The Bill Simmons Podcast - Ep. 19: Malcolm Gladwell

Episode Date: November 5, 2015

HBO's Bill Simmons talks to best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell about Grantland's abrupt demise, public funded sports arenas/stadiums, new owner syndrome, Tom Brady's never-ending career, the corrupt NCAA, Obama's next job and how America needs a sports czar more than ever. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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They guarantee you'll be happy or your first pair is free. Once you feel MeUndies on your body, you're never going back. The Bill Simmons Podcast is also brought to you by HBO because they were nice enough to give me my own television show that launches next spring. Thank you, HBO. Newsflash, you don't need cable or satellite to watch HBO anymore. Just download the HBO Now app and start your free one-month trial today. You know, when I think of West Coast rap, one of the first people I think of is Malcolm Gladwell. How are you?

I'm very well, very well I love that association Yeah, well you had your gangster rap stage there a little bit Right before the New Yorker, I remember I did, you know, when my long hair stage Totally, when I was But I was rocking more Much more of a kind of a West Indian vibe, you know

Than I was a Snoop West Coast kind of thing. So we have, we have a lot to talk about. And in fact, this is going to be an especially good podcast because you and I have not had like a long phone conversation. Sometimes we haven't talked in a couple months and, and normally that kind of steps on the podcast because then you're just repeating the same beats of the, but this is a nice, fresh conversation that we've needed to have for a little while anyway. So I'm excited. Yeah, I know.

First of all, we should talk about Grantland first. Let's just get that out of the way. You were, what was your title when we launched Grantland? Founding Contributing Editor or something? I can't even remember. It was, oh, yeah, I think that's what it was. It was Kosterman, me, who else? Jane Levy.

That's right. And John Walsh, the great John Walsh. I still love John Walsh. I will always love John Walsh. Nobody will ever be able to tear my love down for John Walsh. Uh, yeah. So you were, and you, we wrote a couple of pieces together. You wrote a, you wrote at least two pieces on your own. On my own, and then we did so many of those back and forth, like four or five of them.

Did some podcasts. Podcasts, and now it's all gone. Yeah, and I didn't really give you a heads up over the last couple months for how I thought this was going to play out. So just as an outsider, just watching this, you're a busy guy, you don't know what's going on. What was your reaction?

It's insanity. I've never seen... So a brand is created, a magazine is created that is fresh and new and edgy, and it has an incredibly loyal following. It has international recognition and then they decide to shut it down i think you actually said this to me in an email do you know how hard it is to create a brand new uh media brand today it's pretty hard it's pretty hard for them to kind of uh for espn to kind of turn around and just say, well, and kind of flush it down the toilet, it's just bizarre to me.

I don't know. You know the whole story. I don't know. I know what I read in the paper, so I don't know the backstory here. I was thinking about this, and it's something I thought about ESPN for a long time. ESPN is a really weird institution. On the one hand, it cultivates this image of edginess, transgressiveness, youth-oriented bad boys, right? That was the whole Stuart Scott, Dan Patrick, the way they genuinely, I think, reinvent the culture of sports journalism, or at least of television sports journalism, in this really brilliant, fresh way. But every time they had an opportunity to back that up, that edginess, that transgressiveness, they behaved like a bank.

Like, they were terrified. I mean, to me, the lesson of the whole fallout of Grantland is how terrified the bosses of ABC and Disney and ESPN were with controversy, which is bizarre because they're in the controversy business, right? Yeah. That's what you try to do when you're in the business of sports journalism, is generate discussion and controversy over something we're passionate about. Every time one of those opportunities pops up, they behave like they're Goldman Sachs. And you have, you know, criticized the managing director of equity research, you know? It's like, can I keep going here? Yeah, I'm enjoying all of it.

Like, for example, the whole thing about you and Goodell, right? So I don't know what happened, but I'm going to guess Roger Goodell got on the phone with the head of ABC and said... Probably Disney. Disney, right? And said, I'm very unhappy with what Simmons said about me on the show. Now, the appropriate response for whoever it was he called would be to say, Roger, I feel your pain. We have a great partnership. I want nothing more than to be fair with you. Why don't you go on Simmons's podcast and defend yourself?

That's called journalism. He's a robot. He never would have done that. I know, but I don't even care what he would have done. That's the appropriate response on the part of ESPN, right? Is we're a journalistic organization. If you don't like the way you're treated, I'm offering you 45 minutes with Simmons

to make your case, right? And then the difficult phone call for them is they should have called you up and said, look, you don't have any choice. Goodell's coming on your show. And by the way, you would have said, fantastic, right? But instead they acted like it was the Kremlin in 1948 and someone had criticized Stalin. Yeah.

It doesn't make any sense to me. I mean, there's two separate stories here. It's like, how did things get so bad? And then also what happened after I left? And I haven't really talked that much about either, but I will say like, it was an awesome place to work. You know,

I think it's funny cause I haven't talked that much about ESPN since I left, but every time I've talked about it, I've always mentioned that I'm super grateful for all the stuff I was able to do there. And the chances that I had to create things. I don't ever want anyone to think that that stuff wasn't super important to me. And I got to say, from 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, it was a really good place to work. When Nate Silver was trying to decide what to do, um, and I was one of the people involved with courting him and it, and really

it started because he came on my podcast after the election and we were in the car, we went to lunch, we were just talking about stuff and I could tell he didn't really know what he wanted to do. And I, at that point I wanted him to write for Grantland and I thought there was a window open and we talked on and off for the next nine months. He talked to some other people at ESPN. He talked to David Cho who was working for me at the time and a couple of ESPN executives and my pitch to him over and over again. And people heard it, including when he was in San Antonio for the finals in 2013. and my dad hung out with him the whole day. And I was like, this is a great place to work.

Like, ESPN gets a bad rap. It's actually a good place for a creative person to work, which it was for those five years. And I think what happens with big companies... Can I point out? Yeah. In other contexts, if you're trying to woo someone to play for your team or work for you,

like, you give them strippers or, you know, they hang out with buttholes. You bring in your dad. I brought in my 67-year-old dad to watch basketball with him. I thought that would get him. And obviously it worked because he signed. But, you know, I thought it was the right place for him. Like I genuinely felt that way. And when Whitlock, his contract came up a little bit later,

it was the same thing. We talked to him. I was like, yeah, I think you should have a column and be on PTI. But I think what happens with corporations a lot of times is people change. The people underneath the big boss changes. The big boss job changes. And you can have just enough shifting where things start to shift. And I'm not saying I was blameless with anything.

I mean, when I did blameless with anything. I mean, you know, when I did that podcast with Goodell, we took stuff out of my podcast all the time. My whole, my whole thing with the podcast was, you know, the third rail is sitting over there. You got to be really careful walking toward it. You don't want to touch it, but it's sometimes it's fun to get really close. And the good thing about podcasts is you can touch the rail. And if you realize that you touched it and you got electrocuted you go yeah we should take that out and we did that a bunch of times and the irony of what happened with that podcast was um you know when i did it i was mad about a lot of stuff that was going on behind the scenes which

i don't need to talk about but um i was my ass off. I was about to do a six hour taping session with Jalen Rose, right? Where we did our little NBA YouTube previews. So we were about to be in a studio for six solid hours doing our first 10 teams. I had done that podcast that day and I went right from the podcast to the studio to do six straight hours. And a couple of my people were texting me like, hey man, you want to listen to that podcast before it goes up? You got pretty into that one.

No, that's fine. It's okay, just go with it. And I never listened to it. If I'd heard, I would have said, you know what, that doesn't sound, I don't think that's worth it. We should take that. I would have taken it out.

You know what, I disagree. I don't think you should have had to. I don't think you should. That's the wrong impulse. The right impulse is that ESPN has to say it's sports. You're talking about Roger Goodell, who is just a goofball that happens to run the league.

