Increased roster attrition helps explain Mizzou football’s two-year slide

Forget schemes and coaching staffs for a moment and focus on one overriding truth about college football — players dictate success.

The three teams who have appeared in Rivals’ top-10 football rankings each of the last five seasons — Alabama (9-0), Ohio State (8-1) and Auburn (7-2) — are a combined 24-3 and ranked in the top nine of the latest College Football Playoff rankings.

Only two of the 15 teams who have appeared in the top 10 multiple times since 2012 are below .500 — Mississippi (4-5) and UCLA (3-6) — and overall those teams boast a .704 win percentage in 2016.

Missouri hasn’t put together a top-30 recruiting class during that time frame, but the Tigers overcame that with excellent player development under former coach Gary Pinkel.

A crack in that foundation developed with the 2012-14 classes, which should form the backbone and dominate the depth chart this season, but instead left the Tigers vulnerable in recent seasons.

Among the 64 players Mizzou signed in those three classes — players who would be juniors, seniors and redshirt seniors — 26 were dismissed, transferred or retired.

“Every year, you’re going to have some attrition and you factor that into your recruiting, but hopefully it’s not 10 or 12 or 15 kids in a two-year span,” said Tigers running backs coach Cornell Ford, who is the program’s primary St. Louis recruiter. “That really hurts you.”

The recent 40 percent rate of attrition has created massive voids up and down the depth chart and helps explain why the team’s performance has fallen off during the last two seasons.

Eleven of the 19 players Mizzou signed in 2012 — including quarterback Maty Mauk and wide receivers Dorial Green-Beckham and Levi Copelin — failed to complete their eligibility.

The Tigers also lost eight of 19 recruits in 2013, most notably defensive end Marcus Loud and three offensive linemen. And already seven of 26 signees from the 2014 class are gone.

“If those kids were to be in the program four or five years, they understand the system and can add to the depth,” Ford said. “They have a chance to develop and you could keep things going, whereas now you’ve got to fill in with a freshman or a junior college player. Those players frequently take a year to learn the system before becoming productive.”

Among the roster casualties, Mizzou has lost six offensive linemen and six defensive linemen. Those losses are particularly acute in the line-of-scrimmage dominated Southeastern Conference.

“It impacts the team a lot,” said wide receivers coach Andy Hill, who is MU’s primary recruiter in Kansas City. “More than anything else, the attrition at O-line and D-line makes it really thin. That’s where you see the biggest impact from my point of view.”

Hill said medical retirements are a crapshoot and impossible to forecast, but other misses, whether it was a flub in character or talent evaluation, come with a hidden cost.

“We recruited a guy,” Hill said. “Well, then if he quits, the guy we didn’t get (in recruiting) because of him could be here developing and become a great player or whatever by year three. It’s kind of a catch-22.”

Dismissals claimed 11 recruits from those three classes, including defensive tackle Harold Brantley and defensive end Walter Brady on the eve of Barry Odom’s first camp in August.

Five other players retired and 10 transferred with the split skewing toward the offense, which lost 16 recruits.

“I think it took a toll, but (our struggles) aren’t solely because of the guys that left,” senior cornerback John Gibson said. “It’s a mix of everything. That, all the adversity that we’ve had, like with the protest last year and coaching changes, just a little bit of everything.”

Gibson is one of five remaining players from the 2012 class, which also includes injured senior linebacker Michael Scherer.

It’s an issue Odom is aware of and trying to address by sprinkling captains throughout the depth on a rotating weekly basis and increased leadership training for the incoming freshmen.

The hope is that it will help staunch the bleeding from future signing classes.

Odom also recommitted to recruiting Texas, making it the second-biggest priority behind in-state players for Mizzou once again.

“When Mizzou was having great success, it had a lot of guys from that state on the roster, and we’ll get back there,” Odom said.

That doesn’t mean the Tigers will ignore Georgia, Tennessee and Florida — states that have opened up since the SEC move — but the focus will return to Texas with an added emphasis in Chicago, where Mizzou has a strong alumni base and there’s another rich talent pool.

This story was originally published November 9, 2016 at 6:38 PM with the headline "Increased roster attrition helps explain Mizzou football’s two-year slide."