The Bill Simmons Podcast - Make-or-Break Fantasy Football Guys With Matthew Berry. Plus, Malcolm Gladwell on How to Fix Youth Sports.

Episode Date: August 23, 2023

The Ringer's Bill Simmons is joined by NBC's Matthew Berry to discuss the top 10 "make-or-break" fantasy football players for the 2023-24 NFL season (2:09). Then, Bill talks with Malcolm Gladwell about his podcast series, 'Revisionist History' (1:01:15), before discussing several ways Malcolm proposes to completely overhaul youth sports in America (1:16:58). Host: Bill Simmons Guests: Matthew Berry and Malcolm Gladwell 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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We're also brought to you by the Ringer Podcast Network where I put up a new Rewatchables last night we did Cruel Intentions me and Juliet Libman and Amanda Dobbins that movie basically was the crest of the teen movie era in the late 90s and also probably the movie that killed it

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So Matthew Barry's coming up. We're going to do 10 make or break guys for the fantasy football season. And then Malcolm Gladwell, who has for some reason not been on for a while, but we're going to talk about youth sports and why it's kind of broken in a bunch of different ways and his plan to fix it. So that is the podcast. Gladwell's coming on around the, I would say like the 105 mark. So if you just want to hear that part, you don't want to hear the fantasy football skip ahead. I don't know why you wouldn't want to hear both. Anyway,

it's all next. First, our friends from ProJet. All right. Our old friend friend Matthew Darius here. It's time. We've done this every year before the NFL season since 1954. I don't think people realize that. They don't realize there were podcasts and football back in 1954. No, it was just you and I and a couple of tin cans yelling at people running on the street. Yeah. Yelling at the operator.

You got to reconnect us. Okay, we're going to do a gimmick this year because there's so much fantasy information. You're in the middle of it. You're doing all kinds of stuff. Everybody's got the same groups and the same tiers and all this stuff. What's interesting to me about this year, and I don't know if it's just this

year only, more than other years, but there's really make or break guys. There's ceiling floor guys that I just feel like are going to swing the league this year where it's like, all right, Jonathan Taylor, there is,

um, are you going to be in the dolphins in three days averaging, you know, 5.7 yards of carry and getting 15 TDs, or are you just going to be languishing in Indianapolis? So anyway, I asked you, I texted you, I gave you instructions. Give me your list, your 10 make or break, high ceiling, low floor guys. Do you agree that there's more than usual this year? It feels like it. There's more guys out there that they just have a really wide range

of outcomes. To your point, Jonathan Taylor has number one running back in fantasy in his skill set, right? I mean, like in the right situation and his ability, he could be the number one running back in fantasy. He could also not play a game this year. Like, I mean, like, you know what I mean? Like, it's just, it's sort of crazy how it all works out, like in terms of, in terms of just the widest range of outcomes. And I feel like there's a lot of players like that. Some due to injury, some due to contract circumstances like Taylor, some due to just haven't seen him in a while.

We've got two different players that make the list that we literally haven't seen on an NFL field in a couple of years. Or haven't seen them play significant snaps, I should say, in a few years. So let's start with Taylor because I think that's the biggest one. So Jonathan Taylor, here's the positives. Here's a guy in 2021, finished top 10 at the running back position, both total points and a point per game basis. We know the talent. Last year, by the way, though, running back 17 on a points per game basis,

running back 33 in total points. He played in only 11 games last season. Horrible quarterback situation. What? Yeah. Horrible quarterback situation, horrible coach situation. And the offensive line wasn't as good as maybe we thought it was a couple years before. So there were excuses. Yes, all of that is true.

But on the other hand, there's clearly better quarterback situation, better coach situation in Annapolis. But there's clearly bad blood between him and ownership. He wants out. And so it's one of those things that's right. He could be on the Dolphins. If you knew he was playing all 17 games, even for the Colts, he's a first-round pick.

But if the... And they've now said, as we're taping this, the Colts have said, Sure, go ahead. You have permission to seek a trade. We'll see if that actually comes through. Is there a team that's going to want to trade a first-round pick, which is what Ursae's saying?

Ursae's saying, I don't believe in running backs. I'm not going to pay you, Jonathan Taylor. But oh, by the way, I do want a first-round pick because he's so valuable. All right, well, pick a lane. Pick a stance. Assuming he doesn't get

traded, then you're like, okay, well, does Jonathan Taylor just say, okay, fine, screw it, I'll play? Or is he just like, hey, you know, my ankle is still bothering me. I'm feeling a twinge. We haven't seen him on a football field. We don't know how hurt his ankle is.

Again, this is somebody who missed time last year due to injury. So whether it's exaggerated or legit, again, I'm not accusing Taylor of anything. I'm actually, I'm team Jonathan Taylor on this one. But there's a scenario where he doesn't play or he only plays the minimum amount of games. He pulls a Le'Veon Bell and just tries to or he only plays the minimum amount of games. Like he pulls a labia on bell and just tries to hold out and, you know,

plays the minimum amount of games or shows up for the minimum amount of game. I, so wide range of outcomes for Taylor. He gives me the heebie jeebies at the moment. So McCaffrey is a good example of this last year. He's got Carolina McCaffrey. What is this?

Well, then I'm a quarterback and He's hurt a lot. And people still paid for him, but you're kind of, you're paying on the hope of maybe he'll be the guy he was in 2018, 19. Then he goes to the Niners. And now he's like one of the best assets you can have.

Now you look at him this year, it's like, Jesus, how much? First of all, you know, I don't talk about rounds. Rounds are for booger eaters. In an auction, which is what the real human beings play, I don't know how high to go on McCaffrey because there's a really good chance he's 1,200 yards rushing

and 900 yards receiving, and maybe will have 15, 16 touchdowns. He could also get hurt and play four games. But his ceiling is a lot higher than it was a year ago. And last year he was a ceiling floor guy. If you had him all of a sudden, he's on the Niners. It's like, Oh my God, what a fucking miracle. I have Christian McCaffrey on a good team now. So same thing for Taylor. Yeah, no, a thousand percent. I mean, I think at least with McCaffrey, there were, there had been a record of success in Carolina, even on bad Carolina teams. The issue with McCaffrey going into last year was he'd missed much of the last two seasons,

just the injury concerns on a guy that prior to that two-year stretch had literally never missed a practice. So it was just kind of this weird thing. So certainly there's injury concerns with McCaffrey. And by the way, if you look at the splits last year in terms of, I wrote this column, this 100 facts column, which is on NBCSports.com. Got a plug in there.

But in the column, I talk about if you look at the splits of McCaffrey when Elijah Mitchell was active versus the splits when Elijah Mitchell was hurt. Mitchell played a lot more than I think people realize. Maybe they wanted to protect McCaffrey somewhat because of the concern.

I'm less concerned about McCaffrey this year. Health is an issue with every player. It's a violent sport. People get hurt all the time. But with Jonathan Taylor, again, yes, it was a terrible team last year, but he was ineffective last year. Plus he's hurt. Plus now there's a situation between him and management where they just at the moment don't see eye to eye. So, you know, I, there gets like, if you're getting into the Najee Harris range, then I'm just, I'm taking Jonathan Taylor. Right. The end of the first round, even the middle of second, I'm like, ah, I just, especially if it's a league where this is like my league, right?

Like if you're in like five or if you're one of those players out there, you're like at five, six leagues, whatever. Fine. Take a shot or two on Taylor because if you get him in the third round, he could produce first round value. But if you're like, I'm in one league, this is my league with my guys from college, 25 years. If I lose, I've got to, whatever, get on a plane to Alaska

and eat at a Waffle House for 24 hours. I don't know that I want to put that on. I don't know if I want to use a second or third round pick on Jonathan Taylor or a significant amount of my budget, to your point, if you're in an auction league. Well, and what happens if he goes to a team that has an awesome offensive line?

I mean, that's the thing. What happens if the Lions are like, you know what? We really love Gibbs, but we have a chance to get Jonathan Taylor. Today, we have traded Gibbs for Taylor. And now Taylor is behind the Detroit offensive line. What if Howie Roseman's like, hey, we've got a ton of cap room. We're all in for this year. I can get Jonathan Taylor behind my offensive line.

Who's your second? Okay, so that's Taylor. Deshaun Watson. Wow. I figured he would be coming up. Yeah. I mean, look, here's the thing on Deshaun Watson. Taking the off-the-field stuff out of it for a second.

He played three full seasons in his career, 2018 to 2020. He was a top-five fantasy quarterback in all of them. But last year, he was 26th when he came back with the Browns. 26th in passer rating, 23rd in yards per attempt.

He averaged 14.3 fantasy points per game. He was QB 16. And honestly, that was better than if you just watched him, you're like, there's no way this guy's QB 16. He looked awful. He was QB 16. And honestly, that was better than if you just watched him, you're like, there's no way this guy's QB 16. He looked awful. He got some fantasy points with his legs. And so

it's been three years since we've seen Deshaun Watson top five fantasy quarterback Deshaun Watson. And he played for a bunch of bad Texans teams where they were just throwing it all over the field. And a lot of times it was indoors. Now he's going to Cleveland, cold weather. So if Deshaun Watson is back to being Deshaun Watson, top five fantasy quarterback, that's great. And because he uses his legs, there's a floor there. But there's also a chance that the

guy just might not be good anymore. It has literally been three years since we've seen Deshaun Watson play at an elite level in the NFL. He wasn't any good. Jacoby Brissett was the best quarterback in the Browns last year, and I don't think it was that close. Yeah, I don't know what to expect from him. And I think it's made the Browns really hard to evaluate, too, because that team's good. You know, and the reasons you would say they're not going to win the AFC

North or they're not going to make the playoffs, it's like, well, I don't believe in Stefanski and I don't believe in Deshaun Watson. And you might be right on both, but there's also a chance Stefanski, he made the playoffs with Baker Mayfield and Watson was a top five quarterback three years ago. And there is a scenario where that team's really good. My guess is in an auction, somebody will throw him out for a buck. There will be silence for a couple seconds. Somebody will go two and three.

And then somebody will be like, I'm going to be able to get him at four. Then it'll go five, six, seven. And it'll probably go to like 10, 11, right? Somewhere between seven and 11. He's one of those guys that, um, he's one of those guys that you could see somebody basically talking yourself into because there's eight guys that I think you feel really good about.

Right. And in order for me, uh, Hertz, Allen, Mahomes, Lamar Jackson, Herbert, Burrow, Justin Fields, Trevor Lawrence. And Fields you have only because of the running. Yes, of course. But I mean, wouldn't Anthony Richardson then be a top nine guy just because of the...

He might have like 300 carries this year. Yeah, we're going to talk about Anthony Richardson here. He's on the list. Oh, let's do it. Let's bring him up. Bring him in. Come on in, Anthony. All right. Yeah, I mean, look, the fact of the matter is, is with Anthony Richardson, another guy with a wide range of outcomes, right? Which is he could be amazing. I mean, think about Jalen hurts his rookie year.

Think about, uh, think about Lamar Jackson's rookie year. Both of them were developmental as passers. Both of them were very run heavy as quarterbacks. Their rookie year didn't throw a lot. And yet both still were top nine quarterbacks on a points per game basis as rookies.

you know, Shane Steichen, uh, who's obviously the head coach at Indianapolis, he was Jalen Hurts' offense coordinator for two years, and Jalen Hurts was the second-best quarterback on a points-per-game basis under Steichen.

And so, Anthony Richardson, who might be better than both of those guys as a runner, just physically. Now, the weird thing is that in college, Richardson wasn't like Justin Fields in the sense that Richardson wasn't a guy who's one read and then just tuck it and run. For Richardson, he was more designed runs. He wasn't as prone to immediately just

take off and start running the way that you saw someone like Lamar Jackson or Justin Fields. This is a stat that'll blow you. take off and start running the way that you saw some like, like Lamar Jackson or Justin Fields. Um, uh, I mean like this is a stat that'll blow you. Like Sam Howell had more rushing yards than Anthony Richardson as a quarterback. Wow. Their last years in college. Yeah.

