In six days, Eli Drinkwitz will sign the foundation of his second full recruiting class at Missouri. Drinkwitz and his assistant coaches will get the credit for bringing a group that will likely end up as the highest-ranked class in school history, edging out last year’s haul by a few spots in the national rankings.
But by the time the faxes — or emails or screenshots — roll in, more than 40 people will have been directly involved in the process that brought each of those prospects to Mizzou, with dozens more having played some tangential role. When coaches call recruiting a team effort, they are absolutely serious. You’ve just never heard of most members of the team.
At Missouri, that team is headed up by Brett Whiteside, brought to Missouri by Drinkwitz as the Chief Recruiting Officer in February after eight years at Auburn. You’ve probably never heard of Whiteside either. He’s fine with that.
“Our success in recruiting has nothing to do with me or any of the off the field staff,” Whiteside said. “We’re here to support our coaching staff. Coach Drinkwitz does a phenomenal job as a head coach, active in recruiting, expects our coaches to be active in recruiting, and they all are, and just do a good job of building relationships.”
But the truth is, this recruiting class — any recruiting class — never happens without Whiteside. While he is not one of the Missouri staffers designated as a recruiter by the NCAA, the recruiters have been relying on him every day for the last 10 months. When fans hear the title Chief Recruiting Officer, they likely believe Whiteside is Missouri’s lead recruiter. That’s not it.
“Not at all,” Whiteside says with a laugh. “A lot of what we do is logistical, operational, administrative in nature.
“It’s just our role to make sure that we’re efficient, that we’re getting from point A to point B and just to put our coaches in a position and let them go do what they do best.”
The biggest weekend on Mizzou’s recruiting calendar begins in less than 36 hours. The Tigers will host somewhere between 15 and 20 official visitors on the final weekend prospects can visit campuses before the early signing period opens on Wednesday. Whiteside and a full-time staff of seven others began working on this weekend in the summer. Asked how many hours have gone into the planning of a weekend that will last just 48 hours, he can’t really provide an answer.
“We knew, and everybody in the country’s doing the same thing, December 10th through the 12th. That’s when we want everybody here,” Whiteside said. “We’ve done things earlier in the year to see would this work on December 10th through the 12th? Everything kind of gears up to this last weekend, and hopefully it will pay off.”
The visitors will start arriving around 4 p.m. Friday. About half of them are within driving distance. The rest will be flying into either Columbia, Kansas City or St. Louis. Most will bring along family members. Schools are allowed to provide round-trip transportation on official visits, which means Whiteside has arranged for drivers to pick the players up from their homes and take them to the airport. Once flights land, staff members will be dispatched to different airports to pick up the players and their guests for the ride to campus. During the weekend, Mizzou will use two buses and multiple SUVs to take players and their family members to the various planned activities on and near campus.
But it doesn’t stop there. Players and their parents are provided dinner on Friday night, three meals on Saturday and breakfast and a to-go lunch on Sunday. On smaller weekends, that’s often done at a restaurant. For larger groups like this weekend, meals are catered.
“We try to embrace Columbia, places that they’ll be eating at when they’re here,” Whiteside said. “We have some caterers that we use that do a great job. I think that just comes down to working with vendors who love Mizzou football, love Mizzou, they want to see us succeed so they’re really willing to help us. They’ve known about this for as long as we have.”
Lodging is paid for by the school, which means Whiteside has reserved a block of approximately 50 hotel rooms in Columbia. When the visitors arrive at those rooms, there will be printed images of the player wearing Mizzou gear as well as baskets filled with their favorite snacks and drinks and other personal touches. That information has been gathered through questionnaires that the Tigers send to each player before his visit.
“We got a great group of people on our staff that are very thoughtful and very innovative on those things. We’re trying to make a great impression when they walk in the room," Whiteside said. "We try to make sure that it’s a wow factor when they walk in.
“When they come in, they expect to be treated as VIPs. We’re going to make sure that they have great meals while they’re here, great transportation. Everything is done first-class."
About half of Missouri’s visitors this weekend have already committed to the Tigers. The visit will simply be a welcome back, in most cases a formality, albeit one that has to be handled well. It’s the red carpet treatment that by this point may not be necessary, but has been earned by the players through the years they’ve put into honing their abilities on the football field. But for the other half of the group who haven’t yet made a decision, this is Missouri’s advertising pitch, a 48-hour whirlwind designed to convince the player and his family that this is the place they should spend the next three to five years of their lives before the NFL. They are the most important 48 hours in a process that has lasted months, if not years, between Mizzou and the player.
