The Athletic Football Show: A show about the NFL - Football GM: The tush push, kickoff changes and hip drops

Episode Date: March 23, 2024

In this week's edition of the Football GM, Mike and Randy discuss the interesting rules that will be brought up in the NFL owners meeting this weekend. From there, the guys turn they attention to J.J. McCarthy and Caleb Willams pro day and how it all played out. Lastly, we wrap up our discussion with the topic that includes evaluating butts in the NFL.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is the Athletic Football Show's Football GM podcast. Welcome everybody to the Football GM podcast. Mike Sando here, along with the GM, Randy Mueller. How you doing? Randy, is your bracket busted yet in the NCAAs? How about this? First off, I'm doing great, but I might be the only guy in the country, Mike, that doesn't play the bracket game.

I never have. I just, and you know this from us doing this show. I struggle making picks even on NFL games on this show because this reason, I don't like it to ruin my viewing pleasure. And if I have a bracket filled out and I enjoy watching the games, then I have a rooting interest that I just can't enjoy the game because I want to be right. And so I want my bracket to be right. So I just, I can't do it.

Sorry. I think you're right. So here's an example. So I had, I'm in a survivor one, you know, where you pick the teams to advance. So in the first round, you're trying to find somebody who might win and then not win a lot after. So I had, I had Kansas going. and they're playing Samford. Well, any good person without a rooting interest is hoping Samford wins that game.

And I had to kind of like sort of hope that Kansas would win. It felt wrong to you, but I was for my own selfish purposes. And then it came down to a questionable call at the end. Do you get, we get the women's tournament going too. You a watcher? I know. I like it. I do like it.

And, you know, I'm a Northwest guy, so I always root for the Northwest teams. But I end up rooting for a lot of West Coast teams, just. because of my biased. And I know Gonzaga are really good, so I'll follow them. And I've actually followed in the NCAA more this year than ever before. Have kind of a rooting interest because I'm a Seattle Storm fan as well. So I like to see what's going on in the women's game. You are a storm season ticket holder, correct?

Partially, yes, I am. I enjoy the games. I think it's a lot of fun. And, yeah, I always have been. I think it's a high-quality basketball, so I enjoy watching it. Yeah, absolutely. Well, we'll be watching that. I do have Kansas alive in my survivor pool.

We'll see where it goes from there. Hey, end of that game, that Sanford, Kansas game, you know, where they had the defensive player for Sanford made the amazing blocked shot, and then they called it a foul, which I don't really fault the refs in a breakaway situation when a guy goes up like that and the guy goes down hard. You almost have to, you're going to call that foul probably. It's just 99 out of 100 times that is a foul, and it just looked like a foul. but it wasn't a foul on replay.

We've talked about replay in NFL. Should there be some sort of a coaching mechanism there to challenge that or something in the tournament? I sort of feel like that should be fixed. Yeah, the finality of it is real. That's for sure. And I think you're right. In that situation, the ref called the fall, not the foul, right? Yeah.

Because it was an awkward fall. And like you said, nine out of ten of those are fouls. But they're probably, you know, it seems like we do make a lot of rules for, for an exception like this, but it reminded me of the Saints' playoff game a few years ago when I forget who were they playing, but the defensive back annihilated the receiver before the ball got there, the Rams, yeah. And obviously that was a penalty. It sparked a lot of, you know, judgment calls and how much you should be affected by an outside source or an eye in the sky. But I do think it would make sense to have an eye in the sky. In basketball, they have it already,

right? Every time there's a last second shot, they go back and review. that and half these last two minute calls when the ball goes out of bounds they review that. So what would be wrong with just including this? I can't see it being an added expense. That's for sure. Yeah. No. Well, yeah, yeah, you don't want everything to be reviewed, but it felt like they were reviewing everything except for the thing that needed to be reviewed at the end of the game. So. Right. No doubt. I think the NBA does that because you can challenge a foul in the NBA, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, there's a mechanism for that. So I felt like for this, look, I mean, part of the tournament is these lessons. It's not always fair and you're going to,

You know, sometimes you're going to lose, and that's just the way it goes, and the ref doesn't see everything. But I felt for that situation, we'd love to see that, be able to be addressed. So anyway, tournament time, it's always fun. Hope if you do a bracket, hope it goes well. But Randy, I think you've got the good read on this thing. You're never going to get it right. So, you know, why even try? Why not just enjoy the purity of it to the extent that it exists?

Talking about rules, changes and stuff, I wanted the segue into what's going on with the league. the NFL is going to have their league owners meetings in Orlando starting this weekend and running a couple days and then everyone will be out of there quickly. But there's a few interesting things to go through here. One is the word the tush push is going to stay in the league. And I kind of like this, Randy, because I want to see how the Eagles are affected by not having Jason Kelsey. We've talked a little bit about the key to that play. It's been kind of a fun play. But when I used to sit as a beat reporter and watch the games when I was working at the Tacoma News Tribune, my partner was Dave Bowling, kind of a mentor of mine, a friend of ours.

And Dave had played center and was a long snapper on the Louisville teams, the Lee Corso Louisville teams way back. And he used to always have those binoculars trained on the center so he'd be giving me these insights of what was going on that. But when we were talking about the tush push last year, Dave texted me and he said, it's my contention that the key to the eagle's success on the sneak is all about Kelsey's ability to snap, get low immediately, and root out the nose. Probably the toughest challenge for a center. And he loved, Dave loved this play being in there. People said it's bad for football.

He's like, BS, it is football. I'm coming at you. You can't stop me. Offensive lineman's favorite play is either a sneak, a fullback dive, power, those types of things. Where do you stand on this? And then do you agree that the Eagles are going to be maybe diminished a lot in this by Kelsey not being there with Kelsey retiring? Well, I think Dave has some good points for sure. And I do think we always want to over-legislate a lot of this stuff. And I think a lot of the pushback from this play, no pun intended on the

pushback, comes from the standpoint that, in my opinion, aesthetically it looks bad, right? It looks like a rugby play. It looks like a non kind of football scrum per se. And I understand some of the old guard might not like that. I get it. But I'm kind of with you. I want some new innovative moves and new innovative things to be, you know, kind of vetted out within the NFL ranks. And like you say, maybe it's a defensive group playing this a little different, a little better. They've got to match this. I always say all along, defensive coaches are really good. Well, figure this out, figure how to stop the tush push. You know, there's a lot to be said for being able to not give up a yard and a half at any time during the game.

So figure that out a little bit. But yeah, I think the Kelsey portion of it will be interesting because I think you're right. Nobody did it like him. In fact, nobody doesn't like the Eagles. But I want to see somebody bow their neck a little bit and figure out how we can stop this rather than let's just pass another rule to change it. As long as we can say, hey, it's not a injury risk. It's not a player safety issue. I haven't seen the numbers, but I haven't surely heard any that say, hey, this play causes failures.

