PTI - Could Shemar Stewart Sit Out the ENTIRE Season?

Episode Date: July 18, 2025

Tony Kornheiser and Pablo Torre discuss the British Open, Shemar Stewart, and Damian Lillard. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, sports fans, the ESPN app has all of ESPN all in one place. The ESPN app is your home to thousands of live events, ESPN shows, and originals across every ESPN network and service. And now you can check if you already have ESPN Unlimited as part of your TV package for no additional calls. Visit activate.esPN.com to learn how to access your account or sign up, then start streaming in the ESPN app. It's all of ESPN all in one place. Sign up or activate now. Part of the eruption, but I'm Pablo Torre, and I am pleased to be back on PTI with you, Tony. Tony Kornheiser. You know, just turned off the television.

Lloyd Howell. Yeah, he's out. You're not going to watch this. You're not going to watch this. Oh, boy. To hear what you have to say. Welcome to PTI, boys and girls. Yeah.

Wilbon has the day off. I am pleased to welcome our great friend, the man who's been finding out a lot of stuff on his podcast. Pablo Tori finds out, Mr. Pablo Tori finds out. Mr. Pablo Torre. And we will begin today with the British Open. Scores were a little better today than yesterday. At the top of the leaderboard is the world number one, Scotty Schaeffler, who shot a seven under 64 today right behind him is Matt Fitzpatrick at minus nine after a great par save on 18.

And just behind him at minus eight is Brian Harmon. The three of them are major winners. Harmon won the British two years ago. Pablo, who are what are you focused on as this tournament makes the turn into the weekend? So I was obsessed with the fact that there's this Buddhist monk from Thailand whose name, by the way, pronouncing it gives me the yips. I'm not even going to try. But in the realm of existentialism at the open, Scotty Schaeffler is actually the guy I want to talk about, not the monk. Scottie Schaeffler, Tony, came into this being so thoughtful as to admit he wrestles with why he wants to win stuff like this so badly.

And here he is atop the leaderboard. And so to me, as, again, a storyline hunter, a profile writer to be, I'm thinking, this guy is proving that introspection is not mutually exclusive with dominance. And he might just win this and be the guy that, of course, the PGA was hoping for when everyone went to live. And here he is in the post sort of brokered peace era doing it anyway. Yeah, I'm sort of sad you didn't want to talk about the monk because then I could have said big hitter of the Lama and people would have laughed at that. But I'll just move on. Those three guys at the top of the leaderboard right now are very imposing. They've each won a major, and Schaeffler has won a bunch of majors at this point. But even though Harmon and Fitzpatrick are not as long as Schaeffler, they can still win the British Open because the British Open doesn't require that.

The course isn't particularly long, and there's a lot of bounce to it. And in a way, the courses in the rotation for the British Open, in a way, many of them reward artistry as much as power. They reward creativity as much as power. So, I mean, I don't count them necessarily out. In a normal circumstance here, I would say that if you are within six shots of the lead going into the weekend, you have a chance. I wouldn't say seven because that's just one shot too many because you've got to jump everybody ahead of you. And I'm not sure you can do that with seven, but six. And so we find out that that would be minus four.

And there are 11 players currently minus four or better. I'm reluctant to take that position now, though, because one of the people you have to jump is Scotty Schaeffler. He's at the top of the board. He's the best player in the world. You're not, not everybody's going to jump Scotty Scher. That's just not the way that that's going to. going to happen. I mean, I think he's in a great, I'm not saying he's going to win. I think he's in a great position to win. And I know there was that press conference earlier in the week where he was

existential about things. But people who know him well say he is the most competitive guy out there still, you know, that he wants to win and burns to win. Yeah, we don't need to be sea ball, hitball. You could also, by the way, maybe be contemplative about whether any of this brings you happiness as well also still knowing nothing else that might satisfy you as much anyway. And that's totally legit. By the way, did you see the weather that rolled in there about 1 o'clock Eastern? There's not a course in the United States that would not have stopped that tournament, not one.

And this is what they do all the time. You can go out at 8 in the morning and have a lovely day. Guy goes out at 12 and plays in a monsoon. That's one of the great attractions of the British Open. We move now to the resignation under fire of Lloyd Howell, the head of the NFLPA. Howell's leadership had come under scrutiny by reports in ESPN and by you, Pablo, on your podcast. I kind of feel like this is your story. So why don't you tell us what happened here?

