Missouri recruiting: 5 takeaways after Day 1 of Early Signing Period
Mizzou coach Eli Drinkwitz had 22 commits on the first day of the Early Signing Period on Wednesday, and he won a couple of recruiting battles that should pay off on the field soon.
According to 247sports, Drinkwitz’s 2021 class ranks 9th in the SEC and 26th nationally. That blows last year’s finish out of the water, as the Tigers were 13th in the conference and 51st in the nation.
Here are 5 takeaways from the Tigers’ class after Day 1 of ESP:
There were the good kind of flips
A few days before the Early Signing Period, Drinkwitz and his staff convinced local wideout Dominic Lovett, a 3-star teammate of Mizzou quarterback signee Tyler Macon, to decommit from Arizona State and stay home at Mizzou. That’s a big-time move for the Tigers, as Lovett should compete for snaps early in his career.
While Lovett’s flip came before the Early Signing Period, Arden Walker’s came on Wednesday. Walker, a 6-4, 248-pound defensive end from Englewood, Colo., was expected to sign with UCLA or maybe hometown Colorado, but instead is headed to Columbia. He’s going to be a solid addition to a unit that needed to add depth — the defensive line.
Reinforcements are coming for D-line
The Tigers are senior-heavy in their 2-deep along the defensive line, so Mizzou really made it a priority to bring in talent to help out if those seniors choose to leave.
Mission accomplished.
Mizzou has 8 defensive line recruits in 4-star Travion Ford and 3-stars Kyran Montgomery, Shemar Pearl, Walker, Jonathan Jones, Mekhi Wingo and a couple of junior college guys in Realus George, a 6-2, 295-pound pickup from Independence Community College in Kansas, and Daniel Robledo, a 6-4, 285-pounder from East Los Angeles College.
The defensive backs are big
Mizzou defensive coordinator Ryan Walters will have 5 new defensive backs to work with next season in 3-stars Daylan Carnell, Davion Sistrunk, Tyler Hibbler, Darius Jackson and Zxaequan Reeves, who hands down has the best name of the class of 2021.
The noticeable part with this DB group is its length — all 5 are listed at 6-1 or taller. The top-rated corner of the group, Carnell of Indianapolis, is 6-1 and 195 pounds while the top safety, in-state product Hibbler of Trinity Catholic High School in St. Louis, comes in at 6-1 198.
It’s finally official with Tyler Macon
Did Mizzou officially ink next season’s starting quarterback? No — Macon isn’t that … yet.
With redshirt freshman Connor Bazelak enjoying a breakout season, Macon is looking more like the future of the Mizzou offense rather than the now. But having Macon, a 3-star from East St. Louis, in the fold wouldn’t hurt competition at practice. The guy certainly doesn’t lack confidence, and he’ll have a chip on his shoulder for those who put him all the way at No. 15 in the dual-threat quarterback ratings.
The 6-foot, 200-pound Macon is a confident dude and he’s been all-in with Mizzou since March. He’ll get to campus ready to roll. Fans should love that.
Daylan Carnell might be one to watch
If there’s an under-the-radar prospect in the class of 2021, it might be Carnell. He looks the part physically at 6-1, 195 pounds and would be a nice counterpart to Ennis Rakestraw, a freshman from Texas who starts for the Tigers at corner.
Sure, the lineup at corner might be tough to crack for a true freshman with Rakestraw, Jarvis Ware, Ishmael Burdine and Jaylon Carlies all set to return, but Walters has proven he’s willing to play young guys. Carnell could be the next one.
Carnell picked Mizzou over Notre Dame, Iowa and Indiana among others.
Good job Drinkz and crew, best class for Mizzou yet.
Congratulations, sounds like you guys have reason to be excited. And your coach is already out-recruiting ours.
Thanks Bill, I don’t know about all that, Stoops has recruited you guys into being a football contender which is something you weren’t before. A lot of Mizzou fans will want to use the flukey 13-14 seasons as examples of why recruiting rankings don’t matter, but it’s pretty obvious just the opposite of that is true.
To call the 13 & 14 season’s flukey is wrong. The season Mizzou joined was bad because of injuries. The seasons up to then show they really weren’t flukey as you say. Other then that though ranking do and don’t matter. If you have a coach like Pinkel then get the guys you can develop and they don’t matter. On the flip side if you can’t get the talent to develop and can’t bring in the guys who are naturally talented then they really do matter. You really need the best of both worlds and it seems like Coach Drink might be able to do that.