Do you think they signed Sequin Barclay for 12 million a year so they could run the push? Probably not. I don't know. I think it helps when you have a quarterback like Jalen Hertz that can squat 500 pounds. I'll say that. So if you got a guy pushing behind him like Sequin, maybe. That's what everybody focuses on. That's what everybody focuses on.

Just be interesting to see to me if they just become okay at it instead of being almost like a 95% win for them to get it. Does it change some of their strategy? And are we going to see Sequin Barclay get some of those touches that so far Hertz has been getting? I think that's just be an interesting one to watch as we've kind of debated not just the legality or the aesthetics of the play, but what's the key to making it work? and it is everybody, but Kelsey's a huge part with his hand on that ball first. Well, and he even admits, he's not going to be there. Yeah, he even admitted that he may fudge a little bit, right, with the movement of that ball. And he actually got called a time or two in some inopportune times and had to face up,

face the music that, hey, I screwed that up. So it will be interesting to see if anybody pushes the envelope, whoever the next center is for the Eagles. Yeah, and a lot of times, Randy, on these rule change things, I just kind of, I sort of fall asleep and they gloss over. These are ones are a little bit interesting to me. We're going to talk quickly on the hip drop taple and the kickoff situation. But one of the other things that Rich McKay, you know, who's always been in the middle of these competition committee, talked about on his annual call with media before in advance of the meetings was the idea that, you know, we've heard before, but the trade deadline must be being moved back and they're, you know, they're sort of afraid.

Or they say they're afraid there's going to be, you know, people offloading too many. players when they're out of the race and it comes on to a looks like a tanking type situation. Do you buy that? Would you want to have it move back? As a GM, is there an advantage to having it when it is or even earlier to be able to see a head around the corner if you're good at that? Or who would benefit if it was moved back? Would there be anything lost for the good of the game? What do you think? Well, these are discussions that we've had in the league for years. I remember Joel Buster, the longtime personnel chief of the league. him and I discussing this, gosh, early 90s, you know, we would have these discussions.

And Joel's pushback to me was always, hey, we don't want to create this buyers and sellers, we don't want to create tanking, we don't want to create bad teams becoming good or, you know, at the end of a year. I don't know. I don't know that any of that floats the boat for deciding for me. I'll just speak from a team builder standpoint. I think football is different from baseball, different. different from basketball in that I think you need a longer period of time to judge and really evaluate your own team.

And I thought for years that you give me six weeks, I barely know what I have after six weeks. I was always on the side of, hey, let's push this out the seven or eight weeks into the regular season. And I think they've done that for the most part. But if there is sentiment to push it out even further, now that the season is 17 weeks with a buy and it looks like he might even go to 18, I would have no problem if they pushed it out another week or two. I don't know that you can penalize a team that's not necessarily in the playoff form in week 12 if they want to give something up for the future. Most of the time they're not going to give up a player that has a contract for years to come

because that's a valued asset. You may give up a rental, kind of like they do in baseball, for a short amount of time. And if you're willing to do that, you know, God bless you. Why is it bad for the commanders to trade their two outside rushers if that's what they choose to do? They went to different spots last year. That's really the concept that the league has pushed back against for moving the trade deadline back. I'll be honest, I don't see a problem with it. I'm fine with it.

I think it adds a strategic element to team building. It also adds a way to replace players that may be hurt. let's say you do have a running back go down week two. And he's your bread and butter for, you know, if it's Barclay or Josh Jacobs or one of these guys that's been paid big money to, it gives these teams a chance then to react to that later in the season. And so I don't see that as being wrong. So you'd have to tell me why we're against it. I think the old reasons I've stated, and I don't know that that really moves the meter for me.

I just think the fact that we've done it forever, and that's why we've done it. don't want to change, I don't think that's acceptable. Well, here's the other thing. You talk about maneuvering for draft position and all of that. That stuff's way more impactful to your team in basketball, like you were sort of intimating. And that's why in the NBA, they have, you know, protected picks, right? You make a trade and it's not, you don't have to give up your first if it's in the top five or the top three. Yeah, a lottery pick.

That's right. Yeah, exactly. One of my good follows on Twitter that people should check out is Jake. Grossman Zero, okay? He's a Michigan law student, and he's got a bunch of kind of cool graphs and graphics and kind of analytics-y things. And one of them is this table that he tweeted out there, retweeted that was actually put together by Michael Lopez, who does data and analytics for the NFL. And it's got this really cool chart that shows just how much more valuable the early Pixar in the draft to a team in the NBA especially compared to baseball, NFL, hockey's on there, too.

It's not even close. So the idea that you could unload certain players in the NFL and then just really, really put yourself in great position for the future, that's a lot easier said than done, right? It's just not the way that it's going to work. Plus the cap now kind of manipulates or constricts what you can do as well. So there's enough factors in there that they're not just allowing open borders where people can just come and go on each team and move without some repercussions. So I think there's enough insulation in there that it's probably worth considering. Okay, so our last couple rules, things that I think are interesting.

I wanted to tie together the hip-drop tackle conversation and the new kickoff conversation. Because to me, they're related in a sense. Troy Vincent, Rich McKay from the league seemed to always be itching to eliminate something. And this year it's the hip drop tackle, right? They want to get that out. And sometimes cynically it feels like, hey, we're just checking a box, any box, just about every year to show how serious we are about player safety and to be at the forefront of it. Not saying they don't care about player safety, but sometimes it feels like these things are agreed upon without really having been fully thought through. Now, Troy said, hey, look, there was resistance to removing the blindside block, the crackback, the horse collar, and all these things worked out pretty well.

And he may have a point there. But the reason they're proposing, Randy, the adoption of this XFL style kickoff is because they implemented safety-related changes to the traditional kickoff and ruined it. They ruined the kickoff. It's now a horrific play. It's just a terrible play. No one's going to watch it. And here's the proof, Randy, that this. they don't think through or can't project the unintended consequences.

Because last year, they put in the fair catch rule on the kickoffs, where you could fair catch these things. And the league said, hey, we've done this modeling. And we think the rate of returns on kickoffs will drop from 38%, which it was and had been in that range for years, to 31%. And guess what, it went to 22%. So a complete miscalculation of what would happen. So now here we are saying we want to take out the hip drop and we're going to not really enforce it during the games. We're going to write letters to players on Monday and try to correct them,

this, that, and the other. What do you think? Let's start with hip drop before we get to kick off. You want it out? I think this was initially talked about after that Mark Andrews injury, you and I kind of, oh, here we go again. And I regretted it a little bit because I felt like I just sort of talked off the top of my head. I hadn't really thought it through.

