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The Healthy Wealth Experience - Where Financial Success Meets Personal Wellbeing
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That's the one thing that I think hurts people is they'd rather pin the geographic victim card rather than getting out. How do I get to these camps? Go to those camps, dominate, be good. It's a speed, skill, strength and size game. The faster you are, the stronger you are, the bigger you are and the more skilled you are, you are going to be recruited.
Brandon Huffman:So I'll say, oh, you know, he was the fastest kid in his league. What did he run? Oh, eleven three. That's not fast. Eleven three is slow.
Chris Hall:Hi. This is Chris Hall, and welcome to Healthy Wealth. It is football season, and so we are honored to have a really cool guest with us, Brandon Huffman, who's the national recruiting editor for twenty four seven Sports. So if your kid is trying to get recruited, you probably heard his name. He's pretty much all over Twitter and Instagram, And and we're gonna talk some football today.
Chris Hall:So Brandon, thank you so much for being on the show.
Brandon Huffman:Yeah. Thanks for having me on, Chris.
Chris Hall:Absolutely. So how did you become a national recruiting editor for a place like twenty fourseven Sports? Like, how does that, like, look?
Brandon Huffman:Mhmm. It it was really I I say this all the time. It was timing. It it was I got into the industry in 2003 in the recruiting side of things. I when I graduated college, I graduated with my degree in communication and my journalism emphasis at the time, Azusa Pacific, did not have a journalism degree.
Brandon Huffman:I had a communication degree. And so I majored in that with my focus being journalism. And this new thing of the Internet was starting to crank out a lot of sports content. And I was writing for a website called College Football Digest, covering the old Pac ten. That's how long ago it was.
Brandon Huffman:It was still the Pac ten. And eventually, that turned into another opportunity with another website, fanstop.com, where I was their NCA sports editor. And I did that for about three years. And then in just the most fortuitous timing ever, I was at UCLA. I was still living in Southern California time at UCLA, and there was a press conference where UCLA was introducing Ben Hallin as their basketball coach.
Brandon Huffman:And the guy who ran the UCLA site on the oldscout.com network said that he and his partner at the USC site were looking for somebody to cover recruiting who knew football, who knew recruiting, who knew the West Coast landscape. And that's how I got my start in 2,003 just covering UCLA and USC recruiting To give other context of how long ago it was, Carl Durell was in his first year as a head coach at UCLA, and a guy named Pete Carroll was about six months away, seven months away from winning his first national championship at USC. So I got into it as people were still trying to believe, is the internet really gonna be where we get our news to now, you know, '23, '24, gosh, almost twenty three years of doing this. I'm in my twenty third recruiting class, And now I'm here at the National Recruiting Editor of twenty fourseven Sports. Been with them for about eight and a half years.
Brandon Huffman:I was with scout.com for thirteen, fourteen years before that. I can't even do the math anymore. It's been so long. Fourteen years. Fourteen years there, eight and a half years of twenty fourseven.
Brandon Huffman:I was part of CBS Sports and now I'm covering recruiting from coast to coast up into Alaska, out into Hawaii and even some international stuff.
Chris Hall:Okay. So like you had mentioned, you went to Azusa Pacific and that's actually where I went to school as well, and that's kinda how we connected a long time ago. Mhmm. So you played for Azusa. Correct?
Brandon Huffman:No. So I actually went there to play, and my freshman year was the retro season. And it was then that I realized that, you know what? There's a ceiling on my future on the football field. Why not go into working in athletics or working in football?
Brandon Huffman:So I spent the next four years working for Gary Pine, who's now the athletic director at Pacific. This is back when AP was an NAI school, and I worked as the assistant SID after I graduated, worked for the school paper, but worked in the athletic department, was the public address announcer for some football games, for soccer, for basketball, for all that, and realized that I wanted to be on the writing side, on the content side, but spent a lot of time around football, around the football program. The year after I graduated, AP won the NAI national championship. My roommate, my senior year was the backup tailback on that team, but I played some significant minutes. The guy who was the NAI player of the year is now a high school coach in Southern California.
Brandon Huffman:So it's been kinda fun. A lot of the guys that I went to AP with, I've covered their sons over the last decade or so. And it's been pretty funny to see how many players in that era that were there, you know, in the in the early to mid nineties that now have offspring that are are being recruited. And it's kinda funny that little humble APU has has produced a lot of people in the football industry, the head coach of Boise State, head coach for the Carolina Panthers, both APU football alums.
Chris Hall:That's cool. I didn't know that about Carolina. That's really neat.
Brandon Huffman:Yeah. Dave Dave Canales, former receiver at at APU.
Chris Hall:I'll be darned. And then you so you were you were actually doing that job when I was at APU because I was, like, 92 to 94. So that's cool. I love that. That's really cool.
Chris Hall:And then, you know, my son is a long snapper. He's currently a rising senior. This will be his last year. He's, you know, trying to get recruited and he's doing all those things. And but you also were a long snapper in high school as well.
Chris Hall:Is that right?
Brandon Huffman:I was. I was a very average long snapper and a very average, you know, especially on on the punts. You know, there was no Chris Rubio is a year older than me. I know Chris. I know Jonathan Himmelbach.
Brandon Huffman:I know a lot of these guys that are snapping coaches, but none of those guys existed at the in the early to mid nineties.
Chris Hall:Oh, I so I have a story about that. So I'm at Azusa. I played middle linebacker, and we had is it is it Barnett? Is that the right name? Barnett?
Brandon Huffman:Yeah, Doug Barnett. Yep.
Chris Hall:He played in the NFL as a long snapper. And he was teaching one of the offensive line guys. I remember the guy's name, his name is Jake. He was teaching one of offensive linemen to snap. And this guy couldn't care less about snapping.
Chris Hall:But the guy knew he's like, dude, if I can get you to snap at your size, you're going to the league. It never worked out. In my back in my head, I'm like, hey, teach me to snap. And you know, here we are, three years later, and my son's snapping. So it's weird how that all plays around.
Chris Hall:So yeah, I know Gary Pine, great guy. So I really enjoyed that. Scout.com, let's talk a little bit about that. So did they get absorbed by somebody else?
Brandon Huffman:Yeah. So it's kind of a funny, long, convoluted history, but the original rivals.com was started in, like, 1997 by a guy named Jim Heckman, who was a University of Washington alum, and he started Rivals. It was the first Internet website to be focused solely on recruiting. And like a lot of websites over the late nineties and into early two thousand, the .com bubble burst. And so the original Rivals went to put.
Brandon Huffman:A guy named Shannon Terry bought it and took Rivals to the next level, eventually sold it to Yahoo. And at the same time, Jim Hepburn came back and started a new brand and it was originally called the Insiders, which eventually became scout.com. And we did that for two years independent as a startup. And then in 2005 Fox Sports bought scout.com. Interestingly enough, this is always a fun fact.
Brandon Huffman:On the same day that Fox Sports bought scout.com for 55,000,000, they invested in another website for $550,000,000 called MySpace. And the irony in all of that is in 2013, when Scout was sold by Fox back to the original founder, MySpace did no longer existed. And so scout.com for a tenth of the price of Myspace lasted longer and outlasted Myspace. So that's always kind of a funny story, but for eight years we were owned by Fox Sports. So I was a part of Fox Sports when they launched Fox Sports one, which was supposed to be the TV station that was gonna compete against ESPN.