Yeah, this is the story that has set the NFL and the union on fire behind the scenes. And there are two big dominoes, Tony, that I was responsible for, both of which are suppressed secret arbitration rulings that neither the NFL nor the NFL PA wanted anybody else to know about. This is senior leadership at the top in coordination with their adversary agreeing on the same thing. So immediately you're like, why? Why do they agree? And it goes back to this idea that Lloyd Howell has a personal conflict of interest and was installed at the top of the NFLPA by a guy named J.C. Treader who was the president of the union. And there is so much more that I've reported on this, but just know this. The way he arrived to power at the

the union was so secretive and so engineered that it hid key aspects of his resume, the fact that he was embroiled in a giant fraud settlement as the CFO of Booz Allen, the consulting firm, the fact that, frankly, the people who voted on him didn't know his identity until the day they had to vote because of stuff that J.C. Treader did. So from the beginning, this was confusing. He had no union experience, no sports experience, was not a lawyer. And he comes in and simultaneously, he and J.C. Treader are overseeing the suppression of information about collusion of partial victory there, as well as most recently, this thing that J.C. Treader got in trouble for talking about running backs should fake injuries in order to avoid, you know, having to show up and play. And so it's a lot. There's so much going on. Yeah. I am unfamiliar with most of this story. I know that Lloyd Howell pretty much just got to the job. It only had been there for two years. So the questions that occurred to me right away were,

Did they do enough investigating of him before he got this job? Was there anything in his background that they might have found that would have disqualified him from the job? I was going to ask you if there's a conflict of interest here. I was going to ask you if in any way it is thought that he enriched himself. You can answer any of them if you want. Oh, yeah. He was also a known paid consultant of the Carlisle Group, which is a private equity firm that has the ability to be on the short list. They made it to the short list to buy shares of NFL teams.

So on its face, he had a business relationship in conflict with his job. That was already number one, an insane thing. But then number two, Tony, beyond even the Booz Allen stuff, it's the fact that this guy, the way he was doing business, man, we're talking about Don Van Netta today reporting that he was on the hook in trouble with the finance department of the union for expensing strip club visits. This is the little stuff, the irresponsible stuff, as well as the big picture stuff around. He wanted to protect J.C. Tredder, who installed him from being in trouble.

Because that guy wanted to take over the union later down the road. It's Game of Thrones Palace Intrigue on every possible level, and the players were the ones who were losing because of it. I'm going to take 20 seconds here, and that's all, to say to people out there that heading a union in sports is historically very important. It goes back to Marvin Miller, who changed. the game of baseball. Yes. Who's probably the most important guy who ever did this? Gene Upshaw did this for a long time with the NFLPA, and there seemed to be a lot of peace.

But it's possible that players said, no, he was too accommodating, and they wanted a different style of management. The other thing I would say is players now make hundreds of millions of dollars and take no risk business-wise, because they don't own the teams. But it's an important job. Yeah. Anyway, go ahead. Oh, it's the most important job opposing the most powerful league, and they want an 18th game,

What do you do if you're the union? It turns out you install a guy who is truly accused of being a Manchurian candidate. That's how bad he was at that job. But we move now, Tony, to a labor story of a different kind. Because rookie defensive end, Shamar Stewart, is weighing his career options due to a contract dispute with the team that drafted him 17th overall, the Cincinnati Bengals. Now, Stewart reportedly objects to language about the potential voiding of guaranteed money that the team is using for the first time.

And if Stewart does not sign, he could sit out the season and read it. re-enter next year's draft or even challenge the rule that currently prevents him from returning to college. And so, Tony, could you see Shamar Stewart sitting out the season? I could certainly see him sitting it out if he was stuck in Cincinnati. I am wondering if there's any way to get back to college. I don't know what this rule is now, but I know that college football is pro football now. College players get paid. He could probably make more money going back to college than the first year of his NFL rookie contract.

He's a first-round draft choice. That's a fact. I can't imagine there's any team in the United States of America in college that wouldn't want this guy. Is there a rule against it? Maybe, maybe not. But we're entering into a period of time here through NIL and stuff like that where all the rules are going to have to be rewritten. They're going to have to be. I'm also curious about this.