Again. So, I mean, Richardson's got incredible athleticism and speed, but it's going to meet, it's going to be, it's going to need to be designed runs as opposed to fields Fields last year, you would watch Justin Fields and there'd be times where it's just like, okay, Darnell Mooney's hurt, Chase Claypool, I got no one to throw to,

screw it, I'm just going to run it myself 70 yards and he's done. So Richardson does need to have designed runs for him. But if he does have designed runs and he develops even decently as a passer, I mean, Michael Pittman's a real thing. Michael Pittman's a very good wide receiver. You've got Alec Pierce there who showed some flashes last year. We'll see what happens with Jonathan Taylor. But if Jonathan Taylor isn't there, suddenly he becomes the goal line back.

There's design runs. Remember, Jalen Hurts last year led all quarterbacks in design runs under Shane Steichen. So if you have these design runs under Anthony Richardson, four of the top six quarterbacks last year on a fantasy points per game basis had at least 700 rushing yards. To be an elite fantasy quarterback,

you need to have the dual threat ability. I mean, so Anthony Richardson could, the best case scenario for him is he could be a top five fantasy quarterback. He could be, you know, Lamar Jackson, Jalen Hurts, Josh Allen, Justin Fields last year. He could be one of those guys. The downside is that the Colts actually play good defense. They win a few games.

Richardson's really struggling. And they're like, you know what? We don't want to shatter this kid's confidence. Gardner Minshew, get in there and play a few games. Or hey, we're not going to do this many design runs for him. We're going to be much more conservative with him. And then he's QB 15 or whatever. I see. I don't think that's

going to happen because... So my Philly guys, Solak and Sheil in the Ring of the NFL show, who also did the Philly special for us and all in deep dive Eagles, like crazy Eagle fans. They thought Steichen was awesome. Like they were just like blown away

by some of the stuff he did last year. And you're giving him this toy in Richardson. I'm going to do something. It's high degree of difficulty. I'm going to land it. The cross-racial fantasy comparison, Josh Allen with Richardson. To me, he's Josh Allen. Like it's kind of the same stuff when Josh Allen with Richardson. To me, he's Josh Allen. It's kind of the same

stuff when Josh Allen came in. It's like, is he accurate? Is he not accurate? He's not like a scrambler like Fields, but he's physical and you can run with him. And if you look at Josh Allen's rookie year, he started 11 games. He played 12. He rushed for 631 yards in ATDs. So he was like 50 yards a game rushing with the ATDs and then he threw for 2,000 yards and he threw for 10 TDs. So if you get that, if you get 12 passing TDs,

2,000 passing yards and let's say Richardson by 50 yards a game he rushes for like 850 yards. Let's give him 10 rushing TDs. Where does that put him? Like top seven? Yeah. I mean, it's, yeah, probably somewhere. It's around where Fields is going to be, right? Yeah. It definitely would be top 10. Yeah. But I think that's a good comparison as well, because yeah, I mean, again,

I mean, Josh Allen is built like a linebacker. Like, I mean, he's, you know, he's just this massive guy as is Richardson. I interviewed, I am,

I interviewed Anthony Richardson and like, he's built different. Right. There's a physicality and presence to him. That's that the physicality presence is just different. Culpepper had that too, way back when. He was another guy. It was just like a big fucking guy.

Yeah, yeah. I just, for people listening, I just, I sort of like made like a muscle fist at Bill. Yeah, it looks like you've been working out. Yeah, oh, sure. Are you on the Frank Thomas stuff? Yeah.

Your lady would like it too. All right, we're going to take a break and Barry's going to do a headphone switch. We'll see if we can improve the technology. get $200 in bonus bets guaranteed. When you place a $5 bet, that is $200 in bonus bets, win or lose. And if you've been thinking about joining FanDuel, there's no better time to get in the action. And right now, as we are honing in to the start of the 2023 NFL season, I was on FanDuel the other day getting ready for my podcast with Cousin Sal when we break down each conference and all the bets and stuff. They have exactos basically for the division. So if you think, like for instance, if you think it's going to be Packers, Lions, Vikings, Bears as your one, two, three, four, you can bet on that on FanDuel. That's 20 to one. If you think the Packers are

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Monday Night Hockey, it's on Monday it's on Prime alright he's got some new headphones, this is going to be great we're not going to talk over each other anymore Matthew Barry, 7 more make or break guys for you, who's number 4? Tuatunga Bailoa wow, he probably should have been

the first guy we mentioned and then the Dolphins fans get mad because they're like, can you break down our team without saying you have no idea if our quarterback's going to play more than four games? It's like, I'm sorry, I have no idea if your quarterback's going to play more than four games. My bad. You guys started a playoff game with Skylar Thompson. Yeah. Seems relevant. Yes. Yeah, so

look, I mean, last two years he's missed eight games. Obviously wasn't cleared until January 31st. He missed four games, multiple concussions. You hate to sort of say make or break based on injury because again, it's the NFL and anyone can get injured, but it's such a...

I mean, because last year, last year, this is a guy who led all quarterbacks in pass rating, led all quarterbacks in yards for pass attempt. He had the second highest touchdown rate. He was fifth in passing yards per game. When Tua was out there, Tua was great. And second year in McDaniel system, we've heard a lot of talk about it. McDaniel system is similar to Kyle Shanahan's. We've heard a lot of talk about a McDaniel system similar to Kyle Shanahan's. We've heard a lot of talk about how intense and complicated that system is and you need multiple years in a system.

And so I think, again, you hate to say this, but right, if he's healthy, like Tua can have a monster year. The Dolphins could have the best offense in football. That's not out of the realm of possibility given the weapons they have and the scheme that he's going to run. Also, in the offseason, he talked about, I seriously thought about retiring. That doesn't make me feel super confident either about spending whatever, just from a fantasy standpoint. I think he's fun to have as your second quarterback if you could just play him a bunch of times, but I don't think he could be your lead guy

in fantasy. I think you'd have to have a really good backup. You can't just be like, I'm all in on Tua. If he gets hurt, that'll be it. You have to have two guys. It depends on your league. If you're in a one quarterback league, I think you can because usually the replacement value is pretty easy. There's enough guys in the waiver wire that you'll be able to get another quarterback if something happens there. But not in my league where I draft seven quarterbacks. You're not getting, you're not getting,

I'm stacking all of them in my league. As you know, I'm a quarterback hoarder. Right. This is, so this is advice for everyone that plays in leagues that aren't with Bill Simmons. So this is not for your West Coast league. This is not your league of dorks. But for any of the for anybody that plays in a

league with normal people that doesn't you know, have a guy in your league that drafts seven quarterbacks. I think you'll be okay. But yeah, it's a concern. The positives is that you know that last year Tyreek Hill, Jalen Waddle, all their guys didn't matter

who was quarterback. They still produced with Bridgewater. They still produced with Skylar Thompson. So maybe you take Tua with Mike White as the backup? Is that crazy? Mike White for a dollar? Who's bidding two on Mike White? Yeah, no, listen, no one's saying two on Mike White.

Again, if you're in a deeper league, if there's a concern that you wouldn't be able to get him on the waiver wire, if something were to happen, then okay. But I agree with you. I think Mike White is going to be a better fit as a quarterback for Miami should something happen to Tua than the guys they had last year. I really liked Mike White.

He was bad down the stretch. He was also banged up. I don't know how much one had to do with the other, but he didn't seem like he could hold up for three games. Now the Jets can't block, so maybe not totally his fault, but yeah. Tua thing. I'll tell you this with Tua,

and we're a lot less meaner as a society than we used to be in the early years of fantasy. Way back in the 1990s with the jokes and the amount of sarcasm and just the lack of lines, there will be some snickers when Tua gets drafted. Just from a fantasy standpoint, somebody in the room will be like, oh, okay. So who's going to be your starting quarterback?

And you'll get all those jokes, but you just got to know. He could play four games. He could play 17. But he's one of those guys that could make or break your season. He could play four games. He could play 17. But he's one of those guys that could make or break your season. I have a quarterback 10. He's got top five fantasy quarterback upside, but he also to your point, he could retire at some point. Alright, who's next?

Well, it's interesting. You mentioned Mike White. You mentioned that offensive line. Brees Hall. When does he come back? I saw clips of him running around looking great, but that seems inconceivable. He tore his ACL in November, I think. Yep.

And so week seven, his left ACL and his meniscus. Now, again, he's a young player, but the other thing is that they don't, that's a team, the jets that, that,

you know, obviously legitimately thinks they have Superbowl aspirations, that they have a chance to Superbowl. They're all in for this year, obviously with Rogers. And so for their point of view, they need Brees Hall in December and January. And that's one of the reasons they went on.

They got Dalvin cook. You mean fantasy playoff time, December and January. And that's one of the reasons they went on and they got Dalvin Cook. You mean fantasy playoff time, December and January? Yeah, but in terms of where Brees Hall is going, you're using that draft capital to get Brees Hall. And if he's not that guy, if he's not the guy that you saw week three through seven where he averaged over 18 fantasy points per game, where he was getting 19 touches a game

where he averaged 122 yards from scrimmage in the four games that he had 14 more touches. He's not that guy. He's just merely like 1B to Dalvin Cook's 1A or anything like that. Then you're sort of like, okay.

Breeze Hall, a healthy Breeze Hall is awesome. I have a suspicion about how I think the backfield split is going to go between him and Cook, and I'll talk about that in a second, but we just don't know. We don't know how healthy he is. Even if he's healthy, does he have the explosiveness?

Remember with Saquon. Saquon had the ACL and he came back, but he wasn't Saquon. He didn't have that big play burst ability. It took him quite a while to sort of work up to that, even though he was out there grinding it out. And so if he doesn't have that big playability or if they're limiting him because they want him to work into shape and they've got Dalvin Cook, I admit running back 14, but that's

a guy that could easily be a top 10 running back that could be a guy that could also finish the year outside the top 30. Wide range for Brees Hall, especially because, by the way, you also, again, he's a young player, and you know how Rodgers is. If Rodgers is like, Dalvin Cook picks up the blitz and Brees Hall doesn't or whatever, he wants a veteran back there. Dalvin Cook's on the Jets, I think, in large part because Aaron Rodgers wanted a veteran.

You know how Rodgers is? You mean, so I shouldn't buy the infomercial hard knocks that is just making Rodgers seem like he's the greatest guy who ever lived? I just think Aaron Rodgers is a guy that's going to be very demanding. He's very demanding on his teammates. He's obviously, he's coming back.

He's come to New York. He gave up whatever, $35 million or whatever it is. He rest on his teammates. He's obviously, he's coming back. He's come to New York. He gave up whatever, $35 million or whatever it is. He restructured his deal. Like Rodgers is all in for this year as well. And so he's not going to, you know, he's not going to be like, listen, I'm not going to get my ass kicked because, you know, Donovan Knight, Zonovan Knight or, you know, Michael Carter didn't pick up a blitz. Get me a, you know, get me a veteran back there. Get me a real guy.

And so, think about 2021 with Aaron Rogers and Nathaniel Hackett were together in Green Bay. The last year they were together in 2021 in Green Bay. Aaron Jones got about 18 touches a game. A.J. Dillon got about 13. And obviously

Dillon and Jones are very different players than Cook and Hall, but I think the split's about right. You know, they used both backs, Dillon and Jones, very effectively that year. That was the year that Rodgers won the MVP in 2021. Yeah, but you made the key point already. The Saquon Barkley, it's a two-year injury. And every time we do this, the guy is coming back a year later

and they're like, oh, he might be up playing. Everyone gets excited. And then the year doesn't go as well as everybody thought it was going to go. And then they're like, well, it is a two year injury. And then a year later the guy comes back and he's awesome again. It's like, you know, it was a two year injury. So Brees Hall is just going to be different in his case. It's going to be a one year injury and a two year injury.

