8/21/2023 football Edit

Ten Thoughts for Monday Morning presented by Will Gar...

Gabe DeArmond • PowerMizzou

Publisher

Gabe has covered the Tigers for PowerMizzou.com since August of 2003 and been the site's publisher since 2006.

1) A week ago, there were no five-stars on Missouri's commit list. This week, there's one committed and one set to visit.

Missouri's recruiting tidal wave continued last Monday (has it seriously only been seven days?) with the commitment of Williams Nwaneri. Mizzou will not rest easy for another four months. You can bet other schools (particularly Georgia and Oklahoma) are not going to relax. Every time Nwaneri wears a red shirt, rumors will kick up. Is it possible he looks around? Sure, it always is. He didn't strike me as a kid who was particularly enamored with the recruiting process and he wasn't under any specific pressure to hurry up and reserve a spot at Mizzou if he wasn't ready, so I don't view the odds as high that he decommits, but of course it isn't out of the question. The two best things Mizzou can do now are to win games and put some more talent around him in the 2024 class.

On the hoops side, recent reclassification Jayden Quaintance will visit a month from today. There's been some chatter of this one for a few weeks now, but it seems Missouri has taken the next step in being the first school to schedule a visit. Quaintance was the No. 7 player in the Class of 2025 and he just turned 16 on July 11. I asked Rob Cassidy, our national basketball recruiting analyst, if he had a ballpark of where Quaintance will rank when figured into the 2024 class. He said for sure in the top ten and quite possibly in the top five. So that'd be a nice piece.

2) Mizzou still has a shot at a top 20-ish football class. The basketball class is potentially in the top 5 to 10 range. That got me wondering what the best year (on paper) was in Mizzou recruiting history. The easiest way to measure that is to add the football and basketball class rankings together. The problem with that is we haven't really kept track of team recruiting rankings in basketball the way we have in football.

Mizzou's highest ranked football classes have come with Eli Drinkwitz at the helm. But on the hoops side, the Tigers weren't doing anything special from 2021-23. When the basketball program landed a top five class in 2017, the football class was 48th.

On paper, Gary Pinkel's best class came in 2010 when the Tigers ranked 21st. The hoops class that year included Ricardo Ratliffe, the Pressey brothers and Tony Mitchell. The other year in consideration is 2008. Mike Anderson signed what would end up as the winningest recruiting class in school history with Keith Ramsey, Kim English, Laurence Bowers and Marcus Denmon. Pinkel landed the No. 25 class which had players like Jacquies Smith, Zaviar Gooden, Dan Hoch and Michael Egnew in addition to first-round picks Blaine Gabbert and Aldon Smith. In retrospect, I think you have to give the nod to 2008, even if 2010 probably would have ranked a little higher on paper.

3) But enough about the future, we're ten days from the start of the 2023 football season.

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