Welcome to the sports media podcast.

I'm your host, Richard Dyche.

One guest on this podcast, he's been on before.

If you are an NFL or a college football fan in the United States. He is a very familiar figure.

Bougar McFarland is a longtime ESPN and ABC analyst. He will be part of ESPN's NFL draft coverage.

His show features Mike Greenberg, Mel Kuiper Jr., Louis Riddick, Adam Schaefter, and Laura Rutledge.

I will, for the purposes of this conversation, mentioned. There's an ABC show, Reese Davis, Kirkcourb Street, Desmond Howard, Nick Saban, Molly McGrath, Field, D.A.T. Thames and Pete Thammel. They focus a lot on what the players did in college, kind of the human interest story of the draft pick. Then there's the NFL network coverage, Rich Eisen Daniel Jeremiah, Charles Charles Davis, Joel Clatt, Ian Rappap, of Court, Kurt Warner. That's sort of similar to Booger's ESPN version where analyzing the pick and how the pick fits into the team. And then there's nine total platforms that ESPN's doing the draft, including McAfee, et cetera. And with all that, I bring in Booger McFarlane.

Booger, welcome. What's going on, Richard? How are you? It's good to catch up with you,

Bougar. So this is very interesting to me because like the draft, it's one thing to cover the

NFL nationally as you do. It's another thing to prep for the draft. So to me, it's like, it's not just having

like some kind of cursory knowledge of these players, but it's being able to converse at least on,

you know, the potential top 40 picks in a way that you can let the audience know that you've done

your research. So let me start here. How do you specifically prep for the draft? Well, I think the first

thing I do is kind of decompress a little bit after the college season, just to kind of, just take a

break mentally for a week or so. And then once I do that, I dive in identifying, you know, the top

150, 175 players. I'm doing the first three three rounds so round one is on thursday round two

and three on friday and so i'm not going all the way to round seven and so you know me diving into the

two 200 250 300 top players is probably not going to do me a ton of good i'm just trying to make sure

i got my bases covered as far as who are the top players,

kind of get a basis of where they are, what they do,

even before we get into the combine and all those different type things.

And once I identify who those players are, then it's a, it's just time.

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