“Coach asked me the other day how many we can handle this weekend,” Whiteside said. “I said as many as you can get here. We’ll make it work. We’ve got a great staff and people that are all pulling that way. If you can get us 20 visitors this weekend, we’ll take 20 visitors. They’ll all have a great time and they’ll all sign with us. That’s what I told the coaches. I said if you bring them in this weekend, they’re gonna sign, so make sure you know that”
The official visits are the headline events in college recruiting, the 16-ounce steak in the center of the plate. But the recruiting process—and thus Whiteside’s job—has plenty of accompaniments to the main dish. Throughout the year, players take unofficial visits to campus, Missouri constantly communicates information both digitally and by mail, and coaches provide regular contact via phone, text message and social media. Drinkwitz and his 10 full-time assistants also hit the road to visit schools and, over the last two weeks, make off-campus visits to players they are trying to woo.
That means Whiteside is somewhat of a travel agent for the 11 Missouri staff members who are allowed on the road during the year. College coaches are nearing the end of a contact period that began on November 28th, two days after the Tigers finished the regular season with a 34-17 loss at Arkansas. The following morning, Mizzou held a 10:30 staff meeting at which Whiteside handed out a printed grid to each coach outlining who would be where and which players each would see over the next 12 days. It was a process that had started a couple of weeks prior, with each coach working out a time to visit with the prospects he was recruiting.
“Hey, this is the day we want to come, we’re going to bring Drink, we’re going to do it at this time,” Whiteside said. “Can you get off work, can we come see you at work, do we have to wait until six o’clock to come see you? Just kind of piecing all that information together.”
And, of course, like all travel plans, everything is subject to change. During the hour in which Whiteside was answering questions and walking through the recruiting process on Monday afternoon he got a call to book an airport hotel room for an assistant that was staying an extra night in Atlanta and a call from Drinkwitz to address some logistics. He was called into another staffer’s office to solve a problem with Microsoft Excel, which Whiteside called the most valuable class he took in college. The pieces of the puzzle are constantly moving and Whiteside is in charge of keeping it all straight while making sure that Missouri and its coaches are abiding by all the NCAA rules that surround recruiting.
Missouri’s athletic department uses Anthony Travel to take care of most of its trips for coaches. It employs a combination of commercial and private charter planes. The Tigers also have use of some private planes and even a helicopter from donors. Keeping track of it all is every bit of a full-time job, especially when the coaches themselves often don’t know where they’re spending the next night.
“Every day,” Whiteside said when asked how often coaches ask where they’re going next. “We make the full itinerary for them, this is what time you need to leave to go to the airport, this is what time your flight leaves, here’s your confirmation number. We’ve already checked you in, here’s your boarding pass. We do all that stuff. And it really is, ‘Where am I tomorrow and what am I doing?’”
Whiteside has the NCAA recruiting calendar pinned to the wall behind his desk. He spins to consult it multiple times during our conversation. He built a Google Maps program at the beginning of the season, dropping pins for all of Missouri’s commitments and top targets, using a different layer for each week to plan Drinkwitz’s recruiting travels during the year. Efficiency is key. If the head coach can see three or four players on one trip, all the better for Mizzou’s efforts. Especially during this time of year, the head coach is meeting with multiple players on most days. It’s all planned out months in advance to not only see as many players as possible, but to strategically line up when those meetings happen, to maximize Mizzou’s chances at ultimately landing each player.
“I don’t want to miss,” Whiteside said.
Whiteside’s efforts — and, he makes it clear multiple times, the efforts of many others inside Missouri’s new South End Zone facility that houses the football offices — all ultimately lead up to the signing period. That begins on Wednesday, December 15th and will run through Friday the 17th.
The Tigers expect their 15 current commitments to sign National Letters of Intent during that period, in addition to any players who might decide to commit after this weekend’s official visits. On Whiteside’s desk is a stack of Mizzou folders. Each has the name of a current commitment on it and contains the paperwork that player will sign and send back to Mizzou next week, binding the player and the school for at least the next year — and hopefully many more.
A big part of the visits over the last two weeks is going over that paperwork and the final steps in the process with each player and his family. Missouri will send those folders out officially to prospects in the coming days, making sure everything is in order for the letters to be signed next week. But even that doesn’t come without its share of trepidation.
“I have NLI paranoia,” Whiteside said. “I check those things multiple times.”
By the end of Friday, the bulk of Missouri’s 2022 recruiting class will finish the process. Celebratory graphics and videos will be shared on social media. Drinkwitz will talk about the class and receive national credit for bringing in a group unmatched in Mizzou history. And there will be an unseen team behind him, celebrating just as much in the background.
“I’ll let coach take the credit for all that; I’ll hold the camera,” Whiteside said. “I’ll be fist-pumping behind the camera.”
And then, it’s back to work. Hotel rooms have already been reserved for January visit weekends. Mizzou will hold a junior day next month for the top prospects in the Class of 2023. There’s another signing period in February and another evaluation period in April and May.
“We’re recruiting 365,” Whiteside said. “And wouldn’t have it any other way. That’s part of it.
“We love it. If we didn’t love it, we wouldn’t be doing it.”
Recruiting never stops and, so, neither does Whiteside.
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