The Bill Simmons Podcast - The Sports Repodders: Floyd-Conor, Yawkey Way, Kaepernick, and 'Pivot to Video' (Ep. 249)

Episode Date: August 21, 2017

HBO and The Ringer's Bill Simmons brings on Ringer editor-at-large Bryan Curtis and Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Gay to discuss Mayweather-McGregor media hype (5:00), politics playing a role in every sports conversation (18:00), the NFL's desire to control everything (25:00), LeBron's power in the NBA (34:00), writers weighing having a platform and getting paid (40:00), the problem with the "pivot to video" (50:00), Boston potentially renaming Yawkey Way after David Ortiz (1:01:00), and Peter Vecsey's beef with Magic Johnson (1:12:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's episode of the Bill Simmons podcast on the Ringer Podcast Network is brought to you by SeatGeek. That's our presenting sponsor, the easiest way to shop for tickets thanks to their revolutionary grading system. Buy and sell tickets in just two taps on your phone. Everything fully guaranteed. Hey, football fans, for $20 off your first SeatGeek purchase on NFL tickets, use promo code BSNFL.

It's a good one, right? I might have used that last week for Rams, Cowboys, and the Coliseum. You did? Preseason baby. $20 off. They probably paid you to take the tickets for preseason. Download the SeatGeek app or go right to SeatGeek.com. And thanks to SeatGeek for taking care of my son and my dad Friday night.

First Fenway Park trip ever, which we'll talk about when we talk to Jason Gay here on the Sports Reporters. Special podcast today, but a five-hour baseball game. Wow. The rarely you actually want the five-hour baseball game when it's your first baseball game. But he got that great Red Sox one. Whole thing was awesome. Thank you, SeatGeek. We're also brought to you by Miller Lite, the presenting sponsor of our newly relaunched website, theringer.com.

They are the official beer of The Ringer. That reminds me of Miller Lite. Send us some beer. We're out. There's no beer in that fridge in the office. Oh, absolutely. There's nothing in there. Come on, Miller Lite. Send us something. It is also South Week on The Ringer. I think we have five pieces of it, including the dramatic return of Rembert Brown.

Amazing. By God, that's Rembert Brown's music. Literally. Good God. So that was awesome. The Ringer NFL show heating up. Football's coming. I would recommend listening to that. The Rewatchables, we've done two. Few Good Men and The Departed, our newest movie podcast. And we have

another one coming this week. Let's just say Keanu Reeves is involved in this week's episode of the Rewatchables. And Talk the Thrones, our last episode is coming up because the last episode of this half season of Game of Thrones is Sunday night. Talk the Thrones. Madeline Rubin was shaken and almost in tears last night.

I was worried about her sanity, health, everything. I could only imagine because I was standing up during the climax, which I only do for sporting events. But I got up. I got out of bed and I was just standing in front of the television. It did feel like a sporting event. So they're at this whole other level of Game of Thrones. I watched that show for what it was, which was just really entertaining. They were like, no, this is the character. And I'm like, I'm an idiot. I'm just, this is a popcorn movie for me, but I really enjoyed it. But I also see all their points

too. Anyway, Talk to Thrones, hashtag Talk to Thrones if you want to jump in. I don't know if we're doing a pregame show or a postgame show or both or what's happening. Last but not least, I may or may not be doing a podcast with Kevin Durant this week. Ooh, part four. I want to throw this out there for the listeners. Email us at themailbag at theringer.com. I was going to do a little mailbag part of the pod with KD. Now don't send me emails like, Hey,

like I'm not going to read those to him, but if he, here's access to one of the two best players in the world, a finals MVP one of the best 20 players of all time now. And he's super candid guy. And if you want to ask him NBA questions, send them to us at the mailbag at the ringer.com. We will shoot some of them at him. You want legit questions, not the conventional Simmons mailbag question where it's a really funny thing. And then it ends in this little- Oh, you can do those too. Okay. Yeah. Okay. I might send one in.

Whatever you want, but don't do insulting questions because we're not going to read those. But if you want, we have't do insulting questions because we're not going to read those. But if you want, we have this natural resource who's ready to talk about basketball. And if you have questions. Ask me anything. Ask Kevin anything. Ask Kevin anything. A.K.A. Jason Gay.

Coming up. But first, the Rock and Roll Hall of Famers Pro Gym. All right. We are taping this on the day of the eclipse. Yet another overrated media manufactured event. It's content. It's an episode of the Sports reporters oh my gosh brian curtis editor-at-large the ringer jason gay um america's editor-at-large from the wall street journal and uh the sports reporters was brutally murdered by espn a couple months ago and we decided yeah we got to start trying to do this once a month now that summer's

ending yeah and we got regular shots jason's the only one who wrote a parting shot today i think he did we're gonna let him read it though right yeah at the end and we'll giggle we'll giggle like every 20 seconds like they used to on the sports reporters remember big belly laughs i i also think i'm the only one with a blazer and a tie on is that is that true? Yeah. Right now? Are you going somewhere? I mean, I have a bathing suit underneath, but I have a blazer and a tie for the camera shot. We're going to rip through these

lot of good sports reporters for August, especially. Topics, yeah. Wow. August, I thought you made a good point. You wrote about Mayweather-McGregor today. And you were talking about the three biggest sports events right now all have nothing to do with sports, basically. Which is really what August is made for.

But Mayweather-McGregor has become this manufactured, gigantic event that people are either feeling guilty about being excited for being shamed into not being excited for it but everyone is agreeing they're all going to watch it but it's turned into this uh this moral judgment which i don't totally understand can i pay my 89 dollars and watch it yeah i think i think we've all come to this conclusion right that we all feel shame at some level either high shame or low shame, but we're all in. We've justified it because we are America's content providers, right? And this is content this week. NFL preseason, eh, not really. Charlottesville fading from the scene. The eclipse will be over in minutes. Mayweather McGregor. That's it.

Great weekend. The weekend before Labor Day. There's nothing ever going on in sports. Jason, where do you stand on this fight? That's a funny thing. First of all, Bill, you're going to go for the standard definition at $89. You're not going to go to the 10-buck vector for the high-def. Oh, my bad. $99. Whatever the highest price is, I'm in. I mean, when this was announced, like everybody, I thought it was just this crazy cockamamie stunt. And I didn't even get the date. As you said, this is sort of a weird time of the year to have a schedule or anything. You wouldn't want to go to a wedding on August 26th.

And yet, there's some genius to this. I mean, we've talked about this before, but very quiet summer, no World Cup, no Olympics, nothing really substantial happening. They basically had the run of the last eight weeks, that press conference thing, which I agree with you, Brian. I, too, rewatched some of that stuff, and it's pretty tough to watch, and it's pretty actually dull for all the hype that it got.

But, man, I felt like sports radio should have been cutting these guys a check for all the free content and argumentation they've been able to have for the last couple of months. Well, you talk about we the one that said we had Mayweather-McGregor, we have LeBar Ball? No, that was gay in an email. Oh, that was Jason? Yeah, were the three you had, Jason?

Well, it's the summer of sports arguments without sport. You have Mayweather-McGregor, which is a stunt. You have LeBar Ball, who is a sports dad. I mean, I know it's connected, of course, to a son. And then you have the Kaepernick debate, which I feel is a really important social conversation to have about what's happening in this country, but also not really a pure sports topic. It's basically been the loudest voices in the room for the past eight weeks. And I can't help but wonder if this is

somehow connected to the climate that we're living in now that you know in order for anything to get any traction and for people to be having you know significant conversations especially in the media it has to be a very very loud volatile topic i think anytime something has sides that's where the argument seems to capture the 24-7 cycle if it's like you can take this side or you can take this side that's why kaepernick which just should not be going on as at the height that it's gone on for months and months and months here that's why it's still going and that's why just entire sports shows are revolving around this topic yeah i think if trump has done anything it's not make people louder because we've had loud probably for a long time, but it's made what you said, the idea of sides a bigger, there's a brighter line. We've always done sides.

Pete Rose in the Hall of Fame, Pete Rose not in the Hall of Fame. That's like an eternal sports argument. But I feel that the sides get more pronounced. You're more dug in and you're willing to say more maybe on each side in the Trump, in the age of Trump. So it's becoming more like debates. It's like, be like that Kirk Cameron debate movie. You just got to pick your side and really, really yell and argue it versus. But don't you think, don't you think there's something about the volume here and the acidity here? I mean, I went to the Mayweather-McGregor press conference in Brooklyn, which of all the press conferences they had was probably the worst. And Leonard Ellerbee, who's one of Mayweather's

guys, was giving a press conference beforehand saying like, look, these guys are saying terrible things. I know they're not saying the most politically correct things. And boy, they really didn't. I mean, it was pretty ugly at points. But this is what it takes now. This is what people want. This is what the world is about now. This is the currency. And part of me wants to roll my eyes and say, God, I hope that's not true. But there might be some reality to this that a generation now has passed of, I really sound like a sports reporter now, but like a generation of the reality television has passed now where

the world has sort of learned its lesson that in order to get attention, in order to grab eyeballs, that you do have to be loud and abrasive and caustic. And, you know, we've learned it in politics and virtually everything else now. I think the one thing I'd say that I got into this in my piece a little bit today was Jerry Cooney, Larry Holmes, 1982, Bill. 1982. That was this fight actually worse. Jerry Cooney, Larry Holmes, 1982, Bill? 1982. That was this fight actually worse. And in terms of being out there and being loud and being selling it in abjectly racial and racist terms, that was this fight. So I don't know that that's so.