It's not like you're criticizing the Pope here. It's fine to have a—you were criticizing, you were bringing up that point in the context of a very legitimate argument about how the NFL treats its players in response to allegations of misconduct. Right. If you can't have free discussion about that, what's the point of being a sports journalism network? Listen, I'm with you. I stand by everything I said about that guy. I thought he was lying.

I was borne out correct. The guy did lie. He's either dumb or a liar, and it's quite possible he's a little bit of both. I would say there's a continuum here, and I'm not sure whether he's more on the lying end or the dumb end, but I'm open to suggestion on it. But my, you know, my issue and the mistake I made and the thing that I feel really badly about is I had all these people that were counting on me, you know, I got 50 people working for that website in some capacity, full-time, part-time. And if, if I'm going to push the envelope, like I did, um, first of all, you you gotta know where the line is because the last thing I

want to do is put all those people in a bad spot. And then secondly, like just as a staff, we should have realized like, Hey, is this worth it? And, and that's something we should have held the podcast. We should have talked about it. We should have had a meeting about it. And I was in a room with Jalen for six hours. And you know, sometimes you wonder, it's almost like when you watch a baseball game and somebody makes an error and they lose the game like david like daniel murphy makes the error in the world series and you think like well that's an error the game could have gone either way if he doesn't do that and then the other hand you think well maybe that error was a micro was a symptom of something bigger you know and in our case i was overworked and i should have listened

that podcast and i was doing too many things and we should have taken our time with it and we didn't but so that really set the tone for just a really bad next eight months and so that's one part of the story and it was always headed a certain way after they suspended me um but but the way they handled the website from the moment they decided they weren't going to renew my contract, which I found out about on Twitter and which all of my staff found about on Twitter, every single person that worked for me and with me, um, all the way through what happened last week, it was all the same issue. It was the fact they didn't communicate with the staff.

They never made the staff was really scared for the future of the site. They were scared for where it was going. They didn't know who the, who the leader was in place of me. I mean, I hired every person that worked there. I was the guy, I was the person for lack of the better word, like, you know, the father figure almost. And the site was the site I came up with. And I was generating a lot of the ideas that led to what the site became and, and then delegating to all these people that had hired. And we had like this awesome, awesome thing. And you can't just change that in a minute. You know, there's going to be ramifications, repercussions. If you do change it, then you have to make people feel good about how it played out. And they just didn't. And from the get go, you know, they acted very corporate about it.

People found out about the new editor in chief on Twitter for the most part, I think only 25% of the staff knew in the moment, everybody else found out after the fact. And when you handle things that way, it goes from there, you know? and so your point about a corporation and how a corporation handles things this was the perfect example of it they handled it like a corporation from may on and that's the thing is like it was a really creative company it didn't always used to be like that and to me that that was the part i think i lost yeah no it's a listen it's a shame. I mean, I make these criticisms from a position of love as well. You know, I've spent half an hour at least a day on ESPN.com or related sites for the last God knows how many years. I mean, you know, like millions of sports fans, I have a tangible investment in this network, in this brand, whatever it is.

And it's just sad to see them betray their own legacy, you know? Yeah. And at the same time, you know, they did own it and they can do what they want with it. I think the thing that was frustrating to me, and especially, you know, people wrote so many nice things about the site and I appreciate all of it uh it was really nice to to know that the site resonated with so many people and they were sad about it we were sad too it was you know just an awful weekend really really really sad and something that i think from the moment wesley wesley was the first one who left and wesley was a huge part of the site and not both on the site and behind the scenes. And when he left and then remember it was leaving and then Jacoby was

basically going to go do his radio show and the site just started a splinter and you could feel it, but I didn't think it was going to be overnight. You know, he, I mean, I was still working there six months ago. Yeah. I months ago. Think of it that way. And the site had just come off its best month ever in April. We literally had our best month. And we were still figuring out how to do the site. I think that's another thing people forget. I knew that the moment something bad happened or if I left or whatever,

I knew that the rhetoric would spin that the site didn't make enough money. But, you know, they made a magazine that's ever made money in its first two or three years. I know. Well, that's true. But we, we should have made a lot more money than we did. And part of this is my fault because I always felt like, uh, listen, just worry about the words. The people are going to come worry about the quality. I, I, the staff can back me up. I never looked at the page view stuff. stuff like i never cared about that i didn't care that so-and-so's piece did uh x amount of traffic

compared to another person's piece like i always was worried about the overall calibration and quality of the site and i felt like in the long run we were going to win but then when the business stuff started and we need to keep growing the site and they're like look you know the site's not it's it's not really raking in the cash and i'm like that's not possible we we have like the best advertising demo there is this doesn't make sense explain this to me uh it was it was really amazing like we had a sponsor we had a sponsored studio that wasn't sponsored remember that state-of-the-art studio? I think you were in there, right, in L.A.? Yeah.

We never had a sponsor for it. How hard is it to get a sponsor? Sports Nation has a sponsor. Yeah, yeah. Really? Nobody? Nobody's available to sponsor this? So it was a lot of moments like that.

You would have thought, Bill, with all that you've done for the Boston sports teams over the years. Dunkin' Donuts? You could have gotten, yeah, well, anything from Boston, yeah. Any of those local ads. Jordan's Furniture could have done it. Yeah, you're right. So it was frustrating.

I mean, it's funny because people have been writing this about that it was a different kind of story, but really it was a story, it was a business story, and it was a story about ESPN, which is built to sell really big things. I've said this before. Like they get 125 million from Dunkin' Donuts and they spread that out on college football

and Monday Night Football and SportsCenter and all these different things. They never, we never really fit into that. You know, we were like a, this little boutique place that's trying to build traffic and, and trying to give them a little bit of soul. And I'm, you almost have to think out of the box to sell something like that, right? Well, they have to, I mean, the challenge for them is they have to remain the freshest and the smartest voice in sports journalism if they're going to stay on top. And that requires investments, right?

That requires doing strange and unusual things. And that requires tolerating some dissident voices from time to time. And I don't know whether they ever, they were willing to kind of, that requires that you, sometimes you pay a little price in terms of your, you know, corporate image to get to keep that difficult position as the smartest and freshest. That's what I don't know. It's easy to give in to the banker's mentality and say we've got to be planned and corporate and all speak with one voice. Or you go the other way and you just go, what are we?

We're a company that shows games and SportsCenter, and those are the two things that are the most important things to us. You know, a lot of the decisions that were made were always financial over creative at that place. Like, for instance, and I made a big deal of this because I went on Mike Francesa's show last month. I was really excited to go on that show. I love Mike Francesa.

And it never made sense to me why I wasn't allowed to go on that show. I love Mike Francesa. And it never made sense to me why I wasn't allowed to go on that show or like the best show in Boston or some of these local shows that weren't affiliated with ESPN because it's good for me to go on Mike Francesa's show and kill it on his show, right? He is the guy in New York city. If I'm on that show and I do a good job, all that does is bring maybe a couple more people from New York to me. You were prohibited from doing stuff outside the ESPN family? Oh, yeah. Nobody from ESPN was allowed to do radio shows outside of ESPN unless you got special permission.

And usually you could get it if you were promoting a book or something. But I wasn't allowed to go on Francesca's show but I wasn't allowed to go on Francesa show. I wasn't allowed to go on any Boston station that wasn't affiliated with the Hispanic. It's like Boston was my place. You know, that's where I have the most fans. That's why I grew up. That's where I wrote about the teams the most and to not be able to go on there and kind of, for lack of a better word, like, you know, kind of control my brand is a good thing.

