Hello and welcome to another episode of the Bucknuts Happy New Year's Day.

I'm Patrick Murphy and I apologize for last week. We did not have a show. I was hoping to do one either for the first round or before the first round of the NFL draft.

I came down with the bug wasn't feeling well. I didn't want to have to subject people to hearing me sound terrible. So we missed out that week, but we're back this week and I think we have a good show planned.

And I am slow sipping this is PBR. I've been been on a PBR kick. So I'm going to drink one of those while we talk some book. I football some NFL draft stuff today should be a good show. And I want to kick things off with Bud Elliott.

Bud, thanks for joining us. Bud is one of our national recruiting analysts and specifically this weekend, but you were looking at and I know you tweeted about this kind of the NFL draft, how correlates with with the recruiting rankings that we put up. So I want to get into some of that. But first off, thanks for joining us. How are you doing today?

Good to see you again, man. Yeah, I'm excited to get on here and chat and hello, Bucknotters. I think I'm doing it right. There you go. There you go. The little loves that. The Bucknot. Hello, Bucknotters.

Okay, so let's start out with talking about the recruiting rankings in general, because I think people see them. They understand the basic idea behind them, but we do it a little bit differently than other sites do I know.

So as someone who's kind of been behind the scenes for people that don't know how these rankings are formulated, can you kind of take them into the behind the curtain look of where our rankings come from?

Sure. So our rankings team is headed up by Andrew Ivans. We have Cooper Patagna as well. Chris Singletary, I mean guys who have, you know, pretty extensive scouting experience guys who have worked in recruiting departments or, you know, in Cooper's case, run a recruiting department.

And like guys who have real experience there on that side of things and, you know, plus guys like a Greg Viggins and Steve Voguefong, Brendan Huffman, who have covered the sport for, you know, 15, 20 years and understand, you know, oftentimes not that the guys guaranteed to be something awesome. But what does a future pro look like at 15 was it like at 16 or 17.

So just from kind of start to finish, and we will take the huddle tapes out there, right, and go through, okay, like this guy had a bunch of yards, how did he, how did he get it, right?

Okay, maybe he plays terrible competition and it's kind of a gimmick offense and maybe he doesn't look all that great. Maybe he actually does stand out. So we'll put him kind of in one pile. So that you have the film component, right, you got to have the film.

And you have to have the project ability component, right, which means you need to not just be a good player now, but we need to thank you for going to put high grades on you.

And that you're going to put a really, really good product on the field later on in your college career and be somebody who is very attractive to the NFL as well. So you're projecting to grow, right.

And how do we figure that out? It's it's frame, it's family history, right, like if you have a dad and a brother played in the NFL, that's probably a, we may bump you a point, right, just we're playing the odds.

That's really what this is, like we, we're making educated guesses at it. And it's not an exact science. I think there is some science to it.

And looking at the data, looking at testing, looking at prior comps, both in terms of like NFL bodies and what those NFL bodies looked at or look, look like at a certain age.

And from there, we kind of just try to figure out who is going to be the best player when it comes time for that NFL draft, who has the highest upside, right.

I mean, that's, that's kind of what goes into it. And then we have weekly meetings, sometimes they're 90 minutes, sometimes they're four hours, right.

I mean, that's, that's quite a bit of work as far as as a group meeting. It's, it's every Wednesday. And there's haggling over players. Hey, like I really believe in this guy. All right, convince me.

Like the, the data here on the testing data here is not quite as good. All right, well, maybe, you know, I, because we're getting in person evaluations, I was at that camp and they were running those forties on grass. And that's a laser for you, right.

So you have, you know, people who have been in the industry for a long time, who have been able to eyeball this stuff and say, hey, that four or five may not be the same as that hand timed on the track, four or five that we're looking at, right. So, yeah, I mean, that's, it's a complicated process.

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