Mizzou's recruiting is noticeably improving during our run of on the field success in terms of player's high school rankings from recruiting services. The heir apparent to Chase Daniel, for example, is Blaine Gabbert, a quarterback from St.Louis who was a five star prospect per Rivals, was ranked among the top 15 overall players nationally and was the ranked as the second best QB in the nation in his high school class. The heir apparent to our star tight end Chase Coffman is Andrew Jones, a four star prospect from Kansas City who along with Gabbert played in the Army All-Star game in San Antonio and recieved offers from schools like Oklahoma. For the 2009 class, Mizzou has signed a five star defensive lineman/tight end from St.Louis named Sheldon Richardson who is a top 30 recruit on Rivals. We are set to receive an official visit from the nation's top running back, Bryce Brown of Wichita, as well as Jheranie Boyd from North Carolina who is a five star wide receiver. And it is basically a race between Mizzou and Illinois for St.Louis five star running back Ronnie Wingo. All told, Mizzou is definitely signing and recruiting much higher ranked players than they had previously. What that means for our future, I don't know. Because frankly we've built our success by finding less heralded guys like Chase Daniel and Sean Weatherspoon who were from Texas but flew under the radar of UT and OU. That's the culture of our program right now is having all those hard working guys with a chip on their shoulder and something to prove (Jeremy Maclin is an exception to this, he was a heralded four star stud who originally signed with Oklahoma). So it will be interesting to see what Mizzou does with a roster that has more Texas and OU style heralded talent on it. But either way I think Mizzou's future is fine. We have the best recruiting base of any North school because Missouri is the only state up there with two big cities to draw from in St.Louis and Kansas City, and if we continue to find those talented under the radar kids from Texas as well, I think MU can remain a force after the Chase Daniel era is over.
Now in the short term, next year will probably be a transition year and a struggle, because even though Gabbert our new five star QB will be talented, he will still be learning the system and does not have as natural a grasp of the spread as Daniel does - but then again neither does anyone else in the nation.
