The Bill Simmons Podcast - The Sports Repodders on Super Bowl Coverage, TV Nostalgia, and the Winter Olympics (Ep. 323)

Episode Date: February 7, 2018

HBO and The Ringer's Bill Simmons is joined by Wall Street Journal sports columnist Jason Gay and Ringer editor-at-large Bryan Curtis to discuss new media's impact on Super Bowl LII coverage (8:00), broadcast experimentation in the NBA (22:00), the best announcing teams (38:00), Chris Berman's return (52:00), and reasons to not care about the 2018 Winter Olympics (1:01:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's BS episode on the Ringer Podcast Network is brought to you by ZipRecruiter, our 2018 presenting sponsor. Innovation in sports have always given teams the edge, whether it's the RPO in the Super Bowl, damn it, or Houston shooting 43 threes a game, the same goes for hiring. ZipRecruiter on the cutting edge of candidate matching technology that learns what you're looking for, identifies people with the right experience, and then invites them to apply for your job. A whopping 80% of employers who post a job on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate through

the site in just one day. My listeners can try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash BSZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. Meanwhile, my old Grantland teammate, Jonathan Abrams, wrote a new book. It's the definitive oral history of one of my favorite TV series ever, The Wire. It's called All the Pieces Matter, The Inside Story of The Wire. Abrams interviewed absolutely everybody. The book comes out on February 13th.

You can order it right now on Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, or wherever else you buy books. Curtis, are you excited for the new Abrams Wire book? Huge. Little taste of it on The Ringer today. I'm very excited. Yeah, we did. We put a little excerpt on theringer.com today, which is just loaded with awesome stuff from the weekend and from this week.

In particular, Kevin Clark's piece right after the Super Bowl. A pseudo-gamer, Brian, was really good. The gamer's back. The gamer's back. So check that out. Good luck to Abrams. That's our dude. He's a Grantland OG. Wrote some of the best things we had on Grantland, including the oral history about the Artest melee, which had one of my favorite stories where he went to, he was trying to get Steven Jackson and hit him up in the locker room. And the PR person asked Steven Jackson, if you want to talk about the artiste melee and Steven Jackson said, I've been waiting to talk

about this for 10 years. It's like exactly what you want to hear when you're working at oral history. So anyway, Abrams, it's called all the pieces matter. The inside of the story, uh, inside story of the wire, check it Pieces Matter, the Inside Story of the Wire. Check it out. Ringer NBA Show goes through five episodes this week, and we have a bunch of stuff coming for the trade deadline. On this podcast on Thursday, I'm waiting until the end of the trade deadline, and then I'm doing a podcast because I feel like a couple things are going to happen.

Don't forget to check out Ringer 360, the video we did of the Super Bowl, of all of our staff, mostly Ph we did of the Super Bowl, of all of our staff, mostly Philly, watching the Super Bowl unfold. It's really cool, done by Jason Gallagher. Coming up, the sports reporters, Brian Curtis, Jason Gay. But first, Pearl Jim. All right. Jason is on the line. Brian Curtis is on the line from Australia. Usually we do this with me and Brian in person and Jason on the phone. Hopefully we don't step on each other too much.

Lots going on in sports. The Super Bowl just happened. I don't know if you guys heard. Philly beat the Patriots. Jason, did you cover the Super Bowl? I did. I did. How was it? And I have to say, it was one of the best Super Bowls. You know, we've been on this good streak recently of some rather fantastic Super Bowls, but man, the ringer is Kevin Clark.

He is like, he's turning into the new Peter King. That guy just had a gaggle of people around him at all times. I used to work with Kevin back at the Wall Street Journal, and I don't even recognize the guy anymore. He has such fancy clothes. He's practically an aristocrat now.

He used Super Bowl week for what it was. He went there, he did a whole bunch of stuff and now you just blew up his head and now we're not going to be able to fit it through the office door. The Minnesota thing that stunned me, only because I've been to these,

so you can kind of read between the lines with the tweets and the stories and all that stuff. It's just what a bad idea it is to have the Super Bowl in a place that's zero degree weather. It's really one of the stupidest ideas ever. It's supposed to be this fun thing where you're outdoors and you're doing all kinds of stuff for, you know, New Orleans, Miami, all the Super Bowl cities that we knew would be awesome. And this one, everybody has to stay indoors because it's zero degrees and people are just aimlessly walking around a mall. Whose idea was this? Brian, why did this happen? I think my favorite part was all the media members who did the ice fishing stunt. Like I made it like a short list and somehow we brought together

Deadspin and Al Roker fishing stud. Like both, both came to that idea separately. Yeah, no, absolutely. It was, it was very, very funny. Have you, this seems to happen every year, but I noticed it the most this year that the reaction cycle is now instantaneous for the Superbowl. In the past, it would be like the Superbowl happened. You'd watch ESPN for like an hour and a half. People would weigh in. Maybe as Twitter evolved this decade, maybe there's stuff on Twitter.