Brandon Huffman:It didn't. Fox Sports West at the time, Fox Sports Prime ticket were televising a lot of high school sporting events in Southern California at the time. Fox Sports really made an emphasis into sports, but then they sold Scott because of its value. It was the only profitable digital property that Scott, that Fox Sports had. So they sold it back to Jim Heckman in 2013, and he took it kind of back to startup stage with the hopes of launching into this media men's interest type of website.
Brandon Huffman:Well, that failed miserably because of just enough leadership and went bankrupt in 2016. And then in February 2017, CBS Sports, which had owned 20 for about two years at that point, bought Scout out of bankruptcy. Shannon Terry, who had started the original rival or who had taken rivals after it had blown up, sold it to Yahoo, I think 02/2007, started twenty fourseven Sports of 2010 and sold to CVS. CVS bought Scout and merged twenty fourseven and Scout together. And that's where we're at now.
Brandon Huffman:Shannon ended up leaving in 2020, retired, started on three in 2021, and then just re bought Rivals back about two months ago and merged on three in Rivals. But the majority of the recruiting team is still at twenty fourseven Sports, but yeah, there's a few of us there that were part of scout.com even before Fox Sports bought it. And we're part of the original scout.com recruiting team. So it's been fascinating to be on that side of it where you have major corporate support from Fox Sports to you're back to being a sports to being a startup to you're now owned by the most powerful media conglomerate in The United States with CBS and Paramount to then watching what happens when Paramount's being sued and CBS is being sued to then just last week, Paramount and Skydance merging, and now we're back to being owned by David Ellison, who is the son of Larry Ellison of Oracle. So it's been a, I came for the recruiting and apparently I stayed for all the business transactions.
Chris Hall:Well, it sounds, I mean, like, it feels like in a space like this, you would feel like you would have consolidation, right? But it actually kind of feels like there's not really consolidation as much as there's like, okay, we're gonna go over here and then we're gonna try this. And then, you know, it's like, it still feels like they're still trying to fill it out and how that works.
Brandon Huffman:Yeah, there's been times where there's been four networks at one time. You had ESPN, you had Scout, you had Rivals, you had, technically you had five. You had ESPN, Scout, Rivals twenty fourseven,
Chris Hall:oh, and
Brandon Huffman:yeah. I I can't count. You had four. ESPN, Scout, Rivals, and twenty four seven. Then you had ESPN, Rivals, and twenty four seven.
Brandon Huffman:Then you had ESPN, Rivals, twenty four seven and on three, to now we have ESPN twenty fourseven, then Rivals on three is merged together. So there's been times where there's been four networks and there was down to three, then it was back to four, now it's down to three. I feel like we are in a stage now where there's going to be never more than three. And it wouldn't surprise me if at some point it only is twenty four seven owned by Scout and rivals on three, which are part of, you know, they're kind of with Yahoo still. And then ESPN still does recruiting rankings and they do a great job.
Brandon Huffman:All the Under Armour camps, excuse me, the Under Armour camps across the country, the Under Armour All American game are part of ESPN. But in terms of TrueBlue recruiting websites, there really is just 20 and Ride was on three. So there's been consolidation, there's been expansion, but there's kind of back to being consolidated. This is why I shouldn't eat a breakfast bar.
Chris Hall:No worries. No worries. We've all been there.
Brandon Huffman:I and granola bar remnant. To you know, there's really gonna only be two true blue recruiting sites because ESPN, obviously, their stakes are in television. They've obviously got their podcast network, their radio network, the digital properties that they have. But yeah, it's been fascinating too, because it's kind of a where we are with media. You have a little bit more consolidation in media.
Brandon Huffman:I mean, remember back when we were growing up, you had ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox. Then you had the cable channels. Well, now you've got Paramount Pictures, which also owns Nickelodeon and BET and CBS and Showtime. Then you've got NBC and you've got them with Comcast and Peacock. So you're seeing more consolidation because it's easier to streamline it.
Brandon Huffman:And now that everybody wants to get in on the streaming game. So, you know, I'm kind of a closet sports business nerd. I listen to probably six sports business podcasts a week. Four or five of them are like daily, you know, daily podcast, the daily buzz in the sports business world. And it's been fascinating because here I am on the content production side that the media side of it, but I'm because I've been a part of major mergers and sellings and acquisitions on the sports business side by these sports business networks, I can't help but be drawn to that because I'm always trying to see, you know, if I'm listening to this podcast, it's talking about the English Premier League.
Brandon Huffman:I know that there's still a way that it's going to impact me because Premier League and, Golazzo is a part of the CBS Sports Network. So it's amazing how they're all intertwined. You wouldn't think that soccer being played meanwhile has any impact on recruiting coverage in The United States, but because there's been so much consolidation at the higher levels, it's trickling down to impact us. So yeah, I think you're gonna see probably more consolidation in the coming years rather than you are expansion. And then those consolidated sites are really gonna be the authorities and the really kind of the champions of that particular space.
Chris Hall:Yeah. Now you are a busy man and I watch you from afar on Instagram and Twitter quite a bit and you're always moving. And so what is that kinda like a daily what does a what does a day in the life of Brandon Husband looks like? You know, in season, off season? Is there a time you take breaks?
Chris Hall:How does that work?
Brandon Huffman:Believe it or not, August is usually my quietest month, and that's because all camps are done at that point. High school season's getting underway, practice is getting started, college season's getting underway, it's getting started. People always think, oh, you're really busy during the football season. I'm not as busy as I am from January and really from December until June is the craziest seven months. Know, all I think last year I spent in 02/2024, I spent a hundred and thirty eight nights in a hotel.
Brandon Huffman:This year, I'm at like 97 and we still got the season. I was, you know, 110,000 miles in the air without ever leaving the country. You know, it's I spent more time in a rental car than I probably did my own truck. It's a lot of travel because, you know, when you're a national guy, you gotta get out to national events. So it's not just events in California and Oregon or Washington, Nevada, Arizona, Idaho, Hawaii.
Brandon Huffman:I'll go to events in Florida. I'll go to events in Texas. I'll go to events in the Midwest. I'll go to events in the Northeast. So, you know, my typical schedule is it varies.
Brandon Huffman:During the season, you know, it's hey. Fridays through Mondays are are the busiest time for me because or Thursdays really. I make games on Thursday night. I make games on Friday night. Saturday, I'm usually watching college football, and one afternoon high school game I'll be at, but then I'm also tracking all the recruits that went to the various games around the country.
Brandon Huffman:How was the visit? And then Sunday, it's a lot of trip recaps. Monday through Thursday, it's a little bit more slower. It's, you know, got reports from the weekend gains, but it's a lot of, you know, catching up with guys that went on the on the road. We get to November, December, you start getting towards signing day.
Brandon Huffman:And then for mid December well, now with signing day being the first Wednesday in December, the rest of December, it's tracking the portal. It's tracking those guys that I covered in high school that are now going into the transfer portal. They're up. They're transferring down. They're transferring sideways.
Brandon Huffman:So you're doing that all the way until, you know, when the the bowl games start, and then you get about a week where it's a dead period, and then because of Christmas and then New Year's, then right after that, guys are taking business that are in the portal before the semester starts or the quarter starts. The same time, I'm in San Antonio for the All American Bowl. I've been there, I think, 19 All American Bowls I've covered in San Antonio. I get home. Last year, was crazy.
