The loss of a few talented, young players is no cause for concern

Dec 18, 2024 | Uncategorized

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COLLEGE FOOTBALL: AUG 29 Murray State at Missouri
Losing young talent like freshman Kewan Lacy is par for the course in the chaos of modern football | Photo by Scott Winters/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

This is the brave new world of college football and no one is immune.

The first week of transfer portal season has been a busy month for Mizzou coaches and players alike. It’s been especially busy for some young (now former) Tigers who have decided to split from Columbia after only one semester at Mizzou. In the first week of portal season, the Tigers have lost not one or two, but three blue-chip freshmen off the roster, two of whom played enough to burn their redshirts this season.

At first glance, this may seem like a disturbing trend for a program who has historically (at least in recent history) enjoyed net-positive transfer portal attrition, losing less talented players in exchange for gaining more talented, and experienced, contributors. Losing three blue-chip freshmen will never be a good thing, especially ones like Williams Nwaneri, Jaylen Brown and Kewan Lacy who showed glimpses of stardom early in their Tiger careers. But take heart Tigers fans. The 2024-25 Mizzou transfer portal story is not done yet.

Par for the course

This may seem like déjà vu, as I wrote this same thing last week when the Williams Nwaneri-sized first domino tumbled, but this is how the game is played now. Keeping highly rated, and thus highly sought-after, young players is an ever-inflationary and fraught business. As more and more highly resourced boosters are becoming comfortable with supporting their preferred programs with NIL payments rather than scholarship or facilities investments, the money available for attracting recruits has sharply increased.

I’m no economics expert, but from what I do remember from the Econ 1200 class I slept through in Middlebush Auditorium 20 years ago, the more money (demand) increases, the more the price will increase. Demand has never been so high, so the amount of money talented players are asking for their services is skyrocketing as well.

Short of signing multi-year contracts with athletes, this trend will continue into the future as transferring to a new school will become more and more lucrative. Nothing is guaranteed in the world of football, so it is impossible to blame a young man for seeking out the highest bidder while the demand is there. Knowing how the game is now played, coaching staffs around the country, Mizzou’s included, must now factor the transient nature of college athletics into their roster building strategies.

COLLEGE FOOTBALL: NOV 30 Arkansas at Missouri
The new college football math is whether it’s more valuable to pay Theo Wease, Jr. or an unproven freshman.

A new kind of calculus

College football coaches have always had to do scholarship and eligibility math when building their teams. In the world of NIL, they now also have to play the role of salary cap wizard when deciding how and where to invest their resources. Mizzou has enjoyed a competitive NIL budget in recent years, and there is no reason to suspect that won’t apply to future years as well.

That said, no NIL budget is unlimited and Eli Drinkwitz has the challenge of figuring out how to maximize the talent on his roster with the NIL budget he can raise. Without knowing the inner workings of any of the Tigers’ three departing blue-chip talents’ negotiations, it is likely that a couple, if not all three, sought to renegotiate their NIL deals prior to entering the transfer portal.

Clearly they did not hear numbers that were high enough to keep them in Columbia and so they chose to depart, as is their prerogative. The math that Drinkwitz has to perform is whether a talented, but unproven player is worth a large increase in NIL money when other players with more proven production are available on the transfer market for similar or less money.

Some players are worth keeping house, and when that is the case, Drinkwitz has shown he will do what it takes. Luther Burden could have made outrageous money in the transfer portal and he was obviously compensated well enough at Mizzou to prevent any wandering eyes. When it comes to this latest of crop of blue-chip evacuees, that may not necessarily have been the case.

Despite flashes as freshmen, Nwaneri and Brown played nine games between them, tallying only four tackles and a single sack combined. Kewan Lacy played in five games himself, but only carried the ball 23 times for 104 yards and multiple fumbles. All three players have bright futures ahead, but was their 2024 production worthy of significantly increased NIL payments to keep them in-house? Time, and Mizzou’s recruiting of their replacements in the portal, will tell. For now though, it seems as if Tiger leaders determined that was not the case.

Arkansas v Missouri
Photo by Jamie Squire/Getty Images
There are plenty of Marcus Carrolls in the transfer portal.

Changing strategies

Throughout the history of college football, the best predictor of future success of a program was efficacy recruiting high school talent. In the modern age, that may seem to matter less and less as today’s five-star commitments are tomorrow’s transfer portal departures. Eli Drinkwitz and his staff have excelled in high school recruiting relative to Mizzou’s recruiting history, but they may choose (or be forced to) re-evaluate how much energy and how many resources, such as NIL budgets and travel expenditures, they devote to high school recruiting.

If a player receives a lucrative NIL payout for a commitment to Mizzou but chooses to leave after only a semester, is that juice really worth the squeeze? Ultimately, the answer is yes, but not to the degree it once was. Winning high school recruiting battles remains important because getting top talent in the doors early and often will always be the best way to build a base of talent and culture within a program. Keeping that talent is important as well, but not at the expense of overpaying players that may or may not develop into top-line SEC caliber players.

What is vital is having a roster of players who are dependable from a production standpoint. Young, unproven players are wild cards. Sometimes those wild cards hit 21, other times they bust. Exchanging a wild card for a known quantity, especially a talented known quantity, isn’t just an even trade. It’s a win.

Even with these recent losses, Mizzou is still winning. The very same day that Lacy announced his entrance into the portal (and sketchy same-day commitment to Ole Miss), the Tigers landed three experienced defensive players in linebackers Josiah Trotter and Mikai Gbayor and safety Santana Banner.

While none of these players directly replace the outgoing freshmen, they are proof that Eli Drinkwitz still has his fastball. And he knows what that fastball is going to produce in 2025, which can’t necessarily be said for the programs landing these talented freshmen.

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