The Wild Tech Behind College Recruiting

From VHS tapes mailed to coaches to AI-powered scouting platforms, college recruiting has undergone a massive technological transformation. In this episode, we break down how recruiters find players across fragmented databases, how social media personality analysis is changing the game, and who the key innovators were that disrupted an industry still struggling to sync up. 00:00:00 - Introduction and overview of recruiting chaos 00:01:15 - The analog era: VHS tapes, road trips, and regional scouting before 1996 00:03:30 - The rise of recruiting platforms and the fragmentation problem 00:05:45 - How stats are stored across competing databases and why nothing syncs 00:07:30 - Innovators who changed the game: early digital scouting pioneers 00:09:15 - Social media scouting and AI-driven personality profiling 00:11:00 - How recruiters measure character and culture fit through online presence 00:13:00 - What set the disruptors apart from traditional methods 00:14:30 - How you could shake up the recruiting industry today 00:15:30 - Wrap-up and final thoughts This podcast episode was fully generated by AI — research, script, voices, and production. Built with Claude, Piper TTS, and automated pipeline tooling.