Now it's like everything's up within a couple hours. I just look at what we did. We had GM Street with Tate and Lombardi had a podcast within two hours of the game. We had probably five pieces up. We might have even had a piece about the halftime show up that might have been up before the game ended. There's just this flood of content that was Sunday night, West Coast time, it was easy to read. And then by Monday, you know, Sal and I taped a podcast at 1215 East Coast time.

And I'm almost thinking like, was this too late? Do people even care about this game anymore? What do you guys think of the reaction cycle? I mean, I think it's absolutely true that there's just an incredible volume of analysis immediately after the game. I mean, it almost feels like watching the post-game shows. I mean, I remember I got back to the hotel around midnight and watching the ESPN late post-game show with Mike Greenberg on a Cincinnati--strewn field and feeling even that was kind of behind the game cycle.

We pretty much moved on at that point to what are they tearing down in Philadelphia? And Malcolm Butler, those were the two stories that the process of the game itself kind of fell old. That's why the Butler story stood out to me so much because it was the one thing that we could not instantly figure out. Right. Yeah. It's like you have all of Superbowl,

all of NFL media in the same place. And all of a sudden Butler's crying on the sidelines before the game and everybody goes, wait, what? And Michelle Tafoya can't get any answers. And they kind of got a few answers, but not many out of Bella chick after the game. And it was like an actual mystery. Yeah. And kind of still is.

It was amazing. You know, one thing I've noticed, and it doesn't just happen in sports, it happens in everything, but there's kind of a follow the leader with bigger stories that kind of unfold. And everybody just kind of swarms on that one story. And you saw that happen with the Malcolm Butler thing.

What I thought was really weird was, first of all, he didn't have that good of a season. No. Second of all, and by the way, I mean, I have all the emails and texts from my buddy Hench. Like, he used to – we had this joking text during the year, like the last big play Malcolm Butler ever made was the Super Bowll interception.

Like it was just running joke. Like we're complaining about him, but he, meanwhile, he's his hero. But I was amazed. Nobody kind of flipped it around and we're like, are we sure Malcolm Butler would have made a difference?

Like the front seven didn't touch falls for four quarters. He did whatever the hell he wanted. And you're telling me like this one defensive back thing was going to swing the game. It was just, it's strange to me that the conversations all seem to go down one direct line and there's, and then you have like the crazy hot takes and there's no nuance anymore. It's really frustrating. I don't know if this message got garbled on the way to Australia,

but did Stephen A. Smith really call the decision to bench him pure evil? Yeah. So there's where you get the hot takes, right? That was amazing. Pure, pure evil. You know, it seems like maybe like 10% evil at most decision to bench Malcolm Butler. I think, you know, when the Pats lost the game, you know, he fit, right. It fits the narrative you're talking about. Cause the first thing you do is say, well, what happened and who can we blame for this? Right. And if you can blame Bill Belichick, which is something you can't really have do very often or ever, uh, for making a personnel decision, right. It's an incredibly appealing story. Jason. It is. And, and, uh, you know, I did a little bit of listening to boston sports radio yesterday and you hear for the first time it's basically 15 years people complaining about bill belichick

and saying you know he might be just a parcells guy i don't know about him you know i'm not sure about belichick uh and it's the typical reaction. You have to lash out somewhere. You know, it's tough to argue with anything the Patriots did offensively, but defensively, I mean, it just felt like they did not make a stop all night. The other part to me is also like, what does the city of Detroit feel about Matt Patricia right now? It's kind of hard to throw that Kyle Welcome Parade after that night. Yeah, I didn't understand.

I think this has happened with Belichick in the past, with Romeo Cornell and Charlie Weiss, and even McDaniels when he got a job super early. You feel like you get a Belichick disciple, and you're just basically getting Belichick, and I'm not sure that's the

case. Patricia, I think McDaniels is going to be an incredible head coach. And I actually like the fact that he failed in Denver because I think sometimes when you fail like that, you learn for the next stop, basically. But Patricia, I'll be very interested to see what happened because this was a team that, you know, in any big game, was playing from behind and basically needed a superhuman performance from Brady.