We've had a little bit more time. Now, you and I have talked to this with coaches at the Combine and stuff. We had some good conversations. What do you think? Well, I don't know that my initial reaction is a lot different. And they'll say it this way. The hip drop tackle in particular, I like the idea that Troy Vincent said they may legislate it on a Monday more than on Sunday. Because I don't think they can give these.

officials one more thing to think about. And I'm not going to slam the officials, but I'm going to say this. Even the basic duties of spotting the ball seem to be challenging for these crews as constructed in the NFL now. They've got so many criteria of how they construct these crews that I think it inhibits from having the best in the world do the job. So that's where I really have a problem. Now you're going to ask these guys who, and gals, there's both, to, to, to,

to legislate something that I'm not sure they're going to be able to understand. I'm not sure they're going to be able to do it in a timely fashion. And it may indeed involve winning and losing a game. So I just want them to do the basics and allow these referees to do the basics so that they don't change the outcome of games. And I could see this rule itself, if implemented, and if it's being, you know, called on Sundays, I could see it again in a judgment way changing games.

and that makes me nervous. So I just, I guess my initial reaction was I don't have faith in legislating it. And my reaction six months later is I don't have faith in legislating it. But I do like the fact that it's going to be done possibly more on a Monday than a Sunday, if that makes sense. Yep. Absolutely. Then the kickoff thing, I mean, you've got to have some thoughts on that because you've

been in that XFL realm. Yeah, I'll say this. And I've had a couple teams already reach out to me about it because they knew it was being discussed. And I don't, did you really explain the difference? Do our listeners really know what they're asking? Because I'm with you that the kickoff play in the NFL has become almost irrelevant. Oh yeah. Yeah. It's a time to get up and go get a soda pop. So here's the proposal, you know, as we're talking about it now. And I kind of, I kind of like it. I want to try anything over, you know, I'd rather have a punt pass and kick competition, you know, or, or, you know, quarterback challenge.

rather than these. The Pro Bowl games. Yeah. Yeah. It's probably, I wouldn't go to that far, but the kickoff is horrific. So the idea would be this.

Okay, so the kicker would be standing by himself at the kicking teams with the ball and a tee at his own 35. The coverage team would be across the 50 at the return team's 40. And then the return team, you know, blockers would be just on the other side of that, like at their own 30 to 35 in that range. And there'd be two returners deep. And so basically what the kicker would have to do, he would have to land that ball between the zero and 20 yard line.

And if he kicked it short of the 20, then the return team gets the ball at its own 40. If the kicker flies the ball in the end zone, the return team starts at its own 35. If the kicker bounces the ball into the end zone, it can be returned. If it is down, the receiving team starts over at the minus 20, which is a penalty for them. So the receiving team does have some incentive to bring it out, but the kicker really has incentive to put it into play.

And then we're putting the coverage team and the blocking return team guys in closer to proximity to each other, but not, you know, so far that they have this huge running start down there. It would be a little bit of a tighter window. So I would love to see, like I tell you this, I'll be watching those in week one, all of them just to see how they go. Would I be disappointed? Do you think it would be exciting? What do you think?

Well, I lived it. For two years in the XFL, we had the exact rule in place. So there is quite a bit of data that has been gathered on this. And I would just say this. What it does is, like you said, takes a whole. away high speed long distance collisions because one line is 10 yards away from the other line and that's where the belt bulk of the people are lined up. It does put a little onus on the kicker to kind of place the ball more than just kick it through the end zone like we're seeing

now. But I'll say this. When I first saw it and when the XFL was going to put this into play, I kind of fought it. I said, this looks crazy and I don't know if we want to do this. This isn't football, you know, your initial old guy on the couch on the porch reaction. But the more I was around it, the more I loved the nuances with it, because what it did was it did make kickoffs relevant. Everyone really is returned. You can make creases that the returner can hit, and it makes for an exciting play. It's penalized, like you said, in several different ways if it isn't executed correctly. And so there are some big penalties, like if it can, kicker kicks it out of bounds.

I believe in the XFL, they brought it all the way back to the other 40. So you got the ball in your opponent's side of the field. So it was severe penalties if you didn't execute it correctly. But I had a couple teams, like I said, NFL guys say, did it change the kind of returner you sought after? And did it change the implementation, employing players differently with a different skill set?

Because the blocking isn't really blocking for, per se. It's just kind of turning a guy's shoulder. If I'm blocking you picture, it's almost like screening out for a rebound, right? I don't have to go kill anybody. I just have to get body position to create a little crease, and then it's all about timing of that return or hitting it. So I ended up liking it. I like it a lot. I would encourage people if you have doubts, watch the XFL this spring. It's going to start in a couple weeks, and their kickoffs are going to be just like that, and they'll be a third season of data before the NFL has to act on it. But Again, much like the tush push for me, I like some new innovation.

I don't like the same old, same old crap that we've been doing for 50 years because we did it for 50 years. I want some new coaching points, some new emphasis on how we legislate it and how we implement it. And let coaches learn something new. One of the teams that reached out to me, I said, you ought to bring one of our XFL special teams coaches to training camp and let them spend two or three weeks with your guys. one teaching it to your coaches but also teaching it to your players because they've experienced it and i think it's a cool rule and fans will love it you remember last year how they put the pitch clock into baseball there is nothing more traditional than baseball and at times nothing more boring than baseball they put the pitch clock in and a year later you don't even you know what even talks

about it or or uh pitch com where where we're giving the signals to the pitcher nobody even brings it up anymore it's just part of the game a year into it and so i think that's what you'd have in football a year later people would say they what what kickoff what what changed you know and i think it's it's you would eliminate a reason to get up and go get a soda pop if you're at home on the couch because anything could happen on these kickoffs and that's probably some of the pushback because you know how coaches are their risk averse right it's it's a play yeah they want to control everything this is a play that you might not be able to control at needs at least this first year or two until you get it all figured out yeah it's why coaches don't want to be in a shootout right totally exciting

game shoot-up, but they feel like they lose game control, you know? Well, and it's something you may be criticized. It's an unsettling feeling. Yeah, you may be criticized for it initially, but I like it. It adds some excitement to the game. It's a new innovation that I think both on paper and on the field can be taught and explored differently. And it's something new to the game that I always think the game should be changing and

evolving a little bit. Yeah. Before we get into some of the, we're going to talk about JJ McCarthy and Caleb Williams and some other stuff. But one thing caught my attention this week. You might have seen this, Randy. Recently, the Eagles put out a video chronicling Saquan Barclay's first day as an eagle, first day in the building. And on this video, we saw that GM Howie Roseman has a quote on the wall, something Theo Epstein said when he was, I think, the new GM of the Child Cubs in a story that ran in an ESPN, maybe the magazine at the time, you know, 10, 12 years ago.

