Following the 2000 Missouri football season, Mike Alden fired Larry Smith. Smith had led Mizzou to its first bowl game in 14 years in 1997 and followed it up with a good, almost great, 8-4 season in 1998. But the bottom fell out in 1999 and the Tigers went 7-15 over the next two seasons. Alden, just a couple years into his tenure, was about to make a move that would transform the Missouri football program and, in fact, change the course of history for the entire University.
Alden was intrigued by Turner Gill and former Mizzou assistant Jon Hoke. He interviewed Florida State offensive coordinator Mark Richt and Western Michigan head coach Gary Darnell, but eventually settled on Toledo coach Gary Pinkel.
“Gary came out on top on every metric,” Alden said. “Seriously. That’s not to offend anybody else, but he did.”
Pinkel was a known commodity. He’d spent ten years coaching the Rockets, winning his division three times and the 1995 Mid-American Conference championship. He was the winningest coach in school history (73-37-1) and was coming off a 10-1 campaign in 2000 that included a win at Penn State. That came after a successful run as the offensive coordinator at Washington under Pinkel’s college coach, Don James.
“A lot of people told me not to come to Missouri,” Pinkel said.
“I think that he saw it as being a challenge, he saw people that were going to be in the foxhole with him,” Alden said. “I think he saw an opportunity to do things in a lot of ways that his mentor Don James did.”
Missouri’s reputation wasn’t exactly sterling at that time. There had been just two winning seasons since 1983. The facilities and the commitment from the administration were woefully behind most of their opposition. Alden called it “a job that everybody and his brother said you couldn’t win at, a place where coaches go to die” and Pinkel had plenty of people tell him not to take it. He took it.
And then, Pinkel did at Missouri what he did at Toledo.
He is the winningest coach in Missouri school history, finishing 118-73 in 15 seasons before he retired. As much as—and probably more than—anything else, it is those 15 years at Mizzou that earned Pinkel a notice last week informing him that he’d been voted into the College Football Hall of Fame’s Class of 2022.
“I just never expected to be invited to the Hall of Fame,” he said. “I just didn’t think my story — a lot of guys win more championships than we did. It wasn’t because I didn’t believe in me or myself… I just didn’t think I was going to get in so I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about it.”
Pinkel got a package on his doorstep, which he forgot to bring in the house until the next morning. He opened it to see a football. His initial impression was that it was a request for an autograph on the ball. He read the enclosed letter from the College Football Hall of Fame that concluded, “Welcome, you’re part of the team.”
“I just broke down,” Pinkel said. “I didn’t think it would ever happen. And then I wasn’t sure. Did this really happen?
“It was a moment I will never, ever forget.”
The path to induction wasn’t easy. Pinkel went 9-14 in his first two years at Mizzou, had three losing seasons in his first four. But the foundation was being laid even though few on the outside may have recognized it at the time. Asked for his singular memory of Pinkel, Alden flashed back to Nov. 3, 2001 in Boulder, Colorado. It was just the eighth game Pinkel coached at Mizzou, a 38-24 loss to the Buffaloes.
“We were outside of that stadium, outside of the busses waiting to leave, Gary was talking to me, he looked at me and he said ‘Man, Mike, I just wish I could fast forward four or five years cause I know what this place is going to look like,’” Alden recalled. “I reflect on that a lot. I think about that in different junctures. While it was great to be able to see the culmination of that, I always come back to him looking at me after a loss and saying ‘I just wish we could fast forward.’”
Pinkel never fast forwarded. That wasn’t him. He built slowly and steadily. In what became the mantra for his 15 years at Missouri, he did what he did. He plugged in his system and let it work. He went from four wins to five to eight and then took a step back to 5-6 in 2004. He insisted it was going to work. It didn’t immediately, but it did eventually.
“You can’t deny the things we did,” Pinkel said. “I believed we could win anywhere we go. My gift is that I’m probably not very good at anything, but I’m very good at people and uniting people.”
The full payoff didn’t happen until year six, when Missouri entered the 2007 Big 12 Championship game as the nation’s No. 1 team. The Tigers lost that one to Oklahoma, but finished 12-2, ranked fourth in the country. It was just the second ten-win season in school history and the first in 47 years. In the next seven seasons, Pinkel would win at least ten four more times. Mizzou made four conference championship games in that eight-year stretch. Since Pinkel retired following the 2015 season, the Tigers are 36-37. Outside of Pinkel’s 15 seasons, Mizzou is 180-216 overall since Dan Devine left after the 1970 campaign.
Eventually, Pinkel’s success played a major part in Mizzou earning an invitation to join the Southeastern Conference in 2012. He quite literally changed the course of the entire institution.
“I think that had a big (part) to do with us being invited,” Pinkel said. “I think that was the difference maker in getting over the hump.”
Pinkel came to Mizzou with no previous ties. He played at Kent State, cut his teeth under James at Washington and then coached at Toledo for a decade. But it was Missouri that made Pinkel and Pinkel that made Missouri.
“I think that when he goes into the Hall of Fame they’ll recognize all those things, but I think at the end of the day they recognize Gary Pinkel as a Mizzou guy,” Alden said. “Over the course of all that time, here he is, he’s Mizzou Made. Mizzou made him who he is and he helped establish that as a legacy here. He became a Missouri guy.”
So much so that Pinkel has stayed in Columbia after his coaching career ended. He still meets his friends for coffee around town. He has children and grandchildren scattered within two hours drive. He started the GP Made Foundation to help area kids and does work around the Columbia community and the state.
He came to Mizzou at a time when the football team — and really the athletic department as a whole — was seeking a new identity. He became the face of the whole thing.
“In coaching, there’s so many times you move and I wasn’t one that moved seven or eight times,” Pinkel said. “Missouri was at as high a level as most every team in the country at that time. That’s where the line is. You can be there. You can get there. We’ve done it.”
“What does it mean to be Mizzou Made? It means that you work harder than your opponent, it means you’re gonna be disciplined in what you do, approach each and every day with a commitment to get better,” Alden said. “I think that’s his legacy. I think when he came to Mizzou we were trying to find what is our identity not only as a football program but really as a department and as an institution.
“I think his legacy, it transcended football, it transcended athletics. It really was the fabric of an institution.”
It is now the fabric of a College Football Hall of Famer. The class will be formally inducted on December 6, 2022.
“I think this will be an awesome experience and a very moving moment in my life,” Pinkel said. “I hope I have to buy tons of tickets.”
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