Brandon Huffman:I went I covered the Peach Bowl. I left for the Peach Bowl on a Monday, covered the Peach Bowl on a Wednesday, flew home on Friday, got home on Friday night, flew out Sunday to San Antonio, was there in San Antonio till Thursday, got on the last flight out of San Antonio, got home on Friday, then went to Hawaii for ten days for the Polynesian Bowl. So I was home at a total of three days the first January, you know, covering college football playoffs, the all American bowl, the Polynesian bowl. You get four or five days at home, and then it was every weekend except for the weekend my daughter got married. I was on the road in Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Idaho seven on seven tournaments at camp.
Brandon Huffman:So you're caught there's so many events that are going on from the new year until the June when the dead period starts that. I think I counted four weekends at home the entire first six months of 2025, and two of those weekends I still had events that I covered. The other two weekends were the weekend of my daughter's wedding, and then the last weekend in June where the dead period had hit. No. That's not even true because I was in Florida that weekend.
Brandon Huffman:So, yes, I had one weekend where I was at home where there was oh, and Father's Day weekend. All the camps that I covered were the following week. So the weekend of daughter's wedding and Father's Day week were the only two weekends that I was home with no events in the first six months of the year.
Chris Hall:Wow. Wow. That's a lot of work. You must, I mean, obviously you must really love what you do. I do.
Chris Hall:Because that's a lot of travel. I mean, you must really enjoy like kind of, I guess probably the best part is maybe finding these talented kids. Know? Yes. Know, taking a kid who has no stars and giving him a four star or a three star and getting them on the board.
Brandon Huffman:Yeah. And I try to get everywhere. I mean, I will by the time this year is done, I will have been in every state in the Western Part Of The United States with the exception of Alaska. I went to Alaska for a camp in 2023. No, sorry, 2024, 2021, and 2020, I went to Alaska.
Brandon Huffman:That's the only state I don't have in the calendar to go see, or I wanna have seen a game by the end of this year or camp, but I'll have been in every Western state, multiple states across the country. And I don't just go to, you know, the big city. I drove to Fruitland, Idaho. I don't know that many people know where Fruitland, Idaho is. It's right in the Idaho and Oregon.
Brandon Huffman:Yeah. But it's home to a former first round NFL draft pick in Jordan Gross, who's an all American Utah. It was a first round draft pick of the Carolina Panthers, a pro bowler. He's now a head coach at his alma mater and they're home to another elite off of the tackle, the number one tackle out West or in the Northwest in 2025 or 2026, Kelvin Obot who's actually headed to Utah himself. But it's right on the Oregon and Idaho border, and it's a small farming community.
Brandon Huffman:I'll drive up there. I've been to small towns in Idaho. I've been to outposts in Northern California and Central California, flyover country type places. And you go find it. Now, the one great thing about this job is there's so many major events that I It's easier for me to go to a major event where 150 guys come to you rather than go to a 150 places.
Brandon Huffman:Because there's not enough time today. There's not enough manpower. There's not enough return of the investment of going to all these small towns. But if all these small town guys have a chance to get seen at a camp, I'm watching. But I will still go watch games in obscure outpost and try to find that talent.
Chris Hall:Yeah. And then so, like, with the camps and stuff, you know, like, we did a few of those. We, you know, where you go to the college camps, and then we did a couple showcase type things too. But, like, with those ones, like, I think the hardest thing for kids and parents too is like which ones they're supposed to go to, you know, because I mean, you know, we get, starting when my son is a freshman now, like I said, now he's a senior, like we would get emails all the time, like, hey, there's a camp, there's a camp. I mean, they would be obscure colleges like, you know, La Verne down in Southern California or, you know, places like that where they'd say, hey, we're going to camp and the here.
Chris Hall:And they all sound like they're gonna be these amazing showcases. But then, you know, obviously, some, you know, like especially for like these Northern California kids where I'm at, these guys are not really getting recruited. So they've got, you know, they can only go to three or four of these camps. They can't go to like, you know, 20 camps. How do kids pick like, well, how do they, differentiate between what's gonna be a good camp, what's gonna be a camp where they're just trying to get money?
Brandon Huffman:Here's what I would say. The only camps you should be paying for are the college camps that there are going to be college coaches at. And those are not the camps that say, hey. We have a bunch of division three and division two school. It's all due respect to small college football.
Brandon Huffman:Was a small college football recruit myself. But those are more for the camp people that are running it, and those are not being ran in June. The only camps that you be paying for are the ones from you know, in in my opinion, even if they say college coaches are gonna be there, the June 1 to the June, where there's going to be FBS, FCS, division two, division three, NAI schools that are gonna be added. The rest is if you're invited to an Under Armour camp, if you're invited to an Elite eleven Regional, those are good to go to because those are free camps and you're gonna have the best of the best. You're gonna have media coverage, you're gonna have verified testing, verified measurements, but I think a lot of kids wanna tweet that they are going to all of these camps, but I'm a big John Wooden guy, don't mistake activity with achievement.
Brandon Huffman:A lot of these guys are getting invitations because they opened their DM and there's the invitation. You know, you don't have to go to everyone. You gotta and do your homework. I mean, that's really what it comes down to is a lot of parents don't do their homework. They see their kid gets invited.
Brandon Huffman:They think it's a big deal. Hey. You've been selected to this all American camp. You should come. And then mom and dad wanna run to Facebook and Twitter say, oh, Johnny got invited to this all American camp.
Brandon Huffman:And it's like, you know, yeah, it's in America and all the players there are probably from America, but that's the closest thing to an all American camp that it is. And it's about doing some basic homework. And, you know, if you're if you're gonna invest you know, I'm the kind of guy that if I'm gonna buy a car, if I'm gonna buy a phone, if I'm gonna buy a sandwich, I'm gonna go read the reviews and make sure that there's good track record before I put any kind of money down.
Chris Hall:Yeah. We had we had to get so I know that you're really involved with the Polynesian bowl, which is awesome. You know, I mean, it's a showcase parts, of but it's invitation only. But we had gotten, and it's something, like, really similar, and it looked like it was similar. It was like, hey.
Chris Hall:This is like an all star game. We've selected you, blah blah blah. I mean, you have to pay for yourself to get there. But, you know, once you're there, we take care of everything. And I was like, oh, that's pretty cool.
Chris Hall:And I can't remember the exact name of it. But all I know is, like, what I did was I went to last year's roster and I started texting kids, DM ing them through Twitter and saying, hey, you were in this game last year. What do you think? And they were all like, the these there's like, it's all division three coaches. There's nothing and it's all from the same team.
Chris Hall:I know what game you're talking about. No media. There was no exposure. But they go but it was fun. And I was like, yeah, I'm not gonna
Brandon Huffman:You're sharing a bed. Valuable time. Yeah. There's four of you in a hotel room. You're there's two beds.
Brandon Huffman:You're sharing a bed. I mean, we all see it. But, like, you know, and again, I mean, it it's cool to have those opportunities to play, but, like, the best of the best that people are gonna go cover are whether it's the free game that's promoted and and sponsored by the Under Armour All American game or the Polynesian Bowl or the all the Davie All American Bowl. You know, that's where the best of the best is. See?
Chris Hall:How does a kid like, let's just take a kid from, like, where I live in Rainy, California who Mhmm. Let's say let's say, if he was at Folsom High School in Sacramento, you know, he'd probably already have six offers. You know what I mean? He's just, he's a good kid. He's a good student.
Chris Hall:He's doing well, but he's up and ready. So he's not getting exposure. He's not really helping. You know, there's like, our school is actually pretty good. Our coach is really good.
Chris Hall:He tries to like this year we're playing Reno, we're playing Del Oro down in Sac, we're playing San Marin down in Marin County. So he's trying to get our kids out in front of people because we know that those teams are getting recruited. So outside of that, that's pretty rare for this area. Most of these kids just play around the area with other area teams. How is a kid like, let's say he's a sophomore right now and he's just really good.
