Welcome to the Andy Staples Show and Friends podcast, Feed the flagship college football

podcast at the athletic. Thank you, as always, for joining us. I'm Sam Conn, senior college football

writer, also known as a techspir, joined, as always, by Max Olson,

our national college football writer and the man who has been monitoring the transfer

portal for the last several weeks. How are you doing, Max, today? I have emerged from the portal

to tape this podcast, and we're doing, we're doing okay, bud, we're, we're surviving. It's it's been fun i we're i think we're about to be

we're about to hit a pretty fun fun fun phase here for the for the portal and uh the the who's

going where yeah yeah it's been a lot it's been a lot of people getting out we've had a few

handful of commitments but for the most part, still some guys out there looking for their

destination. So let's start there, Max. As we sit here, we're less than a week from signing

day, Wednesday. And of course, I know the portal guys have some time on this if they need it,

but we'll have recruit signing next Wednesday. And then we'll

also have guys making portal decisions here soon who haven't, a lot of them visiting places this

week and this weekend. But what are some of the takeaways that you've come with here as of late

in this, this most recent week of portal activity? Yeah, I think this weekend's going to be

critically important for everybody because we

have a dead period kicking in here at the start of next week.

And so these official visits that these transfers and recruits, obviously, but certainly

these transfers are taken this weekend.

It's kind of their last chance to go do that.

And then they don't have another opportunity to go visit any campuses until January 4th.

So now it's kind of, I mean, we're going to get into kind of decision time for a lot of these guys next week.

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