- Obviously the big news of the week as we flip the page to the 2022 class is four-star quarterback target Sam Horn taking a visit to Columbia last weekend. It's significant on a lot of levels and shows how highly Horn himself thinks of Missouri's program by wanting to get a visit in before baseball season starts which will limit his free time throughout the rest of the spring semester.
In case you missed the story from our Georgia Tech site, here is what Horn said of his trip to CoMo:
"It was a really good trip to Missouri. That's a place I can see myself at."
Florida is another school that recently entered the mix for the Collins Hill (Ga.) product and a trip to Gainesville could also be in the works before his baseball season begins. Georgia Tech is another school that is recruiting him hard and is closer to home.
Horn is being proactive and doing some detailed homework on the schools he likes, one would expect a commitment sooner rather than later.
UPDATES:
- Sategna is another wide receiver target that named Missouri as one of his current top suitors in a recent interview with HawgBeat.com. The Tigers offered the three-star prospect back on December 4th as Texas A&M, Florida State, Oklahoma State, Baylor, Arkansas, USC, and Oregon are the other programs making a strong push. Sategna is still taking his time with his recruiting process and seeing what other schools will get involved in the next month or so before releasing a top schools list.
- AuburnSports.com caught up with Pride recently and the two most noteworthy pieces of information is 1.) he has no favorites right now, and 2.) he's in no hurry to make a decision. Pride's list of suitors is long and lengthy, but Missouri is still clearly in the hunt for the St. Louis product.
NEW OFFERS:
- Missouri extended an offer to Himon on Thursday, it was his first SEC offer for the three-star prospect. His other notable offers include Miami (Fla.), Kansas, Memphis, SMU, New Mexico, and others.
- Recently told Rivals.com Sam Spiegelman that Georgia, Oregon, Alabama, and LSU are the schools he's in contact with the most.
- The 2023 athlete currently holds 13 offers on his resume.
INDY THIS WEEKEND:
- The annual Best of the Midwest Combine will be this weekend in Indianapolis and Sean Williams is expected to be in attendance. Obviously, Missouri had success recruiting the Indy area in the 2021 class and some 2022 targets from the state that could be in attendance (speculating at this point until we get a participation list) include Omar Cooper, Jr., DJ Moore, Kiyaunta Goodwin, Tayven Jackson, and Caden Curry. Will likely be some other targets in attendance from the surrounding areas, including St. Louis possibly. Regardless, if there are Missouri targets there, we'll talk to them and provide updates from the event.
THE BIG STORY FOR 2022 PROSPECTS
At this point, it seems to be a foregone conclusion that the recruiting dead period is going to be extended through May 31. So what does that mean for the prospects? It will be interesting to see. In 2021, recruiting was put on hold in March. It became obvious pretty quickly that visits and off-campus recruiting weren't going to return in time for the early signing period and the NCAA and the coaches weren't going to do the right thing for kids and change the process to allow them more time, so a lot of 2021 players began to commit pretty early in the process. They wanted to make sure they had spots and they knew they weren't going to be able to visit a lot of places anyway. That also led, we believe, though we haven't run the numbers at this point, to more prospects staying closer to home for college. A lot of kids don't want to commit to a place for four years that they've never visited. A lot of juniors had probably already had chances to see games or take unofficial visits or at least be more familiar with schools closer to where the live, so it's likely when you take a look at the full class that a lot of schools probably fared better with prospects in their immediate geographic vicinity than in years past.
But will that be the case this year? At some point during this recruiting cycle, things are going to get back to something approaching normal (in recruiting, yes, but also in life in general). We are not in any way attempting to turn this into a COVID policy thread, there's already a thread for that. But the point is, there are vaccines out, people are starting to get them and there is optimism that most of us will have had the opportunity to get the vaccine by the end of the summer. If that's the case, you'd assume that travel and recruiting visits will resume by the fall. That will give kids in the Class of 2022 a chance to take visits, to see some coaches at their games this fall, etc. So we wonder if rather than accelerating the process this year, it might actually get pushed back. Will more players wait until they can take visits before making a decision? Will there be fewer commitments during the spring and summer than in a normal cycle as kids wait to do that?
The other factor in that is that coaches aren't sure at this point what kind of numbers they're dealing with. We don't have complete clarity on what's going to be done with scholarship limits to adjust for the fact that there are pretty much no seniors in college football this year. Something has to be done, but nobody seems quite sure what it is. We talked with a colleague who covers a Power Five program earlier this week who said that the program he covers may have single digit scholarships available for next year as of today. There are a lot of programs that could potentially be in that boat and probably need to wait for a little bit of clarity before really filling the class.
So, anyway, the 2022 cycle could be a different one and one that is slower to develop than in years past.
It will also be interesting to see how the process changes. We've talked a lot about how some of the things that have happened during the pandemic probably aren't going to go away. A lot of things that we've done in person, we've found out are simpler and cheaper to do virtually. Will coaches continue to travel all over the country? We'd bet that some of that travel, some of the in-home visits, etc, go away. The budgets of these schools are going to take a nose dive next year and they're going to need to be looking to cut some corners. One way you can cut corners is to not have ten assistant coaches flying all over the country to "bump into" players in the hallways of a high school. We talked to Mizzou recruiting coordinator Casey Woods some about that on the 573 Report last week
A little more big picture than normal this week, but these are things to consider for fans of recruiting in the next year.