I just don't think he's going to have the same explosiveness. And I think Cook's going to eat into his carriers. He's not on my list. So, and by the way, and you know, kind of an addendum to him, he wasn't going to be one of the guys I brought up, but Javante Williams is under that same,

is in that same conversation. Another guy that, you know, that touched, that, that had a, that was really talented, but had a bad ACL injury.

They signed some IJP Ryan to real money. Sean Payton, his last five, his last... Five of his last six years that he was coaching the Saints, Sean Payton gave 150 touches to multiple running backs. Five of the six years he was with the Saints. And Samadja Pirine's been given interviews like, why'd you go to Denver? He's like, because Sean Payton called me and said, look at how I used running backs in Denver. I'm sorry, New Orleans. I'm going to use multiple running backs. You're going to have a real role come to Denver.

So even though it's great, Devontae Williams played week two and awesome story, but does he have the explosiveness? How much does Samadji Pirine touch the ball? Does Sean Payton try to turn Greg Dulcis into his version of Taysom Hill in Denver, like a joker and do weird stuff in the backfield? So Devontae Williams is another guy that's sort of like an addendum to Brees Hall. Yeah, not on my list.

Who's next? Najee Harris. So before you go, I'm kind of out. I actually think the backup's going to cut into a lot of the stuff. The backup was good. Is that where you're going? Jalen Warren. These aren't people that I'm definitely

in on. These are the top 10 guys that could make or break your season. These are guys... I didn't want to go with somebody that's got an ADP in the 60s because that's not going to make or break your season. Najee Harris is being drafted as a running back too. He's going in the first four rounds

in most drafts. And so that's somebody who if you leave your draft with Najee Harris as your running back too, if he's the Najee from two years ago or whatever, okay, great. But if he's the guy from last year where he averaged 3.8 yards per carry, which is bottom five among running backs with 100 or more carries, where he's 5.5 yards per reception, second lowest among qualified running backs with 100 or more carries, where he's 5.5 yards per reception, second lowest among qualified running backs. He had 10 different games with a snap rate below 70%.

To your point about Jalen Warren, who looked awesome and ripped off that 63-yard touchdown in the preseason, yeah, Najee Harris is somebody that, again, could be a top 15 fantasy running back, could also be outside the top 40 and not be as good as Jalen Ward. Yeah. Here's a good trivia question for you, Bill.

Last year, Najee Harris had 313 touches. 313. Out of those 313 touches, how many of them went for 20 or more yards? Oh, God. Probably like less than 10. I would say like eight. One.

Wow. He had one carry of more than 20 yards out of 313. Wasn't there all kinds of stats about how bad he was at making guys miss? And I test-wise, because I remember coming out of college, everybody loved him and was like, oh, my God, that guy's a beast. I test-wise, I never God, that guy's a beast. I test wise, I never, he never really stood out to me that much. He might be Trent Richardson.

Oh, wow. I just was like, you know, I mean, again, this is a guy who last year, you know, again, had over 300 touches. He was top eight in both goal to go touches and red zone touches among running backs. He had doubled his fantasy points in 14 to 17 games. Like there's a volume based argument for Najee Harris. The question is, does he get the volume? red zone touches among running backs. He had double-digit fantasy points in 14 to 17 games.

Like there's a volume-based argument for Najee Harris. The question is, does he get the volume? Because to your point, Warren continues to like look good, look like the better running back, be more efficient. My Steeler fan friends, because I've mentioned this Najee thing to them, and they're like, oh, did you see, Mr. Trubisky is his quarterback. Eight-man fronts and that whole thing. So there is a're like, did you say Mr. Trubisky is his quarterback for the eight-man fronts

and that whole thing. So there is a case like, all right, he's in a better situation. Pittsburgh, I think, has a chance to be really good. They finished the year seven and two, which everybody's talking about the Lions as this amazing, oh my God, the Lions.

Look at how they finished the year. And it's like, well, the Steelers also finished the year. Well, we don't talk about them at all. And I kind of like Pickett. I thought he was okay last year. I don't think he's an all-pro, but he's okay. He's better than Mitch Trubisky. So I think that division is going to be awesome.

By the way, I agree with you. Pickett's one of my sleepers. So I've got my love-hate column coming out later this week. And Pickett's going to be on it as one of my sleepers. So I've got my love hate column coming out later this week and pick, it's going to be on it as one of my, you know, others receiving votes in the quarterback position. I really like him. I think he's more,

again, he's, he's not super mobile, but he's, you know, 20, 30 yards a game mobile. And Deontay Johnson,

second year, George Pickens, Pat Fryer move. Like they, Alan Robinson in the slot, the ghost of Alan Robinson, like in the slot could be ghost of Allen Robinson in the slot could be useful.

They've got some weapons. They finished the year strong. I like Pittsburgh. I'm with you. I do think Pickett is potentially in a two-quarterback league or a deeper league. I think he's an interesting sleeper. I like Pittsburgh this year as a sleeper offense.

I have a joke that only you will get and four other people. Alan Robinson, the Carla Gugino of fantasy receivers. Just each year, like this is the show. This is a movie. It's going to, no, she's in a movie with The Rock. This is it. It's going to hit. Alan Robinson is maybe 45 and we're still going to be thinking this is going to be the year for him. Carla Giugino. There was a TV show that she was in. I mean, there's a million things that she was in. There was a cop show, I think,

that they tried to make her... She was in the Showtime Roadies show. But San Andreas was probably the closest she came. But I always liked her. I was like, just somebody put her in a good movie. Jesus. Wasn't she... Bill, this is adjacent to our 90210 love. Wasn't she in Melrose Place for a minute?

No, I think she just looked like four people that were on Melrose Place. She might've been on one of the reboots. Maybe. All right, so we're agreeing too much. Who's next? I can't wait to argue with you about one of these guys. I've agreed with every pick so far.

All right, we'll figure it out. Other guys that I think could make or break your season that just wide range of outcomes. How about JK Dobbins? So I think the rate, the Ravens offense, I think is going to be awesome this year. I think awesome.

Awesome. So first off Lamar's happy. He got paid. Todd Munkin is the new offensive coordinator. You think about what he did at Georgia. I think they are going to be much more pass-heavy. I think they're going to be much more up-tempo. Hopefully, Bateman stays healthy, but adding OBJ,

Zay Flowers is the real deal. They already have Mark Andrews. That's going to be an up-tempo, fantasy-friendly offense. Okay. But with J. with JK Dobbins, like, you know, like again,

so I can give you positive stats like for his career, 5.9 yards per carry, which is the highest among all running backs of that stretch. Minimum 200 carries three of his final four games last year. If you return from injury, he had 90 or more rushing yards. He's averaging a rushing touchdown every 20 carries for his career. That's top five among running backs over that stretch.

And yet, he's never had a game with more than 17 touches. He's had under 15 touches in 17 of his 23 career games. Baltimore actually ranks 28th in running back carries over the past two seasons. When they run the ball, it's often with Lamar. And I don't think it's going to change much because I think they're going to be much more pass-happy this year. He's got one game in his career. J.K. Doms has one game in his career with over 25

receiving yards. He's done nothing in the passing game. So it's just like if J.K. Doms is the lead running back on an offense, he's in scoring position often, he could get a bunch of bunny touchdowns. He could also just be in this weird mix where it's him and it's Gus Edwards and there's

some Justice Hill and Lamar Jackson leads the team in rushing again and they're just throwing the ball all over the place. Other piece, their defense looks like it might be in trouble this year. They've already had some bad luck on the injury front. It was dubious in general even before Humphrey went down.

I'm wondering, are there going to just be higher scoring Ravens games this year? Yeah. And more like that 37-30 game near the end of the year against Pittsburgh. Is that just going to be,

you know, just a little more fun Ravens team than we're used to. A little less Justin Tucker. More touchdowns. A little more explosive. I just feel like they've changed their identity every year. And how many times have they brought in a first or second round receiver at this point? Like, are we up to 10? And each year it's like, this guy, Marquise Brown,

just wait. Who's that guy? Boykin. Miles Boykin. But it just seems like this rotating cast and they've never totally unlocked it. And also, I know they paid Lamar, but it just seems like this rotating cast and they've never totally unlocked it. And also like, I know they paid Lamar, but they also, they paid Lamar and you know, that, that comes with a different level of expectations. What happens if they start out, you know, two and four and he throws a couple of picks and people are like, fuck man, we gave you all this money. So I don't, I'm just not as locked in on them as I think other people are.

I don't know. They love it. They almost went to Cincinnati and beat the Bengals in the playoffs with a backup quarterback. I think Harbaugh's a hell of a coach. I think the Ravens always play tough and I do think

Hope Springs Eternal with OBJ but if he's back to anything, like the fact that Lamar called him, recruited him there, I do think Munkin wants to... I mean, every stop of his career, Munkin has just been a guy that throws a ton.

And so Bateman, if you look at the underlying metrics of Bateman, like in terms of... I think there's... I have Rashad Bateman in way too many dynasty leagues. I like Bateman. like in terms of, you know, there's, I think there's, I have Rashad Bateman in way too many dynasty leagues. I like Bateman. You don't have to sell me on Bateman. I mean, I agree. Bateman's good. He just got hurt last year. Zay Flowers, I think, is the real deal.

So anyway, I'm in on, but J.K. Dobbins, wide range of outcomes. I don't love, I don't have a lot of J.K. Dobbins this year. I probably won't be drafting him a lot. But that's a guy with another wide range of outcomes. I don't love, I don't have a lot of JK Dobbins this year. I probably won't be drafting him a lot, but that's a guy that was another wide range of outcomes guy. I think one thing with Baltimore, first of all, their schedule is brutal coming out of the gate. They have like four or six, but just in general, they're playing AFC South and NFC West. You go through, there's like a lot of like gimme games with them that I wonder, like when you talk about

running backs, you know, they get to play Arizona and they get to play Houston. And what if Tennessee's not good? They get to play Indianapolis early. And could there be some games where they're just like, if they're stacking and they're like 30, 30 and 10 and Dobbins is getting cheap ones near the end, something like that. I don't know what to expect from them. I've in general, I've not had a lot of fun with Ravens on my fantasy team, and I don't really know what that is. Well, yeah, they're one of those teams that's other than like Andrews and Jackson,

they're one of those teams that's like much better real-life NFL team than a lot of fantasy points. Right. Tucker's always great, though. Tucker's been the most reliable Raven. Yeah. Tucker's great. Jackson's great when he's out there. Obviously Andrews is great, but then you're like, you know, the next day you're like, wait a minute, six for 73 from Devin Duvernay. Why did that happen? Right. All

right. Who's next? Okay. Alvin Kamara. So I've, I've read all of these stories. How his, what was his right leg was two pounds bigger than his left leg or whatever. They found like his old muscle distribution was way off and they fixed it and now he's like this refurbished Ferrari. Yeah, I mean, look, here's

the thing on him, obviously. So he's got the three game suspension. He's somebody that has been banged up as well. So we know he's missing three games immediately. Needs to stay healthy as well. This is somebody who last year had an 18% target share, had seven different games with over 100 total yards, only six running backs had more.

Five straight years of averaging 18 or more touches a game. But last year in week eight, he had a 42-point game. If you take, if he had that monster crazy game in week eight, take that game away. And if you take that game away, he averaged 12.1 points per game, which would have been running back 24

on a points per game basis last year. Over his final nine games, from week nine on last year, he was the 36th best running back in fantasy on a points per game basis last year. Over his final nine games from week nine on last year, he was the 36th best running back in fantasy on a points per game basis. Averaged under 33 receiving yards last year, a career low. Who is quarterback? He's had six rushing touchdowns in two years.