Chris Hall:Like what what's what should be his game plan to get on like a Brandon Huffman's board? How does a guy like to get on your board?
Brandon Huffman:Yeah. So here's the I'm gonna answer that question and and kind of two parts. One thing that I think people struggle with in a lot of ways is getting outside their own bubble. And this isn't a shot at you, Chris. This isn't just for regionally based because I hear this all the time.
Brandon Huffman:Oh, you know, my kid is just as good if he was down in Sacramento or Los Angeles or San Diego, he'd have a ton of offers. If your kid is as good as you think where he would be getting a ton of offers in Sacramento, San Diego or Las Vegas or Los Angeles, he would already have them because now he's got the opportunity to be the big fish in a small pond. And I see this all the time. Oh, if he was, you know, if this kid is in in Idaho played in in Los Angeles, he'd be a five star. Well, it's like, dude, he's a five star in Idaho.
Brandon Huffman:If he was in Los Angeles, there's five guys just like him, more likely that he's not gonna get recruited to that extent. So now these are very intentionally going to small town USA, Idaho and finding him and saying they want him. But if he's in LA, they're also gonna go to this school and that school and that school
Chris Hall:and this school and this school. And they're
Brandon Huffman:gonna find four or five guys that are just as comparable. So you're you're you're better off being an elite player in that small town. The number one player in Idaho this year comes from Fruit League, which nobody's ever heard of. Alright? The the number one player in California, yeah, he is from Folsom.
Brandon Huffman:But, you know, the oh, the NorCal kids get sucked up. Well, why is the number one player in Northern California? In California, I'm from Northern California. You know, there's coaches here here's the the crazy thing that I I think it's the acceptance that maybe my kid is not as good as I think he is. I don't wanna think that my genetics and DNA has hurt my kids' chances of playing at the next level.
Brandon Huffman:So I'm gonna blame coaches for being lazy. I've been around college football for twenty three years. Here's a crazy thing that people don't understand. College football coaches wanna win football games. They wanna win lots of football games.
Brandon Huffman:They wanna win national championships. They wanna have an opportunity to win a national championship and go to the Super Bowl. You know how you do that? It's by getting the best players. So you're not going to just say, well, I only want this player because he's at this school.
Brandon Huffman:They're gonna go find the best player in the country. Michigan's in the news today on Friday for the NCAA sanctions that came down as part of their cheating. But what people forget is that part of the reason that Michigan won a national championship is that Jim Harbaugh did a really good job of turning over every nook and cranny to find good players. Alright? Yeah.
Brandon Huffman:His star defense alignment played at Servite High School in the best league in the country, but his starting tight end played in something called Kimberly, Idaho. Alright? Wouldn't be a first round draft pick at the Michigan Wolverines. Kimberly, Idaho is, like, two and a half hours from Boise. Alright?
Brandon Huffman:Off the beaten path. It's not easy to get to Boise. So it's called coaches will do their due diligence if the player is worth it. And so that's the hard part. It's like, well, if he was down at this school, he'd have a bunch of offers.
Brandon Huffman:That's not entirely true because there might be eight to 10 other guys that are just as good, if not better at that school. That's why coaching, you're going to that school because those good players are all there. So I think that the first thing is to not play the geographic victim card. That's the one thing that I think hurts people is they'd rather put the geographic victim card rather than getting out. How do I get to these camps?
Brandon Huffman:Go to those camps, dominate, be good. But you also got to have all the identifiable traits that make you worth recruiting. It's a speed, skill, strength and size game. The faster you are, the stronger you are, the bigger you are, and the more skilled you are, you are going to be recruited. Just because you're big, fast, strong and skilled in a smaller region, doesn't mean you're big, fast, strong, skilled against better competition.
Brandon Huffman:And if you're against that competition, that's not as strong as the bigger schools, you better dominate that competition, not just be good. Okay? Then you also have to have the identifiable traits. You've got to have the size, the length, the speed, the quickness. And I'll say, oh, you know, he was the fastest kid in this league.
Brandon Huffman:What would he run? Oh, 11.3. That's not fast. 11.3 is slow. Yeah.
Brandon Huffman:Might have won you the league hundred meter championship, but that's not gonna get you recruited unless you're 275. K? Oh, well, you know, he was an all league tackle. Cool. How big is the Audi six two two three?
Brandon Huffman:That's not an NFL tackle. That's not a college tackle. That's a middle linebacker. That's a fullback. That's a tight end.
Brandon Huffman:You're smaller than a lot of the tight ends. You know? So it's mistaking all league for don't mistake activity with achievement again. You know? Just because you're all league doesn't mean you're going to to play.
Brandon Huffman:And here here's what I'll go back to. My My first year on this job, dove down to USC, I met with Pete Carroll. And he gave me some great advice and said, don't be a stats guy. Like, what does that mean? Well, don't just look at a kid's box floor if you got all league and assume that he's a good player.
Brandon Huffman:That means he helped his team win on Friday. That doesn't mean he can help me win on Saturday. That doesn't mean he could help a team win on Sundays. It means he helped his team win football on Friday. Everywhere in the country, there's gonna be a quarterback in Reading.
Brandon Huffman:There's gonna be a quarterback in Bradenton, a quarterback in Dallas, a quarterback in Chicago that's gonna throw a touchdown pass. Does that mean that kid's a division one football player because he threw a touchdown pass? Quarterback's supposed to throw it for a lot of yards. Running back's supposed to rush for a lot of yards. We see we're supposed to catch a lot of touchdown passes.
Brandon Huffman:Offensive linemen are supposed to get a lot of pancakes. Defensive linemen are supposed to get sacks. Linebackers are supposed to get tackles for loss, and VB's supposed to get picked. That's happening in thousands of high school games all over the country. But does that make those guys elite prospects?
Brandon Huffman:No. We're trying to find the guys that are doing all that, but then have all the physical traits to help us win on Saturday and then on Sunday. K? If you go if you go look at the NFL draft, every year, there's guys that are elite college football players, but they've hit a ceiling. College is as good as it's going to get.
Brandon Huffman:And and it's always sobering in a sense to look at this the night that the NFL draft ends, and you see a lot of guys that are really good college players that didn't get drafted. Well, what do they do? I mean, they they were productive in college for three or four years. You know, they're playing at the Clems Ins, the Alabama's, the Georgia's. Why are they not getting drafted?
Brandon Huffman:Because the traits don't happen. So even the guys in the bigger schools don't necessarily have the translatable traits. So I say that to come back to, if you're a small town kid, how do you get on the radar by having those identifiable traits that separate you from not just the players in your own backyard, but from everybody else in your region. Because if you're good enough, the the whole phrase, if they're good enough, they're get you're gonna get found. It's never been more true than it is in 2025.
Brandon Huffman:Because with a video camera on your phone, social media, you can get yourself scouted. And then you go to those events, and you go into those events, and you dominate. There's a kid who I met when he was in eighth grade in when I was at one of the camps in Alaska. And as an eighth grade, he was gonna be at this camp where he's going to Cal Poly, and he's at he's at Anchorage, so it was harder for him to get recruited. College coaches aren't going to Anchorage if they don't have to.
Brandon Huffman:But he so he went to every possible camp he could possibly go to in California, was MVP at a number of them, and then he got a couple of SCS scholarships. Now he's going to Cal Poly, gonna get a great education. The weather is going to be a shock for him going from Anchorage to San Luis Obispo, but now he's played a vision of football. So he went to them, and that's the thing. You can't sit back and say, you know, if they're good enough, they'll find you.
