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

I'm Mitch Light, a college football editor with The Athletic, and I'm joined by Ari Wasserman,

our national recruiting writer at the Athletic.

Ari, we've got some new listeners today.

Our show is usually behind the paywall as part of the Athletics Audio Plus content on Apple Podcasts.

But today, this show is free for all to download on the Andy Staples Show and Friends feed.

Ari, since we've got some new listeners, why don't you tell them what Stars Matter is all about?

You know, I was actually kind of thought it was funny that they put the show behind the paywall

because I'm sure there's people who would pay not to listen to what I have to say.

But I am super excited about the idea of exposing this podcast to

a more general listenership and hopefully that will get people more intrigued moving forward

about what we're doing. But basically, we're at the point now where recruiting is mainstream

discussion point. Ten years ago, if you thought about recruiting, you thought you were a super fan who

only subscribed the message boards and read things online and places that you had to pay for.

And one of the biggest nerds cared about recruiting. But everybody does now. And now that it's in

mainstream visits, commitments, recruiting rankings, all that is out there. Mitch and I work

tremendously hard, who he's my editor, if you didn't know that, to put out

interesting recruiting stories in print on the athletic, have now taken the journey of doing

a podcast where we discuss recruiting at a great length and not just who's going where or

who's visiting where or rankings and

trying we analyze philosophy uh we analyze uh the reasons for things happening the future we talk

about recruiting and giving context of the way that these teams are building their rosters

...