Plus, Alshon Jeffery throwing us an interception. Like if he just catches that or it goes out of bounds, they're up by two touchdowns and the game might end up being a blowout. But do you guys – I'll start with you, Brian, on this one. Do you guys like Super Bowl week anymore? Do you feel like it's week anymore? Do you feel like it's this necessary? Do you consume the content? Are you like, oh, cool, I get to read a week of Super Bowl stories, or do you just shut it out? I consumed almost nothing. I consumed a bunch of

Twitter headlines. It felt like we have gone, and I know this is a gradual process over the years, but there's like a bar stoolization of the media that's sort of happening at something like Super Bowl where it's all bits. Yeah. And it's all gags. And, you know, there's a couple like, you know, somebody went to Fargo or I think actually two people went to Fargo to ask, you know, what are you sad that Carson Wentz isn't playing in the Super Bowl? And, you know, somebody went to and did the full story in Texas and all that stuff. But there was almost nothing. And it seemed like every time I was on Twitter, somebody was wandering around the mall, making fun of the mall or ice fishing, like I said earlier.

And yeah, it just seemed very, very bit heavy. You know, it's really tough when you're there for a week. I went to a bunch of Super Bowls and then just stopped because you go and you're expected to write every day about something, but you're basically writing about the same things everybody else is writing. And you're assuming that everybody else cares about what it's like there. Because really, if you're going to a Super Bowl and you're there on a Monday, your main job is what's it like here, in my opinion. But I'm not sure anybody cares. Like for me, it's like I saw Minnesota last week and I was like, what's it

like there? It's cold. Okay. I'm good. I don't need anything else. Oh, there's a giant long mall to walk around. Alrighty. But what I thought was really fun and, you know, we experimented with it a lot at the ringer and I thought it worked were, you know, like stuff like Instagram stories. We had Roger Sherman there the day of and he was just doing these little 12 second videos of here's what it looks like outside the stadium. Here's what here's how much cocktails cost. Here's where you get beers. I was like riveted because it would that's the kind of stuff that i've never really seen i don't know what the minnesota stadium's like and i wonder like brian talked about the bar stylization um i wonder if that's

the future of the super bowl it's just these little instagram videos and clips and here's what a party's like and here's what the max do they even have the Maxim party anymore? I don't know. Here's what the Maxim party's like. There's Chris Berman with 20 fans around him, and you're just experiencing it with these little videos. But where does that leave you, Jason, the old school calmness, calmness? I'll tell you where it leaves me.

It leaves me flying in on Saturday night, which is what I do this year. I probably shouldn't have been to that. Wow! But, I mean, let's not forget, this Super Bowl was denied what would have been one of the great Super Bowl storylines of all time, which was the Minnesota Vikings. They were just one win away

from being the first ever Super Bowl host team in their own stadium. That would have been pretty awesome. I think it would have justified all of the nonsense of minus-five-degree weather. And, you know, let's face it. New England, we've been here before. What possible storyline is there to go into the game talking about? Philadelphia is not the most adorable team ever either. And I think a lot of the general sporting public was kind of, you know, not into seven days of buildup than this one. Fortunately, again, the game turned out

pretty terrifically. And I want to ask you, there was a funny transition that happened after this game, which was basically this had been a season of piling on the NFL. We've never seen anything like it in terms of just, you know, the protests, the politics, all the complaints about the quality of play, the pretty quarterbacking, just the general malaise around the sport, declining ratings and so on. And then lo and behold, people are writing these, you know, treacly tributes to the sport saying, this is why football is football and it will remain part of the American experience. It was an amazing transition from what the first five months of the season were all about. So I noticed that and I agreed with it because the game was awesome. I think that's why people get so frustrated when football is that bad in September and October, because they know there's just a higher level to be played. And when you watch bad football, you're comparing it to games like Super Bowl 52.

That's what people want. I think the problem is abolishing the practice time and the scrimmages and all the stuff that they took away and the offseason workouts and everything that you kind of need to do to get ready. Combined with some of the safety stuff and everything else, it's just it takes kind of nine to ten weeks to get there. I thought the Steelers-Pats game was really good. But that was, what, week 14 or week 15. It really does seem like you have to treat the first nine weeks as the preseason. Speaking of treatment, Brian Collinsworth, enemy number one with the Eagles. Now, three years ago, he was enemy number one along with Michaels with the Patriots because when

they beat the Seahawks, Patriot fans like myself were furious that they kept bringing up Deflategate. They brought it up in the fourth quarter when Brady's coming back. They're having a conversation about it. There's four minutes left. Even after, it was kind of like, well, you know, and they just seemed to try to taint the Patriots as the game went along when it, at that point it was just allegations you noticed. And you wrote about for the ringer, how the Eagles fans just turned on Collinsworth in a massive way as the game was going on.

