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

I'm Mitch Light. He's Ari Wasserman. Ari. How you doing, bud?

We also work at the Athletic. Good. How are you? Yeah, we do. I used to introduce us both at the athletic, but then you said I was saying the athletic too many times in the intro. So I tried to be a little more concise. Yeah, you were more concise. I can't please you, basically. No, we were more concise. And that was definitely the best intro that you've done. But now next week when we do it, just go the athletics recruiting podcast. I'm Ari Wasserman, you know, whatever. But I'm not Ari Wasserman. Yeah. Okay. This is going to be a big show today. It is. It is. Okay, we got some great questions, some great mailbag questions. Keep him coming to Ari for his written mailbag, which he does on Tuesdays. We take a lot of the questions from that. Some he answers in the mailbag. Some he doesn't. We got a great one that we're going to have a lot of fun with. Um, and can I say that like I read all of them and they're really, really good. And yeah, it's really hard to choose sometimes. And I'm really happy that we put some of these on the podcast because, you know, I mean, I even might suggest to you that we don't add a prompt this week because there were so many good ones from the week before. You know, and I don't want people to feel like we're ignoring them or they're missing out. It's just you can only have four or five a week. And there's like 30 good questions. It's really, really hard to manage. So I'm happy that we can at least address a few of them on the show. Right. And the best way to get Ari to address a question or us to talk about in the pot is like a theory type one. You know, we we like all of them, but the where's this kid going, where do you see this class? The specifics about a class, it's more just

that the big picture. We like all of them, but where's this kid going? Where do you see this class?

The specifics about a class, it's more just the big picture stuff that Ari likes to attack.

And if you listen to the podcast, stuff that we like to talk about.

It's kind of the calm before the storm in recruiting as far as commitments go.

Ari, not a lot going on.

So movement in the 2023 class, your favorite,

one of your favorite things, the famed Massachusetts to Michigan pipeline was very active this week with Michigan got a big tight-in commitment from a four-star. Andrew, I guess it's Raplia,

from Milton Mass. So kind of joke there because that's, uh, that's, uh, what are the origins of the, was it Don Brown basically when he got hired? They were going to, they were going to mine Massachusetts. Yeah. It's like funny because it's, it's just like picking this huge recruiting strategy and then attacking a place that doesn't have a...

It's like, I'm going to mine for gold in a place that doesn't have gold.

You know what I mean?

And then whatever...

Yeah, yeah.

And, you know, actually, Michigan ended up getting a few good players out of there.

So I'm not saying it was a complete waste, but I was always baffled by the idea of like, you know, of all the places that

Michigan could spend all these resources and time, you know, you would probably pick a place like

Atlanta or something. You know what I mean? Or a place that has a ton of top end talent. And like,

I don't know. It would be interesting to go look up, Mitch. I bet you that Massachusetts doesn't

have a five-star prospect, maybe in the history of the recruiting rankings.

Yeah, there's, that's good question. There's, they do all right. I mean, there's usually, I'd say probably, what do you think, three to five P5 guys a year from Massachusetts? There's that pushing. Yeah, and I'm low P5 guys. I mean, like, I don't know this, this, um, Andrew Raplia, tight end.

...