Recruiting can be a funny thing sometimes.

Colleges tend to fall in love with a player that fits every physical category. Is the player 6-foot-2? Does he weigh 225 pounds? Does he run a 4.4-second 40-yard dash?

Those are all valid questions, and at some places, if a player does not fit that bill, he won’t play.

And, at the end of the day, there’s nothing wrong with those benchmarks. They eliminate some candidates who might not fit the bill.

But, also, sometimes they eliminate players who really can play.

For Bentley, which plays in D2, coach Saj Thakkar does as good a job of anyone of not chasing measurables when looking for prospective players. We caught up with him Saturday at the New England Football Coaches Clinic at Gillette Stadium.

Thakkar looks for the best players, and doesn’t worry about the numbers as much.

One example is running back Vinnie Holmes, a star at Mansfield who was maybe a little small for D1. But he has been a star for Bentley.

“That’s kind of what we’re all about,” Thakkar said. “The measurables are great, but at the end of the day, you’ve got to play on Saturdays. I think Vinnie is a great example. People might have said, not tall enough, maybe not fast enough, and now he’s one of the best running backs in all of Division 2, a 1,000-yard rusher, first-team all-conference, a leader on our team. That’s what we want. I really value versatility in all three phases. We want guys that, maybe if you’re someone who’s a great player, but is he a running back? Is he a slot? Is he a DB? To me, those are the guys we want, because they’re football guys.”

Bentley ends up recruiting guys that would fit in at the FCS level. And it’s a winning strategy.

“I think the guys on our team now, even the guys we have coming in this class, the class of ’24, a lot of the guys I’m looking at, and having the experience of coaching at the high FCS level at a high academic place, a lot of the guys that we have coming in could play at that level of football,” Thakkar said. “For whatever reason, they just missed out. Really for us, our philosophy is to get the best possible players we can out of Massachusetts who might have just missed out on a Boston College or Harvard for whatever reason, but want to be in Boston, want to be a great academic place, who are really good players.”

Two players in that vein who are in this class are Duxbury running back and linebacker Alex Barlow and Peabody wide receiver and defensive back Eli Batista.

“I think both those kids, if they might have checked one more box, are Division 1 players,” Thakkar said. “To me, they’re both talented enough to be Division 1 players. For whatever reason, a kid like Eli, maybe it’s his height. For Alex, maybe it’s his speed. But they’re both tremendous players. Both those guys, could start on offense, could start on defense, and are impact players on special teams. It goes back to our philosophy of finding the best possible players. They fit exactly what we’re looking for.”