Hey, hey, where you been? But God talk is about to begin. Hey, hey, hey, come on in.

Hey, welcome to another episode of Buckeye Talk. I am your host, Steven Means, and I am the only host here today as you all know Nathan is on baby duty right now and Doug is off doing math or whatever he's doing. I don't know that's always doing something weird.

We're doing a special episode today of recruiting episode with obviously Ohio State and Notre Dame playing each other first.

They're not just, you know, preparing to play each other on the field. They've actually been getting in each other's way a lot during this recruiting cycle for 2023. So I am joined by one of our former stringers who is now working for the Rob Notre Dame rival site inside Indie Sports and that is Kyle Kelly. Say hello to the people Kyle.

Hey, how's it going everyone? Steven, thanks for having me on. This is a pretty cool. I was an avid listener back in the day or not too long ago, probably as early as two months ago. So really excited about this opportunity and to talk a little Notre Dame Ohio State recruiting.

It's your first time on Buckeye talk, isn't it?

It is actually. Yep.

Okay, cool. We're not going to make this weird.

So let's just kind of get into it.

Let's get to some of the fact for us obviously Notre Dame as we're recording this has the number one recruiting class in the country, which I'm not sure anybody would have predicted coming into May that Notre Dame would be in this position Marcus Freeman taking over as the head coach there for Brian Kelly has made some hayway there just from your perspective as a person who is now covering that.

How is that I guess a simple way to put it is how is how are things going is the coaching staff happy with where they are heading into May as we get closer to when we start seeing more official visits.

What is the vibe around Notre Dame and how this 2023 class is being built.

Yeah, I mean, I think the vibes are absolutely outstanding.

You know, they they pretty much had a decent class going into the new year with Brian Kelly.

I think they had about five commitments, including a five star Keon Keely who started off the class and he was kind of he's been the high profile guy in this class.

I know that's someone Ohio State's targeting, but I mean the vibes are just unbelievable around Marcus Freeman.

This is a guy that in his first press conference, you know, his introductory press conference, you know, he said that, you know, he's going to be the number one primary recruiter for every single guy.

And that seems to be the case. There's a lot of kids I talked to that say they talked to Marcus Freeman a significant amount compared to any other head coaches around the country.

This is actually something that, you know, when I was covering Ohio State was something frequent with kids as well that they said, you know, they were speaking to Ryan Day pretty frequently.

So, you know, Marcus Freeman has taken a great approach in recruiting and going back to that the introductory press conference.

I immediately after that press conference, you know, he left on the same suit and tie and he was on the West Coast and Wisconsin or he went from Wisconsin, then to the West Coast.

That is it was recruiting guys at same day during the contact period. So he's really taking it to heart.

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