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1) A week ago, there were no five-stars on Missouri's commit list. This week, there's one committed and one set to visit.
Missouri's recruiting tidal wave continued last Monday (has it seriously only been seven days?) with the commitment of Williams Nwaneri. Mizzou will not rest easy for another four months. You can bet other schools (particularly Georgia and Oklahoma) are not going to relax. Every time Nwaneri wears a red shirt, rumors will kick up. Is it possible he looks around? Sure, it always is. He didn't strike me as a kid who was particularly enamored with the recruiting process and he wasn't under any specific pressure to hurry up and reserve a spot at Mizzou if he wasn't ready, so I don't view the odds as high that he decommits, but of course it isn't out of the question. The two best things Mizzou can do now are to win games and put some more talent around him in the 2024 class.
On the hoops side, recent reclassification Jayden Quaintance will visit a month from today. There's been some chatter of this one for a few weeks now, but it seems Missouri has taken the next step in being the first school to schedule a visit. Quaintance was the No. 7 player in the Class of 2025 and he just turned 16 on July 11. I asked Rob Cassidy, our national basketball recruiting analyst, if he had a ballpark of where Quaintance will rank when figured into the 2024 class. He said for sure in the top ten and quite possibly in the top five. So that'd be a nice piece.
2) Mizzou still has a shot at a top 20-ish football class. The basketball class is potentially in the top 5 to 10 range. That got me wondering what the best year (on paper) was in Mizzou recruiting history. The easiest way to measure that is to add the football and basketball class rankings together. The problem with that is we haven't really kept track of team recruiting rankings in basketball the way we have in football.
Mizzou's highest ranked football classes have come with Eli Drinkwitz at the helm. But on the hoops side, the Tigers weren't doing anything special from 2021-23. When the basketball program landed a top five class in 2017, the football class was 48th.
On paper, Gary Pinkel's best class came in 2010 when the Tigers ranked 21st. The hoops class that year included Ricardo Ratliffe, the Pressey brothers and Tony Mitchell. The other year in consideration is 2008. Mike Anderson signed what would end up as the winningest recruiting class in school history with Keith Ramsey, Kim English, Laurence Bowers and Marcus Denmon. Pinkel landed the No. 25 class which had players like Jacquies Smith, Zaviar Gooden, Dan Hoch and Michael Egnew in addition to first-round picks Blaine Gabbert and Aldon Smith. In retrospect, I think you have to give the nod to 2008, even if 2010 probably would have ranked a little higher on paper.
3) But enough about the future, we're ten days from the start of the 2023 football season. It's been kind of a weird summer in that it still doesn't seem like we've fully focused on the upcoming season. So much happened with NIL and realignment and then the recruiting heat wave in early August that it seems strange to me the season starts in ten days. But here we are. To me, this season doesn't seem like the one in which Missouri will take the giant leap, but it does seem like one that needs to be an important step if Missouri is going to take the giant leap. Put more simply, I don't think Missouri is going to win ten games this year. But I think this can be a season that shows progress and is an important step toward becoming a team that can win ten games in the not too distant future.
You're presumably going to identify your quarterback for at least the next two seasons by mid-September (whether that's Brady Cook or Sam Horn, we'll talk about shortly). You should have at least one, maybe two, young guys at running back ready to go. Luther Burden and Mekhi Miller are back at receiver and this year's freshman class is older. Guys like Tristan Wilson, Valen Erickson and Logan Reichert should be ready to go on the offensive line (in a perfect world). Your recruiting classes that have ranked 12, 19 and 33 are the core of your team and you're adding Williams Nwaneri and the rest of what you get in 2024 to the mix. That starts to really look like a team that has an SEC level of talent. But you have to get there. If you only win five or six (again, I think that's unlikely, but you have to at least acknowledge the possibility), everybody's going to wonder if you haven't even really started to turn the corner by now, why should they ever believe it is going to happen?
So my minimum bar for a successful season and a feeling that the corner is being turned is seven wins. And I'd feel a whole lot better at eight.
4) Of course, we do have to acknowledge there are going to be a lot of holes to fill on the defense next year. I'll break the defense into two categories.
Players we know are done after this season: Darius Robinson, Jayden Jernigan, Josh Landry, Realus George, Chuck Hicks, Chad Bailey, Joseph Charleston. That's four starters and 80% of the top five at defensive tackle.
Players I'd expect to be done after this season: Kristian Williams, Ty'Ron Hopper, Ennis Rakestraw, Kris Abrams-Draine, Jaylon Carlies. That's five more starters and the rest of the top five at defensive tackle.
Add in the fact that if Missouri's defense is as good as or better than it was last year and somebody might want Blake Baker to be their head coach and it's going to be a massive rebuild defensively before the 2024 season. But, again, you've been recruiting well, you should be able to fill some of those holes and you can probably offer some high-level transfers instant playing time. Which again all points to why it's so important for the offense and the team as a whole to take a step forward in 2023 even if it isn't the year you reach the final goal.
5) Okay, so back to the quarterback thing. Drinkwitz said on Saturday night that he expects Brady Cook and Sam Horn to both see action against South Dakota. To me, that means they both need to see first half action. Putting Horn in a 34-7 game in the third quarter doesn't show me much. I'd like to see a situation where Cook gets the first and third quarters and Horn gets the second and fourth (I do expect Cook to take the first snap) or something similar. Give them both meaningful PT with starters in the game. More than that, whichever one doesn't start the South Dakota game, I'd like to see start the Middle Tennessee game. MTSU is better than USD and worlds exist in which they can beat the Tigers. But it shouldn't happen and I want to see how both guys come out of the gates in a 0-0 game. The goal here to identify your starter before the Kansas State game. I think the best way to do that is to give them virtually identical situations. Whichever one gets the first quarter against South Dakota, give the other one the first quarter against MTSU. If your starter buries you in the MTSU game, not only does it become obvious you made the wrong choice and truthfully, this season probably isn't going anywhere significant anyway.
