GD: Excellent. I would recommend the Pacific Northwest to anyone. Got a couple of excellent recs from PMers and met up with both. But it's a bit of a climatic shock exiting the terminal at Lambert to a triple digit heat index. May move soon. Also, I think Mizzou got five commitments in the eight days I was gone which is an excellent ratio so it worked out for everybody (except Sean, who had to greatly increase his workload for a week).

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GD: I'm not sure I'm qualified to answer that yet because this is the first time I've ever covered great recruiting. Like you said, Gary Pinkel had some great teams, but signing day was never a day of huge celebration for Missouri fans.

The answer, really, is either one. You have to have one or the other. You need something great to sell. I've always said that really good sells and really bad sells. Mediocre doesn't. Recruiting classes in the mid-30s sells if you end up with a top ten team. But if you end up 7-5 every year no one cares. Oddly, if you end up 2-10 and get fired, that sells. The middle ground is what you don't want.

Having recruiting like this at a place like Missouri is different, too, because it's never happened. A top 15 class is better for business here than it would be covering Tennessee or Texas A&M or somewhere it happens all the time. You mentioned Tennessee and I'd guess Vols fans are kind of conditioned now to think recruiting rankings don't matter and get less excited about recruiting than they used to because they've seen it fail to translate for 15 years now. Missouri fans have always been the opposite. They've told everyone who would listen that recruiting rankings don't matter because they watched Pinkel turn middling classes into great teams. But now that they're getting higher level classes, suddenly the rankings matter a little more. Funny how that works, isn't it?

Ultimately, it has to translate into wins or it's not going to matter. Don't get me wrong, two or three more top 20 classes will be great for business and traffic and I'd love it to happen. But if Missouri is 5-7 in 2024, people are going to be a little less excited about ranking in the top 20 in early February. The recruiting sells in the moment and for a couple of years. But for the long term, it has to be backed up by winning on the field. Obviously, you want both. From a fan's perspective, if you can only choose one or the other you choose the wins on the field. But from the perspective of someone running a Rivals site, I think they both have about an equal impact and the recruiting might actually be better. There were plenty of places you could read about Missouri's 2007 or 2013 seasons...there's only one place you're going to get regular in-depth coverage of this recruiting class.

GD: Not really. He doesn't really do interviews. He wasn't at the workout on the day Mitchell Forde was at North Kansas City. He was at Night at the Zou, he hasn't taken any other visits that we know of so we know Missouri at least isn't out of the picture. But everything we've heard is that it seems unlikely he ends up in Columbia. That said, the longer it goes without hearing of him really tied to anywhere else, the better it is for the Tigers' chances.