It's not like, it's like not the Berlin Wall, but the Bristol Wall. A little bit. All right. But from their side, think of it this way. They're trying to build a giant business

with ESPN Radio, right? Yeah. So their attitude was, we're paying our talent all this money to work for us. Why are we then helping competitors we have in different markets when part of the draw for espn radio is that you know we have these people and they come on our shows which is fine but then that means i have to go on those shows so there are only a

couple espn radio shows like in the last 15 years i like i like coward show i used to go on coward show everyone so i went out with silo and svp i went on levitard show a bunch of times yeah but i didn't want to go on micah mike show so that means i can never go on a morning show ever yeah that's that's oh just a weird like imagine hbo saying you can only go on shows that are time warner yeah that's it like really lena dunham can't do an interview with anyone other than time warner so but that goes back to your point about the corporate thing and um you get you have to you can't get too caught up in those kind of uh corporate games if you want to be a serious journalistic force. I mean, just like a, but maybe the lesson of this is next time you start something like

Grandland, you can't start it at the big company. You have to go independent or find someone who's scrappier and a little more willing to take chances. I mean, maybe that's the kind of sad truth of this. It's sad. It happened. I have like a half an hour hole in my day now. I don't know what I'm going to do without Zach Lowe in the NBA season.

I'm already like going through Zach Lowe's separation anxiety. Well, and I think the thing they underestimated probably was the culture of the site and that people were pretty close in the relationships. And, you know, we were always a little understaffed, which is just the way it is. But it's easier to get people to work harder than usual when they really believe in the site and they believe in everybody that works for it. And they're also competitive. I mean, I'm sure you have that at the New Yorker where you have unbelievable writers at the New Yorker and it raises your game, you know, cause you're like, I gotta be good.

I got, we have this guy and this guy and this guy and this guy. And I, I'm not, I can't, I guess spend the extra three hours on this piece. Cause you know, I'm going to be in this issue with these people. And we had that and we had people that really raised their games. And it was, you know, I don't think anybody expected what was going to happen last weekend. But it was, I think it did help that so many people wrote nice things about the site and all that stuff. I mean, people like Zach Lowe and Barnwell, I'm guessing will be kept on by the main ESPN. I think a lot of them will. Yeah, I think they're going to make an effort. I just hope we get to read them in the same way and at the same length. The one thing I didn't like is they tried to make it seem like,

you know, when I hired a couple people from Grantland, I hired three editors and Juliet, who wasn't an editor. And the message was being massaged out there that this killed the site and it was like you can't they gave two weeks notice like if you're committed to a site you can't replace three editors no matter how good they were yeah you know that that just to me it seems totally disingenuous and i personally think that that you know when you read that the site they had agreed to site shut the site down a week before they actually announced it then uh i don't know kind of speaks for itself you three editors leave behind the scenes plus juliet who was an

editor and then dan fearman leaves concurrently but now but now that's when you realize you have to shut down the site it's disingenuous yeah i don't believe it for a second i think i think uh it was what it was hold on we got to hook up our friends at audible.com do you love books but find that you never have time to read them well audible.com has the perfect solution get audiobooks listen to them at the gym during your commute, or even as you're watching football on mute. Audible.com provides over 180,000 audio programs from leading book publishers, broadcasters, entertainers, magazine and newspaper publishers, even business information providers. Their free app works on iPhones, iPad, Android, Windows, Kindle Fire, and over 500 MP3 players.

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Right now, Audible.com is offering a free 30-day trial membership. It includes one audiobook of your choice. Go to Audible.com slash BS to start your free trial today. What else do we have to talk about? So much, Bill. I feel we've gotten that enormous issue off our chest. Let's talk Milwaukee Bucks stadium deals. So this is, I said I wanted to talk about this, and it still sticks in my craw.

You know what makes me angry about this? I feel like this whole issue blew up in August. And when I say blew up, it didn't blow up. It was like a couple stories here and there, a great story in Greenland, and then it went away. But here you have two of the wealthiest people in the United States, two hedge fund guys, right, Wes Edens and Mark Lazzari, buy the bucks and basically go to the state, Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, and do the same thing everyone always does, which is we're going to move to Seattle or Las Vegas unless you build a stadium. And they get a deal that is probably worth half a billion dollars from the Wisconsin taxpayers. So, you know, we've heard the story a million times, right? But that does not – I feel we've heard it so many times, the obscenity of it

has now started to diminish. It's not registering the way it should. Just to recap, two guys who are collectively worth probably north of $10 billion go around and go to a state that has a deficit. Running a deficit is running out of so much money, they cut $250 million from the University of Wisconsin's budget. They go to that state and say, unless you give us half a billion, we're leaving. And they get a commitment of – I mean, the deal they got was so lopsided. Not only is the state giving them this big bond issue and all kinds of other things, the state didn't even ask for any share of naming rights. So the state essentially builds the stadium and then gives up the $120 million that's coming in naming rights to these two guys who are worth between them $10 billion.

I mean, this is – how is it we are in a – first of all, how is it that we are in a position right now in America where this can happen, and we're over it. We can't even muster any kind of outrage. Are we really that cynical now about the interaction of wealth and privilege and professional sports? And my second thing is, where is the leadership on this from the people running these leagues? At what point do the people running the baseball, basketball, football stand up and say, all right, from now on, everyone take a pledge, no more public money? Is it really that hard for Goodell or for anyone to make that? That would do so much for the integrity of the game.

So much to kind of suggest to the fan base that they're the teams that they are passionate about, that they follow are concerned with more than simply what happens on the field, have some concern about, you know, the communities in which they play in. I mean, I,

I, I, why am I, why is, why did we just let this pass without getting genuinely angry? I have a couple of thoughts. One is that if it was such a good business deal for the city, why didn't the two rich billionaires want to do it?

That's a red flag, right? It's a great deal for you guys. Yeah, you should do it. Why aren't you doing it? That's one. one second is you know john oliver tackled some of this on on his show a few months ago and i thought the part that he missed and the crucial part of this whole discussion is the nba has seattle as its extortion city that's right, yeah. makes no sense at all that Seattle doesn't have a basketball team. It's, I would say one of the eight biggest markets when you consider,

um, I don't think it's eight biggest market in population, but I would say top six or seven in terms of the amount of wealth that would fill the courtsides and the suites and the local advertising with all the Seattle businesses and internet stuff and all this stuff going on there. You want a team in Seattle. Yeah. They don't have a team. Team got taken with the Oklahoma city, which was the biggest disgrace is Stern's entire tenure other than 2002 game six Kings Lakers. But, uh, they never get another team and now they're the extortion city. And I actually think I was anti expansion for a long time,

but I actually think we almost have enough players now where we could go to 32 teams. There's enough good players in the league now where you could do it and you can give Seattle the expansion team. But in the meantime, people like the Bucks owners get to extort the local play. And you, I didn't,

did you mention the part where they, they were smart enough to make a couple powerful local Wisconsin slash Milwaukee people very small minority owners of the team? Exactly. Spread the cash around. No, I mean, on a certain sense, I don't blame them. These are guys who have gotten where they are in business because they seize every opportunity.

And they understand that because of the way the league is structured and the fact that there is this small child in Seattle that's been kidnapped and is used as a means of extorting cash out of local communities, you can play this game. You can get someone to chip in half a billion dollars to help you build a stadium. But I'm wondering where their shame is. And why doesn't Silver just stand up and say, we now have a situation where, for goodness sake,

the Dolans are getting taxpayer money, they're getting taxpayer subsidies for Madison Square Garden. The Dolans who are, comma, the Dolans, comma, billionaires, comma, who own one of the most lucrative franchises in the world are getting a bailout from the taxpayers of New York City. At a certain point, why doesn't Silver just say, come on, guys, we can't persist and persist in earning the goodwill of our fan base if we behave like assholes? That's what this is about. It's just about don't be an asshole. Owning the Milwaukee Bucks is really, really fun.

