The Bill Simmons Podcast - So Long, Rodgers, Plus a Football History Deep Dive With Cousin Sal and Chuck Klosterman

Episode Date: January 13, 2026

The Ringer’s Bill Simmons is joined by Cousin Sal to recap the Texans taking down the Steelers to wrap up the wild-card round before previewing the Texans-Patriots matchup (1:52). Then, Chuck Klosterman joins the pod to talk about his new book, ‘Football,’ and the evolution of humans' relationship to the sport (35:44). Host: Bill Simmons Guests: Cousin Sal and Chuck Klosterman Producers: Chia Hao Tat and Eduardo Ocampo The Ringer is committed to responsible gaming. Please visit⁠⁠⁠ www.rg-help.com⁠⁠⁠ to learn more about the resources and helplines available. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Bill Simmons podcast brought to you by Fandall Sportsbook. We're also brought to you by the Ringer podcast Network, which has the rewatchable, is a movie podcast that I host. We're putting it up on Tuesday this week. We did What Lies Beneath? So go check that out wherever you get your podcasts, including a video on Spotify.

Coming up on this podcast, Cousin Sal and I are going to talk about the Steelers, Texans game, the end of Aaron Rogers' career, what this means for the Patriots this weekend and a whole bunch of football subplots. And then BS Podcasts Hall Famer, Chuck Kloosterman is here. And we're going to have a wide-ranging, really fun conversation about 100 years of football. It's all next.

We're going to take a break. And then Cousin South. The Bill Simmons podcast is presented by Fandall. Fandall's got it all. Same game parlay's, quick bets for jumping in live. They have your way. Go check out your way. You can build the bet that fits your play, your way.

Plus, don't miss out on the NFL playoffs. One of my favorite times of the year. all month long, download the Fando app or head to Fandall.com slash BS to get started. Get ready for the playoffs. Let's go. Must be 21 plus President Select States, 18 plus in D.C.

Kentucky and Wyoming. Game prom. Call win a hundred gambler. Or visit RG-8-8-7-7-7.com. Call 88879-777 or visit ccpg.org slash chat in Connecticut. All right, we're taping this Monday night right after Stewards, Texans. The voodoo has run out, Cousin Sal.

no longer will we have Aaron Rogers in the playoffs. We might not have him in the NFL. His career ends on a pick six. I don't know if that's the bigger storyline of the game that that might be it. Is it Mike Tomlin might be done with the Steelers or is it, whoa, Houston. Let's take them seriously. What is it for you? Oh, I don't think it's Houston.

Let's take them seriously. Because the last 25 minutes of that, you were licking your chops. You love that Houston was coming up. I mean, you'd rather have the Steelers. but that Houston team was kind of a disaster aside from the defense, right? Yeah, I don't want to end up on the Houston bulletin board as a Pats fan.

You did it with the Chargers. It worked. Well, the CJ Stroud performance. I mean, we had the Houston's defense outscored Pittsburgh 14 to 6. The defense turned it up. And Rogers, all the stuff, anyone who bet against them

any week of this season, and then got it turned on them. And you go, oh my god how did i lose that and then it like all came back on them this game like all the garbage 40-yard passes that turned into a pass interference nope the pass that gets tipped up in the air and the guy catches it nope hit the ball hit the ground uh it just was it's it's like their luck ran out they stayed at the table too long the people were they were vacuuming underneath them at three in the morning as they're playing blackjack and they're just getting smoked by the dealer it was

time to go and a dealer could have beat them even worse right like that could you It could have been like a 44 to 6 game if Stroud didn't. Well, yeah, like four fumbles in the first half. He recovered two of his own. He couldn't make any, they had no eye contact with the center. I don't know what was his fault or the center's fault. I think they met during the National Anthem or something. Like, I don't know.

He just like, look at the guy's ass. They'll see when the ball's coming. Like he's never looking at the ball. Right. But it didn't matter. You're right. And I hate Aaron Rogers. And he did, was bad.

He was like 4.8 yards per attempt or something. And throwing tantrums on the sideline, all that. But that defense was, I mean, he didn't have a, he was like in a dunk tank for three hours also, right? Like they were just attacking and the strip sack was going to happen one way or another. Well, one of the playoff manifesto rules is don't overreact to a big playoff win from the round before. I think people are going to now overreact to this Texan's defense, which was admittedly really, really good. That was a pretty shaky Steelers offensive line, a quarterback that could have moved, a wide receiver who did not seem to, Mecalf, who did not seem to be on the same page.

with Rogers anymore. They couldn't run the ball. And with all of that said, it was 7-6. Stroud was, it felt like falling apart in sections. And it just felt like a classic Steelers game that they were going to somehow win

9 to 7 or 13 to 12 or some ridiculous score. And you were like, oh my God, how did they win that? It was all the makings. And then Houston, you know, to Stroud's credit, as bad as he was, he made that huge throw when they were only up one when it seemed like he was ready to turn the ball over again.

all of a sudden he hit somebody for 49 yards. I felt like that turned the game. They got a field goal. They got some space and the D turned it on. But I would be careful with people thinking now that this defense is going to go 2,000 Ravens. You know, next week, Drake Bay is going to actually be able to move around unlike Rogers today. I think it'll be a similar game to yesterday, like Chargers. I think the Texans will score more.

But I think it's going to be like in the 1914, 19, 19, 16 range. and you're going to hope to get a lead. And, you know, nice little break for you again. Nico Collins, I mean, couldn't even, that was, you know, of all the fumbles and everything else, that was the worst play probably for Houston. That passed to Collins, not open, by the way. Being treated for a concussion, he definitely has one, didn't walk off the field. I mean, let's just, let's see his availability for week one in 2020.

Shorter time, too, because we go from Monday night to Sunday. the Pats have Gonzalez, who's also in concussion protocol, their best cornerback. He goes in concussion protocol. Houston's going into this game like, oh, crap, if they win, who do we have on Collins? So now it seems like both of them probably aren't playing. I think usually it's a week. Sometimes if it's seven days, sometimes the guy will sneak back. So Gonzalez has a little bit of a history that Collins seems really far-fetched that five and a half days later he's going to be playing in a playoff game.

it is interesting that people are all over this Monday night game and obviously it equates to more money for the league right having a Monday night playoff game but you could do three Saturday three Sunday and then not have to worry about one team getting more rest and in the case of a concussion it really is a big deal right yeah like the difference between a six or seven day rest could mean the world could mean if the guy's out for the year or not you know as is the case for Nico Collins

Why do you have a demeanor that suggests that maybe you lost some money on the Steelers today? I swear to God. I swear to God, I bet Houston. I swear I did. Okay. I did. Yeah, because we're O and four. I only had the Steelers and one T's.

We were O and four in Ringo 107 and we had the Steelers. I'm like, oh, we're going O and five. And so we did. And I'm like, oh and five too. And my record in Ringo 107 now is 40 and 55. I went two and four with my picks, but somehow in O'N five. And now it's like, I was, want to go the other way. I want to make history. What's the worst record I could buy? This

season is now a throwaway. I have years in the past where I've done well. I just didn't have it this year. It's fine. It's like the Chiefs. Chiefs have done really well in the past. They had a shit season this year. I want to see how bad this can get. I'm not changing my process. I'm not doing the George Costanza and going the other way. Good. I'm just going to keep it going and see what I end up with because this we did terrible and overunders we did terrible in the springer 107 or least I did and it's like I just want to throw this shit year away I'm going to come back next year like rocky and rocky four I'm going to be lifting logs I'm going to be uh I'm going to go on vacation with my wife and my alcohol buddy whoever that is just got a lot of shoes from yeah yeah

multiple alcohol buddies oh man there's a joke both of us want to make I'm not going to do it yeah so many So many jokes. We should do 20 minutes on this. But yeah, I'll be back next year. And I don't care how bad it gets this year. Listen, 11 and 0 is great for the playoffs, right? There's 11 games. Now there's 12.

12. 12 and 0 is the best you could do. Oh, no. It's 13 and 0. 6 421. Yeah, 13 and 0 is the ideal. 13. Okay.

So 13 O and 13 is the best. But, yeah. But 0 and 13 is the second best thing you could do. I mean, that's pretty remarkable. Yeah. The problem is I had in real life, I had the Pats, like when I did the straight-up picks, I had the Pats and I had the Panthers. In Ringer 107, I had the other four losses, and then I did the Pats as a parlay with the over, which didn't hit.

So I went a legit O and Five. Right. Yeah. Regardless. Can we talk about more likely to be back? Give me the odds for unfandle, Rogers or Tomlin, who's favored in the more likely to be back on Pittsburgh next year? It's so funny. I had written down parlay that they're both back.

The steal with the Steelers. Let's do all the odds, even though Fando has none of them. Okay. All right. Both back, I'm going to say plus 600. Oh, really? Yeah, I think that's high. I don't think Rogers comes back.

Oh, I think it should be. I think it's like 15 to 1 that they're both back. So higher, you think it's less realistic. Yeah, yeah. I think one of them is probably four to one and the other's probably, I'm going to do the math wrong, but maybe two to one. I mean, Roger, Tom one's more likely to return, I would think. You don't think so?

I think Tomlin's more likely to return, and we do this with coaches. I did this with the floor on last night's podcast with you. And I'm like, this has to be it. And then today they're like, yeah, they're talking extension. Right, right, right. No hard feelings over an entire decade of terrible playoff stuff. But I would think this is it for Rogers. But anyway, so you say, all right, we'll meet in the middle.

So we'll say 10 to 1 is a parlay for that. Yeah, I think so. And you think for Tomlin, like plus. 150, he's not back? I think only because it's the Steelers and there's pride and everything else. And, you know, if there's a team that's going to turn their back on the fact that he's 0 and 7 in his last seven playoff games, it's Pittsburgh. And also, I think I'm out.

That's a tough list, by the way. Do you see that list? And now it's him and Marv Lewis at the top. I forgot Marv did the seven straight before we never saw him again. Right. Pretty hard. Yeah, that was bad news. Seven straight losses is tough.

I wouldn't be surprised either way. I'd be surprised if Rogers came back with the Steelers. That said, he's probably one of the top 32 quarterbacks in the league. I just think if you're really thinking about it, if you're him, you're going back to a night like tonight where you're just, you're under siege. You're like, did you ever see that movie The Grey with Liam Neeson? The plane crashes and the wolves are just starting to kind of hone in on the guy.

and there's just too many of them. And one guy near the end, there's like three guys, sorry, spoiler. Like there's like three guys left. One guy just gives up. It's like, fuck this. Wolves come get me. I can't fight this anymore. That's kind of how I felt with Rogers in the fourth quarter.

It's like I just, I'd wolves come, just come, eat me alive. I'm done. Yeah. I didn't think basically he can, he can't move at the speed you have to have in a game like that. Working backwards is like, this is how it's going to be. Kind of best case scenario. We make the playoffs.

We have a home game. It's freezing out. It's effing freezing out. It's at night. And I have a mean defense, top-ranked defense coming after me. And I'm going against an offense with a terrible offensive line and a QB that might melt down.

And he did. He melted down. Right. The QB was bad. We should talk about the running game, which I think should maybe concern you a little with this week coming up. They did have 164 yards at Woody Marks. We can stop that, though.

Run. You got throwing us to beat us, I think. okay but I mean this run game kind of came out of nowhere for the Texas you have to right you have to kind of prep for it a little bit yeah true marks was good the problem with marks and I had him on both fantasy teams he would just be out of the game he would have a good like first quarter and you'd be like whoa what do you might and then all of a sudden that was it you never saw him again he actually played the entire game this time around so we think the odds of neither of them

coming back to Pittsburgh what would you put them Rogers and Tomlin now I'm going to get confused for neither of them coming back they're both gone so I would think it's minus I would say that's like minus minus 125 range

yeah yeah right in there I probably contradicted myself here though but yeah right one's a fairly one's like minus 350 and one's like closer to even yeah so if I'm Tomlin I want the Atlanta job

yeah That job's still open. They're interviewing people. As we've discussed many times in this pod, I thought that team was legitimately talented. They shot themselves in the foot. They lost a bunch of dumb games. They have a really good nucleus.

They're in a weird division that I don't think is good. And he could switch conferences, start over, give them that kind of energy you need when you finally have a good coach again. And that would be my preference for him. That's what I would also be fun. My hot take for 26. was one of them, aside from you eating pizza, like in three weeks,

is that Tom one does go to Atlanta. But... Oh, interesting. What about this? Baltimore? You like the NW.A move? This is what Billy Gil was pushing. Oh, yeah, that's right.

He was pushing the, yeah, the Hogan joining National Hall, just ripping the mask off. What if he did do the TV for a year? Took a year off. He's been at it for a while. We could almost guarantee which teams are going to need coaches next year. Cincinnati's going to need. to coach.

I don't want to work for a cheap team. I don't want to work for the Jets. O and two. I'm just trying, you know, it's always going to be six or seven teams are right in there. What was it,

eight this year? I would argue the Giants job and the Falcons job are legitimately good jobs. And I think the Ravens with Lamar, if you can get his head straight a little bit, I think that's also a really good job. You convince him to actually be in the field.

That was my idea. Yeah, the Ravens would be good, too. But the Falcons was like, hey, He knew the Ravens, though? Can he do it? That's like a huge. I don't know.

That's like you going to work for like Fallon. Yeah, we'd have to redo the trader bracket, I think, if that happened. Yeah, that would be. That's a lot. Yeah, I can't imagine anyone doing that. I just can't imagine he just flips sides in the AFC north. And then comes back to Pittsburgh twice a year. You go to the NFC, you have a little distance.

