Trio of four-star commitments boosts Mizzou football in recruiting rankings

COLUMBIA, Mo. — Eli Drinkwitz netted a hat trick.

Across three days, Missouri picked up three verbal commitments from high school prospects — all four-star recruits. That adds up to an even 12 stars: a recruiter’s dozen.

The latest additions to Mizzou’s 2025 recruiting class give the Tigers a total of 15 pledges, suggesting the door will soon close for high school players wanting to join MU. And with the number of open spots in the class waning, the group has jumped up in recruiting service rankings.

Missouri’s ’25 class now sits 16th in the nation according to On3’s industry rankings. That’s good for ninth in the Southeastern Conference, behind Texas but ahead of Tennessee.

Rivals.com places Mizzou in a similar spot: No. 14 nationally, seventh in the SEC.

Even with classes starting to fill, there’s still plenty of time before any school’s composition is finalized. National signing day won’t take place until December, after prospects have played their final seasons of high school football and the college football regular season has run its course.

Assuming MU’s most recent pledges stay on board through that point, they’ll raise the ceiling for the next batch of incoming players.

Jayvan Boggs, a four-star wide receiver out of Cocoa, Florida, kickstarted the latest wave of commitments. Missouri’s primary competition for Boggs’ services was Central Florida.

Quarterback Matt Zollers, who committed to Mizzou earlier in the cycle, was at least one of the driving forces behind Boggs’ decision, publicly lobbying on social media for them to combine in the Tigers’ future passing game. Boggs earned Mr. Football honors in Florida for his junior season, in which he caught 93 passes for 1,493 yards and a whopping 23 touchdowns.

On Friday, the wide receiving corps picked up another weapon in four-star recruit Donovan Olugbode. Hailing from Naperville, Illinois, Olugbode has been playing his high school football at IMG Academy in Florida.

He took official visits to MU, Florida, Southern California and Washington but saved Columbia for last. Olugbode’s stats have been limited at talent-rich IMG, but his highlights show an ability to separate from defenders both before and after the catch with the body control to go up for contested passes, too.

A four-star player in the trenches came Saturday with a commitment from Lamont Rogers, an offensive lineman from Mesquite, Texas. Standing 6 feet 7 and weighing 305 pounds, Rogers already has a ready-made frame for blocking in the SEC.

His final crop of six schools were MU, Texas, Oklahoma, Texas A&M, Florida State and Southern Methodist.

While it varies some between recruiting services, Olugbode and Rogers appear in some rankings of the top 100 best prospects in the 2025 class, regardless of position.

ESPN, On3 and Rivals, for example, have Rogers ranked between No. 60 and 74. Olugbode sits at 56th and 69th in the class per Rivals and 247sports, respectively.

Their commitments follow an uncommon — but not unparalleled — recruiting miss for Missouri. CBC wideout Corey Simms, a four-star prospect who landed on the Post-Dispatch All-Metro second team last season.

Following in the footsteps of former teammate Jeremiah McClellan, who signed with Oregon, Simms decided to head west, picking USC.

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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.

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COLUMBIA, Mo. — Missouri was a legitimate national title contender.

It wasn’t in a hypothetical or what-if world. It wasn’t even about whether the Tigers could win the requisite football games to reach that status. It was about technicalities, and in 1960, Mizzou had as good a case for winning a national championship as anyone.

The hang-up was that the college football authorities of the time had their eyes on different champions. At the time, the sport was more than half a century from settling the title matter with a playoff, and the NCAA wasn’t willing to weigh in, leading to varying opinions on who was the best in the nation.

In 1960, the AP and coaches polls picked Minnesota as their champion after the regular season. But the Gophers went on to lose the Rose Bowl to Washington that year, leading the Huskies to earn the champion honor in some eyes. Separately, other entities opted for Mississippi, which won 10 games and tied another. There was even a stray shout for a one-loss Iowa team.

And then there was Missouri.

The Tigers finished the regular season with one loss — a painful one to Kansas near the end of the campaign. The Jayhawks had fielded an ineligible player, though, and a few weeks after the game was played, the Big Eight conference voted to forfeit two KU victories, giving MU an undefeated season, with an asterisk.

Mizzou then beat Navy and Heisman winner Joe Bellino in the Orange Bowl, finishing 11-0. But the Tigers don’t claim to be champions.

The NCAA’s modern records list Minnesota and Ole Miss as the champions from that year. Now, some in Missouri circles would like to see their school added to that list.

“I’ve been beating the drum to try to get the university to recognize it because I think they have as much a right as anyone in the country to be national champions in 1960,” author Brendon Steenbergen told the Post-Dispatch on a recent episode of the Eye on the Tigers Podcast. “But, you know, people have different feelings about that.”

Steenbergen likely knows more about Mizzou’s 1960 football season than anyone else who wasn’t actively part of it: He spent a decade researching and writing “Respectable Roughnecks,” a book detailing the season releasted earlier this year.

The story of that campaign, in his eyes, is about much more than whether MU would be justified in retroactively hanging a banner for 1960. What makes that season so compelling 64 years later is how unprecedented the Tigers’ journey was.

“They had the No. 1 ranking in the country for the first time, and they had their first Black player on the team,” Steenbergen said. “First All-American. First time they ever won a bowl game. First Orange Bowl. First, first, first, first, first.”

He grew up in the 1980s, a rather meager stretch for MU football. After making three bowl games in the four seasons between 1980 and 1983, Mizzou didn’t have a winning season again until 1997.

“I did have a vague recollection that in the ’60s and ’70s, things were different,” Steenbergen said. “Things were really strong, and Missouri had a lot to hang their hat on.”

When the Tigers joined the Southeastern Conference in 2012, he got to thinking more about that history. He looked back on some of those firsts and had a thought: “Well, this is a really interesting story, and there just isn’t a ton out there about it.”

