Welcome to Stars Matter, recruiting podcasts from The Athletic.

I'm Mitch Light, and he is not Ari Wasserman.

He's Andy Staples.

I have very strong opinions on Mall Food Court bourbon chicken, though.

So, I mean, I'm as close to Ari Wasserman as you're going to get.

If we need someone to play the role of Ari Wasserman, you can do so.

And I'm confident you can do it quite well.

But as any listener of this podcast or as Andy Andy Staples podcast knows,

our friend Ari is getting married this Sunday. He's in sunny Southern California. I think the

wedding is Sunday. So next time we hear from Ari, he'll be married. He didn't get married in Norman,

Oklahoma? He did not. He couldn't afford it. It was basically everything was both too expensive

there. So he had to he had to slum and go in Southern California. Well, the Tar Humara's catering is, is pretty pricey. Maybe the honeymoon's there. I don't know. He, you know, he has not revealed where the honeymoon is. But Andy making his third appearance on Stars Matter. We're going to do the normal stuff. We got trivia for Andy,

but we're going to talk a lot about the NFL draft. If you're a college football fan,

you're probably a fan of the NFL, but you're probably really a fan of the NFL, because

this is kind of where you see the guys that you've been watching for three or four years,

where they might end up. I assume you're a big draft guy, Andy. Oh, yeah. Yeah. This is the nexus. This is where they overlap. I will say I've gotten a lot more into the NFL over the last three, four years, just because NFL coaches finally stopped complaining about college offenses and we're just like, oh, I know. Why don't we do some of the stuff they're doing? So it makes it easier for the players to adjust. And what a miraculous thing. You get more interesting games when you do that. Yeah, no doubt. I mean, and there's been more coaches going back and forth between the NFL and college. And that's something we've talked about in this podcast as recruiting begins becomes even more, I don't know, difficult's the right word, all consuming. We're going to see

more coaches leave college football for the NFL. But yeah, I've been dating back to the probably

the mid-90s when it became a thing on ESPN. I would sit down and watch, you know, all day,

Saturday and Sunday. In fact, I went to the draft in 1995. Right after college, I lived in Manhattan, and a friend of mine worked for the NFL. This is a cool job. My friend Doug Spitzer, who probably doesn't listen. I haven't talked to him in 15 years. He was a graphic designer with the NFL. And he, in his office, he had, well, you know, you're Mr. Jacksonville Jaguar.

He had, he was working there at the time of expansion.

And he had helen forms and logos of the Panthers and Jaguars.

He didn't pass.

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