I think part of the Mayweather McGregGregor thing is it's the bar bet. Would this guy beat this guy? Of course. This is the living. This is Michael Phelps versus the shark if the shark had been profiled by Wright Thompson. Holmes Cooney was interesting. I was glad you brought that up in the piece. There was this really strange time in american sports history and i wrote about some of it in my book from basically i think it almost started with with the first rocky movie in 76 and carried all the way through that holmes cooney fight and you you

read it when you read the old sports illustrated features of the books, when you look at how certain things were covered, there was this underlying mentality that blacks are taking over sports. What are we going to do? And you read all the old NBA stuff, like the famous Sports Illustrated piece that we've discussed on this podcast multiple times, where it's like, what does the NBA do? How do they sell this all black league to white fans? And there was this weird panic that when you read it now, it's incredible. You link to a couple of those Holmes Cooney pieces that are just staggering to read. It's like, we don't even know if Cooney's that good, but he's the great white hope we need. It's like, what? He's with Rocky on the cover of Time Magazine. Yeah. And Rocky, I mean, you look at some of the sports movies that they were making back then,

and Rocky's like, Apollo Creed was this Muhammad Ali champ. But those first two movies, yeah, it's a Muhammad Ali versus the average man. Those are the first two movies. The third movie is just racial. This is like Clubber Lang from the streets. He's the blackest contender possible. And he's just too dominant for Rocky.

And Rocky's now got to go back to the streets. And he's got... I mean, it's really a crazy movie to rewatch. And somehow one of my favorite movies. But that was that era. This whole Mayweather-McGregor thing is seem to pulling out some of the old DNA of that.

Yeah. I think so. In an uncomfortable way. Mm-hmm. Sort of like, how could you, I don't think we could go quite as far, at least the sanctioned bodies and journalists wouldn't go quite as far as you say that they would in 1982. Well, they wouldn't put McGregor on the cover and be like, the great white hope we need. Like that just isn't happening. But there is that kind of covert sense of that here.

And, you know, when McGregor is saying, dance for me, boy, at the press conference and saying it multiple times, I mean, I don't, what else do you take away from that? I mean, what's, what is, that is not the subtext. That is the text. Yeah. And that's not running away from it. I mean, what's, what is, that is not the subtext. That is the text. Yeah. And that's not, and not running away from it at all. The promotion,

not running away from it at all, you know, embracing that frankly, uh, and trying to goose attention for the fight. So, well, yeah,

I mean, I think that there are elements of this, you know, to this day. Absolutely. It does seem it's, it's, I mean,

I, I never enjoyed the press conferences and they made me uncomfortable. But now when you look at what's happened in the country the last couple of weeks, this fight in that context, the way they promoted it seems a little more insidious. It does. By the way, you talk about 82 being this kind of last gasp of, you know, white supremacy, you know, in sports. Oh, we're losing, we're losing our, we're losing our hold on this. We're losing our turf. And yet we, our hold on this turf. And, and yet we talk about the Trump stuff in the same way. There's a last gasp.

There should have been a lot of last gasps in American history. We keep gasping, gasping and gas. Oh, Oh, this is his last gasp of this white establishment. What, what, this keeps happening. Yeah. 2017, we thought it was going to be over by now. I mean, and keeping, you know, in mind that this is a podcast of three middle-aged white guys, I mean, the Kaepernick story, I mean, races at the front and center of the Kaepernick dialogue. Whether or not you believe that there's a football issue,

it's undeniably part of what has kept this issue front and center. It's undeniable what we're losing now is the nuances and i think part of it is how opinions are marketed even on a place like twitter where you see the headlines now and it's the headline tries to capture whatever the writer wrote in six or seven words. And you, I look at something like the Kaepernick thing and I think it's such a complicated story. It's a guy who, first of all, when you look at some of the quarterbacks who are starting for some of

these teams, like Jacksonville has a Blake Bortles, Chad Henney quarterback battle right now. And you look at that and you go, Kaepernick hasn't played really that well in four years, but he has played well at some point in his life during that Super Bowl run, the famous Packers game. And it seems like at least give him a whirl.

So you just like, you take everything out of it. It's like hard to believe they wouldn't at least try him and see what it would be like. On the other hand, like we went through this with Tim Tebow five years ago, where no NFL team seems to want to take a chance on a backup quarterback who's going to get an inordinate amount of publicity and attention. The Tebow thing established that. The coaches, they just don't want the reporters every day. Why isn't he playing? Is he going to play? Oh, he threw three passes today. They want to steer clear of that. So that's an established track record of we don't want our backup quarterback getting attention. But on the flip side, Kaepernick is probably a starting quarterback,

even though he's not very good. I don't think he can win a Super Bowl, but he's better than Blake Bortles. No question. So I see all the sides of this, but it has turned into the sports argument where it's either like you have to be all the way on one side or all the way on the other side. It seems like it's a lot more complicated on that. What do you guys think? I think this age of media and sports media, there's both less nuance and more nuance at

the same time. Yeah. I mean, I don't know that we would have gotten like the statistical proof of how good Kaepernick was that Bill Barnwell wrote or we wrote on the ringer or wherever in the same way, 10, 20 years ago. And then we wouldn't have gotten as many nuanced columns from as many people. But then there,

of course there's Twitter and the president of the United States, by the way, it's talking about Colin Kaepernick. I mean, this is different from Tebow. Obama did not come out and say, I don't think Tim Tebow should have a job. And any NFL owner is going to have to answer to me. He hires Tim Tebow to be the quarterback, because I don't believe in Tim Tebow.

I mean, that's what Trump said. There have been so many Trump things since, that was, I think, March, I want to say, April, somewhere in there, that we now have forgotten about that. Donald Trump said, don't hire this quarterback or else. I mean, that's just incredible. And on top of it, this social issue element of it has become such an exploding cigar for the NFL and for NFL ownership. I mean, they've tried to control it. If you believe that there has been some sort of collusion to keep Colin Kaepernick off a roster, now you have players across the league, high-profile players, players who are beloved, like Michael Bennett, Marshawn Lynch, who are also doing protests now. I mean, the idea that they were going to somehow contain this by keeping a guy who seems eminently qualified to at least be a backup in the NFL.

And we're really crossing the streams here, by the way, Bill, comparing Tebow to Kaepernick, because I think there were compelling football issues with regard to Tim Tebow's capacity to play in the NFL. I mean, I don't want to outrage Tebow Nation. He's a sweet, sweet man. But I don't think that from a playing quarterback standpoint, a Colin Kaepernick's resume is quite deeper. But the social element of this, it's just uncontainable. And so the notion that somehow you were going to be able to just keep a guy out of the league

to teach a lesson or something like that was just preposterous from the jump. And it shows how, again, it sort of points to everything we were talking about at the top, that, you know, we are in a climate now where politics touches everything. The idea that somehow you can insulate yourself in the sports world from it, that's just not manageable. You hear all the time from people, you know, I wrote about Kaepernick last week, got a bombarded with email from people saying, look, I don't want this in my football, you know, like, like peanut butter and you know, whatever. I don't want these things combined. You can't help it nowadays. This is the climate that we live in. Politics touches everything everything he was really bad two years ago because i remember picking against them every week because of how bad he was and it just seemed like

he had completely lost his confidence his mojo everything like he seemed like a guy on the way out of his league last year he was a little bit better i the interesting thing about tebow to me if if there was none of the tebow mythology that went with him, I actually think he would have been an interesting second or third quarterback for a team because his style was so distinct that when he came in and the scrambling, it was almost like this change of pace type thing. Some teams use their backup quarterbacks that way. Other teams want their quarterbacks to be a carbon copy of the guy they have. But I do think there was a place in the NFL for him. And there's clearly a place in the NFL for Kaepernick. At the very least, he's somebody that if you had a team like Seattle, where they have a quarterback who likes to play and roll out and do stuff, you would think Kaepernick would be a logical backup for them.

And obviously they didn't want it. I don't believe the collusion thing though, because I think these guys are too rich and too smart to do something that stupid. If that came out, do you know how much money that would cost them? Like the kind of suit that he could do against the NFL. I really,

I find it hard to believe that these guys are on some group owner text. Slack. Yeah, some Slack. Stay away from Kaepernick. Yeah, let's all agree not to sign him. I don't think they think that way. Well, they could all come to the same. What did you think about what they did down in Baltimore,

where according to reports, you had both Harbaugh and Ozzie Newsom okay with the idea of signing him, feeling he was a great candidate. And then the owner of the Ravens, Steve Biscotti, coming out and basically saying, we want fan input. We want the fans to tell us what you think, which basically seemed to be a flag that they wanted the fans to freak out and give them cover for not signing a guy who was very qualified to quarterback their team. I thought that was really shaky.

And especially that owner, who was one of the tightest owners with Goodell. And that was one of the times when I was thinking to myself, man, I wonder if Goodell kind of quietly told everybody not to do it. Who knows? What did the owner say? Pray for us? Pray for us to help us make this roster decision? Can I give another weird media angle to Kaepernick, which I think is a little bit underrated?

Please do. He hasn't talked to anybody for the last several months. And he's talked to Dave Zirin, but about community organizing and not football and not being signed by the NFL. You've seen Peter King and Albert Breer both bring this up. Yeah. We are so used in the sports media when a situation like this happens, you go to the sympathetic magazine writer, the magazine writer writes the sympathetic profile that tells your side of the story. He's not judgmental, but it is very clear that he is

telling your story in the magazine, either as told to or just as a normal piece. He hasn't done that. And I think that's sort of blown a lot of long-form people's minds because it's like, the market is crying out for that profile. And every magazine writer who is worth anything would love to tell that story. But he's refusing to do it.