Brandon Huffman:That doesn't mean they're gonna come to come to you to find you. If you're good enough, you gotta go to those events, and then they're gonna find you when they're looking through all the verified traits and testing markers, and then they'll watch the film and see if the film matches the athletic traits. And then if you have both, then your entire future may change.
Chris Hall:Yeah. Well, I love that. That's such a great answer. I really appreciate that. Not only for me, but like, you know, because I live in a Northern California small town, you know, we do have a lot of what we just talked about kind of like in the background, but you're right.
Chris Hall:I mean, it's never been, we've never had better access. Like my son, he probably has fifteen, twenty special teams coordinators, probably assistants in his DMs on Twitter that he can regularly talk to. He's got another half a dozen guys, maybe 10 guys. He's got their cell phone. Can actually text them and talk to them and stuff.
Chris Hall:And so I think it's never really been easier, like you said, but they had to have the transmutable skills. And I really like the analogy that you move because I think people can only think in that first person like where am I right now? But I was the East West game East coordinator for like six years. And you know, we're talking about some of the best of the best college football, it's a college football all star game. And I mean, you walk in and I'm not a small guy, I'm six foot two, I'm two thirty five, two forty five.
Chris Hall:And you know, and I walk in and I look, I look like a miniature version of a human being when I'm standing next to these people. And then you watch them and they do great things and they're performing on the field. And then sure enough, like, you know, half of those guys are going to get picked up as an undrafted free agent. They're not even going to get drafted. Yep.
Chris Hall:And then, you know, there's and then out of those half ago, those guys, you know, half of them, you know, probably don't even get Nick Sterling Longster. So these are the best of the best. Like you're talking about, I mean, you know, I think they, you know, you got three or four college All Star games. And this is probably like ranked number two out of all of them. Yeah.
Chris Hall:So so that's a I mean, it's a really good point. Like, you know, your skills can be good. They can be excellent. But that doesn't mean they make it to the next level. And I think that's really cool.
Chris Hall:But I think I really love your explanation. Think thank you for sharing that. That was really cool. So let's talk a little bit about NIL and transfer portal and all these kinds of things. I don't want to sound like a victim oriented, but I actually do think these twenty-twenty six kids probably have it harder than anybody else, because of the disarray of what's happening in college football with NAL and how many people they can have on roster and how to Google can have scholarships and MA and all that stuff.
Chris Hall:So can you kind of go into that, what you think about how that's operating like in today's world?
Brandon Huffman:I have had a job for twenty three years where I cover college football and the top athletes, and I've been able to monetize their abilities and write about them. So I have been a a big champion of, these kids deserve to get paid. You know, schools have made millions of dollars. Coaches have made millions of dollars. I've made hundreds of dollars, not millions, with my career in covering it.
Brandon Huffman:So I'm all about these kids getting what's owed to them and what they deserve. Here's the thing, and I see this every single year. The transfer portal is killing recruiting. No, it's not. There's still supply.
Brandon Huffman:There's still demand. Right? Okay. So unless a school drops football and a 100 roster spots just went away, those football players have to come from somewhere. Right?
Brandon Huffman:So those players that are being recruited out of the portal, whether they're at a FCS school going to an FBS school, if they're at another FBS school, it's going sideways, if they're in a d two school jumping to FCS or FBS, that school that loses them has to be placed and replenished that play that player as well. Right? So what it's doing is it's not killing recruiting. It's recalibrating recruiting. And what I mean by that is there's still 85 guys that are allowed on a roster on scholarship.
Brandon Huffman:Some schools can now have a 105 if it's up to the conference. The NCAA is allowing for a 105 scholarships on FBS programs. A couple of conferences said we're staying at 85, but a 105 roster spots total. K? So, yeah, there have been a few spots that have lost, most about walk offs.
Brandon Huffman:But what it is is the days of back when signing day was on the first Wednesday in February, you would see a guy that might be committed to Fresno State. And on the night before signing day, USC and UCLA might say, you know what? We'll take this kid as our twenty fifth player in our class. We'll develop him. We're not gonna see him on the field for three years.
Brandon Huffman:We're gonna retro him. We're gonna stash him. He's not gonna transfer without having to sit out of here. We can develop this guy. And then in year four, when he's now no longer a 17 year old boy, he's a 21 year old man, he's bigger, faster, stronger, where he's gonna go dominate.
Brandon Huffman:Those days are done. Now schools, they have their recruiting classes essentially done at the June till fourth of July weekend. So they'll there are now schools that will not sign another 2026. They won't even recruit or talk to another 2026 player. They're only worried about keeping those guys that they have.
Brandon Huffman:Okay? And and NIL factors into that. They may outbid another school for the end for another top kid who might be getting cold feet, there's a coaching change, whatever. But the days of the FBS school is making a late flyer on a kid, those are done. What that has done is that has allowed FCS programs to get better players than they ever did before.
Brandon Huffman:It used to be that off, you're only an FCS player. That's like, no, that's actually a good thing. Because you can go to the FCS level and dominate for two years, and now you can go from the FCS to the FBS. In April, there's a young man who signed with an FCS school out of high school. High school quarterback in the state of Texas, wasn't heavily recruited.
Brandon Huffman:They scored on the wing t, so he went to a school called the incarnate word. K. What are you supposed to do? The incarnate word ended up transferring to Washington State, left Washington State, went to Miami, was the number one pick in the NFL draft. K?
Brandon Huffman:There's still players like that that recruiting didn't go great out of high school. So instead of him crying and saying the portal's killing recruiting, he went to an FCS school, dominated, and worked his way up, and now he's the number one pick, and he's the starting quarterback for the Tennessee titans. Yes. Is that an extreme outlier? Probably.
Brandon Huffman:But the point being is that you're never seeing more FCS players get drafted than that. Now they're not getting drafted out of FCS schools. Most of those guys have left the FCS program to go to the FBS level. But what it's doing is it's recalibrating. So instead of dreaming of that big power four offer from the in state school you grew up re rooting for, you'll know by May if that's going to happen.
Brandon Huffman:You might know much sooner than that if that's going to happen. Now you need to start looking at the the g the group of five schools, the FCS schools, even the d twos and the d threes. There's still spots to play. It just may recalibrate the level of which you think you're going to play and the level of which your skill set will allow you to play. So I I think the twenty twenty sixes are in an era now where, yes, no, it's it's a lot more difficult to get recruited by the big schools.
Brandon Huffman:It's not difficult to be recruited. K? If you have the skill set, there is a if you have the skill set and the academics, there is a place for you. It just may be different than where you dream to play. The reality is, Chris, neither of us ever dreamed to play in at Azusa Pacific.
Brandon Huffman:You know? We probably dreamed of playing at the Roswell in the Coliseum growing up in Southern California. You may have dreamed of playing at, you know, Berkeley or Stanford being from Northern California. You probably had where you wanted to play, but if the dream is to keep playing college football and then potentially after that, you'll go where you can get on the field. And too many kids logo chasing.
Brandon Huffman:That's where you run into the issue of it's hard for us to get recruited. No. It's like you were chasing the wrong schools rather than the schools that were chasing you.
Chris Hall:Right. Okay. Okay. Yeah. When it comes to the 2026 kids, the one thing I I don't know I don't have clarification on, but it seemed like they were gonna move from a 135 rosters down to a 105 rosters.