Producing talented players year and year out is not a luxury, it's a necessity. And it's part of a larger quote. that I don't have to give the whole thing. But I saw this posted by our former colleague on Twitter here at the Athletic. Zach Berman used to cover the Eagles for us. And then he noted that, hey, Andrew Barry, GM of the Browns, you could see if you watch some video they had. There's something on his wall.

It says to win a Super Bowl, you either need the best player like a Tom Brady or you need to make a decision that could cost you your job, which, by the way, I think almost any decision can cost you a job in the NFL. But any thoughts on these rain? Do you have any sayings on the wall? I mean, I've heard you say none of us is as smart as all of us, things like that. Do you have any things like that? Do you think it's corny?

What do you, you know, it just kind of caught my attention. I wondered if you as a GM had stuff like that. Yeah, I hear you. I've really never been a quote on the wall guy. I've always tried to think that nothing I have in my mind is going to enlighten the rest of the world. So maybe it's the, I'm not, you know, I don't think I need. need to share what's inside my P brain. But it did make me think about it when I see these that a lot of, I don't disagree with any of them. A lot of these are philosophies that for me have been

embedded in my mind forever. And maybe I just take them for granted. Maybe I should share some of these. That's all these guys are doing is sharing some of their beliefs by putting something on the wall that may help somebody else. And I surely don't have a problem with it. I just think as long as I've been around it, I probably took these things for granted. One or two of these things do strike me and took me back to thinking. And now I'm not going to throw Mickey Loomis, my good friend for many years under the bus, but he had a picture in his office forever. And we both saw this. It's funny. We both saw this. You remember the old sporting news magazines, right, where you get to, this picture was on there. And I hope I can describe this for our listeners. But this picture appears on Mickey's

well, I don't know if he still has it, but he had it for years in his office. It's a picture of soccer players lining up to defend a free kick. So, you know, they get in the line, right? And they're like shoulder to shoulder, six, seven guys lined up to block what's coming, a free kick that's 10 yards away. But the saying says there's nothing in life that's free. And these six guys are lined up, where do you think their hands are? What do you think they're protecting when they're lined up?

I know exactly. We don't have to tell people they've got to. class standing right in front of them, wherever your hands would hang down. By the way, we're going to talk about butts later on this thing. We're talking about butts. Well, we've covered it all. The athletic by Josh Candle about butts. We're talking on the other side of your butt is where you're going to have those hands, right?

Yes. And the saying goes, there's nothing in life that's free. And we all know this is a free kick, but it's not free to some that are defending it. So those kind of things, yes. I always go back to this quote for me. And I think this might be something that we talk about later. but it's, well, I'm going to save this for later. So I'm going to pause my thought and we'll come back to this part later,

but no to answer your question. I didn't have a bunch of quotes. I like free-flowing discussion, though, and I'm not against a good laugh. So I have no problem having any of this stuff to talk about. Look at, you're becoming a professional podcast here with the tease. You're just going to leave that hanging out there. We're going to get to this before the end of the show.

We are. We are in part of our show sheet that we stick to tight. Every word we say is mapped out. Well, you were on me last week because I went, you know, we have a loose outline here, but it got real loose last week. Randy couldn't even figure out what we were going to talk about next because I just took the, I took the boat in a bunch of different cove, different areas here. Either that or your, now you're doing the same.

I got it. Your copying and pasting wasn't quite as clear as it was normally. We work out of a Google document, shared documents. So, you know, we got a few notes in there. And then I end up moving around at the last minute by then Randy's our. already, you know, taking them and put him wherever he wants to have him. So sorry about that. No, no, we're good.

Hopefully we don't lose our listeners off of this. But, hey, someone I know, I said we'd talk about J.J. McCarthy, Caleb Williams, Williams had his workout USC. We'll get to that. But someone I know tipped us off in December about this Michigan quarterback, J.J. McCarthy, who hadn't even declared for the draft yet, having a shot to challenge at the very top of the draft. this same person tweeted today

after J.J. McCarthy works out at Michigan today, meaning Friday, he will add to the narrative of being the most interesting and maybe talented NFL passer in this year's group. Randy, who is this guy who's been saying this for so long and then decided he would just sort of, I don't know about double down, but just sort of remind on Friday, who is this guy?

Well, I don't know who that guy is. Sometimes he just. It's Randy Mueller, everybody. It's Randy Mueller. Can we get a round of applause? Can we get a round of applause? No, no. Sometimes he just can't bite his lip longer, long enough, and that's the problem.

And I see everybody, everybody's raving about these pro days, right? This can be determined. That can be determined. I have never been a big pro day guy. Okay, I want to watch the tape. I want to see them actually playing football. I don't, these combine workouts that we see in Indianapolis of them raving over a guy's deep throw. Wasn't that about a week-long discussion over Malik,

Willis's long throw that he made a couple years ago that was going to ascend him to the top 10 in the draft and be the next greatest quarterback ever. Yeah. Remember, you were a little skeptical of that at the time. Well, and that's my point with these workouts. I do remember that. Yeah. So I know what's going to come away from this JJ workout.

And I guess by the time this podcast airs, we will know this. But my projection and guess is that this guy's going to fire the ball all over the place. This is the equivalent of watching, you know, I think I mentioned it. When I was younger, I got a chance to go watch batting practice with the Oakland A's in the old kingdom. And this is when McGuire and Canseco were both playing. And when you stood next to the batting cage, when these guys were taking batting practice before the game, it would give you goosebumps as to how hard they would hit the ball and how explosive it would come off the bat. Sometimes when you watch John Elway throw the ball in warmups, I would just stand around and watch him and just kind of marvel that the ball, the spin rate and the way it came off of his hand.

I mean flying. And I'm not saying J.J. McCarthy is going to be anything like these guys in players. But I'm saying his strength to me is his arm strength and his ability to make tight window throws. He's going to spray the ball all over and everybody's going to be raving about his arm. That's all I'm saying. Does it show us any more than we already know? No. not if you know what you're doing when you watch the tape.

But I'll guarantee you everybody's going to be talking about how strong his arm is and the throws that he made and how eye-popping the ball comes out of his hands and the velocity and all this other stuff. And I just I see it coming with McCarthy. But you saw it coming for the right reasons in December though, too, in terms of the things that actually matter in terms of how he plays and the way you think he can play on time from the pocket, throwing the ball in an NFL offense.

That's what you saw. I agree with you. Now you're saying people are going to see him really showing off in this workout and maybe come to a little bit of a similar conclusion, but not necessarily for the right reason. Well, I think people will catch up with the evaluations now and say, hey, now I see it. I really see it, you know. Oh, yeah. So that's all I'm saying.