Forget about the profiles. The Players' Tribune can't even get them. Exactly. And so, it's like there's this, and everybody keeps saying, well, he hasn't talked. He needs to talk. He needs to tell NFL teams. But when they say talk, they mean talk through me, talk through my writing. And I just find that very funny. And I find it, and I don't know why he hasn't done it other than he just doesn't want to do it. But I find it fun. He's not going through that media ritual that we all know so well. Or this whole thing has broken

him a little bit, or he's become a little more enchanted by the celebrity aspect of what his life's become. And he's out there and doing a whole bunch of stuff. Or he doesn't trust someone to do it. I mean, it's like, you know, it doesn't need Peter.

It doesn't think he needs Peter King to tell a story. I don't know. I mean, I can't take the sort of like, he has to be, you know, sort of both sides of the mouth. It seems to say like,

this guy needs to make a statement. this guy needs to give an interview, and at the same time saying we don't want him to be a distraction. It's one or the other. It's true. But the one thing that I think that, you know, him putting a little bit more of a public face on himself would help is he's put his money where his mouth is. I mean, this is a guy who has thrown, I guess, a million dollars plus now into community organizations, being very mobile in terms of the issues that he cares about.

And I was shocked by the amount of reader mail I got from people who are saying, look, if this guy has a problem, instead of kneeling for the anthem, he should be giving money to causes. Like, well, he is giving money for causes. He's actually doing what you want him to do. The fact that that message hasn't gotten out to people, I think is a reason for him to maybe be more public, but he's under no obligation to do that. And again, like if we're buying into the notion that teams don't want backup guys to be distractions or any guy to be a distraction, frankly, then it just seems ridiculous. The idea that you have to do some sort of like Diane Slayer sit down in order to

quell the nerves of GM. I don't think they mind the distraction if the guy's awesome. I think Michael Vick is a great example, right? Dogfighting. If Michael Vick was 27% worse, nobody touches him. But here's Michael Vick. He's incredibly

talented and people looked at it and then the Eagles were like, you know what? We believe in second chances. And they gave him a second chance. They gave him a second chance because he was one of the most athletic, talented quarterbacks we've had this century. If he wasn't as talented and athletic as he was, guess what? Michael Vick's not playing anymore. And that's how it would have played out. Can I ask a question? Yeah, go ahead.

This point has been brought up, I believe, on the ringer in several other places. And it feels very, very true to me. But I'm curious as to why you think it is, Bill. Colin Kaepernick's in the NBA. This is a non-issue. No one's talking about this. I mean, it might have been an issue for a couple of weeks, but it would have gone away completely. He wasn't starting or whatever he was as a basketball player.

Why is that? Why is the NFL so fertile for this controversy to rage and rage and rage? It's something we've talked about a couple of times on podcasts, but the perception of how NBA players would be treated if they were in the NFL and vice versa. And, you know, I was, I was saying how Russell Westbrook played football and Cam Newton played basketball. Cam Newton is just loved in a totally different way. And then somebody else said to me, no, no, the good, the good analogy is James Harden and Cam Newton is just loved in a totally different way. And then somebody else said to me, no, no, the good,

the good analogy is James Harden and Cam Newton, because they're both these really talented guys who have been awesome and, you know, been MVP candidates and they've had trouble in the playoffs. And, and if James Harden was an NFL player, there would just be like hot take after hot take. Does he take it seriously enough? All this stuff. So I do think for whatever reason,

the minds of the average sports fan processes NBA players differently than NFL players. That would be part of it. And the other part is there's a military aspect to the NFL and just like do your job. Nobody's bigger than the team. Keep your helmet. And the Goodell and those guys

don't celebrate nobody nobody's bigger than anyone else and i do think that plays into it and the nfl seems to be really really invested in keeping it that way does some of this too have to do with in recent history the biggest stars in the nba have been outspoken about this stuff lebron james carmelo, Chris Paul, Kevin Durant. You know, Tom Brady has not only not been outspoken, he has been kind of ashamed, not ashamed about his dalliances with Donald Trump. Drew Brees. I mean, we just named like Aaron Rodgers, you know, had some they have they have moments. But you would think Rodgers would be a much bigger presence with this.

He said and he's had a moment right when somebody said something during the national anthem a couple of years ago now. But I think when somebody like LeBron sets the tone, how can you be mad? What are you going to do? Get rid of LeBron James? There's no way. Jason, don't you think part of it is the mindset of the owners themselves, the makeup of of the owners and also the commissioner the nba is like adam silver who's definitely a 21st century commissioner half of their owners are guys that came from you know newer money tech industry hustled made it themselves the nfl is like

other than shad khan on the on on jacksonville it's 31 old rich guys. It really is. White guys. Yeah, old rich white guys. And it's, you know, NFL football is culturally about control, right? Controlling the team, controlling the play, controlling the message. And going back to your point about individuality and sort of, you know, these personalities being allowed to flourish in the NBA and not in the NFL, I can tell you, like, I had a conversation not long ago with a quote-unquote league source who was saying, like, there's a little bit of frustration in the NFL about the idea of the NBA just commanding all the attention for these individual personalities. I mean, we're in this great moment for the NBA with all these sort of, like, you know, really interesting individual people and then some great teams on top of it.

The NFL, you got Tom Brady and you got some sort of, you know, you got a handful of other quarterbacks and then some great teams on top of it. The NFL, you've got Tom Brady and you've got some sort of, you know, you've got a handful of other quarterbacks. And then Odell Beckham, but Odell Beckham, I can tell you, in New York is getting all sorts of grief all the time, even though anybody under 21 kind of adores him. They're not terribly comfortable at the idea of people breaking out and being individual stars. And that's a real issue for them, I think, going forward,

because you're not going to be able to strictly sell sports as an athletic product. It has to be personality-driven. I just think that that's the way everything is going in entertainment. And so if it's just like, oh, watch the football, and especially if the football is sort of bad, which a lot of NFL football was last year, that's going to be an issue. Hold this thought.

Wanted to talk quickly about SimpliSafe. Summer winding down, life's going back to normal. Maybe you're coming back from vacation. The kids are going back to school. Brian, your kid pre-K yet? Yeah, a little pre-K this year. Yeah, a little pre-K. How about you, Jason?

Yeah, pre-K, man. Doubling up pre-K this year. Yeah, a little pre-K. How about you, Jason? Yeah, pre-K, man. Doubling up this year. Great times. Great times. You show up at the end of the school year. All the kids are lined up. They sing some song. None of them know all the words.

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$100 off simplisafe.com slash BS. All right,Safe with two I's. $100 off simplisafe.com slash BS. All right, the irony of the individuality with the NBA and the NFL is that last decade, this was the all-time sore spot for everyone who ran the NBA and a lot of the owners too. They did not understand. And it was a perception that came out

of the 80s and the 90s and especially the lockout, which was so damaging for the NBA, where people were so critical of the players and the way they acted, the way they acted off the court, all this stuff. And you talk about 07, 08, 09, when the NBA really started to turn around with the personalities. And Kobe had his reinvention tour. LeBron and his generation are coming up and the guys were so much better at dealing with the media. And the NFL is just running amok

and having all this stuff happen off the field. And the people running the NBA are like, what the hell? Why are we considered the league of the thugs and the bad guys? Look over there, look at the NFL. And now 10 years later, that is flipped. And now 10 years later that is flipped. And now the NBA can do no wrong. And the NFL is just like an ongoing police blotter. Why do you think that changed Brian?

It's a really good question. I think, um, I think it's probably because I think the commissioner, as you said, becomes the sort of lightning rod, you know, but by the way, Adam Silver will have his moment, you know, it's gone too well for five months away. I mean, I'm waiting for the turn. I can't wait for the turn because I'm going to go back and I have the clip file, you know, of all the, this is the biggest, most, you know, the righteous man in, in, in the sports, you know, and I'm just going to pull all those out, you know, I'm ready. Come on, let's turn. Cause no commissioner get, even Roselle got, you know, he, he had let's turn because no commissioner getting roselle got you

know he he had some moments right it's like nobody goes the whole way he's had the best five-year run of of good pr i think anybody's had yeah yeah and and you know he's he's sort of he has to he should write goodell a thank you note every day because this made his job so much easier yeah because whatever he does whether it's on a tricky issue like domestic violence, whether it's on all this stuff, he just, Goodell is going to do a worse job. Yeah. So it's a layup.

I think that's got to be a lot of it, right? Yeah. And I think obviously the football players, there's more of them. You're talking about probably four and a half to five times as many NBA players. And there's just been more incidents that I think people can point to and the leagues handled stuff badly.

But I do think the NBA has caught this wave for whatever reason. I don't know the full explanation of it. The guys that are coming into the league, they're almost like, I hate to use the word trained, but they're just well-trained with how they handle the media. They're savvy to how they handle their public persona. Think about that. They're on Twitter.

They're on Instagram. They're on Facebook. They can communicate directly to anybody. This should be going way more wrong than it is. If I was 21 and I had access to all this stuff, I would have been a disaster. Jason, why are these guys so much better than the previous generation? I think because they know they have the power.

I mean, LeBron knows that he is the most powerful person in the NBA. If it doesn't work out for him in one location, he can go to another location. If he doesn't work out in the NBA, he can start his own league. If he doesn't work out in basketball, he can start a media empire. He's an empowered person and it's sort of been a pleasure to watch, frankly, in the last half decade, especially sort of the growth of his social consciousness and the fearlessness with which he puts himself out there. I think of in the NFL, guys are incredibly wary of saying anything that could be turned into some sort of controversy. But LeBron has not shied away from it in the slightest.