Andy Dalton, Trevor Simeon. Who else was Taysom Hill? Who else was QBing? Jameis Winston. I mean, he's a quarterback. So if Carr can just be competent and then Kamara comes out of suspension,

that would be the case, right? Plus the fact that he realizes now how to distribute the muscle in his legs or whatever that story was. That's the pro argument is that Derek Carr is a step up,

that he's, that Kamara has, you know, has regained a step and he gets back to being, you know, because he's not going to cost you the kind of draft pick

he has in previous seasons. The anti-Camara argument is that again, he hasn't been good for a couple of years. He's struggled with injuries. He's missing three games. They have Jamal Williams, who was certainly solid last year. They have Kendra Miller, who I like a lot as a rookie. Taysom Hill is always there to vulture a handful of touchdowns as well. All of a sudden, you're like, okay, well, again, this is crazy. He's had 400... The last two years, Alvin Kamara has had 463 carries, and he's got

six rushing touchdowns. In the last two years, six rushing touchdowns. Only six rushing touchdowns on 463 carries. But the fact of the matter is, it's like, I'm out on Kamara this year, and I could be wrong. But that's a guy with another wide range of outcomes because to your point, if they've refurbished

him and he's ready to go and he comes out of the suspension ready to prove everyone wrong and ready to show the world he's back, okay. Running backs and receivers, I always just like going to the pro football

reference and just looking at the body of work you know he had 16 touchdowns in 2000 or 2020 but then you know the last two years you know 900 yards rushing 400 plus yards receiving and it's that

it's this mystique of, Oh, I have Alvin Camara on my team. He's fucking incredible. He's destroyed playoff weeks for whoever, but he, that guy might be gone. Cause we're in the,

you know, Hopkins was in that spot. Julio Jones was in that spot where it was like Julio Jones two years ago. Anytime you're a two years ago guy, I start to get nervous. Cause football is pretty unforgiving. We don't have a ton of awesome fantasy comebacks from guys in football. And that's what we're talking about at the top of the pot about Deshaun Watson.

And I got another couple years ago guy for you. Calvin Ridley. Really tough one. A year off, new team. years ago guy for you. Uh-oh. Okay. Calvin Ridley. Tough. Really tough one. Really tough one. New team. I'm not sure I loved him to begin with.

He was like one of those good, but like, I'm not sure how great he was guys, but was putting up stats. I test wise, never completely jumped out. He, the last game he played in the NFL,

October 24th, 2021. That's the last time we saw him. He turns 29 in December. In 2021, he had a 59% catch rate. He got a career low 5.4 yards per target. He was playing through a foot injury and didn't have great quarterback play. So you can excuse all that.

He's going to Jacksonville. We love Trevor Lawrence this year. I'm really excited about Lawrence in year two of Peterson's offense. It looks like from the preseason, it looks like it's going to be him and Zay Jones on the outside with Christian Kirk in the slot. So he's going to be out there on every two receiver set. But on the other hand, like you've got Zay Jones and Christian Kirk and Evan Ingram and Travis ETN. Like there's a lot of mouths to feed and that Jaguars offense,

along with Calvin Ridley, the hype on Ridley has gone really high. You know, his ADP is pretty high across the board and multiple sites. And again, October 24th, 2021. It's been a year and a half since we've seen him play football. He's 29. He's a weird one. Again, could be

top 15 fantasy wide receiver. Could be awesome. Could be a guy that flashes here. Could be like a guy that flashes here. You know, could be like Zay Jones, which is Zay Jones had a handful of good games last year and other games he just wasn't the guy. Well, the case for Ridley, Trevor Lawrence last year, 4,100 yards, 25 TDs,

and felt like he was coming on as the year was going along. So a Ridley pick is really a Trevor Lawrence pick. You're saying I think he's going to be at 4,700 yards this year and 36 touchdowns. And who is that going to? But I'm with you. He seems overvalued to me.

And I thought Kirk was becoming more the guy for them anyway. If I'm going to take a Jacksonville guy, I'd rather have Kirk. I thought Kirk was good last year. He just took shit because of the contract. 100%. He was very good. I think Lawrence... Lawrence was on... When I was trying to come up with my

fantasy ride or die this year, Trevor Lawrence was on my short list. And I thought he was a little bit too obvious, so I ended up... And I didn't want to do a quarterback again, but I think Lawrence has a monster year. I think he's going to be really, really good this year. But the question is whether it's all going to Ridley or if it's just distributed about everyone. And it's, this isn't a great comparison,

but like more like my homes where my homes has a monster year and just all the other guys other than Kelsey, you know, or just get sort of, it just kind of works out. Yeah. Yeah. One, one week it's a Ridley game. Next week it's a Evan Ingram, two touchdown game. And the week after that, it's a Christian Kirk game. And then it's to dump off to Travis ETN that you scampers. And you know, like, it's just, I don't know. Um, but Ridley's one of those guys as well that could, could be awesome. Could be, you know, not worth it. How many, how many do we have left? I've completely lost track. You tell me. So Kyle counts nine. So we have, we need've completely lost track. You tell me.

Kyle counts nine. We need one more. Make or break ceiling floor guys. Who is it? Then I'm going to give you one. I'm going to give you my number one. There's a couple of guys that are ceiling floor guys. I'll give you some nominations and then I'll give you my last guy.

I think DeAndre Hopkins is on the list. No. Cross him off. I think Keenan Hopkins is on the list. I think... No, no. Cross him off. No. I think Keenan Allen's on the list. I'm in on Hopkins this year for the record. I'm in on Hopkins this year. Good luck. I prefer Mike Williams to Keenan Allen at ADP this year. But here's a guy.

Kyle Pitts. Again, 27% target share last year, second highest among tight ends, 28% of his team's end zone targets prior to his injury, second highest among tight ends, tied for second highest, but three or fewer receptions in eight out of 10 games last year,

under five fantasy points in six of 10, under 12 fantasy points in 21 of 27 career games. They just added Bijan Robinson. Arthur Smith wants to run the ball. in six of 10, under 12 fantasy points in 21 of 27 career games. They just added Bijan Robinson. Arthur Smith wants to run the ball. And I don't know if that's because he feels like he doesn't have a choice because he can't throw the ball. Because last year, you know, Ritter wasn't great and Mariota wasn't great.

And so he felt like the only chance he had was just running the ball. Or if that's just a philosophy. I mean, he came from Tennessee where they had Derrick Henry. You know, Kyle Pitts had a thousand yards as a rookie. And then last year, like nothing and we'd be like free Kyle Pitts and the talents off

the charts, but they also have Drake London and they just added Bijan and they're run heavy and we don't know if Desmond Ritter is any good. I think we know the answer on Desmond Ritter and it's a thumbs down. I added Bijan and they're run heavy and we don't know if Desmond Ritter is any good. I think we know the answer on Desmond Ritter and it's a thumbs down. I think Bijan Robinson to me was my backup guy I was going to mention at the end of the podcast

for my end for a make or break guy. Because he's one of those, I think he's going to go for more than you think. I think people like him. He's fun to have. He's like this flashy new toy and there's a chance he. He's like this flashy new toy. And there's a chance he might just be fucking awesome. Like really awesome.

So I think he's going to go for more money than people realize. But it's also one of those things where if you're in it, and it's like, whoa, we're at 27? Oh my God, we're at 29? Oh, fuck. All right, 30. And now we just get to like 38 all of a sudden with Bijan Robinson

nobody knows what's happening I can see that well well here's the case against Bijan Robinson and to be very clear

I don't believe this case I'm all in on Bijan but the case against him is Arthur Smith and what if Arthur Smith decides to give

I don't know 5 to 7 touches to Tyler Algier, who had a thousand yards last year. And oh, here's three or four touches for Cordero Patterson. And all of a sudden he decides to throw it more to Kyle Pitts and Drake London. And then all of a sudden you're like, yeah, you know, B. John Robinson goes from being like, he could be a top three fantasy running back to now a guy who's more like running back 12. But the argument against B. John Robinson is Arthur Smith

and the usage that doesn't seem to make sense because we all thought, well, you used the top five overall pick on Kyle Pitts. You're going to throw it to him, right? You used the top 10 overall pick on Drake London. You're going to throw it to him. Right? But

I will tell you that I don't know. I think Bijan Robinson is one of those guys like I just I think he is special I have interviewed him and you know Bill you've done this a lot too sometimes you interview a player and it skews you you know like whether you like the guy you don't and sometimes it always

translate but I thought he was so impressive in terms of what he talked to me about his approach to the game and his attitude and what's important to him, and everything I've heard from people around him. Just, you know, somebody who's super focused on football. Really, I think he's a great kid. And, you know, obviously the talent's off the chart.

I think B. John Robinson's going to have a monster season. I'm a big, big fan. I wish Algier was on a different team because he would be my number one guy to get. I thought he was awesome last year. That was the last team that needed a new running back. I know they love him. Alright, here's my guy. My make or break guy before we go.

It's Aaron Rodgers. There's a case that he's not going to be very good this year because they can't fucking block. And Brees Hall, as we've talked about is a two year injury and Garrett Wilson is great, but that's really it for receivers that scare you on the team. And Robert Sal is the coach and people are treating Aaron Rogers as like,

he's still in that, like Joe Burrow, Trevor Lawrence class. And I'm not sure he is. Not to mention the fact that, what is he, 39 years old now? He's 14. 40 years old. Really, really hard schedule.

Hard division. Last year, he threw for 36-95, 26 TDs, and 12 picks. Which basically, I can get from, what, 16 quarterbacks in the league? But I think there's this renaissance of Rodgers, Jets, looks oh my God, two years ago, 48 TDs and all that. And I just don't see

it because I don't think they're going to be able to block for him. So to me, he's a stay away. Yeah, no, listen, I didn't include him on my list just because I don't think he's being drafted high enough to make or break your team fair I think he's I think it's more make or break for NFL I will in

today's NFL in today's NFL you need to be one of two things you need to either be a dual threat Josh Allen Jalen Hurts you know fields Lamar Jackson somebody like that. Somebody, again, four of the six quarterbacks last year in points per game had at least 700

rushing yards. Justin Fields, you need to either be a dual threat like that, where you get your points with arms or your leg, or you have to have 35 to 40 passing touchdown upside. Joe Burrow, Justin Herbert, by the way, Joe Burrow had five rushing touchdowns last year. Just gimmies. So you need to either be just a pocket passer that can have just a massive touchdown. Mahomes, right? Somebody like that. And Mahomes still gets you

20 yards a game. Or you need to be a true dual threat. Aaron Rodgers isn't running. He's just not running. So then you're like, okay, well, does he have 35 passing touchdown upside? And the answer is no. Because to your point, the Jets are in a very tough division. They've

got a really good defense. They're not going to get into shootouts. One of the reasons why they went out and got Dalvin Cook to go along with Brees Hall is because they want a more balanced offense. Again, go back to that 2021 season. They want to be more balanced on offense. They don't want to put it all on Rodgers. Rodgers isn't an idiot.

He's not going to be like, I'm going to do this all myself. He wants help. He chose to go to the Jets because he knew they had all the pieces except for a quarterback. They were a quarterback away. Aaron Rodgers doesn't need to be Aaron Rodgers with a cape and MVP Aaron Rodgers. He just needs to be an above

average NFL quarterback, and they've got a real shot. So I don't think that he has a... I have no interest in him fantasy-wise this year because I just don't think he's going to run. I think he's going to be fine. He's going to be QB 15. And there are other guys with more upside.

He's going to be Derek Carr. You know, like... I don't think people realize this, though. And I'll tell you this, I would much rather have Anthony Richardson than Aaron Rodgers for fantasy this year. Sure. Oh yeah. No question.

And I'd rather have Fields too. And those are people that aren't as good a quarterback as Aaron Rodgers is, but it's fantasy. And the sleeping giant with fantasy the last, I don't know, 15 years has been these quarterback running stats. And I always discount them. I always look at like, I just want passing yards quarterback running stats. And I always discount them. I always look at like, I just want passing yards and TDs.

