Ten years after joining SEC, Mizzou still striving to 'close the gap'
On Sept. 8, 2012, 71,004 gold-clad fans packed into Missouri’s Memorial Stadium. Former SEC commissioner Mike Slive and reporters from national outlets across the country joined the sellout crowd, all there to witness a moment more than two years in the making. Missouri’s matchup against No. 7 Georgia marked the Tigers’ first conference game as a member of the SEC.
The home stands exploded when Missouri quarterback James Franklin hit wideout Marcus Lucas for the game’s first touchdown, a 40-yard score, and then again in the third quarter when Franklin found L’Damian Washington for a 69-yard touchdown that gave the Tigers a 17-9 lead. Georgia would ultimately pull away for a 41-20 win, but the atmosphere on that evening still stands out in the mind of Mike Alden, Missouri’s Director of Athletics from 1998-2015.
“All the pageantry and everything that surrounded that particular game and the entrance to the SEC was special,” Alden said. “The crowd wasn’t a lot different, size-wise and all that other stuff, at the Georgia game than it was for many of our other games that we’d had over the past 10 years. But I think the difference in the enthusiasm — here we are in the SEC and on national TV.”
Rumors of conference realignment, including talk of Missouri divorcing the Big 12, first started to percolate in December of 2009. After more than 22 months of public assurances and private back-stabbing, of leaks and denials, the SEC officially announced Missouri as its 14th member on Nov. 6, 2011, effective at the start of the 2012-13 academic year.
Saturday, 10 years to the day after it joined its new league, Missouri will once again take the field against Georgia. This matchup won’t draw quite as much hype, at least from Tiger fans. Missouri is a 39.5-point underdog against the No. 1 Bulldogs, the largest spread in favor of a Tiger opponent since joining the SEC.
The expectation for Saturday’s game reflects Missouri’s reality a decade after its move to the SEC. Those close to the athletics department maintain that the Tigers are better off in their new conference, and the past 10 years have included some highlights, most notably Missouri’s SEC East championships in 2013 and 2014. But in a league that continues to set new standards for spending and that just added Texas and Oklahoma to the mix, Missouri has its work cut out if it wants to keep pace on the field of play.
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Alden didn’t exactly know what to expect from Missouri on the field once it joined the SEC. But he admits he didn’t expect that.
The Tiger football team struggled during its much-anticipated debut season in the league. Missouri finished the year 2-6 in conference play and 5-7 overall, failing to reach a bowl game for the first time in eight seasons. However, it wouldn’t take head coach Gary Pinkel and his team long to bounce back. The following season, Missouri got off to a 7-0 start, including consecutive wins over No. 7 Georgia (still the Tigers' only win over the Bulldogs in league play) and No. 22 Florida. Even after a heart-breaking overtime loss to South Carolina, the Tigers won three in a row, setting up a massive season-ending matchup with former Big 12 foe Texas A&M. Win, and Missouri would secure the East division crown in just its second year in the conference.
A 57-yard fourth-quarter touchdown run by Henry Josey sealed the victory and sent the home crowd into a frenzy. The win not only earned Missouri a trip to the conference title game in Atlanta (where another victory would likely have secured a spot in the BCS national championship game) but announced loud and clear to the other conference members that the Tigers could compete.
“It validated Mizzou having the ability to compete at a high level in the SEC,” Alden said. “... It recognized the fact that we have the ability and certainly the resources and the fanbase to be able to do it.”
The rest of the league received the message well. In the 24 hours or so after Missouri beat Texas A&M, Alden remembers receiving at least one congratulatory phone call from every other athletics director in the SEC. That touched Alden. At a time when Missouri was still enduring pot shots from other Big 12 administrations for its messy emigration from the league and the Big 10 forced Nebraska to accept a lesser share of revenue than the schools it joined, this served as proof that SEC camaraderie was more than just talk, that the other schools were legitimately happy to have the Tigers.