And also, I do think that there's a little bit of a media component to this. I do feel like, in addition to the fact that ownership is more conservative, the league ethos is more conservative, I do feel the media in the NFL is a little bit more conservative too. I mean, not necessarily the case of Kaepernick or something like that, but you see it in something like the Ezekiel Elliott story, where when I see that stuff talked about, domestic violence talked about on sports radio, I mean, it's like watching somebody juggle chainsaws. They're not equipped with the, you know, understanding of either, you know, the, the, the incredible, um, you know, severity of the

accusations and charges, but also the legal system in order to have any sort of like, you know, cogent conversation about it. Yeah. By the way, when we, I love it when we talk about the power of athletes, let's, let's, let's see how this manifests itself with the next CBA negotiation. You know, we're already on the D Smith tour again. Oh, D Smith's going to do it. You know, he's going to, he's going to win it this time. They're not going to let old Goodell get away with it. I just, I, I'm in the, and I'm a pro labor guy, but I'm in the, let's see this actually happen before we get really excited about how powerful these guys are.

I mean, are they going to win a labor negotiation finally? They did a bad job with the last CBI. I had him on my HBO show and it was me, him and Gladwell. And we'd talk for 45 minutes because he was filibustering on every question. I like him. He's a nice guy. I think he's smart. But he was definitely a politician with some of his set answers.

They did not do a good job with the last CBA. There were a lot of holes in it. They gave Goodell way too much power. You look at some of the skill positions. Let's take Le'Veon Bell, for example. He should be holding out. That running back position, you're out of the league when you're 31. These NBA guys, they know they're going to have a 16, 17, 18-year career if they're great.

LeBron can sign these one- and two-year deals because he knows he's going to play until he's 40. He's controlling his own destiny. No football player can do that. Maybe Brady, maybe Rodgers, the quarterbacks. Kirk Cousins. Yeah, I guess Kirk Cousins by default because he's got a dumb owner who keeps signing into these one-year deals. But even Brady has to take less on the salary cap to make the team better. So does Rodgers. And when you think about the billions and billions and billions they're making, but then also streaming money coming. The NBA, they had some article about the NBA,

like basically Chinese League Pass. Did you guys read that article? No. So they had League Pass in China. I forget the number, and I don't want to say the wrong number, but it was something like $20 million per team or something. It was up just as free money from China because all these people are getting in the league pass. They split up.

I think it was like a $500 million deal. And they're just making money hands over fist. And even though this current CBA has been really good for the NBA, all these players are noticing all these stories. They're seeing where all the digital money is going. And with the NFL, I don't think it's going to translate the same way it feels like the players are becoming less and less powerful you know yeah but that runs in in in contra to everything we're saying here i know they have their own voice on twitter they're bigger than ever they can say what they want lebron can say what he wants without uh fear right and yet you know when is the w going to come at the

bargaining table well you could argue it already came because like if you're lebron james you're making 30 million dollars a year but then you're also making 40 to 50 off the court and but what about on the club but just make both on the court and off the court all the money. Somebody said about Steph the other day, he's worth $50 million. Maybe. Yeah. I think they make a lot. I don't know. It was a bad deal.

The last deal was a bad deal for the players. That's not an argument, right? I think they could have made more. You don't think that they look at Neymar and say, hey, wait a second. Obviously, European soccer model, you know, obviously European soccer model, you know, you have competing leagues, you know, you have NBA versus NBA versus NBA fighting over talent, but you don't think that they look at a superstar like that and say like, hey, wait a

second, I'm globally important. I'm as big as Neymar, you know, maybe, maybe not true, but you don't think that they look at those numbers and say like, we're vastly underpaid in terms of our value to the league and to the franchise. I know, but did you see what that Neymar deal was? I mean, most of that was the transfer fee. I don't think he gets that. Doesn't he just get... No, no, I know he doesn't get the 220, right.

He gets, like, his salary is probably right around what LeBron makes. I think, you know, they use the NBA as the tool to then go make more money elsewhere. LeBron's has a chance to be the first billion-dollar athlete while he's still playing if he plays some of his business stuff right. KD's over there in Silicon Valley just jumping in on all these different things. They're using the NBA as a platform to try to achieve all these other things. It doesn't seem like there's that many NFL players. They're not around long enough. LeBron's in year 15.

There's no NFL player that plays 15 years unless they're a quarterback at this point or some grizzled defensive end. So I think it seems like the shelf life of some of the contracts or the careers, I would say, is a bigger obstacle. Wait, we have some more stuff we got to talk about. I have a perfect pivot.

Pivot? If we want to pivot. Why don't you pivot? I'm going to pivot here because you're talking about measuring your salary against the platform. Can we talk about the idea, because it comes up in sports media a fair amount, the idea of working for free or working for peanuts.

There was this conversation about SB Nation recently and whether or not they were paying people fair value for their work. This is a constant conversation on the web. SB Nation is not alone in this regard in terms of people starting out for very little or no money with the sales pitch being like, look, we're going to give you an audience. We're going to give you a platform. We're going to give you a platform. We're going to make it look nice, and anyone can look at it. And a lot of people are taking Internet sites up on that offer, but at what point does it stop being a business model and be something else, i.e. exploitative?

And I hear all the time, you know, I'm not a big fan at all of the idea of working for free, but then people I respect and like a great deal say, look, it allowed me to get in the door. It allowed me to get my voice out there in a way that I never would have been able to do on my own. And so it was worth it for me. I'm skeptical. What do you think, Brian? A couple of thoughts. One is I think my first experience with this personally was 10, 15 years ago when the college football message board thing was really coming about and you paid $10 a month. And there were a couple of journalists who gave

you the inside dope university of Texas in my case, but it became clear over the years that the value to the site, wasn't the news, which would get on Twitter in five seconds anyway, but the people that were posting for free on the college message board, though the unpaid labor, as it were giving you barbecue recommendations and letting you know in Texas when Whataburger brought the spicy ketchup back, you know, that kind of important information. I think that was it, you know, and there's a little bit of a parallel with the SB Nation thing. I just, you know, I think the thing that was most shocking to me about that article, which

was on Deadspin, we should say, was the SB Nation people saying, oh, no, everybody here is paid. And it was actually just not the case. Everybody was not paid. And there was no way you could think that everybody was paid. And, you know, it's not so it's not it's not a thing to say, look, here is our business model. We, you know, we're going to pay a couple of people. We're going to pay certain people. We're going to give a very tiny, barely stipend to other people. And then other people are just going to write for free. It was, oh, no, everybody's paid. Well, everybody's not paid.

So I think the first thing you have to do if you want to come to grips with all these models is actually say what the model is. Well, I just look at, like, from my own standpoint, 1997, I'd been out of the newspaper business for almost a year. And there's this digital city Boston site that has a movie guy. I'm trying to be their sports guy. I would have done anything to get read by anyone. And I think they paid me $50 a week for the first three months. And I just busted my ass and eventually I got to $200 a week. And then, um, I was still bartending on inside for a year plus. And I can't remember exactly

when I got to the point where they were paying me like five 50 or 600 a week, but it was probably like about 15, 18 months in no benefits. Um, And I did that site for four years just trying to get seen. And it sucks. And it becomes discouraging after a while. But on the other hand, there's no other way I could have created a break. So I look at somebody like, you know, look at Kevin O'Connor, one of our young basketball writers. He was writing for, I think, Celtics blog when we saw him.

And I don't know what he was making for them. He's probably making a little, but not a lot, but we never would have seen him. 300,000 is the starting. But we, we wouldn't have seen him if he wasn't on that site. So it's a catch 22 where you can't get seen unless you're writing and it can be SB nation could be fan sided. It could be all these different places. It could be deadspin.

It could be wherever. But you have to get seen somehow. How are you going to get seen? Nobody's just going to say you're hired. I think that happens pretty rarely where you're coming out of journalism school, you just get a job in a newspaper. That seems less and less conventional these days. How do you feel about it, Bill? Well, I was just going to say I look at it. How do you feel about it now that? Well, I was just going to say, I look at it.

How do you feel about it now that you're on the other side of it? Now that you're on the side of hiring? Obviously, the motto we had at Grantland and the motto we have here is that we pay people who write for us. And I think we have over 70 people. We probably have 45 to 50 on the writing side and they all, you know, they make money. The sports reporters is grotty.

J.S.K. not getting paid for this podcast. I think I don't know what I would do if I was a 23 year old writer. And I think a lot of it has changed from where it was 20 years ago because there's more people trying to do this now and yeah my it's funny people would ask well if you ask me what's my advice i'm a 23 year old i want to write about basketball someday what should that what should i do i think my advice would be the same as your guys advice right go out and write and try to come up with original content and try to get seen by

the right people and do whatever it takes to get there. All right. So what does do whatever it takes mean? Well, how do you get seen? Well, you probably get seen by going on some of these sites and trying to get seen. And that's the part that is both fair and unfair, I think, because you have a platform to get seen. But on the other hand, you're providing labor to somebody who's basically turning a business into it. So I don't know. I don't know what the right and the wrong answer is. You seem, now Brian seems sad. It's hard to be happy in this day of pivoting to video and writing for free. But that's a whole different conversation.

