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Short of perhaps the first game day of the season, the most anticipated day on the 2021 college football calendar has arrived.
Tuesday marked the start of June and the end of the NCAA’s moratorium on in-person recruiting contact that has spanned more than 14 months, since the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the sports world in March of 2020. Over the next four weeks, prospects will once again be able to take official visits to schools, interact with coaches while on campuses and showcase their skills at camps or individual workouts.
It will make for a welcome change for both recruits and coaches after a year of Zoom conversations and virtual visits. But with another dead period looming June 28-July 24, it’s going to be a hectic month. Missouri already has plans to host a group of top-priority prospects for an unofficial visit on June 2, host more official visitors during all four weekends in June and put on seven camps on campus — all with other unofficial visits and individual workouts sprinkled in between.
“It’s going to be crazy,” said recruiting coordinator and tight ends coach Casey Woods.
Woods believes the Missouri staff did an admirable job adapting to all-virtual recruiting, but he said during a phone interview last week that he’s excited for June to arrive for a pair of reasons. When in-person contact was banned, it became difficult for coaches to accurately evaluate prospects and form genuine relationships with them.
Woods called in-person evaluation as “the number one thing you missed” while recruiting from a distance. He noted that college staffs depended on high school coaches for accurate heights, weights, wingspans and other measurables — far from a given. Out of necessity, he’s developed the ability to estimate a prospect’s height based on a picture of the player standing next to a cinder block wall. When the first members of the 2021 class arrived on campus in January, Woods said the staff was a bit surprised by the size of one or two players.
“Things look different in person, sometimes, from an evaluation standpoint, and I think we’ve missed some critical elements in being able to do that,” he said. “... I remember the mid-year enrollees, and we had some of those guys, they’re walking in here and you’re like, oh, gosh dang, he’s taller than we thought he was. Man, he looks really good. So there’s been some of that.”
Likewise, Woods said the ability to watch live as prospects play or participate in drills provides a more revealing glimpse of that player’s skillset than watching film from a game or camp. In order to help college coaches make up for so much missed evaluation time, the NCAA is allowing staffs to work out prospects one-on-one this month, which had been prohibited in the past. These in-person evaluations come with regulations — for instance, two prospects can’t work out at the same time, which means no quarterbacks throwing to wide receivers or defensive backs covering a pass-catcher — but Woods is excited about the ability to put prospects through drills. He hopes that becomes a permanent part of the recruiting process.
“We can kind of control what we see,” he said. “Sometimes when you’re in like a spring evaluation period or something, you go watch them play and you can certainly see some of the things that you need to see, but this allows us to have control over specifically what it is that we’re looking for, and it gives us a lot more opportunities. I think the limitations and restrictions that they put on camp a couple years ago before the pandemic were necessary and important, but if we were trying to operate off those same rules this summer and be able to evaluate this entire class and evaluate what’s coming up behind them, there would be no way.”
The other, obvious aspect that has been missing from recruiting over the past 14-plus months is the ability for coaches to cultivate relationships not through Zoom meetings or phone calls but face-to-face conversation. The ability to do so will be especially welcome for a Missouri staff that had only about three months from the time second-year head coach Eli Drinkwitz was hired to the implementation of the dead period. It’s not just the players who the coaching staff has, generally, yet to meet in real life, but their parents, guardians and high school coaches.
Plus, Woods said virtual recruiting made it more difficult to tell which targets were seriously interested in the Tigers. While the coming month will be hectic, it should also be revealing. One byproduct of squeezing nearly a full recruiting cycle’s worth of visits into four weeks is it doesn’t allow prospects to visit schools just for the sake of visiting, or college coaches to waste time or resources hosting a player they’re not interested in adding to the roster.
Missouri is currently scheduled to host a dozen official visitors this month. By the end of it, Woods believes staff will have a much better sense of where it stands with each of its top targets.
“I think that will be the most critical element of this, actually sorting through what’s real and what’s not in recruiting, who really likes you and who really doesn’t,” Woods said. “... But I do think what it does is it gives you a real picture of those guys that are interested.”
The first and biggest opportunity for the Missouri staff to make a splash during June will come Wednesday, when the team will host its annual “Night at the Zou.” In his first year hosting the event, Drinkwitz has added his own spin. In the past, Night at the Zou revolved around a camp, but this year it will be an invite-only unofficial visit opportunity for the team’s eight current commits and the top remaining players on the staff’s board. A list of players we expect to attend the event can be found here. Woods said it was important to the staff to try to get its top targets on campus early in the month, before visit fatigue sets in.
The staff’s vision for the day, which will include a dinner at Drinkwitz’s seven-bedroom home, is to start building a sense of community among the Tigers’ top targets, selling them not just on playing for Missouri but playing with one another. If all goes according to plan, Woods hopes fans will be able to one day look back at not just this month, but Wednesday in particular, as pivotal in building a roster that can contend to win the SEC East.
“I think that this is one of those days, one of those nights and one of those events that you can look back on a few years from now and say, man, that was a time that really made a difference,” Woods said. “... I think maybe we’ll all look back and say, boy, that was really something special.”
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