It's time to start giving Mizzou football the respect -- SEC respect -- it deserves
COLUMBIA, Mo. -- You ask if it sounds funny to call Mizzou a "football school," and Bob Sundvold sort of laughs. He laughs and offers up this story, from 1978, back when he first started working for Norm Stewart on the Tigers' men's basketball coaching staff.
"When I first moved to Columbia, Norm was the first guy to bring it up," the longtime former Tigers assistant, now the head hoops coach at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, tells FOXSportsKansasCity.com. "He said, 'Hey, man, we're a football school. And when football does well, it's awesome.'
"And I think that we all were proud of the success we had in the '80s (in basketball), and knowing that the football team was down and had some really bad years. But Norm always kind of knew it was a football school. So we never fought that."
Since 2005, the University of Missouri men's basketball program has posted a .627 winning percentage, 62nd among Division I programs over that span. Context: Kansas ranks first (.831), Kentucky seventh (.753), Florida 12th (.745), Wichita State 21st (.714).
Since 2006, a run of a decade, the Tigers' football program has won 84 games and posted a .700 winning percentage, 16th best in the NCAA's Football Bowl Subdivision over that stretch. Context: Texas has won 81 games since '06; Nebraska, 80.
"It's kind of nice always flying under the radar," says Mitch Morse, the former Mizzou lineman who now plies his trade with the Kansas City Chiefs. "But tell you what, and this is positive: Those days are starting to come to an end, when we fly under people's radars. And they expect something from us."
We do, don't we? Or at least, we should. Since 2007, the Tigers have racked up five campaigns of nine wins or more. From 1901-2006, Mizzou posted all of two: 1960 (10-1) and 1969 (9-2), both under the great Dan Devine.
Now that's a bit of a flawed comparison, given the new normal of 12 or 13 games across a regular season. But Morse's point still stands, and firmly. We're a few weeks away from preview magazine season, when talk of the autumn to come starts to filter back into summer conversations, and there's Team Pinkel, the reigning two-time Southeastern Conference Eastern Division champion, not going freaking anywhere.
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"Absolutely, we take that as a compliment, I think," new Tigers athletic director Mack Rhoades says. "I think that certainly was part of the brand identity once they entered into the league. And Coach (Gary) Pinkel and his staff, the fact they've made two conference title games, certainly that leads us to being branded as an 'SEC football school.' That's certainly extremely positive for us today and will continue to be in the future."
That said ...
"I mean, I think of it as a 'football school,' but I also think of it as a school about all of our other sports programs as well," Rhoades continues.
"In terms of the football program, it's one of the best-kept secrets in the country when you look at what Coach Pinkel has done since he took over in 2001. ... It's been a program that has won; it's certainly been a program of consistency. Certainly, over the last seven years, I think, again, (of) five division (titles), playing in (four) conference title (games) during that same time span. So, you know, I think, finally, it's starting to get the recognition that it deserves. I think the SEC is a big part of that."
Win rings with the Yankees, Red Sox or Dodgers, it sticks in the national consciousness. Beat the snot out of Florida enough times, dominate in the SEC, the nation's top football circuit, and it's largely the same effect.
And to some degree, how you perceive Pinkel's Golden Decade depends on your age. Gen X-ers grew up with Norm on the front porch, swinging with both paws, stealing the headlines, while various football peers got their brains bashed in by the Nebraskas and Oklahomas of the old Big Eight football world. From 1984-96 -- 13 seasons, a baker's dozen of bad -- the Tigers trotted out losing campaigns.
"You've got to understand: Everything in sports is generational," says Paul Blackman, MU Class of '71 and a former Tiger Club of Kansas City president. "So to my kids, who came up when Mizzou football was awful and when I'd take them to games, I was afraid I would be turned in for child abuse for subjecting them to that. (At the time), we were being ranked higher in basketball and winning games, so my kids thought of Mizzou, even when they were in school, as 'Oh, they're a basketball school.'
"Being older, I'm from an era that I understood that Missouri was historically, from the time they started sports, a football school, and basketball didn't even become relevant until several years after Norm took over."
To wit: The Tigers boasted the eighth-best winning percentage of any major college football program in the 1960s (.750, 72-22-6), tied with USC and ahead of Penn State (.737). In the 2010s, Pinkel's Tigers are 46-20 (.697). What's old is new again.
And woe, the quest for context. Some have likened the Mizzou of now to perhaps where Kansas State was, perception-wise, 18 to 20 years earlier, when a basketball-first hub was watching the birth of a gridiron beast, when Bill Snyder was turning something miraculous into something lasting, something iconic. Something defining.
"To compare (Mizzou now) to K-State, it's ludicrous to me," Blackman says. "K-State was irrelevant in football for their entire (existence) until Snyder came along. Mizzou was not irrelevant over their entire history. They've had lulls before. The wilderness years, even our worst years, we were still drawing more than K-State was drawing. But I understand. I don't think it's a fair comparison, but I understand why people do.
"And I am one of those that happens to believe firmly in (Tigers basketball coach) Kim Anderson. ... I believe that if the administration is patient with him, I think we'll see some steady progress. He's going to build it the right way. I'm not flapping my arms because we're not going to get a Jayson Tatum. You need more than a Jayson Tatum for one year to get the program on solid footing.
"A lot of factors came together to put us in a horrible funk (in football) and it's hard to get out of," Blackman says. "KU is a perfect example of that.
"For all the taunting I've gotten from KU fans, I've offered a wager -- which has yet to be accepted -- that Mizzou will be relevant in basketball much sooner than KU will be in football. And my definition of 'relevant' was going (above) .500 and getting to the NIT, and I would say the same in football is getting to .500 and playing in a minor bowl. We'll be playing postseason basketball long before KU is playing postseason football."
Before Norm showed up, Mizzou had won 17 games or more in a season just three times in its basketball history, and all in a cluster -- 1917-18, 1919-20 and 1920-21. From 1970-99, Stewart won at least 17 games 24 times.
From 1935-84, a span of 60 seasons, Mizzou football posted a losing record on just 12 occasions. From 1985-2000, a stretch of 16 seasons that coincides with the salad days of the Stewart era, they did it 14 times.
"I don't know what the right comparison is," says Doug Bates, Class of '99 and the current Tiger Club vice president. "But it's an interesting dynamic, because they both have big alumni bases, so there's a lot of people that would be engaged in conversation about how they're similar and different.
"I'm OK with Mizzou being known as a 'football school' if it's because of the recent success under Gary Pinkel. Which is pretty impressive to resurrect the program from where it was when he took over to where it is today. But I'm not OK with it if it means basketball is really bad. If we're a 'football school' because we can't be called a 'basketball school,' I don't think anybody is OK with that."
That's not to say you can't have both, that they can't be kicking tail and taking names at the same time. Rhoades' mission is to become elite across the board, in all fields and facets. But some facts are indisputable, and the fact is that football, especially SEC football, is the tide that lifts all boats, and the crests at Faurot Field are as high as they've ever been.
Fool us once, shame on you.
Fool us, twice, well ...
"There are those who said, 'Well, you can't duplicate it,'" Morse says. "Well, it's kind of fun that we did. And I can't wait to see it here in the next few years."
When the Tigers win repeat divisions, when they run circles around the baddest of the bad, they act like they've been there before. It's the rest of us who need to catch the hell up.
You can follow Sean Keeler on Twitter at @SeanKeeler or email him at seanmkeeler@gmail.com.
