Missouri Coach Gary Pinkel Said His Tweet Was Strictly About Supporting His Players

The Mizzou Family stands as one. We are united. We are behind our players. #ConcernedStudent1950 GP pic.twitter.com/fMHbPPTTKl

— Coach Gary Pinkel (@GaryPinkel) November 8, 2015

Yahoo- Missouri coach Gary Pinkel said Tuesday that the tweet he sent Sunday with a picture of him and his team should not have included the hashtag for the Missouri student movement Concerned Student 1950.

The movement, which was backed by members of the football team over the weekend, helped lead to the resignation of Missouri president Tim Wolfe. Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin is moving to a different position at the end of the year.

"No what happened was is that I have somebody that tweets for me a lot to get information out and that person should not have put that hashtag on," Pinkel told Kansas City's 810 WHB on Tuesday.

Pinkel said the movement to remove Wolfe had nothing to do with his tweet as well.

"No. Not at all. It had nothing to do with it," Pinkel said. "It was just about a young man that was really struggling and that what it was about."

"This was strictly about me assisting my players," Pinkel said. "That's what it was about. Nothing else."



​You know how I know that Gary Pinkel's tweet was strictly about supporting his players, and not about some random kid in a quad screaming about racism and starving himself? Because college football coaches don't have time to care about students that are not on their football team. Of course the picture of his team united as one was about nothing more than making sure they didn't come apart at the seems. He's a football coach. He's not a social media director. Whether he applied the hashtag to his tweet or not, it wasn't about #ConcernedStudent1950. It was about not becoming the next University of Missouri employee to draw the ire of a football team that was powerful enough to get the President of the University to resign.

​He didn't care about the racist acts of people he didn't know. He didn't care about a hunger strike. He didn't care about the job of the man who helped hire him. He cared about his team reaching their desired goal so that he could coach football on Saturday, and that's all he should care about. Asking him 1,000 different questions regarding race and his feelings on the matter is a fruitless endeavor. For one, because an SEC football coach is fluent in speaking around issues he doesn't want to discuss, but also because a football coach's stance on social issues shouldn't matter. As long as he wasn't the one drawing swastikas in poop, which it is safe to assume that he wasn't, then the last thing we should be worried about is Gary Pinkel's take on a situation that he wished he never had to be involved in. He or his social media consultant may have added an unnecessary hashtag, but their only intention was to bring an end to this thing as soon as possible. Gary Pinkel just wanted to get back to football, and if he were the coach of my team then I would want nothing else from him.