And if the Ravens take him on and he loses, that's kind of, that's an extra. embarrassment, right? So I don't know if it's worth it for that. If I were him and in general, like how long is a football coach supposed to stay with an NFL franchise? Yeah. Right. Even Andy Reid burned out in Philly and then went to KC and rejuvenated. But by the time he ran his course in Philly, he was done. Belichick ran his course with New England. Like it's going to be somewhere between 10 and 20 years for the really, really good coaches. He goes to the Giants. That's the best coach they've had since Tom Coughlin's nose. would turn like bright maroon.

Right. That's right. I miss those days. I miss seeing him in the freezing cold. That's good. So Steelers had 175 total yards today. But this is a weird game. We're going to remember it as 36.

I genuinely thought that Steelers were going to win up until that 50-yard pass. And as soon as they went up 10-6, I felt like the game was over, unless the Steelers could pull their garbage, whatever. Right. I mean, we were at one point saying, geez, CJ Strz, just take a knee. and punt, right? Because it was that bad for Rogers and stuff. And that was probably around the third quarter.

But yeah, then he completed that pass. I was like game. Our buddy hench texted us that his initial stood for choke job. He took a break from his 1778 takedown of the French. He made up for four hours of American Revolution talk with that one fun. Good job by you. It was pretty solid. All right.

What are you thinking? Forget about the line for a second. But what do you, you're fairly, I'm ready to move on. I'm ready to move forward. Are you more confident before this game at the opponent, the next game, or after the game now? I watched, I watched the Pats game again. So we came on right afterwards. We're going live on Netflix.

Yeah. And basically watch. Are we on YouTube today? No, no. We're still on Netflix. Oh, good. Yeah. All right.

Yeah, we're right next to that John Bernthal show with the his and hers. Oh, all right. Which is, I got to say a little bit on out of time with Denzel Washington's corner. I don't if you saw that movie from 20 years ago. Yeah, yeah. The real ones will know. It's a little on the corner. I still enjoyed it.

I support my guy Bernthoff. Yeah. I watched the game again, and I don't think we were positive enough about how good Drake was in the second half. His stats were great. He had like a 140 QB rating. He was like 11 for 14. He had the scramble yarders. Really the only play he missed was the touchdown to the tight end.

But I do think it was one of the, I think it was a young QB who kind of sucked in the first half. And then in the second half got his sea legs. Now you move to next week with how fast that Houston defense is going to be. But he can actually move around and try to create plays. The problem, I don't think they had Matt Collins again next week. And the receivers just didn't seem like they were open. yesterday.

I don't think it's going to get any better tomorrow. So it feels like it'll be around the same game unless they can run on them. Do you think they can run on them? I don't know. I don't think it'll be like today where just like everything kind of fell into place because the Steelers just lost whatever edge they had.

But I do wonder if like Christian Kirk, Collins being out is really rough, right? But Christian Kirk might be as good as most, all of your receivers? I don't know. Is he? I mean, not when Diggs is hot. But he'd definitely play for us.

There's no question who would be on the field. It's weird that Houston's another team that the Pats have owned really this whole century. And the Chargers were another one where it's just in my head, I'm like, whereas I was talking to, I was talking to somebody about Denver and Buffalo. Like if the Pats were able to go into round three, would you rather play Buffalo at home or go to Denver? Buffalo and home brings Josh Allen the best part in the week. We probably weren't even superlative enough about yesterday. Right. The pets are 0 and 4 in the playoffs in Denver.

Do you know that? Ruline Jones safety. I think that was 87. The Jake Plummer game in 2005, one of the most ridiculous losses in the history of the franchise. I don't think we got a single call the whole game. Champ Billy running 100 yards. Ben Watson knocking out of bounds.

Ball clearly goes through the end zone. They call it out at the one. still mad about that game. The third one, I think Gronk was out in Denver when Peyton Manning had a good team. And then the fourth one, they lose 2018. Brady makes the best throw of his career. They're down eight, driving.

2016, it was the noodle arm, Peyton Manning year where they ended up winning the Super Bowl, but he's got the noodle arm. And that was a Grong two-point conversion. Grand two-point conversion, they didn't get it. Brady, I'm convinced, was concussed for most of that game. and it was just kind of a game from hell. Yeah, and those were the four times I played in Denver.

And in general, L.A used to kick our ass. And in general, we always lose to Denver. Right. Except for the T-Bow playoff. L.A. No, he's not L.A. He's not. But do you use the baggage, even though these are all different guys,

all we're talking about are uniforms, but there's certain teams you're like, ah. Because Denver's like that for me. yeah i i do what as a fan the players don't give a crap no i'm just saying for you for us three times over i'm not saying it's rational no no yeah no i don't want to see the packers

um so the packers are your team well the 49ers for sure i mean that goes back forever with the catch and everything else and dack screwing up a you know a snap like with no time left and all that stuff i can go back back so i guess it's the 49ers and then everybody else yeah and then all the other teams since Jerry Jones is all the other NFC teams.

The thing that makes me feel good is I, as I said last week, I do think Drake has greatness in him and wasn't great in that first game. And I actually liked that. And Vrable called them out. Like in a good coach way, it was just like, yeah, he made a lot of mistakes, blah, blah, he's got to take care of the ball better. Like I think he's going to really push them this week, push May to be like, hey, there's more in there.

We got it. We need it this game. Houston's great. We need you. And if it's him versus Stroud and the defenses can be relatively equal and we're home, I like the May chances,

but he's got to be a little better. So you think there's 2000 Ravens potential with this Houston team at all or no? I think Stroud has to be better than he was, right? So I don't know if that's good or bad for the Patriots, but I think you got to get a lead. And I texted you,

I wasn't understanding what you were doing. You were texting me some local Boston what you talked about last night. I texted you one of the radio hosts like doing like the classic glass half-empty tweet about the game. Yeah, stupid. Yeah, but that's what they're going to do all week. This Houston defense, the way the pets looked,

Will Campbell on the left side, they're just going to run him over. And by the time the game starts, you're going to think they should be 10-point underdogs. I think the most important thing you did yesterday was like reestablish playoff dominance, especially like defensively. at home.

Yeah. And now, like, make everybody a little nervous to come to you here. Well, there's some good video stuff

with Vrabel. Apparently the Monday meeting before the game, he looked at Milton Williams and Barmore, the two big nose tackles. And Milton Williams, when he's in the game,

the defense has been good. And he's like, it's January. You know what January means? Big dogs, it's time for them to show up and kind of stared those guys down and everyone was like,

whoa. And it was his theme all week, Big Dog. So then when they made play as Milton Williams got the last sack. And he's like, the big dogs are here to eat. He was doing all that. So they've been really pushing it. He knows how to push

the buttons and get certain guys going. And I wonder if he uses that with the offensive line this week. Little nobody believes in us. I don't know if it's the best. I'm trying to think if it's the best one. They're all good. They're all very solid, I think. No, the

best one's Rams, Rams. Well, no, it's nine or Seahawks. I mean, nine are Seahawks. right no yeah rams bears is probably going to be interesting because that team is ridiculous that bear's team and then uh i guess bill's bronco man they're all good i like them all now rams bears is the best one is it the best one ryan clark said on e's pin today that caleb williams was now top five quarterback in the league what's your league this league the nfl heard that today that's all it that was really turned out first take um Caleb williams really good we'll see we'll see if it can keep going for him.

Top five seems strong. Well, now I'm going through it in my head now, and I hesitate to put anyone at that five spot now. Maybe he's right. I don't think it's Caleb Williams. I don't think it is. Do you think he's, I'm looking at my QB pyramid? What does this mean?

Who you trust more? Like Mahomes is still there. Alan's still there. Lamar is still there. Burroughs the one I'm not even sure about at four anymore. I'll put your boy there at four. I'm happy to put Caleb over a borough for now after that weird burrow season we had. There's nobody else.

May has to be above Caleb, right? That's fine. She's Ryan Clark may have done it. Ryan Clark, I apologize in real time. You may be right. No, honestly, I still, so you don't put Stafford. I know you hate Stafford. I would have Stafford ahead of Caleb Williams at this point.

Stafford's ahead of Caleb Williams. I put my guy ahead. I mean, Dax's in the playoff, you know, for their record. It's okay. Ryan Clark's back in this. He's not 10th. Good job, Ryan Clark. I mean, the guy was on ESPN for 12 straight hours today.

We've got to give him props. That's right. Got to come up with stuff. I think he really was. I think he was on for 12 straight hours. Was it really? Yeah. Wow. He was on first take.

He was on NFL live. He was on all their pregame halftime stuff. It was an amazing job by him. Well, they fired everyone. They have like three guys left. That's true. They had to, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, they have to. But it's a cup. All right. So we got to guess the line. Okay. I have it written down. If you get this, I'm up two to one. I'm up two to one in games.

If you get this, you tie me and therefore win the season for the first time since all the way back in 2024. It's been a while. I have the Patriots favored by one and a half in New England over the Texans. Okay. One and a half. What'd you have? Don't cheat. What is that?

I had three. Patriots by three. Okay. Definitely not going to be three. It's going to be lower than that. It's two and a half. I lived to see another week. Son of a bitch.

Well, I was even thinking to go and hire. They were three and a half against the Chargers. I don't know. I thought maybe Houston, by the second quarter, I was like, if this is how Houston's going to present themselves, maybe the Patriots are worth more here. So C.J. Stride isn't one of the top five quarterbacks in the league. According to Fandle.

No. Man, that seems high, Sal. I don't know. No. You don't think so? So the Chargers were three and a half, right, all week? Yeah. No, that's fine. So Hertz drops out of the top five.

Mahomes is still there. Is Lamar out of the top five? Lamar has to still be in there. Don't take him out because Caleb Williams had a great fourth quarter yesterday the other day. Herbert's out. Even the nerds are threatening to turn on Herbert now. I know. I will say Caleb is in the top five and maybe top three of my team is playing.

You are a bet against you. You're down seven, but I'm completely terrified because you're capable of any throw. Yeah. Right? Like there's no way to ever feel If he was in on Pittsburgh today Down 146 You wouldn't have given up on the game

Like you would have with Rogers That's true This guy could do Who knows Definitely top five more exciting I put them maybe ahead of Lamar In that department Like more exciting

He could pass Lamar next year Anyway I love the fucking crazy arms Like Elway was like this We've only had a couple dudes Dudes that can throw When their feet aren't set Or when one

Right When they're up in the the air. Right, right, right. The scrambling's great too. But then there's other times. You can watch them for a half hour and the ball's just bouncing around all over the place. It needs like two hours to settle in.

It's just weird. I was thinking to him as a closer. Like, could he, Marianne or Rivera this thing? Or they just use him in the fourth quarter? Or does he actually need the agent for? Yeah. Does he need the first two hours to get it out of a system so that the fourth quarter is good? Well, the Rams defense definitely, I wouldn't say, is going to kind of shut him down.

They'll give them a pass rush, but you can throw on them. Right. So what did they do here real quick? Let's talk about this. So you talk about the TV schedule? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the Bears Rams, we're coming on after Bears Rams Sunday, right? Little earlier than normal.

Yeah. The Bears played Saturday and the Rams played Saturday. So why do you have to move that to Sunday? Whereas who's getting screwed here? I would say Like the Texans are I don't understand this here. So Buffalo, Denver is the first game.

San Francisco, Seattle is the second game on Saturday. Houston. And that kind of has to be because that's West Coast, I guess. Although Denver's, I guess, West Coast as well. Houston, New England. And then Rams Bears, 3.30 Pacific. So we'll be coming on at like 7 o'clock. That's great for us.

Yeah, yeah. No, good for us. Seven o'clock PT, right before the Landman season finale. Oh, wow. Yeah. Well, maybe we'll just keep it rolling. Really tough, tough, tough, tough landman season. I don't know about... Well, you ruined it for everyone, but John Hamm's plight. That was it. I don't... I'm starting to wonder if Taylor Sheridan can write seven shows at the same time. This has been cracks in the armor for this one. We know seven's the number, the big number. Yeah, I think seven simultaneous shows is too hard.

Seahawks had 13 days off and the Niners have like six or five. Listen, the Niners are just happy to be alive. I know. Next to that electromagnetic practice center fiasco thing they may have going. They're probably just excited to go to Seattle. I wonder. Can we go today? Can we leave on Wednesday to get out of here?

You talked about how we wrote together on Jimmy Kim alive that first year. Remember that big cancerous box over our head that was just buzzing? All day long. Yes, I did. Probably full of asbestos, all that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. We turned out, right?

Right? No. I think so. Can you, I was thinking the Shaky's game on Saturday, which we always joke about, the first game around one we call the Shaky's game. There should be a name for that first game on Sunday that the 12 o'clock PT start. For this round coming up?

Yeah. Yeah. Clearly that's where they want to stick the worst game every time. Because the Saturday one's a little later. It starts 1.30 Pacific. It's going into primetime East Coast. So you want to put a good one there. Second one is an official prime timer.

And then that 12 o'clock PT Sunday game, you kind of... I think that's a good rating. I'm getting rid of that one. Is that? Oh, yeah. 3 o'clock Eastern? That's what you're talking about, right?

Sunday nights, Saturday and Sunday night are the two best games. The nights for sure. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the nights for sure. But now it's network. So that Seahawks game is a Fox game. Oh, your game's an ESPN ABC game.

Interesting. So we get Buck and Aikman? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's amazing. Yeah, you get Bucking and Akeman. That's what I'm seeing on ESPN. So we get Romo doing Buffalo, Denver.

