The Bill Simmons Podcast - Best In-Game Dunkers, LeBron Vs. Steph 37.0, Chicago’s New QB Hero, and Building a 2024 Media Company With Jason Goff and Dave Finocchio

Episode Date: March 20, 2024

The Ringer's Bill Simmons runs through six sports topics, including playoff hopes for Lakers and Warriors, the Patriots' poor spending habits, the uncertain future of NFL Network's ‘GMFB,’ all-time in-game dunkers, and more (1:58). Then Bill is joined by Jason Goff to discuss the Bears trading QB Justin Fields to the Steelers, a Bears QB deep-dive, Chicago preparing for Caleb Williams, and more (29:02). Finally, Bill talks with Bleacher Report cofounder Dave Finocchio about starting BR in the mid-2000s, competing with sites like Vice, BuzzFeed, and SB Nation, his newest platform The Cool Down, and the differences between building a media company 20 years ago versus today (1:02:48). Host: Bill Simmons Guests: Jason Goff and Dave Finocchio Producer: Kyle Crichton The Ringer is committed to responsible gaming, please checkout theringer.com/RG to find out more or listen to the end of the episode for additional details. Sponsored by Empower. Not an endorsement or statement of satisfaction by a client. Visit empower.com for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Coming up, we're talking in-game dunkers, Caleb Williams in Chicago, how to build a multimedia company in 2024. Lots of stuff next. It's the Bill Simmons podcast presented by FanDuel. Football is in full action. FanDuel's highest rated sports book is the best place to bet it all. We've been doing pretty well on million dollar picks this year. I love the first month of the season because you have to go into the season thinking,

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Please visit rg-help.com to learn more about the resources and helplines available and listen to the end of the episode for additional details. You must be 21 plus and present in select states. Gambling problem called 1-800-GAMBLER or visit rg-help.com. This episode is brought to you by Prime Video. You know me, I can't go a day without sports. I really can't. And now Monday nights are all about hockey.

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They're all on Prime. Prime Monday night hockey. It's on Monday. It's on Prime. We're also brought to you by the Ringer Podcast Network. We have new rewatchables that went up on Monday night. We did Internal Affairs, which is one of the batshit crazy cop movies that's ever been made. Me, Chris Ryan, Van Lathan. We had a great time. You can eventually watch that entire video on youtube.com slash Bill Simmons where we put up videos from the rewatchables. We put up clips and videos from this show. Here's the plan for today's show.

We're going a bunch of directions. I'm doing a six pack at the top because I had a lot of basketball, football stuff. I want to hit the very top. Then Jason Goff from our Fogo podcast, our Chicago pod, he's going to tell us what the hell is going on with Caleb Williams going there, trading fields, the state of mind in Chicago. We're going to dive into the history of Bears quarterbacks too.

We're going to dive into all of it. Then last but not least, Dave Finocchio, who's one of the founders of Bleacher Report, who is now working on a multimedia site called The Cooldown. He is going to explain the difference between what it's like to launch a website slash media, whatever, in the mid-2000s, and then what it's like now. What are the challenges in 2024? I want to start on Tuesdays having conversations with people that bring some sort of level of expertise, a little like what we did with Casey Wasserman

a couple of weeks ago, at least until we get to the basketball playoffs. We're going to start messing around with the second half of the Tuesday pot. So it's a really fun conversation. I think you'll enjoy it. It's all next, first, our friends from Pearl Jam. All right, I wanted to open a six-pack here. These are six things that aren't quite worth their own segment,

but I care about all of them, and I want to hit them really fast. Let's see if we can do this in 15 minutes. First one. I was on FanDuel today and I noticed the Lakers and the Warriors are both underdogs to make the playoffs. The Lakers are plus 140 and the Warriors are plus 164. The Lakers are 37 and 32. The Warriors are 35 and 32. And it made me realize basically FanDuel is telling us that it's very

unlikely that Steph Curry and LeBron James will make the playoffs this year, which is kind of jarring to think about. They're probably going to play each other in the 9-10 game. And I was trying to figure out what's a better bet. And I ultimately decided probably neither because the odds aren't good enough. But I looked at it.

I looked at the schedule. And I actually think Golden State's going to get the ninth seed. Golden State, they still have Memphis at home. They have Utah twice at home. They have more road games than home games, but they still have, they're at Charlotte. They're at San Antonio. They're at Portland. They're playing Houston on the road.

Who knows if Shangoon's going to be back for that game. They get to play the Lakers on April 9th. That is in LA. They're up 2-1 in the season series right now. And if they win that game, I think not only would they definitely be the nine seed, but they would also have the tiebreaker. And the Lakers, it's a little dicier with them. They only have five home games left. They're at Memphis. They're at Brooklyn. They're at Toronto. They're at Washington. They're at Memphis. So those are probably five they'd be favored in. But man, you look at the bigger numbers for the Lakers. The Lakers, out of all the 18 teams that have winning records, the Lakers are 12 and 20 in the road. They have the worst road record by far. They are minus 0.1 point differential this year. They're the only team

out of the 18 winning teams that has a negative point differential and they're 19th in net rating. And I just think if I was going to bet Lakers or Warriors for who's going to miss the playoffs, I think I would bet the Lakers, which sucks for me because my big boost this year for FanDuel was the Lakers have to get to 45 wins. The smarter bet though, so the 9-10 winner, which will be Golden State or the Lakers, I think those are the 9-10 seeds, they're going to play the 8 seed, which is going to be either Dallas, Sacramento, or Phoenix. And that's where you get some real value because Dallas is plus 440 to not make the playoffs. Sacramento is plus 290 and Phoenix is plus 250. Now let's say Golden State beats the Lakers and then they're playing at Sacramento

in the 8-9 game because I think it's going to be Sacramento. I was looking at the schedule. That's probably the most likely one. but let's say golden state at Sacramento. Are you taking Sacramento in that game? Cause I'm not. So a lot of, uh, seven, eight, nine, 10, I guess six, seven, eight, nine, 10 chickenery. But I just feel like the words are going to make it in the Lakers. Aren't that's, that's where I landed. So I wanted to talk that out. Thanks for listening to me. All right. Next one. I did a little wanted to talk that out thanks for listening to me alright next one I did a little walk and talk about the Patriots

just not knowing what the F they're doing and was wondering maybe they don't have a plan and maybe they're just cheap and I wish I had put more thought into it than a one minute walk and talk

on YouTube but I did want to talk this one out too so they've been from a spending standpoint the worst team in the league the last 10 years for the amount of. So they've been, from a spending standpoint, the worst team in the league the last 10 years for the amount of money that they've spent.

Last year, they were 30th in spending at $188 million. The Browns spent $282 million. Over the last 10 years, according to ESPN's roster management system, they've spent $1.62 billion in players, which is dead last in the NFL. And Philadelphia spent $1.62 billion in players, which is dead last in the NFL. And Philadelphia has spent $1.92 billion. Now, you can twist some of this stuff around because some of the spending stuff, you can miss on free agents. You can guarantee a ton of money. You can push money

backwards where eventually you're going to get crushed like the Saints did a couple of years ago, like Denver's getting crushed this year. So it doesn't necessarily mean cut and dry. This team loves to spend money and this team doesn't, but it does say something because they had Tom Brady, who was basically taking a discount every year because he wanted to win. He wanted to put the money back into the team. And yet now we have all this evidence. They didn't put the money back in the team. They were 31st in spending for seasons in 2020, 2014, and then they were 32nd last year. And then this year they walked into a free agency with just a shitload of money. They re-signed a couple of their role player free agents, plus Kyle Duggar and Michael Onwenu. They brought Henry back, a couple of their role player free agents, plus Kyle Duggar and Michael Onwenu. They brought Henry back, Kendrick Bourne, Anthony Jennings, and Josh Uche.

And then they signed a bunch of role player free agents. Antonio Gibson, really good third down back. KJ Osborne, fun to have in the slot. Jacoby Brissett, good stopgap quarterback for a year if you want to go 6-11. On and on and on. They still have like $47 million to spend. And now I'm leaning toward the cheap because Gerard Mayo said, the new coach, that the Pats would be ready to burn some cash in free agency. And they just didn't. And here's why this bothers me. If you want to throw away this year and you want to say,

hey, a year from now, we have a bunch of free agents coming up. They got to figure out, pay Christian Barmore and a bunch of people. And it's like, this would be a stopgap year for us. Well, we just had a stopgap year. We're in four and 13. That's one thing. The other thing is they're almost definitely, and I want to talk about May versus Daniels in a second, they're almost 100% chance they're getting Drake May or Jaden Daniels as their quarterback. Why wouldn't they want a foundation for those guys to walk into, either one of them, where you at least have one good receiver, where you have a left tackle, you just have the basic necessities you need to succeed as a rookie quarterback if he's going to play. Now, if they don't think he's going to play as a rookie, whether it's May or Daniels and it's Brissette, that's fine. But it just seems like the team's going to suck again. And there were little moves like Keenan Allen. He cost a fourth round pick. Do I think Keenan Allen's going to be in the team seven years from now? No, but at least he's confident. Mike Williams, Tyler Boyd, two really productive receivers who

are still available right now who probably cost eight to 10 million. Isn't it worth getting one of them? What scares me is they're putting whoever this quarterback is in a position of fail because it's a new coach with a coaching staff of a bunch of people who were like the eighth to 12th choice that I think they had initially. People that I don't think anybody around the league has been wowed by the coaching hires. And then you're putting them on a team with no weapons and you just kind of have to keep your fingers crossed that it's going to work out. And we have seen this happen with the NFL over and over and over again. Like look at fields. We're about to talk about fields with Jason Goff.

You put somebody who's talented in the wrong spot and it could just backfire. And I think all this team should care about is, can we put our franchise QB in a position to succeed? The thing that really scares me is that they might trade out a three for a lot of picks and then they can talk about, here's how smart we are.

We got two first rounders and first runner next year and we're going to build from the ground up. It's like, do I trust any of these people to build from the ground up? We have a new GM, we have an 82-year-old owner, and we have a brand new head coach. I just want the franchise QB, which leads to the third thing. May versus Daniels, which I'm obviously obsessed with because I keep bringing up on pods but it's so fascinating to me

how split it is between the two guys and all the mocks like the mocks are coming out like we have our ringer mock draft we did Danny Kelly has Daniels second and May third

Kuyper just put out one Daniels the second May's third Field Yates on ESPN Daniels the second, May's third. Field Yates on ESPN. Daniel's the second, May's third. Daniel Jeremiah. Incredibly well-respected.

He has May's second, Daniel's third. And Nate Tice puts out his big board. I like Nate Tice. He had May 1A. He basically had May 1A and Caleb Williams 1B as prospects. Jaden Daniels, 19th. And he didn't kill him because he still has him as a top 20 prospect, but he's like, I'm worried about this. I'm worried about this. I'm worried about this. I'm in a position now where I'm kind of landing on Drake May as the guy I want them to get because 230 pounds, the upside, he feels Josh Allen and me

to be, I'm worried about Daniels is going to get hurt. But I also want to keep my options open in case May goes second to Washington and we get Daniels third and then I have to go, no, I love Daniels the whole time. This is really wrecking me. Patriots haven't had a top pick in 30 years.

I just haven't gone through all the stages of talking myself into stuff, getting swayed by mock drafts. It's been pretty fun to watch. I just haven't gone through all the stages of talking myself into stuff, getting swayed by mock drafts. It's been pretty fun to watch. This will be my fourth thing. I saw Good Morning Football today. It did a really good long segment about the Patriots and just how weird it's been with the Apple documentary that was just so anti-Belichick.

I don't even want to talk about it. And some of the players who got interviewed for it are starting to speak up. But just in general, what's going on with this team? And they did a really good 15-minute segment about it. And I mention this because I don't know what's going to happen to that show. And that's a show where Peter Schrager

has been on this podcast a bunch of times. Kyle Brandt has been on this podcast and on the rewatchables a bunch of times. We do action movies and McCord is on there and Jamie. It's just an excellent show and a show that I watched a ton of in the mornings. And I think a really unique show in the football landscape.

