Later today, Barry Odom will walk into the annual SEC coaches meeting in Birmingham with his conference coaching colleagues with a major bone to pick. Back in late January, the NCAA handed out penalties including a bowl ban and recruiting restrictions to Missouri based on some infractions by a tutor.
An article by CBS Sports points out that programs have been hounding Missouri players non-stop daily about transferring to play their senior season with them, and Odom isn’t happy about the way it’s being handled.
Odom’s frustration has taken center stage because of NCAA bylaws more than two decades old that allow for seniors to transfer without penalty from programs hit with post season bowl bans.
He specifically called Tennessee out onto the carpet in the piece.
“Everybody is going to have a bad day,” Odom said, expressing his frustration with keeping his players from transferring. “You combine that with somebody that — who’d we beat 51-17 this year? Tennessee? Yeah, those guys. They are non-stop reaching out daily [saying], ‘Hey, come here.’ The grass is not always greener somewhere else.”
“It’s frustrating that our governing body has allowed that. You can’t cut a player. You can’t remove a player for not being a good player or injury, but yet, they let people go recruit our guys,” Odom went on to share.
Odom shares in the article that he’s reached out to some of those SEC head coaches, hasn’t been getting his phone calls returned.
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Other programs that have faced post season bans in recent seasons like Penn State and Ole Miss faced very similar issues, with college coaches quickly descending on their campus just itching for the opportunity to make their pitch to players who have enjoyed a number of season in a college off season program now, not to mention their invaluable on-the-field experiences as well.
A fired up Barry Odom walking into that room of fellow SEC coaches targeting his players, not willing to return his phone calls would be fun to see, to say the least.
Almost immediately following the NCAA’s announcement of the penalties and post season ban, Missouri announced plans to appeal the decision, maintaining that Odom – who had been on the job about six months at the time of the infractions – wasn’t even interviewed by the NCAA and that the penalties are typical NCAA overreach.
