Welcome to the fifth year of “What Just Happened?” It’s the now monthly guide to everything you already know about Missouri athletics. It used to be weekly, but is there really that much hunger for meandering asides that are, at best, tangentially related to a 48-7 victory over SEMO? If you’ve ever finished one of these columns on a Friday morning and thought, “I hated that inflatable mascot as much as the next guy, but enough already,” just know that I listened.
I haven’t written for this website since March, which gives me some real momentum as far as the not writing thing goes. I’m perfectly conditioned to not write with great regularity. It’s part of a wider life strategy of doing less work as I gently transition into my golden years, a period that will be marked by increased viewership of network television crime procedurals, probably falling off a ladder at some point and definitely becoming less diligent about ear hair removal.
But enough meandering, there are happenings to rehash.
Revisiting realignment
During the previous round of conference realignment, Missouri was emotionally involved in a confusing two-year romantic comedy. It started with a classic misinterpretation of the desires of Jim Delany, degenerated into awkward makeup sex with Dan Beebe and culminated in the blasting of “In Your Eyes” from a boombox held aloft outside the bedroom window of Mike Slive.
It was a tortured process full of insincere loyalty oaths behind closed doors followed by a dozen anonymously sourced articles blaming others in the room for their selfishness. But with some well-timed football success and a fair number of cable TV subscribers in the brief period when such things mattered, Missouri ultimately was accepted as Texas A&M’s plus-one into the Southeastern Conference.
That, to me, is what conference realignment should be: thinly veiled boardroom treachery dragged out over a long period of time for our amusement. So I found it disappointing this summer when Texas and Oklahoma accomplished the same feat as their former Big 12 mates without a peep getting out until the deal was all but done. Thickly veiled boardroom treachery isn’t quite as fun.
Regardless, at some point in the next five years, the SEC will expand to 16. The Big 12 will either survive as a diminished version of its old self or scatter to the prairie winds. That disappoints me, because I think the college sports experience is better with a bigger pool of big-time schools that span the whole breadth of the country. This is probably a selfish reaction, as it provides cover when my spouse asks why it’s necessary to watch a Kansas State vs. Iowa State game at 11 a.m. and a Washington State vs. Oregon State game at 11 p.m.
We all want to freeze college athletics in the era that suits us. For me, that period was when Missouri was in the Big Eight and the national landscape was still divided into regional leagues of eight to 10 teams. Missouri had some real history with its one enemy and six frenemies in the Big Eight, and Texas was someone else’s pain in the ass. Those were the days.
The events of this summer reinforce what we already knew: Missouri’s leaders made a smart business decision to leave the Big 12 in 2011, as the reward for loyalty is the thoughts and prayers of the leaders of the other power conferences and an invitation to explore the exciting new opportunities available in the Sun Belt Conference.
From a competitive standpoint, the move to the SEC hasn’t transformed Missouri for the better, nor reduced it to Vanderbilt status. To revisit the parting shot from former Texas athletic director DeLoss Dodds, Texas’ bad years have not been better than Mizzou’s good years. Actually, since Dodds made that comment in 2013, Texas’ good years haven’t been better than Mizzou’s good years. The Longhorns are 56-44 over the last eight seasons, and the Tigers are 58-42.
As for whether the addition of Oklahoma and Texas to the SEC will be a positive for Missouri in the future, I judge it mostly on whether the change will make it easier, harder or the same for the Tigers to win eight football games in a good year and 10-plus games in a great year. That’s the benchmark set by Gary Pinkel, and that’s what Eli Drinkwitz is aiming for.
We’ll have to see how the scheduling works in the new SEC, but in terms of the easiest path to football victories, it’s hard to improve on the situation Missouri currently has. With a home in the very manageable Eastern division, a cross-divisional rivalry with Arkansas and four non-conference games that are usually winnable, this is about as good as it can get for an SEC school if the goal is strictly accumulating wins. The flip side is, as a fan, you’ll get more meaningful games to watch when the conference schedule expands to nine or even 10 games. You just might not be as happy when those games are over.
As much as I enjoy the drama of the realignment process, the payoff is never very satisfying. The real winners are administrators who make more money. What do I care about the size of someone else’s budget? Missouri is one of the winners of conference realignment, but it’s not any more fun to watch the Tigers play different teams than the ones they used to play. The biggest prize for winning the realignment game is you avoid worrying about your school being relegated to second-class status, which is something you never worried about before realignment.
Outfit assessment
I’m on Team Cargo Shorts, which tells you all you need to know about my fashion sense. Or perhaps it tells you I carry up to eight items on my person that require separate compartments.
I generally abstained from the great uniform debates of the Barry Odom era, when every week brought some different combination of black, gold, white and anthracite, although I did have one strong opinion on the matter — just choose an outfit and stick with it. In retrospect, that wardrobe budget would have been better spent on tutor hush money.
But even for a uniform agnostic, I must say the new duds unveiled this summer are, in my uninformed opinion, the best Missouri has worn in more than a decade.
Stripes? Yes.
Gold pants? No football team has ever looked good in black pants for reasons I can’t explain.
Jersey numbers big enough to discern for yourself when you’re watching an SEC Network Alternate broadcast and the announcers are not interested enough in their jobs to memorize a roster? Thank you.
Pockets? Well, you can’t get everything you want.
Don’t go away mad, just go away
For most of his five years as Missouri’s athletic director, Jim Sterk said unremarkable things in a pleasantly bland manner. It was one of the great upsets in school history that he managed to get sued for defamation. The guy lets fly with one little hot take on local sports talk radio — accusing South Carolina women’s basketball coach Dawn Staley of creating a hostile atmosphere for the visiting Tigers — and here come the lawyers.
I thought the sports talk radio business model was built on the premise that there were no repercussions for making wild unsubstantiated statements. How is Colin Cowherd still financially solvent? Anyway, Sterk’s slip of the tongue cost the university a total of $75,000 — $25K to Staley’s charity, $25K to Staley’s lawyers and $25K to the SEC for violating the league’s code of ethics.
That was a bargain compared to the price paid to make Sterk go away altogether. He reportedly will receive his full salary, which totals nearly $1.5 million, for the next two years. We’re all numb to stories about coaches being paid off for services not rendered — Kansas is still writing checks to a string of football coaches dating back, I believe, to Pepper Rodgers — but I didn’t realize athletic directors were important enough to merit this treatment. So when UM System president Mun Choi announced at Desiree Reed-Francois’ introductory press conference that “business as usual goes out the window with our new athletics director,” he was overstating the obvious. Reed-Francois’ guiding principle should be WWJSD — What Wouldn’t Jim Sterk Do? — because whatever it was that Jim Sterk did, it was definitely not making his boss happy.
The first sign that business wasn’t as usual came during the AD search, when we got from Point A to Point B in fewer than three interim athletic directors. It can never be proven, but since Hank Foley isn’t here to defend his job performance during a one-week stint as interim AD in the summer of 2016, I choose to believe he was so preoccupied with his other job as interim chancellor that he was talked into a new marketing idea based on the dubious premise that Mizzou fans were yearning for an inflatable mascot.
But enough already about that.
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