Commentary: Long way to an easy answer
Laird Veatch may be an excellent Director of Athletics for Mizzou. That needs to be said first. I have no objection to the hire, which should be finalized in the next few hours, at all. I don't know enough to have a reasonable objection to it.
So what follows is in no way an indictment of Veatch, the job he's done at Memphis or the job he'll do at Mizzou.
My question is simple: What took so long?
Desiree Reed-Francois was named the Athletic Director at Arizona on February 19th. That report broke from Pete Thamel at 10:51 a.m. Central time. That day--in fact, before noon that day--I posted that I'd predict Veatch to be her replacement.
That's not patting myself on the back as a seer. I've predicted a million things on here over the last 21 years and every now and then a few of them even turn out to be right.
It's also, again, not anything against the hire. Veatch knows Missouri, he has experience as an athletic director and he's probably ready for this step.
But why, if Missouri ended up hiring exactly the person that I--and many others--thought they'd hire before the shock of the Reed-Francois announcement wore off, did it take 63 days? And, oh by the way, a not inconsequential $125,000 payment to search firm TurnKeyZRG?
The hire was made by a Board of Curators that had just recently formed an Intercollegiate Athletics Special Committee to oversee the finances of the athletic department. When asked why the committee was formed, somewhere in the middle of a word salad, Curator Bob Blitz said this on Thursday: "With the statistics that we saw, we felt in fulfilling our fiduciary duty that it was a must to step in and find out more about what was going on in the athletic department...We're trying to make sure that the athletic department is running in a financially responsible way."
Like spending $125,000 on a search firm to help identify the guy identified as a leading candidate by anyone with a brain who has followed college athletics for the last few years?
Veatch checks boxes. He was at Missouri early in his administrative career. The job--and the salary--is a clear step up from where he's at. He knows people at Mizzou and some of them on the search committee that eventually hired him. He likely views Missouri as much more of a destination job than many others out there. You didn't need to pay anyone six figures to tell you that. At least not if you have an idea of the landscape when you start the process.
Maybe, you say, the search committee exists to give the school cover in the process. And I'll grant you there's some of that (we could delve into why people in college athletics think their processes need to be guarded like nuclear codes, but that's another column for another day). Not only is the secrecy overvalued, it doesn't really work all that well. The last time Mizzou hired an AD--Veatch was one of the finalists when Reed-Francois got the job by the way--I was asked by someone after the introductory press conference how our initial list of candidates was so accurate. The question was asked because those in charge are paranoid about leaks.
But the answer was simple: It's not freaking rocket science. When there's an opening, anyone who follows this stuff can come up with a logical list of candidates. Every now and then there's an out of left field shocker, but most of the time, the initial lists of sensible candidates are pretty accurate because, well, they're sensible.
Here's a sample of text messages I got within minutes of the news breaking:
"Could have hired him two months ago."
"Not sure you needed a search firm for that."
"We took nine weeks to hire the first name on your hot board? LOL."
With all the talk these days of financial responsibility (remember, the schools sure don't have enough money to pay the players themselves), maybe that $125,000 could have been better spent elsewhere? It probably at least could have covered the first couple weeks of Veatch's salary.
Again, none of this means the hire sucks. Veatch is stepping into Mizzou at a time with a good amount of momentum and will probably do just fine here. The defenders will say you have to go through due process and make sure you're hiring the right person even if the right person is the first one you think of.
I don't disagree. Nine days? Cool. I'll even give you a month. But nine weeks? To hire the guy that was identified on Twitter and message boards within nine minutes?
I'm gonna check the classifieds. I gotta get me one of them search firm gigs.
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