It's not super nerdy. It's accessible. They react off the Sunday and Monday games, kind of like what we do here. And it's just like a fun hang. And I don't watch morning TV every morning, but whenever I did in the mornings, I would always watch Good Morning Football. And it felt like NFL Network, they're just showing games. They have the old Super Bowl stuff and all the top 100 stuff and all the NFL film stuff. But this was like the one show

that gave the network an identity. And they announced pretty abruptly last month that they're moving the show to Los Angeles. And everybody who worked for the show was taken by surprise. I'm not sure if the cast is going to go to LA. If they go to LA, the show would start at five in the morning.

So basically ruining the show. And in bigger picture, it feels like NFL Network is headed toward either not existing or being sold off to Amazon or Apple or one of those things. But it's a really unique situation. I can't remember of a TV sports show that's actually good that might not exist. It's the hardest thing to land. And it doesn't matter if you're on

ESPN, ESPN2, FS1, you can pick any channel. If you create something that people like, and you create something that's a little bit of a brand, that's the hardest thing to do, whether it's a TV show, it's a podcast, whatever. And they actually did this and they did it on the NFL's channel in a way that I never felt like those guys were shills for the league. They had real conversations. I thought they were educational. They were fun. They did some Aaron Donald stuff this week that I thought was really, really high end. Ties in a lot of the stuff we care about here. I don't know if you heard Solak and Shield

when the day Aaron Donald retired on the Ring NFL show. They had finished their podcast and then went back and they taped, they re-taped the first 10 minutes as a new lead about Donald. And it's fucking great. And I just think there's a certain level of dialogue that we've gotten to with basketball and football

specifically, where you can kind of tell who gives a shit, who's putting in the work, but also who's making it more fun to think about the different storylines, the plots, all this stuff. And this show did that. The only two NFL TV shows that I think really have succeeded are that show and NFL Live on ESPN. And ESPN would never get rid of NFL Live. So I don't know what the fuck the NFL is doing, but if this show is going to cease to exist, that's just dumbfounding to me. Also, why does the NFL need to save money? They need a hundred million bucks, just sell a Saturday, December game to Apple. I'm super confused by this. So I just wanted to voice

my opinion on that. All right. The last two things are both about Anthony Edwards. One, Team USA has a fascinating Anthony Edwards decision to make, and we're getting close to it. Minnesota's going to be a top three playoff team. Ant, since Towns went out, he's like 30 a game. He's a walking highlight film, and he's really blossoming. It's very similar to Dwayne Wade in the mid-2000s. It's similar to when...

Do I want to say the MJ word? I'm not going to say it. Very similar to Dwayne Wade in the mid-2000s when he was blowing up. And Team USA right now is KD, LeBron, Tatum, Curry, Bam, Booker, Drew Holiday, I assume Anthony Davis, and then probably Joel Embiid if he's healthy. That's nine people. And then the other six spots are probably three spots for Anthony Edwards, Halliburton, Derek White, if they just want a glue guy bench player, which by the way, Derek White should probably be on this team for all the stuff he does.

Bridges, Mikael Bridges. Palo, if they wanted to go young guy, let's get him some seasoning. And then Jalen Brunson, who was on the World Championships team. And my guess, if it's, you have Curry and Booker and Drew right now at the guards, and it's probably Ant versus Halliburton, and then maybe White versus Halliburton, Brunson if they wanted a fifth, sixth guard, which I don't know why they would. And then maybe Bridges for defense. The question is, if they pick Ant

with what's happening with him right now, where him and Tatum are becoming the two under 30 American potential superstars, is Ant going to be cool not starting? And also, if you're just thinking about America, where we are with players, what do we want to present in the Olympics

where you want to have a mix of young and old? You don't want it to be like the old guys. You want a mix of here's where the league's going. They have a lot of interesting starting five decisions in general because on paper, it probably looks like Davis, LeBron, Durant, Curry are four of the starters, unless Embiid plays. If Embiid plays, he gets it over Davis. But definitely LeBron, Durant, Curry. Those guys are starting. They're too famous. Sorry, Jason Tatum. You're literally the perfect Olympic player, but you're probably not starting.

And then AD or Embiid in the center spot. And then I would say Booker, but if I'm Edwards, I'm better than Devin Booker right now. Now, I'm not saying that's true. I'm saying he's thinking that. I'm better than Devin Booker. My team's better. I do more. I score more than him. I'm a better defender. I should be starting. So if you're Team USA, can you bring Edwards in and now you have this little who should be in that two guard spot, Booker or Edwards, is Edwards going to be good coming off the bench? Is Edwards going to come in and say, actually, I'm the best athlete on this team and maybe this should be my team.

A lot of it depends on what's going to happen in the playoffs. But my point is, Edwards has blossomed to the degree that I don't see how you can't not have him on the team. He has to be on it. And then I guess you figure out the starting thing later. So I would say Ant is the 10th. I would put Palo in there and probably Bridges just for some wing defense and some protection. But I think Ant

has to be on the team. And I don't know if I would have said that four weeks ago, which leads to my last thing. He had an unbelievable dunk on John Collins last night, which you've seen if you have social media, if you looked at your phone once in the last 24 hours. Magic Johnson. I wouldn't say he's an unbelievable tweeter. I wouldn't say he's broken a lot of news and really made me rethink basketball a bunch of times. In real life, unbelievable asset, most fun person to talk to. Twitter, maybe not as great. But he tweeted something that really got my juices going. He said,

Anthony Edwards is the best in-game dunker right now. And I was like, whoa. And I'm thinking about it. I'm like, is that true? That is true. I think that's true. And it got me down this rabbit hole trying to figure out who my best in-game dunkers of all time were, which I think I did in a column like 20 years ago. I have some honorable mention guys,

and then I'm going to list my top five. Honorable mention. David Thompson, who is kind of the first great in-game dunker. And unfortunately for me, we didn't have league pass back then. I think I saw him in person twice

and I saw him on TV a couple times. That's it. But there's some good highlights. He was only 6'3", 6'4", but could go up and over people. Daryl Dawkins, Clyde Drexler, Scottie Pippen, Jason Richardson,

LeBron, Wade, Kobe. I'd put Wemby in there. Edwards is now in the conversation, but I would not put him on the all-time list. But I'm psyched that he's even the first guy I would

think about in this conversation in a while. And I don't think Jordan makes my five. I'm afraid I'm going to be hit by a lightning bolt, but Jordan doesn't make it. Jordan had some really good in-game dunks. See, I mean, he had the baseline run over Ewing.

I get it. Jordan had awesome dunks. But what made Jordan great was how he operated in the air and levitated and bought that extra time. And it was more how he was around the rim than just the vicious in-game dunks. When I think of in-game dunkers, and this is why I feel bad leaving David Thompson out, these are dunks that you don't know they're

happening in the moment. And the guy who's dunking doesn't even realize it's happening in the moment. And then all of a sudden he's dunking on somebody. And there's one guy in particular that went out of his way to dunk on people. And I wrote about this in my basketball book. And he's my number one of all time, but we're not going to get to him yet. My five guys going backwards. Sean Kemp, number five. Sean Kemp, especially like that first five years of Seattle stage, he was just on Sports Center every once in a while.

He'd be like, let's go to Seattle. And as soon as I said, let's go to Seattle, I was like, did Sean come dunk on somebody? Like you were thinking that way. He had the famous one over Alton Lister. But just in general was, you know, he was like 6'10". Was the first like 6'10 guy who just seemed like he was going out of his way to dunk on people. He would have the alley-oops.

He has to be on there. Dr. J, I can't believe he's fourth on my list. Dr. J had some classics. Unfortunately, a lot of them aren't on video from the ABA, which I think he was dunking on everybody left and right. I can only judge from what we saw when he got to the NBA. But in the 77 season, he has two dunks over Bill Walton, one in the All-Star game and then one in the finals.

That are two of the best dunks ever. He's got the rock-a-bye dunk over Cooper. So he has to be in the top four. Vince Carter, some people would have Vince Carter first. He has the Fred Weiss dunk. But Vince had that run really first four years of his career when he was going out of his way to dunk on people. And it was really, really fun to watch. I'm both like still in awe of the first couple of men's years,

but also like a little disappointed. I feel like it, it actually could have been, it could have even been greater. He should be number one on this. He's not. Number two is Blake Griffin, who now has been forgotten as this just really like the first great Twitter dunker. This was right when stuff started going on Twitter as it was happening in real life. But his first couple Lob City years, and I was fortunate enough to go to a couple of the games where he had some of his famous ones, but it was out of control. He jumped the games where he had some of his famous ones, but it was out of control.

He jumped so high. He went out of his way to dunk on anyone. Plus they had Jordan too. And I actually think, I don't want to do where they do the thing on social media where they're like, white chocolate was a problem, but Blake Griffin was a real problem. People were terrified to be posterized by him

and they would get the fuck out of the way when he was starting to dunk. Number one is Dominique Wilkins. This is one of those things like, I won't entertain arguments about it. He dunked on everybody. I remember doing a podcast with him for Grantland. It was like one of the first things

I wanted to talk to him about is, were you actually like, Dominique loved dunking on people so much that it was almost like when he was in the air, he would have reached over and grabbed somebody to put underneath them so he could dunk on them. He did the greatest dunk I've ever seen in person. When in game seven of the 88 Celtics Hawks, he took a shot from the top of the key and immediately followed it and just brought it home. I don't know if that was on anybody, but it was one of those dunks, the crowd almost went silent. It was like we had just watched a murder. We're like,

could a human being do that? But I think what really made him special, and especially when they were in the Atlanta games, and Atlanta used to love playing the Celtics back then. But he would just go out of his way to dunk on everybody. And there were more dunking kind of dummies back then. There was a lot more. The league was not as athletic in the mid-80s. He had a dunk on Bird once that he dunked on Bird. And I thought he killed Bird. Bird, for some reason, tried to block one of his dunks.

And Dominique sent him into the basket support. Did Bird just actually get hurt on that? He is, to me, number one. I'm going to be hard pressed to ever in my life think anybody's going to be better at dunking because he would dunk over his head. He would dunk two hands on people. He had the two hand on top of people, which I just feel like nobody does anymore. So seeing Edwards last night dunk on John Collins the way he did, which is just amazing. Maybe he'll climb the ladder. He's only 22. It feels like he's still growing as a crazy athlete. Anyway, that was my list. I can't believe I didn't put Jordan on it. So Kemp five, Doc four, Vince three, Griffin two, Dominique one. Those are my in-game dunkers. That's it for the six pack. Come back

with Jason Goff in a second. From upsets to buzzer beaters, nothing compares to college basketball and FanDuel in March. I think my favorite buzzer beater ever, weirdly, is Christian Laettner. Just because I was watching that with all my college buddies, the game was amazing. And then the shot was just an absolute jaw dropper. Still the best buzzer beater ever, weirdly, is Christian Laettner. Just because I was watching that with all my college buddies, the game was amazing. And then the shot was just an absolute jaw dropper. Still the best buzzer beater I think I've ever watched in a group of my friends. Sometimes you're on the wrong end of those moments. That's why FanDuel is giving everyone a no sweat bet from now until March 20th. It doesn't matter if you're new to FanDuel or already have an account. You'll get bonus bets back if your bet doesn't win. You can even use your no sweat bet on a college basketball parlay. I'm going to go on the women's side on this. I really like the

USC is like 35 to one to win the title. And they have Juju Watkins, who's one of the best women's college players in the world. I really would rather do their final four. Those odds aren't up yet, but I would take a flyer on USC. What the hell? 36-1? Never know. Download the FanDuel Sportsbook app if you don't already have it by going to FanDuel.com. Make every moment more with FanDuel, America's number one sportsbook.

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See terms at sportsbook.fando.com. Today's segment is brought to you by Empower. From fans to pro basketball players, almost everyone has money questions. Empower can help answer yours so you can be ready for whatever is next.

Roussel and I talked about rookies on Sunday and about whether Wambudyama could win defensive player of the year. The real story is how unbelievable Wambudyama has been for the last couple months and what he's turned into. And it's almost obscured what's happened with some of the other rookies in the league. Like Chet Holmgren. Poor Chet. He's having one of the best rookie seasons of anyone in the last 10 years.

