As I mentioned before, it's part of the Bad Season Checklist that a few committed recruits will end up looking elsewhere. It's just going to happen, and your hope has to be minimizing the damage. I'm still (perhaps irrationally) confident that Lee's Summit linebacker Nick Ramirez (who decommitted to take visits recently) will end up a Tiger, but we can cross another name off the board.
Four-star OT Jake Campos, who just switched his commitment from #Mizzou to #IowaState, told me he canceled his visit to Columbia.
— Pete Scantlebury (@PeteScantlebury) December 1, 2012
Word began to leak yesterday morning that Campos had flipped. Unfortunately, it appears that Mizzou isn't going to get a chance to woo him back. Campos is a four-star lineman according to Rivals.com, and the W. Des Moines product has evidently decided to stay closer to home. Two thoughts:
1. Physically, Campos is still a work in progress (he's still listed at 6'7, 250) and may not have been a serious threat to play as a true freshman until he got some more good weight on him. But this still stinks for a couple of obvious reasons. First, he's apparently got four-star potential. Mizzou needs as many of those guys as possible. But further, he's an offensive lineman. That makes three high-ceiling linemen Mizzou has lost in about the last 12 months or so. Last year, Mizzou had scored commitments from two such linemen: Simon Goines and Germain Ifedi. Goines decided to go to UCLA and has started all 13 games this season. Ifedi, meanwhile, already cracked the second string at A&M. Every team suffers decommits over time, but it is very, very unfortunate that these three have all come on the offensive line, the same unit that a) suffered some graduation-related attrition after 2011 and b) got absolutely, positively waylaid by injuries in 2012. Spread these injuries and defections out, and you can survive. Instead, Mizzou's depth in an incredibly important unit has been decimated.
2. When Campos committed, being that he was a four-star out-of-stater I figured there was a chance he might end up choosing to stay close to home if Mizzou struggled in 2012. Highly-touted out-of-staters are the first ones you worry about in the decommitment portion of the Bad Season Checklist. But to the extent that I was worried about this, it was instinctively a fear of him going to Iowa. It hit me yesterday just how much ISU could benefit from the fact that Iowa is a bit of a dumpster fire at the moment. Good for Paul Rhoads, I guess.
There should be quite a bit of other recruiting news in the next week or so, as Mizzou's major official visitors are coming up fast. Here's to hoping the news we'll be passing along is of the good variety.