Talking big picture with Desiree Reed-Francois
With the 2022 football season just 87 days away, everyone has been focused on the future in the Southeastern Conference. What will future schedules look like in the league?
The conference's athletic directors and coaches met in Destin, Fla. last week and came to no conclusion. The two choices are an eight-game conference slate featuring one permanent opponent and a nine-game schedule with three annual games. Mizzou Director of Athletics Desiree Reed-Francois said on Tuesday afternoon she expects the league will come to a consensus by the time it holds meetings in the fall.
"I think there's benefits and drawbacks to both for for Mizzou," Reed-Francois said. "I do have a preference where it ends up and I know coach Drinkwitz has a preference. Where it ends up, I'm not sure."
Mizzou head coach Eli Drinkwitz did not implicitly state his preference last week, but did say he believes tradition and protecting rivalry games in the SEC is important. His answer seemed to indicate a leaning toward the nine-game model. Reed-Francois echoed those sentiments.
"I'm a bit of a traditionalist," she said. "Rivalries matter. We're going to continue to build rivalries and rivalries within the Southeastern Conference."
Those permanent opponents will be set by the league. While schools will likely have some input, there is no formal submission of opponent preferences from the schools to the league. For Mizzou, one definitely stands out.
"Arkansas because of the geographical fit, makes a lot of sense," Reed-Francois said. "There's also some others that we just genuinely don't like."
That change is (at least) a year down the road. But the rest of the college sports landscape has changed significantly just in the ten months since Reed-Francois succeeded Jim Sterk in Columbia last August. But for all the changes, she said her job isn't really that much different.
"In the end, we're educators. So the challenges and opportunities do they change? Sure," she said. "But you know what? We went through a pandemic. And we all adjusted. I think that's what you have to be able to do as a leader of an organization. You have to be able to adjust so that you can advance. So we're going to, but you have to stay value centered. You have to think about what's in the best interest of your student-athletes, what's in the best interest of your University and your state."
Reed-Francois and Mizzou coaches are about 20 stops into a 34-city caravan in which they will be within a short drive of every county in the state. She estimates they'll travel 7,500 miles and see at least 5,000 fans in person. It's part of the outreach she is doing to try to rebuild attendance that has dropped consistently in both major sports in the decade since Missouri joined the SEC.
"People genuinely love the University of Missouri," she said. "And if anything, the caravan really reinforced to me, and I shared this with our staff too, is we've got to come to work with a grateful heart, because what we do matters to a lot of different people. So we need to appreciate that. We really are the state's institution."
Fan outreach has been one of the major focal points of Reed-Francois' first season. She has taken multiple head coaches to all of those caravan stops and has tried to reconnect with a fan base that has been a bit fractured in recent years. But ultimately, there's one thing that brings fans back more than any other: Winning.
"We're not interested in participation trophies. It's not good enough just to be in the Southeastern Conference," she said. "We need to be competitive in the Southeastern Conference. Now, we have some work to do. No mistake about it. We have some foundational work to do, and we're going to continue doing that. It starts and ends with our people. And we have some great people who are working really hard, but there's a lot of work to do to close that gap."
Reed-Francois referenced Keegan O'Toole winning a national championship in wrestling for a program Brian Smith has turned into a national power. She spoke of the success of Shannon Welker's gymnastics program, which finished fifth in the country. She pointed to Drinkwitz having "broken records recruiting" and to the strides that have been made and hope that has been instilled by Dennis Gates in his first three months as the basketball coach. But there is, to steal from Robert Frost, miles to go before they sleep.
"There's a lot to like, right? There's hope there," Reed-Francois said. "We need to bring people back to Columbia, to bring them home. Because we, I can't do it by myself. Eli can't do it by himself. We've got to do it together."
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