He's a super important part of a team that has a chance to be the one seed in the West. He's really their last line of defense. They don't really have another big guy you would completely trust. If you get some foul trouble in the playoffs, they're going to be a lot of trouble. His shooting percentages are good. And yet somehow he's not going to win the rookie of the year because he had the misfortune of going against

this absolute butt-kicking rookie in Wimbanyama. Same for Hame Hakes. I feel like there's some years where Hakes could have actually stolen the rookie of the year, like if it was a weaker year he's been really good on a playoff team but that's the thing sometimes you never know when it's not your year, I mean for up and coming rookies

right now, Keontae George on Utah has been somebody that's been really jumping off the screen if you're watching League Pass Utah, they're doing a little bit of a rebuilding program, but he's been really fun to watch. When it comes to helping you with what's next in your financial future, Empower is the one to watch. Get answers to your money questions at empower.com. Sponsored by Empower, not an endorsement or a statement of satisfaction

by a client. All right. So we brought in Jason Goff back in, I think, 2003 to do a Chicago podcast for us called The Full Go. And it has just been an absolute Chicago sports shit show from the moment we launched the podcast. But now there's signs of life. The Bears have the number one pick. They are all in on Caleb Williams, who everybody I know who cares about the draft absolutely loves. And yet it comes with some sadness for the Justin Fields fan club, which I think it's fair to say included yourself.

Yes. He goes to Pittsburgh for basically nothing. The Bears try to do this whole thing where it's like, you know, we had better offers. We just, you know, we wanted to send him to a place he could succeed, which is the most bullshit thing I've ever heard in my life.

They had no other offers. And usually I'm like, I'm like, Mac Jones is done. There's no, I've watched it. He's lost his confidence. It's done. I still don't know with Fields. I've heard both sides. He only has one 300 yard game in his whole career.

Russell pointed that out. And yet I've watched him just destroy a couple teams he only has one 300 yard game in his whole career. We're still pointing that out. Um, and yet I've watched him just destroy a couple of teams over the last couple of years, including mine. And it's like, there's something there. Yeah. What's what's there.

Well, I want to start off by saying thank you for, for putting the entire shit show that Chicago sports has been on my back. Maybe it's your fault. It seemed like you were putting it there. So there's no maybe about it. It seems like it's my fault. And, you know, a hundred years of Cubs futility and all the other things.

I'll take that. I'll take that. You know, nobody's wrong. I think about this situation. I think that's why we all sound like losers. The Justin Fields thing is incredibly complicated and seemingly simple

at the same time. You know, when you're in your third year and everybody sees what you haven't done in three years, but then you look back and track the steps

of what didn't happen all the months and games leading up until the culmination of the you gotta do it season. Like two years before you gotta do it season like two years before you gotta do it season was all right one year under matt negi who had no confidence or thoughts of playing him because he wanted to have andy dalton out there because he knew his job was on the line

so he had to win games and the and the first time he puts him in is against miles garrett and jadavia and clowny and no max protect, no schemes to actually nurture and take care of a young quarterback. He gets sacked nine times. So that was his introduction to the NFL. And then his second year, you get Luke Getzey and the Bears are notorious, man. And I keep talking about this. These quarterbacks don't come pre-bad, right?

The Bears are notorious for hiring people in pivotal positions who have never had that job experience before. There's two coaches, I believe, in Bears franchise history that have had previous head coaching experience, and one of them was John Fox. Okay, so you look at the Luke Getze hire, and you're like, okay, guy's never had play calling duties in his life

on a professional stage, on a professional level. He was Aaron Rodgers' quarterback coach. And by the time Aaron Rodgers is two MVPs in and 12, 13 years in, how much coaching are you truly doing? You hand him your prized pupil. And, oh, by the way, you've got a new organizational leadership ideology. So it's not their guy. So on top of that—

You left out all the receivers they didn't have. Yeah, yeah. He's throwing Amir Smith-Marset. He's throwing Amir Smith, Marseille. He's throwing a dude who nobody would play with on Madden, nevertheless, in real life, right? So all the things that happened, and on top of the bill, he didn't play well enough in the biggest moments, right? He had boom plays, but they were all of sheer talent.

And that's why the Mike Tomlin cut has been circulating, not only especially here locally, but nationally about coaches being scared to coach. The pivot interview that he did and coaches not, you know, mentioning anything other than pedigree is a coaching situation. He talked about hand placement. He talked about foot placement. Well, if you don't have the right coaches,

they're not going to polish that diamond for you. And I think Justin Fields could have been a diamond. And I think the fact that there's also another aspect of it, new thing for this organization, right? We've seen Vince Evans. We've seen Cordell Stewart. But those dudes didn't have franchise quarterback foundational piece. This guy is going to be the face of our organization going forward to him. So to watch it be botched in the way that similarly it had been botched before was disheartening. So anytime you saw him make a play, it was like, oh, there it is. That's the thing. And then Luke gets he forgets that he can run and expects him to throw in 37 dropbacks. There was a culmination of things on

top of the fact that he didn't play as well as he needed to play in his make or break year. And that's where we find ourselves. But in the end, this conversation is the Chicago Civil War. And it's happened so many times, whether it be Rex Grossman, Kyle Orton, Jake Cutler versus the world. We've never truly understood how to watch a quarterback develop or how to nurture a quarterback as fans. So every time we get one and it's kind of spoiled by the infrastructure or maybe not as talented enough, then we get into our little agenda filled corners and come out fighting. When in the end, this should be the most enthusiastic period in my Bears fandom. I got a chance to watch 05, but at 85, I was five years old. You get a number one pick,

you get clean cap space, you got draft picks, you got foundational pieces on the defense and on the offense. You've got a Ryan Poles-led team where it seems like his fingerprints are finally going to be on this thing. After Matt Iberflues is out of here and they get their B2C coach, then we can start talking about the sustained success that we've been looking for. But in the end, it's all been kind of disheartening and weird to listen to. Yeah, I feel like I should have some violently strong opinion one way or the other on fields. And I think I'm more glass half full than glass half empty.

Yeah. But there were two games, and I was betting on the Bears a bunch last year because I actually thought, especially in the second half of the year, I liked how they were playing. And there were two games that if you're going to be anti-fields and say,

this is the reason he's not going to make it the Browns game. Now that's the Browns at home or an awesome defense, but they just made him look silly. And they made a lot of QBs look silly in Cleveland. And then it seemed like Minnesota, I think it was Minnesota emulated the Browns, everything they did. And, you know,

and I was listening to football podcasts and some people were pro field, some people were anti, but people were like, this is the recipe. This is how you beat fields. You have to make them throw. He's sloppy with the ball. He'll turn it over if you pressure him. He'll put the ball on the ground. He'll throw it through it. But I still feel like there's a ton of talent there. And I at pittsburgh there's no way he's not going to be better than mitch trubisky and what we saw from kenny pickett last year and they'll figure out how to steer him toward the things he can do and that the problem is it seems like they promised russell wilson the starting job and that's insane there's no way fields isn't

better than russell wilson at this point right well? Well, see, that's the thing. There's enough of an argument that he could be. So the reason why Russell Wilson is there is because he's cheap, right? And because he's seen things. He's a professional quarterback. He's got a decade in the league. He's a game manager. Yeah, exactly.

But we know Justin Fields is going to play at some point. There are a few starting quarterbacks that get through 16 games, nevertheless 17. So we know Justin's going to play. I'm just happy. And going back to your point about Ryan Poles sending Justin to where he wanted to go and that being the bullshit part of it. Now, this is the interesting part to me.

I think Ryan Poles and what happened with Roquan Smith and what happened with Robert Quinn where he jettisoned Roquan Smith and what happened with Robert Quinn, where he, you know, he jettisoned Roquan Smith after a game of chicken that I think the Bears and Ryan Poles lost, to be honest with you. You send the best inside linebacker to a defense who's known for coveting those kinds of players. And then all of a sudden they turn not only into a good defense, but into an excellent defense. And then you go out and spend money on Tremaine Edmonds and TJ Edwards. Right. So, yeah, I think he learned from that instance. And also, you know, the Bears understand that it's time to start paying some of these guys, start getting some goodwill in this locker room. That's why

Jalen Johnson got his money. That's why Montez Sweat got his money. The specter of having taken care of Justin Fields after three years, the organization just simply not taking care of him because of the circumstance, because of the fact you're cratering the team, trying to get the number one pick in his second year, which was developmental. If it is the truth, I think it shines a light on what Ryan Poles has learned about this being just not a press play kind of situation and relationships do matter. If it isn't, and they're just throwing smoke out there because the dude didn't have anything and they want to cover for him as well. That's another way that Ryan Pose, I think, has learned that

relationships kind of matter. And when it's time to pick a landing spot, if a guy is going to take two or three million less, I think these kinds of things, especially with agents and especially with young dudes around the league, I think these kinds of things matter. So even if it isn't true, I think Ryan pose needed a little bit of a bump in terms of, you know, Q rating when it comes to how he's handled some of these player exits. I just like the Viking, uh, I'm sorry, the Raiders signed Minshew for two for 25. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just, I'm just rolling the dice with fields for a year. People are saying like part of the problem with fields is it was the last

year and he's heading into an extension. So it's almost a no win for the team. Cause you get one good year from him, but if he does really well, now you're in the Baker Mayfield Tampa situation where, Oh shit. Now I have to pay this guy a hundred million for three years. Cause we redeemed his career.

And I think some teams are afraid of that. At the same time, if you make a list of all the, if you make a list of the 32 starting quarterbacks, he clearly should be at least in the bottom quarter. He should be starting over a couple guys. Blame Daniel Jones. Blame Daniel Jones. I mean, just blame how quarterbacks are taking care of the league.

Oh, that's good. I like the blame Daniel Jones, fear of the next Daniel Jones. mean just blame how quarterbacks are taking care of that's good I like to blame Daniel fear of the next Daniel Jones that's true hey blame listen what there are more you talk about fear I think NFL coaches live in fear more than they live in confidence and all the other shit is just bravado and armoring up to make sure that you understand I'm a footbally footballington but in the end, it's like, wait a minute. Do I go with this dude who has the potential to make everything around me look good

but also has the potential to get my ass fired? You see how we're talking about Brian Dayball right now? He came in and he was the bee's knees. Then all of a sudden, Daniel Jones turned back into a pumpkin and now we're talking about him being on the hot seat so i think and he got in two arguments with his dc now mike frabel is breathing on his neck to take the job right and that's it that's one year so

when you when you look at a young quarterback who fans are going to look at anytime you bring a um a prospect like that in fans gonna take a look take a look and go, wait a minute, though. If you're the shit, if you're the guy that you say you are as a coach and the people who hired you think you are, then you should be able to get the best out of this person right here. And I think there's a lot more fear that NFL executives and coaches govern with than they'd like to let on. I think, I think Justin Fields as a prospect was, was fear inducing because of everything that, that, that the prisoner of the moment plays that, that might catch, get you in that. Oh shit. This might be the next big thing that you're passing up on. I mean, hell Arthur blank sat at the table and looked at everybody in the media, the simple media in Atlanta a couple of years ago and said, Lamar Jackson is not on the table for us. And went out there with Desmond Ritter. Now, if you tell me that if that's not

playing with fear, and that's an owner saying that. So what do you think the scouts and the coaches beneath them are saying, especially when a prospect like that is dropped in your lap? Everybody's looking at you like, why didn't it work with you? And Luke gets, he got fired, right? Because of it or because he wasn't doing the best to accentuate his positives. It Luke gets, he got fired, right? Because of it, or because he wasn't doing the best to accentuate his positives. It's just, it's, um, I think the, the entire NFL quarterbacking ecosystem, uh, it deserves an examination. I think Justin Fields is like just the next benchmark along that journey. It's tough because the people who were like, see, I told you Fields wasn't any good. Part of their argument becomes

the league just told us what he's worth, which I totally get. On the other hand, the situation of what the league told you he was worth, you got to go team by team. He definitely played better than Bryce Young last year, but Carolina's not going to move on from Bryce Young after a year, right?