No, but I think there's two different ways. There's, there's a way to see it through the eyes of the young journalists. I'll do anything to, to get some eyeballs on me. It's love of the game. It's I'm trying to make a career, but then they're seeing it through the giant media entity that is making money in perpetuity off people working for it for free. I just think that's two different sort of ways to look at it. It seems less romantic when you look at through the second lens if you have a site if you have a site that uh has been on some place for seven years and you're still not making money from it at that point you you know it's it becomes harder to justify and you probably become a lot more bitter about it um so i i don't know and

some of this has to come down to how long do you do something before you give up? You know, I talked about this. One of the last podcasts I did for ESPN on my old podcast, it was ESPN.com's 20 year anniversary. And I did a whole podcast about kind of how I got there. And there were two different points when I almost gave up, you know, 1996 after I left the Herald. And then in 2000, year three of my site, my site was good. I had an audience, but I couldn't break through. I couldn't make that get over the hump. And I remember going out to dinner near the end of that summer with, with, with my future wife and my mom and my stepdad. And I was like, I think I'm going

to give up. I think I'm going to, maybe I'll go into commercial real estate, you know? And I think a lot of writers have hit that point where you just go, is this worth it? Is this going to happen? And what's interesting is the Defiant Ones, which I thought was incredible, has a similar couple spots about Iovine and Dr. Dre in there where Dr. Dre is like, like i have the i have the chronic it's this great album nobody wants it should i give up should i quit is was this album just not good and then he finds jimmy ivy and i think you know i i can't imagine how many people we see that here in la with actors people who move out here all of a sudden they're 35 they think they're going to be john ham it's like john ham took a while to become Jon Hamm.

It's still going to happen for me. And then they're 38, they're taking another job. So I don't think this is a situation unique to writing, but it sucks. And sometimes I'm sure there's people that have given up that shouldn't have. I think Brian's right on the, you know, from the writer angle, the hustle part

of it, I think, has always been part of the business. And no matter how far back you go, there are people who started as copy boys or people who are making Xeroxes and stuff. That's always been part of the culture of journalism or really any business. I think that where the dynamic has changed with low-paid labor or no-paid labor is, it's one thing if you were doing it for your small- you know, small town country, you know, weekly newspaper or some small daily that was barely returning a profit. It's another thing when you're an apparatus of this like big dot com machine where like venture capital in the millions, tens of millions is pouring into these things. And they're still at the bottom of it, all this

unpaid labor. That distresses me. And it actually makes me root for things like, here's another pivot, guys, but the athletic and what they're doing, which is a, I don't know if it's a new model or just frankly sort of old-time newspapering in the respect that, look, it's a subscription model. They're going to pay people wages. They're going to be reporters who have sources, and they're going to travel, and they're going to do this stuff, and we're going to ask them out. I don't know how it works. It hasn't been spelled out to me in a way that i can totally comprehend it but it's hard not to root for it a little bit because they seem to be

doing it right uh i have a thought on that quick break to talk about bow and branch bone break you like sheets brian yes i do like sheets do you like having good sheets tate doesn't care. Every time I do Bow and Branch, Tate feels awkward. I think I'm old enough to know the difference now. Yeah. Well, I think all of us remember being in college with bad sheets. Guess what? Great sleep starts with the right sheets. They're more affordable than you think with Bow and Branch. They make the most comfortable sheets you'll ever sleep on. Fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, wake up ready to kick some ass.

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I'm going to have Jim Bankoff come on who runs Vox media, um, probably in the next few weeks when we'll talk about all this stuff, because I think it's a, I think it's a fascinating topic and I know he has some thoughts on it too. The pivot to video part of this whole thing, which we have not talked about on the sports reporters, but has become this little crutch for yeah basically people who have decided that their writing part of their website didn't work so they say pivot to video i don't i think it's it's a fancy way of saying our old objective didn't work so now we're trying this and there's been four

or five what five examples maybe at least of this yeah but on the other hand we haven't seen any site that was having like dramatic success on the writing side just kick it to the curb

and pivot to video so it does seem like it's all part of the same issue. And the issue is it's really hard to make a website. It's hard to make a website that has the right level of quality and the right balance of stuff. And we found this out the last, you know, year and a half with our current endeavor, it's just hard. And, you know, they reached a point on the internet where there was

an incredible amount of content and you knew there was going to be some sort of supply and demand issue. The pivot to video part, there's a soullessness to it that I think really bothers people. How do you feel about it, Brian? It's the euphemism. Yeah. I mean, it's pivot to video, not, not you're fired. You're laid off. You've been pivoted out of a job. We saw this with the New York Times the other day when they were in the process, and still are, I guess, of dumping their copy editors. They said, well, everyone's invited to reapply for their old job. That also means you're laid off. That's the same thing. Yeah, I think that's the soullessness of it. And by the way, I think it's this is the oldest journalism thing, which is the writers hate the TV people. And I'm talking to two occasional TV people here, by the way.

I hated myself. age white guys were growing up the local sports paper guy said oh that idiot on the local news he didn't know anything about sports right talking head with a hair piece and that guy doesn't know anything and that is still the thing and i maybe i feel like a prince knob now but when i see somebody write a really good piece i say i wish i'd written that or i wish i could have written that story yeah or i wish i had thought of that yeah when. When I see a colleague or a peer get on TV, I say, I wish I had his job. I don't say, I wish I did what he did on TV. I said, I wish I had the job, the money, the visibility. And that's an important difference, I think. And I think that's kind of what informs some of this, too.

Well, it seems like a lot of people that go on TV, I mean, this is even a slightly different topic than Pivot to Video, but I think we're in the current age of there are people who want to be on TV. Stephen A. is born to be on TV. I know he started as a writer, but he loves it. He can do three-minute monologues. Give me the ball. Give me the ball. I want this.

Yeah. He goes first take for two hours, does his radio show, goes on SportsCenter. There'll be an NBA game he'll come on after. Like the dude loves it. Then you see other people that, especially ESPN, you've seen that more and more people that are writers that seem like they're on TV because you can make more money on TV, but it's not their first love.

And they're not people that, you know, love the red light of it. I think Jason and I are probably leaning a little more to that camp. I love being on the NBA show because I felt like, even though the actual experience was pretty miserable, I love the idea of this great game ends, and the first people who are going to talk about it right after the game, you can be one of those four people. That's why I wanted to do the show for those two years. Cause it was awesome.

Then doing an actual TV show is a lot harder. And then you realize like, eh, this is for certain people. I'm not one of them. Um, but there is something cool about the immediate reaction. Jason was in the grind where he's doing a show every single day. And that's when it becomes like, oh man, what am I doing? And I'm sure you felt that way, right? For hundreds of hundreds of viewers. But even if you had had a ton of viewers,

like the grind of doing that show and having to come up with takes and doing that, did you like that or did you not like it? I mean, there were moments I liked it more than others. I mean, what I found very quickly was that there's not a lot of correspondence between being, you know, a writer and being on television or certainly not good at television. And there are people who are incredibly gifted on television who you wouldn't want to be writers and vice versa. I just think that the thing about the pivoting to video, which makes me wary, is that there's just a very tactile reason for this happening, right? It's about embedding

advertising, available advertising, into these videos. It's really as simple as that. And what I find pretty preposterous about a lot of the explanations for this is that it's being audience demanded. I don't know about you guys, and maybe this speaks again to our middle-aged whiteness, but like, I'm not like getting excited about watching videos on Facebook and social media and so forth. I'd much rather sit and read a 1,200-word article than I would watch even a 90-second video. And it does make me think, you know, there are places that have done terrific jobs with it have figured out

cracked some kind of code in terms of how to do instant delivery video but it does make me wonder sometimes is the destination is where we're going in writing as a journalism tribe is our destination all just to be crappy

like local news stations is that what it's all just to be crappy local news stations? Is that what it's all going to come down to? Because the quality control is all over the place. Well, I think there's more and more creativity coming into video. It's certainly something that we've been having fun, like trying to figure out good ways to do this and reach people right away and all the different layers to that. It seems like we're in the early embryonic stages of that. I think part of the problem right now though, is that

the old internet model with the way advertising on websites and stuff like that, it wasn't a good model. And I think it took a lot of, it took some, some, well, most companies a long time to realize that. And once they realized that, the model shifted on the people that were making content. And they were like, oh, no, it was great before. It was great before. It wasn't a great model. And now we're seeing whatever this new model that's emerging,

it seems a little video-heavy right now. The stuff always moves in trends that are almost too severe. So now it's like video video video it's like well there's a lot of ways you can integrate sponsors and there's brand and content and there's podcasts um there's video ads at the beginning and the end of stuff there's there's ways you can do like we we're doing like theme weeks like we did this south week and get a sponsor for that like that you can get more creative I think the old way of here's a banner for your Peter King column. You get a banner on top of it and here's the price.

That model is just going away and it's not coming back. And I think part of this is too, we haven't seen as much great web video yet that us print kind of that us print snobs go oh i want to do that i mean i think if 10 years ago we said oh we're all going to pivot to podcasting all the print people would have gone oh my god it's the end of what is the words yeah but then there was cereal and there was mark maron and there was the sports reporters perhaps most importantly and all of a sudden everybody's like oh where's my podcast and if don't have a podcast, I don't exist in this media world. And podcasting is okay, right? Video.

You're the only person who didn't say, where's my podcast? You said, Brian, where's your podcast? I was like, Brian, here's your podcast. And Brian's like, I don't want it. But yeah, I do think there's more opportunities for talent, which can also be a bad thing. Yeah. You're a writer in your late 20s, and you have four different ways to go. Yeah, what's up, Jason?

Not to turn this into a recode conference, but what's your take on subscription-based websites and whether or not they can work? Going completely behind a paywall and making your business sub-based. You must've thought about it. I think it works if, if you're the New Yorker or Washington post or the New York times and you have an incredible amount of equity with, with, uh, your audience and the model that I think is really good, that is going to work and succeed

long term is the model where here's some of our stuff and you could read 10 of our pieces a month or 12 but if you want to if you want the whole shebang here's the subscription thing that model's working i think it's very hard to start from scratch with a subscription model. We looked at that. I'm not saying it wouldn't work, but the problem is you're walling off the new people that can come in, the people that would potentially want to experience it or like, oh, I want to get in on this. When you're creating a moat around your content from the get-go, I think Glenn Beck found this out way back when.

