We talked about the safeties on Wednesday, so let’s stay in the defensive backfield and take a look at how I think the Missouri Tiger cornerback depth chart will look going into 2025.

Click here for the safeties position group analysis.

The Tigers played a three-man rotation this season and all of them are back, but I expect we’ll get a slightly larger rotation this season.

This year’s rotation was Dreyden Norwood, Toriano Pride and Nick Deloach, with Marcus Clarke, Shamar McNeil and Ja’Marion Wayne all appearing in five games or less.

Clarke’s eligibility ran out and the Tigers lost highly-rated freshman Jaren Sensabaugh to the transfer portal. Otherwise the entire group is back and the Tigers brought in Stephen Hall from Washington State and incoming freshman Mark Manfred.

Norwood had a rough time around the start of SEC play this season and I think it colored people’s opinion about him for the rest of the season.

I’m not a fan of just removing the best or worst parts of a player’s performance, but outside of the games against Texas A&M and Auburn, Norwood allowed 14 catches on 25 targets for just 192 yards and one touchdown. That’s a pretty great 11-game season.

Like I said, not a fan of doing that, he did perform pretty bad against A&M and Auburn - eight catches on 10 targets for 135 yards and a touchdown - but an 11-game resume seems more representative to me than a two-game one.

I’m expecting some continued development going into Norwood’s redshirt senior season.

Pride had a lot of Tiger fans excited as a portal addition going into the season and - after a pick-6 against Murray State - was a little bit of a letdown.

I think again, part of that is people allowing something to distort their view of his production. Unlike Norwood, it wasn’t about a couple of bad games, but I think Pride struggled when compared to Kris Abrams-Draine and Ennis Rakestraw.

Tiger fans were used to elite corner play, then had a big promise from a highly-rated portal addition and he was average or slightly below average, which then turned him into a terrible player in the mind of many fans.

He was fine, especially in zone coverage where he was the highest-graded Tiger corner according to PFF.

In 2022 when Pride was a regular in the Clemson secondary, he played almost entirely zone, so I think there was a combination of him being a bit overrated in the portal and a lack of experience playing the amount of man coverage that Mizzou’s defensive scheme required.

After a year of adjusting to the scheme, I expect Pride to develop more as a senior.

The redshirt freshman worked his way fully into the Tiger defensive rotation with a strong performance against Texas A&M, then stayed in the rotation the rest of the season, but didn’t play much against Mississippi State or Arkansas.

Out of the returners from this year, Deloach certainly has the most room for development as he enters his redshirt sophomore season. I expect him to enter the season as a full part of the rotation, though likely in the same third spot he was this year.

Hall is entering into a very different situation than what he left at Washington State.

He played 536 coverage snaps in 2024, no one on the Tigers played more than 316. Hall will play significantly less than he did at WSU, but that’s not to say he won’t be a full part of the rotation.

As a man-coverage defender, Hall was the highest-rated among the 2025 Tiger group in 2024, and he’s second behind Pride in zone coverage with by far the biggest sample size in both.

I don’t think Hall is the type of player you change your defense around, but he is one who should fit into what the Tigers already do nicely.

McNeil played in five games on defense, but never appeared on more than 10 snaps outside of the game against UMass.

He was a three-star recruit in the 2023 class.

I don’t have a ton to say about McNeil, I think the addition of Hall while the Tigers returned their entire regular rotation from this season isn’t a good sign for McNeil to move into the main group.

Kind of the same deal here. Wayne was a three-star prospect in the class of 2022 and played even less than McNeil this season, appearing in four games and playing 29 total snaps with 17 coming against UMass.

Otherwise, he played four snaps against Alabama, one against Oklahoma and seven against Iowa.

Again, I don’t think it’s a good sign for Wayne that the Tigers brought in help for the rotation when bringing back the entire rotation from this year.

Manfred is a three-star corner who we have ranked as the No. 70 corner in the country in this year’s class.

I expect Manfred to work in on special teams at best this season, with maybe a handful of snaps in blowouts against cupcakes.

Freshman safety Charles Bass might also play some corner this season, but the Tiger staff sees his future fully at safety from everything I’ve heard.

I think the Tigers will go to a four-man rotation this year, instead of the three-man grouping they used this season.

Having the entire main group return makes this one pretty easy.

Norwood and Pride will likely take the majority of the snaps against with Deloach and Hall as the rotational spots with a close-to-even total split in snaps.

I don’t see any reason why McNeil, Wayne or Manfred would work into the rotation at this point unless one of them has a very impressive spring and summer.

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