Right. We have Brady doing the Niners Seahawks. Oh, this would be good. this is good. And then Peacock is going to be Terrico and Collinsworth, Rams bears. I love it. Football's so good.

Mike, Matthew Stafford. He's not even looking at him, Mike. Mike, Caleb, boy, you know what Bill said about him throwing all contorted in the air. He's right. In the air. He's 12 feet up in the air, Mike, just whipping a 50-yarder. He's top five in my book. All right, so the lines we have now for next week,

since we did them yesterday. Buffalo, are they favored yet? I'll go back to it. Yes, they are. Buffalo is now favored. Yep. Minus one and a half. Seahawks minus seven and a half.

Patriots minus two and a half. Rams minus three and a half. It feels like there's a seven-pointer using the Broncos up to plus eight and a half, the Seahawks to minus half, and the Patriots to plus four and a half, that I'm already eyeing.

Were you the only home team to win this week? Yeah, right? Yeah. And so we expect... No, the Bears were a home team. The Bears were home team. Sorry, yeah, yeah, right. No, we'll count that, yeah.

Two out of six. And so now this is getting even up here. All right. So long, Aaron Rogers. That's it. I mean, you know, one more thing. I'm just looking at this now. And I should probably start up a GoFund me right this second for how much I'm going to lose on the Indiana Hoosiers, Seattle, Seahawks, Moneyline Barley.

That's it. It's coming. What is that going to be? So Seahawks minus 390. And then we have Indiana minus 350. So you use that as the anchor and you'll put that with a third team all over the place? No, minus 163 is fine. So 48,000-900.

Yeah, because 48,900 to win 30,000. That's good, right? Sounds crazy. Is that where you need to recoup? And then I'll be halfway back. Do you think Baby Doll watched us on Netflix last night? Oh, interesting. Did not comment on it.

So I have to say no. you once in a while I'll comment and even then you don't even know if he watched it but today he didn't even comment. There's a theory going around that Baby Doll are your agent, Jimmy's agent, my sometimes agent, my agent hybridation.

There's a theory that he's retired. Really? Yeah, that's the word on the street. It's not an official retirement, but it's an unofficial retirement. That's not good for me because I just wrote him a quarterly check at the end of December.

We'll see. Maybe it's not true. We'll find out. You're going to be back on Sunday night with me. So we'll be earlier on Sunday night. It looks like around 7 o'clock range. That's right. And we'll have an answer for that.

We'll have an answer for whether in ring or 107, we could go for the 0 and 13. Let's do it. I just want to be 0 and something, whether it's 13 and 0, 0 and 13, whatever it happens. I'm happy to do it. People something to fade. That way they know, right?

That's the thing. People like, oh, look at your record sucks. It's like, cool, bet against me. That's all. I'm laying the blueprint. Just if you think it's so funny and win some money. Go ahead, knock yourself out. There you go.

That's your Johnny Cocker moment. Great see you. We're coming back, taking a break. Come back with Chuck Closterman right after this. All right, so we're going backward in time. Chuck Closterman is here. BS podcast, Hall of Famer. We're taping this late morning Pacific time.

He has a book coming out called Football. And ironically, this is probably the best football time right now where you have the semifinals of college. You have the NFL playoffs. We just had five games. There's about to be a six playoff game tonight. It's like football, football, football. Ratings are the best that's ever been.

You and I have both been football fans our whole life. And then you decided I'm going to write an entire book about my complicated relationship with football. Yes, that is exactly what has happened, Bill. That's exactly what it is. You know, I nailed it. I've been thinking about this stuff for 40 years now in my life. I think I've been thinking about it very consciously for about 20 years.

And I just, I finally did it. I mean, there's been a bunch of books where I've kind of talked about sports here and there. But this is the first time I was like, look, this is what it's about. This is the book. So was it the Kaepernick situation? Was it CTE? Was it, what was the tipping point where you were like? Because I remember for me, I had, and I was writing for Grantland at the time.

And it was early 2010s, really worried about the NFL and what it said about me that I loved it so much with the way that they were treating the players, the schedule, the concussion stuff that they were kind of doing the plausible deniability of. And it was just like, man, this sucks. I don't feel good about this. And then for some reason, the mid-2010s, I kind of just rolled over and accepted it. I was like, you know what? I love it. Well, it wasn't like that for me. It wasn't an incident in that way.

You know, I mean, the Kaepernick thing is mentioned in the book. I mean, the CTE stuff is in the book, certainly. But I think it had more to do with the fact that I had just, I'd always wanted to do a sports book. And you and I have talked about this a lot over the years. I think that maybe as a game, we both prefer basketball, like the purity of basketball, the idea of basketball. I think if someone said, like, what is the greatest game,

I would say basketball is a team sports? sport. But football is so much more important. It weirdly matters to me so much more than the other sports. The actual application of the game itself, like what I'm actually seeing and experiencing. And about, I think about 20 years ago, I just kind of made this decision that, like, I'd like to write a book about football that was kind of all-encompassing. That it was about sort of, you know, it was about players, it was about teams, but it was really sort of about, the idea and the meaning of this. And as football evolved into this thing, that is not just the most popular sport in the United States, but more popular than all of the sports in the United States,

really. I mean, like I mentioned early in the book, how in 2023 of the top 100 broadcasts on television in the United States, 93 of them were football games, pro football games, and then like three or four more were college games. There's nothing else like that. I mean, I'm in person. who's kind of interested in the monoculture, I always have been. And the only elements of the monoculture left in the United States are football and Taylor Swift, I guess. Like, that's really it. And landman. Landman, I think it would be the third one.

Well, it would be land man. I don't know. So, like, I mean, this is something I've been kind of been thinking about, like I said, for four decades, really seriously for two decades. When I brought the idea up to my publisher, they were not enthusiastic, I think they, I don't know what they thought the book was going to be. but it's not the book I think they imagined in practice. I think they seem pretty happy about it now. And I'm happy about it. Like I,

which I don't often say about these things that I write. I mean, if we went back and listened to the podcast that I've done with you, whenever I write books coming out, I generally feel like they're terrible. That's just sort of nature I am. I mean, like the closer a book comes to publication,

the worst I feel about it. Yeah. I have, you know, this isn't perfect, but it's close, closer. to what I imagined in my mind than most of the books I've done, that what I wanted to do and what ended up being is similar. Well, it seemed like you were spilling all of your football thoughts. Yes.

You're just trying to get them all down with some sort of structure through basically like nine different topics and trying to hit as many things as possible. And there was some, how much do you want to spoil? Well, I don't care, really. I mean, a little bit, I guess, but not in a bit. you know, it is very interesting how the world is now. Like, you know, when that book abundance came out last year?

Okay. Yeah. Now, that seems like a book I would read, right? I never did read it, although I feel completely informed about it, because I heard it on podcasts like nine different times. Like, sometimes I think that the way things work now is you write a nonfiction book and, you know, maybe 150,000 people read it. But most people experience it through this, through these kind of like these ancillary

moments of people discussing the book. So I understand that there are people listening to this podcast who I think would be prime people to buy this, and they probably won't. They'll be like, I just don't, I don't buy books anymore. It's really hard to sell books to men particularly. So if you want to talk about specifics of the book, that's fine. I don't mind, you know. I was psyched that I had to read the book because you were coming on and plus I wanted to read it and it forced me to read. And as we discussed, I usually read stuff on my iPad now because we're older. But I think part of the issues with books these days is that it's so much easier to just kind of consume other things that don't take as much brain power as a book,

which I think is, you and I've talked about this offline a bunch, I think is the most alarming thing when I think about people under 30. Because it's not just like, oh, people got to read more. It's like, when you read, you learn about the past. And the only way to know how to prepare for what's coming in the future is to learn from the mistakes of the past. And if you're not reading and you're just watching, like, you know, the craziest clips of all time on Twitter or Instagram or wherever,

you're not going to learn backwards. And that's the part that scares me the most. That's how you and I both, I think we both had a lot of time by ourselves when we were kids. And I read everything. And I just don't feel like I would have done that if I was a kid now.

But, you know, it's an interesting thing. Like, okay, so there's this belief that like nobody reads anymore. Now, I don't think that's actually true. In a weird way, I think people might be reading more than they ever had in their life because they're constantly staring at their phone. What they're not reading are books. And the problem with this, if there is one, I mean, I guess, you know, things change

and you just got to accept that the world changes, is that anything like that's like in through the internet or sort of through the media in the present tense is really, kind of like a prisoner of the present. It doesn't really exist with the idea that the past happened. It doesn't really care that much about the future outside of tomorrow. Well, wait, let me interrupt that for a second, because we saw this happen this weekend and we see this happen all the times in sports now when there's a really good weekend. People like, that's the best weekend we've ever had.

And it's like, was it? Do you want to go through the last 50 years and actually try to figure this out? but it's just like present, big hyperbole when we're the other. And that's how things get consumed for the most part now. Yeah. And maybe that's understandable and natural. Like, but, but, you know, I can't change in some ways the person I am. Like I'm, I like writing books.

I like, I like books. I just, I'm at the age of the kind of person who does, I guess. And that's the only way I really would have felt comfortable doing something like this. Like if I, I, if this, what's in this book, like, it wouldn't make sense

as like a substack that I do over time. Like, it's, it's this thing. Or like a narrative podcast where you do each chapter, you interview people. Well, all right,

I'm going to spoil a couple things. The basic premise of the book is you think football is not going to exist in the way, in the way that it does now in 50 years. Well, the basic premise, the most basic premise is this, which is that,

football is probably the most popular thing we have in the country right now. And there's a sense that this is just how it's always going to be. But nothing is like that. In 50 years or 100 years, the world's going to be different populated by different people. And football, it may not, you know, it might, it probably won't completely disappear, but it's going to radically receive and will not be the center of the world as it is now. And when that happens, people in that time are going to explain or try to explain what it was, you know, in the same way that people now sometimes try to describe, you know,

the meaning of Roman gladiators or the meaning of jazz or these things, you know, that from the past that are still around, but they're kind of gone. And it never works. Those, it's always wrong. Like, because people are always basically projecting the present onto the past. They're taking, this is how we think about things now. So therefore, this was the failure of this thing in the past, because it's also always sort of framed as a failure. The thing ended, so something must have went wrong. And I know that's going to happen with football. I can see it already. I can see people just preparing for this almost, unknowingly, that when football starts to change and starts to become less important and moves away, they're going to say, well, this was,

this was why that happened. This is what football meant. And I'm trying to describe what football means now and why it sort of became the thing that it is. I mean, If somebody said to me, what's the best way to describe the last half of the 20th century, like 1950 to 2000, you need some vessel to sort of use as a way you describe that? I would use football, which is why a lot of this book in some ways will seem like it's a little bit, I wouldn't say mired in the past, but involves the past. I mean, most of the things discussed in this book, many of the players, not all of them, but a lot of them are players who are retired now or things that have happened already.

And I feel as though the future is not designed for football to dominate the way the past was. You know, obviously I agree with you. What's interesting about that is you could say from 1888 through about 1975, baseball was the sport that explained everything the best. Right? And then so with football, I would almost, you could almost, there's an over. overlap for a while. But one of the points you made in this book is that at some point football grabbed the America pastime title from baseball. And some of that was unforced errors

that baseball had. Other things were that football just became way more popular. Fantasy football came in, they figured out how to just put more games on. Like you mentioned in the book how you watch two and a half games a week. I was, there was the early game and then they were usually a double header on one of the networks unless the Pats were playing. So it was sometimes three afternoon games, but maybe usually two, plus the Monday night, I was in the same boat as you could maybe stay up through CoSel. And then we experienced it through football highlights from the pregame show on CBS. There wasn't ESPN back then.

Football cards, magazines, books, Sports Illustrated. Like, we're just kind of grabbing any piece of it. And I think what's changed so much since now that we're in our 50s is football is just everywhere. are all the time. I think of how many channels it's on now. Absolutely. You have a game on Amazon, NBC, Fox, and CBS. We have five playoff games in four spots, and you can see every piece of it. You can see the highlights right away. I can watch after a Patriots game. I can see Mike Frable greeting every player as they run back in the tunnel. And then I can watch the locker room speeches everyone give. And I can do this within an hour of the game. And if you had explained

to any of this to us in 1978, we would have been, our brains were broken. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. And we would have wanted it. We would have wanted what I'd describe, even though I don't know if necessarily the way it's working out is better for the consumer. But just to go back to something you had said earlier, you know, it is an interesting thing. Like football was more popular than baseball in the 70s. It already had passed it. But we didn't think of it that way. We still looked at baseball as sort of, you know, the American pastime and football was this other thing. Do you feel like football had stars in the same way that baseball did? I think that was the one difference where it felt like, Pete Rose, Reggie Jackson, and a couple of those guys were just bigger than any football player except maybe Staubeck? Well, but here's the deal. That seems like a positive, but it is a problem for any sport focused in that way around people.

See, football has real advantage of many things, but one of the real advantages it has is that, you know, the players are almost faces. You know, we're always watching this clash of colors on the field. uniforms are it's a warlike kind of simulation where the person the the the 20 most popular players in the NBA now are more famous than the 20 most popular non-quarterbacks in the NFL for sure they're more recognizable and that seems like a benefit right if you're the NBA you're like this is great we have all these personalities but the thing is personalities disappear and people's feelings toward them change matters is the thing itself the reason for the reason for

football is so dominant is not because of the individuals. It's because of the collective. It's because the sport is what people like. You know, you had mentioned like this thing with bathe ball. It is interesting. So, you know, football starts, you know, late 19th century or whatever. And then it intersects with the rise of television in the 1950s. And that is what makes it happen. The famous Colts Giants game, that really kicks it off and then we're just off. I mean, that's sort of the marker we use. But it really goes beyond that. Because certainly when you're inventing a sport in the 19th century,

when you're inventing college football, television doesn't exist. When television as a medium was being created, there was an idea that, oh, we can show sports on this, but it was like we can show the Kentucky Derby on this. You know, we can show baseball games on this. Football was not the, no one looked at television and thought like this will be the perfect machine to broadcast. football.