Like Glenn Beck did his own site, right? Started out, had X amount of people, probably I think it was close to a million. I can't remember the numbers. And then the problem is he started with that base, but you can't grow it because nobody can read your stuff. So then it just starts going down. So I think for the athletic, I think the key will be making sure people can read some of

the stuff to suck them in. I think if they just put a motor on it, I think it's just riskier. I don't know if it'll work or not work. I'm rooting for those guys. I'm fascinated to see how it works. Yeah, me too. I think you want people to at least read a couple of your best things. So I'm sure they'll figure out the balance.

What about the hyperlocal angle? There's the guy, I guess, Greg Bedard, I think, in New England, who's doing it with New England. It's kind of obviously a very fertile sports world right now and doing obsessive Patriots coverage. And I know that he's basing that model off of... Brian, can you remind me who the guy in Pittsburgh

is who did this a couple years back now and has this pretty thriving operation? A guy he was at? I don't remember his name either. I know you're talking about that. Yeah. But a really inspiring case of someone from the ground up building something that worked.

And the idea of being just super obsessive, hyper local. And if you've got to have every last thing about every practice rep that happened at Patriots practice, then this is your place. And just go for the total junkie. Yeah, I was going to say, if I had to bet, and I hope they all work, but if I had to bet, I would bet on local. And then even within a city, one team, right? Like we've seen the athletic Bay area. They're just like, we're going to, we're going to hire every Warriors writer. Every Warriors writer is going to be here. So literally if you, if it's not Haynes on ESPN, like you have to come here for Warriors news. And that's really smart because then if you kind of wall off as much as you can,

you kind of wall off a team. I think that's a good idea. Here's my fear. ESPN tried this. They had ESPN Boston, ESPN Dallas, ESPN LA, ESPN New York. Was there one other one? That's all I remember.

You would think like, so they definitely had those four and they put money behind it and they try to attach it to the ESPN radio stations and they hired good people and all this stuff and they abandoned it. And I don't know whether they abandoned it because it was managed poorly because the audience wasn't there. I know like with ESPN Boston, part of it was, it was really hard for them to compete with just the DNA of the Boston Globe

and the Boston Herald and just generations of people that are just used to buying those two papers. And maybe that's flipped now in the middle of this decade where people are more likely to pay, to put their credit down for stuff where people are more used to getting stuff in unconventional ways. But I know that that ESPN model, cause I was there for that. It didn't work as well back then, but I also think it was mismanaged too. And I think part of the problem with those sites is they didn't, a lot of them didn't have like the one draw like ESPN Dallas.

You must've gone there, Brian. Sure. You know, it didn't feel organically Dallas, right? That was ESPN zone, really good writers,

really good reporters, but it didn't, it somehow it's felt like a a little part of a larger borg entity rather than a dallas thing right i think weirdly i didn't like that you know yeah it was a little like how esp in the zone never is pin zone what was it called yeah that was felt like an espn zone it never felt like they belonged to whatever city they was in they were in and that's what killed them uh quickly let's talk about proper cloth every guy knows it's hard to find a dress shirt that fits maybe the collar is too tight the sleeves are too long the shirt's too loose i have some good news

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Enter gift code BS to save $20 on your first shirt. Again, propercloth.com slash BS. Gift code BS. We want to talk about... Can we pivot? Can we pivot? Speaking of Boston, speaking of local to Yawkey Way. Yeah, let's say.

I want to hear Bill Simmons on Yawkey Way. It was a big topic this week in my fam. Plus, my son was there for Fenway and the whole thing. So, obviously, they had to do this. I agree with it. I love the idea of calling it Ortiz way i think it's great i think it symbolizes you don't want big pappy way no i'd call it david ortiz way and just call it ortiz way big pappy way i don't even what is it sounds like a like a chocolate bar or something um

the timing of it was atrocious it it it opened the door up for them to seem like they're pandering or reacting. What I didn't like about this, again, I think they should do it. I thought it was long overdue. And the Yawkey, even though he did so much good stuff with the Jimmy Fund and everything, the history of the Red Sox and the racial history of the team is just part of the DNA of the team in a bad way. And if I'm a black Red Sox fan going to a Red Sox game and say, oh, I'm going to walk down Yawkey Way, the guy who wouldn't sign Jackie Robinson and told them not to sign Willie Mays and we didn't have a black player until 1959. It's like, I wouldn't feel good about that.

Here's my question. Ortiz was retiring last year. They always said the big obstacle with Yawkey Way was Mayor Menino. And the Red Sox claim, and I've met a lot of the Red Sox guys. I really like Sam Kennedy. He said they've been talking about this for 10 years and that Mayor Menino, it's just they couldn't get it done. All right. Well, Mayor Menino left two years ago. Ortiz was retiring last year. Isn't that the perfect time if you're going to, you know, kind of quietly move away from Yawkey

and start fresh and get rid of it and name it after Ortiz? Why didn't you do it last year? Why are you doing it now? Now they're opening that, now they're in this debate that they put themselves in and they're going to be accused of pandering and overreacting on this stuff. And meanwhile, the reasons to do this were genuine and real and good. And they should have done it a year ago. What do you think, Brian? I think with a lot of national with national emergencies, create opportunities to do what you wanted to do already and should have done already. Right. People are pointing out that all these Confederate monuments that we could have taken down any time over the last hundred years are coming down because of what Donald Trump said.

Yeah. In two different occasions over the last week. And, you know, it could be read as pandering or it could be read as here's something we wanted to do and need to do already. It is now to the level of the presidency of the United States, more than a local Boston debate. And this is the time to do it States, more than a local Boston debate. And this is the time to do it. And we're going to do it. And we're not going to wait around. Even Henry said in his email that he sent to the Herald, you know, when you have leadership like this in the White House, this is no longer tenable to wait on anymore.

It's time to move. What do you think, Jason? Well, then you add the dynamic that John Henry owns a newspaper in Boston, which is kind of fascinating as well. I mean, you can also dictate public debate a little bit, not to say that he has some sort of bat phone to the Globe Newsroom, but that's part of this too. You know, quite honestly, I understand what you're saying about the optics are a little weird because it's coming right after Charlottesville, but I just feel like, you know, not to be cynical about it, but nothing lasts anymore. You know, we're on to the next in terms of controversies, and I don't think this is going

to be some sort of thing that's going to stick in a negative way to the Red Sox if they make this change. I think that most people are in general agreement that this game's got to go. Yawkey's got to go. David Ortiz is an ideal replacement for many, many different reasons. I think people are going to be okay with it, and the fact that it had some sort of, you know, it was in the vapor trail of Charlottesville, it's going to be forgotten very quickly.

I hope you're right. I wish they'd done this last year, but I hope you're right. I just know that growing up, you know, outside of Boston, and there's this great book by Al Hirschberg, I think was his name. It was called What's Wrong with the Red Sox. And it was like basically the history of the Red Sox up to that point. And to find out as a little kid that your team could have signed Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays, but didn't because you had a racist owner,

you know, that I was six years old. I'm like, what? We wouldn't sign. He had Willie Mays. We couldn't get him. And it felt like it was part of the DNA. And in a weird way, like karmically, who knows how much that explains the 86 years, but I'm sure from a karma standpoint, not great. And when I was growing up,

the team was always really white and just did not have a lot of black players. And it, it, it, it started a shift in the nineties. Then it really shifted with the Ortiz teams and all that stuff and then it now it is where it is now but um getting rid of yaki way is a good thing i know we do this with every single news event but if i went to 10 year old bill simmons and or let's say

20 year old bill simmons and said someday president don Donald Trump will lead to the renaming of Yawkey way. What kind of odds would you have given me for that statement? You know, it's interesting about the Yawkey way thing. I mean, maybe it's just me, but I never really called it Yawkey way. You just go like, yeah, let's meet outside Fenway. It wasn't like, yeah, it's like, if it was called Yawkey Park, this would be such a bigger deal. And I'm sure it would have already been gone, but Yawkey Way, it's like, I don't know. I agree. I always say, you know, Lansdowne Street to me is always the more known street,

you know, it's the street behind the Green Monster where all the nightclubs are and stuff. Yawkey Way, yeah, I guess. Yeah. And the thing that would have really shocked 10-year-old Bill Simmons was the fact that Fenway Park was still an operational ballpark. I mean, that's the thing that I can't believe is actually Fenway still exists. I want you to know that it would have shocked 20-year-old Bill Simmons and 30-year-old Bill Simmons equally. From my old website that we talked about earlier, I remember writing a big piece about how we had to dump fenway i mean the new owners came in and really fixed it and made it better in a lot of ways but there's still 10 000 terrible seats and half the seats face center field and it just seemed logical like all right the thing we like about fenway park is the intimacy in the wall you can just build another park that looks exactly like it now they figured out how to modernize it and now you see

what happened with new Yankee Stadium, which all the Yankee fans hate. It's like, God, thank God nobody listened to us. Nobody listened to the Get Rid of Fenway Park crowd because places and museums. I mean, a million years ago, one of my first jobs, I worked at the Boston

Phoenix, which is right next door, or was right next door because it doesn't exist anymore. But the Boston Phoenix was right next door to Fenway Park on Brookline Avenue. And this was when the debates were raging about replacing Fenway Park. The new ownership group hadn't come in, and there was a debate over, okay, we're going to put the new park in South Boston, or we're going to put it in Fort Boyne Channel. And then there were the state Fenway Park people who were universally regarded as the crazies.

