2020 offensive lineman Jalen St. John commits to Mizzou

The Missouri Tigers picked up a commit recently from Columbia’s most nearby metropolis.

St. Louis native Jalen St. John committed to the Tigers on Thursday. St. John, who attends Trinity Catholic up in the Spanish Lake neighborhood of STL, announced his commitment in a video he posted on his Twitter account.

Jalen checks in at 6-foot-5, 300 lbs. as he enters his senior season. He’s an offensive guard and ranks 37th at his position in the 2020 recruiting cycle. Nationally, he ranks 604th among all recruits in 2020, and stands 11th among all Show Me State recruits.

For Mizzou, this is a very solid get. In landing Jalen St. John, they now have five of the Top 15 recruits in the state of Missouri. He joins four-star outside linebacker Antonio Doyle, three-star wide receiver Jay Maclin, three-star offensive tackle Mitchell Walters and three-star pro-style quarterback Brady Cook (15th). A common thread here is that they are hitting the St. Louis area hard. All of these recruits are either listed from St. Louis (Maclin, St. John, Walters and Cook) or from a St. Louis suburb (Doyle, who hails from Hazelwood).

That is certainly an area of strength for football in the state. And while they missed out on the top two recruits from STL — five-star Jordan Johnson, a Notre Dame Fighting Irish commit and Mookie Cooper, a four-star Ohio State Buckeyes commit — they are still doing a very good job of pulling in talent from STL. If you wanted to pull the curtain back, you can include Missouri’s 16th-ranked recruit, three-star guard Drake Heismeyer, a Mizzou commit from St. Charles, which is also a suburb of The Lou.

Mizzou’s 2020 recruiting class now ranks 34th in the nation and 12th among all SEC schools.