Commentary: The expected casualty of a coaching change
When the NCAA instituted an early signing period for college football two years ago, most of the talk was about how it would impact the prospects. But two years in, the biggest impact of the new timetable may be on the coaching carousel.
The last time Missouri went through a coaching change, Barry Odom was hired on December 3rd. It was late, but Odom had two full months to put together a recruiting class. When Odom was fired on November 30th, Missouri took just eight days to find its new coach. And yet, Eliah Drinkwitz found himself with only 10 days (eight by the time the hire was officially announced) to salvage what he could of the 2020 recruiting class.
The day Odom was fired, Missouri had 17 commitments. Over the last two-and-a-half weeks, Robert Wooten, Jalen St. John, Jalen Logan-Redding and Cooper Davis opened up the recruiting process and went elsewhere. Ray Curry took an official visit to Arkansas and signed with the Razorbacks Wednesday morning. Dominique Johnson pulled a signing day shocker (to the public, although not to the Missouri coaches) and signed with the Hogs as well.
That meant in the early signing period Missouri inked just 10 players (Kevon Billingsley remains publicly committed to Missouri but did not sign on Wednesday). There are two days left and Drinkwitz could have something up his sleeve. But the early signing period has become THE signing period and now the new coach is going to be left filling at least a third of his class in the supplementary February period.
That’s not his fault. It would be unreasonable to ask him to do much more than hang on to as many guys as he could that were already committed with eight days in which to do it, while also asking him to do every radio show under the sun and hire a staff. Very few coaches could do it. Even the coach understood the reality of the situation he faced.
"It’s nearly impossible to try to add somebody unless you have a previous connection," he said on Wednesday.
The only way anyone would sign more is if he was coming from a program whose commit list he could raid to supplement what was already on hand. Appalachian State is a very good program, but the truth is its commitment list wasn’t stocked with guys that look like early impact SEC football players.
The Mountaineers list 17 commitments. They have nearly as many unrated players (4) as three-star players (5) and none with four or more. That doesn’t mean they can’t be very good college football players. But only about half of them list at least one Power Five offer and outside of a couple random (questionable?) Tennessee offer claims, the best of those are from the likes of Duke, Georgia Tech and Rutgers. In other words, there weren’t a bunch of ready-made players Drinkwitz could ask to follow him. And Drinkwitz didn't ask.
"I appreciated my time at App and did not want to do anything that I didn’t think would be in the best interest of both of us," he said.
Again, this isn’t Drinkwitz’s fault. I’m not blaming him that this signing day was more notable for the guys Missouri didn’t get than the ones it did. He did a nice job hanging on to Elijah Young and JJ Hester. His first season at Missouri will be more about what he can do with the talent already on the roster than what he will bring it.
But this is what you sign up for when you make a coaching change in today’s college football. It’s all well and good to say that players should commit to a school and not a coach. But almost none of them do. They signed up to play for Odom and when you fired Odom, you said you were good if the class fell apart. If Missouri wasn’t prepared for this, someone should have explained how recruiting works to the administration.
To be fair, this class was rated in the 50s even if Drinkwitz had held on to everyone (it slipped to 71 as of Wednesday afternoon). They aren’t losing a bunch of five-star, can’t-miss prospects. The last three classes that Odom had ranked 34, 39 and 49. With a strong February, Drinkwitz might still be able to get this class to that range.
"Without casting too many rocks at our current roster, we’re probably not going to know exactly what we need until after we get through spring football," Drinkwitz said. "But there is going to be some depth situations at the wide receiver position, potentially the offensive line position and then we’ve got unproven people at safety. I think we’re going to be fine, but we’ve got to see those guys. You know, they haven’t played yet.”
Regardless of what happens in the late period, this is almost certain to be the fifth consecutive year that Missouri fails to crack the top 30 in rivals.com's class rankings. It’s not a death sentence, but when you’re lining up seven weekends a year trying to beat teams that everyone thinks has better players than you do, it’s awfully tough. It can happen, but it’s tough.
Drinkwitz won’t be judged on this class. He’ll be judged on whether he can get this year’s team to come closer to fulfilling its potential than Odom was able to do the last two seasons. He’ll be judged on the classes going forward. New coaches get at least a two or a three year honeymoon period where they get credit for the positives and the old guy gets blamed for the negative. Thus, he gets credit for keeping the ones he did and Odom and the Mizzou administration get blamed for the ones who left.
The issue is this: Missouri already faces significant hurdles in the SEC. It has less support than most programs in the conference financially. It has a worse geographic recruiting territory than most programs in the conference. It has less history of success than quite a few programs in the conference. And now it has something of a lost recruiting class because it had to change coaches eight days before the most important non-game day of the year.
Best of luck, coach. Wednesday was a mulligan, but now it’s time to earn that $4 million price tag. The challenge is significant.