Why not hire a Mizzou coach from Missouri?

Now that all the furor and hoopla surrounding the Missouri basketball fiasco has subsided, I suppose we are left with what we all knew deep down, we would be left with. That is, of course, a coach that meets the necessary criteria at Missouri. Someone who is acceptable to the Kroenkes and Lauries. And don't think for a minute that those two families are unfamiliar with Mike Anderson's history.

Those two families are really one family. They are Waltons from Bentonville, Ark.

You know where Bentonville is, just up the road from Fayetteville where a coach named Nolan Richardson walked in after Eddie Sutton figured Kentucky was a better place to be than Arkansas.

Richardson was coaching at Tulsa before he left for Arkansas as did Anderson, who tagged along with him to Fayetteville as an unpaid assistant, beginning to learn the trade.

We all are aware that Anderson's mentor won the national championship at Arkansas a dozen years ago while Anderson was his then paid assistant.

Yet nowhere, nohow does Anderson have any connection with Missouri. Of course, Quin Snyder had no connection with Missouri and look how his tenure turned out.

Let's see, the last Missouri coach from Missouri was Norm Stewart. Was he successful? I won't even bother to answer my own question to that one.

Stewart openly criticized athletic director Mike Alden in the days prior to the announcement that Anderson's "40 Minutes of Hell" was coming to Columbia, prompting this great line in the Friday Kansas City Star Voices commentary, "With all due respect to Mike Anderson, anyone who attended any Mizzou games this past year has already lived through 40 minutes of hell."

The only thing Alden could have done that could have pleased the remnants of what used to be a rabid following would have been the hiring of at least someone with name recognition. Name recognition has been what Alden has steered clear of in all his hirings. Well, sure. Alden doesn't want to hire someone who might hog the spotlight. It would be bad to have a football coach as popular as Dan Devine used to be, or a basketball coach with the following Stewart had before too many people decided he was past his prime and got him shoved out the door. Boy, they made a good decision with that one.

And in this coaching search, Alden went out and got some help from people like Jon Sundvold, then told them their helpful services were no longer needed. Who knows? Maybe Alden had already been told whom to hire. Or at least handed a short list.

What the hiring of Anderson failed to do is exactly the thing the head coach of the state's primary university needs to do. If you look at Stewart's record, you can see that a goodly portion of his outstanding athletes came from within the borders of Missouri. I'm sure his loyalty to the state had something to do with his ability to keep the good kids at home where they belong.

What I mean by that is let's say if you have a really good player from someplace like maybe Poplar Bluff, you might convince him it is better to stay right here in Missouri than go off to someplace like North Carolina. Hmm.

Let's see if anything changes for the better.