Mizzou Men’s Hoops Coach Haith’s Future At School Murky Due To Miami Scandal

Asked whether he expected Frank Haith to be Missouri’s basketball coach at the start of this season, athletic director Mike Alden came down, squarely, and rather uncomfortably, on the fence.

“What I’m saying is there’s a process,” Alden said Wednesday after a brief appearance at the Columbia Quarterback Club’s football season kickoff event at Shiloh, a downtown bar and restaurant. “I don’t know what the future holds on all of those types of things.”

Alden was just as uncertain about another major story concerning Missouri: the stability of the Big 12 Conference.

“I attended a meeting on Monday,” Alden said of a gathering of conference athletic directors and other officials with conference commissioner Dan Beebe in Dallas.

Among the topics of conversation, Alden said, were distribution of league revenues, Texas’ private TV network and Texas A&M’s possible move to the Southeastern Conference.

“We talked about trying to hold this thing together,” he said.

When the Quarterback Club event was put together, it was planned that Alden would introduce Haith, the man he hired as basketball coach in April.

But that was long before Yahoo Sports, eight days ago, broke its University of Miami scandal opus, which included the allegation that Haith acknowledged knowing about a $10,000 payment to a basketball recruit while Haith was the coach at Miami.

Haith did not attend Wednesday’s event, though Alden said he and Haith were scheduled to attend a St. Louis Cardinals baseball game together today.

“Certainly, Frank’s doing a great job,” Alden said. “I’m working with him every single day. But we have to make sure that we go through the process.”

As the Yahoo story was being finished, an MU basketball media official — based on his asking Haith — told Yahoo that Haith “had no involvement” with the Miami booster who made the allegation, Nevin Shapiro.

“I wasn’t part of that conversation,” Alden said. “But certainly, if you look at it, there obviously was some level of relationship” between Haith and Shapiro.