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

I'm Mitch Light. He's Ari Wasserman, and Ari is sitting right next to me. The newly wed, wed Ari Waserman. How's it going, buddy? Don't forget that Bill Landis is also in the room. Yeah, we have a studio audience for the first time ever. He said he's going to boo us so you need to be, your hot takes need to be strong or else you're going to get booed. Yeah, well, I always envisioned like my life and how it would turn out and I always thought like, you know, I'd get married to the love of my life by the ocean somewhere and have all my friends and family there and then immediately honeymoon with you and Bill. So, and we're also forgetting that our producer, Mike's in the room. Yeah. So I want to make sure that he also is represented into the studio audience, but we are in the same room and we're going to try to have a really good show where, you know, we're right next to each other. And it's the first time we've met in person. And we've had a podcast for what, seven months now? Yeah. Okay. So let's do it. Why don't you run us through the commitments?

You're going to tell me what to do?

Yeah. Don't I always?

I got to backtrack for a second. Wedding, five-star planning was the execution.

Was it four-star, high-star, low five-star? I think that the planning was three-star planning and the execution was five-star bill bill was there i don't know i people

hold up a number bill people have seemed to uh think that it went really well um hold on we composite

rating from bill landis five-star wedding if it was no i wasn't i wasn't invited know. Well, it's funny. You have this weird criteria when you're inviting people to your wedding of having met them in person. I know. I know it's strange. But that's kind of the way we went about it. But we didn't really put that much planning effort into it. And I thought that the execution actually turned out to be quite good so I'm very happy with it happy to be married happy to be done with it now that we

can just like go on to our lives and not have to call light people in the middle of our workday

um but yeah totally awesome and I got to look at bill while I was getting married so that was good

perfect sounds perfect all right um so we are recording Wednesday uh and I got to look at Bill while I was getting married, so that was good. Perfect. Sounds perfect.

All right.

So we are recording Wednesday.

You'll be listening to this Thursday or whenever, but Ohio State just got a commitment from

Austin Sarveld, an offensive lineman from Lakota East High School.

Number 350 nationally, Ohio State, now there are seven, four stars in the state of Ohio.

Ohio State has four of them.

It's the number six class, but no five stars.

Ari, I'm guessing this recent commitment doesn't change your opinion of Ohio State's trajectory.

Bill kind of talked me down off the ledge. I'm going to let it play out. I'm not going to go too crazy. I'm going to let things play out. So when you said Ohio State's turning into Penn State before? Is that off the record? Right now, there have a Penn State class. And if they finish with this class this way, then it'll be a Penn State class. But I also saw, you know, funny enough, during my wedding weekend, I didn't do a lot of reading about recruiting,

but I did see that Ohio State got a few crystal balls from some five-star prospects from coast to

coast, Bill, correct me if I'm wrong, Brandon Innes was one of them. So like if they start

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