Pinkel created the blue print for Mizzou to be a success...

Posted on: October 9, 2022 at 20:07:10 CT

... and it started with locking down our in-state borders away from our regional rivals.

The reason we were so bad in the 80s and 90s is because Mizzou was the after thought by high schools players in state

Nebraska, Notre Dame, Oklahoma, Illinois, Wisconsin, then later Kansas State were taking all the best players and then we were settling for the scraps

Then Pinkel got here and put an end to that and quickly... starting with stealing Damien Nash away from Nebraska in his first class (that also had Brad Smith in it).

Within just a few years, he had developed special relationships with high schools everywhere in the state. And with a superstar in Brad Smith, people started to take notice of Mizzou, who became an entertaining team with him alone at the center of it.

Nebraska's line to us got severely cut off
K State's cut off
Illinois' cut off
Colorado's cut off
kansas' cut off completely and totally

Mizzou was getting 50-70% of the top 10 players in the state with only a few getting scattered elsewhere

And not coincidentally, those programs started to fall while Mizzou's rose above them. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't all just the state of recruiting in Missouri.

But Missouri is a state rich with football talent, while those states just don't have great talent they can pull from. They have to go outside. And when the closest neighbor with resources cut them off and made it difficult, it severely damaged those programs, with Mizzou's gain.

And once Mizzou started beating those teams to death on the field, everyone wanted to go to Mizzou and be part of it. By the time 2010 came around, there wasn't a single high school player that had any memory of anything but Mizzou being a better program than all those other ones around them.

Our 2007 team on the starting offense was Chase Daniel (TX) and 10 players from the state of Missouri. The entire offensive line was from MO. Temple was from MO. Coffman and Rucker were from Mo. Maclin, Franklin and Saunders were from Mo.

Now just imagine, that if that were the 90s before Pinkel, Rucker would have been at Nebraska, Coffman at K-State, Maclin at Oklahoma and Temple at Nebraska and Chas Patton is likely our starting QB.

You can take that 11-1 teams and that'd be 5-7 at best. Probably 2-10 once you do the same for the defense and special teams and lack of coaching we would have had.

That's how ****ing huge a difference the state of Missouri recruiting is.

The pipeline to Texas was also huge. But whether we get players from Texas or Florida or Georgia or wherever... we first and foremost HAVE to lock down the in-state borders... because Nebraska, Kansas, KState, Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Iowa State, Arkansas, Tennessee will ALL be relying on our state to feed their programs.

And since those are our regional rivals... we have to box them out.