Is just this the future of sports? Every announcer is just going to get shit on and that's what their life's going to be like. It's the present of sports. It's what it is right now. I mean, I think they would all tell you that. And, you know, it's funny because the things they were mad at him about were not the deflate gate

thing, which you're talking about. It was more like I've looked at this replay and I didn't think this was a catch or I'm not sure this is a catch or I'm just trying to predict that the referees aren't going to call this a catch after reviewing it. And that's what I'm mad about. And to me, there's no doubt in my mind, if the, the pats had, you know, if those were two pats touchdowns and he's looking at the same replay, he would have called it exactly the same way. Right. But he's sitting there in real time, trying to parse out the catch rule. And he and Michael's of course, referring, you know, mentally to catches they've seen overturned this year. They have no idea what it means.

But Philly fans just turned on. It was like Paul LaDuca was going after him on Twitter, which is just really random and funny to me. Everybody, like, how dare you ruin our Super Bowl? You were the soundtrack of this game. When I rewatch this game, I'm going to have to put up with you. It's just hysterical to me. I will say that if they had had Twitter during 2003-2004

baseball playoffs, I shudder to think what would have happened to Buck and McCarver with the Red Sox fans. I tremble with fear for them because I can tell you I would have been all in going after those dudes every time they brought up Babe Ruth, all that stuff. I think we have a natural reaction to just hate announcers and they're interfering with us. And

I found like on NBA League Pass, when I watch the games now, I just mute the TV. I put on podcasts because what am I going to hear from a local announcer that is going to enlighten me or help me or help me understand basketball or anything? They're all like super biased. I include my beloved Tommy Heinsohn who I do not mute, but they're all super biased there. They don't really have anything to offer. They're all guys who retired 30 years ago. They didn't even play against any of the guys that I'm watching and they just offer nothing. So here's the solution, mute it. And it's a second, we always talk about second screen with, uh,

how this is a second screen world now to me, it's a, it's a second set of ears world. Like there's, you don't have to listen to TV sound anymore. We have so many better ways to do it. Do you guys, do you guys ever mute the announcers or no? That's so funny you mention it because one of the things they hand you at the Super Bowl is a little audio device that you could clip into one of your ears whereby you can hear the NBC feed while you're actually at the game. I never do it because it just feels like somehow wrong. I mean,

I get the idea you're going to get information that the announcers don't. Sometimes they don't think that you can't see just you're there at the stadium. But it just seems really unnatural, the idea you're being there and feeling the whole environment and you're somehow putting yourself back in the television experience. Brian, do you remember when, I'm going to say early 80s,

you might not remember this, you might not have been old enough, but NBC ran a game with no announcers? Oh, yeah. Famous story. Yeah, absolutely. It was weird. And I think Fox did one later where they just had Jimmy Johnson and Terry Bradshaw, if I'm remembering this correctly, and there was no play-by-play guy. And Jimmy just sort of, Terry turned into the bad play-by-play guy.

And Jimmy turned into the bad color guy, like halfway through the game. Yeah. The total travesty. I'm very old fashioned. This is, I like to, again, if I'm, you know, league pass is a different story, but if it's like this, I want to be in uncle Al's hands, right? Yeah. I want him to guide me through this, especially when it's in

the fourth quarter of a really exciting game like that. Like I, and when I go to games and sit in press boxes, especially a football game, for whatever reason, I miss the commentary and I miss the announcing and I miss just that, that soundtrack and, and those guys who are so good at what they do sort of bringing you through. And that's why the outrage, and I totally understand. It's a huge job. It's Twitter. You're going to be under the microscope. Nothing you can say is great.

I get mad at announcers. And by the way, when you're talking about being mad at announcers, it's because when your team is playing, you're just in such a terrible emotional state, and you just want to blame somebody. It's true. And it's like, there's Chris Collinsworth. Why not him?