It's easier to follow. But then you go against these guys like, Jesus Christ, Jalen Hurts had 40 points yesterday. And, you know, I think people get it more than they did. Yeah, I mean, I don't, just so you know, I don't think anyone thinks of, I mean, I have Richardson at 12. I have Fields at seven. I have Fields at 7. I have Rodgers, I think, at QB 17. Like, I don't...

I'm pulling up ADP. I'm pulling up the ADP on FantasyLife.com, by the way, to get a plug in there. Because we have... On FantasyLife.com, we have the ADP for all the different providers. But at the quarterback position right now, Aaron Rogers is, you know,

he's going like outside the 10th round on every site. Oh, so he's going to pick one Oh two on Yahoo. He's going at one 21 on underdog. He's going at one Oh six on FFPC. Like his, you know, he's,

he's QB like 15 he's going after Gino, Kirk Cousins, Daniel Jones, Dak you know then I'm going to give you a different guy Brock Purdy okay $1 yeah I think you could end up starting in some weeks that

offense is loaded he's 100 he was a top 10 fantasy quarterback down the stretch and he was he threw at least two touchdown passes in every game he started That offense is loaded. He was a top 10 fantasy quarterback down the stretch. And he threw at least two touchdown passes in every game he started. And now it's another year in Shanahan's system. And the thing that's brilliant about Shanahan is that he will scheme that. He'll be like, listen, Brock, the issue with Brock Purdy in college, talking to my scouting buddies, right? They said the issue with Purdy was in college, talking to my scouting buddies, they said the issue with Purdy

was always just all mental mistakes. And what Shanahan is brilliant at is sort of eliminating the mental. You don't need to think about this, this, and this. All you need to do is, here's this read, and if this read isn't there, you're going here. It's just very simple,

how it's been explained to me, is that he's really good at, Shanahan's really good at sort of scheming it up so that it's really simple for Purdy and the skills can take over. And to your point, that's a guy that can throw a five-yard out to Christian McCaffrey and then he's running 40 yards for a touchdown. Or Debo Samuel.

Or Brandon Ayew. Or George Kittle. They have all these guys that are so good after the catch that all he has to do is be semi-accurate, which he was down the stretch last year as a third-string rookie. Now he comes into camp knowing he's the guy. They've told him, you're the starter.

You're a QB1. So I don't mind Purdy. $1 back. I don't mind Purdy at all. As a guy, to your point, in the auction as a late-round guy. We got to wrap it up. Who's your number one guy this year?

Justin Jefferson. Okay. Justin Jefferson. He's my number one overall guy. Yeah. Okay. It'd be interesting to see the list of all your number one guys

heading into this season over the last 25 years. Like Tomlinson had to have been that for like three, four years in a row, right? Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah. Who has the most. That'd be good. You got to put that in your column. I should. I'll go back.

I'll get the research guys on that. Yeah, like the alpha guy each year. Justin Jefferson. Justin Jefferson this year is my number one overall. Okay. But my fantasy ride or die is Amon Ross St. Brown. Oh, that's yeah. He's counting all the names of the people drafted before him for every

game. I like that guy. I got a crazy bill. I have a, I have a crazy stat for you on Amon Ross St. Brown week 13 of 2021. That was his breakout week. Yeah.

Right. From that time. Here's the entire list of wide receivers in the NFL with more receptions than Amon Ross St. Brown since week 13 of 2021. Justin Jefferson. That's the list. I'm not surprised.

You watch Lions games and he would catch every third down pass. He's got basically a 30% target share. The only players with more fantasy points than Amar St. Brown since week 13 of 2021. Justin Jefferson, Devontae Adams. That's like, again, he's a guy that was going, you know, before I announced him as my right-of-eye,

he was going as like wide, you know, like, you know, mid, middle, second round, upper, you know, between the top and the middle of the second round, wide receiver, eight or nine. He just, he's not discussing the same breadth as the Adams and the CeeDee Lambs or the Stefan digs of,

you know, the elite fantasy wide receivers. And I think he is, and I think he should be. So anyway, that's my ride or die. All right. Plug some stuff quick and then we're going.

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Securian Canada, insurance designed for life. All right, my old friend Malcolm Gladwell is here. You could call this podcast Two Guys Whose Fingers Used to Work. You still write sometimes. I'm like basically... Sometimes. Constantly. I'm writing a book as we speak. What is the book about?

I'm actually working on two books. One is a kind of a reprise of The Tipping Point, my first book, updated. And then I have a book about Los Angeles in the 40s and 50s and the rise of, it's all about what it meant to be black in LA in the 40s. It's by Tom Bradley and Jesse, you know Tom Bradleyadley former mayor of la first black mayor of la and jackie robinson were went to ucla together yeah they were like with a bunch of other really

interesting people but um there was a little group it's like a very small group of of black athletes not more than athletes they were actually all incredibly good, brilliant scholars as well. At UCLA in the 30s, there's like 10 black people on campus and five of them. One of them is Bradley. One of them is Jackie Robinson. Another is a guy who goes on to be a famous Hollywood actor. Another guy is a guy who goes on to be, was the greatest college football player of his era. Kenny Washington.

Yeah, Kenny Washington. This is weird. It's all about that world. I'm writing all about that world, which absolutely fascinates me. All right, so we'll call this one guy whose fingers don't work anymore and the other guy still does.

Sounds like your fingers still work. You have an open invitation. If you would like to do a mailbag, I will do it at the drop of a hat. All right. Let me see. I might have to go back in the gulag and teach myself how to write again. Um, you, once upon a time you wrote the intro to my basketball book, which next year will be 15 years since, since it came out. I'm dying to write another book. I just, I'm never going to do it. Mentally, I'm writing it. Just update the basketball book. That would only sell

a kajillion copies. The James Harden chapter would be really fun, right? Oh my God. Just really tackling that, dude. Just diving in big time. How long has Revisionist History been going now? Revisionist History is in its eighth season

and the season launches next week, next Thursday. So with a big thing on, uh, guns called Doctors, Guns and Money. Um. So when did you, when did you start it? It was like 2015, 16 range? Something like that. Yeah.

Yeah. Eight years. Because I remember, um, one of the reasons we started the rewatchables was because you were telling me about revisionist history and about the library and people like they would listen to it when it came out, but then more people would find it and find it. And I was like, we got to come up with like an evergreen podcast and stumbled into the movies. But you were the one that was telling me like, yeah, people go backwards.

Like they'll listen to season two and then they'll go back to season one. And I always thought that was, that's like the hardest plane to land in any podcast. Yes. If you could do that, I mean, if you're backlist, I mean, musicians, you know,

this is the great advantage the music world has over the rest of us, which is the backlist is everything. I once heard David Geffen, is that something? And he was talking, this is years ago and he was saying everyone asked him what would he do if he bought a another label and geffen said i would get rid of absolutely every current recording artist fire my entire a and r staff and just

i just want the backlist he had no interest in new music. So that was so, back then, this must have been 10 years ago, that was a radical thing to say. Today, people would be like, yeah, sure. Of course, just buy the backlist, right? Well, remember Michael Jackson, what did he buy, the Beatles?

Or he bought half of the Beatles or something with the catalog. People are like, whoa, that's weird. And now, you know, God only knows how much he made or his family made from it. But you're right it really wasn't until the last 15 years or so

but we also have so many more mechanisms to listen to music now and pay people for their old work yeah

you've seen like Bob Dylan his catalog sold Springsteen just anybody who has some sort of,

you know, 30 year history or whatever, seems like they're more valuable than ever. I am dying to sell my catalog. DMs are open. If anyone wants to buy it. I'm going to be the Bob Dylan. So season eight is about drugs,

doctors, and what? And guns, doctors. It's six episodes about how crazy america's gun culture is it which sounds like boring npr but we do really weird and fun things with it the the first one is episode is all about the court's obsession with this um 17th century the supreme court's obsession with this 17th century, the Supreme Court's obsession with this 17th century English, for lack of a better word, asshole, who they've decided was involved in the single most important

gun case of the last 600 years. So it's stuff like that. What was, out of the seven you've already done, what do you think was the most popular one? Or what's the one that maybe people mentioned to you the most or had the most opinions on? It's the one about the golf courses of LA. A good walk spoiled,

where I point out that the only reason any golf course within the city limits of LA still exists is because they don't pay property taxes. Right? The land, because the land under, it changes all the time, but the land under LA Country Club is probably worth 20 billion, depending on your, it's

what is it? 300 acres in the most expensive neighborhood in the world. One of the most expensive neighborhoods in the world. Yeah, 20 to 25 billion, I would say. Yeah, 20 to 25 billion. So if you think about that, normal property taxes on a $25 billion property would be hundreds of millions of dollars a year, right? So how do they exist? How is it possible? And the reason is, so I got, I was, every time I go to LA, I would just, I couldn't get this thing out of my head. I had a friend who lived right by Brentwood. How is it possible? And the reason is, so I got, I was, every time I go to LA, I would just, I couldn't get this thing out of my head.

I had a friend who lived right by Brentwood. I would run around Brentwood country club and I'd be like, I don't understand how do they do this? Everyone I know in LA pays like some huge property tax bill. And like, I'm in Brentwood and there's some, a group of like, whatever, 60 white guys are playing golf on 150 acres. How does that work? Right?

And then I had this idea that I wanted to, when I figured out that LA Country Club was worth 25 bill, I had this really complicated idea where I wanted to join and then lead a movement by the members to sell the club. Because in the bylaws, I think, if I remember this correctly, if the club is sold, the proceeds go to the existing members. So if you figure there's 500 members, how many members would there be at LA Country Club? Probably like 500, 600 would be my guess. So you're splitting 25,500,000,000 ways, Bill. That's like, this was my retirement plan.

I was like, I have to figure out how to, first of all, very hard to join. But you got to know somebody, you know, you have to, I don't play golf. There's all kinds of issues that would happen. But if I joined and then became that guy and I figured out how to do it too, which is you would then just go and tell the public of LA, guys, this is ridiculous. This should be a park. What are you doing? And then the public pressure would mount, they would be forced to sell, and I would get one 500th of 25 billion. This is brilliant. I'm surprised they didn't listen to it and go, wait a second,

we could just join another club. The pressure in every other case you can think of, people ultimately follow the economic logic. Like Goldman Sachs used to be a partnership. And then one of the CEOs figured out, oh, wait a minute. if we just end the partnership and take it public all the current partners will get a one-time pay you know uh paycheck that's in the hundreds of millions of dollars right so that's why it was sold it's like the guy just was oh why are we holding on to this for the next generation let's just sell and cash out well this is my point about all these country clubs in la like just sell and cash out. Well, this is my point about all these country clubs in LA. Just sell out. Cash out.

800 members for LACC. 250K initiation fee. Okay, so what can you do? Wait, can you... 800 divided into 25 billion. Can we get the number on that? It's probably like

40 million a person, right? Yeah. I used to be pretty good at math once upon a time. Yeah, something like that. It's the freest money. It's the freest money you'll ever come across. And all you have to do is put up 250K to get 40 billion and conduct a massive public relations campaign

to raise the ire of the LA public to the point that they tax the club. Because the minute they tax the club, it's over, you got to sell. That's the most fun club to go after too. I have multiple people in my life, Jewish, who are convinced that that club for a lot, like has a really bad history with that.

And people that, I had friends that wouldn't go to the US Open because of how they felt about the club. Yeah. So there's like some real. It's not, Bill, it's not an allegation. It's a fact. I mean, they had a longstanding policy against quote unquote industry people.

Yes. You know what? We know what that means. I know people who won't even like play there, go to the U.S. Open, anything. They're like, that place is absolutely dead to me. They don't want people like me there. If you go to the top of the Waldorf, which overlooks the club,

and you look down, it's the only chance you get to really look down, you realize it's maybe the most beautiful piece of urban real estate I've ever seen. It's stunning. If you just built a ring of luxury homes around the outside, you could charge, I mean, an infinite amount.

