Published on Show Me Mizzou Sept. 4, 2025
Story by Tony Rehagen, BA, BJ ’01
Photos by Paul Nordmann
Deep in the windowless maze of Kirkwood High School’s athletics building, Pioneers head football coach Jeremy Maclin strides down the hallway with a plastic shopping bag in his grip. He cuts through the gym and ducks into the musty football locker room. There, outside his office, two assistants wait with several dirt-caked footballs and a handheld power drill, armed with a stiff-bristled brush. The appliance appears to be out of juice.
The assistants are “mudding” the footballs, a process in which they pack new pigskins in a thin layer of special clay-like rubbing mud. Once the balls are dry, the assistants brush the the dirt off, leaving the once shiny and slick leather softer, tackier, and easier to grip. In essence, the process makes the balls tougher and more durable. Maclin reaches into the bag, pulls out a replacement battery for the drill, and his assistants get back to their task.
Sitting behind a printout-strewn desk in his cluttered closet of an office, Maclin shows no scars or outward signs of wear. But at 37, he has endured his own breaking-in process to get to this position. As a student at Kirkwood High, Maclin grew up without his biological father. He relied on the generosity of a surrogate family, the selflessness of a caring but overwhelmed mother and the guidance of two older brothers to become a two-time All-American at the University of Missouri and an NFL Pro-Bowler.
Then he started over, in a sense, returning to his high-school alma mater as a volunteer assistant coach who worked his way up to the top job. “Everything just kind of fell into place,” he says. “Our head coach retired. I said, ‘You know what? I love it. Let’s full send it.’ Now I’m heading into my fifth year.”
Returning to Missouri also has helped Maclin reconnect with his alma mater, where he was enshrined to the Football Ring of Honor in 2023. He’s excited about the direction of Mizzou Athletics, he says, especially the football program.
Maclin is a living symbol of the program’s own “mudding” process. He played in an era when Tiger coaches were trying to convince athletes, particularly kids from the talent hotbed of St. Louis, that Mizzou had transitioned from an NFL afterthought into a viable launching pad for top prospects to pursue a professional career. In this way, Maclin might be as important to today’s Missouri football team as he was when he was catching passes and returning kicks.
“To build a program, you need athletes to sell it,” says Cornell Ford, assistant coach at Mizzou from 2001 to 2019. He recruited Maclin and dozens of Tigers after him. “You can go anywhere in the country and talk to recruits about our players, but you have to have a name. That name was Jeremy Maclin. A lot of kids out of state don’t know anything about Missouri. But they know Jeremy Maclin.”
Maclin understands how a young football player growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s might not have known much about Mizzou. He was one of them.
Living barely 90 minutes east of Columbia, Maclin was aware of the Tigers and their Big 12 rivalries with Nebraska, Colorado and Kansas. But those were the days when fans tore down the goalposts in celebration of beating a 2-9 Baylor team (1997) to clinch eligibility in a throwaway bowl game. The arrival of head coach Gary Pinkel in 2001 started a change in culture, but it was a gradual shift.
Meanwhile, Maclin was more of an NFL fan. His interest in football came through two older brothers, who both played. It was just one of many things he learned through his siblings as the three Maclin boys grew up without a father. “I had a lot of uncles who were very constant in my life, but when it came down to it, it was me and my two brothers,” Maclin says. “We were fending for ourselves, learning the ropes, and learning how to carry ourselves and be men.”
When Maclin was 15 and entering high school as a standout athlete in basketball and football, he came to a crossroads. He had grown close to another family, Jeff and Cindy Parres and their two sons. Maclin was friends with the boys, and Jeff had coached them in Pee Wee football when they were 9. Maclin’s biological mother saw the opportunity for her youngest son to focus on his future with a bit more stability and safety.
With her blessing, Maclin moved in with the Parreses. “His mom was a hard-working lady doing the best she could,” Ford says. “I think the move gave him a foundation to transition out of the rough upbringing he’d had, where he could grow up and be a kid. [The Parreses] weren’t trying to replace his family, they were just trying to give him a good home life.”