As it true. Well, wasn't that boxing, though? Boxing, too. I feel like boxing was the most important TV story. Yes, absolutely. I mean, all three of those sports, when football or when television was created, I think would have been like, this is what this box will let us do. But one of the big arguments I make early in the book and the reason it's the first essay

is because in many ways it's the most important is an incredible coincidence happened. is that football is better experienced through television. And television, for a whole variety of kind of semiotic reasons, the best thing it can do is show you a football game. The way it's designed, the way the passive experience of watching television works, it's just ideal for football. And this is why football became the thing that it did. It's this kind of enforced marriage to television

that ended up being the best possible thing, for both sides of the equation. That's why, like, when I say, like, football was more popular than baseball in the 70s, but we were still kind of operating from this idea that what mattered is what we said matter. So if we say baseball is the national pastime, it was. But at some point that changed, where the consumer had more control than the person dictating what the meaning is. And football now is, you know, so pervasive that it kind of informs the lives of people who don't care at all. Like, there's just,

it's a cliche thing to say, but really, like, as somebody's into the monoculture, it's just football and Taylor Swift. That's it. Like, all that, Verissa is gone, you know? And that's why I would say football is really a way to understand the last half of the 20th century. I'm not sure it'll be the best way to understand the 21st century. Well, there's some genius things that they added to with it. When you think about the football we watched in the 70s versus where they are now, like, Part of the problem with football was half the, if you came into a game, you didn't know what the score.

This seems like so basic. I know. You wouldn't know what the score was for 20 minutes. And then they might flash the graphic. They're like, oh, the Browns are winning, you know, be one of those. They gradually realize, oh, we should put the score on the bottom. When you're watching, especially on the old Square TVs with the reception's not awesome, you never knew what was the first down.

You couldn't see the ball sometimes. You couldn't see like replays of what happened. Did the guy catch it? add instant replay. They add all these things that kind of make you a participant in the game, even though you're not playing. I have opinions on all the strategy on both sides. I think I'm smarter than half the coaches, even though I'm clearly not. I'm debating whether this was a penalty, whether he caught this. Why did they call it this way that time when they called it the last time? Baseball lost a lot of that with the stat revolution. All of a sudden, there weren't as many arguments

because you couldn't be like, Otani shouldn't bat first. That's ridiculous. So fast guys should bat first. I was talking with my friend Kevin Hensche the other day about when the 78 and 79 Red Sox, we had Rick Bawson and Jerry Remy at the top of the lineup because they were the fast guys.

And their on base was like $2.90. I was like, well, of course they should be at top of the lineup. But now if you redid that Red Sox lineup, Fred Linn would clearly bat first. Yeah, it's very, very, very. It's like, for somebody my age, it was very weird to see like, like Otani batting first.

I was like, right? It's weird. Baseball kind of solved all this stuff, but football, I feel like we've never really totally solved. We still have games like that weird Pat's Chargers game where it's just like the Chargers

can't figure out how to block these guys. You know, it's like the basic things that were still happening in the 1930s. And that's, I think, why it still works. The things you're saying are all true, but I guess I feel like it's something even much bigger than that.

I mean, okay. Oh, no question. I'm just saying that I think that stuff helps. But what I'm saying is like, okay, So one thing that's often mentioned, particularly by people who don't like football, is a kind of a very famous Wall Street Journal article from 2011 where these guys studied these pro football games and they were like, do you know, in a three hour telecasts of an NFL game, there's 11 minutes of action. Right. You're sitting there for three hours and there's 11 minutes of action. Now, if somebody was inventing football right now for the first time, there was no way that would get through the pitch meeting.

If they said this is a three-hour sport and there's actually about 11 minutes of action, people would say like, that's insane. No one's going to sit through that. Nobody wants that. That's a huge flaw. But it's not a flaw. As it turns out, 11 minutes is the perfect amount.

Because these things you're talking about, they happen in between plays. Yeah. Like there's like football has this, like this accidental upside, which is super intense, hyperaction in this small, window of time, maybe seven seconds.

And then there's this time when you can think about what you saw, what you will see next. What was the meaning of that? Maybe the analyst will describe what we actually saw in a way that we couldn't comprehend. Or maybe I'll hate the analyst and think he's an idiot. Sure. Either way I win. Or you can think about something else. You can talk to somebody about something that's not involved with the actual football

game or you can talk about the football game. This experience, which seems like it should be a mistake. It should be a mistake that something that lasts that long has that little amount of action. This is one of these things that like, it's a one of the many counterintuitive things about football and that the TV experience is great despite the fact that it would never get through a focus group. The fact that somebody said, the main view you will have in a football game most of the time will not show you all the players. You will not be able to see the free safeties.

You know, when the quarterback drops back and throws the ball, you will have a moment. Well, you will have no idea if the guy is open or covered. Like these things that seem like they should be problems actually create this sort of internal psychological tension that makes this experience so enriching. I really believe that football, the reason that it is the best thing television kind of has ever sort of been built with, you know, the best is because even a bad football game is weirdly watchable in a way that isn't true about other things. Like the very apex, you know, the greatest.

final four game or like an extremely tight world series in the ninth inning, those are as good as any football game. At the apex, it's all shared. But at the bottom, a bad football game is still better than a bad almost anything, you know. And then you throw in gambling and fantasy football and other things you might have and that's even better. Yeah, two things on that. One, the 11 minutes. It's 11 minutes, but there's so much to discuss between every play, it doesn't feel like 11 minutes. But you notice it, like when I have the Sunday set up and I had the six games going at once. It's always amazing how many games are either in commercial or nothing.

Like, you can actually watch six games at once because there's so little action in all the games that you can, for the most part, get a feel for every game, right? Sometimes two games will have something happening at the exact same time. But for the most part, you really can watch six games at once. I mean, but you're an insanely specific situation, Bill. You are not like both people who love football. I get it. But I'm just saying that's,

one of those things where it's like the 11 minutes, you really feel it. You couldn't watch six basketball games at once. It would be impossible. It's true. You watch the Red Zone on Sunday and then you watch the Sunday night game. Red Zone's another one. Red Zone is just constant boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

But here's the other thing. So you compared it to basketball. Basketball has, you know, the 11 minutes problem in reverse where basketball is constant. But then when we get to the last four minutes, what happens? It becomes too slow. There's too much time.

There's timeouts, there's instant replay reviews, and there's not enough action. And we're constantly going, come on, just start. And that's why when we watch like the world FIFA championships or the Olympics or something, and there's like a real pace to the games, we're like, this is much better. Why can't basketball be like this? So in a weird way, they have the opposite problem. One of the things I kind of talk about in this book is how, you know, there are kind of three types of sports. there's the one sport that is like basketball, soccer, hockey, to some extent, auto racing and boxing.

They're kind of hypnotic. They're constant movement. Because it's action that's perpetual. It never stops. So you can almost sort of be hypnotized by it. And when the action is great, of course, you're thrilled. But even, you know, the second quarter of an NBA playoff game can get dull sometimes. Like you can kind of check out.

There are other sports that are almost totally intellectual and cognitive. baseball, golf. You know, these sports where most of what you're watching is thinking about what could or could not happen, you know? Golf's a great one for that. And it's actually sort of everything you see when you're watching golf is kind of like set up, prologue for what you kind of hope will happen

at the end, okay? And then the third one is football, which is unlike the other two. In the sense that it is like the second version where there's lots of stoppage of play and there's lots of consideration of what could happen, what happened earlier, all of these things. But in the moments of action, it is so hyper-kinetic

that it feels as though you're watching something very intense and that's moving fast. It doesn't feel slow in the way some of the other cognitive sports do. And football is unique in this. Like football takes the best qualities from these two kinds of sports and makes it into one sport. And again, this was completely accidental. No one planned this.

Like, nobody thought to themselves that, you know, the way football operates will be ideal for this television medium, and it clearly is. I mean, and even if someone wants to argue with me, if someone wants to say like, oh, there's many things that are actually better on TV or whatever. It's like the evidence sure suggests the opposite. Yeah, the evidence suggests that people would rather watch football than anything. Like, you know, it's like, like in 2024, the, the, the, the numbers were a little bit changed because it was an election year.

But people still watch the Super Bowl more than they watched the election results. I mean, there's no comparison to this in other countries, right? You know, soccer is the sport of Europe. In many countries, it's almost like their combination of football, basketball, and baseball and hockey altogether. And yet, we would never see in, you know, in Norway that 93 of the 100 most watched events were a sport. I mean, people in Japan love baseball. It would never be a situation where 93 of the 100 most watched Japanese broadcasts for baseball.

Like, this is, like, America is different in a lot of ways. This is one of them, you know. Well, it's funny that football has evolved perfectly as the decades has evolved, whereas other sports have not. Like, I think about tennis. And no fault of tennis, but the players just became more durable during matches, right? you have these matches that are like five and a half hours, five hours,

four hours and 48 minutes. And it's kind of like the players out grew the sport in some ways where I actually think they could probably think about changing the rules. I'm not sure anyone wants to be there for five hours. That was always Mac and Rose things, like make him go back to wood rackets. Or make it like four games a set or something. But so I used to love tennis more than I do now.

And now I watch Womelton and I'll watch U.S. Open. And that's really it. But for the most part, I don't want to spend five hours watching a tennis match. Although this is another thing that sort of complicates this conversation. I mean, could tennis find a way to become more popular in the way that baseball found a wage makes some real changes and become, I mean, baseball is a better experience now on TV. The last World Series is evidence, you know?

Yeah. But yet something like, you know, tennis or track or any of these things, like they don't really need to be this thing that. 80 million people care about. Like, they can be their own thing and then kind of evolve in their own way. But now football can't do that anymore. Football can only get bigger. The NFL can only expand, and that's what makes it fragile.

That's why, like, you know, at the end of this book, I talked about this idea of how, you know, football could kind of collapse. Right now, that seems insane. Right now, it seems more likely that football would swallow up every other sport, and that's all we would have. But nothing works that way. people change, the world changes. It was the only part of your book that I disagreed with vehemently. Really? So you agreed with the part

about Tom Brady and Jim Thorpe? No, it was just when you talked about how commercial money, not to spoil, but commercial money was going to go away and they wouldn't be able to replace it, I actually think they're always going to be able to find a way to replace the money.

And you're already seeing it now. You never could have predicted the streamer stuff. They'll keep making the schedules longer. They'll keep selling these one-off games. And I just think as long as the ratings and the interest are where they are, the money's going to come from however people consume it. And what the real thing we've learned is that people, you mentioned this earlier,

it's more fun to stay home and watch all the games than it is to go to a game. It's the only sport where you can definitively say, like, why would I go to the game? I'd rather watch it because it's more fun to watch it home. There are many reasons to go to a pro football game or a college football game, but one of them can never be, I want to see the game better. That can never be it.

The two things I want to say before we move on to this, though, it's like the thing you say about how, as long as there's interest in the sport, they'll find different ways to pay for it, that's possible. Like, you know, it's, I think certainly in the way we are now, let's say advertising disappeared tomorrow.

I think that the NFL could sell these games all a cart. But why would advertising disappear, though? Like, it's never going to disappear. People are always going to have to tell, other people about their product. Okay, but here's, here's why I would say this. Okay, the reason I think that at some point, advertise,

the idea of commercial advertising, particularly, is going to disappear. Yeah. Because, you know, we don't have any proof that advertising works now. The only thing we know about advertising is that it can introduce people to a product that they've never before experienced.

So if someone who's never had a Budweiser and they see a commercial for Budweiser, it introduces that in their life. But if they see a thousand Budweiser ads, It's not necessarily going to make them want to drink it more. So advertising is already a gamble. It's just the best thing that we have if you're a company or a corporation. It's a little tautological, too, because it's like, well, we advertise a lot and our company is successful,

so we put more money into advertising and it stays successful. I think that there is going to be a realization in the future that advertising is a lagging indicator of everything. And that the amount it costs, not just to create ads, but to pay for them, to pay, whoever, you know, Fox or Prime, whoever is showing them, isn't worth it. It's like it's, you know, and that's going to be a sudden sort of sea change, right? There's going to be this sudden realization that what these platforms and these networks are paying for this sport, it's not to work. Suddenly, there's going to be a collective bargaining agreement and the amount of money's not going to go up for covering the NFL. It's going to go down. And there's going to be a work stoppage.

And the bigger thing here, Bill, and this is the key point, is that I think the human relationship to football is already starting to change. And 40 years from now, which is two generations, the average person, their only relationship to football will be, it's an entertaining distraction that's on television. And if there's a work stoppage, they're not going to care. If there was a work stoppage now, people would lose their fucking mind. They'd be like, what am I going to on. What's not going to do on weekends? How do I live? But I mean, I have, you know, when the strikes happened in the 80s, you know, that was, and football wasn't as big as it is now then, but it was big. And people were like, we want these

games back. We need these games back. I can imagine a time in 50 years when this happens. And the kind of person who consumes football does not have a hard time living without it. And that's what the thing that we cannot possibly, it's hard to visualize that now. Like it's very difficult to visualize a world where people aren't like us. But of course there will be in the same way that we're different people than the ones who lived 50 years ago and probably could not believe that horse racing would ever disappear. I want to keep going on this. But ironically, we have to take a break to hear from our sponsors.

