It’s not just coaches who are selling high-profile recruits to sign with Mizzou
Evan Mack darts through the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity house, passing a table of fast food remnants and calling for a pair of his most artistic brothers. He walks out the front door with Andrew Sacharin and Hayden Stark: two painters ready to show the University of Missouri campus their finished product.
Wearing an AEPi shirt and backwards hat, Mack climbs a ladder to the top of his two-story home. He carries a bed sheet onto the slippery roof, then turns around to help Sacharin up the ladder. “Please be careful,” a fraternity brother says walking into the house.
With Stark directing from the front yard, Mack and Sacharin drape the bed sheet across the building’s long facade. They use bricks to keep the wind from blowing it away, then release the cloth edges to let their banner fly.
It carries a brief message — a request, a plea, a hope.
“Kelly to the Zou.”
Former Clemson quarterback Kelly Bryant visited Missouri last weekend, spurring similar banners from fraternities across campus. Bryant helped Clemson to the College Football Playoff in 2017 and went 16-2 as a starter. He played four games with the Tigers this season before freshman Trevor Lawrence useated him as first-string quarterback.
Bryant will be immediately eligible next season because of a new NCAA rule that allows players to redshirt for a season if they play four or fewer games. He visited Louisville and Arkansas before arriving Friday in Columbia.
“When the news came out that Kelly was coming on an official visit — I don’t know who the first one was, if it was me or another kid — but we were like, ‘Yo, we’ve got to get on this. We need a Kelly Bryant banner,’” said Mack, who works as a student assistant on Missouri’s football team under special teams coordinator Andy Hill.
His house wasn’t alone.
Eight fraternities hung bedsheets in Greek Town or on College Avenue before Saturday’s game against Kentucky. Delta Sigma Phi’s banner featured a well-drawn painting of Bryant in a MU jersey, and Beta Theta Pi’s read, “Choose the right Tigers,” under a crossed-out Clemson logo.
In the past two years, fraternities have joined Missouri’s recruiting effort for multiple top-level players. Houses made banners when blue-chip basketball recruits Michael Porter Jr. and Kevin Knox visited Columbia in April 2017, as well as when EJ Liddell and Mario McKinney toured campus last month. A week ago, fraternity buildings and apartment balconies held signs for Josh Christopher, a five-star basketball recruit in the high school class of 2020.
Is the budding tradition excessive? Possibly. Does it stand out to recruits? Absolutely. Christopher tweeted that signs for him were “super dope,” and Porter and Knox took pictures with AEPi brothers in front of their banner.
The Bryant bedsheets mark the first banners for a football recruit in recent years. With Missouri set to lose All-SEC quarterback Drew Lock to graduation, the displaced Clemson passer would become a prominent face the moment he stepped on campus.
Mack realized that, so he and a cluster of fraternities took it upon themselves to make Bryant feel welcome.
“I think it just builds up the whole culture of Mizzou, the SEC and football in general,” Mack said. “When you walk around campus and you see stuff that’s supporting your team, it helps hype everyone up.”
As Mack and Sacharin finish lowering the Bryant banner Friday, a crowd gathers on the lawn. The AEPi brothers snap pictures to tweet at Bryant, commenting on the clean lettering and well-traced Missouri logo.
“After this, if he doesn’t come to Mizzou...” one onlooker says.
Missouri’s coaches were set to begin a weekend-long recruiting pitch. The fraternities had already made theirs.