5 replacements for Gary Pinkel at Missouri

With Gary Pinkel retiring as the head coach of Missouri football, who are five candidates to replace him?

In what has been an unbelievably tumultuous couple of weeks for the Missouri Tigers football team, things are only getting more uncertain for the team. On Friday afternoon, one of the longest tenured head coaches in the SEC in Missouri’s Gary Pinkel announced that he will be retiring due to health concerns at the end of the season.

Pinkel was diagnosed lymphoma, a form of blood cancer, in May 2015, but initially made the decision to continue coaching through his treatments. However, those plans have obviously changed given this announcement and decision. That being said, it’s hard not to respect Pinkel’s decision as he continues his battle with cancer and wish him for the best.

It’s also impossible to deny what Pinkel has done for the Missouri program since he took over as the head coach in 2001 when the Tigers were still in the Big 12. After going 4-7 in his first year with the Tigers, he built the program to the point of going on a string of seven-consecutive winning seasons—including three seasons with 10 wins or more—from 2005-11 when the Tigers then moved to the SEC.

There were certainly doubters regarding how Pinkel and the Tigers would fare with the move to the most vaunted conference in college football, but Pinkel even succeeded there. After going 5-7 in their first SEC season, the Tigers won 12 games in the 2013 season and 11 games last year, winning the SEC East and playing in the SEC Championship game in both years, despite losing in the both title games.

Pinkel’s last impression at Missouri will undoubtedly be his recent show of solidarity with his players as they linked arms and boycotted all football activities until school president Tim Wolfe resigned amidst allegations of racial inequality at the school. It’s a powerful part of Missouri’s history and Pinkel was in the center of it.

Now the search will begin to try and replace a coach that has done so much for the school and the football program. It’s going to be near impossible to replace a man in Pinkel who has built up Missouri to the heights that they’ve reached, but that’s the task at hand now for the Tigers administration.

Though we don’t know specifically what they’ll be looking for in their coaching search, you have to imagine that they’ll be looking at many of the top head coaching candidates around and try to get them to make the jump to the SEC. As of now and with another SEC program in the South Carolina Gamecocks also searching for a new head coach, here are the top-five candidates to replace Pinkel at Missouri.

Next: No. 5 Matt Campbell