Yeah, I got you. That's good. There's a lot of nuance in these Mueller tweets. That was a lot of, there's a lot behind that one. Don't overthink it. Don't overthink it, Mike. Trust me. Investigated that.

That'll be investigated of that. So, hey, Caleb Williams Pro Day, Bears contingent there in full force. I mean, they had everybody but Papa Bear George Hallis there at the workout it looked like to me. Keenan Allen was there. I mean, you ever had a player, you ever gone to a pro day and brought a player from your team? No. I've gone on recruiting trips, though, and had the quarterback come with me when recruiting a receiver somewhere and free agency, something like that. Who is that?

Who did you bring? We actually were trying to sign a receiver from Atlanta. Michael Haynes. Remember the real fast receiver? Yeah, Michael Haynes. He was good ball player. And this was when Rick Meyer was our- That's shocking you would be going after a fast guy. It's shocking to me. Rick Meyer went with me and Bob Brickowski to Atlanta,

and so we could spend time. Rick Meyer was our quarterback with the Seahawks at the time. He was coming off a rookie of the year type year. And so we brought him, and the four of us actually played golf in Atlanta. And so I'm not opposed to using players to help us recruit and do some certain things. But I've never brought one to a pro-day workout.

And they didn't have to bring. bringing Keenan to, he obviously lives in L.A., having played for the Chargers. But I did think it was cool that he showed up in his Bears outfit and all that to help support the cause. I like the whole vibe of this thing. And usually we downplay kind of these pro days. But, you know, there was a lot of kind of chatter around Caleb Williams, you know, in terms of is he going to refuse to play for a certain team? What's the intangibles and all this stuff?

And, you know, this just seemed like about as smooth and not worried about it tangibles of a day as it could be, including what Caleb Williams said. And of course, people can say whatever they want and try to, you know, it may not be genuine. But everything seemed pretty good to me. Everything sort of aligned here, doesn't it? Yeah. Wasn't it in the same like, what did you take out of the pro day? I thought it was really predictable.

And I love the fact that the Bears apparently went a couple days early and spent a lot of time with him. with sources, with all kinds of people at the school. That's really how you get to know. And I think somebody reported this on ESPN. It might have been Dan Graziano, said they went to dinner with Caleb and some of Caleb's teammates as well. And I think any time you can see these players in their environment, reacting with relationships of people they've been around, I think it's all informative.

So, yeah, for me, nothing really changed. I mean, I still think Caleb's the best prospect. I think there's a little gap after. him, but I don't know if there'll be a position player or not that even is in the mix outside these quarterbacks and receivers in the top five or six, but I don't think it changed. I think for me, he's a really good player, and this did nothing to detour from that. I understand these are scripted workouts to start with, so you're just confirming some of the things that you might have seen on tape or something like that.

Now, you did have, you know, kind of your loose, we haven't got to your official draft rankings. we'll do that as we get closer to the draft, but I know you've looked at a lot of the guys, especially the quarterbacks, and you had Caleb Williams number one, and I believe you had LSU's Jaden Daniels two for a while. Is McCarthy in that mix for two with you? Do you think he could be for teams? How do you, what's your sort of top three, four, and then what do you think it could be for the teams? Well, I think depending on the team, and again, this can be said for the receivers, too,

depending on your criteria that fits best for your scheme and what you're going to ask this guy to do, your list may vary. For me, in my vision of what I want, an NFL quarterback to me, yeah, J.J. McCarthy is right there with Jaden Daniels. At two and three, probably I have no issue really with, probably less issue with McCarthy than with Daniels. So I think, yeah, for me, they would be two and three. And then after that it'd be Drake May 4 for me.

But that doesn't mean that's the way they're going to come off the board. That just means for me, that's a sequence that I project kind of how good these guys are going to be in two or three years. I don't care when they get picked. that's for my money how I see them. And we'll go into great detail and depth in these when we get into more of the draft previews stuff. Last week when we recorded our show, it was right before, like later that day, the Bears traded Justin Fields to the Steelers.

I asked you at the time why Chicago didn't seem to have much of a market for him. And you said, you know, frankly, really the film was just so rough last year for Fields that when the league looked at this, it was really going to affect the interest in him. And I think we saw that happen. They didn't get much in return. but there still seems to be a pretty big gap, Randy, between kind of the public perception of the fields and the league perception of them. Was this a good move for Pittsburgh simply because the price was low?

Or do you think there's a real chance that fields could become something for the Steelers? Because I know you pointed out, shoot when they drafted Fields. There were some real concerns, but I never sensed that you were like, you know, down on fields. So did that film that he had last year convince you that he can never be anything? or do you think the Steelers maybe have something here in him that, you know, could be lasting or enduring or develop? Yeah, I think it's fluid. I think you're right. There's a difference in perception between what the public thinks and what NFL evaluators think.

I think described probably best by where do you think the ceiling is on Justin Fields. And I think that's how NFL, and I've said this a lot the last couple weeks, NFL teams are much more critical. of evaluations and of players on the inside. We never hear that because no one's ever going to say anything negative about a player outside publicly. The public perception is that everybody's good. We're going to stamp them all. You're either great or you're awful.

And I think in Fields' case, it's complicated. I think the biggest thing for me that I didn't see on film this year that I haven't seen yet is his ability to get the ball out. And we've talked about that. And that's setting your feet, releasing. the ball on time, having processed the information correctly to go to the right target and then delivering it accurately. That sounds like a lot. But if you can get back and get the ball out on time, you stand a pretty good chance. And he just hasn't done that for whatever the reason.

So I think you've got to do it on rhythm. I think you've got to do it consistently. And I think NFL evaluators see that more than the public. So that's the difference. I think with regard to Pittsburgh and him going there, I don't think he could have found a better spot. I'll be honest with you. I don't care what they gave up or how little they gave up. And you know, we've talked about it on the podcast for the last two years. We thought, and I've said it a million times, that him and with Arthur Smith is a marriage made in heaven. That offense might be the best offense that Justin Fields could ever have and ever be around because there's a lot of predetermined routes. There's a lot of predetermined targets. There's a lot of RPO's that take advantage of his

athleticism and getting him out on the edge, I think they're crazy, no matter who wins the starting job in Pittsburgh, if they don't have a package for Justin Fields every week in the game, just with some of the things he does. Yeah. If you could have pictured Justin Fields in the role of Desmond Ritter the last couple years, I mean, I think you're talking apples and oranges. Justin Fields, for me, his skill set was a much better fit and had much more long-range hope than any Desmond Ritter skill set ever, and I'm not killing the kids.