It's just like the whole thing is waiting to be developed. Kyle texted me as we were talking. I was bragging about my math and my math was off. It was 31.25 million per member out of the 800 members. Who doesn't do this deal tomorrow?

Who doesn't do this deal tomorrow? I mean, there's, and you've loved to dive into a lot of this stuff, but even sports ownerships and things like that have all kinds of crazy, the ways that they can get the cities to build buildings for them and the ways you can write

off quote-unquote losses or depreciating value of your franchise while that franchise is also like escalating at a crazy rate and the media rights deals are going through the roof and you're pretending like, oh, I don't know what this is worth. And it's like, you guys know. Our players are depreciating asset. I think they are. You get to, you know, Jim Dolan, you know, still doesn't pay property tax on medicine square garden and hasn't i think since the 90s whatever is they that the accumulated value of the property tax break that jim dolan

got from the city of new york is now greater than a billion dollars like it's just like it's absolutely first of all it would be one thing it would be one thing if it was San Francisco, you could say, well, they got us four titles. No, we gave him a billion dollars and he's delivered absolutely nothing. Right. It's not even, I'd have a conversation if they had five titles.

But this is why it's so hard to get any of these teams now. And you're either looking at the really low market teams, like small market teams, like somebody like Charlotte. Yeah. Or you're looking at a situation like Phoenix or with the Washington football team where the owner has to flame out in a big way. And that's why he's going to sell.

Otherwise, Clippers, same thing. Otherwise, I think in the last 10 years, because I remember we did a couple back and forth, either Freest Pin or Grandland. One of the things we were talking about was like, did we reach peak selling a team? Remember the NBA? I think like seven teams sold in 18 months.

And there was a real panic about what the economics were. There was a lockout. I think two of the sports had lockouts. Now, at least for football and basketball, the values are as great as ever. Baseball is the one that's pretty fascinating with the RSNs and how that's going to play out. And look at a situation like the Padres

where they're spending just crazy amounts of money and this team is not even doing well. And it's like, how is this a good business model? So I don't know what happens to baseball. Especially like you go to a game, the vibe is, even the pitch clocks helped. The vibe's still weird. There's a giant net up now. People are on their phones half the

time. Everything feels distracted. Plus there's 81 home games a year. Who has time to do that? I don't know where... We've been predicting the death of baseball for 30 years. I think it's going to die,

but I'm really interested to see what the next iteration of it is. Yeah. Yeah. No, I'd rather, we missed our chance to buy an NBA franchise. There was a moment. We could have at least been in a group.

We could have put together a group. No, I'm being serious. Suppose you took, we took like our greater friends circle. Well, the rich people, serious. Suppose you took, we took like our greater friend circle. Well, the rich people you know. You know like some rich, rich people. I'm talking to a rich person.

I don't know what you're talking about. No, no, no. I'm just, no, no, no. But you don't need, this is the thing. If you go back to the 70s and you buy a marginal franchise in the 70s,

like if you bought the Cavaliers in, what are the Cavaliers worth in 1975? No, but you could say 70s, 80s, like the Dallas expansion fee was like, I don't know, 12 million bucks. It was, I think all the way through the late 2000s. Like when you look at what the Philly guys got the 76ers for, it's unbelievable.

Like you can't believe it. And the Warriors, those guys paid, I think, I think like $350, $400. And people are like, whoa, that's so high. And I was like one of the only ones. I was like, that's like a top six market. Like that's an amazing deal. And people were so worried about what the salaries are going to be. And it's like the salaries are going to be fine.

People are always going to pay for sports. My point was, you could syndicate, could you find, you know, a thousand people in 1977 willing to put up

one thousandth of the value of an NBA franchise, knowing what we know now? And the answer is, yeah. Oh, yeah. That's basically what the Packers did. Yeah.

The Packers are owned by the city. Yeah. Some of the leagues don't want that. They want kind of a one person. And they want that person to be a real scumbag. Yeah, they're like, oh, you're too decent. Well, one of the interesting things now at the NBA,

they don't have a single black owner again. Oh, right. Yeah. So that's one of many reasons why LeBron's getting the Vegas expansion team, which has been a done deal for like two, three years.

But they're going to have Vegas and Seattle and whatever new ownership groups they're going to figure out ways to bring people in. Let's take a break and then I want to dive into youth sports

because I obviously have a lot of thoughts having been through this for the last 12 years. So we're going to talk about youth sports, but you've also been in the college loop too. You've written a lot about colleges and the prices of things,

and you've taken some shit. You're kind of at the center of a pretty big debate about what is a college education worth? Are we doing this correctly? How are we coming up with the rankings for these schools? So are you glad you even went down that road? Because it seems like that stirred up as much shit as you've ever stirred up. No, no.

All good shit. I mean, it's very difficult to find someone who will defend harvard university who didn't attend harvard university right and even many people who attend realize and it's very difficult to find anyone who doesn't give money to harvard university who thinks giving money to harvard university is a good idea the my favorite observation was when i figured out that princeton university is a perpetual motion machine machine, that they make so much money from their endowment that the return on the endowment is somewhere between a billion and $2 billion greater than the cost of running the entire university. In other words, they don't have to do anything. They can just sit there and they can run Princeton in perpetuity.

Just on the interest. Just on the interest. And have money left over, by the way. I believe last year they had a billion five left over, even if they had covered their entire budget with the proceeds from the endowment. And people still give money to Princeton, which is like, why wouldn't you just light your cash on fire

like on Nassau Street in front of the university? still give money to Princeton, which is like, why wouldn't you just light your cash on fire, like on Nassau Street in front of the university? I mean, it's just people's behavior is so irrational when it comes to that. But it's youth sports that I want to delve in today. Let's do it. I have a lot of thoughts. I have four propositions about youth sports. All of them are premised on the same thing, which is that it's the system, the youth sports system is broken. Okay. Doesn't work. Couldn't agree more.

Okay. Proposition number one, all travel squads should be abolished. All of them. Here's why. This actually builds on something that I pointed out in my book, Outliers, which I thought had changed and hasn't. It's gotten worse, which is that there is this what they call relative age effect in competitive sports, which is that whenever you have an age cutoff, elite athletes cluster around the cutoff. Right. So this was one of your best things you ever came up with, that Canadian hockey thing with the January and February birthdays. It was unbelievable.

An overwhelming percentage of elite hockey players are born in January, February, March, and April. Why? Because when they put together the travel squads, when kids are six and seven, the cutoff is January 1st. So the kids born in January, February, and March are the oldest. Which really matters when you're six, February, and March are the oldest. And you look at them- Which really matters when you're six, seven, eight. Really matters. And then they get them extra practice and they travel and all that stuff. And so they actually do become the best. So I'm going to read to you, Bill, the birth months of the members of the 2023 Canadian Junior Hockey Team.

Oh, God. Okay. This is the birth months. Ready? Yeah. January, February, August, February, April, September, January, January, July, January, January, October, May, November, April, September, March, February, January, June, April, April, January. So that is 23 members of the team.

There are seven born in January, three born in February, one in October, one in November, and none in December. So basically what that says is, if you're a Canadian and you're crazy about hockey, and your child is born in October, November, December, you couldn't forget about that child ever playing football. Yeah, play basketball. Yeah. Although you can see the same effects, it. That's a longer, complicated conversation. But so we see these effects in soccer. We see them in any sport that has traveling squads. We see these age effects and they are, they're not small. They're huge.

So the question is, why would you perpetuate a practice that's meant to develop talent that has the effect of leaving at least half of the talent on the table, right? It doesn't make any sense. The logical answer would be you do half years and that would be a better way to do it, right? You have, I'm on my six and a half year team. I'm on my seven year team. And instead of just lumping everyone under a year. A better, so a better strategy would be a third, a third,

a third, because the kids born in June are still, there's no June kids on these teams. It's all January, February, March. So you really have to break it down into thirds. And, but yes,

that's one, one approach. So you call him like, he's a seven year, first third. Oh, he's a seven year first third. Oh, he's a seven year second third. And that's just how you do it. You have three sets of traveling squats.

I'll accept that. There's another solution which works in individual sports, which is so simple and beautiful that has only been used as far as I know once. And that's by the British squash system. One of the greatest youth squash systems in the world. And that is that you graduate to the next age class on your birthday. Okay.

So you spend a third of the year, or not, some portion of the year you spend as the youngest kid in your age cohort. A third of the year is in the middle. And a third of the year is one of the oldest. So you get three, because it's not necessarily all a bad thing to be the youngest. Because if you're the youngest, you're overmatched physically. So you're forced to think creatively to come up with strategies to compensate. In the middle, it's a wash. And then it's also useful to be one of the biggest and strongest, because then you get confidence and you score the most goals and you do all those kinds of things. So if you move kids up on their birthday in individual sports, then every kid cycles through all three of those stages.

And when British squash did this, they went from really struggling to find elite squash players to realizing they'd been neglecting this massive talent pool of kids. And all of a sudden, kids born at the end of the year had a real shot at becoming elite performers. So like- You know, I don't want to poo-poo this, but we covered a lot of this on The Ringer's British Squash Pod.

I don't know if you've listened, but we did a whole series about this. Bill, think about this. You have two kids. I also have two kids, by the way. I know. You're just quietly pumping out kids. So I think about this a lot.

The same thing is true when your eight-year-old takes a standardized test. Have you thought about how unfair this is? Yeah. Your eight-year-old is taking, if your eight-year-old

is born in December, they're taking a standardized test with someone born in January. Of course their score is going to be lower. So you should take a standardized test not on one day, but on your birthday. Right? Everyone should take it at the same stage in their development. There is no way now, when you take one of those state aptitude tests or assessment tests, there is no way to meaningfully compare a December 8-year-old to a January 8-year-old.

That's nuts. It's like there's 12% difference in their ages. Well, but then that also leads to people holding their kids back at crazy early ages. We saw some of that in LA. My kids would be in first grade with kids that were like 9, 10

months older than everybody else. Up where I am, like at Hotchkiss, it's now common for kids to be held back twice. There are kids graduating from high school at 20. It's insane. That's literally insane. And it has to stop. It started in basketball and then it trickled to all the other sports. And then there's all these theories about when you should do it. Like, oh, the best time is repeat eighth grade. Then you go into ninth grade as a freshman, but you're, you know, he was a November birthday and he was pretty on the younger side and he probably weighed by the end of the year. He, there was so much running. He weighed like one 55. Now he's playing as a sophomore. He's one 80. It's a huge difference. He's 25 pounds heavier. Um, and if we just held it back, but I'd never would have done that. Why? So, so I want him to enter the real, real world world a year later I'm not doing that yeah

what happened up here is that the youngest kids got held back a year and so the oldest kids parents responded by holding their kids back a year whereupon the previously youngest kids parents responded by

holding their kids back a second, whereupon the previously youngest kids' parents responded by holding their kids back a second year. There's a point where no one's ever going to graduate from high school. It's just like holding back, holding back, holding back. My question is, what does the kid think? Do kids really want to spend that much extra? Is high school that much fun? When I was in high school, all I wanted to do was get out of high school.

I don't know. Why would you want to spend too much? They don't know any better. There's some reasons. Like if you had some sort of injury or if you were just super young or immature, I can see it. I did a PG year.

One of the reasons was because I crashed my motor scooter the summer before my 12th grade. And I just needed another year to get my shit together for it, but I wouldn't have done that otherwise. I think people now take advantage of it and they feel like it puts their child in a position of strength, which maybe it does when they're 13. But I think ultimately all this stuff evens out. I'd love to know, do we have enough data now whether this actually works? Whether what works?

Just the whole holding back thing. Like, how do we even know? Well, we have data that says that relatively older kids have advantages that persist well into college. Oh, so then what are we talking about then? These people are all geniuses. No, no, no. No, but the problem is that you always have a class of losers. If you play this game,

the only thing to do is to do what we were talking about with sports is that school should be segregated by, by birth month, that you should have three classes all the way through middle school where, you know, January to April, you know, June to whatever. So there's way more movement. Yeah. Yeah. So there, you, you just have to kind of... That's pretty interesting. That's the only... Why schools haven't done this is a source of enduring

mystery to me. It's so obvious that a January kid and a December kid do not belong in the same second grade classroom. It's blindingly obvious. I was thinking a lot about soccer. All these other countries for women's soccer have now caught up.

