told my friend Pat Gucciardo back at Toledo, I wasn’t going to change our program. After our 2004 season at Missouri, Pat and I talked again.
“Gary, I’m not going to ask you again,” he said, “but do you feel good about what you’re doing?”
I did.
“Yeah, I do,” I said. “And as you know, we evaluate everything.”
I told the team we weren’t changing. The coaches were going to work harder, and they were going to work harder.
I knew we were under pressure going into 2005, but I didn’t dwell on it. Nobody put more pressure on me than I did. The pressure was self-induced. I had to learn how to keep the pressure from affecting my job. Were my coaches worried about pressure? We didn’t talk about those things, but my staff knew me well enough that we weren’t going to start throwing around magic dust to fix our problems. I just had to remind our players that our way works. We had to stay positive. I think back years later and we worked so hard to get to a bowl game in 2003, but then we struggled to repeat that success. We had to coach better.
We didn’t change a thing when it came to the foundation and structure of our program, but when we did our 2004 postseason evaluation and looked closely at our offense, defense, and kicking game, we came to the conclusion we had to adjust our offense.
• • •
Our offense struggled in 2004. Brad Smith didn’t run the ball as much, and he wasn’t making the progress we needed as a passer. There was one team in the Big 12 that I spent a lot of time watching: Texas Tech. Mike Leach brought his no-huddle spread offense to the Big 12 and changed the game in our conference. I was in Big 12 meetings with Mike all the time, and it was pretty obvious we were very different guys. He was quirky but so intelligent. I had so much respect for him and what his team was accomplishing with that offense. They were going to bowl games every year. Our players were just as good as their players, so what was the difference? Their offense was better. After the season, I called in Dave Christensen and we started talking. I told him, “We’ve got to do something different.” He felt the same way. He wanted to play faster. He wanted to spread out our formations. Those concepts are so common in today’s game, but in 2005 only a handful of teams had truly embraced the no-huddle spread offense.
One of those teams was Bowling Green.
After the 2002 season, Urban Meyer left Bowling Green for Utah, but Bowling Green kept his offense in place and continued to win a lot of games under Gregg Brandon, who had been Urban’s offensive coordinator. We flew Gregg and his staff to Columbia and they taught us their version of the no-huddle spread. We didn’t want to dip our toe into a new offense. We wanted to dive in head first and fully submerge into a new system. We changed every aspect of our offense. Formations. Plays. Terminology. Signals. Everything. I thought it was one of the great installations of an offense I’d ever seen. I was so thankful for Gregg and those guys at Bowling Green.
We always said we’d never change the foundation of the program, but we always evaluated everything within the program. We’d go back and grade everything, from recruiting to spring practices to winter conditioning. We always tried to make ourselves better. The foundation doesn’t change. The structure doesn’t change. But the other side of being a successful team or corporation is that you’ve got to stay on the cutting edge of change. You can be the last one to change and get passed by, or you can be the innovator. You can’t just live in a box. You have to adjust. At Nike, Phil Knight would preach the practice of relentless evaluation. How are you going to make yourself better? This was our answer.
Once we installed the new offense, we intentionally downplayed how drastically we changed the system with the media. You only get one chance to surprise your opponents, so we weren’t interested in sharing all the nuances of our changes. These weren’t subtle tweaks to the offense. We tore up the old playbook and changed everything. Four- and five-receiver sets. Shotgun formations exclusively. No huddles, ever. It was bombs away downfield. That’s what we needed.
Our coaches believed the new offense would give us an edge on Saturdays, but there was more to it. It was good for morale, too. After that difficult 2004 season, our program needed a spark, an emotional boost.
• • •
We installed the offense before spring practices. After spring practices comes spring recruiting, and after recruiting comes camp season. After camps, coaches would get a chance for some down time.