It's a privilege that almost no one in the world, no basketball fan in the world gets to exercise. Enjoy it. Have all the fun you want, but don't make the taxpayers of Milwaukee subsidize your little hobby. I mean, it's just like a scene. Well, and also, I can see it of Milwaukee subsidize your little hobby?

I mean, it's just like a scene. Well, and also, I can see it if it's Sacramento, right? Because if Sacramento loses the Kings, which they almost did, now what's their identity? Their identity is like the governor lives there. But that was their team. It's almost like when

Hartford lost the Whalers. It's not almost like it. It is like it. When Hartford lost the Whalers, then they're way closer to New Haven and Bridgeport than they want to be. When they had the Whalers, they had a team in one of the four sports, you know? And so if Milwaukee

loses the Bucs, whatever, they stole the Packers and they still have the Brewers. No, no, here's the thing, Bill. Those are two separate issues. What I want is for Silver and Goodell to stand up and say there is always going to be this tension with small market teams where the owners are going to want to move to a more lucrative market. There's no way we can get rid of that. That's called the marketplace. We have to deal with that on a case-by-case basis. But we have to stop the practice of using that uncertainty over small market teams as a way of looting the pocketbook of local taxpayers. That's what I'm saying. Have this argument about whether

the kings belong in Sacramento or the Bucks belong in Milwaukee. Fine. But do not use it as a way to get half a billion out of a state that's running a deficit of $2.2 billion last year. Well, we never even mentioned the real part here is that nobody has ever really been able to prove. There's been exceptions, but for the most part, the whole, the mindset of, well, it's going to create so many jobs and so much money for the, for the local economy here. It's, it's a pretty dubious argument. And especially with the Olympics,

which has shot that argument in the foot over and over again. But, you know, I look at, so here's a good example of where this actually might've worked in LA. They create the Staples Center, L.A. Live. They create this whole area in downtown that between the two basketball teams, the hockey team, the concerts, they have all these other businesses. There's 15 restaurants there. They have a whole bunch of other stuff. And downtown was, you never wanted to go down there 10 years ago. It was the place that the Clippers and Lakers played in the Kings,

and you just kind of got out of there as fast as possible. Now downtown LA is really heading in a good direction. There's a lot of good bars and restaurants. There's all these living places that are going down there. Could that have happened without this? I don't know. But LA Live really helped. And I think that's an argument in case of, yes, this is where it works.

Boston's maybe the flip side. They tear down the garden. They build the new garden, basically. And they're saying it's going to invigorate that whole area and do a whole bunch of things. And then I was there for a Celtic game in April. It still feels like the same place. The Mass Pike thing is gone. The highway.

I-90? I can't even remember which one. I-93? I can't remember, Bill. You've been gone for 13 years. I can't even remember what highway it was. That's heartbreaking. People in Boston listening to us, you broke like a million hearts.

He's forgotten our interstate. That's not fair because I call my daughter my son's name and vice versa 10 times a day. So I'm just old. But yeah, so I think that was a case where maybe it didn't invigorate that area as much as maybe they thought. But it seems to be really hit or miss. The economic studies suggest that the kind of economic bounce that you're alleged to get from building a stadium rarely materializes. There are some exceptions, but where there is an exception, that stadium is a clear-cut home run in terms of revitalizing an area, then the owner should be quite happy to pay for it himself. He can open lots of bars.

He can open a restaurant and hotel complex next door. He can do all these things to benefit from his own investment if it's such a good one. Totally agree. It's crazy. We didn't even mention, you talked about the NFL and the NBA. I think the NFL guys are just wired a little differently

than these NBA guys. The NBA guys, it's a little bit more of an ego purchase from where you get to sit courtside, get to own a team. The guys are so marketable it's a league that's going up it's it's now starting to get in that financial stratosphere that the nfl guy the nfl is like old school fu money you know it's just really really really rich old powerful

guys yeah and and if it's not rich old guys, it's a younger guy who got handed the team by his rich, old, powerful dad. And the way they operate is on a different plane than the NBA. I think they're much more cutthroat. And the deals they make and just everything they do feels... They're a lot more conservative. I mean, I think it's

a... The NBA crowd is a lot more impressive in terms of how smart they are, how innovative they are. A little out of the box, yeah. Well, except for your friend Vivek, who is out of the box.

I want to defend Vivek. Please do. Please defend Vivek. We're making a first. This is a first in podcast history. Look, here's the case, Vivek. Now, you call him my friend. I've known Vivek a while. I wrote a first in podcast history. Look, here's the case for Vivek. You call him my friend. I've known Vivek a while. I wrote about him in my book.

You had a whole chapter. A whole chapter. Here's the thing about Vivek. One, Vivek, a very, very smart guy. Now, keep that in mind. What is going on right now in Sacramento is he is going through the learning process of what it means to be a successful owner.

Why do you expect him to work it out in two years? You just went on for half an hour about how it took a long time to understand what Grandland was and how to make it a success. You had a learning curve, as one does when one is starting a new and complicated enterprise. But Zach is going through his learning curve. Vladi Divac is an experiment on the way to successful MBA management. Take my producers laughing right now. He's literally snickering. It's hilarious.

Keep going, though. No, look, come back to me. You're just in a hurry, and you're impatient. Vivek has taken the long view. Come back to me in three years' time, and we'll have a discussion about how good an owner he is. At the moment, he's figuring it out. By the way, can I just say, Bill Simmons,

that if I handed you the Boston Celtics tomorrow, you cannot tell me you wouldn't have a period of two years where you went insane. I've read all your columns on the trade machine. You'd make a thousand trades in the first 12 months. Admit it. Admit it. You would.

Before I give my response, I wanted to say hi to our old friend, Stamps.com. How great would it be if this post office was open 24-7? Well, breaking news, it is. At Stamps.com, you can buy and print official U.S. postage for any letter or package using your own computer and printer. Even better, Malcolm. If you sign up for Stamps.com and use the promo code BS, you get a four-week trial plus a $110 bonus offer that includes postage and a digital scale. Go to Stamps.com, click on the microphone at top of the homepage, and type in BS.

That's stamps.com, enter BS. Here's my Vivek response. We've seen new NBA owners struggle that first year. I call it new owner syndrome. Actually, I came up with one of my dumb phrases for it. You saw it with Joe Lacob. You saw it with Wick Grossbeck. You saw all these guys. They take over a team.

They think they're the dude. They think they're the smartest guy. They're chest puffing out. They spend too much time with the trade machine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then about a year and a half later, after they get punched in the face a couple times by bad moves or bad judgment or whatever,

that's when they realize, oh, okay, I gotta to start delegating more. Maybe I need a better team around me. Maybe it is important to have a basketball savvy front office guy. And, you know, it changes for different people. Now, you talk about Vivek's learning curve. Vivek hired a guy who wasn't really not involved in the NBA for the last 10 years, but also wasn't living in the United States.

He was living in like Belgrade. Didn't really have the reservoir of like, I think if you ask Vlade who played in the 2008 finals, I don't know what his answer would be. So it was an eccentric choice, but I'm sure Vivek had his reasons. But anyway, I'm going to go back to you. You take over the Boston Celtics. First of all, you go insane on the trade machine. Then who do you hire? You hire like House to be your general manager.

Who knows what the – Can I get House? Are you positive I could get him? I would absolutely hire House. I'm just saying you'd make some eccentric choices, too. Half of the management of the new Simmons-led Boston Celtics would be graduates of Holy Cross between 1985 and 1995. That's not going to look a little suspicious to an outsider. Then you'd settle down. Yeah, I mean, I am the same guy who was in charge of a site that was probably worth over $100 million and now doesn't exist.