“I mean, are you kidding me?” Alden said. “First of all, we’re in our second year in the SEC and we’re going to the SEC championship game, and every single athletics director, every one, called me on the telephone. And I’ll never forget this, I was in Atlanta the day before the game when we were playing in the SEC Championship game, and when I was walking on the field, I got a call from Jeremy Foley at Florida. Just one of the athletic directors that had called me. But he called me again, and he said, ‘Mike, I’m going to tell you something. I know you guys have been in big games and things like that, but I’m going to tell you, in my experience at Florida, outside of the national championship games that we’ve played in, you will never be in an environment like you’re going to be in tomorrow in the SEC Championship game.’ So if you think about that camaraderie and that esprit de corps that the schools have in the SEC, it never was more evident to me than after we beat Texas A&M and every single athletics director called me.”
The Tigers would lose to Auburn in the league title game, but they would defend their division title in 2014. Across Missouri’s first three years in the SEC, only Alabama and Georgia won more football games. The success wasn’t limited to the gridiron, either. Missouri softball went 15-8 in its first SEC season and advanced to the conference championship game before falling to Florida. Men’s basketball went 11-7 in league play during its debut season and secured an NCAA Tournament bid. The volleyball team pulled off an improbable 35-0 regular season in 2013, winning Missouri’s first SEC championship in any sport.
Yet the early success would prove to be more a blip than a harbinger of future dominance. Missouri saw its momentum on the gridiron derailed in 2015. An already struggling team drew blowback from fans when it joined a campus protest against racial injustice and threatened to boycott a game. Pinkel, having been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, retired at the end of the season. Missouri hasn’t logged a winning record in SEC play in any season since. Likewise, the school’s other revenue sport, men’s basketball, has managed just one season above .500 in conference play since the first year in the SEC. The Tigers' last NCAA Tournament win came as a Big 12 team when Mike Anderson was head coach.
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In the past year, “closing the gap” has become a mantra for Eli Drinkwitz and the Missouri football team as he tries to build the Tigers back into an SEC contender. While Alden and Pinkel didn’t use that exact verbiage, that’s been an emphasis since the day Missouri agreed to join the SEC.
As Missouri prepared to transition into its new league, Alden identified three key areas where the athletics department needed to improve, and quickly: attendance, donations and facilities. The latter two areas go hand-in-hand, and Missouri has shown clear progress there in the past 10 years.
Since joining the SEC, the athletics department has renovated the East side of Faurot Field, adding luxury seating and an upper deck of bleachers. It demolished the existing South end zone stands and replaced them with more club seating and a state-of-the-art football facility, which includes the team locker room, weight room, dining hall, coaches’ offices and more. The department also recently broke ground on a new indoor football training facility, which will include a 100-yard field and be located next to the team complex. The project is scheduled to be completed in the summer of 2023.
The football facilities haven’t been the only ones to receive a makeover. Missouri also opened a new softball stadium in 2017 and recently completed renovations to the men’s and women’s basketball locker rooms and practice court. There are still more projects to be completed — the baseball stadium, for instance, remains half grass and half artificial turf — but Alden believes Missouri has done a good job of getting its facilities up to par in the SEC.
“Coach Pinkel talked about this, and I would concur with this as a quote-unquote administrator. In the SEC, you always see cranes. All the time, on every campus, as far as athletics. And it wasn’t only football. It could be, my gosh, it could be baseball, softball, swimming and diving, volleyball, basketball. Whatever it is, there’s a constant focus on facility maintenance, facility improvement, facility enhancements and facility growth. And so at Mizzou, I think we did a really good job on that over the course of several years, while I was here.”
Those facility enhancements were made possible by improved fundraising. And the department hasn’t just sold donors on financing special projects. Missouri reported a record $55.5 million raised for the Tiger Scholarship Fund in 2020-21. That’s $9.8 million more than 2011-12, the department’s final year in the Big 12. Three of the four top fundraising years in school history have come since 2016-17.
The catch is that while Missouri has upped its financial game since joining the SEC, the rest of the league hasn’t exactly been stagnant — and those schools had a head start. Missouri reported more than $110 million in revenue during the 2019-20 fiscal year. That’s more than an 80 percent increase from 10 years prior, when Missouri reported $61 million in revenue. But expenses have soared, too, as the Tigers try to keep pace with their SEC peers. Missouri reported a deficit of nearly $9 million in 2019-20. With the department scheduled to lose out on the SEC bowl disbursement this year due to NCAA sanctions from Missouri’s academic fraud violations and ticket sales revenue taking a hit in 2020-21 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the department faces an uphill battle to get back in the black.
