Welcome to Stars Matter, a recruiting podcast from The Athletic.

I'm Mitch Light. He's Ari Wasserman.

Today, we have a special guest, Max Olson, from The Athletic. Max, first of all, good afternoon, good morning. I was going to introduce you, but I don't even know your title. Senior College Football Writer, Transfer Portal, dude. How about just badass? Sure. I'll take badass. That's fine. That's fine. You know, it's an honor to be on here. I listen to a lot of Ari podcasts, but Ari and I never get to do podcast together. So this is, it's just great to see your smiling face, buddy. No, I don't think so. I don't think so. Although, well, I guess we'll see. Yeah. We'll see. Don't for you. I'm excited to be here. It's an experience during a podcast with Arir.

If we don't get out of this podcast without me and you arguing about who has a higher ceiling, Oklahoma, or Texas, then it was a fail. I mean, I listen to the Grace one. I know he's going to try and make me cry. I don't know what he's going to try and hit me with it. but I'm looking forward to it.

Hopefully we won't see his feet.

Like we're in the middle of a podcast,

and Grace just said,

Grace said,

are those Ari's feet?

Yeah,

well,

I'll do my best. admit me with it, but I'm looking forward to it. Hopefully we won't see his feet. Like, we're familiar podcast, and Grace just said,

Grace said, are those are his feet?

Yeah, well, I'll do my best to not insult the listeners too. Yeah, keep your body parts off the screen. As long as we don't talk about Texas A&M cheating, like I'll be able to make it through without profanity. Oh, let's go there. Yeah. But I do think that, you know, not to ruin the parade of grab ass before we get into this.

But, like, Max... But I do think that, you know, not to ruin the parade of grab ass before we get into this.

But like Max is really, really well connected in the Big 12.

It's super knowledgeable about a lot of the things that we're going to talk about today.

Mitch, I'll let you, you know, kind of take us through that.

But I'm super excited to hear your takes on a lot of these things because I do think that a lot of the programs, at least in Texas and in the Big 12, or the former Big 12, are at interesting crossroads, probably the most interesting crossroads they've had in years. So it's going to be a fun talk. Well, you sent me which ones you wanted to talk about, and it's mostly the Texas schools, so I assume you asked Sam to be on the podcast, and Sam was busy, and I'm

kind of the filling, but I'm happy to try and pretend to think about, what would Sam say in these situations? And I'll try to, you know, fake my way through it here. We actually just recorded the same podcast with Sam, and we're going to just decide which one's better. And then we're going to go. You're just going to cut together the best of from Well, it's funny.

Actually, I have tweaked some of those questions.

This might have to be part one with Max,

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