Former Mizzou coach Gary Pinkel inducted into College Football Hall of Fame
Nick Saban told Gary Pinkel not to take the Missouri football job. Pinkel, then an extremely successful head coach at Toledo, where he had beaten Penn State the previous season, was considering the move and had reached out to his old Kent State teammate for advice.
"Don’t go there,” Pinkel, speaking earlier this year, recalled Alabama’s head coach telling him. “I had a bunch of guys tell me don’t do it.”
Fortunately for Missouri and the fans of what had become a woebegone football program, Pinkel didn’t listen. Before the 2001 season, he left Toledo and was introduced as the Tigers’ 31st head coach.
Then, he proved Saban wrong. Pinkel, who said this week he was partially inspired to enter coaching after a chance meeting with Vince Lombardi at a Cleveland Browns game as a youngster, became MU’s all-time winningest head coach and was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame Tuesday in Las Vegas.
According to him, getting that far was never part of the plan.
"I really didn’t have a goal to get in there,” Pinkel said Tuesday in Las Vegas. “I just wanted to win enough football games to keep my job and help kids.”
The Tigers didn’t immediately grow into their best form when Pinkel took over. In his first year, they won four games, then five, then up to eight, then five again.
Having an overall record like that and only one bowl appearance could sink a college football coach today. Missouri opted to keep rolling with Pinkel, trusting it would soon pay off.
Besides, a large part of his coaching style was everything off the field, which wouldn’t necessarily show up in the win column.
"My job is to develop young men,” Pinkel said in an interview released by the National Football Foundation. “Make them better people. Values, and being accountable and responsible, you know, how you treat a lady, all these kind of things. I used to call it fatherly advice and I gave it to them all the time, whether they wanted to listen to it or not. But I tried to do a lot more than just win football games. But you have to win enough games to keep your job, so it worked out well.”
Missouri achieved bowl eligibility in 2005 and 2006, something it had only done four times in the 20 years before Pinkel took over the job. Then came MU’s fabled 2007 campaign.
Missouri won 12 games that season, including the Cotton Bowl, and finished fourth in the final AP Poll. The next four years, Missouri flew high, making bowl games every season and winning 10 games twice.
The success helped them secure a spot in the expanding SEC. After one down season, the Tigers won the east division twice in a row.
Pinkel retired after the 2015 season with 118 wins as a Tiger. In his post-retirement life, he founded the GP M.A.D.E. foundation, to help disadvantaged children.
One day, a box containing the news of his Hall of Fame election arrived at his home.
“I opened the box up and it gave statistics about how difficult it is to get into the Hall of Fame, and it said ‘Welcome to the club,’” Pinkel said. “I broke down.”
Between then and his induction, Pinkel has been honored at both Missouri and Toledo. At every stop, he has thanked those who he said made his journey possible, from players, to assistants, to support staff to his mentor, former Kent State and Washington coach Don James.
“I can go on and on and on and so it’s a big thank you to all of them,” Pinkel said. “The secretaries, everybody that we worked so hard and worked so well together, overcame adversities and have a tremendous bond to this day. I’m thankful for all of them, it’s a blessing.”
The other members of the 2022 Hall of Fame class included LaVar Arrington (Penn State), Champ Bailey (Georgia), Michael Crabtree (Texas Tech), Sylvester Croom (Alabama), Mike Doss (Ohio State), Chuck Ealey (Toledo), Kevin Faulk (LSU), Moe Gardner (Illinois), Boomer Grigsby (Illinois State), Mike Hass (Oregon State), Marvin Jones (Florida State), Andrew Luck (Stanford), Mark Messner (Michigan), Terry Miller (Oklahoma State), Rashaan Salaam (Colorado), Dennis Thomas (Alcorn State), Zach Wiegert (Nebraska), Roy Williams (Oklahoma) along with coaches John Luckhardt (Washington & Jefferson [PA], California [PA]) and Billy Jack Murphy (Memphis)
This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: Mizzou football: Gary Pinkel joins College Football Hall of Fame