So maybe I'm the wrong person to ask. Yeah, I don't know what you should be giving lessons to. Yeah, but I do think, though, the stuff I've heard about the Kings, I mean, the draft stories, about he thought he was getting Mario Hazonia or Christoph Porzingis at six, and they weren't there, and everybody just kind of looked at each other confused,

and he didn't want to take Emmanuel Moutier at six because he hadn't worked out with them. So he took Willie Colley-Stein, just took him at six, wasn't probably going in the top ten, just grabbed him. Was good with that one. That is just bad management. You just take Moutier and you figure it out. He's the best asset. Yeah, yeah.

Stuff like that. Or what about when he traded Stauskas, who was the eighth pick last year, to clear cap space to sign Wesley Matthews, who then signed with Dallas? That was a problem. Gave away a couple picks there. This is basic NBA 101 stuff that they're screwing up, and Vivek's been there longer than two years now, so I think people should be concerned.

I am a little more patient than you. I say give him time. You've got to make all of these mistakes once. The question is, do you make them a second time? When time comes for that second round of mistakes, let's evaluate them. Back to the original topic, though, about stadiums and stuff. As you said, this just keeps happening over and over again. And I think people know it's wrong, but nobody really cares.

And why does nobody care? Well, nobody cares because ultimately it's the same thing like with boxing. Nobody, boxing's kind of lawless. Stuff just happens. People make up their thing like with boxing. Nobody, boxing's kind of lawless. Stuff just happens. People make up their own rules in boxing. Like you could fail a drug test or you could show up, you could show up, uh, five pounds overweight for your fight and they decide, well, the title's not going to be at stake, but you're still going to fight, which is crazy. If you're 143 pounds and we're supposed to fight at 143 and I show up and I weigh 150 and they say,

well, you're still going to fight, but the belt's not at stake. Like, who has an advantage, me or you? So it's just lawless. And the stadium stuff is just as lawless to me. I know, but the difference is our money's not at stake in the same way in boxing, right? We accept the fact boxing is the crazy, lawless, transgressive sport.

They're doing something they shouldn't be doing, right? We all know that. They're beating each other over the head repeatedly, which is a little bit crazy in retrospect. The thing that bothers me about, but that stays within the realm of sport. The thing about stadiums is it's sports that's bleeding out into areas where sports has no business belonging. And that is in raiding the public purse and taking money away from the case of Wisconsin, the exact same week or one month after Scott Walker signed the bill giving the Bucs those many hundreds of millions of dollars, he took $250 million out of the budget of the University of Wisconsin. I mean, it's like that. Well, it's education.

I mean, who cares? It'll be fine. We have enough educated people. We don't need a lot more. But I think like, all right, you've heard me talk about the concept of a sports czar before. And it would be a weird way to spend federal resources. And it would be a weird person to have in Obama's cabinet, along with people who are in charge of things that actually mattered but at the same time we need to know i'm all i'm all over the sports and we and we have talked about this we we have a back and forth somewhere in my archives that have

probably been destroyed by now that uh about the need for a sports are but i just think there's so much money at stake in sports year to year. And there's so many different things like this Milwaukee Stadium thing where we clearly need somebody who's in charge of things. And we don't have it. And that's why I don't think anything will change until that's somebody's job to help change that. You know who should be the sports star? Who? Obama. Oh, that's an unbelievable job for him.

His time as president is nearly up. In Obama, we have, I think, the most serious sports fan we've had in quite a long time. Yeah. Nixon was a pretty big sports fan. Obviously, Gerald Ford was an All-American. But I don't know. I think he was a football guy. I mean, Obama's a serious, knows a lot

about basketball. And by the way, as far as I can tell, is a very good basketball player himself. I mean, he's not an elite level basketball player, but I think he's good. I think he's stepped down a little bit. I talked to him recently about something and

he said he wasn't really playing anymore because he was too old. I'm saying he's got the... He's mid-50s. Yeah, I mean he had an unbelievable run. He's such a big basketball fan that I think he watches hardwood classics on NBA TV and stuff.

He'll bang out like the old Jordan versus the Knicks in 92 type of moment on the treadmill at five in the morning. So, yeah, I'm with you. He's the perfect sportsman. He was at the Bulls home opener. Has any president, not only did I see him in that Bulls opener, but he even got interviewed. Has any president ever had more post-presidency options than Obama?

I feel like there's 47 jobs in play for him, including. Bill Manning. Yeah, I mean, he could run ESPN, maybe. He really... To bring the conversation full circle. If I was the NFL, I would say, here we have a... Name your price. Here we have a league, which is the most valuable sports league in North America,

one of the most valuable leagues in the world, and it's being run by a buffoon, how can we get legitimate in a hurry? Yeah. I mean, call up Barry. Barry O. He's your man. Let me tell you something. Barry's listening for $44 million a year.

That's what Goodell made. He made $44 million. I know. It's unbelievable. Yeah. That number, when that came out, I think that got the attention of every powerful person who was making at least $15 million a year. I think all of them were like, wait, what? How much does he make?

There should be. Okay, so let's call this the Simmons stat, which is the ratio of your IQ to the amount of money you make. Why is it named after me? That feels insulting. Because it came up in a conversation with you. I think, do you think that... Still feels insulting.

That Goodell has the highest Simmons number ever recorded? Why is it a Simmons number? Can't it just be the Goodell number? Okay, call the Goodell number. Why is it named after Goodell? It's the Goodell number. I think it's called the Goodell number because it's inconceivable that anyone could have a higher ratio than him. Well, the biggest red flag with him, and it's a red flag just in general, and I'm not saying this is always the case.

There's been people who have succeeded who have been legacy kids, but the legacy kid thing always scares me. Yeah. And he is somebody whose dad was a rich and powerful guy. Yeah. And all right. So what does that mean? Well, first of all, that means rich and powerful people are working all the time. Maybe not, maybe not thrown in as much parenting as normal. That's a possibility. Um, it's always dangerous to just hand somebody every break or tell them it's all going to work out no matter how I mean I would say a lot of the problems we've had in American history could be traced back to legacy kids or maybe some of the

problems I mean just ask Knicks fans have you enjoyed your legacy kid Jim Dolan running the Knicks these last 20 years exactly James Dolan my friend is poster child dude I wonder what Dolan's Goodell number is oh good Dolan it might be the Dolan number. Maybe it's the Dolan number. The thing is, Dolan, it's complicated because he doesn't draw a salary the same way Goodell does. But you could work out what his annual compensation is. And I don't know who's dumber between the two of them. It is, man, that's a horse race.

That's a race to the bottom between those two. It's a horse shit race yeah the legacy kid thing though it can go another way too where they're they have kind of an attitude about people thinking it's been handed to them which can go equally terribly yeah yeah how dare you don't don't i think that the dysfunction of goodell and the dysfunction of dolan are quite separate yeah uh i think that do Dolan has exactly what you described, a chip on his shoulder over the suspicion, correct as it turns out, that he was handed the world on a silver platter.

Yeah. He hates the fact that people think that about him. But it's a 100% fact. Which is 100% fact. But I think Goodell, I think his whole deal, his psychology is a little different. I think he's the—remember that famous line about George Bush Jr. that—or George Bush Sr. from Molly Ivins who said—I think it was Molly Ivins—that he was born on third base and thought he hit a triple?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The best. That's the Goodell thing. I think he genuinely believes he's a man of accomplishment and that he got everywhere. He came up from the bottom himself. He's deluded as opposed to being bitter, which is the particular James Dolman. Well, and that's why I really loved with Goodell. I loved the whole argument in that Outside the Lines piece by Dan Van Atta and I think Seth Wickersham. I can't remember the other writer, but the whole concept of Goodell screwing up with Spygate and destroying the tapes.