It is being said that he abhorred. to a particular clause in the contract that has to do with behavior, that if you behave in a certain way, they don't owe you this money anymore. I don't know what that means. Nobody has said what this behavior is. Nobody has come out publicly about that. Is this just aimed at him? Has he shown a type of behavior over some period of time that they're worried about? Or as Wilbon would say, is this just catch-all hocus-pocus junk? So, you know, that those are things that make me interested in the story. Yeah. Yeah, I love the story because this is directly flowing out of the bigger picture topic you raised just now. The whole idea that this is a job for a union that knows what it's doing. This is America talking about labor relations through the juiciness of an individual sports contract. And so in this case, it's the question of plausibility. He has, because of the way that money is now in college sports, the plausible threat. of I don't need to do this job that didn't exist before in the same way. And frankly, I am rooting for him to test the limits via the court system of those rules that need updating.

But I am also realistic that when it comes to the difficulty of actually carrying through on holding out, sitting out, it's the same big picture topic, right? Who has more financial pain tolerance? The owners, the team, or the players in question? This is the same big picture topic that haunts. any union, any individual player. And so I think they'll probably get it done, but guaranteed money again. That was at the core of that collusion ruling I referenced. It's the core of this story, too.

There's just one other part of this, which is if you're Cincinnati, at what point do you say, you know what, let's just trade them? It's not going to work for us. Let's just trade them and everybody moves on. Let's take a break coming up. Baseball is back underway today. What should we expect from the upcoming trade deadline? We will ask him Kirkjun.

We will also ask him whether the red hot brewers are likely to chase down Wilbon's Cubs. Do you think the NFLPA will quickly move to put someone else in? Or do you think this is going to take an awfully long time? They got a clean house. J.C. Treader is the next name that I am watching. Most underrated name in the story is that guy

who's been behind all of this, Tony. The second half of the baseball season is officially underway today, which makes it a perfect time for a visit from our great friend ESPN baseball analyst Tim Kirchon. Let's start with the All-Star game. Everybody watched it. Sort of a surprise ending from people like me that didn't know that was coming. What do you think baseball learned from this year's All-Star game? Well, they learned that a great way to break a tie game when one of the teams is out of pitchers is to have a swing off. It was wildly successful. The fans loved it. More important, the players loved it. I was on the field for the whole event, and I was standing amongst the American League players. And when Brett Rooker hit home runs in two of his first three swings, those guys were going crazy.

They were jumping around like school children. And then when Kyle Schwerber came up and hit three straight homers, the National League side was going crazy. So it was a really fun way to finish a tie game. in an exhibition game. I asked Corbyn Carroll of the Diamondbacks after the game on the radio, what was that? He said that was madness. But it was a really good madness. And I hope they use it again when we have another tie game and one of the teams has run out of pitchers. But we're not going to use this in the regular season. Sorry. I'm way too old for that. In two weeks, in two weeks, baseball is getting back to business. Trade deadly. line, right? So madness-wise, what do we expect? Well, we got to keep our eyes on the Diamondbacks

because they are the key team here for me. They have a bunch of players that could really help other teams. Zach Allen and Merrill Kelly are two quality Major League starting pitchers who could really help the Mets or the Yankees or virtually every team out there. The Diamondbacks also have Eugenio Suarez, a great home run hitter, and he made a great defensive play in the ninth inning of the All-Star game. So if the Diamondbacks are the big sellers that we think they're going to be, that's the team we have to keep our eye on. It's going to be, in a way, a pretty robust trade deadline for several teams. So if we're getting back to the homers for a second here, I want to look ahead to the award stuff. Cal Raleigh, big dumper, right? He's the fan favorite. So much.

MVP, AL MVP talk. Could he actually win this ahead of Aaron Judge? I think he could because he's become a folk hero and he leads the league in home runs and RBI as a catcher. But he's not just a catcher. He is an elite defensive catcher and he's the leader of that team in every way. However, I would still vote for Aaron Judge as the MVP. other than homers and RBIs, he leads the league in virtually every offensive category. Last year, he had one of the greatest years, a right-handed hitter has ever had. It was the best year by anyone since Barry Bond's retired, and this year is even better than last year. So if you vote for Cal Raleigh, I don't have a problem.

But if I'm voting, I would vote for Aaron Judge. He's been the best player in the league this year. We will get you out of here on this, and we do this. because Wilbon is not with us today, and we assume he's watching. Milwaukee is just a game behind the Cubs. They're making Wilbon very nervous. They swept the Dodgers last week, I believe, in Milwaukee. They're in L.A. for three more starting tonight.

