This is new.
Not since college football recruiting services started assigning hotel-like star rankings to high school players has a Missouri coach crammed so much highly regarded talent from far away into one single class.
We’re not talking about out-of-state as in just across the Kansas and Illinois borders, either.
We’re talking about a four-star (though one scouting service says five) quarterback from Big Ten country (Matt Zollers) helping convince not one but two four-star receivers in Florida (Jayvan Boggs and Donovan Olugbode) to join him in verbally committing to Mizzou.
We’re talking about a four-star linebacker from Ohio (Dante McClellan) and a four-star running back from Memphis (Jamarion Morrow) making the same college pledge as a four-star defensive tackle from Belleville (Jason Dowell) and a four-star offensive lineman from Eureka (Jack Lange.)
Wait, there’s another one.
On Saturday, Lamont Rogers, a 6-foot-8, 300-plus pound four-star offensive lineman out of Texas joined Mizzou’s star-studded 2025 recruiting class. He became the eighth four-star recruit, per Rivals, in that group. Six of them play their high school home games in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Tennessee, Florida or Texas.
Relentless recruiter Eli Drinkwitz and his staff are blending recent on-field success with aggressive name, image and likeness offerings to accomplish something at Mizzou that was once thought to be impossible.
You better get the best players from in and right around the state, said the old Mizzou adage, because it’s not a reliable plan to pull the best players from other states. Old adage out. New one in. Drinkwitz wants the best players from in and right around the state. He also wants the best players from any and all states. Wanting them is one thing. Getting them? Something different. But now he’s doing that, too.
This upcoming season, the one right around the corner, could be a massive one for Mizzou. Coming off an 11-win season that ended with the exclamation point of a Cotton Bowl win against Ohio State, the schedule asks — no, begs — the Tigers to make the expanded College Football Playoff as an encore. These 2025 commitments will watch it play out from their high school campuses. That they are committing before seeing how it goes says a lot about the momentum Drinkwitz now drives.
Yes, Drinkwitz has to keep these commitments and turn them into signatures upon dotted scholarship document lines. Nothing is official until then. But Drinkwitz has flipped more commits his way than he’s lost to other programs, just like he’s had more wins than losses in the transfer portal. Pledges tend to stick with him.
Yes, a lot of this recruiting momentum is connected to Mizzou’s aggressive NIL efforts. And? It’s not against the NCAA rules — not that those matter much anymore. Drinkwitz led Mizzou to the front lines of NIL, and his efforts to rally the department, university and state around the cause continues to pay big dividends for not just football, but all sports.
And yes, sometimes these recruiting rankings just flat out make bad reads on players. But while it’s always fun to celebrate the ones who break through alleged no-star ceilings, the big picture is pretty clear. The rankings are accurate more times than they are not, and great recruiting classes — if held together — greatly improve the odds of great seasons. It’s been true at Mizzou before, when some of Gary Pinkel’s most heralded recruiting classes grew up to power the Tigers to previous peaks. But again, we’ve never observed something like this in the recruiting-ranking era. Not at Mizzou. Prospects with gobs of legitimate scholarship offers are turning down their home-state powers to pick Drinkwitz and his Tigers.
After Rogers on Saturday picked the Tigers over Oklahoma, Texas, Texas A&M, Florida State and others, Rivals ranked Mizzou’s 15-player 2025 group as the No. 14 class nationally.
The competition being beaten, even more than the assigned recruiting stars, is what’s really telling.
Penn State wanted Zollers, the quarterback who continues to work his pick-MU campaign. Boggs, who previously committed to Ohio State, picked the Tigers over UCF and Florida. The Gators wanted Olugbode, too. McClellan turned down Michigan State. Morrow stiff-armed Alabama.
Mizzou is going behind enemy lines to do to some premier programs what premier programs used to do to Mizzou. It’s happening at a crucial time, too. As the SEC expands and becomes even more daunting with the additions of Texas and Oklahoma, Drinkwitz has expanded his reach.
You become a great team by beating great teams. You get there faster if you first beat those great teams on the recruiting trail. Doing it on your home turf is one thing. This is different. This is new. It could be Mizzou unlocking a higher level.
