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GD: I don't know that I'd say that. Larry Rountree and Tyler Badie were two guys who were rated pretty low and are probably the best thing about the offense. You've got guys like Albert Okwuegbunam, Trystan Colon-Castillo and TreVour Wallace-Simms who just aren't playing as well as they have in previous years. That's not recruiting. That's guys having bad years. I'm not saying coaches are without blame for that, but it's not as simple as saying the guys they recruit aren't good enough because we've seen those guys be better. We go into every year just assuming everyone is going to improve. We do that despite the fact that it legitimately never happens. Some guys get better. Some stay the same. Some get worse. Missouri has too many guys on offense that are getting worse.

Recruiting has hurt at two positions. The most obvious is quarterback. I ran through it following the Georgia game and I'm not going to rehash it all here. But they missed on guys for a couple of years which put them in the position of having to take a grad transfer this year. And the grad transfer hasn't played as well as they hoped. But nobody--or at least almost nobody--can say that they saw that coming and that they were saying all along Missouri shouldn't have taken Kelly Bryant. This site, and the fanbase as a whole, was euphoric when Missouri got him. It was the seminal moment in Odom's career at that point. It hasn't worked as well as anyone hoped it would.

The other spot is wide receiver. Missouri has missed quite a few guys, most notably in the year where it lost Jafar Armstrong and Eli Gardner at the wire. Mizzou doesn't really have any difference makers at wideout right now.

So, if you want to say that recruiting is the biggest issue with the passing game, I'll agree. But the truth is, recruiting is almost always the biggest issue for teams that aren't meeting expectations. The only way you really get better in college football is to get better players. We parse every decision and crush every coach that loses a game and I'm not saying coaching and development don't matter. They do. But usually, the team with the best players wins. If you're not winning enough, the basic remedy is to get better players.

I don't want to get into a whole thing about what Missouri fans should expect in recruiting, but the truth is after his initial class, Odom's recruiting has been about what Missouri recruiting has always been. The Tigers are pretty much always going to be somewhere between 25 and 45 in the class rankings. They will never be in the top half of the SEC in those rankings. Then they have to take the players they have and make them better than Rivals thinks they are.

More than anything, I think what you're seeing over the last few years is that as Missouri settles into the SEC, it's every bit as difficult for them to be good in football as many people thought it was going to be. Yes, they should be better this year. They should have beaten Vandy and should have at least competed against Kentucky. But they did beat Ole Miss and South Carolina, two teams that are generally in their neighborhood or better in recruiting rankings. The point is, Mizzou has gone from a league where it was usually between 4th and 8th in recruiting rankings and rarely had to play the top three teams to a league where it's pretty much always going to be 10th to 13th and it's going to have at least four teams on its schedule every single year who the recruiting services think have better players.

GD: I'm not sure everyone is opposed to it. You're talking about one thread that had about 20 responses. Some people are opposed to it, likely because Steeples is in his 20s and has never recruited (at the college level). He's done very good things at DeSmet. That's a far cry from doing it as a Division One assistant. I know Robert transferred to Memphis when Barry Odom was there and it wouldn't shock me if Odom would offer him a position in the program. But it's going to be in the recruiting department or as a GA or something and he's going to have to spend some years working his way up the food chain. Down the road, Robert Steeples may be a fantastic Division One assistant. To think that simply adding him to the staff is going to significantly change the program is pretty out there to me.