Let's be mad at him. Yeah, people even turned on Romo a little bit as the season went along. Cause he was too chatty and all this stuff. Romo's like the best innovation we've had with announcing. I noticed during this Superbowl particular, and I always thought Michaels and Collinsworth were A plus gold standard. I didn't think they were an A plus in that game. The most interesting thing, Michaels is almost called too many good games now. Cause that game was amazing. Like if you had put Kevin, like Kevin Harlan, if he had announced that game would have lost his fucking mind. Michaels now is like, he's like Leo DiCaprio in a nightclub at age 45. He's just 25 years of having sex with models. And they're like, Hey Leo, would you like to meet this model? He's not impressed at all. Oh, well, she's

a nine and a half. I've seen better. That's what I feel when I hear Michaels and that's these games. Like I think Buck has actually surpassed him on the excitement scale. Now Buck will rise to the occasion. Now Michaels is like, I've seen everything. I can't, if Gronk had caught the Hail Mary, he would have been like, ah, Gronk caught it. Patriots win the Super Bowl. There's so much, there's so much psychology, right? Because Buck is now compensating back because he was, you know, doing a summer all impression

for a while and everybody got mad at him because he wasn't excited enough. Right now you're saying that Al has been so perfectly excited throughout his career, miracle on ice, et cetera, et cetera, that he's now going back. By the way, he was, that last play was a really hard play to put a call on, right? Oh, yeah. Because the way that ball and the Hail Mary sort of bounced up,

and for a half second you thought the Patriots caught it, and then you had to glance back at the clock and say, oh, wait, did all 10 seconds run out on that Hail Mary? So you got just kind of by his standards anyway, kind of a blah call. Let's take a quick break. Now that the New Year's madness is over, it's time to work on your story for 2018. LegalZoom can help you make this the year you finally get serious about launching and running your own business. Rest a little easier knowing that your family's future is squared away with the right estate plan.

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Start writing your 2018 story with LegalZoom now. That is LegalZoom.com slash BS LegalZoom, where life meets legal. Coming back, we're talking about announcers and innovations and all this stuff. You mentioned the Jimmy Terry Bradshaw game. NBA, I think it's NBA TV, has been experimenting a lot with this players club stuff, where either there's no studio host and it's just players kind of hanging out. But then like these game broadcasts where it's all the players and it's supposed to be like a hangout with the players.

But what happens is exactly what Brian described before the break, the players start trying to just imitate broadcasts, like play-by-play. So like Brent Berry, who I think might have a case to be the best collar guy in the NBA right now. I actually, with the Steve Kervoid, if I had to gun to my head, I could hear anybody be the collar guy for a game, I'd probably pick Brent Berry. But they have him doing these players-only nights, and he's the play-by-play guy. And instead of doing it like a hang, he tries to do it like Kevin Harlan would do it.

And it doesn't make any sense to me. What's the point of having a players' night if you're going to have the guys imitate broadcasters? The whole point is, like, you have three players. Just shoot the shit. That's the gimmick. I don't know. What do you guys think of that? Jason, start with you. My problem is

that they just say players only so often during that segment. It drives me crazy. There needs to be like a $5,000 fine for every time they say it. But that thing works best as a format when they're flipping game to game and they're kind of feeling that you're flicking channels with these guys

and you have a couple of games that are really good in the fourth quarter and so on. I mean, listen, I think that given what we're seeing in ratings attrition, given what we're seeing in the way that digital companies are trying to innovate with the game, I think mixing it up is good. I support all of it. It's never going to work perfectly. It's going to take a long time to settle upon anything.

I actually don't think you're going to settle upon one thing. I think what we're going to see is there are going to be multiple experiences of people. Some folks are not going to want to watch an atraditional sports broadcast. Some people are going to want to watch entirely on social media.

That's the most interesting development now with young audiences. It's not that they're not consuming sports or care about sports. They're just processing it in an entirely different way. The whole notion of watching the first quarter, second quarter, third quarter. You don't miss anything now. You used to be afraid

that if you weren't watching a game you would miss some great highlight or player. You'd have to stay up until 11.30 to watch it on SportsCenter. Now you see it within nanoseconds. And so there's going to just be any kind of, there's going to be multiple presentations of every game because there's no way to fill or just do one mentality. I think part of the problem is the people that produce those games or those studio shows

or whatever, they're used to doing things a certain way and they're terrified to mess with that way because ultimately they don't want to get a call from their boss being like, what the fuck just happened? Why did you allow that? So they want to experiment, but they don't want to totally commit

