Missouri’s athletic department is a massive operation with a nearly $100 million budget, so a certain amount of dead weight is inevitable. Still, when an employee making $600,000 annually to coordinate the football team’s defense does not coordinate the defense, that is a glaring organizational inefficiency.

I mean, for that kind of money, if DeMontie Cross isn’t coordinating the defense, he probably should be across the street performing craniotomies. If we are to believe that college football teams need armies of directors, analysts and graduate assistants to keep up with the competition, it stands to reason that losing a defensive coordinator should be devastating.

But when people wonder what impact Cross’ firing two games into the season might have on the Tigers, I would assume the answer is none. The real question is how much better Missouri would have been last year and this year if Barry Odom had hired a defensive coordinator he could tolerate and trust.

When he came to MU in December 2015, Cross checked all the right boxes on paper. He was a former Tiger player from the St. Louis area with recent ties to the state of Texas, where Odom wanted to re-establish a recruiting pipeline. It is the disadvantage of a first-time head coach that he doesn’t have a ready-made staff to transplant and has to assemble a crew whose compatibility is a mystery. Odom’s eye for talent has proven dubious, as four defensive assistants have already left.

Odom’s stated reason for firing Cross was “philosophical differences” rather than the poor performance of the defense, which I believe to be true, because Cross had little to do with the performance of the defense.

Although Cross retained the title of defensive coordinator this season, it was just a title. He could have been called “assistant to the regional manager.” He was stripped of play-calling duties midway through last season and essentially was just an inside linebackers coach. On Mondays, Odom and offensive coordinator Josh Heupel are available to local reporters on a teleconference. Cross wasn’t even entrusted with the responsibility of explaining things.

As for why Odom didn’t get rid of Cross after last season, I can only assume it was a financial decision. Cross had two years left on a three-year contract, and it would have been expensive to pay Cross to not coach and then pay someone else a similar amount to replace him. As for why Cross would stay where he wasn’t wanted, he almost certainly wasn’t going to get another Power 5 defensive coordinator job, so he would have taken a big financial hit to be a position coach elsewhere.

Cross was the too-big-to-fail assistant coach until Odom decided he was more trouble than he was worth. That doesn’t inspire much confidence that the football program is being run with maximum organizational efficiency.