Ryan Poles

They came in and talked about what they need, like what's the prototype.

I knew from what Dennis was bringing, scheme change over the last few years, it was going to take a little bit of time to get exactly what we needed.

But as you go through that season, you ask more questions.

You sit in the weekly e-mails of our roster all the way to last week here and then go through their UFA stacks and inserting where our players line up in there, both guys under contract and not.

You get more and more clarity as you go through.

So I feel pretty good about that.

Yeah, I think it paints a clear picture in terms of makeup.

I like to follow the whole journey.

I don't hold it against the 18-year-old that gets a million bucks to go to school and maybe didn't have his priorities straight.

I think most of us here, if that happened to us, we might be doing some crazy things too or maybe not focused where we should be focused.

But I want to see the learning lessons that come from that.

I want to understand their structure of the people they put around them.

I want to understand how they battle through adversity.

I think the toughest thing is when there's an out to transfer when things get hard.

We hurt the resilience of our young players.

So I want to learn through that and understand how they grew throughout their whole deal.

That doesn't mean we would eliminate everybody, but we know what's coming in the building and what we need to lean into because I think we have to pick up some of that education on our side more than back in the day where colleges were kind of doing that education along the way.

And I don't blame the college coaches.

That's a really tough position.

You've got to compete.