I'm just saying that I think Justin Fields is way more talented. That type of offense could be good for Russell Wilson, too. I think it could be fascinating to see how it plays out. I agree. I want the package of plays for Fields. Maybe they promised Wilson, or maybe Wilson wouldn't, maybe you wouldn't get much out of him. If he, you know, that would go south unnecessarily early if he didn't start the season. But could you, I can almost see a situation where Russell Wilson opens the season as a starter, and then who knows?

I mean, maybe Justin Fields when the weather gets bad or, you know, you. you know, Wilson's a little banged up or just struggles against some tough defenses on their schedule. Do you kind of see both of them playing enough to evaluate both of them this year? Yeah, I definitely do. I think I would rather have Russell Wilson and Justin Fields together than Pickett and Russell Wilson just because of the skill set needed to run what Arthur Smith, one, wants to do and two, what he needs to be effective at it. So I agree.

I like it if they haven't promised Wilson the job, no matter. what happens because I think it's going to be really cool to follow this all of camp, all preseason. Yeah. And let's just name the best guy the best guy, okay? Kind of like how Russell Wilson got the job in Seattle 15 years ago. When they had signed a guy off the street, the guy from Green Bay, remember the quarterback? Matt Flynn, yeah. As the starter, they drafted Russell Wilson in the third round, but by the end of preseason,

it was evident he had the play. He was the best option. I just hope the Steelers have that same attitude. in that, yeah, we may have promised Russell the first chance, but once they get on the field, every bet's off, right? We're going to play the best players. And so I would have wished Kenny Pickett would have saw through that and decided, hey, I want to compete for this job.

And he didn't, and that's why he's ended up in Philly. When you do the evaluations of the players coming into the draft, you're basically telling us whether this guy has the skill set to succeed in the NFL. And then there's a whole separate evaluation. for that that the teams are in better position to do, investigating the character and all that. Now, with your contacts and just experience, you may be able to have a pretty good feel

if a guy just has a bunch of red flags or there's some sort of a deal breaker. There really wasn't that on picket coming out. I don't think, you know, there was anybody who thought this was going to be, you know, a guy who wasn't going to, was not going to check those types of boxes sufficiently in terms of the intangibles.

But maybe we've learned about him here, huh, in a negative way. Well, I think you can earmark two or three different instances where competitive spirit could be challenged for sure. I think his drive to compete, his ability to swallow his pride and do whatever he has to do for the team. I think those are questioned a little bit now by Pittsburgh people, and probably biggest reason they moved on from him. It'll be interesting to see if that follows him to Philadelphia, because I think there's a little bit. bit of a lack of self-awareness by him. I heard him interviewed from Philly after the trade, and he said I wouldn't do anything

different. It's what I wanted. I think I've handled this right. Boy, Mike, I don't know. I don't know if I could, you know, say you've handled this right or not. If I was you, I would rather be in Pittsburgh competing against Russell Wilson in an offense that I think I can be good at rather than going to Philly and backing up Jalen Hertz, who's already making $50 million a year and is going to be the guy of regardless.

So I just don't know that that that's a great career decision. Is there a cure for entitlement at that age in that position? Sometimes some humble pie, but I don't know how you get it nowadays because I do think a lot of these kids now have been promised a lot of things throughout the course of their careers, as short as they are. And when it doesn't go exactly like they think it should or if they've been promised, they don't tape their ankles and head out and are going to get my job back. They're going to hit the transfer portal.

And that's kind of what I viewed Pickett is doing. He got sideways somehow in his communication with others in the building, didn't like it. So he joined the transfer portal. He hit the button. And they found, lucky for them, they found a place to send him across the state. Yeah. Not good for him. Well, the other thing that came to, it highlighted what happened to them.

And you might remember this. When they came to Seattle and played last year, he was somewhat healthy, had been hurt. but they elected, the Steelers elected, to continue to play Mason Rudolph, and he got a little butt hurt about that, and that seemed to have spawned the first sign of questioning what's right for the team. Again, in communication, you know, things happen. It's not as simple as we all think it is. It's not always about us, and sometimes you do have to take a step back and look at it from 30,000 feet, even if you're the quarterback and a former first round pick. And that was a struggle back then to to do that and do the right thing.

All right. So you promised earlier in the show, Randy, to talk about, you know, quotes on the wall thing. You had a good story. I promised to talk about butts, okay? Okay. On the show, because Josh Candle, who writes as part of our NFL group out of Atlanta,

wrote a fun story. The headline was a high butt factor. It might be the NFL draft prospect's most prized asset. And it's a fun story. I mean, basically the idea that scouts and evaluators do scrutinize a lot of things about the prospects, but specifically the hindquarters of players in the evaluation process. I think Josh exhausted every thesaurus in America to find out all the different ways he could describe the human behind. We got deriers in there.

We got rumps, tushes, rears, posteriors, ass. I mean, there's probably about 10 other ones in there. I didn't go through the whole thing and pull them all out of there. But there was a couple fun quotes, one from Ryan Day. Quote, it sounds weird, but I'll go to these recruiting functions. I'll bring my wife and I'll go, did you see his butt? I'm all excited about it. And she's like, what are you talking about, you weirdo?

There's references in there to, you know, the linemen who are light in the ass. We've heard that for years. We didn't see a sand reference in there. Does the guy have sand? I always liked that one. but that's why we got you on here Randy as a multi-time GM to really, really get into the details of the butt. I mean, what are you looking for in a butt, Randy?

You're killing me. We have a producer. Don't worry you. We can clean this up. If we need to cut anything out of this thing, we can't just let it go. The first thing I want to say to our listeners is this was not my idea. This topic didn't come from anything that I. anything that I brought up. I like the story. I thought it was fun. Yeah. Yeah, it was great.

It's like we're in a bar at 3 a.m. having drinks and looking around the room or something. Now we're talking about men's posterior. And I say that tongue in cheek because it does get a part of the discussion in evaluations in draft rooms and around NFL offices. It is a factor. And I often equate it to, are you a horse racing guy? Do you ever go to the horse racing guy? Do you ever go to the horse races? What do you determine how to make your bet in the horse racing world? It's kind of like that. Yeah, I've gone to the track before.

Yeah, like Del Mar. You ever go to Del Mar? Oh, yeah, I've been to Del Mar a few times, so obviously my time in San Diego, but I've even gone further. Oh, that's right. I've gone to the Keenland yearly sale in Kentucky. And I often said, what do I want to see? What do I want to learn?

I want to know what Bob Bafford looks at when he walks around this barn when there's a hundred horses. How did you get into this? Are you kind of a blue blood guy? No, not at all. Anybody can do it. I mean, what are you talking about? I had a stint in my life where I loved horse racing and I spent a ton of time and got to do this.