Chris Hall:Did that happen?
Brandon Huffman:Yeah. It went to one from one twenty down to one zero five. So you went from let's see. I'm gonna do the math right here. One thirty times 15.
Brandon Huffman:So there's technically, there's 1,950 players that were already on rosters that were essentially phased out. So it's not even the recruiting that was impacted. It was the retention. But then those players, a lot of them were walk ons, and they were telling you to, you know, go to a lower level or go somewhere where you can play, but there's still spots available. But, yeah, what that the what gets buried in that is when everybody's gnashing of the teeth and saying, oh, well, a 105, you know, spots.
Brandon Huffman:You know, now schools are a lot of schools in the specific conferences are allowing a 105 players to be on scholarship rather than 85 on scholarship and 35 walk ins, all 105 could be on scholarship. So there's give and take, but only one dominates the clicks and the headlines.
Chris Hall:Well, and and I you know, like, one of the things I think about with the NFL is, like, you know, you got kids like like Archmanny, you know, a great player, but hasn't really started many games. You know, he's been behind Quinn Ewers the whole time. Mhmm. And he's got more NIL than Brock Purdy got in his first contract. And he's not even playing, you know what mean, for the most part, and then you've got other kids who are literally on the roster who are starting, who are still walk ons, like, at some point, doesn't it make sense that like, if you're at least starting, you should have a scholarship?
Brandon Huffman:Yeah, and I think you're seeing more and more schools shifting to that model. And part of the reason why you're seeing the schools saying, hey, you know what, even though we can have 105 guys on scholarship, we only want 85 to be on scholarship, is because revenue sharing is a lot easier to distribute to 85 players than it is a 105 players. So those other 20 players, if you're not getting revenue sharing, you might be on scholarship, but you're still essentially a walk on because you're not getting the piece of the pie. You're getting your academics paid for, your room and board paid for, you know, closing gear and food, training table. But, you know, I think nowadays if you're a starter, you now have leverage, because from the revenue sharing standpoint, now you just turn around and say, I'm gonna transfer to another school that I can get.
Brandon Huffman:There was a kid that was at UCLA last year who was a walk on, was a backup, started a couple games after injuries, ended up parlaying that into a full ride to Stanford where he's gonna get revenue sharing. He was a walk on at UCLA, but played in a couple of games. You got on the field, started, and now he gets to go to, you know, the number one public or or private FBS program in terms of academics in, you know, college football. So you you see less and less walk ons not getting a piece of the pie. You're and we're also we were in this four years of kind of the Wild West.
Brandon Huffman:The Wild West isn't going away. That's not going to change. But now with revenue sharing, there's less creativity coming from NIL Collectives and more, it's just coming from the top. This is now being shared with the media rights deals with these conferences and with those programs in those conference, there's becoming the distribution of the wealth like it is in the NFL. Your quarterback's gonna make 50,000,000, your long snapper's gonna make the league minimum.
Chris Hall:Right. Which for the NFL is not too shabby. Not at dollars thousand a year is pretty good minimum wage.
Brandon Huffman:A 100%.
Chris Hall:So what do you got? So now August, it's pretty quiet for you for the most part. By the way, thank you so much for the great answers on these questions. Like these are things that like literally rattle around my head all the time. And to hear your clarification on it from somebody who's like in the mix every day, it's very helpful.
Chris Hall:So I hope the listeners enjoy that as well. But so you've got, you know, a couple more weeks and then, you know, the season's starting pretty much. I mean, I know that some schools are actually playing ball games this week. So at this point, is this when you start visiting, like, the schools and watching the games themselves? Or
Brandon Huffman:Normally it would. I'm in a kind of a weird state of life right now, and it's not a weird state, it's an exciting state. But if you're hearing an echo, normally I have a bunch of pictures on my wall. I usually have, you know, jerseys on my wall, but my my house is is being sold. And at the August, my family and I are moving to Arizona.
Brandon Huffman:And we will basically spend the opening weekend of college football driving from Washington, Arizona, which sucks because there's some great games starting in the morning, and U Hauls don't have satellite radio. So I will be listening to the Ohio State Texas game, and I'll be listening to the Alabama Florida State game, which is a bummer. But I'll be very excited to watch the Monday night football game between Carolina or North Carolina and TCU. So I got that going for me. But in a normal year
Chris Hall:Miami versus Miami versus Notre Dame. I
Brandon Huffman:should be pulling into Arizona just in time to watch that at the hotel. Then I move into our house on on Labor Day, but there's only one game. So I'll get to, you know, get some, and I may, you know, sneak peek at my TV or at my my phone while I have a rest stop, not while I'm driving.
Chris Hall:Sure. Of course.
Brandon Huffman:Of course. Normally, I'd be yeah. Exactly. I'm always about conscientiousness on the road. Normally, though, I'd be, you know, living in Washington.
Brandon Huffman:They start high school practice next week. By this point, I'm starting to, you know, get out where am I gonna go to practice, what games am I gonna go to. Last year before the September, I had already been to four different states for high school football games, not counting Washington where I lived, and went out and spent a weekend in Idaho, watched four games out in Idaho, went down to Oregon, saw three games in Oregon in a and it was great. They staggered like a 12:00, 04:00, and 07:00 starts, so I can knock out three. Nice.
Brandon Huffman:Getting to some jamboree. So, yeah, it's typically from mid August when practice starts, I'm at a game every weekend until state championships in California are dead. You know, Hawaii started their season last weekend. Utah starts their season this weekend. My colleague, Blair Angulo, it was in Salt Lake City today and yesterday.
Brandon Huffman:He was at a game last night. He's going to games tonight. California starts on the twenty second. Oregon starts some games on the twenty ninth. Washington starts on the fifth.
Brandon Huffman:Arizona starts at the August. And so, yeah, from this point on now, it's tracking who's going it really ramps up when the college season starts because my busiest part of the fall is tracking who's visiting what schools for those games, who's been invited by the school that they're recruiting pretty heavily, you know, usually it's it's not the official visits because those are down really heavily done in the spring. It's the unofficial game visits, which are big for the underclassmen. So, like, you saw UCLA hosts Utah in their season openers that I think it's the last kickoff of Saturday night on the opening day. So UCLA is expecting a big list of recruits.
Brandon Huffman:Oregon State plays Cal that week, and Oregon State's hoping for some visitors. Washington, I think, has, like, UC Davis Castle. Some schools Arizona State plays Northern Arizona. So those schools can now have it's been dead since June 26. The dead or no.
Brandon Huffman:June 23 is when the dead period started. So players have not been on college campuses in almost two months. So that opening weekend of college football is the first weekend that recruits are allowed to go back to college campuses for visits, unofficials, games, all of that. So that's when things really start ramping up because you have games Thursday, Friday, and then Saturday. You're tracking who's at what games across the country.
Chris Hall:Yeah. Okay. That sounds pretty busy. So now why the move from Pacific Northwest down to Arizona?
Brandon Huffman:Yeah. There's this full thing in the sky called the sun, and I don't get to see it very much living in Seattle. Know, born and raised Southern California, my wife's family is from Washington. She lived up here when she was in high school. So we moved up here when our oldest was born, and we spent a little bit over twenty years here, but I have a mobile job.
Brandon Huffman:I'm on the road a ton. I'm all over the country and my kids are getting older. My oldest graduated from University of Washington last summer. My son is a sophomore at Arizona State. We we have our our youngest at home.
