Historically, why does Arkansas fails to recruit Missouri in football?
Noticed the top 10 Missouri football recruits recently signed with the following schools:
OU: 2
UT (EOE-A): 2
OSU (Ohio): 2
Iowa: 1
Clemson: 1
USC: 1
Mizzou: 1
I noticed top teams like OSU, UT, Clemson, USC, etc… recruit Missouri with success while we don’t. And those teams, distance wise, are much further away than the UA.
Why does Arkansas fail to recruit Missouri like others? Does CCM have any coaches assigned to Missouri?
When a program loses to pitiful Mizzou 3 out of 4 times I would not want to go there if I was a big time recruit from the show me state. Losing to these bums so often was more pathetic than Bielema losing to A&M every year.
Hopefully Chad can reverse this embarassing trend.
I’ve wondered that for years. There are a lot of Missouri kids closer to UofA than to Mizzou. I don’t think Springfield puts out to many SEC players (don’t know why they don’t have a few, good sized town) but still. From your numbers it is clear there is some talent. We have to be closer than all those schools other than Missouri and maybe Iowa depending on where in the state the kids are.
10 isn’t huge for the population the size of Missouri, agree with you there, but it is still 10 kids that we are closer too than most schools they went to.
Missouri is a very different state than the other states in the SEC. Soccer is huge in St. Louis and KC. A lot of good athletes playing high school futbol in the Fall. Probably the only state in the SEC that does not have Spring football at the high school level. I didn’t hear much about 7v7 tournaments in the summer when I lived there. The interest isn’t there, the passion isn’t there. The St. Louis city public schools have many of the same issues the LRSD has and are not turning out a lot of D-1 players.
Overall they have similar issues in HS football as Arkansas. With twice the population as Arkansas they have 30% lower African American population. This is a good resource to compare state demographics: https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/united … s.missouri
In years gone by, Kansas City Rockhurst has been fertile ground for recruiting. East St. Louis, which is technically in Illinois, also has had players. Not sure about the rest of the state.
I visited with Barry Switzer once about Missouri recruiting. He told me that it’s worth hitting for the top four or five players to see if there is any mutual interest, but nothing beyond that. Better to work hard in Texas. Oklahoma and Arkansas would both find one now and then there who wanted to leave the state. I remember talking to him about Arkansas landing Gary Anderson from Missouri. He said, “What’s the connection?” I didn’t know that there was one. Sure enough, he had relatives in Arkansas.
There have been some good players at Arkansas from Missouri. Obviously, there was a connection with the Bequettes with George. There was no connection with Mark Smith. He just thought it was close (to Webb City).
Steve Little wasn’t from Missouri, but he played high school football in Overland Park, just outside Kansas City.
I’ve long thought it was surprising to see so few football players here from the Kansas City area. There are some good programs there and it’s about three hours to Fayetteville. Several Kansas City-area high school teams come down here to play football games each fall, so they know about the area.
According to Kansas City Star, there were 25 FBS signees in the Kansas City metro area this year, including 20 with FBS programs. Many of those were with Kansas, Kansas State and Missouri, but there also were signees with Clemson, Michigan and Texas.
Arkansas’ baseball program has done a great job recruiting Kansas City, which is near where Dave Van Horn was raised. Four players, including Isaiah Campbell, on this year’s roster are from the area and there are three Kansas City-area signees in the class of 2018.
Of the current Missouri products on the Arkansas roster, Brian Wallace, Hayden Johnson and Armon Watts - all had Missouri offers while Shane Clenin did not.
Arkansas did not the four current in-state players on the Missouri roster - Damarea Crockett Taylor Powell, Barrett Bannister and Akial Bowers.