Mizzou hires defensive line coach

COLUMBIA, Mo. - The Missouri football team brought 20 new players on board Wednesday. It also added Jackie Shipp.

Shipp was announced as the team's defensive line coach on National Signing Day, a week after previous D-line coach Chris Wilson left for the NFL.

"Jackie Shipp was probably the biggest signee that we had of all the guys," defensive coordinator DeMontie Cross said. "His history, his pedigree, his experience, his qualities as a man, as a person, as a mentor."

Wilson had held the defensive line coaching position for a little more than a month.

"The timing of it was not good," Cross said, "but the reality is it just forced us all to rally together as a staff and continue to recruit the guys that we have and let them know that things are OK. We're going to be fine. So once we did that and put that out of our minds, we knew we had a few days left recruiting, and we got the class that we wanted and happy to have coach Shipp as well."

Shipp spent the last three seasons as the defensive line coach at Arizona State. Shipp is the latest in a handful of Missouri hires with Sooner ties, as he coached defensive lines at Oklahoma from 1999-2012. He was also Alabama's defensive line coach in 1998.

"I was joking around earlier: I've already got a coaching tree," Barry Odom said of Wilson leaving. "That's pretty good. A couple weeks into it and I've got a coaching tree. Yeah, you sure don't think that's going to happen, especially when you're interviewing and hiring a guy, but it did, and I'll go back again to Mack Rhoades, that's provided me everything that we needed to do to put together the greatest staff that we could."

Odom said he had a list of coaches ready to pursue when he got word Wilson was leaving.

"I'm so excited obviously that he's a part of our family," he said of Shipp. "He will do a great job. Anytime that I positioned myself to be a head coach, I always had a list of guys that I'd want to try to hire, and you keep your list of guys that you want by position, by coordinator, and if you ever just have one name on that list, that's probably not very good."

Missouri's defensive line was last coached by Craig Kuligowski, who left to take the same position at Miami after Gary Pinkel resigned at Missouri.