Plus, while Missouri ranks No. 30 nationally in revenue, it’s 11th in the 14-team SEC, only about $200,000 above Mississippi State. Six SEC schools topped $150 million in revenue in 2019-20 — eight if you include eventual newcomers Texas and Oklahoma. That is why “closing the gap” will likely be a constant pursuit for Missouri.
“As much as I want to say we have a $200 million budget, we don’t,” Alden said. “We have a $110 million budget.”
So, how can Missouri compete in a league where it’s virtually assured to operate at a financial disadvantage? Alden outlined a two-pronged approach: catch up to the league powers as much as possible, but also find creative ways to overcome the deficit.
The most glaring area where Missouri stands to gain on its conference peers is putting fans in the stands. The football team saw attendance dip precipitously following the 2015 season, and it has not recovered. In 2012, Missouri’s first season in the SEC, home football crowds averaged 67,476 people, the highest figure in school history. Every season since 2015, the average crowd size has failed to reach 55,000. In 2019, Missouri averaged 54,160 fans per game, which ranked 10th in the SEC. So far this season, the team is averaging 46,680. That is on pace to be the lowest figure since 1996 (not including the pandemic-impacted 2020 season).
Boosting attendance will be one of the top priorities for newly-hired athletics director Desiree Reed-Francois. Campus leadership showed a sense of urgency when it pushed Jim Sterk out with two years remaining on his contract and hired Reed-Francois in August. Reed-Francois did not respond to multiple requests to be interviewed for this story, but following her introductory press conference, she addressed the challenge of boosting attendance and offered a glimpse at how she’ll approach doing so.
“When you’re going to close that gap, you have to first listen to people,” Reed-Francois said. “So our season-ticket base is going to be so incredibly surveyed. I want to find out about their game day experience. But not just the game day experience in the stadium. I want it to be from everything from, when they’re about to buy tickets, is it easy? I want to push the easy button on things. Is it easy to get to the stadium? Is parking easy? Are game attendance greeting them in the right way? Are they having an incredible experience, right? Because we’re not just competing with St. Louis and Kansas City. We’re competing for people’s time. And we gotta make sure that we’re creating an event where people fear missing out.”
Regardless of whether or not it starts selling out Faurot Field and Mizzou Arena, however, Missouri is almost certainly never going to match the financial resources of Alabama, Georgia and Texas A&M. Therefore, Alden said, each individual team as well as the athletics department as a whole has to find ways to “out-maneuver” the competition.
“You gotta out-work them,” Alden said. “You gotta out-team them. You gotta out-hustle them. You gotta out-luck them at certain times. Because there’s no question they’re going to be able to out-spend you.”
The secret weapon that could allow Missouri to do that: patience. College football programs in general and the SEC in particular have grown less patient than ever. Last year, Auburn paid a record $21.5 million to buy out the contract of former football coach Gus Malzahn. Texas paid $15.4 million to fire Tom Herman, not to mention $5.45 million to hire his replacement. Last month, LSU announced it would part ways with Ed Orgeron at the end of this season. Less than two years after Orgeron led the Tigers to an undefeated season and national championship, the university will owe him $17 million to go away.
Drinkwitz, meanwhile, has been as bold as anyone in proclaiming that Missouri can compete at the top of the SEC. He did so again Tuesday, saying “I’m never going to settle for second while first is still out there.” But he’s also repeatedly emphasized that getting there will take time.
“It starts with the foundation, and I feel like we are laying that foundation, and I think we are establishing the culture of what we want to be,” Drinkwitz said Tuesday. “But I know that it’s a process, and it’s not always going to happen as quick as you want it to. … Like, I’d like to walk out of here and lose 10 pounds. It doesn’t happen like that. I’ve tried it. I’d get on a Keto diet and I lose it, and I gain it back. What do I have to do? I’ve got to maintain discipline over the course of time. So, you know, I think we’re still working in that course of time. Excellence is a habit. It’s what you do over the course of time. We’re trying to establish that excellence. Are we there yet? No. You can see by the play on the football field that we’re not always there, we don’t consistently produce excellent habits. I’ve seen flashes and glimpses of it, but we have to do it consistently and repeatedly.”
