Hey, hey, where you been, look I've talked, it's about to begin, hey, hey, hey, come on in

Welcome back to Buckeye Talk, it is the BFF's podcast, Buckeye Football Fridays, Buckeye Future Fridays.

Man, it's only been like a month, I'll get it.

Buckeye Friday Futures, the recruiting podcast, the recruiting podcast.

We didn't want to just call it the recruiting podcast, that would have been too basic and now I can't ever remember what we actually did call it.

I'm Nathan Barrett from Cleveland.com, he's Steven Means.

We do know what we're talking about, we think, other than what the actual name of the podcast is.

But this is our weekly shot every Friday, where we talk about how Steve football recruiting.

And this week we actually want to catch everybody up on something that Steven's already been doing on our site, Cleveland.com slash OSU.

You know, they're every morning, and he has up another what we call recruiting battles.

This is something he and I did last year, where we basically went step by step, player by player through the remaining candidates,

or top candidates for Ohio States at the time, 2021 recruiting class and kind of broke down, you know, who are the other main contenders.

Actually, maybe I should describe it, Steven now since you're the one doing it, but I guess just how what are you trying to give people some insight into with each of these battles?

Yeah, I think because of the way Ohio State is recruited, there comes a time when I don't even want to call it a quiet zone for our state, because you never really know something.

I mean, we learned last year, you might get a commit on a Monday and then the 24 hours later another kid recruits, but because they've done so much of their work early, there is a point where you kind of have to take a step back and just reset.

And zero allow fans and readers to focus and okay, this is now that Ohio State has clearly established themselves within a class and within a cycle.

Here's where the focuses between now and the early signing period here are the 30 to 40 guys that they're hoping to turn into anywhere from eight to 12 commits.

Obviously, some of these guys are higher on Ohio State than others, but the idea is to zero in the focus and so that you know who to pay attention to when things happen when you see this kid put out a top 12, you should expect to see Ohio State's name when it when a guy zeros in on his top three come July, you should know that are at this point in the process, he's probably not considering Ohio State.

And so I can put my focus elsewhere and so it's just a way to kind of guide fans on who they should be paying attention to as Ohio State tries to close out a class that already has 11 commits in and it's probably looking to add eight or nine more at the most.

How many recruiting battles do you think actually are battles and you know what I'm saying as opposed to when I observe recruiting, I see a lot of situations where.

For in state kids for Ohio, in Ohio that want to come to Ohio State in a high state offers them not really a battle, even when you're talking about higher ranked recruits guys out there on the national level i'm wondering how many times is it where you think like in your mind like both of these coaching staffs are thinking what's Ohio State doing in a high state seeing what's

Clemson doing and trying to like match pace for pace how much they're contacting a kid what they're telling a kid and how much of it is just every school puts up their best offer and tries to develop a relationship.

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