Yeah. And then for the next seven years, all the other rich owners who are all a-holes to begin with, just, just feeling like he was Kraft's boy. Yeah. And you know, Kraft helped them with,

Kraft helped do every revenue deal that Goodell did basically for the first, and they were super tight. Yeah. And at some point the other owners really genuinely felt like Goodell was in the bag for Kraft and he knew it. He knew these rich guys were like, nah, yeah, when you roll over in it, is Kraft Kraft next to you and they're making these little side jokes. And then this whole deflate gate thing happened. And all he did was want to prove to everybody that he wasn't Kraft's boy. Watch this.

Oh, I'll show you. I'm going to take a first round pick from him. But that's like a total legacy kid thing. Yeah. That's like just this loser's mentality of caring what everybody else thinks. Now all of a sudden you're in this ridiculous, like really, I don't think we talked on a podcast about this. Like, did you have a take on deflacate? Every time we learned something new, it got more ridiculous. It's one of those rare cases where you sometimes think that as new

revelations come out, it will resolve the controversy, you'll have a deeper understanding. This was the opposite. Every time I learned something new, I was like, wait, it's just like stupider and dumber. And the Wells report, such as it was, was a piece of astonishing garbage. I mean, just because a report is produced at great cost by a fancy sounding law firm and a lawyer with a long reputation does not

mean it clarifies the issues or represents an intelligent and thoughtful analysis of the issues. That report was just bullshit. I mean, it's just like ordered up by the NFL's office to cover their disastrous decisions.

Yeah, that whole thing was something. I mean, it was great for the Patriots because you win the championship and then you actually have a stick up your ass about the next season, which doesn't really happen. And we were standing out the Warriors. The Warriors have been out of their minds this first week because they've talked themselves into this narrative. And don't think Steve Kerr hasn't been pushing this down their throats all the time.

I don't care that we won the championship. Nobody thinks we deserve that. Everybody thinks we're lucky. Nobody believes in it. Nobody believes in us. Everybody says we're lucky. Everybody go here. Hey, I have another story about how lucky we were.

And he's just been feeding that and pushing them with a cattle proddle for the entire training game, even though he's been hurt, like he's been in and out. He had back issues. And, uh, but I think he's developed hurt. He's been in and out. He had back issues. But I think he's developed this mentality in those guys that they have something to prove. And that's what happened with this Patriots team too. It's not like you need extra incentive to play a football game and hit people at 30 miles an hour,

but there is an edge to this Pats team in this whole season. How do you feel about this? But there is an edge to this Pats team in this whole season that I, you know, if they just won. How do you feel about this Pats? Put this Pats team in perspective of the Brady era. How good do you think this team is? So the first 10 games of the 0-7 team that ended up losing the Super Bowl is the best Patriots team of all time. Yeah. That team was, I think, the greatest football team of all time. That team was I think the greatest football team of all time.

And then Sammy Morris got hurt. Even though he wasn't that good, it was like they didn't have a running game after that. The weight of the season wore them down and the Super Bowl was just all these different events that just the perfect team to play

them. I think the team was burned out. They had a bad game plan. They didn't get any – it was bad luck and bad everything. But I think that was the best team. I think out of all the Super Bowl teams, the 0-4 team was – the third Super Bowl team was probably the best one because Brady was really close to being Brady at that point. And their defense was really good.

They ripped through the first couple games. The Eagles Super Bowl was a little unsatisfying. That should have been the cherry on the sundae of people just talking about how awesome they were. But remember, they won 21 straight games. I don't even remember how many in a row they won. 23? Yeah.

Tate, look that up for me. They had a streak. They broke the record for consecutive wins. So that has to be the best team, right? But this team, the difference now with Brady is the way the sport has changed. Even though he's old, he just goes to the line. He knows what to do every play. I've never seen anything like it.

He just goes. He's like, oh, you guys are going to do this? I'm going to do this. It's almost like he's reached some Tom Cruise, Thetan Seven level of quarterback Scientology play. This is the most eloquent defense against the charge they stole signals, which is actually, look at Brady. Like, maybe what you thought was stealing signals was actually just a really,

really, really intelligent, well-prepared quarterback. Well, and more and more prepared every year. It was 21 straight, it says. But you see it with Manning too, and Manning is actually like the more ravaged version of Brady, right, where he's just physically on his last

legs and can only make certain throws anymore. I saw that game this weekend against the Packers. The Packers game. His arm did not look... His arm looked fine to me. It looked better than it did at the beginning of the season. He was making

plays down the field. That answers the question. I think the issue with him is he's not consistent week to week or more importantly not consistent over the course of the season. He may not be week to week or more importantly not consistent over the course of the season well and that's able to keep that up and that's the thing people need to remember the old quarterbacks because we saw that with farb and you see the merino and all these guys when they hit a certain point they can still get there it's just that they can't get there game

after game after name and it was like ties into like i remember having great talks with steve nash about this and he hit this with his finish line like he could have played basketball at a really high level once a week he just couldn't do it three times a week you know and i think for a quarterback the difference is if when manning has a bad week it's going to happen on the wrong week it's going to happen in january when it's 20 degrees or whatever. I think Brady's a little more foolproof, but Brady's been so unbelievable. The real guy that is the guy that is the guy that makes this go and is other than Brady, the best patriot, I think, of all time, other than Brady and maybe John Hanna, is Gronkowski. I think he's unequivocally the best tight end of all time. Nobody has ever done the things that he's doing at that position.

And every single game plan, the other team is just trying to figure out how to stop him. That's like their first goal, and then they figure out the rest. But three guys being thrown at him on pass plays. No tight end has ever dealt with that. You sort of feel like if they wanted to, they could throw him on every down. They could. I don't think they want him to get hurt. Yeah, it's like they're choosing

not to, but not for... But it does say that in a crucial game, like a Super Bowl or something, you actually kind of could, right? You could throw him way more than you did in an ordinary game. You can tell. There are certain times, like that Colts game, halftime, they come out. It's like, I bet we start throwing to Grock a little bit more here.

Like, they'll save it. They're so afraid he's going to get hurt, though, because what's happening is he's so big. Every Pats fan knows what I'm talking about. He's so big. And he's going down the field with a full head of steam after he catches it. And the guys just go right at his legs. and that's how he got hurt in 2011. There's no other way to tackle him. As a Patriot fan, or a fantasy football owner of Gronkowski,

you live in constant fear. He catches that pass and turns around, and there's that safety right at his knees. It's just the fear you live with every pack game, which is no different than what it was like with Pedro. When Pedro was at his peak, just every pitch worried that his arm was going to go out. Wait, I want to go back to something you said about Manning, which is that what I don't understand is,

given that we know this about Manning, that his performance is becoming increasingly variable up and down as he gets older, then why, if I'm the coach of the Broncos, don't I do what Popovich does? Start managing his minutes. Just sit him for a game or two? What's that?

Like, just if they're 13-point favorites against so-and-so, he just doesn't play. Or he plays a half. He's got to have a backup. I mean, going into the season, you should have said to yourself, he can, Danny can get us to the Super Bowl, but he can't get us to the Super Bowl by playing all

16 games start to finish. So let's have a, let's plan around having somebody else play roughly equal minutes. I'll go further than you. I thought they just should have started his season in November. Yeah.

Because this weekend should be his first game. Yeah. Yeah, all right. We're 4-4. Now we have Peyton Manning for the next 11 weeks. And maybe you're better off doing it that way. I don't know enough about how much repetition you need as a quarterback. Yeah.

