Missouri Tigers football coach Gary Pinkel announced his retirement last Friday, stating a battle with non-Hodgkin lymphoma as the reason for his sudden resignation.
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That’s when Pinkel, who had stood by his striking players, announced he would step down at season’s end. The winningest coach in school history revealed he had been diagnosed with lymphoma in May, and had undergone several rounds of treatment over the summer.
Dan Mullen directed his first words of his press conference on Monday to Gary Pinkel. You just look yourself in the mirror and say “You’ve got to be kidding me”, he said.
A Kenya Dennis taunting penalty mid-way through the fourth allowed BYU to cut the Tiger lead to 20-16, but the Missouri defense did enough to lead the Tigers to their fifth win of the season. He’s led the team to 10 post-season bowl appearances.
Pinkel’s announcement came the same week that the Missouri system president and campus chancellor resigned after Pinkel’s players, with his backing, said they would not play or practice until a graduate student’s hunger strike ended. He was focused exclusively on beating BYU at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, Mo. “I’m going to miss that”, Pinkel said.
“It is very flattering”, Pinkel said.
“I felt great going into the season but also knew that I would need to re-assess things at a few point, and I set our bye week as the time when I would take stock of the future”, Pinkel said in a statement issued on the eve of Saturday’s game in Kansas City, about two hours away.
Pinkel is the only active coach who boasts the career record for wins at two FBS programs – Missouri (118-71) and Toledo (73-37-3) – and he’s one of three former SEC coaches with that distinction, joining Bear Bryant (Kentucky, Alabama) and Steve Spurrrier (Florida, South Carolina).
“I’ve been around him for about eight years now – ever since he started recruiting me – and everything he told me he would do, he did that and more”, linebacker Michael Scherer said. “We wanted to do it for coach”.
Athletic director Mack Rhoades said the 63-year-old Pinkel won’t be involved in the search for a successor.
“We talked a little bit before the game” Mendenhall said.
The news conference was Pinkel’s first opportunity to discuss his decision at length, other than after the BYU triumph over the weekend.
“I may live another 25 years. I was doing walk-throughs in the indoor facility, and she said ‘I just got a call that it’s out there somewhere, ‘” Pinkel said. Both teams are playing better football now than they did at the beginning of the season, but the Tigers are playing with emotion and after churning out a season-high 434 yards and scoring two touchdowns in one quarter for the first time since September 12.
Pinkel will leave Missouri with six years remaining on the contract he signed in April. “And I’m going to miss him”.
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Pinkel says he will use his time after coaching to focus on getting healthy and spending time with his wife, children and grandchildren. “That, to me, really showed the passion, the drive and the commitment that he had to build Mizzou to something that people would respect and recognize”.