So you mentioned horse racing as a sport that was absolutely massive and then declined in public interest year after year after year, basically starting, I would say, in the 90s, right? Somewhere around that. I would say it started decreasing in popularity probably in the 40s or 50s. In the 70s, when there was just in these kind of a... 70s is a renaissance. We were kids.

There was an incredible run of horses, right? But even those horses, like, you know, people unironically argue, like, C-Biscuit was as popular as Babe Ruth. That wasn't the case for Seattle Slew. Seattle Slew wasn't as popular as Reggie Jackson or whatever, you know. Like, it had already started to change. to the point now where to be a horse racing fan signify something very specific. Either you are an addictive gambler or you own horses.

You know, that's basically it. Or you're an addictive gambler or owns horses. Sure. Sure. That's the third category. But the horse racing thing, it really was like if you go back, like if we rank the sports in 1928, it's horse racing, boxing and baseball. some order and I think football's probably fourth.

I mean, fourth. It's very, you know, it's an odd thing is that people love to bring up this thing of the three biggest sports 100 years ago. They never go to the fourth one. Was football the fourth most popular? I think football was fourth and then I think it started a nudge horse racing out probably in the

40s. Probably probably. I mean, because it's only a spectator sport in the 20s. And boxing you could do on the, that boxing was a big radio sport. So was horse racing. So probably, and then by the 50s, I think it switches. The boxing, who was the guy that died in the ring?

By, from Boobo Mancini here. No, no. And then in the 60s, I'm blanking. Amil, Emil Griffith killed Benny the Kid Paray. Whatever that happened on live TV. And that seemed like that was some sort of weird tipping point for boxing. It's like people started to go, whoa, it's going on here. Are you sure that's what made it happen?

because that's like a modern view of that. I don't know. No, I think that's when it happened. I think that was like a big public reckoning with what are we watching? It was like the first time that it happened with boxing. I think that was the fight. Then Ali spiked it up again in the 70s. Yeah.

And then when we saw Ali in the 80s that probably wasn't open. I mean, obviously Max Kellerman or whatever, be a better person to talk about this. But it's like that the decline of boxing is very complex. It has a lot of different aspects as to why corruption, the way the fights were, you know, the way fighting has changed. Like, like there's a really great, I don't know if you ever listen to this podcast, hardcore history.

This guy, Dan Carlin has an amazing episode about how boxing is the one sport that all experts basically agree is the only one where the guys would lose the guys of the past. And that even many of the things that, many of the things boxers did in the past can't even be done now. There's no one to train them. And because the weights don't change, you know, guys stay in the same. name weight class, a boxer from the past would beat a boxer from the present in all likelihood now.

So boxing is kind of its own thing. Okay. The decline in baseball is something we've talked about. And I think it's like it's, it's, it's. Yeah, we've talked about nuanced. But like you can, there are some sort of kind of wide brushes that can be made. Horse racing is the easiest to understand. I mean, to me at least.

I mean, that's, that was just like there was a time when we had a relationship to horses and there's a time when we did. So we were watching something now that's alien. We're watching these things that we like, like I. Like, I would guess that there are people listening to this podcast who have many, many people who have never touched a horse, have never actually had their hand on the horse. I would guess maybe the majority of the people listening to this podcast. But your case in the book was that horse racing was so much more popular in the first part

of the 20th century because people actually spent a lot of time around horses. They still cared about horses. I mean, even if they used them for transportation. Yeah. Well, you know, yeah. Maybe in the year 1900, even an urban area like Chicago was called the city of horses. There were horses everywhere. If you had a blue-collar job, horses did the work.

Maybe you didn't have a horse, but your dad probably did. Your grandfather almost certainly did. Like you would have been, you know, the country was more rural. So the idea of just running into a horse was calm. The idea of encountering horses was not some kind of surprising thing. It would probably be surprising if you leave this podcast and saw a horse. That might be enough for you to tell everyone you know. You will not believe they saw was a horse on the street or whatever.

So I think that is a huge part of it. And that's why I kind of made this comparison to what I think is going to happen with football, in that it is increasingly becoming something that people only watch, that they would never let their kid play. They didn't play themselves. Their father didn't play. They, you know, that it's this thing that that is an only, you know, it's the mediated experience only. And when a mediated experience only disappears, it can be replaced with other media. You know, that seems like an obvious thing to say, but it's true.

Like, I don't think the way people feel about football is going to continue. I think that in many ways, people our age are kind of at the tail end of this. There's still some people younger than us who it's, you know, but for the, for the, for the, idea that it's like a normal thing, like a normal thing to, you know, like, like you, I don't think you played high school football, but you probably went to high school football games. And you just, it was like it was in your world, sort of, you know. Yeah, because I think, I don't know if I agree to you on this one, because I think it's more realistic that football will evolve and there will be different forms of football at the same time. And you're already seeing this with the

flag football stuff. That's a different thing. No, I know, but it's, it's, it's, it's, I think some stuff's going to shift that way. So your basic premises, right? But I don't think football necessarily like goes on the major decline or I think it'll just kind of shift where some people will just be like, oh, high school football is just now flag football or it's like no hitting. And that's just where we are 50 years from now. I mean, I think this is why it's kind of a complicated but interesting thing.

It's sort of like there are some components of football that have to be there. for football to be what it is. You know, nobody watches, or very few people, I would say, watch football as a blood sport. Very few people watch football, hoping to see guys just get rocked and get carried off in stretchers. That's not how it is. Yeah, but as recently as 30 years ago, I think that was a component.

Well, it may be, there was some of it there. But even then, there was always this idea that, like, what they liked about football was the game itself, but for it to be meaningful, there has to be the risk of real injury. That if you take that, that what is interesting about football is not necessarily or just entirely what you're seeing on the field.

The guys running a post, the quarterback's rolling right. They're pulling these guys. Like, that's interesting, right? But they're doing it in this incredibly dangerous scenario. And as you remove that danger, the meaning of the thing that you like changes. Like, you, it's a guy,

Guys, say the guys are going to climb Mount Everest, right? He doesn't want to die. But it's meaningful because he could, right? Football has that. Football needs to have an element of violence and of danger, not because the violence is what we like, but the violence changes the meaning of everything else. So if, as football moves away from this,

like moves, you know, they say like, we could play flag football, right? You know, it would be just as exhilarating to see, you know, pukuk and a coup or whatever, run a pattern without the idea that he doesn't get his head knocked, when the ball comes in or whatever, but it's not the same. And that's what I think is going to change. I think the idea is going to that we're going to just completely bifurcate this, where there's going to be people who watch football and people who play football and they have no relationship at all,

no interaction whatsoever. Football players are all going to come from the same places, the only places in America that say that we're going to stay with this. We're going to, this is part of our identity and our culture. And that makes it perilous. It makes it precarious, I guess. The idea that there is this thing that people are supposed to care about, even though it has no meaning to them in a personal individual way. See what I'm saying? Kind of, yeah. I do.

I just think you got to throw in the college, as long as college football and college scholarships exist. I think there's going to be a huge part of the country that still cares about being good and, you know, whatever the before high school football, high school football, can I get somebody to pay for my college by playing football? Okay. Okay, we're in a very fascinating time to have this specific point, okay? We sure are.

Okay, so like, let's say, I don't know when our first podcast was, 20 years ago. If we would have said, you know what's going to happen in about 20 years? Indiana is going to be the clear favorite to win the national football championship. And Nebraska is going to be 16 and O in basketball, and they could win the Big Ten. Yeah. What? Big Ten. Well, none of it makes sense, right?

None of it seems possible. Now, in the short term, these things, NIL stuff, portal stuff, is going to slightly boost the popularity of these college sports because now people in Indiana are able to watch football in a way for the first time in this way. Anytime you professionalize something, it does have a short term benefit, a short term game. But over time, I do think this is probably going to be a disaster for college sports. I wouldn't even use the word probably. I think we're headed that way already. I think you're just kind of said that there'll always be places, though. In Tennessee, they'll always care about Tennessee volunteer football.

And maybe that is true. But I'm talking about as a high-end sport that competes against the NFL and all these other places, it's so poorly governed right now. We're getting to the point where people are in the playoffs and they just leave their teams. Well, yeah. Or they decide they're transferring. You have like guys in the secondary of a team that's in the final four just transferring?

And be like, okay, guys, good luck. Like, you're done as a sport if that keeps happening. It's not even poorly governed. It's ungoverned. It's ungoverned. It's a wild west. So, you know, and now,

in the present moment, we can't really blame these guys, right? Like, you can't look to a kid and, you know, like I saw today or whatever, I think like the Arizona State quarterback is like he's transferring to LSU, I think I saw this morning. I'm sure he's going to get a ton of money

for doing that. And he's going to be a high profile person. So you can't look at that kid and be like, you can't blame them, right? You have to do what's best for, every person has to do what's best for them. You can't expect them to think about the long-term health of the sport. You can't put this on coaches. You can't put this on anyone.

You can't expect them to think about things in the future. But these things are going to be detrimental in the future. People are going to have a less relationship with college. We've already seen what happened with college basketball when guys only played one year. okay it was like we didn't have relationship to the best guys you know it's like you you'd see a player and he'd be gone or whatever football is now i mean all sports are doing this i guess basketball as well have like done such a amplified version of this we've guys from the g league now going back to college football players playing on seemingly somehow six different what about the guy in

kansas darren peterson who's got a huge i'm n i'll i'm n i l money and then got hurt. Then there was rumors that he was just going to be done and keep the money. Then he came back and he's whatever happens. He's only going to be there for six months anyway. I just feel like all the stuff that's happening in college like this decade is confirming how stupid college sports were for a long time and everybody was in complete denial with it, right?

It was like these athletes are getting exploited. Everybody's making so much money for them. These guys should be more empowered. Well, now we empowered them. And now it's like wild, wild west, and there's no middle ground, and there's nobody to figure out the middle ground. That's the thing that, you know, maybe there's other parts of America that work like this. But this is unsolvable because nobody's going to solve it. Nobody's going to be empowered to be able to be like, okay, here are my ideas.

Everybody's got to listen to me. Yeah. Like, can you imagine? Like even in the Cowboys dock when Jerry Jones was like, fuck it, I'm just going to do my own deal with Nike. And everyone's like, whoa, you can't do that because he kind of broke out of the 32 team code that was there. college has no code. Well, no, it had like, the NCAA, as it turns out, was just a bunch of letters. They really have no ability to do anything.

Other than just prevent people from playing was like seemingly their only ability to do anything. I also think that the way these things are perceived, okay, so you remember some years back, it was like, I believe it was the Northwestern football team. And they were like the first team who was going to unionize or whatever, you know. This is before guys were getting out of. NIL money and all this stuff. Yeah. And there was this move where I think this perception that's like, well, that's good these kids

are doing this. This is unfair. They're being exploited. We kind of looked at college football players the way typically a labor, you know, somebody who covers labor would look at like coal mines and coal miners or whatever, you know. Like suddenly the idea of having a free college education and being able to have this life was a complete ripoff to these guys. guys that somehow if you played for you went to Notre Dame or whatever and you played football and

were the hero of the town and then got a degree and all these things for free that was now seen as like you got you got jammed you did not get what you were worth because technically you weren't technically you were someone like Ting Tibeau or Johnny Mansell was certainly making more money for these universities than they were getting back so it's like I say it's understandable that like that any college athlete would be like okay how how can I get I got to take care of myself You can't expect that person to think about college sports in general. But who's supposed to think about college sports in general? Who is it?

I actually got this idea. I've been getting a bunch of good mailback questions about how to save college sports. And the best idea that I've heard that I think is really tough to refute is this seems like the perfect system for relegation. Where you have maybe it's 24 teams in there, like for college football. It's like the top 24, 16 get to advance, maybe eight are in the playoffs, the other 16 get to stay at the top level, the bottom eight that didn't make it now drop down to the second level, the top eight move up, however you want to do the numbers, where you're in, basically we have a top top level that everyone would want to be at. Other teams have a chance to move into that level. And there's like a clear disparity between the levels and that top level makes the most money, they figure out how to make it so that it's split better between the players and the coaches and the universities and maybe that works. Whatever is happening now with the conferences? What's the goal of that? You said to save college sports. Like what is the goal that to keep them

popular? I don't know if the huge risk that in the short terms college sports are going to become less popular, that just seems to me like hyper professionalizing it. Yeah, but that's my point. I think we should. What is the point to have in these conferences? We have conference. We have conference. The whole point of college sports conferences was that they were regional. And it was like the PAC 10, these kids are in college. We don't want to have them traveling all over the place. So they're going to play the schools that are closely approximate to where they live. And now you have UCLA flying to play Penn State and all this crazy shit.

Like what's the point of that? I mean, so if we're going to hyper professionalize it, let's actually do it. But okay, I guess, but I don't want that to happen, right? Okay. So like all these things, the ship sails though? Well, it has, but I'm not going to be here and be like it's staled. So therefore the ship is fucking great. The ship has sailed.

And it's awful. Like, it's bad that this happened, right? Now, I guess what you're kind of arguing is not a bad argument. You just got to keep going forward, right? And I would say, well, keep going forward. Don't even make the guys playing for these schools go to school there. Just let these colleges like, you know, pay people to represent the university. Well, you know, I guess that would be just as interesting.

