A year ago, both the Mizzou Football staff and fan base were looking at 2018 as a massive opportunity. Mizzou had already offered 10 huge in-state prospects and would soon bring all of them to campus at once for a Tiger Ten summit of sorts.

Mizzou landed one of the 10.

1. Ronnie Perkins signed with Oklahoma
2. Michael Thompson signed with Oklahoma
3. Kamryn Babb signed with Ohio State
4. Mario Goodrich signed with Clemson
5. Ayodele Adeoye signed with Texas
6. Trevor Trout signed with USC
7. Cameron Brown signed with Ohio State
8. Dallas Craddieth signed with Iowa
9. Daniel Parker signed with Missouri
10. Daniel Carson signed with Texas

I’ll have some thoughts on this pretty soon, and we’ve got a few other recruiting pieces to share over the next couple of days, but that is quite obviously going to be the primary story line for the class. 2018 confirmed that there is no home-state advantage for Mizzou Football right now.

Mizzou did a pretty good job of hitting the numbers it needed to hit in terms of position-by-position needs, loaded up on receivers (and more receivers), added lots of meat on the interior, and put together a nice set of hard-hitting defenders — seriously, basically every commitment piece I wrote for Mizzou defenders coming aboard included some variation of “Damn, this dude can lay the wood.”

But instead of what you could pretty much describe as the typical Missouri recruiting class — lots of mid- to high-three-star guys, primarily from Texas (nine), Florida (two), Georgia (two), and, yes, Missouri (five), but with seven other states involved as well — this one was supposed to be a special edition of sorts. Didn’t happen.

If the class produces some future stars and starters, and if talent evaluation continues to be the Odom strength it has been so far, then no one will care in a few years. But I can’t blame people for feeling a little disappointed in “typical” for now.

Yesterday at Rock M Nation:

More Links:

• With 2018 recruiting over, it’s finally time for new Mizzou assistants to start bonding with their players.
• Tonight at Mizzou Arena: Mizzou Women’s Hoops hosts Kentucky (8:00 p.m. CT, SECN). The Wildcats aren’t great (12-12, 4-6 in SEC), but neither was Florida, and the Gators nearly sneaked out of Columbia with an upset a couple days ago. The grind is real, and Lauren Aldridge might be the key to overcoming it.
• You’re going to want to watch this Amber Smith feature, by the way.

• Softball season begins tonight. Meet Regan Nash, one of the team’s more important players.
• Karissa Schweizer now has all-time top-five times in three track & field events (mile, 3,000-meter, 5,000-meter) and is on the Bowerman Award watch list because of it.
• NERRRRDS.
• New PAPN! In lieu of anything topical (i.e. National Signing Day), we talked about NFL stats, oblivious college sports administrators, the Sun Belt, weight room size, and ... QBs I prefer over Drew Lock (one, at least).