COLUMBIA, Mo. _ A question from the media rarely catches Missouri football coach Barry Odom by surprise, but one knocked him off guard at last month's Southeastern Conference media days. A reporter from Tennessee asked Odom about Missouri's staff having the most African-American assistant coaches in the league.
Odom hadn't realized that, but it's true: No team in the conference has more black assistants than Mizzou's seven, which matches Auburn, Florida and Mississippi State. Only four other SEC staffs have more than four black assistants.
Mizzou's seven black coaches, out of 10 total assistants, represent a wide mix of backgrounds:
_ Garrick McGee (wide receivers) has been a head coach at Alabama-Birmingham and served as an offensive coordinator at four Power 5 schools.
_ Veteran assistants Brick Haley (defensive line), Vernon Hargreaves (linebackers) and Cornell Ford (running backs) have been coaching in college programs for a collective 90 seasons, including a couple years in the NFL for Haley. Ford is one of the longest-tenured MU assistants in team history, coming up on his 19th consecutive year on staff.
_ A.J. Ofodile (tight ends) is a former Mizzou player on his first college staff after coaching for 15 years at Columbia's Rock Bridge High.
_ Brad Davis, 39, (offensive line) and Ryan Walters, 33, (defensive coordinator/safeties) are the staff's only under-40 full-time assistants.
On a campus where four years ago student activists demanded the school hire more minority faculty and staff _ and where the football team joined the protests and briefly boycotted team activities _ Odom doesn't hide from discussions of race. But he insists he doesn't hire coaches on the whims of political correctness. (He's also fired two black coaches in the middle of seasons: Jackie Shipp in 2016 and DeMontie Cross, his former teammate, in 2017).