You go team by team, it makes a little more sense for the Patriots. They have the third pick in the draft. I'd rather have Justin Fields than Jacoby Brissett. But it doesn't make sense for them to have Justin Fields because they're going to take a quarterback at number three. So you go team by team, it's a little more logical. Where I lose the narrative is like,

why wouldn't the Giants have tried to trade for him? Why these teams that are probably moving off their quarterback in a year anyway, there's a couple of teams. I'm just like, man, the Seahawks, like could, could he, could he be like a better long-term bet than Gino Smith? I think there's a case he might've been. Um, and I also think if you look at three or four of the games he played last year, plus the Patriots game in year two, it's like, there's something here. This is not Desmond Ritter throwing nine of the worst interceptions in the history of the league. There's something here. We saw it, though. Just don't totally know what it is. And this is maybe my personal connection to it. So I may be like attributing or conflating something that shouldn't be conflated in this way. I remember watching Derrick Rose in a championship game at high school score, I believe, two buckets. Right. And dominate the game. Dominate the game. Then he goes to Memphis. And it wasn't until the end of his freshman year with John Calipari was like, hey, CDR and Joey Dorsey are terrific young players,

but you know you're the man, right? And all of a sudden he gets to the league and Derrick Rose was scoring 24, 23 a game. And that was never really his game. That was never like, I got to dominate scoring the ball. Justin Fields got here after being the Big Ten Offensive Player of the Year.

And some people saying, hey, Trevor Lawrence is is one but this guy might be one eight like he's you know maybe not too far in terms of the the overall raw intangibles uh raw tangible things I should say the measurables he gets to the league and he looks around and there ain't Jackson Smith and Jigba there ain't Garrett Wilson ain't these dudes. There's not three first rounders on the offensive line for you. And he's like, uh-oh, to win, fuck winning. To save my life, I got to run around. I got to make sure that I get first downs.

I got to make sure that I'm moving the chains because all eyes are on me. And in that, some of the footwork, some of the hand placement, some of the eye stuff, and also the timing, I think was corrupted from Jump Street because of the infrastructure that he didn't have around him. You show me a good team and I'm going to show you where a young quarterback should go. But it's not going to work like that. By the way, I watched it happen with Mac Jones. His second year completely ruined his career. They hired a defensive coordinator to be his offensive coordinator. They didn't have a good QB coach.

He had bad weapons and he lost his confidence. And then by the time we got midway through year three, he's just throwing the ball to the other team in big spots every time. We're going to take a break. I want to go through the history of Bears QBs with you. And then hopefully you won't drink cyanide. This episode is brought to you by my old friend, Miller Lite. I've been a big fan of Miller Lite, man, since college days when I was allowed to have beer. I think nephew Kyle is a fan too.

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So I don't know if I've ever done this on the pod. I actually did a Bears QB deep dive. And I was trying to figure out two things. How bad was this? And can anyone else even have an argument for like, no, no, we had it worse. So basically starting with the 1970 merger, the numbers are unbelievable. So Jay Cutler, just by stats, is the best QB ever. He's the only one who's thrown for over 20,000 yards, 23,000 for the Bears, 154 TDs, 109 interception. And he's the

only one with 50 wins. Of course, he was 51 and 51, but he was the only one with 50 wins. Then if you go individual seasons, 1995 Eric Kramer, they went 9-7 with him. 3,800 yards, 29 TDs, 10 interceptions. 2006 Rex Grossman, almost 3,200 yards, 23 TDs, 20 interceptions. Yikes. But they went 13-3

with him. But here's the thing. No Bears QB has ever thrown for 3,900 yards. Nope. 3,900. No Bears QB has ever thrown for 3,900 yards. Nope. 3,900. No Bears QB has ever thrown for 30 TDs. And I think if you ask casual fans, who's the best Bears QB ever, they would say Jim McMahon.

Jim McMahon never threw for 2,400 yards or 16 touchdowns. I'm just saying, if you ask somebody in like St. Louis, he's the best Bears QB. Jim McMahon would be the first one they name. Since the NFL merger, here are all your QBs who had six starts. Bobby Douglas, Gary Huff, Bob Avellini, Mike Phipps, Vince Evans, Jim McMahon, Steve Fuller, Mike Tomczak, Jim Harbaugh, Steve Walsh, Eric Kramer, a lot of white guys, Steve Stenstrom, Dave Craig, Shane Matthews, Cade McDowd, Jim Miller, Chris Chandler Cordell Stewart, that was rough Rex Grossman, Kyle Orton, Jay Cutler

Josh McCown, Mitch Trubisky Nick Foles, Andy Dalton and Justin Fields those are all of your quarterbacks who started six games since 1970, it's unbelievable no, no, no, no.

It's very believable because this is the franchise. I mean, Moussa Mohammed said this is the franchise where offense and wide receivers and quarterbacks

go to die. Like, this is what it is. The Windy City, literally. Yeah. And, you know, so much of

the Bears' identity forever has been defense and middle linebackers and running backs. You want to really see some things. Go look at those wide receiver numbers. Go look at the all-time yards leaders. Offensively, this thing has been haphazard for a generation or two. It hasn't been... I remember watching Bears football as a kid and waiting for the 3 o'clock game so I could watch real offensive football. And it's all shade and all slight to the Bears. Like, I would watch them and then couldn't wait to watch Cincinnati versus Oakland

or watch the Rams and Jim Everett play against the 49ers and Joe Montana on the second game because it always seemed like the Bears were playing a different sport offensively. So when Jake Cutler was traded to the Bears, I was working at the time in local radio, and it was, you talk about like top five, top six events. It was huge because we were getting, as a fan base, a 25-year year old dude who had been a two-time pro bowler for a team that had been bereft of quarterbacks since as you mentioned i mean we're talking about jay burwell and plus everyone is saying like what is denver doing for the one time

you were on the right side of a trade where everybody's like what is the other team doing why would they give him up and guess what go to Go to an NFC championship game, got Julius Peppers and all them dudes on the other side, and he gets hurt. And Caleb Hayden has to finish out that game. These are the things that Bears fans have to live with. I remember seeing those Cleveland Brown jerseys with every quarterback's name on the back of it and how long it went down. The Bears, if it's not for our market and the tradition, the Bears are one of the five or six worst probably franchises when it comes to that in all of football.

And it shouldn't be that way, especially for a family run business. The problem is, Bill, you've got too many outsiders who every time there's a new coaching hire or every time there's a new executive that's up for hiring, too many outsiders get a chance to come in and consult the Bears. And I keep saying this on my pod. I'll be damned if I own a cleaners and it's been in my family for 100 years and I don't know how to fold and press. Right. Or I don't know how to sew or I don't know how to work the machines. Every time, whether it's Ernie Accorsi or the latest vintage Bill Polian, why do you think Matt Eberflus is the head coach of the Chicago Bears? Ryan Polis didn't come in here and be like, hey, you know who I've been having my eye on is the defensive

coordinator in Indianapolis. So there are things that when we see the end result being Justin Fields or the quarterback position being lacking, there are so many things that go so far back that it's unmistakable for Bears fans, but nationally, it seems like what the hell is going on there? Boy, you make a really good point about the receivers. Oh, don't even, don't do this. That'll make- It's basically, it's Brandon Marshall and Alshon Jeffrey and Curtis Conway, and that's kind of the level it's at. For most of my childhood, Johnny Morris, who used to host the Mike Ditka show when I was a kid,

I'd watch the Mike Ditka show with my dad and then watch the noon and kick off here in the city. That man, Johnny Morris was for most of my childhood, the leading receiver in Chicago bears history. Like even in the, the newer evolution of the NFL, when Herman Moore and them boys in the same division was catching a hundred passes a year, right? Like this, this has been happening here for a long time,

man. Long time. My memory as a kid, I'm older than you is the, the Walter Payton, you know, back in the day, we would get either two games on a Sunday or we get three.

And then maybe Monday night football he might be on once I never got to see Walter Payton like there were all these dudes I never got to see David Thompson I never got to see George Girvin I never got to see Walter Payton um but when Walter Payton was on or or they would show the highlights and be like let's go to Chicago and they would show some amazing Walter Payton thing. I was like, Oh my God. And it was just kind of, he succeeded OJ as the guy. Yeah. Yeah.

And fortunately he didn't succeed OJ in anything else, but he succeeded OJ as the guy. And then they win in 85. They had that great team. And then everyone's mad that he doesn't, that fridge gets a touchdown. He doesn't get a touchdown, but he was.

And since then, it's like, it's 40 years of offensive sadness. All you have to really look at is the two of the most esteemed and recognizable players

in Chicago Bears history are Gale Sayers and Dick Buckets. Who literally haven't played in the playoff game. Or also haven't played in 50 years. Gale Sayers was done in the playoff game. Haven't played in, or also haven't played in 50 years. Well, that's the thing. And Gale Sayers was done in the early 70s.

They never played in a playoff game. They never played in a game that mattered. Those two figures, right? So when people are busy making fun of, you know, Bay Sanders and Calvin Johnson, not, you know, reaching those heights in Detroit

and how they retired early because of it. Yeah. This franchise has had its share of futility. That's why it's so crazy because it's like, this should be an amazing moment for all of us. You got the number one pick, you got cap room, you got all these players, and the foundation seems to be built.

Well, that might be traded down. They only got four picks. See, these are some of the things that we could look at, too, because there have been two picks that have been traded from this draft already. Ryan Pohl's trying to bolster an offensive line, so that number nine pick... Well, it feels

like you can get a left tackle with the ninth pick or potentially the third best receiver. Everybody's saying there's three. They like Braxton Jones a lot on the left side. I think he's a swing tackle. I don't think he's a starting left tackle. That's the other thing. Take a look at some of the left tackles the Bears have employed over the last, I don't know, 20, 25 years.

So you're saying like messing up quarterback, left tackle, and receiver over and over again in the passing league? Not good. Not good. Well, let's spin it positively. Mm-hmm. I mean, Caleb Williams might own Chicago by mid-October. I hope he does. He could come in, be immediately good.

The team, I thought, was really encouraging in the second half of the year. I really thought they were pretty frisky. Plus, you figure the draft and they kept their free agents. By October 10th, he might be the guy. Give us the guy hierarchy in Chicago. Obviously, it peaks. Let's go back 15 years. Derrick Rose is the guy.

He gets hurt. Who do we have the last 12 years who's the guy in Chicago? Last 12? With the Blackhawks success, Patrick Kane and Jonathan Taves right up there. The Cubs' success, Chris Bryant, Anthony Rizzo, Javi Baez, that whole crew.

Wilson Contreras, along with that, Kyle Hendricks and those dudes. The Sox side of things, it's been more abundant. So who about late 2010s who we looking at at that point? Early 2020s. Ooh. Gets a little dark? Yeah, a lot dark, Doc. Man, who would be the guy right now is what I'd ask, right?

That's my point. You don't have a guy. No. I mean, Conor Bedard, but it's hockey, right? Conor Bedard has damn near been put as one of the faces of the NHL already because of what they know he's going to be. Oh, so potentially you could have the best

hockey player and one of the best four quarterbacks. Yeah. That's why things are turning around. That's why it's so crazy because it's painful

to watch. And you have Vucevic for two more years. All right. That's enough. I think that's enough. Only 25 million a year. You're good. It's a big three 25 million a year. You're good.

It's a big three. Every time I think we're getting ready to have a good faith conversation, you do this kind of thing at the end of one of our talks. You know,

the Vucevic thing, shout out to Vuce, but you know what you're doing. You know what you're doing. Well, I do like watching the Bulls, just FYI. I think they've been,

ever since Kobe White went into the lineup in a real way, they're a fun, they're a reliable league pass team. Yeah, they're entertaining. The Rosen at the end of games has been really good. He's the favorite to win Clutch Player of the Year right now. Well, that's the thing.

They love playing Clutch games, whether it's against the Celtics or the Wizards. They don't care. They love playing close games. They play up to their level of competition. They play down to it. They go with this double big lineup trying to get back to the 90s. It's an interesting basketball experiment. We'll see how it turns out.

Listen, they lost 25 points a game in Levine, and they've stayed right around 500, and they're in all these games. All right, so Caleb Williams comes in. Yeah. It seems like he wants to be in Chicago, correct? It seems like it. It seems like we're not positive yet, but we Williams comes in. Yeah. It seems like he wants to be in Chicago, correct? It seems like it. We're not positive yet, but we're like 90% sure? Right, right.