to it. I remember, I can't remember what year it was, but Jalen and I announced a game with Tirico, which I had really pitched them on, let us do this. It was an LA game. And the conceit was we were just going to be me and Jalen and we were going to shoot the shit and not try to do it like a traditional broadcast. And we did it with Tirico and he bought in. I like Tirico, by the way, this is not a bash on Tirico. He bought in. I like Tariqo, by the way. This is not a bash on Tariqo. He bought in for the first three quarters and we kind of did our thing. And then when the fourth quarter happened and it was like a relatively good game,

he kind of took the reins and it was like, okay, now it's time to do this like a real basketball game. And it was so weird. It was this random meaningless game between I think the Celtics and the Lakers or the Lakers and somebody. It meant nothing. There was nothing at stake. It was this random meaningless game between I think the Celtics and the Lakers or the Lakers and somebody. It meant nothing.

There was nothing at stake. It was like February or March. And I don't know. I just think there's a fear. So then I look at the stuff that NBA TV is doing and it's like it's players only. But it's not really players only. Like it's – they're still in these traditional sets with these sofas that were bought 10 years ago and it's still done like tv and it's not not now you have the other side which is like what kg is trying to do with area 21 which i think is interesting i just don't think i'm not

sure he's a tv person he doesn't seem to really offer anything other than yelling and screaming but that seems to be more of the model of, you know, here's, we're throwing a bunch of people in a room and who the hell knows what's going to happen. Really hard to pull off. What's your take, Brian? Yeah. You know, the most successful version I've seen of this, they do it in college football national championship, where they put all the coaches in a room together and their current coaches, first of all, so that gives it like a little, little edge and a little little currency yeah and what they do is they rewind the film like really quickly like in that perky jerky coaches film kind of way after every play and talk

about what happened so instead of having that traditional you know minute or 30 seconds between plays you actually get all these guys kind of arguing hey look what he did there look how they snuck that tight end out there all that stuff stuff. That to me, cause there's actually like a value add and it's actually, it's kind of a place I want to be, which is in, you know, with these experts watching the game. I thought, I think the thing about it, it's like, we want to blow up the announcer color guy thing. And again, I'm all for experimentation, but I just think it's one of those things that's hard to blow up at the end of the day. And I think the studio, the studio shows where I'd start, by the way, just blow all those up, you know, basically besides inside the NBA. I mean, it's like,

they're all boring. They're all terrible. There's, I just get nothing out of any of them, but, but the, but the way we do games, I think it's a lot harder. Yeah. I, uh, so Sunday I was driving around when the Celtics were playing the Blazers. So I was listening to Sean Grandy on the Sirius NBA station, who's my friend. So I'm a little biased on this, but he's also like one of the few somewhere between six and nine out there on the planet who know who exactly know the rhythm of how to do a basketball game and he was doing it with Maxwell who's been around for a hundred years and uh and it's this great game and it's back and forth and he's describing everything and it was like I didn't even need to watch this on tv he did such a good job with it there's still a place for great play-by-play, and there's still a place for the old-school awesome combination.

I think Michaels and Collinsworth have been good. I really like Nance and Romo, and I also think we found out from Nance this year who I think all of us kind of felt like probably shouldn't be a number one play-by-play guy anymore. And then you put him with Romo, and all of a sudden Nance is good again. So much of it depends on chemistry. And I just think it's hard. Like TNT has never replaced Steve Kerr.

They have Reggie Miller as their number one guy. I don't feel like any of us believe he's the number one guy. It's really hard to find those guys and have them rise to the occasion. Jason, who's your favorite basketball combo right now? Well, it's always going to be Gorman and Tommy until the end, for sure. But, I mean, there's part of me that feels like we sound like, you know, three guys talking about how much we love walking out and picking up our newspaper in the morning.

That the experience of processing a game through a play-by-play person and an analyst is increasingly passe. I mean, it's hard to argue with, let's take a basketball game. Is your young NBA influencer fan, are they really buckling down with Jeff Van Gundy and Mark Jackson? Or are they, you know, I don't think so, you know, sucked into social media and they're following along with, you know, a half dozen people who work for you and a whole bunch of other Twitter voices who are giving you value in terms of, you know, stats and breakdowns and video jokes. And it just seems more fun. I mean, you know, I always think with the Super Bowl, just to go back to that for a second,

that, you know, the Super Bowl is principally a television show, right? It's a great football game, but it's a television show. It's a massive spectacle. It's the most watched thing during the year. It's got this halftime show. The ratings peak during the halftime show, which I think is a really important thing to point out. And now the sort of public tension has shifted to social media during the actual game itself.

