Hello, Miami Dolphins fans. How are you today? And thank you for listening to the Dolphins Talk.com podcast.

I am your host, Michael Leva, joined by a very special guest, Nathan Geese, who covers Texas Tech football for the Lubbock Avalanche Journal. You can follow him on Twitter and social media at Nathan Geese. Nathan, how are you doing today? I'm doing all right. How are you doing? I'm doing great.

And the Miami Dolphins here this past week drafted a couple guys from Texas Tech that have Miami Dolphins fans very excited. And I want to start off talking about Jacob Rodriguez, top of round two, pick 43. I watched a lot of Texas Tech football last season as they were a very good team. Obviously, they made the playoffs and all that. And I kind of knew how good he was. And I'd been sort of pounded to the table. I want that all to take Rodriguez. Even though it's not a position of need, I want to take Rodriguez. Then when it happened, I'm like, oh my God, they did. Was there a lot of chatter or thought that he might go late round one heading into the draft? There was a little bit of he could sneak into the back end of the first round,

but I think kind of to your point,

not a lot of teams at that point needed a middle linebacker to kind of shore that up.

So round two was always kind of where we thought we would go,

and we always kind of expected to be the top path of the second round. Yeah, and Texas Tech this past year had a lot of great players

on defense that were picked last weekend and Lee Hunter, Ramello Heights, Rodriguez, and of course

David Bailey. How important was Rodriguez to having that unit kind of click

played a high level and in the eyes of most people,

the best unit on that side of the ball in the entire country?

Oh, it was huge.

When he decided that he was going to forego out the draft last year

and come back for his final season at Texas Tech. That was kind of the nucleus piece

they needed to bring in the guys that they did and figure out, okay, we have our true one-of-one

top-end middle backer there, and we can surround him with those pieces. I mean, he was already coming back with so much experience at that.

And when he decided to do that, that's when they kind of say, okay, we have this,

let's build around that and let everybody go to work and do what they do best.

And they did a really good job of just surrounding him with the talent and putting

other talent around Jacob as well. Yeah. best and they did a really good job of just surrounding him with the talent and putting other

talent around Jacob as well. Yeah. He started so how close was he last year to heading to the

NFL? Was it close close or was he like or was it just like a thought and then he goes and then

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