A few weeks before preseason camp, my wife and I went to Las Vegas with some other couples for a getaway. While I was gone from Columbia, I was in touch with everything back home every day. I never delegated to the point where I was in the dark on what was happening around the program. I wasn’t a micromanager; I just didn’t like surprises.
On July 12, a Tuesday, we went for a long walk in the late morning. I didn’t take my phone with me, which was incredibly rare. I’m on call all the time, and that thing never left my side. When we got back from our walk, I grabbed my phone and I must have had 10 calls from Pat Ivey, our strength and conditioning coach, and another eight or 10 calls from Rex Sharp, our team trainer. I had another four or five calls from Mike Alden, our athletic director, who was on vacation in the San Juan Islands. I said to my wife, “Something really bad has happened.” I just knew it. There’s nothing normal about that many phone calls.
I called Mike and Rex and Pat and they all told me what happened. Aaron O’Neal, one of our young players, a freshman linebacker, had died after a workout in Columbia. You can’t be prepared for a phone call like that. We got on a flight home as soon as possible.
Aaron had just finished his freshman year. He redshirted in 2004 and was going to be a great player for us. He came from Parkway North High School in St. Louis. He was an exceptional young man with a big bright smile that lit up his face. I loved recruiting the kid and just loved everything about him. He was only 19 years old. How could this happen?
Once we got back to Missouri, one of the first things I did was travel to St. Louis with Cornell Ford, our assistant coach who had recruited Aaron. We had to go see Mr. O’Neal, Aaron’s father. It was something we had to do. There were a lot of tears that day. It’s a moment you never want to experience in this line of work. Parents entrust us to watch over their kids. There aren’t many head football coaches who have had to make that visit.
There were so many questions to answer, so many things we needed to address. Weeks later I wondered in the back of my mind if our staff could overcome a tragedy like this, but our primary focus, after visiting with Aaron’s father, turned to our team. How will our players recover? How will the players respond to losing one of their teammates, their brothers?
We got the team together and talked to all of the players. We had doctors talk to the players. At that point we weren’t sure what had caused Aaron to die. When something like this happens, it’s really easy to point fingers and blame people, but I believed in the people we had working for our program and the people working on that field that day. I was confident in our staff. They knew to recognize the warning signs when kids are stru
ggling during a workout. I wasn’t at the workout because NCAA rules prohibit coaches from attending those offseason drills. But I also knew what kind of people we had on our staff running those workouts. I trusted them to do their jobs the right way. Those guys, our trainers and strength coaches, were absolutely devastated.
We had to heal. Aaron’s family held a funeral the next week in St. Louis. Later that week, we had a memorial service at Mizzou Arena. It was so difficult for our players, our staff. I spoke during the service, as did Mike Alden; Bob Bunton, Aaron’s high school coach; and two of our players, Derrick Ming and Dedrick Harrington.
Initially that summer, all of our thoughts were focused on, number one, Aaron’s family and, number two, our team. Hearts were broken and we had to comfort people through their loss. Over time, the legal process set in and also the potential effects something like this might have on our program. We worked hard to establish trust with recruits and parents, especially in the St. Louis region. In the back of my mind I thought about those potential issues right away. But at that time, I had bigger, more immediate, more personal concerns. How would our players cope with this tragedy? Our assistant coaches told our players to have their parents call us with any concerns or questions. If we got any of those calls, we had to be honest and handle things the right way. But I never had a parent call and accuse our staff of pushing kids too hard. That never came up. So I felt pretty comfortable with how we handled that part of our program. Our golden rule was to treat our players like we would treat our own kids.
We couldn’t discuss details publicly with the media. We were instructed immediately that we couldn’t talk about what happened that day from a legal standpoint. That had nothing to do with anyone’s guilt or innocence. The athletic department wanted to be more transparent, but it was one of those situations where the school’s legal counsel and our public relations office came from different perspectives. We wanted to protect the school’s image and talk about what happened that day; legal was more concerned with liability, which also made sense from the university’s position.