Like you watch Spain. Spain was awesome in the World Cup. And that's a country that really only got into this, what, 15, 20 years ago because they had this whole stigma against women playing sports. Yeah. Which the veil was lifted and now they're fucking awesome at it. So all of our advantages in soccer, it's now going to turn into what happened with the men.

And we have this broken system of how we develop players. And even you see about these younger players who are on the US team, all those players make a lot of money from being on the US national team, right? So the older players want to keep their spots. They don't want the younger players to come up. And just all the incentives are completely wrong. But we have good, we've developed a couple of good younger players, but not nearly enough to keep the advantage. So this brings me to proposition number two. Okay.

Ban all formal competition pre-high school. All right, now let me walk you through this. We're going to use soccer. So I'm sure you know about these new German rules for youth soccer. They're super interesting. They basically say, now they're using a cutoff of 12,

but basically for pre-12, they don't play full teams on a full uh field they play some version of very small sides uh more shorter games um no refs uh it's up so with with six and seven year olds you're playing three on three you're playing in a in a quarter field you You're playing no goaltender. Each side has two goals. And you play seven rounds of 10 minutes. And then it's tournament style.

So each little team of three. It's like knockoff almost. Yeah, you move. You go to the next pitch if you win and the previous pitch if you lose. So everyone's constantly playing. And then by the time you get to age 11 what you have is roughly you have maybe seven on seven with a goal with a goalie six six outfielders and you have half a field half size fields and you're playing like you know 12 minute games

with that same tournament style and the idea is there's no reason through that age, what you're interested in is skill acquisition. And the best way to acquire skill is to touch the ball. Well, that's futsal. This is a cousin of the futsal idea, which is the same thing. Like just shorter spaces, learn how to beat people in traffic.

Fewer players. And then the second thing is acknowledges is the first point we were making, which is you can't, when you do any kind of full-scale competition prior to puberty, you don't know what you're seeing. You think you know who the best player is and you don't. You're, you're just rewarding the biggest and most mature player. Or in soccer, you're rewarding like the, fast kid who, once you hit a certain size, if that kid doesn't grow enough, that kid's going to be out. That kid needs to get to at least 5'3". Yeah, there's just too much variability in kids pre-puberty to make any kind of intelligent

judgment. So we should just stop doing it and just say, let's develop everyone's skills. And by the way, I was looking, I got so deep down this rabbit hole. I was looking at attrition rates in youth sports. And there's really beautiful data from, you know, Australians are obsessed with swimming. It's their, it's the most important national sport. So if you're a seven-year-old in Australia, you do competitive swimming. And you can track the attrition rates over time from like six through let's say 15 and basically every slow developing younger kid just drops out

so they have a situation where they realize they're trying to fix it now where they realize that here's a here's a sport we care about more than anything else we want to be the best in the world but our talent pool is basically restricted to the kids in the three-month oldest cohort. Or actually, they're even better. In Australia, there's ways to measure your actual physical maturity independent of your age. So that's what they're doing. And they had this new thing now where, let's say you've got a bunch of 13-year-olds swimming the 100-meter freestyle. Before the race starts, you measure everyone's relative maturity and you give them a score.

The baseline is the 12-year-old who's exactly as mature as a 12-year-old is supposed to be. And then you could be plus 11. You're physically 11 months older than you are or minus seven you're actually physically seven months behind you run the race and then you have two sets of results the raw results and then the adjusted results where they tinker with the times to adjust for your level of relative maturity so what you see is so your kid could come in last, and then you could say, no, no, no. Look, on the adjusted rankings, you're actually first, but you just happen to be the youngest,

the relatively least mature 12-year-old in the group. It's a little bit of a curve. It's a curve. They're grading on the curve, right? Which is so genius. I love this so much. And they should be doing this in school. All exams in school should be graded on a maturity curve.

So your big theory with these first two is that we are losing possible great athletes because of these dumb systems we have in place, mainly based around either age or the stupid way that we do use sports, that we're just basically losing possible great athletes for reasons that have nothing to do with whether they're a good athlete or not. Yeah, exactly. All right. Going backwards though with the travel team, because then we'll tie into this other thing. So your kids aren't old enough yet for you to realize this. The travel teams are completely based on fear.

They leverage the fear of the parents that I might have this kid who's a great athlete. I have to do it this way and I have to commit to this whole crazy schedule on the weekends or my kid, not my, I might not find out if my kid was that good. My kid might not play if we skip this weekend because we were supposed to go back for grandpa's 80th birthday. And then we skipped the weekend

and now all of a sudden he's not playing or she's not playing. It's all fear-based. And then the other piece of it is they want you to do the one sport and not anything more than that. And the weekends, I was thinking the other day because Palm Springs was one of the cities out here that

got hit by the little mini hurricane we had. I was like, man, Palm Springs with rain? That's weird. Then I was thinking about how my daughter played travel games in Palm Springs three years in a row, where we drove to Palm Springs and it was like two and a half hours each way to play a one-hour soccer game. And it seemed like it made sense at the time. It's like, well, I can't skip that.

I don't want the team down. Now I'm like, that's fucking crazy. That was my entire Saturday, just driving back and forth to Palm Springs to watch her play in an hour-long game. Like, why did we do that? Once you get out of it, you realize how insane it is. Completely insane.

Well, this brings us to point number three, which is the most crucial of the three points. Going back to the Germans, another thing the Germans do in that idea of these different ways of training kids in soccer. Which was really smart. I really liked that. Yeah.

Is, so no referees, and also, crucially, no parents. No parents. Yeah. So the parent ban, the parent ban the parent ban so i did this i did this thing with it with uh uh there's a woman named linda flanagan who wrote this amazing book on what's wrong with youth sports and i did a interview with her at the y in new york and we talked a lot about how parents parents have anyone who has been a parent in this situation

knows this. Parents have ruined youth sports. All the problems stem from the parents' expectations, the parents' pressure on the coach. The coaches don't want to coach anymore because the parents make their life miserable. And the coach and the parents make the kids' life miserable. And I was thinking about this because I was a big runner in high school. Right. And when I was growing up in Canada in the 70s and going to national championships, there were no parents. My father, in the entire time, I read all of the, by the way, I'm not dissing my father.

I loved my father to death. In my entire running career, my father attended two meets. One was because I lost my ride and he had to drive me. And the other one was he was one of the designated drivers to the Ontario Championships one year. But he worked the, he volunteered to rake the long jump pit. And all I remember is rounding the final curve. By the way, I will say it modestly, I won the race. I'm in front, I'm rounding the final curve and I look into the infield and there's my dad raking.

And then he sees me and he waves the rake and he goes, you know, go Malcolm, go! And goes back to raking. That was it. That was the only one he attended. And my experience as a child as a successful child athlete was so overwhelmingly positive i mean it was the greatest experience i've ever had one of the ways the idea that my parents and no one's parents were

there the idea that parents would come was just like unthinkable well that's the also the worst sport if you're the parent. You're like, I'm going to go stand at the halfway mark of the race and then my kid will run by. It's like, oh. But it's not. There is no, someone has to give me a compelling reason why kids are better off when they're parents. I hear that. Is this true?

I wouldn't notice. This is a naive question. Do parents go to practices? I would go sometimes. And if there was a track and I would walk around on the track. But more because I love sports and I was just fascinated by how they would run stuff. I think if a parent is at a practice being disruptive in any way, there's something wrong with that.

Deeply wrong. Yeah. Yeah. Like I went, my son, cause I had to pick, my son's playing football and I had to pick him up a few times. Right. So I understand that. If I have to pick him up, it's like, well, I'll go an hour early and I'll get to watch

some of the practice. I'd love to see what they're doing. I mean, participate. I mean, practice participation, active, active watching, engaging, all that kind of stuff. That's a little weird. I mean, here's the problem. When your kid goes from, every parent has this reckoning. And we talked about a lot on Parent Corner with Sal, because we would talk about like going to our kid's stuff on Sundays and just like the, just the amount of commitment it is to put that. But you have this kid, it's a baby.

Then it's like this little two year old that's just running around crashing into things. And then it's three and it's four and they just keep gaining these skills every year. But there's still like these little tiny idiots, right? They're, you're just like, this would be amazing if I can even hold a conversation with this person. And then they start adding things. And then all of a sudden you see them out in a field running around kicking a ball and it's like, oh my God, they can do this.

And people get so enchanted, enamored with it that they kind of lose their, lose their minds. So even like around age six is really when they can start competing. It's so much fun to watch your kids play sports that it's really easy to lose perspective on it. You know, like my daughter, when she was, I think nine, her team had a run to like the semifinals of the state cup here. And it was way more exciting than a Boston sports team. So that's the part where that's the drug, right?

And then all the other stuff that sucks about it is the part you kind of get through. But yeah, I mean, I've watched parents burn out. You can see it and you can kind of tell who the parents are too in the moment. Oh, that's, this is going to be bad. The problem is, is a small, there's a small, like when I was talking to this woman in the Flanagan who coached for, she coached track for years. It's not every parent, obviously,

but the problem is that once you invite parents into the room, there's going to be two of them who will just make your life miserable. And there's, you know, it's just like- Especially now in 2023, where everybody, this is like, my son was triggered today when you yelled at him during the, right, you're in that whole world now too. you bet my my son was triggered today when you yelled at him during the right i think you had

that you're in that whole world now too my i don't think my i don't think i had a track coach for four years in high school i don't think my parents ever either met or talked to him it was like my thing that was like i'm making my parents sound like they were neglectful they were the anything but but it was like it's just a different time was like, I was talking about this with somebody the other day about, we used to have dogs in the eighties and then it was like, what happened to your dog? My dog got hit by a car. We just went and got another dog. Like that's how we treated dogs 40 years ago.

It's just, it was just, things were different. I went to little league practice by myself every day in the sixth grade and had games and nobody was there. It's like, well, this is how it's going. You didn't even really think twice about it. Wait. Okay. Proposition four, which is related.

Again, this is the one I also learned from Linda Flanagan makes a really, really, really, really good argument for this. No more athletic scholarships because the parental, and she licks it back. What's driving parental craziness often is not is the fantasy that the kid will somehow get a free pass into college on the basis of their athletic ability. Which now saves you $350,000 potentially if it's the right school. And that's what's driving the mania. So what you have to do is remove the incentive for the craziness. And also there is no, there's no good argument for athletic scholarships. Like if some, if you think a kid would play well or contribute to your school in some meaningful way, let them in. If they need money, give them

financial aid. Why is it that. Why does it have to be segregated under the category of sporting ability? Well, but there's been some conferences and leagues that have adopted, like the Patriot League does this, right? The Ivy League has always been like this, although they have even more cutthroat. It's even worse than scholarships that they have. It's worse. Well, Bill, it's funny you mention it. They have financial aid. They could just pull it away. No, the Ivy League is the most egregious party on this. The benefits given to... We just went to that Supreme Court case where they banned affirmative action on the grounds that the

court said it was impermissible to give any kind of benefit admissions benefit to someone on the basis of their race meanwhile the admissions benefit given to athletes by harvard university dwarfed the benefit they gave to people on the basis of their race dwarfed it they're like do you know what the if you are someone who's so harvard does a they have a in their admissions process they have a kind of sorting process and they end up with a pool of kids who are all they believe have the ability to thrive academically at harvard but that pool is much larger than their freshman class and then they do what they call the sort or the lop or something and they go through and they pull out kids who they think have, and the four criteria for pulling them out is legacy, school contribution, which I think is how rich your parents are, being a member of a minority, and sporting ability. And sporting ability is the biggest of the four.