Like a minor league, almost. Exactly. But like I don't I don't want that to happen. Like, you know, it was I liked it when they were, I want them to be different, you know. I like I don't want the, I don't want Saturday and Sunday to feel the same to me. Yeah, that's fair. They increasingly do because all these other things are going to happen to the game itself because of this. Like, what's great about college football, many things? But one of them is that the diversity in the way teams played,

was a huge spectrum. Do you might see a team playing, you know, like the Flexbone and they're playing an air raid team and it's like this collision? One thing you saw with the SEC over the last 10 or 15 years is those teams fundamentally kind of play the same because they had all these great players in the same way in the NFL.

That once, you know, you can't do it like a, a lot of the things that I think that you might see is kind of like gimmicky in college or like a 15 quarterback. Can't work in the NFL, right? There's too many good guys. Like, you can't, you can't, the, like a Mike Leach system or whatever would not have worked maybe in the NFL because people would just take these things away and something like that. But at college, they still, that still existed, right? It was a neat thing to see.

It was neat to think about how maybe football on the West Coast and football in the Southeast and football in the Midwest is sort of fundamentally different. And that the kind of players you see are kind of fundamentally different. That even though recruiting is national, most teams kind of recruited regionally. I mean, that's going to be completely old. over now. Like you say this relegation thing. So let's say we did that. We have 24 teams and the bottom eight teams get relegated. A kid is still going to basically be, at this point, be sort of persuaded to go to one school over another, not because of whether or not they might get relegated, whether or not they're at the top. It's like, what check is bigger? I mean, well, like, that's,

that's what, this guy in Indiana, that's just, he's brilliant for a lot of reasons. But the reason that guest to good coach is because he's the best at evaluating talent and finding bargains. That's what Belichick thought he was going to be good at. And maybe he still will be, but he thought that was the advantage, which you're basically the 33rd NFL team was how he phrased it. But even that's kind of so let's say he was. Let's say he had, let's say Billichick was the best evaluator of talent or whatever. It's still like, do we have the money in our coffers to pay for these guys? Like, you know, that's what it really kind of comes down to. But here's the problem with the money part, the NIL we've already seen the boosters, who it seemed like a good idea

the first couple of years are not going to keep committing money to it. Because you have the Ohio state situation where they, would they get like $35 million worth of NIL and then they lost anyway? And it was like, hey, can you write us another check this year? It's like, no, I'm good, actually, thanks. It's a weird way. It's like some people are listening to this conversation. And they're like, you don't, you want these kids to be the equivalent of like indentured servants. You don't want them to, it's like, it's a weird argument to make. No.

Always supposed to argue, everyone kind of feels like they're supposed to argue on behalf of the player. What is best for the player? And, you know, I understand that. I understand that. I understand that thinking. But it's really the institution that matters. It's the, it's every player in orchestra.

It's every program in orchestra. What is best for all of those things? And that's just an impossible thing to deal with. So I do think what's going to happen to say with college sports, I do think there is going to be this temporary spike in interest. I'm sure to someone living in Bloomington, Indiana, this is incredible. Like this is like, they may be like football their whole life, but not like this. It's going to expand these things into places that weren't traditionally, you know,

hotbeds for these things. So at first it will seem like, oh, like I think everyone's interested in, in like this national football championship. But over time, it's going to change. the thing that we liked originally. That's why we were talking earlier in this conversation about why I think football's benefit and advantage is that personalities do not drive it.

Teams drive it. Like the idea of football is what drives it. Whereas on the NBA, it's not that way. Now personality, you know, celebrity drives the NBA now. I think you're missing one thing with college, though. Which is? First of all, we've turned into halves and have-nots more than ever with college football.

right? It's more glaring than it's ever been. And you might have a James Madison type of outlier every once in a while. And then what happens? They make the playoffs and the guy immediately gets hired by UCLA and we won't see them again. I wonder when you think about the cost of having a football team from a scholarship standpoint and how you have to match those scholarships on the other side, I just feel like more and more universities, the liability, concussions, how much it costs to do a program, the way people transfer around, how much depends on. How much depends on. on a coach and how much of a good recruiter he can be, how many laws he can kind of bend his way around. I think we're going to see more and more colleges at the mid-level

just be like, fuck it, you know? And then we're going to turn into like the higher-end colleges playing football and then like div three. Possibly. And that's just kind of where we're going to go. Football pays for a way of their sport though. That's the thing. I mean, like even if you look at the Mac or whatever, it's like, you know, if you're at Marshall or whatever, it's like the fact that you have those match and games on Tuesday, that's what's paying for the Marshall women's team in basketball, for the track team of the bat. So it's going to be hard for college to say we're going to dump football.

But are people going to care about those games as much when we become more about the haves and the have-nots and there's only 20 games that, 20 teams that you really need to watch every college football season and everybody else is kind of over there. I think what you're describing, I actually think kind of the opposite is going to happen. You think it's going to be better for those teams?

That's what you're describing is how college football was for most of my life. Great. Alabama and Texas, and they had down years, but for the most part, when I was a kid, the teams that were great in college football were still that later, right? Now, who are the haves and haven't? Indiana was a have-not forever. Now they have it, as long as they got this coach and as long as they can pay for it. Nebraska was a have-not in basketball.

Now they're undefeated. They were a have-in football, but now they're not. Now they lose their quarterback. You know, it's like, I think that what's going to happen is it's going to be more like, I mean, one of the reasons the NFL is so successful as the mass, you know, creation is because every six or seven or eight years your team should be good. The whole thing is designed for that through the draft, through the parity, through all the salary cap, all those things.

Like, if you follow a football team for 40 years, there should be at least three, or four times when you're in contention for a Super Bowl. Unless you're the Jets. Unless you're the Jets. You know, because they've just done everything wrong. And yet it still is not unfathomable to imagine the Jets being good in three years. It could happen. That could happen.

It's probably unfathable to Sean Fennacy. A couple of things you had in this book that I just want to go quick because we're not going to go for seven hours here. You talked about the concept of goats and football and came to the, I'll spoil this chapter because I liked it. But also, I don't want to spoil too much of the book. You're basically like, the goat should be somebody that created the ground that obviously we're going to keep getting better and better at sports as the years pass.

Brady is the goat because it was a recency bias. And or people think he's the goat because recency bias, he played. He had the most success at the most important position we've ever seen. But the odds are there's going to be another Brady. Jim Thorpe comes in, did things nobody could have ever imagined, kind of created the template for where we were going to go, and that should be the true definition of a goat.

I mean, that's an interesting chapter in the book because the amount of football players named in that essay... You had eight goats. I think might be more than in any other chapter in the entire book, the number of things about football I discussed, and yet, ideologically, it's kind of like just about the idea

of how greatness is measured. And I think that the modern person thinks about greatness, for the most part, and correct in the sense that whoever is the greatest player in the present, in theory, is the greatest player of all time because of the way training changes and nutrition changes.

It's like cars. The 2006 best Porsche is probably better than the 1976 best Porsche. So when you're talking about the greatness, of anything. And there are exceptions, and I'm sure you're going to pick some up as soon as I say this, but when I'm thinking, if someone asks me like, what is the greatest whatever in anything, any subject, what I'm trying to do is think of what is the earliest incarnation of greatness that's still present in the modern version? So it's like the earliest version of something that was great, indisputably great,

that still exists in every version that comes after. And my argument with Jim Thorpe kind of... So it's like a prototype goat? Well, a proto, a little bit. I mean, because otherwise, the argument over greatness... Or it's goat ground zero. It's kind of meaningless. I let goat ground zero is kind of where you're going, right?

I guess. That way I would be, yes, if I could have called that, I guess. I just, I think that that is the way greatness needs to be considered. It has to be like, we always want to... think of the future, but greatness comes from the past. It's sort of like the building blocks of these things. I use the Beatles of the example in this book, not, you know, unsurprisingly, sort of like what makes the Beatles so great is that not only what they did, but sort of what they did is still completely present in all the pop music that came after. Now, granted, sports are

different. Sports have a greater objective element than a subjective element, and people talk about this. To me, it really came down. to Jim Thorpe or Jim Brown. Because I think the argument could be made that the sport Jim Thorpe was playing had no relationship to the sport we have now. Whereas Jim Brown, you know, we're playing. We have the platoon system.

We're wearing face masks a little closer. But when Jim Thorpe played, it was an 11-on-11 sport. Touchdowns for six points. The first-down was 10 yards. There was passing. There was strategy. All these things were there.

Like the rudimentary elements of football were there. And he was the first great player. And that makes him the great player for us. So by this argument, Bill Russell is to go to basketball. Well, you know, that's a really interesting one because I do think that the way, like with in the same way that football has, you know, have these different kind of hinge points. It does seem to me like there was a real hinge point in basketball with the NBA, ABA merger, in the addition of the three-point goal

in this period in the late 70s. I think that basketball dramatically changed. The idea that it added a way to score that had never before existed, an extra point for a three-point goal. So I think from that way, you could really look at basketball having these two chunks.

In the first chunk, I think it probably would be Will Chamberlain. And I think in the second chunk, it would be Michael Jordan. Will Chamberlain, if you like losing at the end of the season? Sure. I mean, the thing is,

that you factor in, I think you actually over-emphasize the wins and losses? The outcome as opposed to the process. Yes, yes, I do. But you, the same Jim Thorpe argument you make in the book for pages is the exact same argument

you can make for Bill Russell. Like he introduced the entire concept of defense, fast break, something running through a center and everybody running off them. Everything they did the late 50s and early 60s became basketball. And he won the title over here.

I think you could absolutely make a very strong argument that if you had to pick one of those guys to be on your team, Russell would be the guy to pick. The fact that every time they squared up against each other, it seemed like Russell got the better of him. Despite the fact the rosters weren't really the same. No, I debunk that. The rosters were just as good. I totally understand that.

What I'm talking about is sort of like the archetype of the basketball player. you know, the ability to do the rudimentary elements of basketball. Score the ball, rebound the ball, pass the ball, play defense. Move up and down the court, okay. I believe, and I wrote this in your book, I believe that Will Chamberlain with a different mindset could have been Bill Russell. I do not believe Bill Russell with a different mindset

could have been Will Chamberlain. I don't think that. Now, in the same way that... I disagreed with it when it was in my book. I mean, so you think that if Bill Russell had been a more sort of selfish, you know, self-oriented... I just think he did what he... But he scored 100 points in the game. I just think he figured out the best, how do I win a basketball game?

How do I use my teammates? How do I use teammate opponent's deficiencies against them? Within the context of... How do I win? Yes. And basketball is a team sport, so you could make the argument that his ability to figure out what was the best way to do this within the confines of this of the five on five game or whatever that should be we can't discount that right you can't discount so yeah if we were doing ground zero

goats thorps for football i think russell's basketball and baby bruce obviously baseball i would say i would say those two but chamberlain instead of russell yes all right i'm discounting chamberlain and then hockey hockey when i hockey gets tougher i think gretsky is the greatest hockey player of all time, even though by my logic here, it should be Bobby Orr or somebody. But like I said, there's always going to be exceptions. There's no, it would be very, there's no theory that on greatness that's so airtight that there are no flaws, unless the only argument that is would be someone who makes the argument that the greatest person in every medium is whoever is the greatest right now

because humanity always advances. So somebody could make that argument and then you can't really disagree with that. You can't. Well, you. But I don't. You talked about Moss, and you talked about how you thought Moss. Who was the best player that I ever saw? I might.

To me, Randy Moss was the greatest football player I saw with my eyes. So the four best football players I ever saw were Randy Moss, Jerry Rice, Lawrence Taylor, and Tom Brady and not in that order. Okay. And I actually think Jerry Rice, I would have, if you could just give me a receiver for their career. Absolutely. And I'd have the best chance to win. It has to be Jerry Rice. Moss, you made the point, Moss had these physical gifts.

That year he was on the pass, those first two months, it was like, I've never had an experience like that as a fan. And there was something, he passed the stadium test, too. If you went to actually see him in a game, it was unforgettable to just watch him run. And it just seemed, he was the only football player I've ever seen where it actually seemed kind of unfair that he was to the defense that he was out there, right?

Yeah, I mean, this book, It's like in some ways it's like a book of criticism about a sport, you know, the same way that you. Yeah. So the rules, I admittedly are my roots, right? So like Jerry Rice and Randy Moss, for a career, no question, Moss is greater. For a season. Or no, for a career, Rice is better. For a career, Rice is clearly better.

For a season, Rice is better. I think potentially for an important game, Rice is better. but for a play, nobody's better than Moss. Well, you wrote about my favorite Patriots play of all time, which was an incompletion. I think it was third down. I ever saw my life. Yeah.

Giant Super Bowl. I was at the game. Everyone in the arena knew it was coming. They double teamed them. He ran as fast as he could for 60 yards. Brady threw it, I think, 75 yards or some crazy thing. And it just missed them. It missed them by an inch.

And it was absolutely conceivable that he was going to catch it. And it was just, It was, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it was so, it was just, it, I can see in my mind right now. But like, one of the things I talk about in this, just briefly, it's not a big part of the book, but, you know, so, uh, my son, when he would play foot, a football at recess in like third grade or fourth grade, the kids would talk about mossing people, okay? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It, in fact, took a post-it note and wrote mossed on it and put it on his forehead.

So when he scored a touchdown, he could lift up his bangs and say like he moths his opponent. none of these kids knew who Randy Moss was. None of them. They didn't even know that the Moss term had a Randy in front of it or whatever. And to me, that's like, this is somebody who's transcended the game, right? This is somebody who, like, it's not, Randy Moss was not the first receiver who was ever fast in a great jumper with great hands who did these things. But he became the definition of this thing, this thing that kids want to do, right, when they play receiver, they want to moss people. They want to use like pure athleticism to simply out catch.

