The keys to Mizzou's in-state recruiting success

When De Smet defensive tackle Mekhi Wingo called his head coach, Robert Steeples, and told Steeples he wanted to commit to Missouri, Steeples tried to pump the brakes a bit. It wasn’t that Steeples, himself a former Missouri football player, had anything against the school, but Wingo’s decision seemingly came out of nowhere. A few months prior, he planned to play his college ball out of the state, and as recently as a few days before, he had scheduled visits to other schools for the upcoming weekends.

So Steeples told Wingo, who was about to drive from Columbia back to his St. Louis home, to sleep on it before finalizing his decision. Wingo contacted Steeples again a few hours later. He said he had slept on it — he napped during the car ride — and he was sure of his decision. The following day, he tweeted his commitment to the Tigers, becoming the team’s first pledge in the 2021 class and the first player who hadn’t previously committed to Missouri under Barry Odom to commit to new head coach Eliah Drinkwitz.

Wingo’s surprising decision started a trend. Seven of the 16 players who have committed to Missouri’s impressive 2021 recruiting class come from either within the state or just across the border in East St. Louis. Already, that’s the most in-state players in one recruiting class since 2015. Four of those prospects hail from the St. Louis area, which has been a source of both plentiful talent and consternation for Missouri on the recruiting trail in recent years. Another high-priority target from the area remains uncommitted in East St. Louis wideout Dominic Lovett, and if the Tigers are able to land the four-star prospect and hang on to their other four area commitments, it would mark the most St. Louis signees in a class since 2015.

Every Missouri staff says it wants to make the state as a whole and St. Louis in particular priorities on the recruiting trail, and in that regard, Drinkwitz and his regime have been no different. But it’s been a while since the Tigers enjoyed this much success recruiting their own backyard, so PowerMizzou talked to coaches from three of the top talent-producing schools in the area to find out the secrets to the new staff’s success.

Within days of Drinkwitz adding running backs coach Curtis Luper to his coaching staff, Trinity Catholic coach John Randle received a phone call from Luper. Both natives of the Dallas area, the pair hit it off. In the seven months since, rarely have multiple days gone by without Randle hearing from Luper.

Steeples has had a similar experience. Whether it’s been Drinkwitz, Luper — a veteran recruiter who has headed up the staff’s efforts in St. Louis — or another member of the staff, he said the frequency of Missouri’s contact has stood out compared to other coaching staffs.

“We’ve had coaches before say the borders are valuable, but their actions in their recruiting efforts don’t match that,” Steeples said. “Coaches are in constant contact with me, whether it’s Drinkwitz or even the defensive coordinator, coach (Ryan) Walters, they’re constantly in contact about young men. You’ve only got 24 hours in a day and they spend a lot of those hours dedicated to in-state talent.”

Carl Reed, the head coach at Lutheran North, which produced four-star defensive end commit Travion Ford, said that to him, the amount of contact from the Missouri staff hasn’t differed much from the Odom regime, but Drinkwitz and his staff have done a better job relating to players and selling their vision. By embracing things like commitment videos and graphics for players’ social media accounts, Drinkwitz has created a buzz around the program that wasn’t present in past years.

“He’s embraced the things that are important to kids now, the social media, the edits, the videos, all of the branding stuff that he’s doing,” Reed said. “That’s what’s important to kids today. Whether you think it should be or shouldn’t be, that’s what it is, and he’s been able to make a lot of headway with that.”

Even if the staff has spent more time in contact with in-state schools, that hasn’t meant it has extended more in-state offers. So far in the 2021 class, Missouri has offered 14 players from the state of Missouri and nine from the St. Louis area. During the 2020 cycle, Odom’s staff offered 20 in-state kids, with a whopping 15 from St. Louis. Those numbers were 16 and 12, respectively, in 2019.

Both Reed and Randle said the new staff has seemingly recognized the importance of not extending offers to local players it wouldn’t allow to commit, which is a sure way to sour relationships. But more than that, Randle said the staff has done a good job of making sure players are legitimately interested in Missouri before offering. Trinity safety Tyler Hibbler, who committed to Missouri on June 23, was a prime example.

“Tyler Hibbler, his father went to Mizzou,” Randle said. “So of course growing up he heard about Mizzou, he’s born and bred, Mizzou in his blood. So that’s where he wanted to go. So you’re aiming at kids that can play in the SEC that want to go to their school.”

With each in-state player that commits to the program, recruiting gets easier for the Missouri staff. Momentum is real in recruiting, and especially in a close-knit community like St. Louis, where a lot of the top athletes have played alongside or against one other since little league, committed players can be the best salesmen for a program.

Coaches pointed to Wingo and East St. Louis quarterback Tyler Macon as the most vocal recruiters of their peers. Steeples said that the gregarious Wingo was the perfect player to get committed early in the recruiting cycle because he’s friends with seemingly every player in the city. Steeples jokingly called Wingo “the Stephen A. Smith of De Smet” because he rarely stops talking. He certainly played a part in his teammate, running back Taj Butts, committing to the Tigers. Randle said that Hibbler and Macon played on the same youth football team, as did a few other commits in the class, and once Macon committed to Missouri, he constantly bugged Hibbler about following suit.

That momentum could carry over to future classes, too. Reed said that both of Lutheran North’s class of 2022 prospects who have Missouri offers, Toriano Pride and Ali Wells, have heard from the current commits and the Tigers are in a good spot with both.

“They’re getting kids around this area that’s familiar with each other, and they’re talking to each other, ‘Well, I’ve been offered by such and such,’ ‘I‘ve been offered by such and such,’ ‘well, we’ve both been offered by Mizzou,’” Randle said. “So they’re saying to each other, let’s take this thing home and stay at home and make home great.”

While the new Missouri staff’s in-state recruiting efforts have been impressive so far, it’s worth noting that sparking excitement is generally easier than sustaining success. Drinkwitz hasn’t been at the school long enough yet to lose games his team was supposed to win, or to wait too long to offer a local player, or to see a Missouri native become disgruntled with his role and transfer out. Once the games start, Steeples said, his ability to relate to high school prospects will take a back seat to how he treats the players in his locker room.

“The next tier is going to be, you’ve got in-state talent at the home school, now you gotta do right by them and take care of them and make sure you develop them to where they contribute on the field,” Steeples said. “Missouri loves to tell the horror stories of guys that stayed in state and Mizzou overlooked them for an out-of-state player, or they wanted to start a pipeline elsewhere so they didn’t place value on a young man.”

Reed had a simpler suggestion for how to keep the in-state recruiting rolling.

“You gotta win,” he said. “Winning is the only thing that matters in this business. It’s a real bottom-line profession. If you win, everything is going to go well and you’ll be able to come in there and get it done, and if you don’t, people will be jumping off the boat and off the bridge. So if they follow this up with having a successful season and winning, things will only get better for them from here.”