13-14 were flukey because of how down the SEC East actually was at the time, to have one of UGA, FL or Tenn down was odd but to have them all down was a fluke. You see you think it’s all about Mizzou but it really wasn’t. It was a whole lot of luck to be in the right place at the right time. Pinkel couldn’t and wouldn’t win a championship with his “we do what we do”, end of story.
“The seasons up to then show they really weren’t flukey as you say.”
Correct, no wins going out the door in the b12 either, the recruiting was average and the game coaching pretty much sucked, that’s not a fluke.
So since Tenn has been down the whole time Mizzou has been in the SEC you can take them out. UG and FL just would lose the wrong games neither were really that bad either. Also Mizzou had an 8-5 record with a bowl win the final season in the b12 not the best but not the worst either. Not say Pinkel was the end all of be all of coaching but he was great at developing the players he got. Why try and down play something that has nothing to do with right now is another thing I don’t get. If a coach can get max potential out of a player in the long run the rankings don’t matter. The other thing is though if you get the better players then you don’t have to focus so much on getting that potential out of them. They have the drive to do. So yes rankings do matter. They just don’t matter with every player.
Florida was actually really bad, far worse than they had any reason to be coming off a national title run. Tenner appears to be the Nebraska of the SEC, a once strong program that is simply struggling and flopping on it’s dying breath. That UGA was ALSO having struggles given their stellar recruiting tells you it really was the right time to fire Richt. Old man ball coach in Scar was nearing his permanent golfing days, I really don’t see how things could have lined up much better for Mizzou.
To put in further perspective Kentucky looked at the success Vandy of all programs was having and figured, “Hey maybe we CAN BE a football program too”. That’s how god aweful bad the SEC East actually was.
Tigger, you don’t speak for the majority of true Mizzou fans. Pinkel recruited well and coached up a lot of players who went to the NFL.
What’s flukey is your negative posts putting down a decent football program under Pinkel.
Amen, you hit that squarely on the head.
Because I’m capable of logical thought I’m not a “fanatic” and I certainly don’t speak for you, but you do a nice job representing the mentally challenged! Keep it up!
Haha dont get mad little buddy. No I liked Pinkel. Mizzou has not accomplished squat this year.
Drinkwitz has proven that he and his half-Drink + half-Odom staff can coach existing roster members better than Odom…. OR…..the Odom roster has proven that it was a more mature and better coached product in 2020 than it was in 2016,17,18,19. Drink did have some freshmen difference makers.
Will Drink train his existing coaching staff or will he go for better teachers?
I say that first because the real truth is,,, high school players compete only in their own hometown area, with very little exposure statewide and none nationwide. So anybody that buys the 247, Rivals, What-ever rankings is silly. Even more silly because it assumes that all athletes mature the day they get their last ranking. Get your college yearbooks out and start comparing. Even better, think of your personal athletic marks achieved when you were a college freshman vs. a senior. Personally my Junior year was a huge year for changes in natural body-chemistry and performance. And I knew plenty of young men in my class who changed zero after enrolling in college,…. worse some of them had to fight sliding backwards to natural body changes like non-athletic, body mass ratio reverses. (ex. %body fat)
Programs motivate and monitor individuals to make the most of what nature gives them every year. These efforts start in the soul/spirit/mind not in what somebody 1000 miles away said about your gross goofy guess ranking when you were 15,16, and maybe they guessed again at age 17 but probably not.
So sorry sunshine pumpers, we just don’t know about Drinks recruiting success yet. Nor do we know about his long-term management of coaching staff yet. There are some good signs though. The most important one I notice is a business-like sense of quality sooner than later. Most games his offense (25 points/game) was noticeably better than Dooley’s (15 points per game) USING ONLY COMMON OPPONENTS TO COMPARE . Special teams seemed coached a lot better this year. The Walters Defense allowed 34 points per game in 2020 compared to 27 points per game last year USING ONLY COMMON OPPONENTS TO COMPARE. Is that because Odom and Drink starved him for scholarships, or because he isn’t recruiting as well, or because he isn’t teaching as well? Clearly however these two averages have to be reversed because year in and year out, winning seasons will not come from having your defense allow more points per game than your offense scores.
Your a crackpot with crackpot logic.
Dominic Lovett is a 4 star recruit, Steve. Both Rivals and 247 agree on that. We don’t get tons of blue chip recruits so it would be nice if sportswriters would report it accurately when we do get one.
You’re right, Tiger TD.
247 has him as a 4-star. I must have been looking at his 3-star composite.
Tollison is a 4 star Rivals recruit, if you add rivals and 247 you wind up with 6 or 7 four stars. Also get used to the idea that East St Louis which is technically Illinois, is considered “in state” by Mizzou. It’s just how we do things.