Published Dec 2, 2019
Ten Thoughts for Monday Morning
circle avatar
Gabe DeArmond  •  Mizzou Today
Publisher
Twitter
@powermizzoucom

Stein & Summers is a rock solid real estate firm with over 46 years of success that can be attributed to our willingness to go the extra mile in service and expertise. With offices in Kansas City and St. Joseph, we provide a full range of services in residential, commercial, multi-family, investment and agricultural real estate. Confidence comes from feeling you’ve been taken care of, so when you see our sign you can rest assured that one of our agents will be ready to provide the best care for any of your real estate needs. Click on the logo for more information.

Advertisement

I'm going to go backwards before we move forward. Let's start with how we got here.

1) It's amazing to say, but in the end, November of 2015 is a huge part of what got Barry Odom fired. Mack Rhoades is not a terrible athletic director. He had plans at Missouri. When everything in November 2015 happened, all those plans went out the window. Everything was handled terribly and Rhoades started looking for the first ticket out of town. He found it eight months later. When that happened, the guy that hired Odom, his biggest advocate, was gone. Odom was never Jim Sterk's guy. I felt for two years that Sterk was looking for a reason to move on. I don't think he ever believed in him. This season gave him that reason. I'm not saying it's unfair. I'm not even saying Sterk is wrong. But if Sterk had kept Odom this year, he would have become his guy. That's not something Sterk was ever going to be comfortable with. So he moved on. Mack Rhoades leaving made it a matter of when, not if, Odom was going to be fired.

2) Obviously there, are football reasons too. I've talked to a lot of people over the last couple of days. And the football reasons are the ones we all knew they were by watching:

A) Kelly Bryant just wasn't that good a quarterback. He was slow to make decisions. He missed reads. He missed open receivers. He didn't run at the right times. There were plenty of problems on offense, but No. 1 was the quarterback. Good kid. Everybody in the program likes him. He just wasn't good enough.

B) Derek Dooley didn't do the things that would have made Bryant successful. If Bryant was going to work, he was going to work because you ran a lot of QB zone, QB counter, QB power, etc. You ran the hell out of the ball to open up the passing game. Missouri never did that. Was there an agreement "We're going to let you throw the ball to impress the NFL" to get him on campus? I'm sure there was. But once he's on campus, your job, when you're trailing at Vanderbilt in the second half, is to run the ball 25 straight times with the quarterback if you have to. And Dooley didn't.

3) The question is one we asked for two years: How did it come to be that Derek Dooley was hired as the offensive coordinator?