This is your annual reminder that I am absolutely insane and keep track of fairly useless amounts of data about Missouri Football’s roster. And, instead of being a weird hoarder of this information, once a year I put it into an article for you to gaze upon, a fleeting moment to take a look at the makeup of this 2025 team. There’s lots of excitement about what the on-the-field product can be, yes, but aren’t you more excited about where they come from, the experience balance, and the blue-chip ratios?
I know I am!
I did this in 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 as well; you can click on any of those links to see what previous iterations looked like.
Let’s start with the roster breakdown. Here’s the overview:
Let me break it down into four subcategories here:
Blue-Chip Ratio
Per 247’s Bud Elliott, the blue-chip ratio tracks how well an individual team recruits over a four-year period. Teams who are able to consistently reel in recruiting classes of 4- and 5-star kids are able to field a team with enough athleticism to compete for national championships. It doesn’t mean the team is any good, mind you (think USC from last year, or Texas from any year other than last year), it just simply means their athletic ceiling is high enough that they could hold their own against elite teams. The cutoff point is 50%, meaning at least 43 of a team’s 85 scholarship players are 4/5-star guys coming out of high school.
When I did this exercise in 2021, I pointed out that the 2020 roster had a 5% blue-chip ratio and the ‘21 version had an 11% BCR. I joked that we should expect ‘22 to be at 24% and then ‘23 to be at 53% since Drinkwitz doubled the BCR in one year and clearly could continue doing so ad infinitum.
While that pattern did not hold, Mizzou’s BCR has steadily improved over the years, and despite losing several blue chippers in the portal, the Tigers’ BCR this year is 42%. Again, this is the best Missouri has ever been in BCR so that’s good. But it shows the importance of stacking multiple Top 15 rosters together as the undervalued 2023 recruiting class (that featured quite a bit of freshmen contributors, mind you) didn’t quite measure up to those lofty star goals, and the highly-ranked 2024 and 2025 classes are quite good, enough to get it up to 42%.
Class Balance
We’re heading into our fifth year of managing super senior/graduate students on the roster and, this year, I’m classifying players differently to get a better idea of the actual balance:
After five years of COVID-influenced super seniors proliferating rosters it seems apparent that the best way to make a run at a national championship is to a.) have way more talent than anyone else (the 130-year standard, obvi), b.) have a bunch of old, super experienced guys starting, or c.) both.
Think of TCU’s Playoff run, and how the majority of those guys were 5th- and 6th-year starters that benefited from a coaching and schematic change…and then they all graduated, and TCU came hurtling back down to earth.
Likewise, the 2023 Washington Huskies had a bunch of NFL talent but they were older guys who should have been working towards second year NFL contracts instead of smoking some dude who was going to become an Enterprise branch manager.
Or, on a more local level, think about how Javon Foster and Darius Robinson were fringe NFL Draft picks that used their extra year to boost their draft stock. Or even Xavier Delgado – the perpetually “better than other options but not great” – used his sixth year to magically become an outright masher on the interior of the offensive line. To me, it seems obvious that teams that feature more older guys across their two deep will be able to harvest more wins than their younger roster counterparts. I don’t know if that’s special only to a sixth-year player or what will hold once all these super senior-eligible dudes get processed out, but it’s certainly true for now.
Anyway…Mizzou features 29 4th-6th year players. While I have nits to pick with this roster in general, I’m taking the older age skew as a good sign until proven otherwise.
Stars and Positions
Outside of specialists, each position group has at least one blue chipper in it. While this roster has fewer consensus 5-stars than last year’s roster, this is the most total star talent a Missouri roster has had since the dawn of the recruiting service era. Going off of stars, the most talented position groups are the o-line (6 blue chippers) followed by the receivers (5) and safeties (4). Receiver and safety had the most recruiting stars at this time last year, and this year features an equal split of blue-chip talent along both the interior defensive line and the edge rushers (three each). Will these be the three best position groups this year?
What states are the Tigers drawing talent from?
At this time last year, Missouri (29), Florida (11), and Georgia (8) were the top three contributing states of scholarship players to the Missouri football team. This year? Missouri’s lead has shrunk (23), the Floridian contingent has stayed the same but currently ranks third most populous state on the roster (7), while last year’s third place team, Georgia, has added one player (9) and now ranks second. Obviously, Missouri will inevitably recruit more Missourians thanks to, ya know, being located in Missouri along with the very liberal NIL laws the state has to benefit Missouri high school athletes. But if you want to win in college football you need to recruit the best players and, more often than not, the best players reside in the southeastern footprint of the United States.
Here’s a visual representation of the areas that Missouri has drawn talent from to craft the 2025 roster:
The darker the area means the more players the team is pulling from that specific zip code. And, as you can see, the dark areas continue to be the major metro areas you would want the Tigers to target: STL, DFW, ATL, plus a growing contribution from Houston and the middle/southern reaches of Florida. Also: hello, KCMO!
Overall – and to no one’s surprise – the roster is skewed heavily to states located in the SEC footprint since, as we all know, the most talented high school football talent tends to come from the southeastern United States. It’s also a lot easier for a staff based in Columbia, Mo. to travel to the southeast than, say, the west coast.
So what’s the point of all this?
This piece is mostly just to act as a depository for my weird data hoarding, if we’re being frank. But also, it serves to give you a better idea of where the roster currently stands and provide a benchmark in order to watch as to how it evolves over time.
I’ll admit it: this is my favorite piece to write every year. I’m not sure if you all get anything out of it but I love deep diving on how a roster gets constructed and where the players come from.
And after five years of recruiting, this roster is 100% guys that Drinkwitz recruited or portalled. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this team has gotten better as more and more Drinkwitz commits have proliferated the roster and established themselves on the depth chart. Hopefully, more good things come from that as it has over the last two years.