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1) So the first week of the live recruiting period lived up to the hype. It had been 15 months since recruiting really happened. I mean, sure, kids still talked to coaches and put out graphics and made commitments and such. But it wasn't recruiting. Talking to a coach on Zoom isn't the same as being around the coach. Taking a video tour of campus isn't as good as the real thing. And there's no substitute for a coach actually laying eyes on a player, both in competition and just from the standpoint of seeing them and being able to figure out if their listed height and weight is actually their listed height and weight (although you'd be surprised how much they can tell from a picture: I had a coach tell me during the pandemic they like to see pictures of kids against cinder block walls because they know how tall each cinder block is, so if a kid is standing up against one of those walls--like you see in most high school hallways--they can tell the difference between a kid that is 5-11 and one that is 6-1). Anyway, recruiting was back and it was back with a vengeance.
We linked all of our important updates this week in our Sunday night recruiting notebook. Missouri was busy and we covered it all.
2) There are a lot of reasons for Missouri fans to feel very good about the way things are going. There have been some weeks like this before in recruiting. There was plenty of excitement for the Tiger Ten. There were fans hanging banners off highway overpasses when Dorial Green-Beckham visited. There was the basketball weekend with the Porter brothers and Kevin Knox. But I don't think the campus has seen the sheer amount of talent at one time as it saw this week. Eli Drinkwitz is getting more high-level players to take a look at Mizzou than has ever happened before.
Here's the simple numerical breakdown of what Mizzou had on campus this week:
A three-star official visitor
A former four-star transfer official visitor
A likely NFL draft pick official visitor
A 5-star unofficial visitor (twice)
11 4-star unofficial visitors
8 3-star unofficial visitors (all ranked 5.6 or higher, which means they're in the upper half of three-stars)
You want to compete for meaningful things in the SEC? That's the way you'd better be recruiting.
3) That said, to quote Seinfeld, there's taking the reservation and then there's holding the reservation. And the holding is really the important part.
If you'll allow me to be the bearer of bad news (it's a role I play pretty well), Missouri isn't going to sign all of those players. The key is signing a decent amount of them. Getting the players to take a look is a step. It's an important step. There really can't be any other steps without that step. But you don't win any prizes for that step. Pretty much every kid that was on campus this week is going to see other campuses over the next six months. If the vast majority of them go somewhere else, nobody's going to take much solace in the idea that "Yeah, but remember when they all visited Mizzou in the same week back in June? That was pretty awesome."
The real test for Eli Drinkwitz begins now. You want to compete in this league, you better be signing multiple four-stars in every class. You better combine that with being able to find the three-stars who should be four-stars and signing some of them. If you have a five-star player within two hours of campus who is showing legitimate interest in your program (and, make no mistake, Luther Burden isn't just doing Missouri a favor by driving down I-70 twice in a week), you need to land that player more often than you don't. Because as well as Missouri is recruiting right now, all it's doing is getting the Tigers into the middle of the pack in the SEC. This league recruits like no other.
In the last ten years, there are 11 programs that have signed at least ten five-star recruits. Six of them are in the SEC. Throw in Ole Miss (nine 5-stars) and seven of the top 12 five-star destinations are in the conference. Alabama and Georgia lead the country, combining to sign 78 five-stars in that period of time. There have been 311 five-stars in the last decade. At the time the linked article was written, 305 of them had chosen a college. A ridiculous 152 of them were headed to the SEC. If you're not great at math, that's one player less than 50% of all the five-stars in the country playing in the SEC. For a decade.
So, yeah, you're going to have to land some dudes if you want to compete to win meaningful things.
4) The numbers above got me thinking about this tweet:
It sounds great. It's 100% true. And big-time recruits ignore it pretty much across the board.
Of the 305 five-stars in the article I linked above, 181 of them went to six schools (Alabama, Georgia, Clemson, Ohio State, Florida State, LSU). That is 59.3% of the available elite high school talent in the country playing at six schools. No wonder there's no parity in college football.
Now, if we're being honest, a lot of those five-stars do get on the field immediately at those places. That's why they're the elite players. They are good enough to play absolutely anywhere.
So let's drop down to the 4-stars. There are about 300 of them every year. That gives us 3000 in the time frame we are looking at. Over the last ten classes here are the number of four-stars signed by the teams above:
Alabama 143
Ohio State 140
Georgia 126
LSU 124
Florida State 108
Clemson 92
That's a total of 733, or 24.4% of the available four-stars. Combine that with the five-star number and 26.7% of the elite level prospects are going to six schools. Do you need to know any more about why there's no parity in college football?
Since joining the SEC, Missouri has signed 20 four-stars and one five-star. That means in a decade, Mizzou has signed a total of 21 four-star and above players. Here are the averages for the three SEC schools on that list of six:
Alabama: 18.7
Georgia 16
LSU 14.3
In the ten years Mizzou has been in the league, those three teams have combined to sign 30 classes. Not a single one of them included fewer than eight four-star players.
5) But it's not fair to compare Missouri to those schools, you say. And you're right. It isn't. It's not really fair to compare anybody to those schools except the three others on the list and maybe USC, Oklahoma and Texas. So what about the next tier in the SEC? After the top three, the rest of the top half in the SEC recruiting rankings is usually going to consist of Texas A&M, Florida, Auburn and Tennessee. So let's look at the number of four and five-stars for those schools over the same ten years:
Florida: 13 5-stars, 119 4-stars, average of 13.2 4-stars or higher every year
Texas A&M: 13 5-stars, 118 4-stars, average of 13.4 4-stars or higher every year
Auburn: 10 5-stars, 117 4-stars, average of 12.7 4-stars or higher every year
Tennessee: 9 5-stars, 103 4-stars, average of 11.2 4-stars or higher every year
6) So that's the top half of the league. You've got to sign about 11 four-stars or higher every year to be in the upper half of the SEC. I've said over and over that it's unrealistic for Missouri ever to break into that group. I stand by that. So let's talk about the teams Missouri should be competing with.
I take Vanderbilt out of it. They just don't recruit on the level of any other SEC school. So we're left with Ole Miss, Mississippi State, Kentucky, South Carolina and Arkansas. That's the group Missouri needs to beat. If you can be the best of that group and you can close the gap on the top half (let's say instead of signing an average of two four-stars or higher every year you're signing six, which is a little more than half of the 7th-place team), that's the formula. So here are the numbers for the five teams we should look at as Missouri's primary competition to be the best recruiting team in the second half of the SEC. Same parameters. We're looking at the 2012-2021 classes:
South Carolina: 3 5-stars, 72 4-stars, average of 7.5 per year
Ole Miss: 5 5-stars (again, the article I linked isn't Rivals rankings), 62 4-stars, average of 6.7 per year
Mississippi State: 3 5-stars, 45 4-stars, average of 4.8 per year
Kentucky: 2 5-stars, 42 4-stars, average of 4.4 per year
Arkansas: 0 5-stars (The article I linked listed them with one, so they're obviously not using exclusively Rivals rankings), 44 4-stars, average of 4.4 per year
So there's your goal: Be a better recruiting team than those five teams and you're giving yourself a shot. Drinkwitz signed five four-stars last year. He's got commitments from three so far this year. He's heading in the right direction. He isn't there. So not only does he have to recruit as well as he's recruited in the first two years, but he has to recruit better than he has. Again, there's reason to believe he can. There are a lot of good signs. But this kind of lays out how difficult it is.
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