Like, it just becomes this channel to dump on everything that's happening on the Super Bowl, like Justin Timberlake. I mean, what is happening to Justin Timberlake's performance is, you know, it's happening on the field, but it's also being rendered, criticized, praised, criticized more on social

media, and that has become the prism through which the whole experience is judged now. I actually thought the Timberlake stuff was really unfair. People just love complaining about the halftime show is what we learned this year. It wasn't that bad. People are like, oh, my God.

You know, I forgot to mention with announcers I like for basketball, I think Doris is probably a very close number two to Brent Perry. And when they use her as a sideline reporter, I honestly want to punch myself in the face. Like, that's crazy. Doris is the best color person you have. The other one who's really good, who is better on the local games,

then I think she'll get better on the national games, but I think she scales it back a little bit. Kara Lawson does the color for the Washington Wizards games, and she's fantastic. That's the one I would bet on long term unless Steve Kerhan's up leaving the Warriors. How would you, just curious, because this is something Chris Ryan and I

argue about all the time. If you could have a chance to recreate NBA TV and just start over with it, just completely throw it away, start over, and try to make it a network that kind of matches how fun basketball Twitter is and how annoying basketball Twitter is, but also how fun it is. What would you do? How would you blow?

I'll start with you, Brian. How would you blow up NBA TV, start over, and try to make it a network that fits in with where we are in 2018? That's a good question. I think, you know, I think it's, it's funny because, so just to circle back to a point you made a minute ago, I think maybe the answer to who's the favorite color analyst in the NBA, it's my, I find my answer is often nobody because it's a job that is really kind of a bad job, right? There's no John Madden really of NBA games, right? There's no great, there's no great color analyst. There's no legacy of color analysts because they just

don't get to talk enough, right? It's not an analyst. It's not an analyst profession. I got to say it, having done it, it goes by fast. All of a sudden, it's the end of the first quarter. You're like, what the hell just happened? I made four points. But remember when we were watching, there were some finals games in the 80s where it was like Steve Jones and Bill Walton in color, right? Yeah.

And you're just like, imagine if that had been the Super Bowl. There would have been blood on the walls at NBC. Like this could not happen. Magic Johnson in the booth a couple of times for the NBA finals. Isaiah. That would have never, yeah. So I almost wonder if you should just go all play-by-play guy

or play-by-play gal and zap know zap to do something fun like you know during timeouts or whatever go to the players room or something like that have guys you know shooting the shit and that kind of stuff and and do some kind of fun thing like that that might be some some way i'd sort of start to to blow it up a little brian Brian, does it matter from a business standpoint? Because I think it's like, okay, Romo comes in this year and is inarguably probably the most celebrated analyst to show up in a sports broadcast in a long, long time, right? You know, just rapturous reviews.

I agree that he probably got a little chatty towards the end of the season, but it didn't move the needle for CBS. They still had the same kinds of decline that every other network experienced with football. You know, I look at what ESPN now has to do. They have to fill that role. And, you know, there's all this sort of criminology of how that's going to be sifted out. Is it that important? Is there a killer hire that they could make that's going to

somehow reflect with uh or result in more viewers i don't think so this is the john gruden conundrum right they're paying john gruden seven million dollars a year and not one extra person is watching monday night football for john gruden so you're just basically taking seven million a year and setting it on fire yeah i think the i i the answer is no, no one's ever watched me. Maybe Madden, right, in his prime was like, we'd have gotten you to watch a game that you would have otherwise not already watched. Of course, he was doing so many great NFC games,

you would have watched it anyway. But I think the answer is like what networks care about is, one, they want competence. You know, you don't want to have big events. And somebody's doing it badly. But the other thing is you want the league to like you, right? Those guys are in business with the league. So when you create a Romo or you have somebody like Trey Aikman or Collinsworth, whatever, who's never going to, you know, who's, who's going to be a guy that Roger Goodell likes,

right. And that's, and that is helpful for those guys. And that's, you know, part of their, part of their job, right. As being nice to the leagues and being in good stead with them. And, you know, you want a face of the network. Who's going to, who's going to help you with that. The best example of this is ESPN hiring Stan Van Gundy and Stern undoing it. Yeah. Basically calling them and being like, our rights deal are up or our rights deal is up in a year. We don't want

Stan Van Gundy on that show. We're not telling you to remove him, but our rights deal is up in a year and we don't want him on that show. You guys decide what to do. I had a phone call with Stan Van Gundy. We were going to work together. So excited. Oh, cool. Stan Van Gundy.