Like, these people were completely off their record. There was no way they were going to save Fenway Park. That was just a completely stupid and romantic notion. And yet, here we are, you know, 25 years later. Yeah, they were like the 9-11 truthers of the Boston sports scene in the late 90s. And when the new owners—see, what we didn't realize was we had horrible owners like we had tom yaki and then who by the way was trying to get a new stadium built in the mid 60s and there's going to be a dome with the patriots there's a great sports illustrator article about

him 1965 that lays out like we know we need a new stadium. Throws out a little racism in there at one point. But by the time it hit the late 90s, the Red Sox fans were just like the guy who just had the worst girlfriends of all time, who had no idea that real love existed. And these new owners came in and they were like, hey, we're going to fix up Fenway. And we're like, no, we don't trust these guys. I don't trust you. And then they fixed it and they made it a lot better. And they put seats on the Monster, which was just completely flummoxing. And they added the club way up behind home plate.

They added the seats on right field. They made the runways nicer. They added more food. They blew out the street behind the park and now it's fun to go there and they saved it i never ever in a million years would have expected it was savable and i jason i remember all that stuff they're going to knock down the phoenix building and put the park next to fenway yeah turn fenway into like they were talking about turning into hotels at one point. But I think there's two great things about Fenway.

One, so my son was there and it was like, I wanted him to sit on the side behind the Red Sox dugout because that's the side where you go in and it's just green. Everything's green and you see that giant wall and it's just like this incredible, awesome experience. That's one. Two is how intimate it is. And the fact that it's hard to get seats and it's 35,000.

It's like trying to get into the hot restaurant. Whereas you build, has anybody ever said, man, I can't get in a Yankee stadium? Never. Hard to get seats. You can get seats anytime you want. There's no urgency to get seats. So it's kind of genius. But this is where we're going, right?

I mean, this is where we're going with the sports experience. I mean, you guys have talked a little bit about the Home Depot thing, which I think will be interesting to watch with the Chargers. I mean, I wish it wasn't the Chargers. I wish it was a really hot ticket.

But the idea of NFL football being played in a 35,000-seat stadium, if you talk to anybody in the NFL, one of the issues that they really have in the league is just the live, the in-game entertainment value, whether or not it's worth it for people to go. You know, the end-of-season tickets, you guys have written about this as well. You know, the idea of people putting down thousands of dollars to go see an NFL football

game is just getting more and more ridiculous sounding because, you know, A, it's too expensive, but B, the television experience is so good. And so how do you, you know, create an experience that people want to pay top dollar for? And I think intimacy is going to be the way to do it. The 80,000 seats arenas are just crazy town. Of course, the Chargers got 21,000 for their first game in town, so they didn't even fill 32. Right. Preseason, though. But still, first game in a new seat, just the curiosity factor of the soccer stadium.

Yeah, nobody cares. The fun game is going to be the Raiders game. Because I already know that all the Raider fans want to go. There's only 30,000 seats. A lot of the seats are owned by season ticket holders. And it's going to be really hard to get tickets. But to me, the Giants stadium was the one I never understood. That was the first one anyone built where they didn't have to go 85,000 or whatever.

Cause you know, if you're in that top tier, like I look at my buddy, Jay bug, who his seats got upgraded eventually, but him and his buddies would go to the Patriots games every Sunday and they would show up, you know, five buddies would go to the Patriots games every Sunday and they would show up, you know, five, six hours before the game, they tailgate, they'd stay for five, six hours after, and going to the game was just a part of it. So it didn't really, you know, obviously they would have loved to have better seats, but they just want to be in the building. But really the whole day was the event. And now that now a lot of these teams have changed that where you can't tailgate until it's like two and a half hours for the game, two hours after you got to get the F out.

And now you're competing against 80,000 people coming in and out of the stadium within this seven hour timeframe. And it's just not fun to go. So I think if, if like the giants had to do that over again, I'm sure they would go 50,000. I'm sure they would get rid of that top deck because if you're not making that an all-day experience and just your experience is only, I'm in traffic for two hours. I get to grow a quick hot dog. Now I'm walking up to the third deck, which is going to take forever. I'm really far away. I don't get to see other football games.

It's not as fun. And I think that's why these games don't get to see other football games. It's not as fun. And I think that's why these, these games are kind of drifting away a little bit. Yeah. But I feel Jerry Jones is pulling in the other direction and I, my uncle has a good one, but he has upper deck tickets in AT&T stadium. And I go in there and it feels like I'm in George Lucas's Galactic Senate. It's awesome. This huge thing. And it feels like I'm, but even in the upper deck, it feels like I'm watching the all 22. It doesn't feel like I'm watching a football game live.

You're not there for the game on the guys in the field. I got to agree. If I understood like schematic football, I would have an amazing view. But I'm like, I can't see. I just like, I'm looking at dots running around. It's amazing. I mean, it's not, it is not a fabulous football experience live. I think in general, when they start building these new stadiums,

I'm going to be really interested to see what happens with that top tier of cheap seats and whether the teams are going to have to weigh a moral obligation, right? Some fans can only afford the cheaper seats, so they want to take care of those fans. You don't want to disenfranchise them. But at the same time, those are the seats that anyone can get anywhere on any secondary market now. And, you know, you throw in the traffic and the food,

and it's like, oh, great. I'll pay $10 to sit way up there in a Clippers game. Well, now I also have to pay for parking. Now I got to worry about what I'm doing for dinner, whereas I can just stay at home and watch it at home. So you have to figure out whatever that seesaw balance is. And I think a lot of these teams are going to struggle the next couple of years with it.

Don't you, Jason? Absolutely. And okay, what do you think? Let's take LA, for example, with the Rams. You know, the plans are already done, but if you throw out the Olympics, you know, which is this wild card for stadium design, but if you throw it, pretend the Olympics aren't happening, what would to you be the ultimate or the optimal seat capacity for a new Ram stadium? 40,000, 50,000 certainly wouldn't build an 85,000 seat place.

I mean, I might be biased on this because I feel this way about NBA arenas too. I feel like they should be like 14, 15. But for me, football, it should be like 50. And I would put, you know, make the lower tier more seats. Have the first set of suites about midway up. Second tier for the fans. And then the top tier, you'd make suites. And maybe over the seats, maybe you have standing room only if people want to go and do that.

But I would cram it in. I just think it's a better atmosphere. The parking and the traffic for football, I think is a deal breaker for a lot of people now. They just don't want to sit in traffic for no reason. You're right. It's design rather than size. Because going to watch the Rams in the Coliseum the other night,

it's great. It has a billion seats, but it's great because we're all one thing. Yeah. And even if you're up high, you're in this one section. But where'd you park? Three levels of suites, uh, I, there were two guys standing outside a mini mall commercial parking lot and they said, it's $25. And I was the only person there. And I said, and they put, they showed me into a space that said tow away zone. I said, I'm not going to be towed. Right. And they said, Oh no, we're

going to stay here with your car all night. Yeah when i came back they were sitting next to my car it was kind of unclear whether they had the actual rights to the space but it worked yeah yeah because like if you do that let's say the rams are in the playoffs in seven years it's not realistic but um ever so all those people coming in and out for a rams game but you don't have the college football rules where you could show up seven hours for the game. You have the rules. I don't know what the rules are for the, for the football,

but there are two and a half hours before it's going to be a fucking cluster fuck. It's going to be terrible. What's going to be fun about that? I hate, I mean, I'm anti lines, anti traffic more than most.

Like I'm not even like, I hate going to Disneyland, which is un-American. So you're putting no hope that Elon Musk is going to solve this whole thing by the time the Ram Stadium is open? We've seemed to be putting a lot of hope in Elon Musk for a lot of different things.

Quick topics, because we got to roll. The death of the personal essay. what are your 30 second thoughts i did it die did i feel like it's dying really i think we had the heyday of the personal essay from like a couple of years ago to 2014 and now it seems like it's it's not as potent anymore yeah though I still feel you have the reported quest that is intensely personal. So it's shifted to that. Right.

I go off to the Pacific Northwest in search of the perfect salmon, and then it's really about my father's death or something. What do you think, Jason? Well, I think the thing that definitely died was the Why I'm Leaving New York essay. That one is dead. I don't think I need to read that one more time. I think the personal essay will always survive in some form because let's not forget that the hate read is a very healthy proportion of the audience for the personal essay.

So as long as you have – it sounds sad, but as long as you have a significant portion of your reading audience reading it because they can't stand it, there know there's always going to be a market for you 74 year old pete vesey breaking the scoop of the summer on patreon and i checked i found out about it early because randomly somebody i was following on twitter on saturday night tweeted it out and i went he had like vesey had like hundred subs on this patreon for five dollars a month but i'm sure that's it's mushroom for that i didn't even know he was reporting again i didn't know he was writing again has this scoop that is 20 hours ahead of everyone woj the terminator shams all the espn people has this, wrote in the piece that he didn't call the Pacers or the Lakers because he didn't want them to know they had the scoop because he thought they're

going to give it to somebody else so he'd get screwed in the scoop. But he's like, I know I'm right on this. And then it turns out he was right. Brian, weirdest reporting moment of the year? Weirdest and maybe the best. Because I want Peter Vesey versus NBA stars, right? Woj versus LeBron, Stephen A. versus KD. That was a warm-up. This is the true... This is old school, right? And you saw him get into it with Magic on

Twitter. That was amazing. It was unbelievable. It's like the Paul Newman and the Color of Money. That's a very charitable rendering of Pete Vessie. But can we just do one second on what a figure Pete Bessie is for your audience members who may not be terribly familiar with his heyday? I mean, this guy was sort of the pre-everything in terms of the NBA insider and pure New York character, but translated over to the NBA on NBC. And, you know, there was nobody like him. And everybody that everyone loves now in terms of NBA insider demo is a debt to him.

