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It was another busy week around Mizzou with the early signing period, some 2023 news, the leadup to the bowl game and basketball. We'll try to cover it all.
1) I wanted to start with my lasting impression from the early signing period and it didn't have anything to do with anybody Missouri signed. I was taken aback by how aggressively Eli Drinkwitz and his staff were pushing name, image and likeness. Before I get into this, I want to say that this is not a commentary on whether I think it's good, bad or indifferent (parts of it are all of those) and it's not an attempt to try to convince anyone to feel a certain way about it.
Anyway, I asked Drinkwitz a question about NIL at his press conference on Wednesday. I prefaced the question with "I understand that NIL isn't supposed to be a part of the recruiting process." He interjected "Oh, it's not?" Honestly, when I started to ask the question, I didn't really know if Drinkwitz would talk about it much at all. Boy, did he.
“It's very much impacting the recruiting process. It's very much discussed and talked about. Not necessarily in a fact of inducements or anything like that, or quid pro quos. But it's very much you've got to educate them on what the opportunities could potentially be, or what you're going to do to help somebody increase their personal brands and how are you going to educate them on what their opportunities of NIL could be and would be should they choose the University of Missouri. I mean, I probably wouldn't know that we have 10 Fortune 500 companies in the state of Missouri if I didn't know through the NIL opportunities what those could potentially be. So, I mean, it's here to stay. You're continually seeing things. There was a school that announced that they have every one of their offensive linemen receive a certain amount of money each year, and then all of a sudden that week they were able to sign two five stars and four star. It's is what it is. Again, unintended consequences. I don't think that's what it was supposed to be for, I don’t think that’s how it was meant to be, but in college football, we tend to try to find every way around the rule.”
He was then asked a follow up about navigating NIL with players and recruits.
“I think you can either adapt or die. That’s just the reality of it. You can either stick your head in the sand or put your fingers in your ears and stomp around and throw a fit about it, or you can adapt. And that's what we have to do. I think everybody has to adapt. Our administration's done tremendous job of trying to adopt new ways for us to educate our athletes about NIL, and whether or not we partnered with OpenDorse and provided them with opportunities to visit with companies, giving them the experience they need in order to market themselves. Our fanbase is going to have to continue to embrace an NIL and what that means for us to compete in this league. You know, recruiting throughout Southeastern Conference, seeing different billboards along the side of the road makes you realize that we're gonna have to do the same thing here as fans of our program and fans of our sport in order for us to compete at a high level. You gotta adapt or die, and you’ve got to be willing to adjust to change. It’s the new face of college football. You can either embrace it, or you can get left behind. And I don’t plan on getting left behind. I got four young girls, so I got a lot of coaching left to do.”
And really, that's the takeaway for me. You can have a staff that complains about it and says "this is never what it was supposed to be" or you can have a staff that accepts what it is (at least until the NCAA and its membership comes up with some sort of governance about it--I think a set of rules that you can't just offer a deal to every single player on the roster and even an NIL salary cap, either individual, team or both, would be fine). Missouri's staff is clearly taking the second approach. At the recruiting reception in St. Louis, Curtis Luper flat out told the crowd that Missouri fans needed to get involved in NIL for players. I had multiple people (and this was nothing I didn't know, but I think it's something many fans either didn't know or don't want to admit) tell me that Luther Burden isn't at Mizzou without NIL. I would imagine it probably played a part with Sam Horn and will with every quarterback recruit for the foreseeable future.
Again, you can choose to participate or not. You can think it's wrecking college football and it can change your level of investment in the sport. That's fine. That's an individual decision. But it's here and it's never going away. And at least for now, it's a major part of getting kids to play for the team you like.
2) The debate on how it impacts the sport and overall competitiveness is going to continue and no one is going to change his or her mind. Some believe it is slanted greatly toward college football's traditional powers and will point to Nick Saban's claim the Bryce Young had almost a million dollars in deals before taking a snap (I'm not sure I believe that, but Saban said it) or to the Texas organization pledging $50,000 a year to every single offensive lineman that plays for the Longhorns for the foreseeable future.
But there's some evidence on the other side too. I mentioned Burden above. The nation's number one recruit, Travis Hunter, flipped from Florida State to Jackson State and if you don't think NIL had a big part (approximately 100% IMO) in that, then God love your innocence.
Overall, I don't think it's going to suddenly swing the balance of power. The best teams are going to continue to get most of the best players. But that's not any different than usual. NIL isn't suddenly going to make most of the five-stars go to non-traditional powers, but I think it can get some of them to. Let's take a quick look at where the country's five stars went over the last five recruiting classes. I'm going to split it into "recruiting bluebloods" and others. Here are the schools I'm including as recruiting bluebloods: Alabama, Georgia, LSU, Florida, Oklahoma, Texas, Texas A&M, Ohio State, USC, Clemson. That's ten schools. Before I go into the numbers, I'm going to guess those ten schools got well over half the country's five stars prior to the 2022 class.
2022
Bluebloods: 18
Others: 8
Undecided: 3
2021
Bluebloods: 24
Others: 7 (Oregon, Notre Dame and Miami are included in this number)
2020
Bluebloods: 24
Others: 11
2019
Bluebloods: 23
Others: 7
2018
Bluebloods: 28
Others: 5
Over the four classes prior to 2022, 99 of a possible 129 five-stars went to the 10 schools I mentioned. That's 76.7% going to 10 schools. Here's the list of where the other 30 went:
Oregon 5
South Carolina 3
Miami 3
Penn State 2
Maryland 2
Notre Dame 2
Michigan 2
Tennessee
Florida State
Mississippi State
Auburn
TCU
Kentucky
North Carolina
Stanford
Washington
Wisconsin
You can make easy arguments for Oregon, Penn State, Michigan, Miami and Notre Dame being recruiting bluebloods. So that's now 113 of 129 five-stars going to the top 15 "recruiting schools." That's 87.6% (or seven out of eight) five-stars going to 15 schools.
Now let's go back to 2022. Eighteen of the 26 who have made decisions have gone to the 10 schools on my list. Penn State and Michigan got one each so that's 20/26 to those 15 schools, which is 76.9%. It may not be a huge difference, but it is a difference. And here's what I view as a very important difference: Three of the top five players this year (Burden, Hunter, Travis Shaw) went to schools not in that group of 15. They are the only top five players in the last five years to go to a school not on that list of the top 10. Between 2018 and 2021, the only top ten player not to go to one of the 15 schools on my list was Zacch Pickens, who was No. 9 in 2019 and went to South Carolina. Maybe it won't end up being a lasting trend, but there was more diversity among the top ten players in the country this year than there's been in the last four years combined (and No. 11 this year went to Arizona). It may be a small step, but it's a step.
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