Then he had a secondary thought — one that seemed innocuous but turned into something more: “Somebody should write a book about this.”

The book covers the events of the 1960 season in extraordinary detail, drawing on historical records and a wide range of interviews alike to capture what happened, down to some of the dialogue. Steenbergen scoured material from the Missouri State Historical Society, MU’s archives and old Post-Dispatch coverage. He talked to living players and the widows of those who had died, also sifting through previous interviews that some players had given.

One player’s spouse gave Steenbergen a box full of memorabilia from that time. Because the players still alive from that time were approaching 80, he felt a bit of urgency to get their story out there.

“Several of the key players had passed away already at that point,” Steenbergen said. “Those guys, they know they’re not immortal. They know that if this book is to come out, it’s got to come out sooner rather than later. ... One of my big regrets is some of the guys who I did talk to will never get a chance to read it.”

Among those who have a central role in the story but won’t read its modern retelling is Norris Stevenson, the player credited with breaking the color barrier at Missouri as the school’s first Black player to receive a football scholarship.

His experiences, from on-field success that fueled a breakthrough season to the discrimination he battled during his career, are what Steenbergen hopes today’s readers find memorable — not just a potential squabble over claims to a national championship.

“Part of the overarching message of this book is that every program, every team, every school, they have their own Jackie Robinson,” Steenbergen said. “Even though they didn’t necessarily get some of the accolades or the glory, they certainly had to deal with all of the same challenges or similar challenges. So I think it’s good that awareness of what he went though and what he accomplished is growing.”

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COLUMBIA, Mo. — The turn of the calendar brought out Red River ragers.

There were parties on both sides of the Texas-Oklahoma border over the weekend, a geographical distinction that, while intact, has officially switched regions. It’s Southeastern Conference country now.

In Norman, OU’s stadium hosted music, a beer garden and a mechanical bull. UT brought out fireworks and Pitbull.

And they finally got to say that line.

“This is a day we have been building toward for years,” Texas athletics director Chris Del Conte said. “Our fans are really excited about this. You can tell by the turnout. It just means more to the fans in the Southeast Conference and their schools.”

While the Longhorns’ and Sooners’ migration to the SEC meant plenty to the broader college landscape — the onset of July also marked the decimation of the Pac-12 and the Southern Methodist Mustangs, somehow, swimming into the Atlantic Coast Conference in the school’s promotional video — the adjustment is more intriguing and impactful for Missouri.

The Tigers are no longer the newbies and instead are part of a welcoming party gauntlet that will greet any postseason football hopes. While realignment renders any debate over belonging to a conference’s geographic region borderline laughable, Columbia looks like less of a central-U.S. strawberry in a bowl of southeastern peas when Norman and Austin factor into the equation.

And during the 2024-25 sports year, Mizzou will rekindle rivalries with some former Big 12 buddies.

The first MU team to face either SEC debutant will be the women’s soccer team, which will host Oklahoma on October 18 and visit Texas on October 24, near the end of its SEC slate. Mizzou volleyball travels to the Sooners on October 27 and the defending national champion Longhorns on November 1.

In what very well might produce one of the more hostile Faurot Field atmospheres in recent years, Missouri gets a gridiron showdown with Oklahoma on November 9.

The Tigers and Sooners haven’t faced each other in football since 2011, MU’s last season in the Big 12. The last time they dueled in Columbia was 2010, when coach Gary Pinkel beat first-ranked Oklahoma for the first time in front of 70,000 fans who promptly took the goalposts with them to the bars.

More recently, tension has flared online between fans of the two programs, particularly around recent Missouri recruiting wins that saw coach Eli Drinkwitz retain the commitment of five-star edge rusher Williams Nwaneri and poach highly rated offensive line prospect Cayden Green from the Sooners after just one season in Norman.

Mizzou played Texas in a 2017 bowl game but will have to wait until 2026, at the earliest, to face the Longhorns in conference play — the SEC has paired schools with the same opponents for 2025 as this season.

In men’s basketball, the last MU-UT battle was a 2012 Big 12 conference tournament semifinal that vaulted the Tigers into the title game. The Sooners and Tigers have played three times since Missouri joined the SEC, most recently in the 2021 NCAA Tournament, which produced an OU win.

The sport that might well see the biggest impact from Texas and Oklahoma’s arrival in the SEC is softball. The most recent NCAA Tournament championship matchup saw the Longhorns and Sooners duel in Oklahoma City, which means a deep conference — every SEC team made the latest NCAA Tournament — just got deeper.

The immediate impact in football will be one of the 2024 season’s commanding storylines.

Texas, fresh off a College Football Playoff appearance, is a likely candidate to make it into the first 12-team version. The Longhorns have a high-stakes nonconference matchup with reigning champions Michigan but gentler SEC slate. Georgia’s a title contender again. The rivalry with Oklahoma remains intact and intense. Texas A&M and Kentucky can ruin bids for conference championship game appearances. But Mississippi State, Vanderbilt, Florida and Arkansas don’t combine to bite the same way that other programs’ schedules do — like the challenge facing Oklahoma.

The Sooners don’t have the same kind of flashy nonconference showdown on the books for this year but won’t catch a break during SEC play. They’ll play, in order, Tennessee, Auburn, Texas, South Carolina, Mississippi, Mizzou, Alabama and Louisiana State — nearly all of which have a real chance at winding up in the CFP.

That could leave Oklahoma rather battered when it visits Missouri in November. And if MU sees the Longhorns this season, it’ll be in the playoffs, which doesn’t seem out of the question.

The reunions that take place between Mizzou, Texas and Oklahoma this season could have postseason implications, particularly in football. At a minimum, there will be lengthy histories to add to, just with a new conference in a presiding role.

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