I loved his Friday column. He actually had a little bit of an impact on me because I loved reading him. I like that he used, he used to do column contributor. You know, he had good jokes, but he would also, his friends would be in the column, which actually ended up influencing me. He had this guy, Frank Drucker, who would be like, calm, calm castigator, Frank Drucker. And Frank Drucker would have some great joke. Like, this is great. This guy brings his friends into it.

So for better or worse, he might influence that. But Pete Vesey, he was just a flamethrower. He's amazing. And now he's 74 and seems like he has an ax to grind against the Woj type of reporter. And I'm kind of excited to see him battle all the old school people if he's really doing this. Yeah, the next front in this war is not Magic Johnson, it's Woj. Oh, yeah. Woj versus Vesey.

It seems like he feels like agents are leaking stuff to all these reporters. Which, by the way, is 1000% true. And if he starts really just throwing bombs, I think it'll be a fascinating little wrinkle to our 2017-18 season. Last thing we want to talk about. I think you brought this up. Was it one of you two in our emails about the lack of profile exclusives? It was Jason. Yeah. About the Sam Darnold, three different profiles.

Yeah, I mean, look, there have been a number of really good Sam Darnold profiles in recent weeks. There was one, I believe the first was Bleacher Report. Jeff Perlman did a really good one. Then SI followed up, did a great one. ESPN has another one. All of them individually are really good. But I can tell you from experience, magazines that you do, like Celebrity Stories, they're always negotiating a window of exclusivity with these celebrities. There's a reason why you don't get four Emma Stone profiles coming out at the same time, because the magazines have said, look, you can do other press well we do this we're going to be

your one long lead time publication here and you know sports is obviously a different element but not that different and it just streams to me like does it put ESPN at a disadvantage to be like the third out of the gate with a big long Sam Darnold profile you've already read the other two are you going to read another one or maybe you're just a Sam Darnold obsessive and you can't get enough. I don't know the answer to it, but it just strikes me as kind of weird because in another genre, you would never see this happen because editors would just fight it out. I think we should have some full disclosure here on the Sports Reporters that the person who just made that statement wrote the cover story for Vogue this month on Jennifer Lawrence, speaking of exclusives. J-Law!

Don't bring that crap into sports, you glossy magazine writer, you. Jason Gissick, nobody else has this J-Law profile, it's just me. And it's just, I just want to point out to you, suckers, that that's the only Jennifer Lawrence profile you're going to read.

It was so third person, the way he put that. No, but I actually think it is in sports. I mean, Lee Jenkins, you know, how many Russell Westbrook profiles did you read? Well, Lee Jenkins is getting the exclusive for all the, he's now in that NBA agent playbook where it's like, we want to get this out. All right, we'll give Lee Jenkins the feature. We'll do this podcast and we'll do this uninterrupted. Like there is a playbook now and you can see they follow it yeah and i think espn mag has their share but i think

ronda rousey or something right if i remember correctly i mean she did other press i think the thing about sam donald is if colleges could do that they would but there's just not the line that there is for russell westbrook big nba star tom brady whatever i think peter king on with tom brady after the Super Bowl, right? How many Tom Brady things did we read? We read one. So I think the exclusivity is, if it's not there, it's certainly creeping in. Yeah.

And I would remind everyone, listen to my Kevin Durant podcast this week. Speaking of exclusives. Send the emails into the mailbag at theringer.com. No, I think with the, it's funny with a college – a feature about a college athlete is 99% of the time going to be boring because the college athletes just – college athletes and coaches are all both terrified to say anything, make any waves. But at the same time, this guy might be one of the best quarterbacks of this decade. And if you're an editor, be like, if you can get time with with that guy you take the time sure i'm sure we're writing about him he's fascinating oh yeah no i get the appeal and and the individual pieces were all really good it's just a question of like is there going to be reader fatigue and do editors have an obligation to like carve out

some kind of like you know exclusive window yeah i i look at to me that the the sweets by now is like the hideki arabu piece where it's somebody nobody even thought to do a piece on him and that was a really good piece and yeah it stood out nobody else had it the piece that rachel did today for gq about dylan roof was really great incredible really really good job. And she went old school on it. I mean, she reported it. She spent months and months on it and talked to everybody. And I thought it was a really special piece.

But yeah, it's tough. Jason, you have a parting shot for us? You're going to take the parting shot this week? Oh, yeah. So if we're going to be loyal to this classic format, we're supposed to end with a parting shot. And I believe as the guy who gets up three hours earlier in the day than you West Coasters, I'm prepared. So should I look straight to the camera as I do this?

Yeah, look at the camera. And you have to start to chuckle. Hold on, Brian. Do you have your fake laugh ready? Yeah. Are you doing fake chuckle or fake laugh? I'm going to do the kind of Hardy Bill Conlon laugh. Yeah, I'm ready.

All right. I'm going to do the loop. I'm kind of jealous of this guy's points, and I'm going to undermine it with my laugh laugh. All right. I say this cautiously as a father of a youth baseball player and also as someone who fears the wrath of helicopter sports parents. But I think it's time to tap the brakes a little bit on televising the Little League World Series. Make no mistake, the Williamsport tournament is about as good as it gets for an American sporting event. But back when the sports were potters, where children way, way back in the pre-iPad, pre-Snapchat 1800s,

we maybe saw a final or a semi-final at best. Now, like everything else in sports, the Little League World Series today has gone to saturation coverage, thanks to television's hunger for any live event it can program. You can watch a month's worth of qualifying live. There are Little League players and teams who are almost overexposed by the time they get to Pennsylvania. Believe me, I know that playing in this tournament is a once in a lifetime thing for kids.

I really could have got this job, guys. Yeah, this is great. I'm really enjoying this. You needed like an eclipse tie in, but yeah, you're rocking around here. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Listen, I know this tournament is a big thing for kids. I would have given away the family dog for a shot at it.

And being on TV is unbelievably cool. But amid all the rethinking we're doing about exploitation in college and high school sports, I'm not sure we should be picking off kids in elementary and junior high for four weeks of global corporate entertainment. It may be a corny, corny, corny, it may be a corny passe sentiment in 2017, but I don't care. Gentlemen, let the kids be kids. Oh, wow. Great ending. Great. Yeah. That was good. I will tell you this. Oh, good. Can I, is that a short list for a Peabody, you think?

I mean, we'll submit it. We'll see what happens. Contractually, we have to, I think. Yeah, it's in your contract. I will say this. As the father of a 12-year-old daughter who just was in a soccer tournament all weekend, that at one point seemed like it was going to come down to penalty kicks, but they lost 2-1 in the finals because the uh the home team had crooked refs but uh i can't imagine watching my kid on espn in a little late game how petrifying

that must be when they show the the parents in the stands i would just be shitting a brick like and not because you want to win i mean obviously you obviously you want your kid to win. You want them to do well. But you're really thinking like, I don't want them to embarrass themselves. I don't want them to be the goat. I don't want something terrible to happen would be, I guess, would be the overriding fear the whole time. I'm not positive it should be televised. I still, I've never really fully come to grips with it. It's too young. 12 year old.

My daughter's freaking 12. Like I'm around a 12 yearyear-old all the time. They are not mature yet. Like, it's a lot to ask to put these kids on ESPN and HD. And it does, I don't know, it does leave me unsettled. You guys don't know yet. Your kids aren't old enough. Yeah, not old enough.

But great extra points for referencing your kids in your parting shot. Thank you. I think that's gold, right? It's good. If I had a counterparting shot, I would have brought my kids into it. Um, well, this was, this was awesome fellas. Let's, let's try to do this more often than once a summer. Thanks to proper cloth. Stop wearing shirts that don't fit. Start wearing custom shirts that fit perfectly because you created them by answering 10 easy questions.

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Thanks to Miller Lite, the presenting sponsor of our newly relaunched website, TheRinger.com. Don't forget about South Week. Don't forget about our last episode of Talk the Thrones. Don't forget about the Rewatchables. New podcast coming this week. Keanu, what are you working on, Brian? Ooh.

You don't have to tell us. Anything you're excited about? I feel you always ask me this, and I always kind of bat it away. You're always up to stuff. Yeah. Just a little twinkle in my eye. Yeah. Stuff coming. Twinkle. Yeah. Jason, what about you? Going to the fight. I'm going to the fight. Great. Great. Try it. Here's, here's my dream for you this week. All right.

You've won assignment. Yeah. You have to get into an Arash Markazi Instagram picture. That's your one assignment for this week. He is one of my five favorite Instagram accounts. And I just, just go look at his Instagram account at the pictures and I want to see if you can get in on one of those. That's my one at one assignment for you this week.

All right. I can do this. I know I can i can do how late do i have to stay out to make it happen though i don't if you see him just tackle him and get in get into a picture my favorite accounts are are him um hall of meat skateboarding accidents and drunk people doing things which i just found out about in the last week which is just tate do you know about that one no that sounds good tate if you Tate, if you're ever on that Instagram account, you'll know something has gone horribly wrong with your Ringer experience.

Jason Gay, a pleasure as always. Brian Curtis, thank you so much. Don't forget about Brian's piece today on The Ringer, and we'll be back two more times this week on the Bill Simmons Podcast. Until then.