If that's a term, their opponent, you know, that's meaningful to me. When you see someone do that in a game, when you're watching just any football game and you see a guy do that, it's like T. Mostyn. That's like a Randy Moss type thing. And I would argue that whenever you see anyone running the football, you're kind of seeing Jim Thorpe. That is that the essence of that, the essence of being. faster and stronger and more agile and more nimble than your opponent. And in this sort of like real kind of DNA of the sport, I think it probably does go back to that.

Yeah, the rat, I'm really, I'm really possessive about the race thing. Because I think sometimes with this legacy stuff, and this is one of the reasons I wrote my basketball book a million years ago, was like some people live on, other people's don't, and some of it has to do with what happened after their careers,

did they stay on TV? Did they stay in the limelight? With social media now, are there clips easily cut into Randy Moss was a problem and you just watch these amazing highlights? Rice was the best receiver I ever saw. Moss was the scariest receiver I ever saw.

But if I had one game, like, how do you not take Rice? He was always open. Did it matter what the quarterback was? And he's playing at a time when... With Rice, you know, he plays with these two great quarterbacks, but then even at the end,

I mean, like, then he goes to the Raiders, so he's 40. But he's also playing during a time when you could still get hit pretty hard over the middle and get your head taken off. You know, you know, absolutely. I mean, you know, I think that it would be, you could still make, you know, because you can use different arguments for this. I mean, that's one of the things. Like, I, there are different ways to think about these things. I'm presenting my way of thinking about this. Yeah.

But, well, the one thing, the biggest thing I learned was that I might have known this and forgot was that Roger's. Stopback was your only true sports hero. Well, yeah, I see, I think it's, I just think it's weird to have a hero as an adult. Like, like, as a, as a man, I shouldn't see another man heroically. Even if they're doing heroic things. It's like that's just now it. Right. You need heroes when you're eight.

And the hero, your hero, when you're eight is your hero for life. So Roger Stalbeck is my hero for life. Um, you know, and the sort of thing that I talk about, is I feel extremely lucky that that's how it worked out because it could have been anyone. And in many ways, Roger Staback, to me, represents the best possible here. You could have picked O.J. Simpson. That would have been terrible. Absolutely. Yes. You know, you know, I got that. It's like, OJ, pull the car over.

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You have chapters that we didn't talk about about simulations, football coaches, the white-black thing, CFL three-downs versus NFL four-downs, which I thought was fun. The football coaches almost felt like that could have been its own book. And I think if anything, has not changed about football over the years.

I think golf's never changed. You can watch a 1979 master's on YouTube. By the way, they have all the old masters on YouTube. And you can watch them. It's exactly the same. Everything, the rhythm about it, it, the course, it's like you're in a time machine. Boxing for the most part is basically the same. Two guys in a ring trying to beat each other and we have rounds and a referee.

And I think tennis, when you think about sports like that, those sports have evolved and changed. Hockey's change. Hockey's change. Basketball's change. Horse racing is probably the same. But when I think about football, football's changed in every possible way, except the coaches still have this outsized something. Like I'm watching what happens now with Vrable and the Patriots. And it's like, we had a terrible coach last year and the team was a disaster.

He came in, culture, the guy, bought into the guys, built certain guys up, stuck with guys that maybe shouldn't have stuck with and just kind of flipped it around. And I watched this happen with Belichick and now I've seen it happen twice with the Patriots coach.

And it's still the most important guy other than the quarterback. And that has never changed. Well, okay, that's never changed, but coaching does have more impact in football than almost any other sport because it's a totally hierarchical thing. I mean, the fact that like every single play is being, not 98% of plays are being dictated by somebody in a booth transmitted down to the sideline. So they really can control it. But to me, the more fascinating thing is this. I would say in practice, football coaches have actually changed quite a bit.

There's a lot of coaches in the NFL now. I can't really say that I remember a guy like that when I was young, especially among kind of the younger offensive minds, the Rams and the Vikings and these things. However, the caricature of the football coach never changes. The idea you're a big sports movie guy. The way a football coach is presented in a sports movie does not waver. It doesn't matter if he's presented positively or negatively.

They still have the same central qualities. Only a used car sale. That's the only job that has more of a shared idea of what the personality of the person is like compared to the football coach. You know, I mentioned how like, you know, there was, you know, there's the movie All the Right Move and there was the TV show coach. And it's the same guy in both, you know. And one, he's a good guy to one, he's a bad guy. But the way he acts is kind of the same. It's like it doesn't really change.

Like we can see that the things the football coach does in different. different ways. I mean, that's why I could have, like, you know, like what Kamala Harris thought was going to happen if she takes a guy who was a, you know, picks a Veep who was a former high school football coach. I think she believed, well, people are just going to accept that these things about football coaches apply to him too. It turns out that was not the thing to do. But, um, but, but, you know, it is like, if, like, if somebody said like, oh, hey, you know, you're, say your daughter, uh, came home and she's like, I got a new boyfriend. And, and you're like, what's he like?

And she's like, well, he's kind of like a football coach. You would instantly have an idea of what he must be like. You would instantly have an idea of what he'd be like charismatic. Don't trust him. Probably full shit. I don't trust his intentions. Well, like, or maybe he'd be like, you know, it's, you know, it's not the outcome. It's the process or whatever.

You know, like these things that they sort of believe about how to live. You know, it's like like. Some sort of code they abide by. Yes. And like, you know, the weather never affects them, you know? And it's like, it's like all these certain things that like things they believe that like you can't be a football coach if you don't believe it. Yeah. Well, and there's so many bad coaches in all sports.

But it feels like they can do the most damage in football. Well, yeah. They can like single hand and like because football fundamentally, it's not that fun to play. you're getting the shit kicked out of you and you really have to buy into the team and the concept of giving yourself up for the greater good, right? And if you have a coach that you either hate

or doesn't get you to buy into that, you end up like the Eagles this weekend where you have AJ Brown's like, I'm fucking out. I'm not even talking to the press. I'm done. I do feel, we've talked about this many times in the past, I do feel that you are unfair to coaches.

Oh, there's no question. So you agree that. but why would you keep doing it if you agree? Well, because it's, it's, I get passionate about this stuff. Listen, there are some really good coaches. And then I think there's a bunch of coaches that are either mediocre or worse that do most of the damage during these playoffs like we saw in that Green Bay Chicago game. That it's like impossible to lose that game if you're the Packers.

Okay. And they were poorly coached. And that's why they lost. Can I give one, I just want to say what my point of why I feel at times like you and Sal and some of the guys are unfair to coaches, right? Yeah. I feel like you look at what they do on Sunday as 90% of the job. When in fact-

No, I don't fail that way. 20% of the job. No, here's where it's unfair. I think it would be really hard to stand on the sideline with all that stuff going on and be able to concentrate on all the stuff you need to concentrate on to win a game. Whereas when I'm on the couch and I can be like, why would you throw on second down when you're just your jobs to kill the clock?

He's worrying about are there 11 guys in the field? What defense? And I think there's so much stuff going on. Sometimes you can just miss shit. Sure. But on the couch, you don't miss anything. But it's more than just that the job on Sunday for three hours is more complicated than it seems.

Those three hours are the culmination of everything else. And I think that a lot of times people will be like, why is this guy still getting hired? Why are they still hiring this guy? It's because, yeah, they do have some, they bad a clock management or there's these mistakes that they make going for $4,000, not going for them. Yeah, they have a flaw. But there's all of these things that make them a good football coach that are completely divorced from the game we see. There's also a media narrative thing that I think, we're watching right now with John Harbaugh, right?

John Harbaugh was going to get fired before Lamar took over from Placo, like halfway through that season. He was like he was done in Baltimore there. Lamar came in and saved his job. And then he rode the Lamar train for, I don't know, six, seven more years. And then he finally gets fired because he can't really click with Lamar in the right ways, obviously. And now he's the number one coaching for age.

And it's like, this guy almost got fired in 2017. And I have no idea how good of a coach he is. And we just got to watch him. Some people think he's one of the best five coaches in the league. Other people are like, ah, we'll see in the second team. We just saw Pete Carroll go to Vegas and was a disaster. So I don't know.

It might be a situation where there's only like four or five good coaches and that's it. Shanahan clearly has proven that no matter what's happening with this team or his roster, he can still compete. Well, I mean, it would seem to suggest that the job he has done this year is maybe the best job anyone has done in the last. Yeah, this is like, he is now like unassailably, you could have picked him apart for the comebacks and for his record earlier in his career. but now he's there. So what do you think about this new story about how the reason the Niners

are all getting injured is because they're... Oh, my God. And the kiddo blows out as the kill is. Perfect for you. Okay. Oh, my God. No, you were one of the first people

I thought of when I read that because I was like, I can imagine Chuck reading this entire thing and then Googling for another two hours about what's... I mean, the crazy thing is the story comes out and then Kittle tears his Achilles two days later.

Like, yet another one. one. So I don't know. I think there's something to it. How much? If I was a player in the Niners, I'd be like, we're not playing until you move the practice facility. Really? Like, yeah. So you put a lot to it. You don't think there's, as a player, you would say, I'm speaking for the team. We need to change our practice facility. I would, wouldn't you? I mean, I don't know. It is possible? Why are they by far the most injured team? Okay. They are the most injured team. Are they by far the most injured team? I think, he said they had by far the most tendon ligament damages.

Anyone in the league? Who said this? This guy who did the long piece about it? I mean, but that's like, let's, let's see the lists. Let's see, like, what's the difference between them one and two? And what's the difference between one and 14? All right. So sign me up for way more research on a fascinating topic.

Because what would it, would it mean that this is hurt? Like, because there's obviously many different ways to get. So what is the idea that, that, I mean, I'm not even disagreeing with it. I've brought it up. But is the idea that there's an electrical charge that is weakening tend? It's like weakening muscles and tenants. I mean, the bigger thing is why. What about the people who work in there?

The people who work, I mean, that would be like, you know, are they constantly, like, do they go to, you know, to urgent care more than the other? Like, these are other things you have to look into, I would guess. I don't know what, it's just, it's a crazy story, but it's strange, you know. I would say it's the most what the fuck story we've had in sports in a while. With the way it was laid out, I was like,

this is unbelievable. How did they not know all this was happening? But this is the kind of shit that used to happen in like 1960s, right? How did they not know? How would they know? How long would it take you before you put that together? That wouldn't certainly be the first thing. If I had an injury-plagued team,

like if I was coaching, if I was coaching the Seahawks or whatever, and we had a ton of injuries, certainly my first thought wouldn't be like, Is there anything built around the stadium that could affecting the physiology of my place? Who's fucking think of that? Like, you know, it's like, it's interesting that it's the story. And if it's, I don't know, it's like, I mean, what is your stance on microplastics in general?

A real thing I'm concerned about with the turfs. I would think about that when my daughter was playing soccer when she was little. And we would see these turfs with the pellets. And I'm like, I know those are bad for people. Yeah, but what about every other extension we have with plastic? To me. Oh, you're talking. about like in bottles and shit.

Either microplastics is just something we're talking about because we need to talk about shit or it's too late. It is over. I mean, what percentage of our plastic? I mean, it's like, right.

On a scale of one to ten, like cigarettes where they knew something was wrong for a long, long time and kept kind of, no, no, it's fine. And then after by what, the 70s?

By the time we were like teenagers, we were like, we know cigarettes are. really bad. But like, they were still running ads for them in the 60s. But there was also like a certain, like no one,

like people knew if you smoked your whole life, you coughed a lot. The first time you smoke a cigarette, you coughed there had to have been, I wasn't alive during that period, but there had to have been some understanding that like smoking's not healthy. It is smoke.

You know? And my mom died at lung cancer at age 51. The military gave people cigarettes because it was like, it'll calm your anxiety, whatever. I had a teacher, a chemistry teacher.

her mom told her when she was in like high school, start smoking, you'll keep you thin or whatever. So yes, we thought of totally different, you know. So I wonder with microplastics, 50 years from now, we're like, holy shit. Remember when these idiots had water and water bottles and were just inhaling plastics? Yeah, it might seem like that. It's hard to.

Wait, I have one more thing before we go. This is a short one, but you wrote about Vince Farragamo in this book. A little bit. And it got me all excited to just kind of rekindle my fascination with Vince, who had a nice little run there, took the ramps to the Super Bowl. I didn't know you were a big Vince Bergamo fan. It was a fascinating rise and fall. It goes to the CFL bombs, comes back, but it made me look at his pro football reference.

And it was one of the most entertaining, like, 40 seconds I spent in 2026 so far. his last couple years, he threw eight touchdowns and 28 interceptions in his last three years. And it's like, you can go in these 1980s deep dives and you'll see some of the worst stats. You know, like, he also came back from Canada and had a 400-yard passing game. I know, he was good the year he came back. And then it was like, I think prior to leaving one year, he led the NFL in passing touchdowns and he was terrible with the Owlitz.

It is just, it is an interesting. Can I, what are some of the- Because now what bad years is like Gino-Smith. throwing 15 picks. It's like, oh my God, Gino was so bad. It's like, can I show you Steve Grogan's pro football reference in the 1980s? I mean, nothing is crazier than just looking at like the trajectory of completion percentage. Right.

There was, when we were kids, you want your quarterback to complete half his passes. You could not have a job like that now. What were some other great 42nd moments you've had this year so far? That was way up there. Okay, what else? What else? It's a very specific tight window. No, I was just trying to think of under a minute.

Just really, that was probably number one. Yeah, Steve Grogan, when I was a kid in 1981, which was an eight-game season, seven touchdowns, 16 interceptions, and 54% of his passes. And it was like normal. Because back then when you're a quarterback, they're diving at your knees. You could hit every wide receiver over the middle.