On the field, Maclin blossomed into a top wide receiver prospect: a two-time First-team All-State player, listed as one of the Top 3 Missouri recruits in 2005, sought after by every major football school. The suitors included Ohio State, Nebraska and Notre Dame, but he initially declared his intent to become an Oklahoma Sooner. Ford, however, never gave up on the hopes of keeping this St. Louis blue chip in-state.
“We were just starting to turn a corner as a program,” Ford says. “A lot of in-state kids felt like they couldn’t stay in Missouri and be successful. Top programs like Oklahoma felt like they could come in and take whoever they wanted. I kept chipping away at Jeremy. He kept coming to games. Eventually, he started wearing Mizzou colors. I knew we had him when I saw him in black-and-gold Air Jordans. Kids don’t put that much money into Jordans if they’re not serious.”
Maclin arrived in Columbia in 2006 with high expectations, but he injured his knee during a drill in the last practice of the summer. His freshman season ended days before it was set to begin. When he debuted the following year, Maclin wasted no time in making his presence felt with two touchdowns in the season opener against rival Illinois, including a dazzling 66-yard punt return. Maclin was just one standout in a stellar cast that also featured quarterback Chase Daniel; tight ends Martin Rucker and Chase Coffman; safety William Moore; wideout Danario Alexander and linebacker Sean Witherspoon.
The team went on to win 12 games, the first time Mizzou had won more than nine since 1969, culminating with a victory over Kansas that vaulted the Tigers to their first No. 1 ranking in 47 years. Maclin compiled 2,776 all-purpose yards, the most ever by a freshman in NCAA Division I-A history. He earned consensus First-team All-American honors.
He received the same honor the following year after helping Missouri earn a 10-4 record, back-to-back Big 12 North Division titles and a second-straight bowl win. By now, Maclin’s talent was getting the attention of NFL scouts, many of whom pegged him as a potential first-round pick. Maclin, a redshirt sophomore, had a decision to make. “I didn’t want to leave,” he says. “Mizzou was a place I could call home, a place that meant a lot to me.”
Maclin went to Pinkel for advice. Riding high on his recent success, with everything personally to gain by keeping his star receiver in Columbia for one more year, his coach was honest. “Maclin’s decision was not an easy one,” says then assistant coach Andy Hill, who was in the room. “He came in and asked if he should leave. Coach Pinkel told him, ‘If you were my son, I’d tell you to go. You’re ready.’ ”
The following spring, the Philadelphia Eagles selected Maclin as the 19th overall pick in the 2009 NFL Draft. He was only the second first-rounder out of Mizzou since 1987. He’d go on to build a nine-year professional career, highlighted by a Pro Bowl selection in 2014.
Meanwhile, Mizzou’s in-state recruiting, especially in St. Louis, gained momentum, with top prospects such as Sheldon Richardson, Dorial Green-Beckham, Terry Beckner, Jr. and Luther Burden III choosing to stay close to home and become Tigers. All except Green-Beckham (Springfield) came from the St. Louis metro area, as did other standouts including Brady Cook and Cody Schraeder.
Part of this is because of the program’s return to national prominence; part is because, since Maclin’s playing days, Mizzou has produced eight first-round NFL picks and nine second-rounders. Maclin deserves partial credit for these accomplishments. “When you go out to recruit and you haven’t done much, you tell players, ‘You’ll do this; you’ll do that,” Hill says. “When you’ve had a Jeremy Maclin, you can tell them, ‘You can do this, because we’ve done it. This could be your path as well.’”
Since taking up the head job at Kirkwood, Maclin has seen his own success, with 31 wins in just four seasons — quite an accomplishment for a public high school in a St. Louis football scene dominated by private schools that cherry-pick talent. Maclin draws on his experience at Mizzou when shaping his student athletes, whether he’s teaching them to run a route, encouraging them in their studies, or teaching them the proper way to “mud” footballs. And when it comes to helping his stars decide on their future, Maclin does his best to emulate his own coaches at Mizzou.
“Mizzou was right for me, but I want what’s best for them,” he says, back in his office, drill-brush whirring in the background. “I want them to go where they feel most comfortable, where they can not only excel as an athlete, but also excel as a young man.”
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