Welcome to another edition of the State of Recruiting's Open Mic.

I'm Mike Roach of Orange 24-7, and each week I plan to sit down

with a friend or colleague in the industry to talk about recruiting. This week's interview

includes a chat with Rice University's recruiting director Alex Brown. Alex worked on the

Houston staff under Tom Herman and with many members of the current Texas staff, and he currently

runs the operation at Rice. We talk about why he got into the field he got into, how he got

to where he is, and what it's like to run a recruiting operation during a pandemic. So without

further ado, we bring you Alex Brown of Rice. All right, my next guest is the director of recruiting for the Rice Al's. He is,

just started his own podcast that we will talk about. I am joined by Alex Brown. Alex, thanks for

coming on the show. Mike, thanks for having me. So we're going to get into a myriad of topics.

I'm sure a lot of people are fascinated to hear kind of ends and outs of how you guys are doing business these days. But before we get to that, just kind of how did you get to this point in your career? What made you decide you wanted to get into the recruiting game and kind of what's your path been?

It's funny that I'm in the position I'm in now because when I was in high school and I was so passionate about the NFL draft and scouting and trying to take the route of being the youngest general manager in the NFL.

That was my dream from a very young age.

My friends, people I went to school with coaches were like,

oh, so you want to be a director of recruiting for a college football team?

And like they were telling me this junior year of high school, senior of high school.

I was like, there's no way I'm going to get myself involved in recruiting.

It's too much of a fake industry.

There's too much selling.

I don't want to be a part of that.

And to fast forward to now, it's become really a way to impact people.

By the way that I really tried to operate as far as being truthful with recruits,

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