It seems like it. Was there a fear he was going to do the Eli Manning, John Elway at any point in like February, March? I don't think there was a fear of that. I mean, honestly, Bill, it was about 60-40 in this city of who wanted him to be here. There hasn't been a rush to just jump on the Caleb Williams bandwagon because of all the feelings and emotions and prognosticators who loved Justin Fields. And then on top of it, Caleb Williams isn't some super clean prospect in terms of the heat that's around him and some of the combine things, which I don't get in the tizzy about. If you want to change the workplace that you are getting ready to enter and you have the leverage to do so, then by all means, knock yourself out, right? Yeah.

I got no problem with that. But, you know, the crying thing, people talk about the painting of the nails and and and some of the videos that he's put out there, people feel like he's too full of himself, which I think is just projection of your own insecurities. Like I want my quarterback to when he walks in the room, everybody in the room understands the man is here. So if he is going to do that and put that much pressure on himself and live up to it, then let's do it, man. Like, 85 was a long time ago. 98 was as well.

This is the third market in the country. And there hasn't been enough winning from the winter sports, especially. It's cool to hang out in the summer and go to Wrigley Field. But this is the best summer city in the world. So there's always things to do. But when we locked in the house and it's time for us to watch either the Bulls or the Bears, it's been far too damn long and far too much consternation over average results. And I'm sick of that as a fan. If Caleb Williams is an asshole and he is a dude who is, you know, safe, but an asshole, then, hey, go be an asshole and go win some Super Bowls.

I'm looking for that dude on the basketball court as well. We've housed enough choir boys in this city. We've housed enough people who you'd love to introduce your sister to. My sister's married. I want a goddamn championship. Let's end on this. Caleb Williams

is listening right now. All right. Give him Jason Goff's four tips for how to win Chicago over like starting tomorrow four things he can do right now that people in Chicago would be like oh man I like this guy

don't talk about the food don't say you want a hot dog or deep dish pizza we don't eat that that's the joking one. But be yourself unapologetically immediately. Set the tone for what the relationship is going to be because if you're cold enough, everybody's going to come to your side.

Everybody's going to understand that this is how we're supposed to rock now, right? So if you talking that talk and you backing it up and just be who you're supposed to be and also understand that the city just wants a championship. That's it. Like all this other stuff can go out the window. You know, when Cedric Benson got hurt in the Super Bowl

and Tommy Harris wasn't able to play and, you know, Daniel Manning blew that coverage and you got Reggie Wayne and all the boys running wide open down there at that Super Bowl in Miami. That was a tough night. That was a tough night, and that was the last time the Bears fans truly felt like they had a shot. That Caleb Haney ends in the NFC Championship game. So all that Bear down and Bear weather shit, that's talk for the novice. This city just wants a championship. So whatever you have to do to prepare, whatever you have to be to be that guy to lead this team

to a championship, you got two professionals on the perimeter, which Justin Fields didn't have. You got a guy in Darnell Wright who has, I think, the talent to be an all-pro type of right tackle going forward. And you got a GM who's talked that talk too. And now that it's aligned and the stadium is getting ready to be built and Kevin Warren is running this thing and Ryan Poles is the GM, you've got everything around you. Just be the dope dude you're supposed to be. Be the guy who's talking shit at USC and now have that transferred to the professional ranks. Everything else will fall in place. It's about championships here. I don't want to hear, like Arturo Skarnaschov has mentioned

competitive. There's six titles hanging up in the United Center. I don't want to hear shit about being competitive. Especially as Bears fans. We won't hear nothing about being competitive. It's Super Bowl. So whatever the plan is to get there, just execute that plan. So be authentic. is to get there, just, just execute that plan.

So be authentic. That's it. Talk about championships. That's it. And don't talk about casual tourist stuff. Like I can't wait to eat deep dish. And I love Michael Jordan as a kid. Nobody wants to hear that. We don't need that. We don't need that at all. Nobody needs that. Good. You like Michael Jordan. What a rare compliment. Right. Now, if he comes in here talking to LeBron stuff, that's when it's going to get fun. That's when it's going to get fun. If he says, like, LeBron's my guy?

It'll be fun, then. Will Chicago take that personally? I'm sure many. First of all, there's a lot more Michael Jordan fans than basketball fans in this city. So, yes. Yes. That's funny. Right. So, yes. Yes. That's funny.

All right. Good advice. Don't talk about how much you love LeBron in Chicago. See, I didn't say that. No, it's just good advice. He's trying to start out with 100% approval rating. He's about 75 right now. Can't wait to get to work.

I want to bring a championship to Chicago. This is a great city with an unbelievable football tradition. I'm so blessed that I get to be a part of it. I'm pinching myself every day. I don't think that's how Caleb Williams is going to sound in the introduction. Something like that. Something. Spin your version of that.

All right. You can listen to Jason on the Fogo podcast. He's going to be covering all this stuff. And maybe even a little Bulls play in magic. Who knows? Hey, listen. I'm looking forward to the next time I'm on with you. Celtics-Bulls.

Oh, Celtics-Bulls. Game five. Listen, the Rosens killed us forever. Don't worry. It's coming. It's coming. And actually, Vooch has kind of killed us forever, too. Yeah. But my team's really good.

It's time for me to get out of here now. You mentioned Vooch again. Good to see you. Always, brother. Y'all afraid of ghosts? How about ghost peppers? It's the moment you've been waiting for. The ghost pepper sandwich is back at Popeye's.

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Please be alert as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all traffic signals. Be careful along our tracks and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware, and stay safe. All right, I wanted to use some of these Tuesdays before the NBA playoffs start to have conversations with people that I just think are interesting. We've done it the last couple weeks. Dave Finocchio is here, my friend who runs the cool down right now.

He was one of the founders of the Bleacher Report. And we wanted to talk about where the internet has gone the last 20 years. All right, so Dave, Bleacher Report, you're at the forefront of internet 2.0, basically. It's like 2005, 6, 7 range, people figuring out what the hell is going to happen here with websites how do we how do we monetize them how do we build them how do we do

content and i am on espn's page two at that point espn has their own strategy you come up with a completely different strategy and now it feels like it's the end of that era when we're moving into this 3.0 era. Do you feel like that 2.0 era is over? BuzzFeed, Vice, Bleacher, just that kind of model? Have we moved into another territory now? from a pretty unsophisticated place to a slightly more sophisticated place. But still, the era we're entering into now, there's just been a lot of advancements from all sides. I think it's totally different. So video has advanced. Social media has completely changed it.

And then the most important thing to me is attention spans have gone out the window. I think it's that. And maybe I'll talk a little bit about what it was like when we sort of stumbled into this space. Yeah. So I got Bleacher Report going when I was a second semester senior in college.

I went to Notre Dame, huge sports fan, and I was an ESPN junkie. ESPN.com junkie, not to kiss your ass, but I loved your stuff. I loved a couple other people's stuff. But I had some real problems as a consumer in the space. One, I thought there was just not enough content that was sort of like fun and entertaining. So when I did Bleacher Report, as like a lot of people might remember, we had a lot of lists and slideshows and sort of debate oriented content. That was like our 1.0 version of that. And then I thought team content was a huge problem.

There was just this, like maybe not so much if you were a Yankees fan, but for most teams, major shortage of quality team content. And so I decided, I'm a kid, I don't know what I'm doing, decided to start a company to solve problems. I thought sports fans deserved a better experience. The thing that really is important to understand about that era. So when we first went to go raise money for Bleacher Report, because back then you had to spend a lot of money on technology. Like you had to build, building your own website and content management system. Today you can buy software off the shelf.

Back then you had to basically, you know, you had to build it from scratch. You had to go do business with venture capitalists. So walk into this one VC's office, give them the pitch. At the end of the meeting, they say, hey, want to be straight with you guys. We think you're smart guys. No disrespect. We want to give you honest feedback. This is a zero-sum game in the business that you're in. Basically, if you're one of the five biggest players in sports, like the five biggest audiences,

and that stuff for the 2.0 era was measured on a monthly basis. It's like how many different people come to your website in a month. So that's ESPN and Yahoo and CBS. That's right. And SI maybe. NBC, SI, AOL Fanhouse was still in the game at that point and there were a couple others and so these VCs say like

with all due respect guys you have no chance in hell of like ESPN's this behemoth and then you have all this other competition you're never going to be able to get into that top 5 set and if you're not it seemed like in 04 ESPN went to a whole other level like when I came back that year, but just in general, it felt like a different place than I had semi-left in 2002. They figured it out. The audience was there. People were going there five, six, seven times a day. It basically was SportsCenter on TV for the internet. Then there were four other people. Fantasy was big, but for the most part,

there was no room for somebody like you. That was the, and you know, you guys at the time did a, they were at that, in that era, they were doing like a lot of chat. I forget what the format was exactly, but essentially like chats with writers. They were like mailbag formats basically started to be a big deal.

So at that point, that was huge for me because that was the first time I sort of understood the rules of the game that I was playing. So like any time you're doing a startup, it's like you got to understand like what are, they're all sort of like strategy games or board games. It's like, what are really the rules here? And so we're like, okay,

if we don't build a top five audience from a size standpoint, we are out of business. Like, like any, any, any illusions or dreams I have about trying to solve problems or create better experiences for sports fans. Like, I don't, I'm not going to have a chance to do that unless we figure out this audience growth piece. So at that point, like we got super, super focused on audience growth and we ended up being great at it. So you're looking at Google inefficiencies, what people are searching for.

If I'm a Yankee fan, I'm Googling, I want news about my team and you're popping up. Yeah, that's basically how it worked. We figured out that when we, I figured out initially that stories stories about the nfl draft would outperform stories about major league baseball like a hundred percent of the time and that espn wasn't covering the draft for a big enough window their draft coverage started back then and maybe like march maybe maybe late february around the you know when the combine

would take place but there was fan interest basically all year long. So we figured out a bunch of stuff like that. We'd see what search terms led people to our site. And it was like, okay, you know, on the day after the NFL regular season, like a lot of people search for NFL draft order and ended up on Bleacher Report. Then you could plug the term NFL draft order back into a product called Google Insights. And you could see actually on an hourly basis for every day of the year, like how many people searched for that term. So maybe our big story like hit on January 2nd. But the, you know, actually the biggest wave of traffic for the Internet was like January 4th.

So we'd then go say, OK, well, the next time we do this, we're going to heavy up on January 4th. So we did that. We did that for every single, you know, team topic, shoe brand, everything. And that was, that was kind of our strategy for, for how to build audience. Well, you know, so I'm thinking about that 1.0 era. A lot of it was determined when you think about who was in the internet the first, like, I don't know, 10 years from the mid nineties to 2005. A lot of it was older people and people who, uh, who had kind of left newspapers or magazines and got hired and didn't really instinctively understand what, what to actually do for content. And I remember when I got to ESPN in 2001 and some of the stuff I would write about, they were like,

I remember I wanted in August of 2001, I did a running diary of my fantasy draft. And I also did, I think like a top 40 fantasy and I made a bunch of jokes and they're like, fantasy? Like they weren't really doing any fantasy at all. They didn't care about the gambling. They were just trapped to that old newspaper model and then eventually that evolved but when you're coming in and you're saying like oh here are the actual inefficiencies people only want

to read about their own baseball team they don't care about reading about other people's baseball teams um people really care about the nba draft the NFL draft. People care about fantasy. It's all stuff that seems easy now, but I don't think it was as easy to see in the mid-2000s. No. I'm one of the classic group of people who grew up as a middle schooler and the height of SportsCenter. I got a little turned off of hockey after a while. I'm sort of more of an NBA, NFL type. That's like my SportsCenter. And I was just tired of having to watch hockey highlights for like 30 minutes on SportsCenter to get the highlights that I wanted. And so there was this inefficiency, as you mentioned, to be able to personalize sports

for people who didn't want to sit through or read through the stuff that they didn't care about. So that was a pretty seismic shift that I think took place towards the middle of that era with mobile apps. And all of a sudden, we had these technologies where we could give people experiences that were just like all of what they wanted and sort of cut out the stuff that they didn't as much. I remember by the time we got to the late 2000s, it really started to feel a little wild, wild west-ish again, where the blogs, the blog era had taken off. So everybody has a byline and there's just a million blogs everywhere and everything's getting shorter, shorter, shorter. You guys were doing better and better. And I remember being mad at

the Bleacher Report thing. I was like, are you fucking kidding me? This is where we're headed? Just short stuff, info, generic stuff, and people aren't going to care about... It's basically going to be style over substance. This is what the future is. And I think it was making ESPN even think, well, wait, which direction should we go here? Should we care about the meat or should we care about the traffic? Should we care about audience? Because all of a sudden you guys were like a major, what was it like 2012, 2013? All of a sudden you guys were like their major competitor for traffic. It was you and Yahoo, I think. Yeah, we started to really sort of explode from an audience growth standpoint in probably like 2010.

