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It's the final Monday morning of 2021 and the week between Christmas and New Year's is fairly quiet when the team you cover has already played its bowl game and the basketball season has seemed over for weeks already. So rather than try to manufacture ten thoughts specific to Mizzou at this exact moment in time, I thought I'd do a little bit of a year-ender. This week's ten thoughts are a look back at the biggest things we followed in 2021 (outside of more COVID talk because if you've still got the energy to do that--and I know a few of you do--well, I guess more power to you). This list will obviously be heavily slanted to Mizzou, but there will be a couple other things thrown in there as well. This is not in any order other than the order in which they pop into my head. I'll say in advance I'm almost certainly missing or forgetting some things.
1) Eli Drinkwitz continues to recruit at a level that we thought previously impossible at Mizzou. A year ago, we were talking about the first top 20 class in the history of Mizzou football. Now we're talking about one that may very well end up ranking higher. Missouri currently stands 19th in the 2022 team rankings. Only four teams within 15 spots of Mizzou have fewer than 20 recruits on the list and just one has fewer than Mizzou's 16. The headliner of the group is obviously Luther Burden, who committed to Oklahoma in October of 2020, decommitted in August of 2021 and pledged to Mizzou two months later. Burden is the second-highest ranked signee for Missouri in Rivals.com history. The class overall is rated where it is because of the depth (six other four-stars and none below three stars) but it's not in the top 20 without Burden. The Tigers probably still have 8-12 more spots. They'll need to use at least a couple on high school or junior college players to stay in the top 20, but that seems likely.
2) Perhaps the most impressive part of the recruiting is that it's happened without any real reason being given on the field of play. Missouri is 11-12 in Drinkwitz's two seasons. The 2021 season was a ho-hum 6-7 campaign that was neither good nor awful. It just....was. The Tigers beat the teams they should have beaten, lost to the teams they should have lost to and went 2-5 in swing games (Kentucky, Boston College, Tennessee, South Carolina, Florida, Arkansas, Army). He's selling hope and potential and a vision for the future and prospects are buying it. Of course, at some point, that is going to need to turn into on-field results. That process will need to begin in the 2022 season. We have more than eight months to dig into that and preview the roster and analyze the schedule and we'll certainly do plenty of that. But we go into it all with the belief that 2022 needs to end with a winning record for Missouri. The schedule is challenging, but not by any means impossible. Drinkwitz will in no way be on the hot seat even at the end of next year. But to show the fanbase signs that Drinkwitz is capable of building a nationally competitive program--as opposed to just signing classes that look good on paper--there needs to be a tangible step forward next year and these four- and five-star recruits need to be a big part of why it happened. Mizzou has four automatic wins on the schedule (Middle Tennessee, Abilene Christian, Vanderbilt and New Mexico State). Georgia is a pretty certain loss. Even if you put Auburn in the probable loss category, that gives you six "swing games." To be a seven-win team next year, Mizzou needs three wins out of these games: Kansas State, Tennessee, Kentucky, South Carolina, Florida, Arkansas). That should be doable. If it doesn't happen, it's fair to at least start wondering if the big-time recruiting is going to translate into big-time winning.
3) Perhaps the biggest reason for optimism is the performance of a guy Missouri fans wanted run out of town midway through the season. And I'm not even going to argue you were wrong to want Steve Wilks fired. Perhaps the only thing more shocking than the sudden turnaround in the Mizzou defense was the fact it was so bad through the first two months that the turnaround was necessary. Overall, Mizzou's defensive numbers still weren't impressive at all. The Tigers finished 106th in total defense, 124th in run defense and 113th in scoring defense. So let's be clear, nobody should be throwing a parade. But Mizzou was significantly better on that side of the ball in the final month of the season than it was in the first two. The defense was a big reason for the wins over South Carolina and Florida and gave the Tigers a chance against Army. It was below average against Arkansas, but still better than it had been in the first eight games of the year. If you're the glass half full type, you'll look at the improvement as a major reason for optimism headed into 2022 and point out that it happened even as Missouri was playing without significant defensive players for most of that last month. But make no mistake, there's no learning curve in 2022. The learning a new system, trying to get their feet under them excuse won't work next year. In year two, the defense needs to be significantly better from the jump. None of this worst defense in Power Five football talk should happen for any portion whatsoever of 2022.
4) Missouri exemplified the impact of the transfer epidemic as much as any school in the country this year. A big part of that is a coaching change. There will always be an overstated amount of roster shuffling in a coach's first two years. There, simply put, are going to be a lot of guys the old staff recruited that the new staff wouldn't have recruited. They're getting their own guys in. Missouri has had 36 players who were on the roster in 2019 and/or 2020 transfer out or end their football careers prematurely (that includes J'Marion Gooch and Jadarrius Perkins from the 2021 recruiting class). I don't know how that compares to everyone else in the country because I have no desire to look at every team in the country, but I've got to imagine it's among the highest numbers in the land. For the most part, they were guys who simply weren't ever going to be significant contributors here. Also, 32 of the 36 were committed, signed or already on the roster prior to Eli Drinkwitz getting the job. So it's a high number, but for the most part, not really surprising. But the Tigers did have two starters transfer after the 2021 regular season ended in Daniel Parker Jr. and Connor Bazelak. Again, neither came as a shock to those who follow the program closely. Parker always came with a bit of drama and Bazelak had lost his grip on the starting quarterback job. Each of those transfers makes sense on some level and neither is a reason to panic. This is simply what college football is at this point in time. There will likely be a few more transfers out between now and the end of spring football. But after that, the number should drop significantly. Of the 82 players we have slated to be on scholarship for next season, 51 of them were fully recruited and signed by Eli Drinkwitz. That number's going to be up closer to 60 of 85 by the time this transfer cycle is over and next season begins. That means about 3/4 of the roster is his next year. If a significant chunk of those guys are transferring out going forward, that's more of an issue (the number also exemplifies why progress needs to start to be seen next year; starting in 2022, you can't blame the last guy much).
5)The other major change in 2021 is that we are now in the name, image and likeness era. I ran down some of the potential positives of that for Missouri in last Monday's thoughts. No need to go through all that again other than to say that Luther Burden isn't here without it and it factored in with several of the area recruits and will continue to do so in the coming years. I've got to think it could even be a bargaining chip in Missouri's corner in the scenario where baseball becomes a legitimate threat for Sam Horn. The idea of the system is long overdue while also admitting that the implementation of it has been severely flawed to put it nicely. But it's here and it's changing college football.
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