It was like, if you had a quarterback that was 22 touchdowns, 12 picks, 58% completion, that guy was like probably an all pro, right? Well, yeah, you know, it's just, okay, the one thing I want to say about this because I know like, okay, so a lot of this book in some ways,

I can hear a person listening to this podcast or hopefully reading the book and being like, okay, so this guy, he's convinced that like everything was better in the past than it is now. No, no, you didn't. I don't think you did that at all. But, you know, it is an interesting deal.

A few years, ago it was like, must have been like the anniversary of Super Bowl 3 for some anniversary. So they were showing the Joe Namath Colts Jets Super Bowl, you know, on they were replaying it. I can't remember if it was on ESPN or ESPN Classic or whatever it was,

you know, so I watched that, you know. And it is, it is kind of mind-blowing. Like, late in the game, okay, it's like Baltimore's down like 16 to 7. There's like three minutes left. They're huddling every play. They're not, they don't use the shotgun. It's like, you're watching this, you're like, how could this,

how could this be the way it was? Like, like, do they, like, the only difference is the offensive lineman, like, jogged a little faster to the line of scrimmage? And I was like, yeah. Score twice. What, what could you do this? So it is sort of incredible how as much as people like me and people like you, like, you know, sort of like long for these, the past in a way and how much loved it and how, you know,

and then when you actually experience, you were like, rewatch it, like, what is this? Like, this is like, like, everything has. has improved, it just feels terrible. I was talking to Sal about that this weekend because we're both following this guy on Twitter. I think his name's Kevin Gallagher. He posts all these old kind of pretty clear videos of. No, I follow it.

Yeah. It's like it's the 50th anniversary of this game. Yeah. It's the 45th anniversary of this game. So during the playoffs, he's been posting all these playoff moments. And some of them, I won't say I've forgotten. I just haven't thought about it a while. There was a lot of Vince Farragamo stuff on there.

There was some Vince in there. Three and stuff was the, you know. Right. The one that's always beat him in like 78 and then the Rams upset him in 79. He had the Hollywood Henderson interception touchdown on there. So they showed the Mike Renfro play, which as a kid was this incredibly important moment of my life that just kind of came and win. And I'm not, I was a Patriot fan, not a Houston fan. But I didn't like the Steelers and the Raiders because they were in the AFC. Those are the teams they had to beat.

So they became like the villains for me, those two teams. I just rooted for anyone and tried to beat them. and Renfro catches this seemed like a touchdown and they huddled and they ruled no touchdown. Now the Steelers fans would say that wasn't like

they would have won the game if he caught it. But it was still a really important play that Houston ended up losing and it felt incredibly unfair and it was kind of the moment when instant replay the ball kind of got going.

But I remember where I watched that game I remember how I felt. I remember being really upset even though it wasn't my team and now we just now that stuff's fixed. Now it's a catch, right? Now they look at it for two minutes

and it's overturned and Houston has a better chance to win the game. So I don't, of course things are better now. You know, like if you're a Houston fan, the Patriots lost on the Sugar Bear Hamilton rather than the passer, which wouldn't be able to be reviewed. The Renfro thing would have been reviewed. But the thing that you just said like,

you said, of course it's better now. That's an example to me of why things are worse now. Why? You just talked about something that happened to you when you were probably, what, nine or ten years. That was nine, yeah. It lives in your mind, right?

Yeah. It also, it means all this, you know, it was, it was this, this critical miscall that sort of solidified the Steelers dynasty, stopped Houston from going the Super Bowl with all those good Earl Campbell teams. They never went or whatever. Bump Phillips never went to her. Okay. Now, that would have been overturned, you know, they would have got the right call or whatever.

But, like, to me, the other thing is better. I mean, I say this on every podcast. So you'd rather have the pain. I hate instant replay in every way. I think it is absolutely insane that the evidence it takes to overturn a catch or a drop on second eight in the first quarter of the game is greater than the evidence needed to give the guy in electric chair. Look, I got to kill a guy.

You don't need indisputable visual evidence to prove that guy before we execute him, right? But in football, I think it is, it does not add. Because they still get things wrong, right? There's still elements of instant replay that don't work. It slows the game down, and it also, to me, forces me to remember, like, there is something silly about this. It's like guys are playing the game. Humans are playing the game.

But humans can't officiate it. We need robots. We need technology to do it. Because even though people are playing, it's so important whether or not Renfro catches that pass that we need to, like, I just, I, it's,

so you're a human error guy. Human error is part of it. In the same way, it would be like, I mean, it just, it just happens sometimes. The only time that I am not against instantly play is I,

I don't mind it when it's, was a basketball released before or after the light comes on at the end of a half or just look at it quick. Yeah. You know, because that's like, it's the last play, this is it.

Like the idea of it, you know, But the idea like instant replay and officiating reasons obviously damaged basketball the last two minutes of a basketball game deeply, particularly the idea of plays that throughout the entire game would be officiated one way, but because we have video evidence, they go the other way. If I hold a basketball in my hands and you punch it, technically, yes, it does touch my pinky finger last. That's obviously out on you. you know. But when I watch it, like a football game, it's like, you know,

they talk about, remember the, like the Rams and the Saints a few years ago, like with this interference call late in the game. It's like, you know, that's just part of it. It happens. It's like, I, basketball happens too. Well, they'll miss a goaltender or they'll miss something

that can't be reviewed. And it's like, hey, we all kind of move on. We moved past it. The Renfro thing was a little different. Like sometimes, like, you'll hear people be like, well, when the playoffs start for any sport,

why does the division winner get a bot? Like it should be, it should just be, you know, a straight recording of the record. So in the NBA, it shouldn't matter if you won your division or whatever. It should matter just, you know, it's like, but that's what it is. We designed it this way. This is the sport. Yeah.

Okay. It's like we're not trying to answer, like, we're not trying to solve a problem. We're trying to create something that is sort of interesting and alive and meaningful and can be used in different ways. and helps us understand ourselves in the world. We don't need to find the best possible truth in all of these cases because it's already a fictional world. It's a simulated thing.

Nothing really important is happening, but we love it anyways. So why do you get to fix this thing that we love to make it more, I don't know what, objectively true? This is kind of what your book's about. It's like the constant quest of solving things, perfection, innovation. Yes. How do we get better, better? One other thing I found out in that Kevin Gallagher thing,

how much I enjoyed the really horrible weather games. I don't feel like we have those anymore. You know, I regret. Houston, Houston just going to Pittsburgh and it's just freezing rain. They lose 34 to 5. It's like zero degrees. That weather could have been a chapter. No, that was the one chapter that I regret.

Like, I felt the book was the right length. Yeah. But I would have liked to write something about it because, This is another thing that sort of sets football apart from other sports. It's not indoors. We never delay the game or stop the game. I guess we're for lightning. But, you know, it's like a, like the weather is part of it.

And it changes the way we think about what makes a football player good, what makes a quarterback good. If a quarterback can't play in the cold, that, you know, it's like, even though he may never face the cold for years, some seasons, a guy never has to play, you know, in the elements. But like, like, it's so. You talk about watching six games at once. I guarantee you the game you watch the most during a blizzard is the snow game.

It's just immediately, you know. Well, you can see it from, it passes the bar test where if there's a TV on and there's snow, everyone will kind of gravitate toward the TV. Almost like there's like a hockey fight or something. They're like, oh. Plus like in HD, it looks even better now. It looks amazing. Like some Friday night and all of a sudden I'll get a text and it will be someone that says like,

you know, turn on Wyoming and. And Colorado State. And I know it's a blizzard. I know what it's going to be. I know it's going to be that. You know? And it's like, one thing. Well, maybe that could be your next book.

Well, I can't. I don't know. I mean, I always thought that would be a really great documentary. Right. I remember. We talked about that. It's very difficult for you to do that because it's hard to get the rights to these football games. It's like only the NFL network could do it.

It seems like it's like it's kind of a strange thing. I also feel like one thing that. But I feel that in a lot of sports, they've made a mistake now, and they can't go back and fix it, which is that, like, you know, they'll delay a football game for lightning. If there's a lightning strike within a 15-mile radius of, I think that they looked at this wrong.

They didn't realize that 15 miles in every direction is this huge expanse of space. But they can't go back because if they said, like, actually would be better if it was a 10-mile rate, or whatever, and someone gets killed by lightning, they'd be like, you actually change this law. But, like, that was one thing that they did to kind of like, you know, improve safety. I don't, because very often, like,

these delays, you know, they clear everybody out of the stands and they can, it's like, it's kind of a disaster. It's pretty bad. The book is called football. When does it come out? It comes out. Tomorrow?

It will be, I guess, stays the 12th, the 19th. Are you doing a little? A week from tomorrow. Okay, so next week. Or a week from, if this is going to running up Monday or a week, it comes down next week. Like if you, and if you order it, like, if someone orders it on an Amazon order, it'll probably be coming before that because the books are already done, you know. And are you doing any little tour stuff or no?

Yes, I am. I'm doing New York, Philadelphia, and then interestingly Harrisburg, and then I'm flying home. And then I'm doing Kansas City, Louisville, in Chicago. and then I'm doing Portland and Seattle. So it's an interesting collection of towns. That does are fun towns. Yeah, my, oh, I'm looking forward to it. But my life makes it real hard to go to these places.

Even like you talk about like being able to like watch six games at once. Like that's one thing about your life that I am envious of. It's like you, because it's totally your job and you're just the work you live in, you can watch everything all the time. my whole life all fall and all winter is just a process of me trying to see these games I want to see, which I then never remember. Like, you know, it's like it, or with very few exceptions. I mean, this is, you know, there was a bunch of years ago.

I sometimes think of this. Like, you know, there's this concert movie about LCD sound system. Yeah. And I'm in. You were in it. Yes. Okay. So we filmed that, we filmed that documentary.

And it's before their last show, which is on Saturday at Madison Square Garden. And they're like, oh, you want you come to the show. You know, you can get these great seats or whatever. But that Saturday was the day of the final four. I already had plans to watch the final four in basketball. So I was like, no, I'm not going to go. I've seen Elsie Nets. I've seen him a few times anyways.

Like, you know, I don't know if I can remember who played that day. Like I think it was the year Wisconsin was really good. Like maybe Wisconsin had one loss, but I'm not sure. So I did go, I did this movie, did not go to the big final show where I probably would have got to sit in the front row or something because I had to see these basketball games. And I don't remember him now. It's like it's just all gone. It's so weird how that is.

Isn't it how like, like I care about these sporting events and I know you do too like so much. And like, what's the anticipation of the games? I think we have pretty good memories for these. Yeah. Like I would say the likelihood of you bringing up something or me bringing up a sporting event. from the past, but likelihood's pretty high. The other person is going to be like, oh, yeah, you know. And yet for the most part, like, I'm just constantly, like,

because I just, there's something about me that just wants to see every game. You know, so like this last weekend, like, you know, I watched college football Thursday and Friday. I could see those. And I was able to see the games on Saturday. But then on Sunday it was like my daughter's birthday and all these things. So I was like, you know, I was planning that party. And then I took my son to play magic gathering somewhere.

So I'm doing all these different things. And I'm like kind of following the game on the radio. phone and stuff like that. I can't imagine what it's like to be you in some ways. Where it's just like, I just go out and I watch everything all the time. You know, and that's, you know. Yeah. The weirdest one for me was when my daughter was like really into the club soccer stuff, having Sundays where I was at games as football was going on and trying to do this with my phone and try it. But yeah, it's, my whole thing is I just constructed my life. So if I'm going to

keep doing this, I want to do it at the highest podcast. possible level I can do it. And I just have to do it this way. But the one thing that's happened, and maybe it's a little age wear and tear. I found myself drifting more to four games this year

versus six. I found it was harder for me to concentrate on all six in the same way. So you don't turn two TVs on or like you now I was just going with a pure multi-view. I started to go upstairs into our little theater place. and just watching the four box on the multi-view

and then having my iPad going knowing if I had to switch things and I found that I concentrated on everything better. Well, I just, I feel like you can absolutely justify watching every sporting event that happens. I mean, that's, you're the sports guy. Well, I could.

How do I justify it? I don't know if I could justify it to my way. Storage Tech is playing vandy this weekend. Like, I got to see it. Like, what's my argument for that? I don't really have one. I so I'm just, so it's... Yeah, but you said in your book,

you were talking about there's two, six and two, teams on a Thursday. I've got to watch this. It's like a great night. I'm drawn to it. It's like it's this dark thing. It's like I'll like how can I get out of every other aspect of my life to see this? And it's crazy because I know I'm not going to remember it. Like I know it's just going to go foof. You know, it's just, it's going to be early, yeah? We have to go. Okay. The book is called football. It comes out next week. I like the title. I really enjoyed the book. Obviously, I enjoy everything you do, but I really had a good time.

Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate you. I know you don't do a lot of, you do not do a lot of this. Well, but you're a special case, though. You're a 20-year Hall of Famer for us. I know.

Well, yes, but still, you wouldn't need to do it and I appreciate that you did. No, come on. All right, good to see you,

Chuck. Good. All right, that's it for the podcast. Thanks to Cousin Sal. Thanks to Closterman. Thanks to Gahow and Eduardo and Jack Wilson

and Chris and Kevin as well. We will be back on this podcast on Wednesday. Stay tuned. We're doing four this week. So we have another on Wednesday, another on Thursday. Don't forget about the rewatchables. If you like movie podcast, that is coming on Tuesday with what lies beneath.

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