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

I'm Mitch Light. He's Ari Wasserman. We both work for the athletic. Ari, hopefully I said that right, but let's not. No more small talk. National Signing Day. The February National Signing Day, we don't need to go over the fact that it's not the big signing day. But I thought still some interesting developments, some movements, some major programs, first year coaches. I know you went to see a kid sign. We'll

get into that, but just kind of your overall impressions of the day real quick. And then we'll go

through some of the, some of the high profile guys who signed. So the thing about the early signing

period was that it has completely removed the intrigue or supposedly removed the intrigue from this day. And I think

that's not true. There's a lot of intrigue. And here's the reason why. The tough part about the

early signing period is that some players are in a rush to take up their spot or to, you know,

solidify their spot in a class.

And some people view not signing early as a risk.

So because of that, whether that's right or wrong, the players that hold out the longest

are typically the ones that don't have to worry about that risk, the five-star athletes that

are going to have a spot in anybody's class because

five-star prospects, there's always room for.

So what has happened is that the truly elite players, and not everybody who announced

on Wednesday is an elite player, but the truly elite players tend to be the ones that

kind of wait the longest.

And, you know, there's a few guys that came onto the scene late,

one of which I saw Andrew Paul in Dallas committed to Georgia.

You know, circumstances are different for everybody.

But three of the top 10 players in the country came into the day,

uncommitted or, know without an announcement and

david campbell was really the only one where we knew i mean it's like 98 exactly where he was going to

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