I think it's different in the NBA. In the NBA, those guys are like dogs. They jump in the pool and they're going to be able to swim. You can be a little bit rusty, but not that rusty. You can miss a game and come back the next game. Of all the quarterbacks in the league, the quarterback most

capable of managing that kind of unorthodox playing time is him. He's so perfectly prepared. We talked about this in one of our back and forths. It might have even been the last one about how hard it is now to compare eras. And Brady talking about wanting to play

until he's 45 or 48, which just seemed impossible 20 years ago. Now you think like, all right, well, you never get hit anymore. If you get hit, all right, well, you never get hit anymore. If you get hit, you always know you're going to get hit. Nobody cheap shots you. Nobody's cheap shotting your receivers. There's all these restrictions on what defense can do.

Maybe you could do it. I actually really do think he could play until he's 45. I haven't seen any real signs of attrition from him other than he doesn't move quite as well and he's maybe not totally as reliable on deep balls. But other than that he looks like the same. It's freaking crazy. Well he definitely doesn't throw the deep ball. I mean I

say this only anecdotally. I don't know what the data says. But he doesn't seem like he throws the deep ball nearly as much as he did in say the Randy Moss era. Yeah because he's not as accurate. and it took a while to realize that. The Pats fans, whenever Brady threw deep, it wasn't like with Moss. With Moss, it was like Moss is catching this. I don't care how many guys are on him. But, no, it's – I don't know how far this goes with him.

By a similar token, LeBron is in year 13. He's never really had a major injury, and he's made the finals five years in a row. And at some point it ends. Like, Tate was coming here. Tate went to the Laker game last night. We were talking about how bad Kobe looks. And you think, like, well, he should look bad.

It's his 20th season. Like, at some point this has to end. You're not going to play for 40 seasons. There's going to be a year where all of a sudden you're not good anymore, and it seems like Kobe's hit that point. But Brady and LeBron, I just have no feel for how long this is going to go. If you told me right now Brady's going to play until 2025, I wouldn't bet against that.

It's crazy. The better question is why does he want to play that long? Yeah. At a certain point it's the kind of wear and tear and is it still interesting and fun to wake up on a Monday morning after a football

game when you're 43 and just feel what you... I don't know, man. Well, you know what? I've talked about this before, but Nowitzki told me about this. He said it's not the games, and the things they love are being around teammates and just being an athlete. That part's awesome.

The part that's not awesome is when it's like July 10th and you have to set your alarm for five 30 in the morning because your strength coach is coming over to work on your core for two hours. And then you have breakfast and then you have to go shoot a thousand threes. And it's like, it's like anything else. I mean, I'm sure both of us have felt that way about writing, you know, or it's like, I know how to do this. There's a blank screen again. I got to come up with something. There's only enough times before you start going,

oh man. I think that's where athletes get to. I think it's the off-season training that's what kills them. That's why Duncan's an alien. Duncan goes to the Virgin Islands and he swims with dolphins or whatever the hell Duncan does.

He eats bugs and does Tim Duncan things. Maybe he goes in a spaceship when nobody's looking to Mars to eat hemoglobin from plants. I don't know what he does. It's amazing. How happy would it make you if the Spurs won the whole thing this year?

It would just be kind of great. I didn't even make an NBA pick this year. This is the first year I had no idea who to pick. It just felt like eight teams could win. I will say that I thought Houston was kind of the wild card, but watching the games, it seems like the Clippers might be the wild card this year from a ceiling standpoint. They're pretty good.

Yeah. It's a pretty good team. I've been impressed by them. Blake's been amazing. They're deep. They have guys who can come off the bench now and change the game for a couple minutes. And they know who they are. And Doc knows who they are.

And it's just the terrible logo and terrible uniforms aside, they look pretty good. Have you watched at all or no? Any of the games? A little bit. Not much. I'm very, very seasonal. As long as there's college football demanding my attention and the NFL,

I can't make the transition to wholeheartedly to the NBA. Oh, wait. I'm glad you brought this up because the LSU, the freak running backs got his big game this weekend, and he's basically stuck in college because there's no rule that says he can go to the pros. Do you feel like when I'm in charge, when Obama and I are the sports stars, we're going to be co-sports stars, I just decided. Yeah.

What about a committee for freak athletes in high school or college? Like Connor McDavid last year should have just been in the NHL. Like why even play junior hockey again? Just get him in there. So what? He's 17. He's a freaking freak. He's the best prospect in 30 years.

And by the way, he got hurt last night, which sucked. But I think certain people you should just be able to make exemptions for, you know? Well, here's the thing. You can't have it both ways. Right now, college sports wants it both ways. They want to not play their athletes, even though they're making enormous sums of money off them. And simultaneously, they want to restrict their athletes' movements to places where they can make money. So I'm like, you can keep that kid in Ohio State in college for that extra year, sure, but pay him what he's worth then.

So what's he worth to Ohio State? A million dollars a year? Two million dollars? Pay him. Put the money in escrow. He can get it when he leaves college. But you can't – it's just the hypocrisy of this position that we can formally limit your opportunity to make a living. And there is no one in America who doesn't think that these freaks,

there's one or two a year, can play at the professional level. There's no doubt about that. We talked about something like Phil Simms. Well, Malcolm, we talked earlier about rich guys. But we talked about... You know what the key, Phil Simms, you know how you do a Phil Simms imitation? It has to do with days of the week.

All days of the week end in D-E-E, not D-A-Y. Oh, Sunday. You see a kid playing on Saturday and you say, I think he can play on Sunday. You talk about a kid who can play on Saturday. But you talk about reallocating funds for stuff. So it's obviously idiotic for Wisconsin to pay for two rich guys to build their stadium when they bought that team for a great price.

They get to write off a million, kajillion different things with it. It's only going to go up in value. They're not losing money buying the Bucs. So why are you helping them buy their stadium? It's a great question. Well, here's another thing. And this is why college sports is so annoying to me and why I just stay out of it.

Everybody gets so agitated. It's such an unassailable corner to say how college athletes should be paid. Everybody gets so agitated. It's such like an unassailable corner to say how college athletes should be paid. There's like no counter argument. Yeah, yeah, of course these guys should make more money, but nobody has a plan for it. But the thing that bothers me is these teams raking,

these colleges raking so much money from these programs. What do they do with it? I would love to, if I knew there was a better plan for exactly what they do with the money, then that would make sense to me. Like, for instance, if you're the sports are, maybe you make a rule that college coaches are basically professors, right? It would be idiotic to pay a professor $7 million a year. So maybe there should be a cap on college coach salaries.

Maybe no college coach should make more than $2 million a year. Well, you have a situation in America now where in many states, by far the highest paid public employee in the state is the college football coach. That seems wrong. That seems just a little bit wrong. I think maybe we should just start there. Yeah. You can't. But here, wait, there's a really simple way to solution to this. And I feel like we discussed this years ago, but maybe it was in the conversation.

We probably did. It's been destroyed in the archives. And that is that any pro team, pro in this case we're talking football or basketball, can draft any college player that they want, regardless of how old they are. And if the college player chooses to remain in the, or chooses or has to remain in college, the money then just goes into escrow until they graduate. And it doesn't count off your cap.

So some phenomenal freshman comes out of high school goes to commits to Louisville I'm the Celtics I have the number one pick I pick him I don't get him for another year but I pay his rookie salary into a bank account and waits for him to graduate how hard is that?

it's a good idea and it leads toward the way we should be thinking with a lot of this stuff, right? Like with the NBA, I don't know why we don't have the rule where the guy can come right out of high school, but if he doesn't get drafted in the lottery, then he can go to college for two years. Like, why aren't we giving these guys more options? Yeah, yeah.

If my man Ben simmons my family member at osu my my brother from australia if he wanted to come out last year and his expectation was i'm going to go in the top five and then it doesn't happen he should be able to go back yeah you know and that's a simple matter if the if the people running the ncaa were even remotely creative or interested in the well-being of their players, that should be done in five minutes. But I feel like this is another thing for Silver. We both like Silver. Silver, tremendously thoughtful, intelligent guy.