Brandon Huffman:He's an eighth grader. She was excited about the opportunity to move and it was more we wanna get back to California, but we wanted to be affordable. And with our son moving to Arizona, we wanted a place where like, hey, where's our kids if they move across the country? Where they come visit? Well, they probably can visit Arizona in the winter and come for Christmas and the kid grandkids can go in the pool.
Brandon Huffman:So it's a change of scenery and a stage in life where we're like, hey, where do old people go when they're retiring? They go to Arizona. I'm not retiring, but I'm getting old.
Chris Hall:Yeah. There you go. I love it.
Brandon Huffman:That's great.
Chris Hall:I've always told my kids, like, know, because we we live in a nice place here too. Reading's nice. It gets real cold in the summer, and then it's a pretty great place to live. But I told my kids, I'm like, if you move, I'm gonna go where you go. So just, you know, choose something that I would like.
Brandon Huffman:It it really mean Christmas. My when my son, you know, who was born and raised in Washington, went to ASU, came home at Christmas, and he came home. He's like, oh, I'm excited to wear all my winter clothes. It'd be fun. Gets home on a Friday.
Brandon Huffman:On Saturday, he goes down to the baseball field. They will play all his college buddies are home from Christmas. They go down and play in a driving range. He comes home. He goes and lays by the fireplace.
Brandon Huffman:He said, I hate this place. I'll never be back here. Why did I ever leave Arizona? And that was the kind of the indication of my wife and I, like, We got one who's getting married. She may move to the Midwest.
Brandon Huffman:We've got a son who doesn't wanna move back to Washington. And then he spent the entire Christmas vacation convincing his baby sister. Hey. You get to wear shorts all the time. You get a pool in the backyard.
Brandon Huffman:You should move. So she so she was all in at that point, and we thought she'd be the toughest one to crack because of how social butterfly she is, but once she was there, we're like, alright, let's do it.
Chris Hall:I love it. It's great. It's really cool. He recruited her. He knew he knew who Lynchman was.
Brandon Huffman:He works in the recruiting and personnel department at ASU. So he's no idiot. He knew exactly how to win.
Chris Hall:Love that. It's awesome. Hey, so last summer, my son and I had the opportunity to come up to Tacoma, University of Puget Sound and go to the Avery Strong Showcase, which is your showcase. I was wondering if you would take a few minutes to tell us, like, how that came about and what's that all about because I know it's important to you.
Brandon Huffman:I'd be glad to. So the AV Showcases began in 02/2016. The first one was held in Southern California in, I believe, June 2016. There was an eighth grader who's getting ready to start his freshman year in high school who was at that camp and got his first offer after that camp. That guy would go on to lead modern day to a national championship, would go on to win the Heisman Trophy and be the number one pick of the Carolina Panthers, Bryce Young.
Brandon Huffman:The camp started because four months before that, daughter, my wife and I's daughter Avery passed away from an operable brain tumor that she was diagnosed with in June 2015. And she was six years old, just finished kindergarten, had been your rambunctious typical kindergartner and started having some issues with her eye. And we thought she might need glasses turned out she had a incurable inoperable brain tumor on the back of her brain stem. And she valiantly fought for seven and a half months before when she was diagnosed, prognosis immediately was, you've got best case scenario nine to twelve months with her. This is not treatable, this is not curable, and it's the mortality rate is a hundred percent.
Brandon Huffman:So we were told make a lifetime of memories in the next nine to twelve months. We got seven. And after she passed away, my wife and I said, listen, there was nothing that could be done to stop this. Modern medicine wasn't up to where it was at, but we want to keep her name alive. We want to keep her legacy going.
Brandon Huffman:So three months after she passed away, we established the Avery Huffman DIPG Foundation in her name, in her honor, but 100% committed to finding a cure for the brain cancer that she was diagnosed with. And we have in just under a decade, we've raised over a million dollars. My wife and I do it as a passion project. We don't take a salary, we don't take a stipend, we take nothing. We spend money out of our own pocket to do it, but to share her story.
Brandon Huffman:And we support Stanford Children's Hospital and the Seattle Children's Hospital Lab with two of the most prominent researchers and doctors in the world that are treating this particular brain cancer. And a big part of what we do is the event space. And I don't ever run the event. It is my event in the sense it's the name, but I just show up. I show up and I tell Avery story.
Brandon Huffman:University of Puget Sound hosted, but we've had so many schools and organizations that have been inspired by Avery's story that they asked, can we put her name on this? Can you come and share about Avery? And I'm like, saying her name, keeping her legacy alive has been our motivation. The fact that we could raise some funds for research is better, but the bigger thing is I get to talk about my daughter. And while she may no longer be with us here, her story is not going anywhere.
Brandon Huffman:And we started the Avery Shanks showcases in 2016. There's a whole seven on seven tour, the Bravery Northwest tour that's expanded all over the West Coast. And then the Avery Sean College Showcases returned in 2,023 at UPS. The first year we did, I said, hey, we should be excited to get 200 kids. We had 500 kids.
Brandon Huffman:This year we had 800 kids. We've had two years ago, the first year we did it, we were the only college camp in The United States that had the had a coach from Michigan and University of Washington at the same camp. But why was that significant? Because six months later, those two teams played in the national championship game. Kalin DeBoer was our was our featured speaker our first year.
Brandon Huffman:Jake Dicker, he's now the head coach at Wake Forest. Both spoke. This year, we had San Diego State's head coach, Idaho's head coach, Washington's head coach, Washington State's head coach. Come. Last year, we had Dan Lanning from Oregon there.
Brandon Huffman:We've had numerous coaches. We've had over 40 schools that have been a part of it. Staffs from all over, players getting offers at those camps, and it's been an awesome opportunity. We've had, I think, seven players that ultimately became five stars that had been at, you know, the previous three camps, multiple Polynesian bowl, Under Armour, and Navy All American bowl selections have come that had been a part of those camps. So it's been awesome to see, you know, and every one of those.
Brandon Huffman:It it the the camp is done about a five minute drive from the hospital, which we sat, and we're told that our daughter is going to succumb to this brain cancer. And so instead of letting her legacy die when she passed away, we're keeping that legacy going. It's been big on the football space this last week, and my brother each year hosts a wood bat baseball tournament in Southern California in her honor as well. So it's not just football, though 95% of the heavy lifting is involved in the football space.
Chris Hall:Yeah. Oh my gosh. I love it so much. And, what a great, testimony to Avery. I know she was super brave during the whole thing.
Chris Hall:And it's just doing this. It was really cool to be part of it. Like, so we were looking at our camp schedule trying to figure out what we wanted to do for my son. And when I saw that we could get to your camp, said, Look, we gotta go. We gotta go to this camp.
Chris Hall:And, you know, we went to it for the right reasons, which I believe, you know, was to support you and further the cause. But then was pleasantly surprised by what you had already mentioned, which was there was, Oh my gosh, there was gobs of college coaches there. And again, my son's special teams. So if you go to a big camp where there's like 20 colleges there, there's a real off chance that you might see an actual special teams coach at one of those. Like they'll say, Hey, these guys are all coming, you get there.
Chris Hall:There's almost never a special teams coach there. They had, you guys had at least twelve, fifteen guys there that were just special teams guys. It was kind of another fun fact. There. San Diego State brought their whole staff.
Brandon Huffman:The whole staff. You had the special team the special teams coach for the number one seed and the number three seed in the college football playoffs were both at the camp, and and Joe Lord from University of Oregon and Stacy Collins from Boise State too. So it wasn't just small college coaches. You had two of the top three teams in the country, schools that had two of the four Heisman trophy finalists, and they had their special teams coach at that camp, which, you know, I think it says a lot about the camp and the talent level that is at each of those camps that you've got, you know, two high profile coaches, and they could have gone at any college camp around across the country. There are major camps going on in Texas that same weekend, and they chose to come And to both of them said, hey.