There’s reason to believe that patience can pay off. Kentucky, led by ninth-year head coach Mark Stoops, is 6-2 and appears poised for a 10-win season. Pinkel’s two division-winning teams were loaded with upperclassmen who had bought into an established culture.
The athletics department as a whole appears to have embraced that philosophy. In introducing Reed-Francois, UM System President Mun Choi didn’t shy away from voicing lofty goals, saying “business as usual is out the window.” But he also made clear that fans shouldn’t expect Missouri to start winning SEC championships overnight.
“At the end of the year, there’s only one champion standing, and that’s where we want to be,” said Choi. “And it may take us three, four, five years to get there. We can’t do it with the snap of a finger. It takes a sustained commitment. So we’re looking for sustained, long-term, visionary leadership that’s going to create that championship culture. ... It’s creating that winning culture that is going to really make this university better.”
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It might be tempting to look at the financial gulf between Missouri and the top of the league or the point spread between the Tigers and Bulldogs Saturday and posit that the athletics department never should have leapt into the lion’s den that is the SEC. After all, Missouri would have ranked third in the Big 12 in revenue in 2019-20, and first if you don’t count Texas and Oklahoma.
Yet Alden believes the fact that the Longhorns and Sooners are leaving Missouri’s former conference for its current one underscores why joining the SEC 10 years ago was the right decision.
For one, the SEC is arguably the biggest brand in college sports, and that means something. Being in the SEC allows the athletics department to better serve its proverbial role as the front porch of the university by attracting new audiences to the school. At SEC Media Days in July, Drinkwitz acknowledged the allure of the SEC was part of what sold him on leaving Appalachian State for Missouri.
“You want to compete against the best in the country,” Alden said. “You want to make sure that you’re elevating your brand, and you want to challenge yourself each and every day. And the third is you want to make sure that you elevate the reach for the entire university and the state, and that’s what the SEC does for you.”
In addition, the Tigers only make more money than the rest of the Big 12 now because of the SEC’s more lucrative media rights deal. Each SEC school received $45.5 million from the league office in 2019-20. That number is expected to increase significantly when the conference’s new television deal with ESPN takes effect in 2024. Meanwhile, after the Big 12 replaced Texas and Oklahoma with BYU, Cincinnati, Central Florida and Houston, each school is forecast to receive roughly $22 million in media rights revenue.
Most importantly, as a member of the SEC, Missouri no longer has to worry about the fear that first motivated it to leave the Big 12 and look for a new home in the first place: being left out of the power structure. When Texas and Oklahoma left the Big 12 this summer, concern once again arose that the league could dissolve. The SEC has no such worries. And as control continues to consolidate within college athletics, Alden is confident that the SEC will always lead the way and look out for its members.
“To know that we were in a solid neighborhood, that we were in good shape, that we were in the best neighborhood in an entire country and we didn’t have to worry about what the heck was going to happen to the homes in our neighborhood, that was great,” Alden said.
The increased revenue and security provided by the SEC mean Missouri’s move was the right call. That’s not really up for debate, especially with the Big 12 on unstable footing once again. But the new neighborhood Alden referenced also represents a new tax bracket, and the Tigers have had trouble keeping up. Missouri has proven that it’s possible to compete at the top of the SEC, but 2013 and 2014 are starting to feel like distant memories, and Pinkel isn’t walking back through that door.
The department-wide strategy to recapture that early success has become clear: Invest in the right people and give them time to succeed. In basketball, the hope is that Cuonzo Martin can build upon the foundation he’s established. In softball, Larissa Anderson has given Missouri fans every reason to believe she can compete with the best teams in the country's best conference. And while Saturday’s spread might not show it, Drinkwitz has started to close the gap to the top of the SEC on the recruiting trail. Next, it has to be narrowed on the field on Saturdays.
Can Missouri get there? If he didn’t believe it could, Drinkwitz said this week, he wouldn’t be here.
“I’m not going to sit there and say that we can’t achieve what other places have achieved,” he said. “We can. It’s just going to take some time. Roll up our sleeves and get to work.”
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