That search traffic got going. We built a huge newsletter program. So one of the things I think you got pissed about at the time, if I remember correctly, was we were the first, I think the first media company to really invest in like what I'd call curation. And not curation as people think of it today, where it's like Brian Windhorst complaining about like, don't aggregate me, like not that. More so like we'd have newsletters, like a newsletter for the Boston Celtics. And we'd include links to a couple articles from Bleacher Report. And then we'd round up the best stuff from blogs and from ESPN and from newspapers and whatever.

And we did a really good job sort of like providing an experience for people where they could go to one place. We try to be google it's like we'll be a portal to get you to the places you want to go and the initial reaction to that i think from a lot of journalists was sort of like f you you're taking our stuff and you know my attitude was like i get it but actually i'm sending like we were espn'ss I think at peak we were sending ESPN like 25 million visits a month so I'm like I'm sending you a ton of traffic so yeah you know I get I get what you're saying but like you know it's kind of also okay for you uh so I like we just tried to think of things in terms of how do we solve problems for fans and just make, make that experience better in a world where,

as we just said, there'd been too much of like, God, I've got to sit through these highlights of like stuff I don't care about or ESPN because of their, you know, TV contracts covers a bunch of stuff that's not up my alley. And like,

you know, I want, I want what I want. So how many years before you felt like, holy shit, this is actually working. So that's like your, your three, I want. So how many years before you felt like, holy shit, this is actually working. So that's like your, your three, your four. So we, no, it took a long time. I mean, started the company in 2005. I did like, I had a, I had a full-time job for two years, uh, doing

this part-time, um, quit my job. Interesting. You didn't even, you weren't even doing this full-time. I did. I quit my job in 2007. I worked in finance in Chicago for a couple of years, just getting my butt kicked, working late hours. And yeah, moved home to the Bay Area in 2007. We raised like a million dollars. Had no idea what the hell we were doing. Just kind of jumped into the pool and tried to figure it out. And we kind of got lucky with the timing of Google starting to push new websites more. If Google had basically pulled an Apple move and said, everything's whitelisted. You don't get into this distribution channel unless an editor says so.

Our business never happened. So I'm grateful for that. We also, I think something else that's really important about Bleacher Report, and my guess is a lot of us played maybe all of us played team sports either through high school or college and we weren't in new york like we stayed out of the new york media landscape for a long time which i think was great for us i have a little bit of a bias that companies that came up in that world in that era there was like a little bit of a sense of entitlement um not all the time but there was a lot of group think they all knew each other. Uh, um, it was harder to find people who were like true team players. So like I, I wanted people who, yeah, you want to do well for yourself,

of course, but you want to be a part of a team. And I, I just think like we, we had some chips on our shoulder cause everybody, everybody in the space didn't like us. We ended up with an enemy early on, which, quick story, in 2008, I have the worst phone call to this date I've ever had business-wise. And it was with Ted Leontis, who um the owner of the wizards and and the caps and it's set up as a prospective investor meeting and uh get on the phone with ted and his first question is like hey who are your you know who are your capitals writers and bleacher reports model was a little bit like it doesn't matter who our writers are but i i was

a dumbass and i didn't have that i didn't have that information like written down and uh um and i tried to sort of explain the model to him and he's like all right cool but like who are your who are your writers and at that point um our internet in the office happened to go out and i was just completely screwed and the guy finishes the call by saying hey to be honest with you. I don't find anything you're doing to be interesting. Like, I'm not I am not interested at all. And worst phone call I've ever had. Yeah. And a week later, SB Nation announces a round of financing.

And he's he's one of the investors in the financing and you know i don't know if like he decided after that phone call or he decided like that was really like a digging for information on us phone call yeah but like it sort of didn't really matter like we we just had a couple moments like that where like that put a chip on our shoulder where we're just like all right that's it like you guys are dead like we're we're going to beat the shit out of you now. Like, um, and we, and so that, that was also really helpful for us to just like have an enemy and like, all right,

we're going to stare these guys down and we are going to beat their ass. So I just like, I think, um, I think they're just like certain characteristics of like, you know, competition chips on shoulder, like a lot of just like carry over, sports, outsiders that like I like those sorts of teams a lot.

And that was at least like 50% of our success was that. And then 50% was the stuff that we talked about earlier of just sort of like some of the characteristics of the space changing and setting up well for what we were trying to do. Yeah. So you have SB nation and fun, a well fan house and, um, some of the ESPN is trying to do their team sites at one point in there.

Um, so you have your sports CBS, uh, SI who really, I mean, SI dropped the ball in all kinds of ways, but, uh, especially with the internet and the two thousands. Um, who really, I mean, SI dropped the ball in all kinds of ways, but especially with the internet in the 2000s. But then you also,

like your rookie class of like big sites, if you're going from like 2005 to 2010, it's, when does Buzzfeed start? Is that a, is that? Buzzfeed's a contemporary. I want to say they started

around like probably 2012. Like 2012? No, earlier. Yeah, yeah. Earlier for sure. Like about... I think Twitter started

about the same time. Like all that stuff sort of moved together. Huffing and Poe... And Twitter was good for you guys, right? We ended up... When I left,

I left Bleacher Report in 2019. We were the second biggest Twitter account in the world from a monthly reach, not from a follower standpoint, not even close, but from a monthly reach standpoint behind Trump. And we had been for a couple of years. Twitter was huge for us. So BuzzFeed was 06. And then Vice is somewhere in there too vice was a weird they'd been around as a magazine for a

long time but that the vice thing was super weird for all sorts of reasons but yeah they were like the darling of the space where all these people were like oh like vice vice is like the lifestyle brand for a younger generation and i'm like part of that generation and i'm like i don't my friends don't really care that much about vice but if you if you say so um but yeah vice like part of that generation. And I'm like, I don't, my friends don't really care that much about vice, but if you, if you say so, um, but yeah, vice was part of that for sure. Yeah. It seemed like by the time all these, all these media companies started to hit in a bunch of different ways when we get to like the 12 to 15 range. And then it became about how much are they worth?

How are you trying to get investors? Do you get, can you cut off 20% of your company and put that money back in there? Everybody had really nice offices. I always thought that was a big part of the vice thing was they would have people come over and the vice offices were spectacular. It became this smoke and mirrors optics versus substance. But a lot of people who had money to spend and invest like got seduced by it. It seems like,

I mean, I, I really liked the first, I think the first time I came to the ringer offices in LA was probably 2016. And I really liked, like, honestly, I really liked walking into your,

wherever you guys were in Hollywood or sunset gallery. Yeah. We were old school. And it was sort of like this old school piece of shit office the way that was that was what our offices were like for a long time too and uh i really dug that because it's like all right these guys are grinding here and the new york thing i was involved with companies who did it too yeah they went like super lux and uh and spent so much money on appearance and brand. And a lot of money just appealing to advertisers companies thought they were such a big deal when a lot of the traffic was purchased and they weren't actually as ingrained culturally across the country as they thought they were. Versus my bias is that at that point, we were pretty ingrained culturally all over the place.

But there was a bit of hoodwinking. Yeah. When we were forming The Ringer, we were looking at the office situation. We were like, we're a startup. Why are we going to splurge on an office just so we can impress people that come in? We need a serviceable office that has Wi-Fi and can function and has a roof and electricity, and maybe we could get a couple of video studios, but it certainly wasn't ambitious. I do feel like that shifted a little bit, especially by the end of the 2010s, people starting to realize, oh yeah, the last wave I think has happened of people splurging just because it looks good aesthetically to somebody that might buy it. But in general, that whole era, you were at the start of it because you got bought.

What year did you get bought? August 2012. Right. So that was the early part of it. But then the rest of the decade was all about BuzzFeed was a big one. Who's going to buy BuzzFeed? Who's going to merge with them? And that became the incentive for a lot of these companies, which I thought was another interesting outcome of the 2010s. How do we get bought became more important than what are we doing? Yeah, I think something happened that there was a

seismic shift right after we got bought, which made us feel a little guilty about selling at first, but ended up being fine. And that was like Facebook basically decided they were going to start really pumping traffic to third party websites. And I think the metrics were something like Facebook was averaging 300. I'm not this won't exactly be right, but it's right directionally. Facebook was averaging like 350 minutes a month per user on Facebook. And then they started pushing like integrating links to third party content. And it went up like over a thousand minutes a month. So they're like, oh, wow, like the more content we have, the better that we're doing.

And people want stuff that's not just their friends pictures like they'll you know, we can become a news feed. did the news feed and uh um so if you're like buzzfeed was one of the big winners from that all of a sudden your your traffic numbers going back to the discussion we had earlier of like you've got to be top five in a category all of a sudden they became like number one in the category because they have all this social traffic. And then they raised a bunch of money because investors were sort of like, oh my gosh, Facebook is going to be the new ecosystem that's going to support the publishing landscape. So all these companies raise a ton of money. They raise money at huge valuations. So it's like BuzzFeed raises it. I forget what the numbers were, but at like $800 million

or a billion dollars. And like the investors are saying, we think you're worth a billion dollars today and we're banking that you're going to be able to grow to $3 billion. And that's how we're going to make a bunch of money. And then it turned out that that social, um, traffic they were getting, like most of their traffic was just sort of a short-term bump and Facebook shifted their strategies and we're like, well, you were beholden to Facebook strategy. And as soon as it shifted, you were fucked. Yeah. And they shifted all the time. And they, um, I think it's fair to say they, they made promises to publishers that were not exactly capped, or at least they, they gave publishers indications of things that were going to happen that did not actually happen. Yeah. They love telling people how great it would be for you. We went through

this when we were trying to figure out the ringer and Facebook was such a monster at that point. And we just didn't trust it. We were like, so we're going to build this business that relies on them sending us traffic. That was why I'm not, we made a bunch of mistakes and there's a bunch of things I would do over again. But one of the things that I think was pretty smart, but we had the, at least we knew from Grantland, like the homepage was still super important and you had to get people in the habit of at least checking your homepage once a day. And we still felt like we, we still need that. We can't, we can't hope that Facebook becomes a t-shirt cannon for our traffic because what if they decide,

eh, we don't want to do that anymore. Then what do we do? Totally. And there were a bunch of companies that went out of business that are long gone, at least like BuzzFeed is sort of still around, I guess.

But, you know, you got any media strategy, you have to have diversified sources of audience. If it's direct audience, it's like this is our newsletter base. These people are coming to our homepage. These people love Bill Simmons podcast. Like that's stable. That's not going to go away overnight. But if it's sort of, hey, algorithmically, we're doing really well with Facebook right now. That's nice. Take advantage of it. But it's probably not like, hey, let's

go raise $40 million to invest more in this strategy. You're kind of asking for it a little bit. So I think... But there was another thing that was happening in the 2010s that you sold before the mindset was really the case of just like keep building, keep building, keep growing, keep hiring people, keep showing the outside world that your hour is pointing up, you're getting more and more people, you're doing this, this, and this.