And it was no special favor. I was shocked that the access you could get. But I thought I'm going to learn what the experts in picking out horses learn and see if there's anything that can help me. well, I think now when I look at horses, the first thing I look at is what kind of butt do they have? How is it shaped? Is that made for long range running? Is it made for sprinting? And anyway, that's what we do in the football side.

And you mentioned it. And there's a definition for all of the examples that you gave. You said something about a high butt or being high cut. And that's something that I equate to really defensive backs. and I'm being serious now, if a defensive backs frame is such that he's kind of high cut and his backside is high

and his hips are a little lower in the front, it usually means, and not stereotyping, but it usually means that person might have a little struggle with turning, with hip fluidity, with planting and swiveling those hips. I've never seen guys with high-cut backsides really able to turn and run.

They can run fast, ahead. They can really sometimes sprint and that's a track guy. That's kind of a track frame. And it might be like an explosive leaper, right? Yes, very much so, very much so. And so that always made me nervous if a defensive back hat was high cut like that because I don't know if he can turn and go the other way quick enough. I've never, I mean, there's a lot of history here. Yeah. I see very few guys that can ever flip their hips and turn when they're high cut like that. You mentioned with offensive linemen and it doesn't surprise me that Ryan Day would say it. Did you see that butt?

We're saying that tongue and cheek. But I've studied offensive linemen enough to know that cheek. You're making cheek references now too. I'm nervous. I'm treading on thin ice here. But an offensive lineman with no butt probably doesn't have enough anchor to lower that base in the backside to stop a firm power rush. That's pretty factual. So if he has no butt, he better have some thick thighs and big below the butt to,

to actually sit and bend an anchor. So that same can be said for an offensive lineman, and Chuck Knox always used to say this occasionally. He'd say, hey, did you see the axe handle butt on the back of that guy? That meant that the axe handle, it was wide, right? It was width of an axe handle, the backside of his butt, and that meant he could sit down and anchor and had plenty of sand in his butt to withstand a power or a bull rush.

So all of these sayings or... We're not talking about a hatchet. We're talking about a full-on axe, like a Paul Bunyan axe. I mean, that's a... Before everybody just completely turns off the podcast, these are things that we're talking about. This is really good stuff.

What I like about it is, like, I've heard these terms, you know, for years in scouting too, but I just remember the first person I thought of when reading the story was just Bruce Smith. I mean, just. built differently. And I felt like he was high cut. I felt like his butt was like 10 feet off the ground. I mean, he was just like a race car, you know? I mean, he was just unbelievable. Daryl Gardner was another one. I don't remember the defensive tackle out of Miami. These

were just a couple of guys. I remember when I was on the beat covering teams where I just kind of looked at them and thought, they just are like put together differently. You know, they're like they're built for this position. Right. So I don't know if you have, if you agree with that, if, if, if, do those guys stand up to you or did I just have it wrong? Oh no, I agree with you. I think 100%. Frame matters. And there's a section on every report that every NFL evaluator has ever made based on we want to body type them. And frankly, for years, when NFL scouts still to this day, when they go to college visits and they go to games and practices, the first thing they do is they're going to body type the players. That's why I want to be on the sidelines and pregame for a big college game or anybody that I'm scouting.

I'm going to put a description in my report about his body type, and we're going to talk about that. You know, we might talk about calves. We may talk about all kinds of stuff as being part of what makes up the frame of, you know, a successful player at that position. And we have history that backs that up. It's not anything to do with, you know, other than just describing a guy's body frame and type. Hey, Randy, though, no one's reading a story about calves. I mean, come on. They're reading a story about butts.

Let's just face it. Probably so. Just face it, the butt's more important than the calf. There's a great quote from Andy Reid. We'll wrap this discussion up. But the former chiefs punter, Dustin Colquitt, said this of Reed. He said, he'd sit down with me at the exit interview and be like, you went to the Pro Bowl.

We don't have a lot to say to you. But don't lose your butt. Punters have to have big butts. As soon as you start looking like you're going downhill from a physique standpoint, you're out of here. Keep that ass going. I'd love to hear Andy Reid say, keep that ass going. It just sounds funny to me.

But yeah, there you go. I feel like we could hear from the athletic HR people any day now, and there's a good chance this might be the last podcast that we put out. No, we're good. Hey, another funny for me this week, we'll just touch on this briefly, if there's any NFL application there probably is, but you saw the show Hey, Atani situation, which, by the way, when you were talking about your history

and being interested in horse racing, I was going to ask you if you met Otani. It seems like he may be if he's not in horse race. racing he's going to be soon with all the stuff that's going on there with the Dodgers. But there's a situation with him, you know, where the $4.5 million in illicit gambling debts were covered either with or without his knowledge, depending on what you want to believe right now. I loved this tweet from Jeff Israel at Jeff Israel 25. Welcome back to Sports Center presented by ESPN Bet.

For more in the Atani situation, we go to our fan duel MOB inside of Jeff Passan. at our draft king studio in LA, brought to you by Caesar Sportsbook. Jeff, how could something like this happen? I just really laughed because that's sort of the world we live in now. No kidding. As yesterday, I was getting one of my sons into the, you know, the bracket pool, you know, where you're pointing at money.

I said, this is good life lessons from your dad here, how to go broke basically in gambling. But it is everywhere and we're going to, you know, I think this, whether or not, the leagues are embracing gambling doesn't really, to me, matter because I feel like it's so ubiquitous in the society that we're just going to have this sort of thing happen, right? I don't really fault the leagues.

We can say, oh, the leagues pivoted, and they used to be against gambling, and now they're for it. I don't think it matters if they're for it or not. I think it's just there. It's existing. It's so much more prominent that you might as well get a cut of it. You're still going to have players.

What are the leagues involved? sanctioning it or not. There's still going to be players caught up in this, just like anybody else would be, right? In society, it's like alcohol, right? You could have beer ads on the games or not, but people are going to still drink beer, right? So, where are you at on this?

And any observations off of this as a GM? Did your GM intend to go up a little bit? Well, I think it's inevitable, like you say, these are the days and times that we've chosen, and obviously the revenue stream because of this has gone crazy in all these sports. So now betting is clearly part of it. I think the hard thing is that for baseball,

this is their poster child. This is their best player. This is their most talked about player, but both domestically and internationally. And so it's a bad look. There's no doubt it. My interest in it comes from a couple different places, not that I care about the Dodgers,

but I'm a big Giants fan. Because you're a Giants fan. I mean, you probably are happy with this. That's why I'm kind of why. watching with a grin because obviously as people know, the Dodgers kind of rescued the... Your Giants agenda. Yeah, my Giants hat is clearly in the middle of my head. So I don't know what's going to shake from this.