It's like if you're in that pool and you're an athlete, your chances of being admitted to Harvard are 83%. If you're a normal person, your chances are 16%. I don't listen who's qualified. But unpack that. Why do they care so much about it? It's because that's what the donors care about. I don't even think they want,

they want their schools. They want their schools to be good at, at these different sports. And that's what gets them excited. That's, that's, but I'm talking like the big div ones.

Yeah. Michigan, Notre Dame, whatever, like part of the reason these coaches and then these bio packages, if it doesn't work for like a year,

it's because they're terrified that the donors are going to turn on the school because the football team's not good or the basketball team's not good. That's driving 80% of this, I think. But that's a separate,

like I'm quite happy to take d1 basketball and football in the elite programs and just say that's a special case but that affects a tiny tiny tiny fraction of kids going to school i'm much more concerned about the run-of-the-mill preferences given to athletes at all the other schools in non-D1 glamour sports. It just strikes me as that's feeding this craziness in high school where parents are going nuts and ruining it for everything and making decisions about their kids prematurely, pushing them into areas like... One of the people I...

There's a book written by a runner, American runner named Lauren Fleshman. She was a world class middle distance runner one of the best of her generation and she wrote this memoir about growing up as a very gifted runner and she talks at long length about the

incredible burden of health problems that female runners have in their late teens and early twenties I mean you can imagine, you're talking about people who are chronically underweight. So as a result,

they're getting stress fractures and they're getting- This is gymnasts and figure skaters too. Exactly. It's that phenomenon. And the question is, why on earth would we create a system where we're putting young girls

through that kind of physical pressure and the answer is that it's not the girls who want to like starve themselves whatever it's the pressure put on them by coaches and parents who have an expectation about what they're they want their 19 year old to do and that's the only way to solve that is just to say it's over you can't your girl could shift is she you can get her into wesleyan but it's over. You can't, your girl could, you can get her into Wesleyan, but it's not going to be because she's the best 3,000 meter runner in the state. It's going to be, you have to have some other reason.

It would be really interesting to see how that changed the incentives of how much people care about how good their kids are at sports. If there was no college scholarship kind of prize hanging in the end. But on the other hand, so I'd go the other way.

I personally know a bunch of kids who used, you know, their excellence at sports to get into schools that, you know, they wouldn't have gotten into. Yeah. Well, no, no. So we're not, Bill, so to be clear. But how would they pay for it otherwise? So you're saying financial aid, not scholarships.

Yeah. So imagine the following scenario, which is you can't get rid of this, nor do you want to get rid of this altogether. You have a scenario where there's a kid playing at an inner city school who's a really gifted basketball player. Grades are good, but not fantastic. A school sees him and says, if he comes to our school, this will give him a real chance to develop his opportunities. We'll take a chance

on him. We'll give him financial aid. I love that. I got no problem with that, right? The issue here is not that kid. The issue is the upper middle class kid. The issue is varsity blues. The issue is some actress's daughter in Beverly Hills who's faking pretending to be a polo player so they can get into USC. Right. That's just,

that's the corruption that's kind of screwing up the whole system. I would add this as a fifth thing. The way that the system is set up now, it basically deters anyone from wanting their kid to play more than one sport because there's not enough time during the weekend.

And this is my single, now my daughter's 18. She's in college. I brought her last week. My single biggest regret as a parent was not having her play more basketball because she was good at basketball. And she should have played soccer and basketball and she should have been able to do both and miss games on one end, miss games on another end and not felt like it was the end of the world and just done both. And you're going to have things where, you know, you're going to have a conflict here. They have to figure out a way to make it so that it's not either or, because that's what it is now. Unless you live in a place,

like we know kids, especially like in, depending on where you live, you can live in certain areas where you can play two sports and be on club teams. And it's not like, you know, it's not your entire Saturday just going one place to the other. But one of the things that I always thought would work, and I don't know, it's so haphazard how all these, especially in soccer, how the clubs are put together and who gets these prime clubs. Like out here in LA, it was like the SoCal Blues and a couple other ones. And then the politics are fucking crazy. They never want new clubs in. They always get the best fields and it's like everything else in life. But what always amazed me was that they never teamed up with a basketball club where it's like, here's your soccer, like kids who want to play soccer and basketball. Here's the club for you. And the coaches will work together and you can do both and everybody's on the same side and this will be really good to you. Or it could be soccer and softball or soccer, basketball and softball, but trying to team up the clubs.

And like with boys, like basketball and soccer, that could be a club or soccer and baseball or soccer and lacrosse because soccer and lacrosse have a lot of similarities. There's just no thought put into stuff like that where it's like actually one plus one equals four if we do this correctly. So this is a hugely important point. And David Epstein, did you read Range? It was his second book. Yeah, I loved Range. Remember in Range, he has that whole thing

about Tiger versus Roger. And Woods and Federer represent two very different paradigms on skill development. Tiger is golf and just golf from whatever age of three. Federer is a two sports star. He's a great soccer player, a great tennis, and plays both until he's 16. And those are what David argues in range is that the Federer model is the superior model, that when you're looking to develop skills at an elite level as an adult, the best way to do it is to have as broad a base as possible. And so you can think of numerous examples. People would always say, remember,

Elijah Wan's footwork came from soccer. Of course it did. How about the best player in the NBA, Anthony Edwards, football player. Oh, yes, right. And you see this. So it's like, it's not just that what you were describing is more fun. It's also the case that it's better for you. It's better for you. If you, if you, if your daughter genuinely wanted to become a member of the American national soccer team,

the best path to that end would have been if she played more than once. Well, I'm doing it. My son picked up lacrosse and ended up playing lacrosse for high school. And now he's playing both. And they kind of complement each other in good ways because one's fall and one's spring. But he started football practice in the middle of June. It was just every day, every day. And then they had a break. And during the break, he worked with his lacrosse coach for three days in a row for 90 minutes doing these lacrosse things, and he came out of me. He's like, that really helped me for football.

And I'm like, why? And he's like, cause I'm just using different parts of my brain. I'm moving different ways. And it's just like, it just kind of jogged me out of just like football, football, football. And I actually like, now I feel better about football. And I was like, that's really interesting. But I think a lot of the team sports people who play multiple sports, it seems like it's really helped them. Golf's a tough one because golf is like... Well, golf, you know,

I was concerned to bring up golf because of Steph Curry. So Steph, I don't know if you saw that clip. I'm obsessed with Steph Curry's golf career because he is the greatest hand-eye of all time. So if he actually wants to do this, I believe him. But think about it.

I think that his golf and his basketball perfectly complement each other because they are both about the same thing, which is the reproduction of a controlled, precisely calibrated motion, right? Baseball's the other one. It's baseball, golf, and three-point shooting. Yeah. And so what he's doing is he's expanding his repertoire, his kind of physical repertoire

of understanding what it means to reproduce that kind of finely calibrated motion. And I would be willing, it'd be so fun to do. Imagine if he had a twin brother. Well, he sort of has... He has Seth. Seth almost counts. Yeah. But if he had a twin brother and the twin never played golf and Steph played golf as much as he's played, I would bet

huge amounts of money that Steph would be the better shooter. There's just no, I just think of those things as so complimentary and it does not surprise me at all

at how many really, really, really good athletes, good pro athletes have stepped on the golf course and all of a really, really, really good athletes, good pro athletes, step on the golf course and all of a sudden they make shots that you can't... They have a kind of... There's an affinity

between golf and these other sports. You know who played Division I baseball in college? The legend, Larry Bird. Are you serious? He played first base for Indiana State and was apparently great. And then there was like a bad hop grounder and it fucked up his finger and his finger was never the same. And he was like, I was an even

better shooter before that grounder. It knocked him like 1%. But yeah, I think the multiple sports thing, not only is it just good to mix it up, but it also puts people in different pressure situations that's good for them in general, right? If you're in basketball and you're playing like, you know, state semifinals and you make two free throws with six seconds left

to send your team on, like that's going to help you if you're also a baseball player or a football player or whatever. The specialization, we've talked about this before, but the specialization, especially having gone through it, it's my biggest regret by far.

So when Ben told me, like, I want to play lacrosse, I was like, that sounds great. You should definitely do it. But I wanted to make a comment about golf, again, and basketball. The area of basketball that I would have thought would benefit the most from playing golf is free throw shooting. Because free throw shooting is interesting in the basketball context because it belongs to an entirely different dimension than the rest of the game, right? It's not in the flow. It's thoughtful. It's deliberate. It's a fixed, it has fixed parameters. It's very similar.

I would, you know, I would, I would love to see a controlled experiment where I took a bunch of really bad free throw shooters. I took them out to the golf course and just had them practice putting for like a year. Oh, to see if like it,

it somehow transferred in some way. Yeah. I would be interested in that because it does seem high pressure, high stakes, reproducible motion, you know, that kind of... Serving is like that too. If you just taught these different people just how to serve and the mechanics of every single

time, it has to be exactly the same. Yeah. One last golf comment, which is, do you know there was one of the greatest American distance runners ever? It was a guy named Bernie Legat. He has, I think, the second or third fastest 1500 meters of all time. Golf fanatic.

But he plays this speed golf where you run between the holes. You play the hole, then you run, then you time it. And I think he has an untouchable world record for 18 holes. So imagine a guy who's one of the greatest distance runners of all time playing 18 holes of golf as fast as he possibly can. That's one of those, like, yeah, you're combining two different skills. It's so fantastic. I think

just hearing about it made me just, I wanted nothing more than to go and be in the gallery and watch Buddy Legat play speed golf. It just sounds so fantastic. Wait, before we go, and we're about to go, Little League World Series, which has been on and I've been watching, which now they mic the coaches,

and you can listen to the coaches come out and talk to the players. I've always had, I just feel like, I'm not sure this should exist. I don't want people to get mad at me, but the amount of pressure on 12 year old kids who are just pretty fragile anyway. And now we're, we're, we're showing this at ESPN. People are betting on it. I have friends that bet on the little league world series yesterday. There's betting. There's coach huddles being. I'm just like, how did we let this happen? That is nuts.

It's on fucking primetime. And these kids are 12. 12-year-old boys. I don't think you can find a less confident species than like a 12-year-old boy. Or a 12-year-old turning into a 13-year-old boy. It's just. And yet I watched like probably five hours of it over the last five days.

I was into it. And they're showing the parents, they're cutting away to the parents with their signs. And it's like, wow, this is basically everything we just talked about maybe not being a good idea, but we're doing it. Wait, were the coaches, were they at least being nice? I mean, were they-

Well, they have to be. They're being videotaped live with microphones. They're like, all right, Malcolm, doing great. You know, they're not going to yell at somebody. They don't want to end up on social media. All right, so Revisionist History starts when? Thursday. Sixth part with my big six-part gun series.

Very excited about it. Can we do this more often? It's my fault. I know you're Very excited. Can we do this more often? It's my fault. I know you're always available. I just, I'm so bad at booking my own podcast. Just say the word.

I'll be there. I'd like to do a deep, a deep dive on ownership and professional sports franchises. That actually be, maybe, maybe I just think there's a lot people don't fully understand about what goes, how much money these guys make from these teams versus what they say they're making. I think this is a really interesting one. What we have to do is we have to bring on as a guest, a tax expert. It's so much about tax.

And the problem is that all of us roll our eyes when we hear that word tax and the owners do not. They understand what they're doing. And like, that's where we're getting play is that they'll say, oh, I didn't make that much money. And then we're forgetting all of the kind of hidden tax benefits they're getting from their investment.

Right. All right, Malcolm, good to see you. Glad everything's well. Thanks, Bill. All right, that's it for the podcast. Thanks to Malcolm. Thanks to Matthew Berry. Thanks to Steve Cerruti and Kyle Creighton for producing as always. I'm going to be back on this feed on Thursday. Don't forget about the rewatch of Those Cruel Intentions. That's up now. I'll see you on Thursday. I don't have.

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