And it was all for the end game of somebody is gonna buy. So it's like, if you're spending more than you make, it didn't really matter because the perception, here's our revenue, but it didn't matter that you're spending more than you make, it didn't really matter because the perception, here's our revenue, but it didn't matter that you're spending more than your revenue was. And for years and years,

people were actually buying into that. And then I think that faucet shut off during COVID. And now it's a different mindset. I think it was bad for the industry to see what happened with Vice, where it was like, Vice has a $4 billion valuation

and they've got a show on HBObo and so people tried to emulate that it's like yeah wow it seemed it seems like these guys like none of us could fit like their audience didn't seem like it was that big but it was it was sort of like well this is the playbook this is what's working and yeah that was a lot of that ended up being a house of cards. And anyone who sort of pursued that strategy. I mean, something I didn't love is that a lot of the execs at companies like that, they did fine because they sold shares in the secondary market. But none of the employees made any money. None of the investors made money unless they exited in secondary. So I just think that got super duper

unhealthy where it was like, also these executives were incentivized to raise a bunch of money because they're like, well, I don't have to see this through to the finish line. If we sell someday, great. But like in the meantime, maybe I can pick up 10 or 20 million bucks. Cause I'll just get some, you know, maybe a little bit naive investor to believe the story we're selling. Well, you sold in 2012, and you had a better version of the experience where you sold to a place that actually reinvested

and tried to build the Bleacher Report brand up and put things in. At some point, it has to be more multimedia, but House of Highlights, which becomes the biggest social sports thing that anyone's created in the last 12 years but i would say there's more positives than negatives for you selling to them right we had like our experience was an a plus overall like you um i mean you I'm sure heard this a lot of times and you've done the same thing now. It's, it's hard to sell to an acquirer and to find a partnership that works really well more weeks than not. And like we, when we were, when we were entertaining selling, like we talked to ESPN, we talked to and turner was the turner was the only one who was

like look like you're gonna be the varsity team here like at espn we would have been like hey like we're interested in using you guys as a platform to right cover high school sports or something and we're like that like they're almost buying you to eliminate you as the competition and yeah and i've heard i haven't heard this directly but i've heard i've heard some regrets from people secondhand over the years that they didn't they didn't do that because we well that was precisely when they had the most yeah they had the most cash i mean that 2012 13 they were like the yankees yeah it probably wouldn't have been the worst move for them but um uh yeah turner turner was like was awesome for our brand. You throw the brand up on,

right after they bought us, the next couple of days, they had Thursday and Friday of the PGA Championship, which I think was at Kiowa that year. And it's like, oh my God, we're being featured on television during the PGA Championship. They grew our brand and took our brand to a different,

put it on a different pedestal than we ever could have sort of managed on our own. And, uh, and then on the flip side, we grew immensely in the three, the two to three years after we were acquired, um, partially because of their help and partially because what we were doing was just really working. And as a result, to their credit, like the guys, David Levy, Matt Hong, the guys who really bought the company there, they kind of just left us alone. And that made it great for me because I'm still running this company. These guys are letting me do my thing. And I think that was a little bit of like, them looking at being smart enough to look at Silicon Valley acquisitions. And like, they looked at what Google had done with YouTube, and they're like, yeah, they kind of left it alone. If it's growing, we should leave it alone.

So I think those guys also deserve a lot of credit for not just doing the usual media thing of like, all right, we need to find synergies, we need to integrate this as much as we possibly can. They didn't do really any of that until after I left. Yeah. It's never going to go perfect. And then the other thing that happens is people leave that were the people you made the deal with. That happened to us. We, we got bought by two people. One was gone within two years and one was gone within three. You know know those were the two people that drove the deal so yeah you're champions who are invested oh okay i guess that's where we are now but you had the same thing like everybody that bob wheat report i don't think any of them are there now yeah they're all gone but they were all there they were all there when they were there for a couple years at

least they were there they were there for a long time and uh yeah, I'd say it's a case study and a great sports acquisition because there were partners on both sides of the table that trusted each other. And they didn't come at us and just say, hey, this is what we need you to do. You're either in or you're out. It was sort of like, hey, this is what we want to achieve.

How can you guys help in or you're out it was sort of like hey this is what we want to achieve how can you guys help can you help and uh yeah it uh um it was awesome for the brand i think when we sold we probably had 125 or 130 employees something like that when i left we had 550 so wow i mean part of it was like our revenue grew from, you know, I think when we, the year we sold, it was 37 million. When I left, it was trending, trending closer to 200. So it was like, you know, the business grew a ton, but they let us reinvest the profits back into the business. And they, they got really into the idea of like, hey, we like, we want to go compete with ESPN. Yeah. We don't want to just see this place do that. Well, they have the sports on the Max app.

They have TNT. They have TBS. They have, during March Madness, True TV gets involved. They're trying to figure out some sort of, how do we have sports all the time? Now they're in this mix with ESPN and Fox with their streaming app. So it's definitely about, we'll take a break and then I want to talk about

the 3.0 version of the internet and the thing you're working on now. After decades of shaky hands caused by debilitating tremors, Sunnybrook was the only hospital in Canada who could provide Andy with something special. Three neurosurgeons, two scientists, one movement disorders coordinator, 58 answered questions, two focused ultrasound procedures, one specially developed helmet, thousands of high-intensity focused ultrasound waves,

zero incisions. And that very same day, two steady hands. From innovation to action, Sunnybrook is special. Learn more at sunnybrook.ca slash special. All right. So now we're in the 3.0 stage of the internet and you created this company called The Cooldown. Just explain what the company is, then we can talk about it. Yeah. Basically the company is, it's a guide for consumers and and for businesses fundamentally to help people transition to sort of like a cleaner and better future which is

basically my way of saying that I've I've gotten really passionate about the idea that they're like we all pollute a lot pollution is a big problem in our country and our planet and the more I learned about it the more I realized I realized that they're great solutions that are good for people's lives and their communities, like health benefits and ways you can save money that also will lower pollution levels in your community. So there's all sorts of stuff going on there. And I thought that getting access to trusted information around like, hey, here's what you can do that's sort of in your best interest to lower your pollution levels and to make your community better. It was just too difficult for people to figure it out. under two years. We launched in July 2022 and we've already built a 35 million person monthly audience of people who are using us to sort of figure out how they can sort of like make life

improvements in that vein. So you're figuring this out. There's a piece of turf you want to take, right? Where it's like, hey, people aren't informed enough about pollution, climate, simple ways to make their life easier, all this stuff. I don't see anyone in this space from a multimedia standpoint. So there's a piece of turf. I want to take it. Now what do we do? So it's like, we have to at some point figure out a website. We have to figure out what's our Instagram. Are we going to be on TikTok? Do we care about Twitter at this point with the way Twitter is going? What are some of the other things you're just thinking about? Like stage one, how do we do this? Yeah. The first thing that I focus on is what you just said. It's like,

what's the problem we're trying to solve? And is it a problem for enough people where it's worth doing? And in this case, I've been on the West Coast for most of my life. It's pretty awful when you live through forest fires and smoke for months at a time. And it sort of made me want to start to figure this stuff out. And so I'm sort of like, yep, this is a problem for a lot of people. There are a lot of people that want their kids to breathe clean air and drink fresh water. And they want their communities to be better. And so it's like, what's the best way that we can share information with people where it's not overwhelming and it doesn't turn them off. And so for this business... Wait, hit the turn them off thing,

because that's a key piece of this. There's a way it's like, sometimes, especially with climate stuff, it becomes this like, you're either way this way or way this way. And it doesn't seem to be what the cool down's about. It's kind of in the middle. It's just like, hey, did you know this? Hey, did you know this? Hey, did you know that? Versus like lecturing people. Yes, you mentioned like, like we're trying to take this turf and own this space, right?

Or create a lot of value in the space. And it's different because like in sports, we were taking market share. Like it wasn't, we weren't creating a new market of like, oh, we're going to try to get people really interested in sports. Like, yeah, that wasn't it. This is like the climate stuff that's been in the market or whatever you want to call the space

it's super niche and it's mostly like very left-wing progressive sort of like we call it sort of like eco people who mostly just talk to each other and it's a shame and they haven't figured out how to make their they're very well intentioned um and there's there's a shame and they haven't figured out how to make their, they're very well-intentioned. And there's, there's a lot of good stuff that they're sort of spinning around, but they haven't figured out a way to sort of translate it to mainstream Americans in a way where it makes sense for people to, to do real things. And so,

yeah, our, our purview is like the way it's being covered a lot of times now is very doom and gloom it's like hey you know there's this extreme weather event in texas and if you don't make these changes we're all gonna die and it's like it's a lot of it is we'll all be dead in 10 years the planet will be too hot in 20 years well we'll all be dead and whether that's correct or not correct we can you know we can debate it to the moon and back but uh what's what's not debatable is it that does not work that does not that that fear-based

sort of fear-mongering stuff does not um provoke most people into taking any action or looking at better technologies that are available to them and like participating in this transition to honestly like what should be a better future because there are like are a lot of better technologies and ways of doing things that are better for your kids and better for you. And so our first strategy was like, let's make this information just relatable to people so it's helpful to them. And it's, and it's, it's just really simple of like, hey, if you're basically like 35% of carbon emissions, we'll just say pollution, 35% of pollution in the US, that type of pollution comes from households, which is a lot. live in homes versus apartment complexes and have more control over, say, the energy efficiency in our houses or the type of energy we use or the appliances we use. The changes that we make actually matter a lot, both in terms of big picture,

but also in terms of personal health. A lot of moms are... Some of this stuff freaks people out, but it is what it is. Like people are more cognizant now that if you have a gas stove in your house, like maybe turn the exhaust fan on or open a window because it's not good, especially for kids to breathe methane gas that's just being burned in a house. Like it's not, it's not good. Um, so that, uh, that builds awareness and, um, people are starting to say, Hey, like, as opposed to burning gas in my house, the next time I, you know, I need a new stove, like maybe I'll get an induction stove or maybe I'll get a, an electric cooktop. Cause like it's clean, it reduces the chance. Like

my kids don't have a higher rate of propensity to get asthma. And so we're sort of like helping people to understand that. And there's like thousands of different examples of just like, yeah, there are better ways to do some things that we probably should all adopt in the next five to 10 years. But we also don't need to like it's not going to do anybody a whole lot of, uh, sort of just like run into the streets screaming, we're all going to die. Yeah. One of the things I really like about the cool down, it's, it, it kind of, it's a little like sports where it kind of zags against what I thought about things, right? Like you did this thing about leaf blowers and how leaf blowers are actually bad. And I was like, what?

Leaf blowers are bad. It's bad. Leaf blowers are actually bad. I was like, what? Leaf blowers are bad? It's bad? Leaf blowers are shockingly really bad. And now, because I was walking around LA and I always see the people blowing leaves and there's a few reasons they're bad, which you explained as you laid it out on the site. One is it's actually okay for the ground

and for grass to have leaves. It brings a lot of positive benefits that you wouldn't realize. It just doesn't look as good. But then the biggest thing is the leaf blower machines are just terrible. It's like the worst exhaust, the worst smoke that just shoots out. And just the anti-benefits of those machines versus just not having some leafs on the sidewalk. It's like no contest. But nobody would ever think like, oh, leaf blowers, why do we do this? And I think that's, to me, that.

And the other one that really jumped out at me recently was the plastic bottles. We're in a plastic bottle crisis, and I have one right here. I'm probably as guilty as anyone. Damn it, Bill. I'm probably as guilty as anyone, but I know, but all the stuff about like every time you drink from a plastic bottle, you're just putting plastic in your body and people don't think, but it's like these little tiny particles. And so you have like a five-year-old kid who's chugging a Dasani. Every time they're chugging, it's like just a little plastic going into their bodies. And what's that going to look like when they're 25?

Yeah, we really don't know the answer to that. But I guess I probably have a credit card's worth of plastic in my body. That's sort of like the studies have shown. I'm not that into having that much plastic. I don't think there's no conclusiveness on whether that's that bad for you yet. But I would prefer to just not be part plastic. The leaf blower thing is crazy. And you think, yes, it's bad for the environment.