Do you like them more than the Cubs in the second half of the season, Tim? Look, it's really close. The brewers are good, and they are charging, and I'm confident they're going to make the playoffs now that the athletes. Jacob Mizorowski for the whole second half. But I think Will Bond's Cubs are going to hang on and win this division because their offense is really good. The Dodgers are the only team in the major leagues that have scored more runs than the Cubs this season. And in an era where it's so hard to get a hit, it's so hard against the dominant pitching that we see. And the Cubs have a very

good offensive team. And I think they're going to hold off the Brewers. But I repeat, I think both of those teams are going to the playoffs, and I think both could be dangerous in October. Thank you, Tim, as always. Thank you. Thank you, Tim. Let's take one last break, still to come. How should we look at Damian Lillard's return to the Blazers? And is Bill Belichick about to get a behind-the-scenes docu-series after all? I hope Wilbon's happy that Tim said that the Cubs would hang on. And that's going to make them happy. He watches it. He heard him from here. Happy time, people.

Happy 68th birthday, Nick Faldo. It's British Open week. The first major Faldo won was the 1987 British Open at Muirfield. Prior to that, the British press called him Foldo because he hadn't won a major. Fowth had 18 pars on his Sunday round and beat Paul Asinger by one shot. Faldo won two more British Opens in 1990 at the old course at St. Andrews and in 1992 in a return trip to Muirfield. Faldo also won three masters for his six majors. Those are probably the most coveted majors for European player.

Faldo went on to a long career in the TV booth at CBS. Pablo, do you know how I know? He had 18 parts on Sunday because I was there covering the open. Beyond how you got over there, which I imagine was by Steamship, are you an Anglophile? Are you nostalgic for those times, Tony? You cover it Nick Faldo. Love the British Open.

covering the British Open, did it twice, loved it. Happy anniversary, Tony Miola. On this day, 31 years ago, the New York Jets and their head coach Pete Carroll, decided to sign the US men's national team soccer goalie to try out as their kicker, even though Miola had not put on shoulder pads since the eighth grade. Miola showed a powerful leg and great accuracy. He made it to the final round of cuts before losing to veteran Nick Lowry. Miola's soccer career landed him in the National Soccer Hall of Fame.

He was a goalie for the U.S. men's team in World Cups in 1990, 1994, and he was a goalie in the MLS from 1996 to 2006. Probably, you know, I was a little surprised they tried out a goalie for the kicking. You know, there's this Kelleher kid at Columbia. I've been watching tape of him. Turns out these goalkeepers can really boom long kicks, Tony. This is the thing goalkeepers are known to do. It makes total sense on that physical level.

Yeah, maybe Dino can do that. Happy trails to unemployment for Damien Lillard. The nine-time All-Stars old team is his new team. Lillard reportedly agreed to a three-year $42 million deal with the Trailblazers weeks after the Bucks bought them out. Between those two teams, the 35-year-old Lillard will be paid $141 million guaranteed over the next two years despite spending next season recuperating from a torn Achilles. And what makes this story extra riches that Lillard requested a trade out of Portland

to Miami two years ago, and the Blazers sent him to the bucks instead. Yes, Damien Lillard today, an amazing offensive player, does nothing defensively. That might be a problem in his homecoming, the whole stopping the other team part. So much money. One omission, the Cubs beat the Red Sox this afternoon ending Boston's 10-game winning streak, and let's go quickly to the big finish. Front Office Sports reports that a Bill Belichick, North Carolina docu series will air on Hulu. surprised? I'm not only unsurprised. I might be podcasting about this sometime in the future.

Inter-Miamis coach says he prefers that Leo Messi rest rather than play in the league's all-star game. Does that make sense? No, no. He's the biggest star the MLS has. If I were the commissioner in the league, I'd say, are you kidding me? Shut up with this. Baseball extended the leave of Guardians reliever Luis Ortiz as it probes unusual betting on some of his individual pitches. Your thoughts? We did a whole episode of my show. about unusual betting activity in the NBA. It is complicated. Good luck solving it if you're the federal government.

Justin Verlander goes for his first win of the season at Toronto tonight. You like his chances. We love Justin Verlander on this show, but he's 0 and 7 at the moment. That's rough. Last one, WNBA All-Star Weekend starts tonight. Do you have any predictions?

Sabrina Yonescu in the three-point contest I like, but I want to see NBA versus WMBA again at some All-Star weekend somewhere. That was great. for Sabrina was amazing. Can you more of that? We're out of time. We're trying to do better the next time,

and I'm Tony Cornhizer. And I'm Pablo Torre, not Mike Wilbon. Thank you for watching, although Mike Wilbon is the guest on Pablo Torre finds out today instead of doing this show.