Ten Thoughts for Monday Morning
So I'm taking a little bit of a different approach today. Missouri's 2022 sports year is basically over. So rather than come up with ten hypotheticals and hot takes and such, I thought I'd go back and look at the ten biggest stories of the 2021-22 Mizzou sports year. I'm sure some would put them in different order than I would. Some would have only football, some only football and men's hoops, but I'm trying to make it somewhat of a representative list. I'm going to link some of the stories we did on these things in these individual points if you're interested in going back and re-reading anything. So here we go:
1) Desiree Reed-Francois replaces Jim Sterk as athletic director. Most fans probably don't view this as the biggest story because the biggest stories all happen on the field or the court. But there really can't be a bigger story for a college athletic department than the person who runs it changing. Back on July 26, I got a tip that Sterk was stepping down in the middle of the day. We spent about three hours calling everyone we could possibly think of and finally got it confirmed late in the afternoon. Over the next few days, it would become clear that it was less of a resignation and more of a suggestion. I don't really know the exact reasons. Different people will have different points of view. In the end, I think Sterk probably gets too much heat from Missouri fans, but I also think it was a good time for a change. College sports was entering a brand new era and I think Reed-Francois is more modern and adaptable than Sterk probably was.
Reed-Francois (this story on her was probably my favorite I wrote last year) spent most of her first few months watching, learning and figuring things out. There have been a lot of changes. People get used to things a certain way and don't usually like change. There had been a lot of comfort in the Missouri athletic department for a lot of years. Some change has been necessary for quite a while. Sterk made some changes. Reed-Francois is making more. No idea whether they'll work, but just continuing to do the same things Missouri has been doing wasn't the way to go because those things sure haven't been working for most of the last eight years.
2) Cuonzo Martin let go as basketball coach. At the beginning of the year, I really had no thought that this would be Martin's last season. With a brand new roster, I think everyone expected a step back, but he'd gone to two tournaments in four years after taking over one of the worst high major programs in the country and there wasn't any real danger he was going to lose his job. And then the season was just a disaster. In every way. The Tigers were blown out by UMKC and Liberty then looked like they were playing a different sport than Kansas, Illinois and Kentucky. The hand-picked roster of mid-major transfers largely couldn't play at a higher level. The season went off the rails early and never got back on them. But it was more than just the results on the court. Don't get me wrong, those were bad and were the main reason he got fired. But more than that, fans had lost faith he could turn it around. The general feeling was that we'd seen Martin's ceiling and it wasn't high enough. It was time. You could make an argument that he'd done enough in his first four years to have a bad year and get one more shot, but he'd just remade the roster the way he wanted it and it was dreadful. The biggest criticism of Martin had always been that he coached the way Gene Keady coached when he played in the early 1990's. It just doesn't translate now. With everything going on around the game and the way NIL and the portal have changed player acquisition, Missouri needed to get more modern. So Missouri made the move.
3) Ultimately, that move resulted in the hiring of Dennis Gates.
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