The exhaust from leaf blowers is literally the worst type of exhaust that comes from anything, pretty much. It's like a 1970 automobile just shooting smoke out but what's even worse is i mean you think about the you know the poor landscapers who are like for or you know if you have your own okay fine great but you know places where i live places where you live a lot of you know a lot of people pay um landscaping crews to come and uh uh and clean their yards up and you you have these poor workers who are just breathing terrible and it's not like they're doing their it's not like you do your lawn yeah they're wearing like covid masks they do it they do it all the time um and it's it's

just like it's not fair to those people uh and uh and so yeah it's like we, I'm in a very fortunate situation. We have a landscape crew at our house and like we've been able to, that the landscape crew has an option to just use all electric equipment. And that's what we do. And if I, the extent to which I buy equipment for like a snowblower or anything like that, like I buy all electric with, with, um, either plug in or batteries cause, uh, um, it's, it's better. It makes me feel less guilty. And, uh, the products actually work just as well, if not better. Like it's not so noisy. That's really nice. Um, it's like, it's basically like, yeah, the noise is another one. It's funny. Like part of, part of what I think is interesting about what you're doing is people either know very little about something or like an incredible amount of

something and there's not a lot of in between. So like most of the people I know recycle at this point. And like in LA we have like the blue garbage can and the green one. And then, but I don't think people fully understand like that. We haven't really figured out the recycling thing completely yet, which is one of the things you've covered. Another thing you've covered was the whole, hey, at some point, we're going to be taking sewage water and turning it back into actual water again. That's happening. People would think that's the most disgusting thing ever. They're spending a lot of money.

I live in Oregon these days, but you guys are all drinking sewage water um which i actually i think is fine to do but uh um that might take me a minute to wrap my head around actually drinking it myself you know the recycling thing is so messed up like i there's certain like you get into a space like this and um and you know when i'm first consuming the information a lot of it's sort of like, Hey, is this like a conspiracy theory or is this legit? Like that's, we have to wade through and, and recycling programs, unfortunately did actually like, we're pushed really hard by oil and gas companies like Exxon, for example, or like, Hey, you know, they, they, um, oil and gas companies, uh, um, create plastic. Like that's, that's their second, That's their second biggest line of business

after the gas station. And so the more plastic, more stuff that's wrapped in plastic, the better for them. And so if it's like, hey, if we have a recycling program where it's like you guys just put the plastic in recycling, it's kind of all good. You know, buy all the plastic you want. But the reality is, in the United States, studies have shown that only about 5% of plastic that goes into recycling actually gets recycled.

And that's pretty messed up. I mean, like paper is good. Glass is not quite as good. But paper and glass or that recycling is um uh is pretty solid plastic recycling is basically bs i'm not it's like sort of a tough decision around is this even worth doing or not uh we do we do it but i i just when it's it's impossible to not use plastic like impossible but like but like we, we try to avoid it when we can and sort of figure that's the best we can do right now. What's the feedback you've

gotten from the first couple of years of this from, from people, like what do they like the most and what do they seem like they're the most disappointed you don't have? Uh, we get, we do get a lot of, uh, a fan mail, um, from especially, or, especially, it's like the simple stuff oftentimes of sort of like the, oh, you guys had this great, great tip for something that, you know, reduced my waste or that saved me money. People are really into saving money, especially in this economy. And so we get a lot of feedback around that, which is like, thank you for surfacing this. I started using this. It worked. We definitely get like we try really hard to be sort of nonpolitical. We've done well with moderate conservatives, which like that was a real goal of ours of like, let's like let's's not make this. Be accessible to everybody. Yeah, this is not going to be right left nonsense. Like we're going to focus on information and people can do with it what they want.

You know, like we're not going to tell people what to do. It's like, here's our finding, take the information. We still do get plenty of sort of like pretty like wacko, oftentimes like super right wing, like, you know, climate change isn't real, this or that, this or that. And it's like, that is, there's about, there's about, you know, from a number standpoint, about 10% of the country of the United States are still sort of like hardcore climate denialists.

And the interesting thing is like, the other thing that happens, oil and gas companies are very, they have a ton of money and they're very aggressive with their lobbying and they're very aggressive with, um, uh, um, sort of like counterpoints where whether they're bots or whether they're real people, they'll, they'll hop into comment threads and they'll like, there there's, we deal with misinformation stuff right like of and you it's sort of in this industry you get to know it's like oh that's like an oil and gas bot like it is it is what it is but there's there's this imagine you'd have a lot of angry restaurants because one of the things that's on

there is about how much food gets wasted which I think is a really interesting topic in general. And how we have no real plan. Restaurants are just like, yeah, foods, we're going to throw this out now. And they just chuck it out. And that's it. There is way too much of that going on, but there also are really cool... A lot of what we do is they're really cool companies trying to solve that problem all this stuff that we're talking about there are super super smart people that uh have either come up with solutions or are working on solutions and they're they're really cool companies that will take old food from

um from restaurants and redistribute it to people who need the food at either for free or at a very low cost and so a lot of what we do is we try to spread awareness. So if you're a part of one of those restaurants and you're like, shit, we're going to get called out by some company for this, it's not just about slapping them on the wrist. It's like, hey, there's a great solution out here. Why don't you participate in this program? So our ethos is everything we do, like every web article.

If we highlight a problem, we need to also highlight a solution. Like we can't just be like, hey, this is a big problem. And, you know, end conclusion, we're all going to die or we're going to end up living in Blade Runner world. It's like, nope, this is a problem. But here's some really cool people

that are working on the solution. Go talk to them. So you've figured out the first level of everything you're doing with this and you built like a base. But then now the question is

how do you build this? How do you grow it? And part of that is like you need a couple faces for for the company I'm guessing. You probably need like a signature podcast. You need

maybe on the website like two writers that are just on the cutting edge of this stuff and become must reads for people? What else do you need? Yeah, it's we're sort of like at the like I'm running a similar playbook to what I did at Bleacher Report because it's kind of what I'm comfortable with. Right. Where like we focused on building the audience first. And so we have this really big audience at this point,

35 million people a month. The next thing we focused on, just like Bleacher Report, was building up newsletter subscriptions. So our newsletters are really popular. We have almost 300,000 subscribers. By the way, for the listeners, the newsletter is good.

It's unintrusive and it's fun to read. I actually like the way it's laid out. Thank you. Yeah, it's really coming along like we've got a home newsletter we have a technology newsletter those two are especially popular uh we're gonna launch um an automotive newsletter pretty soon anyway it's good it's good stuff uh we've started to do some like more impactful like brand partnership stuff um we're partnered with alex honnold this year with free solo climber awesome guy um really really grateful to have gotten to know alex he's uh um he's he's sort of like a cool little bit unexpected messenger in the space where like

we've gone and spent a bunch of time with him and uh i've done a bunch of videos on sort of like how he lives sustainably in his life also he has they just had their second kid but he has a daughter that's probably almost three two two to three and they like it's sort of like about how he teaches her he's teaching her from an early age around like sort of best practices like every morning they get up and they like go take the compost out together. And it's like, there are these rituals that we're all going to end up adopting at a certain point where like you and I grew up in sort of like a recycling world where, you know, it's like we got used to recycling in California. Yeah. But like, you know, composting is going to be the new recycling. And so anyway, that's been, that's been cool, but we're definitely, we're definitely all about finding people that are

not sort of like your classic, I don't mean to take shots at them, I appreciate all the work that they're doing, but sort of like bleeding liberal climate people. That's not quite our jam. We're more so looking to work with people who have influence with audiences in a totally different light. They're a country singer or they're a sports star and they might have an interesting point of view on this or maybe they're involved with a company that's trying to do something about this and they want that company to grow faster and for their solution to accelerate.

So that's more of what we'll try to do. And yes, we also have like some more influential people in the space that we'll likely bring on. Cause yeah, it's important to have like your business, obviously like you've done most of the hard work yourself to build it up, but having that front face or those couple of front faces that people really trust where they're like,

Hey, if, you know, if Bill says this is something that's worth doing, then I, like, I, I trust that it's worth my time to check it out.

So that'll be part, that'll be part of our evolution to sort of like have those people where it's like, I like this person. Like I'm a mom and she really resonates with me. And so like, I'm going to read her stuff regularly or watch her videos. And so.

Well, the last piece of this, just to bring it full circle, and then we can end on this, is just in the 2020s, the way you're trying to build a company like this is totally different than how you would have done it in the 2008 to 2012 range. Because you would want to try to build as many employees as you could, try to build as much revenue and audience as you possibly could, and then hope that, I don't want to say fool somebody, but hope that somebody would be like, oh, they're making this? But I think everybody's kind of wary of that now.

People now look like, what are the decisions you've made? How many people did you actually need? How much money are you actually spending? What's your goal for this year and the next six? Because I just think anyone who would invest in a company like this is just way smarter with the way they look at it than they might've been 12 years ago. I know. It's so crazy like people want you to actually make money these days. It's the damnedest thing. But yeah,

no, it's like, it's totally, it's different for a couple of reasons. One, we're in an era of media where like niche really matters. You, you need,

you need to build something that really solves a problem for an audience. And it's hard to be all things to all people. So I think, I don't think this is like the generalist media play where it's like, we've got a vertical for this and for this and for this. It's like, nope, really focus on one thing. Do it super, super well. Matter to an audience. So I think that's a key part.

The other thing you just mentioned, we've been profitable for nine straight months at this point. And we have a lot of money in the bank. We could be investing... If I was running this business seven or eight years ago, we'd be spending way more money right now. But I don't want to do that because I want to build this in a way where we have good business fundamentals. And if we do sell the business someday where it's an attractive business, not just because climate is a hot topic and we got lucky, but it's an attractive business

because it's just a good business. So that's another lesson. And it's way easier now too. I don't have many technology costs these days, for example, versus the other era of media. My product and engineering team at Bleacher Report, without even talking about design people,

is probably like 60 to 70 people. It was a huge group with a massive expense. Our tech expense now is almost nothing. And so there are some fundamental shifts that have taken place in this space where you can if you know what you're doing you can run a content company uh um more profitably and then also the other piece i'll mention is you can do things with the learnings from these companies that can be pretty impactful. So like in our business, instead of just like doing run-of-the-mill advertising campaigns, we're able to help our clients get a lot smarter about like we hey, Bill did this. But in aggregate, we can help a brand understand what messaging is going to actually move their target audience to do something.

We can say like, hey, you've been trying it this way. That's not working. Here's why. If you try it this way, your yield is going to be way better. And so I think for businesses in this space also, it's not just about sort of like, okay, you've got these eyeballs, like throw some advertising against it. It's like, what else do you have strategically? Is it like, are people buying, are they transacting, you know, through your, through your site? Is there, are there sort of like data and insights or other like

B2B tools that can sort of be built on top of the audience. So I think that's also... And credit to Axios and Politico. Some of those businesses I followed really closely. And we're not doing exactly what they're doing, but they definitely opened my eyes to... There's a lot of value to really owning a certain audience and sort of being able to take the three together and do the one plus one plus one equals six type of type of thing. So sometimes somebody like you would be being looked at by somebody who's also thinking, so we'll get that and then we'll get this and then we'll have this. And now we have

this. Yeah. Uh, especially in the, in sort of sort of the you know whatever you want to call it the climate the sort of better future landscape where there's a bunch of different stuff being built yeah and uh and it's really about the end game is putting together cohesive consumer experiences just to make it easy for people and And so there are different bits and parts of it that have to come together. But the end game is you have a great experience and you end up making more of these changes in your life or being supportive of the changes in your community

because it's like, oh, this actually makes sense for me. I'm not going to lose a bunch of money as a result or it's not going to be a big hassle because it's easy. So we're all trying to build to just make it as easy as possible. The cool down. I really like the newsletter. I enjoy the Instagram. I don't go to the website. You're two for three with me. I really like the Instagram and the newsletter, especially. I always learn stuff, but it makes me think. Good luck with this. Good luck in the 3.0 era of the internet. Thanks.

We'll go crush 3.0. Appreciate you having me on. All right. Good to see you. All right. That's it for the podcast. Thanks to Dave Finocchio. Thanks to Jason Goff.

Thanks to Steve Cerruti and Kyle Creighton for producing. As always, don't forget, everything is available on youtube.com slash Bill Simmons, including the new rewatchables that we did, Internal Affairs. That will be up later this week. And I will be back on this feed with a new podcast on Thursday. See you then. We'll be right back. Must be 21 plus and present in select states. Fandle is offering online sports wagering in Kansas under an agreement with Kansas Star Casino LLC. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. Visit Fandle.com slash RG in Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, Vermont.

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