I think it'll be interesting. And this kind of provokes a quote. This quote would be on my wall if you want to talk about quotes. There's something I do not know, the knowing of which changes everything. And we've heard this story presented in two or three different ways. They've pivoted off their stories. multiple people have reported certain things, authorities coming from all angles, hasn't even got to the level of breaking the law yet, but it might.

I just don't think we have enough information to even know what happened. I'm not convinced that Otani himself didn't make the bets. And so that's how, you know, you can be swayed by the information that you get. And I don't think we have enough. And I think it's going to be interesting to see how baseball plays this, because I don't don't know how transparent they will be. And if they insult our intelligence by just coming out and saying the most simplest best thing for the league is this happened rather than the actual investigation proving what happened, that's the part that interests me the most. I don't know.

It's going to be interesting because they really have to have the integrity of the game at heart. And they can't have that being questioned in any way. In other words, players betting on really anything. But especially if it were, they've gone way out of their way to say so many times that no bets were made on baseball. I mean, that's Pete Rose reincarnated, right? And we've been fighting the Pete Rose thing for 30 years now. They can't have that again. So we'll see.

And they're saying he didn't bet on baseball, but baseball wasn't bet on. We'll see in your notes here. Do you remember SpyGate? Those tapes were destroyed. So that's kind of interesting to me because we'll see what they do. And if it becomes a bigger matter where, you know, they could lose control of it too.

If there was any sort of a criminal component, there's an investigation by law enforcement, then, you know, it could go in a different direction. or they might not have control of what happens. And certainly that wasn't the case with Spygate, where it was clearly an internal matter. There was no federal law broken or something there where you're going to have authorities looking into it.

So a little bit different, but certainly interesting. Yeah, I don't think any laws were broken in Spigate. That's the key, right? And I think whether it's the Dodgers or the league has gone way out of their way to say, nobody's investigating us from the FBI or anything else. They need to keep it in-house, and they need it to go away sooner than later.

And I think we'll see that this hangs around probably longer than SpyGate. It's going to be a big issue unless they can just throw a big wet blanket over at all. Vez is in the Major League Baseball League office. So it'll be interesting. We've hit about an hour here, Randy, close to it. You got anything in the GM notebook? I had another item in here, but... Yeah, no, I'm good with that because...

I would say this, just one note on the GM notebook, and it comes from you, was your idea. I think I tweeted about it. this early last week with regard to the Broncos. They have had two different instances since free agency started where players have been said to have agreed to terms with other teams, and then their minds were changed a few hours later. And it made me think, how would this happen? What would you do? And it's happened to me once, maybe twice, as well over the years. And in both times, what happened was I wasn't, there's, there are several people.

people that may be charged with negotiating contracts or have input on that in an NFL building. Sometimes it's always one guy. A lot of times there was a couple of us. And so sometimes we weren't working on a particular deal or a coach would bring you some information that a player told him that you weren't aware of. So really the way it happens is sometimes a team may not even make an offer or not even be aware that said player is going to sign in Jacksonville. And when you get that information, you say, whoa, wait a second, the agent never mentioned this is even possible. So the timing just wasn't right for me even to communicate an offer that could make the player change his mind.

So a lot of times, not a lot of times, sometimes a bit of information travels back to the guy that is negotiating a contract within a team's office and it changes the whole inflection of the agreement. And like you say, a lot of these things are agreed to but not signed. and players do have the right to change their mind. That's happened quite a few times over time for sure. But it was interesting. In Denver, this having happened, and I thought two things.

One, either the Broncos were slow at the wheel and asleep in, they weren't monitoring their own players, or two, they didn't give the offer where they were willing to go in time before that decision leaked out that the player was going elsewhere. However, that information was involved, it forced you to then have to react. And maybe having Sean Payton in your building is helpful when it comes to having him then get involved and call a player and just saying, hey, wait a second,

here's what we thought was going to happen. Maybe we can sometimes the agent gets the blame, right? And that's part of the job. You get the blame, but they understand that's part of the job. But I'm kind of long-winded circling back to this. This happens. It doesn't really happen twice in five days, though. that's why I thought it was interesting with Denver.

Yeah, exactly. I wondered even if there's, if you were an agent representing a player and you had an outside offer is there's no advantage to not telling the other team about the offer, especially in this case where you know the player is willing to come back, right? Would you, now this is a little different with some of these because I think one or two it was, were they, one of them was before the signing period open where you could just be talking, right? You can announce that you can come to terms, but you, what wasn't going to be signed yet.

would there be an advantage from an agent's side of just, oh, that's how Denver found out. Yep, you guys didn't come to us. We're signing with Jacksonville or whatever. And then it was actually to get the Broncos going. I wouldn't think so. You'd be taking a big risk, wouldn't you? The Broncos would say, oh, okay, see ya. Maybe, except it did happen with.

I don't understand how it could happen. It did happen with a kicker that in this instance, Sean had brought from New Orleans with him to Denver. And so he probably has a personal relationship with that. that kicker though and hey everybody has an agenda I'm telling you everybody has an agenda and they don't always align and maybe they're trying to squeeze the last dollar out uh which you know sometimes happens in different ways but I just it was interesting that two of these things happened to the Broncos within a short window of time and it just made me think is everybody on the same page here or not and they were able to keep them both you know yes so you know good for them if that's what they

wanted, but yeah, definitely an interesting process. So, good deal. You got anything else? No, I think I got it. I think we're, we've talked about butts and, and, uh, all that kind of crazy stuff, enough to where I'm fully nervous now about how this is going to come out on the podcast. Ah, it came out good. It came out really good. I think you acquitted yourself well. Uh, you anchored down. You were able to handle it. And we'll, uh, I'm going to head off to the, the league meetings here in Orlando, they have these league meetings in warm places. You never notice that? Yeah, they're never in tough spots.

They're smart. They get that part. I'm going to embrace Orlando. Although, I will say this, they're having it at a real fancy Ritzkerlton Hotel. And when I went into book Travel, you know, usually you go in there and you put in the zip code of the hotel where the league's going to be at because he wanted to stay close to it. And it came back for this Ritzkerlton Hotel. it came back as in policy for $1,800 tonight.

It said in policy. I don't know if we talked to this before because it did make a big impression of the time, but I didn't do that. I'm not standing. I don't think the New York Times would really have that one in policy if they knew it was $18. I think it would be disclosed later that it was out of policy. I think I would be called out of policy. And so I will not be staying at that hotel, but it should be nice at least to get a little bit of warm weather.

And then we'll come back and do it again next week. How's that sound? awesome. I'm looking forward to it. Have a good time at the meetings. Okay. Thanks, man. This was the Athletic Football Show's Football GM podcast.