This is your annual reminder that I am absolutely insane and track fairly useless amounts of data on Missouri Football’s roster. And rather than be a weird collector of this information, I put it into an article once a year for you to look at, a fleeting moment to take a look at the makeup of this 2024 team. There’s a lot of excitement about what the on-field product can be, yes, but aren’t you more excited about Where they come, the track record and the blue-chip ratios? I know it’s me!

I have this in 2020, 2021, 2022and also 2023; you can click on any of these links to see what previous iterations looked like.

Let’s start with the breakdown of the team lineup. Here is the overview:

Let me break it down into four subcategories here:

Blue-chip ratio

According to Bud Elliott from “247”the blue chip ratio measures how well a single team recruits over a four-year period. Teams that are able to consistently land recruiting classes filled with 4- and 5-star kids can field a team with enough athleticism to compete for national championships. That doesn’t mean the team is good (think USC last year or Texas any year other than last), it just means their athletic potential is high enough to compete against elite teams. The cutoff is 50%, meaning at least 43 of a team’s 85 scholarship players are 4/5-star guys fresh out of high school.

When I ran this exercise in 2021, I pointed out that the 2020 squad had a 5% blue-chip rate and the 2021 version had a BCR of 11%. I joked that we should expect 24% for 2022 and 53% for 2023, since Drinkwitz had doubled the BCR in one year and could clearly continue to do so. ad infinitum.

Missouri’s BCR for 2022 was 21%, which is pretty close to 24%. But in 2023, the unstoppable “BCR line doubles” model stalled, and instead of staying at 50%, it’s just 27%. And now, in 2024, it’s up again (a good thing!), but not enough to break 50%, sitting at 31% for the year. Again, this is the best BCR Missouri has ever had, so that’s good. But it shows the importance of putting together multiple top-15 rosters, and the underrated 2023 recruiting class (which, mind you, included a whole lot of freshman contributors) couldn’t quite meet those lofty star goals, and the highly ranked 2024 class didn’t deliver enough to get past 31%.

Class balance

We’re entering our fourth year of having super senior/graduate students on the roster, and this year I’m classifying the players differently to get a better idea of ​​the true balance:

After four years of super-senior rosters getting bigger and bigger under the influence of COVID, it seems obvious that the best way to compete for the national championship is to a) have a lot more talent than everyone else (the 130-year standard, sure), b) have a lot of old, super-experienced guys in the starting lineup, or c) do both.

Think about TCU’s playoff run and how the majority of those guys were fifth or sixth year starters and benefited from a change in coaching and training regimen… and then they all graduated and TCU was brought back down to earth.

Likewise, the 2023 Washington Huskies had plenty of NFL talent, but they were older players who should have been working toward a second-year NFL contract instead of beating up some guy who wanted to be a store manager at Enterprise.

Or, on a more local level, think about how Javon Foster and Darius Robinson were fringe players in the NFL Draft who used their extra year to boost their draft value. Or even Xavier Delgado — who is always “better than other options, but not great” — used his sixth year to magically become a downright destroyer on the interior of the offensive line. It seems obvious to me that teams that have more older players on their two lines can pull off more wins than their younger counterparts. I don’t know if that’s just true for a sixth-year player or what will happen when all these super-senior-eligible guys are out, but it certainly holds true right now.

Anyway… Mizzou has 25 fourth- through sixth-year players and most of those guys are on both lines, quarterback, running back, receiver and linebacker. I’m taking that as a good sign until proven otherwise (and really wish we had more experience/old guys in the defensive secondary).

Stars and positions

Aside from specialists, every position group has at least one blue chipper in it. I haven’t researched this, but honestly, I don’t need to: Like every previous year under the Drinkwitz administration, this is the largest number of star talent a Missouri roster has had since the recruiting service era began. Going by stars, the most talented position groups are receivers (6 blue chippers, two of whom are 5-stars), followed by safeties (4) and edge rushers (4). Receivers and safety had the most recruited stars this time last year, and this year the interior defensive line (four blue chippers in 2023) has swapped with edge rushers (four in 2024). Will these be the top three position groups this year?

Which states do the Tigers draw their talent from?

This time last year, Missouri (26), Texas (11) and Florida (6) were the top three states with the most scholarship players for the Missouri football team. This year? Missouri’s lead has grown (29), Texas’ share has shrunk and is currently the fourth most populous state (7), while Florida, last year’s third-place team, has nearly doubled its number (11) and Georgia has climbed back into the top three (8). Of course, Missouri is bound to recruit more Missourians because, as you know, it’s in Missouri and the state has very liberal NIL laws that benefit Missouri high school athletes. But if you want to win in college football, you have to recruit the best players, and most of the time the best players reside in the southeastern United States.

Here is a visual representation of the areas Missouri has sourced talent from to build its 2024 roster:

The darker the area, the more players the team draws from that particular zip code. And as you can see, the dark areas continue to be the major metropolitan areas the Tigers should target: STL, DFW, ATL, plus a growing contribution from Houston and central Florida.

Overall, and this is no surprise to anyone, the roster is heavily weighted toward states within the SEC’s catchment area because, as we all know, the most talented high school football talent comes from the Southeastern United States. Plus, it’s much easier for a team based in Columbia, MO to travel to the Southeast than, say, the West Coast.

So what is the point of it all?

Honestly, this article is mostly intended to be a repository for my oddball data collection, but it’s also meant to give you a better sense of where the list currently stands and provide a benchmark to watch how it evolves over time.

I’ll admit, this is my favorite article every year. I’m not sure if you all get anything out of it, but I love the deep dive into how a roster is put together and where the players come from.

And after four years of recruiting, this roster is essentially 100% made up of guys that Drinkwitz recruited or acquired (Brady Cook, Mitchell Walters, Will Norris and Drake Heismeyer are the only ones left from Odom). I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this team has gotten better as more Drinkwitz players have added to the roster and established themselves in the rankings. Hopefully more good things will come from this, like last year.