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Barry Odom is going to chase recruiting rankings a bit. Does that come with a down side?

Here are three Mizzou things for Saturday morning.

By Bill Connelly
Peter Aiken/Getty Images

1. Some notes from the Kansas City Tiger Club meet & greet

The KC Star's Tod Palmer was covering the get-together.

Maybe the most interesting comment comes up top. Odom verified that he will indeed be chasing more big-time recruits and recruiting rankings. We'll talk more about this in the future, but I'm curious about this approach. If you spend more time on the four- and/or five-star guys, you better land some. Otherwise, you lose quality time with the high-three-stars you'll be counting on if you don't get the fours.

In Gary Pinkel's first full class, the 2002 class, he went after quite a few big-timers. (You can search the Rivals database for that year if you want.) Five-star Brian Pickryl from Jenks (Ok.). Five-star JUCO LB Pasha Jackson. Four-star Texas LB Kelvin Flood. Four-star New Orleans WR Akieem Jolla. I seem to remember some other names that aren't listed in the database.

None came to Columbia. They went to Texas and Texas A&M and Oklahoma and Miami and whatnot. Pinkel did well that year in securing most of the big-time in-state names, but while players like Dedrick Harrington, Atiyyah Ellison, Brian Smith, Marcus Bacon, and David Overstreet ended up making an impact, a large portion of the class did not.

Pinkel seemed to realize very quickly that aiming that high was, if not pointless, then not the best use of his time. From that point forward, you saw fewer home run swings and a lot more line drives. It worked out. If you've established good relationships with those second-tier recruits, you can still hold onto a lot of them when the blue bloods start looking around late in the recruiting season. But if you're missing on the same kids they are, then you drop down a level, you might not have any leverage. It's all about timing, leverage, what you have to sell, and how good you are at selling it.

We'll see how it goes for Odom. He's put together a staff with quite a few well-regarded recruiters, but "recruiter" is a word Mike Alden used repeatedly to sell Gary Pinkel at first, too. I'm more interested and curious about the 2017 class than I have been about a class in a really long time, both because of who Mizzou might land and how Mizzou might approach things. It's going to be fun to watch.

2. Today's schedule:

Men's basketball at Alabama at 2pm CT.

Tennis vs. SLU at 10 am and Missouri State at 5pm.

Kind of a light slate. Wrestling and women's basketball are up tomorrow.

3. A not-so-out-of-context Wes Clark tweet

Jakeenan Gant and Russell Woods are suspended, and evidently D'Angelo Allen might be sick. So that might make for some minutes for ... 6'7 walk-on Adam Wolf? I got an impassioned e-mail from a reader a few days ago asserting that Wolf might deserve a look -- he seems to be a pretty good shooter. Of course, he's 202 pounds, so he's not exactly going to give Mizzou much heft underneath. Regardless ... the odds are stacked for the Tigers in Tuscaloosa. Even more than normal.

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