It's that time of year when I don't know about you, but I start itching for a little bit of football.

Basketball is now in the rearview mirror.

But a guy who is always on the football beat, especially in Texas, is Mike Craven.

He is joining us here on Heartland College Sports.

I'm Pete Mundo.

Thanks for being here as a part of the show, whether it's on our radio affiliates, our YouTube channel as well.

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Same thing on the podcast. Of course, Mike does a great job with Dave Campbell's Texas football.

Find everything you need to get at Texas football.com. Well, Mike, it's a crazy time of year for you.

You've hit all the big 12 schools obviously down there. You've hit all the

FBS schools as well. How is this year any different without the portal after spring? How is that

changing things for you this spring? It's made my job a lot easier. That's right. Especially at the G6 level.

I've joked with coaches a few times this spring where I would go by last year, they'd start telling me about their defensive tackle.

And then they go, well, hey, don't write about him before the portal closes.

And so this year they've been a little bit more forthcoming with their roster, more on record with who's standing out because they don't feel the danger of being pillaged if, you know, an assistant coach at Texas reads the report and, you know, go snags their guys to be their

fifth stream defensive tackler or whatever. So it's been a lot easier. I'm anticipating fewer

changes throughout the month of May. The Brendan Soresby thing kind of came out of nowhere,

but the spring portal has been probably most important for the coaches, but second most important for me.

Well, that's great because I even heard, you know, coaches would say they don't want guys getting placed on the social media feed with some great playing spring ball because that goes viral and that guy gets poached.

So do you feel like the lack of a spring portal has been nothing but positive for

coaches and I mean, maybe not players, but at some point you had to have guardrails on this thing to

some capacity, right? You got to have guardrails. I think the only pushback, some coaches would rather

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