Foregone Conclusion

Why?  Why?  Why?  Mike Anderson, Mizzou's head basketball coach recently announced that he would not be accepting a job offer from the University of Oregon to be their head coach.  This past weekend, Coach Anderson met with officials from UO, but made a statement today that he would remain in Columbia.  C'mon, MA! How could you even consider taking over a program you beat by 37 points on December 5th?!

Aside from the money, it is hard to determine why it would be worth the time.  Currently, Coach Anderson makes around $1.5 million per year, but could earn over $2 mil based on the incentives in his contract (he'll make about $1.7 mil based on this past season).  Oregon reportedly offered about $800,000 more as a base salary.  I realize that a figure like that is nothing to sneeze at, but Oregon?  Really?!  Oregon basketball is about as hopeless as the Chicago Cubs.

Over the past two seasons, Anderson's teams have won 54 games with four wins in the Big Dance. That is impressive.  The current recruiting class is ranked as high as 11th by many scouting experts.  Clearly, Mike Anderson knows what he's doing.  He and his coaching style have made a good program even better, so I certainly don't fault any other program for approaching our coach.  But MA is building something here.  Entertaining an offer from a lesser program sends the wrong message.  It gives me the impression that when Alabama (Anderson is from the state of Alabama. In fact, Mizzou hired him away from University of Alabama-Birmingham) fires its coach next year, MA will be gone.  I wonder if next year's crop of recruits think the same thing...

The Mizzou Men's Basketball program is a program that is coming off two straight years in the tournament, and an Elite Eight run a season ago, and overachieving in 09-10 resulted in close loss in the second round of the Big Dance.

This program appears to approaching a level that many programs strive for, and I realize that a raise is a raise, and $800k is a huge raise by any measure.   But who likes to start a difficult project over from scratch before the initial task is even completed?  That's what he would've been doing if he'd taken the job at Oregon - starting over.  He would've been hitting the reset button and taking a step backward.  Although Mizzou loses the Battle of Rich Alumni, Oregon's basketball program is nowhere near the prestige that Missouri holds.

(Even Phil Knight's Nike money doesn't compete.)

Ultimately, I think he would've just been getting paid to lose.  $2.5 million to recruit against (and lose to) Arizona, Cal, UCLA and Washington. It's hard to recruit good players to play basketball at Oregon.

The Pac-10 is a lesser conference than the Big 12.  The Pac-10 had only two teams make it to the NCAA Tournament last month.  The Big 12 had seven.  That means that the Big 12 had six times as many teams earn a chance to compete for a National Championship.  Mizzou is a better team in a better conference.

Oregon basketball averages 7800 fans, while Mizzou brings about 13800 to each home game.  A bigger fan base means that more games will be televised. More exposure means more revenue and better recruits.

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There just is no comparison.