Missouri fires head coach Barry Odom after four seasons

The Missouri Tigers have fired head coach Barry Odom, the school announced Saturday morning.

Athletic Director Jim Sterk released a statement, which part of can be found below.

“I want to thank Coach Odom for his contributions to our program,” Sterk said. “He and his staff have worked diligently during the past four years.

”Coach Odom has represented our program with integrity and dedicated himself to developing our student-athletes on and off the football field for which we are grateful. We wish the very best for him and his family in their future endeavors.”

”As a program, we had tremendous momentum coming into the 2019 season with the opening of the new south end zone facility as well as other strategic investments in our football program,” Sterk said. “However, we lost a great deal of that energy during the last half of the season. This decision was difficult to make but was necessary.”

The last paragraph sums things up nicely. Mizzou came into the season with high hpes behind graduate transfer Kelly Bryant, and got off to a 5-1 start before losing five of their final six games of the season, all to SEC opponents.

The question now becomes: What does Mizzou’s candidate list look like?

One would imagine someone like Memphis’ Mike Norvell would get a look, but he’ll get calls regarding most vacancies this year, as he’s won a school-record 11 games at Memphis this season. Regardless, he should be Sterk’s first call.