Missouri football coach Gary Pinkel announced on Friday that he is resigning at the end of the season.
The resignation is due to health reasons. Pinkel was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in May, according to the Associated Press. He received multiple treatments in May and June and the doctors said that the treatments wouldn’t interfere with his coaching duties. On October 26 he had a PET scan and met with his family. The next day he decided that this season would be his last.
"I made a decision in May, after visiting with my family, that I wanted to keep coaching as long as I felt good and had the energy I needed," Pinkel said in a statement. "I felt great going into the season but also knew that I would need to re-assess things at some point, and I set our bye week as the time when I would take stock of the future."
He went on to say that he wants to focus on life outside of football. Pinkel’s resignation comes at the end of a tumultuous week at Missouri where players went on strike because of racial tensions at the school. Players even tweeted that they would boycott Saturday’s game against BYU unless the school’s president Tim Wolf stepped down, which he did.
Pinkel became the coach at Missouri in 2001 after coaching at Toledo for ten years. In ten seasons at Toledo he was 73-37-3. At Missouri he is 117-71 and made two appearances each in the Big 12 and SEC championship games, according to USA Today. Pinkel has 190 career wins, which puts him 19th all-time in the Football Bowl Subdivision. He is tied for second among active coaches with Nick Saban and Bill Snyder, behind Frank Beamer.
Missouri is currently 4-5.