Brandon Huffman:We would love we we we would love to be a part of this, and we wanna be here to support you and support your foundation. And, you know, the Avery Showcase is exactly the kind of event we wanna support. So I could tell you as a dad that that means more to me than than anything is that they wanna come support and share Avery's legacy too.
Chris Hall:Right. Well, I think you just do so much for this community, you know, you know, from kids to parents to coaches, recruiters, like all the all the specialized coaches that are out there doing their thing. I mean, you just do so much for the community. Think it's it's a great way for them to, like, know, sort of also thank you for all that you do. And I know I'm appreciative of you.
Chris Hall:I know that I've been lucky to be able to, actually text you and say, hey, what do you think about this? It's been pretty cool to have access to you. So is there anything else that you'd like to talk about? I wanna be respectful of your time. I told you I'd take about a minute or a minute, fifty six minutes.
Chris Hall:So
Brandon Huffman:Yeah. No. I I would just say, like, you know, guys, it's it's the biggest thing is is you got the opportunity to spend ten to fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, Lord willing weeks playing the game that you love so much. Make the most of those games. Stop worrying about stop, you know, watching somebody else's plate.
Brandon Huffman:Don't look at their meal. Look at your meal. Worry about what you're eating, and how you can make that enough to make you full. And and I think that this one thing is, you know, don't now more than ever, don't play the victim. Play how can I, you know, be the hero?
Brandon Huffman:And what can I do to change my life and change my family's life? And you control that. Alright? The college coach doesn't control that. The media doesn't control that.
Brandon Huffman:The player that you think you're better than across the field, he doesn't control it. You control that. Control what you can't control. Worry about what you have to worry about. And I think you do that.
Brandon Huffman:It's gonna be the most pleasant experience of your senior year, your junior year, your sophomore year, freshman year, whatever year you're in.
Chris Hall:Yeah. That that brings up one more thing that I wanted to ask you, and I I have in my notes here, which is what does JUCO play in these days? I mean, with the Diego, thing, you know, some coaches we talked to, they're like, JUCO doesn't count. Some coaches we talked to, they're like, we have no idea.
Brandon Huffman:We think that does count. That's a misconception that it doesn't count. No. It does count still. There has not been an NCAA ruling that if you go to a Juco, those years don't count.
Brandon Huffman:What it was is a it was a blanket waiver given for players that played during that time that they could give you, but not every player was given that waiver. There was a couple of other players that, you know, were impacted and thought, oh, I'm gonna have a sixth year, and then the NCAA said, no, you're out of eligibility. Those JUCO years counted. The calendar, the clock started, so the years count. So JUCO football is still an awesome opportunity.
Brandon Huffman:I know that, you know, coach Snelling over at Butte College in in Chico does a fantastic job. You know, there's a lot of really good I would say probably the two schools that do the best in California getting their players recruited are City College of San Francisco and College of San Mateo. And both really successful JUCO programs, but also getting players recruited. So JUCO is absolutely an option, but don't just assume if you're going to a JUCO, it's not counting against your clock. The NCAA has not ruled that JUCO football does not count towards eligibility.
Brandon Huffman:What it did is it gave Diego Pavia a waiver until the NCAA makes their ruling, but not everybody even got that waiver. So Juker football is still an awesome opportunity to get filmed. If you're not getting recruited, you're not ready to go to a small school yet, you wanna bet on yourself, Juker football's fantastic, and it's gonna be good high level football.
Chris Hall:Okay. Good. But is at this point, we do believe it counts towards your eligibility.
Brandon Huffman:Yep. A 100%.
Chris Hall:Does. Okay. That's a great clarification. Thank you for that. So, okay.
Chris Hall:Well, Brandon, thank you so much for your time. I love having you on the show. If you ever to come back and talk about anything, you're always welcome.
Brandon Huffman:And that's
Chris Hall:it. For me, I'm trying to you know, with my podcast, I'm trying to talk about, obviously, accumulating wealth. And to me, you know, you can't be wealthy if you also don't have health. Right? And so sports plays a big part in people's like existence as far as like being healthy when they're young and translates really well into being an adult, you know, and being active and stuff like that.
Chris Hall:So I'm really a big fan of football. It obviously changed my life. I came from a pretty forward book upbringing and, you know, I've done pretty well for myself and I definitely tip my hand to football for that. That was a huge thing. I was actually supposed to go, I was at junior college, I was supposed to go to Western Missouri.
Chris Hall:And like last minute, the defensive coordinator made a couple phone calls, and I ended up going to Azusa, which I had never heard of before.
Brandon Huffman:Sure.
Chris Hall:But it was kind of like, do I want to play football in Missouri? Or do I want to play football in Southern California? And it was pretty easy choice. Yeah, But I think that's kinda where like, again, like, some of these kids, I think, are still on that same fence. You know?
Chris Hall:Like like, do they wanna play FCS? You know? They wanna try to find a division two school, or do they wanna go to JUCO? You know what I mean? So think, you know, I think the best thing you can do, like, me, I always said, I just want to go to school for free.
Chris Hall:Where I want to go is fine. Now, does division two schools obviously give scholarships? Do division three schools give
Brandon Huffman:They don't give scholarships for for athletic no athletic aid, but it's academic based. So if you are a good football player and you have good academics, they're gonna find academic aid for you. But they don't give athletic aid at the division three level. NAIA, they do. FCS, FBS, D2 all do.
Brandon Huffman:D2, they're smaller scholarship numbers than FBS and FCS. There's a lot of partial scholarships. Like we'll give you 6,000 or we'll give you 12,000. We'll cover your books and, you know, even the FCS level, they have 21 less scholarships to give than FBS. But division three is the one school that doesn't give athletic aid, but they find a way to give you a lot of academic aid to offset a lot of the costs.
Chris Hall:Okay, good. And that's kind of same way with NAI.
Brandon Huffman:Yeah, NAIA gives a little bit more on that because they are permitted to give athletic aid. So they give a little bit more on the athletic side, but then also can couple that with academic aid.
Chris Hall:Yeah, so when I went to Azusa, they gave me academic grant, athletic grant, and basically I ended up paying for my books. That's what I that's what I ended up paying for. So Yep. So okay. So that's kind of still the same then.
Chris Hall:Juvenile is still the same way then?
Brandon Huffman:Yeah.
Chris Hall:Okay. Any any advice for any kids out there listening and they're maybe a sophomore in high school?
Brandon Huffman:Control you can control. The best way to do that is have fantastic tape. All the traits help too, but if your film's not good, it doesn't matter how big, long, fast you are. They're not gonna be interested if the film sucks. So you can control that on Friday night, but then you also control that on Monday through Thursday in practice in the classroom, the weight room, then you control it on Saturday and Sunday with good decision making so that you don't offset everything that you work for by being stupid.
Brandon Huffman:So control what you can't control and focus on being good on the field, and then everything else should fall into place after that.
Chris Hall:That's great advice. Great advice. Thank you, brother. Appreciate your time.
Brandon Huffman:You bet.
Chris Hall:Have a wonderful weekend, and enjoy the move.
Brandon Huffman:Thank you. I will. I don't know if I'll enjoy the move, but I'll enjoy the destination.
Chris Hall:Sounds good. Thank you again.