Silver just has to call up the NCAA. I feel like he could make it happen. I think he wants to. I think it's super important to him. My thing is, I don't understand how... All right, so Ben Simmons right now. He's at LSU. The season ends mid-March.

You go to the tournament. You might win, I don't know, three, four games. Let's say he loses in round two. At that point, why even stay in school? You're going to the NBA. Just leave the next day. Sorry, my four four professors that are pretending to take classes with them out i have to go get ready to be in the nba it's it's idiotic the whole thing is just ridiculous you've duke had four what do they have four one and done guys and the team that won the title last year you

think justice winslow was worried about like his classes and how what his gpa is gonna be all he's thinking about is getting ready for the draft yeah so something's got to be fixed my personal take is that if you play college sports you should have to play for two years and and if you don't and if you leave then they lose a scholarship and it should be two years it should be two years. It should be two years scholarship. It should be like, you know, if I give Justice Winslow a scholarship and he leaves after one year, I can't replace that scholarship for a year. You know what I mean? Yeah. I like that idea.

Put some onus on the teams. And if they're going to recruit those one and done guys. They pay a penalty. Yeah. There's a little bit of a penalty. You can't just do it every year. Coach K, who's done the greatest job ever of revising, you know, who he is, is just, you know, that, that guy, my God. But he, he expressed so much contempt about what Calipari, Calipari was doing. Meanwhile, I just replicated

it. He figured out a smarter, kind of less publicized way to replicate it while coaching the dream team in 2008, in 2010, 12, 14, 16, which is the greatest recruiting tool you could ever have. Yeah. You know? He's in the homes of all these recruits. He's the guy. And you don't think he could be like, you don't think he could say, hey, LeBron,

can you call this guy for me? Yeah. Give me a solid? There's no way he doesn't do that. This is what we've been talking about all through this podcast, which is the system has been corrupted in some way. And a lot of what successful people are doing now is just working at corruption. They're just taking advantage of these loopholes.

And it's time, I think, to pay... This is what Obama, the sports czar, needs to do, is to pay attention to the big picture. Yeah. Well, in this case, the big picture really is stuff like, why is Wisconsin paying $250 million for the Bucs owners? Where does all the money go from LSU's program if the star running back turns out to be the biggest stud in 10 years

and they're selling his jersey left and right? Is that money going toward professors? Is it going toward a building? Is it going toward the library? Where is it going? Who's getting it? I don't know. I don't know the answers to that.

I've never read the right giant piece that explained it to me. Have you? Well, there was a book that came out recently about this. I think that made the argument that there's a small group, like 10 or 12 teams, I think this is football, that make a lot of money off their football program, the ones you would expect, the Florida States, the Oklahomas, Alabama. And then there's a much larger group in the middle who are trying to make the top 12, failing and losing a ton of money. Those are the ones that we ought to be concerned about. Doesn't that sound like every business, though?

Except in this case, they're not supposed to be businesses. They're supposed to be non-profit institutions furthering the education of young people in America. That's the problem. They're so caught up in pursuing this completely tangential

operation of college sports that they've lost sight of what they're supposed to be doing. They should not be taking money out of the pockets of the education of everyday students, right? Well, and that's what made the Harvard thing so amazing when the coaches realized that they had this incredible loophole being in the Ivy League where you could basically just, if you screwed up with some scholarship, like if I gave you a scholarship, I thought you were going to be awesome. And it turned out you weren't that good. You're a bench guy. Now you're a junior. I could be like, you know what?

Sorry, I'm taking the scholarship back. Thanks, though. You get to stay here. And then I just give that scholarship to somebody else. The irony of this whole thing is the Ivy League, you have the best chance to build the greatest possible team, as long as you found people that were smart enough to get into your school. You're basically

the only school that doesn't have the scholarship salary cap. Yeah. It doesn't surprise me that the Ivy Leagues would have figured out the best angle. Wait, last thing, and then we've gone way too long. It took too much of your time. Although, I'm really having fun. I haven't talked to you in a while. PEDs, which we always circle back around, They had this thing recently, a few months ago.

It was after I left ESPN. I can't remember what month. When the story came out about how they had retested all the samples in London. Oh yeah. From, uh, what was it? Track and field and swimmers and like everyone failed. Every single athlete, all of them. It was a hundred percent failure rate.

Well, two, two responses. One is, you know, the news that broke today, which is that the former head of the IAAF has just been arrested on charges of taking bribes from the Russians to cover up doping violations. So, like, the head of track and field internationally, the former head, is now revealed to have been on the tape to cover it. It's like unbelievable.

It's like this is the biggest story to hit. I mean, very few people in America are track and field fans. I happen to be one of them. This is the biggest story to hit track and field in years. I would say believable, not unbelievable. You could, any of those guys, I'm just assuming, are getting bribed. Yeah. But the London stuff was that it wasn't everyone, but it was a pretty significant percentage of people had questionable. Yeah, but had questionable.

I mean, I thought higher than I would have imagined. Yeah. And it just breaks my heart, you know, because I mean, although I have very, very convicted, complicated feelings about doping, because I don't feel that we always make the right kinds of arguments. Nonetheless, to think that there were races that were decided because one guy got away with taking drugs and someone else didn't is, I mean, that's just, it's so heartbreaking. And the drugs are always ahead of the test. They are always ahead of the test. Can I do a shout out to, on this general question, I'm totally fascinated as always by the Lance Armstrong story. I went back and read a book,

written 10 years ago or more about Armstrong called Lance Armstrong's War by Daniel Coyle. Oh. We went on to write a bunch of other really good books. It is so fantastic.

It's the best book I've, well, one of the best sports books I've ever read, but one of the best books. If you're ever going to read a book on cycling and how weird and hilarious

and screwed up the cycling world is, this is the one. This guy did a unbelievable job of just bringing it to life and he doesn't really talk that i mean it's all before the drug stuff broke it's just about the insanity of professional cycling it's just like the weirdest sport you've ever encountered it's and you know what's great about cycling one of my favorite things because you see it because you know californ Malibu's there, and the PCH,

and there's that 28-mile stretch where all the bicyclers are riding down there. It's the only sport where the people who aren't the professionals try to dress exactly like the professionals. I know. If I liked auto racing, I wouldn't go into my car dressed like a NASCAR driver wearing a fire-retarded suit and a helmet. These guys are all, they're at the Starbucks in Malibu wearing Tour de France outfits.

They're in their late 50s. Not just that, the yellow jersey. Like they're leading the Tour de France after, you know. Yeah. What are you doing? You're 58. You're going 21 miles an hour instead of 20? I think it is hilarious.

My favorite. It is kind of like when I play, if I was playing semi-pro baseball, I wouldn't dress up like Babe Ruth. Yeah. You know, we're like heavy, heavy wool uniforms.

Anyway, uh, anything to plug any stories coming? Uh, you know, nothing of any, I got longterm stuff I'm doing for the New Yorker, but, um, no, uh, right now I'm still in the beginning phase of most stuff.

No, no book that's going to dominate every airport for five years. That's not happening. I have some ideas, but they're a little far off. So. A little far off, like far off to do or far off for. Uh, it's funny. I just had today lunch with my agent and had a minor discussion about a future book idea so that's where I am

is she just looking at you like like a hungry person just staring at you like hey so any book ideas Malcolm agents are always interested to hear about upcoming projects that's all I'll say wow this was fun I'm glad we

did this. Please come back on the Bill Simmons podcast. It was a pleasure. Thanks for listening to me, by the way. Thanks to Audible.com, the home of over 180,000 audio programs from the leading audiobook publishers, broadcasters, entertainers, and business

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