Big 12 North has as many 5 Star signees as South

[MizzouAustinite]

and in the North they are spread out among three schools - Colorado, Mizzou, and Nebraska. In the Big 12 South, Oklahoma stockpiled all three 5 star recruits in that division so far. This is of course per the Rivals ranking system, which we all know is not always the best way of predicting college performance and is a prestige thing more than anything else.

At any rate, it's very interesting. I guess as an MU fan I'm sort of happy to see the North continuing to get stronger although I'd rather Mizzou be the one stockpiling. Blaine Gabbert with a year tutoring under Chase Daniel is a phenomenal situation for us though.

 

[l00p]

Let's hope so. It's about time you folks up in the north started pulling your weight. The South has been carrying you bigtime while you poach money from bowl games, big bowl games.

The Mizzou and Kansas stories were fun to follow and watch. So happy for y'all, really. The entire conference gains by the North doing well, finally. I hope it is sustained.

 

[MizzouAustinite]

Thanks. There's no question Mizzou more than any other North program has been guilty of being the sleeping giant who did not pull its weight - its the lone North school with multiple truely sizeable metropolitan areas (St.Louis and Kansas City) with no other D-1 schools in the state and for that reason it is to me the only North school where you can truly build a top quality Big 12 program solely by keeping all of the best in-state kids at home. Of course, anyone of you who've been to either of Missouri's largest cities realize its not that simple as they are both border cities whose suburbs bleed over the state lines heavily on either side, and neither city holds nearly the sense of beiing 'part of a state' or state pride that Texas cities do. If anything our state is much more like New Jersey as far as having most of the populuation smushed along different borders, except that unlike New York and Philly's borders with New Jersey, for us the main city is actually within our state line albeit just barely. But that's always been the difficulty for us, kids in those cities are just as apt to feel loyalty or closeness to the the KUs, Illinois, Kansas States, Nebraskas etc as they are to Mizzou. The only way to get their attention is by winning which we finally started doing, and it seems to be paying dividends.

I guess the closest parallel for UT is the Dallas-Fort Worth area where OU takes a lot of kids because its close to the state line and Norman is roughly as far away as Austin. But the Missouri border city situation has traditionally been even more difficult to cultivate loyalty or state pride with - it'd be like trying to get kids in Texarkana to identify solely with Texas and not with Arkansas.

 

[Mr. Orange]

Its nice to see improvement in the north, but the real sign of success in recruiting is in having quality throughout the class and not in a couple of players. While I don't really place a tremendous amount of faith in Rivals, since thats what the original poster used, I'll use the same numbers. And by using the rivals numbers, you can see that the South still leads rather comfortably in recruiting.
Rank (followed by average player rating)
South:
5 OU 3.81
14 Texas 3.55
16 A&M 3.16
27. OSU 3.04
42 Tech 3.07
51 Baylor 2.48

North:
15 Colo 3.3
26 Mizzou 3.0
28 KSU 2.91
30 Nebraska 3.0
40 Kansas 3.1
63 ISU 2.35