Barry Odom shares personal influence of Gary Pinkel, new HOF inductee
Long-time former Missouri coach Gary Pinkel was one of the biggest names announced on Monday from the new 12-member 2019 class of the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame.
Current Missouri coach Barry Odom worked under Pinkel in multiple roles before and after Odom coached at Memphis from 2012-14.
Pinkel became Missouri’s winningest coach during a stint from 2001-15, and Odom worked under him in roles that included administrative graduate assistant, director of football recruiting, director of operations, safeties coach, linebackers coach and defensive coordinator. Odom was an assistant or staff member from 2003 to 2011, and then returned to Missouri in 2015.
Pinkel had an 118-73 record and his teams had five 10-win seasons beginning in 2007 and played in 10 bowl games beginning in 2003 and won conference division titles five times in an eight-year period between 2007 and 2014. Pinkel’s teams played for the Big 12 Championship in 2007, when the Tigers reached a No. 1 national ranking, and won SEC East titles in 2013 and 2014.
The 2007 team, led by QB Chase Daniel and WR Jeremy Maclin, rose to a No. 1 national ranking – the first in school history – as the Tigers beat rival Kansas 36-17 for the Big 12 North title.
On Tuesday, Odom recalled how Pinkel’s coaching influence shaped how he runs his own staff meetings.
“I catch myself using the same vocabulary, using the word, ‘mammoth,'” Odom said at his regular weekly press conference on Tuesday. “He had great influence. His attention to detail and his structure and his consistency with the way that he did it. … It’s just the way that I learned on how to run a program. The thing that I admire, when you get tired of doing it, I think back to every single day he did it the exact same way. … He believed in what he did, he believed in the structure of the program and the way that he ran it, and had such a huge impact on the things that we still do today.”