And all of a sudden he was off the show. So, yeah, you have to make people happy. I think there are two names out there. I don't know. I think they would affect the ratings positively a tiny bit. They definitely wouldn't go down, and I think the buzz you would get would make it worth the $7 million a year that they paid Gruden, which was outrageous and ridiculous.

There are two names out there that could affect a network positively. Can you guess those two names? These people are not employed right now by networks? These people are retired athletes who are not employed by networks right now. So Peyton Manning. Ding. What do you think, Jason? What's number two?

Oh, God. The listeners are playing along. I don't know who number two is. Kobe Bryant. Oh, I thought you were for Monday Night Football? No, I was saying for any sport. Oh, yeah. no, for sure. Those are the two.

Don't you think also that ESPN, their continued relationship with Kobe Bryant with these documentaries and so on, didn't he just get nominated for an Oscar? He did. But this is sort of part of keeping him in the family of ESPN with the idea that theoretically he could flip the switch at some point and be like a game-changer personality to them in basketball.

Is that an operating theory? They gave him a show that I think has some potential, a show that he wanted to do. He didn't want to be a talking head. He's creating this almost like this little scouting session room where I think it's a half hour and he's doing 10 of them. And he basically like you're you're breaking down tape with Kobe, you, me, whoever. Like we're just kind of in the room with him as he as he pontificates and tells us stuff.

It's interesting. It's certainly an idea that we haven't seen yet. I think. But don't you want to just hear him do the game? I mean. Yeah. Fuck yeah. I mean, A-Rod, who I think putting him with Vaskirjian and Jessica Mendoza is a bad idea. I think it should just been the two of them. But I think A-Rod would be pretty good as a game announcer. You know, I liked his play. I didn't think he was as good the second postseason as he was the first. But he's a star. And I think he'll be able to break down stuff like watch how he jams him here. Here's what he should have done. Like I'll be able to learn things from him, which is kind of what I want from from a bit from my lead baseball guy, which is not what we were getting with Aaron Boone and Jessica Mendoza. I'm sorry. I don't know. It's like anything else. It depends. If it's the right name,

all of a sudden it makes sense and it's awesome. But when it's John Gruden just talking cliches for four quarters, it sucks. I fear that we really do sound like geezers because I do feel like there is a huge proportion of the basketball audience that is watching House of Highlights.

That's how they process the NBA. Yeah, but we're conceding that, though. I 100% agree. I still think people watch games, though. No, for sure. But I think that when you consider what is going to drive the bus for the league, it's House of Highlights.

Yeah. And, you know, that's an interesting case study because that involves the NBA being, and that's an interesting case study in and of itself because that involves the NBA being, you know, and other leagues being cool with the repurposing of highlights and so on. There was a time where

leagues would have never let that fly. Well, hold on. Let's walk that back a second. The NBA is cool with it. The NFL is not cool. Not cool at all yeah they do not like it so you know but you talk about house of highlights like they were at i think i forget what the exact number is but i think they they like sextupled their audience over the last year or something is that possible yeah i think they're up to like 8 million followers.

They're at like a million 14 months ago. And it is like, we talked about this on a previous sports reporters. This is the place that told me Zion Williamson mattered. I wouldn't have known that. I just, you know, I would have heard from a, from, from some scouting report or seen some slam magazine top 100 or something, now I can actually watch him dunk on people. And you weren't getting that on SportsCenter.

I think, Brian, I think SportsCenter is now acknowledging the House of Highlights thing. Like you're seeing with the Snapchat show that they're doing, it's a Snapchat SportsCenter that has been really successful for them just from a financial standpoint. They still don't really know what to do with the real sports center. And I don't really know what the answer is either.

Any insight on that? Well, I think you're right. They are acknowledging it. I think it's funny because I think we think about how to jazz these up and we think of the form, right? It's going to be a quick Snapchat thing with music and, you know, music over the stuff. But I think a lot of what we want, if I can speak for not only the geezers on this call, but everyone else is, you just want a lot of different things, right? You want to see like the NBA highlight, and then you want to see the high school kid who did the crazy thing.

And then, you know, in the barstool realm, you want to see a guy fall off a tractor into a mud hole, right? Or something like that, something fun. You know, there's this kind of aesthetic where you kind of want all that in the same place. And I think, you know, SportsCenter has all, I mean, going back to Dana Keith, right, has always had a few funny little tags at the end. Here's the high school kid hitting the full court three and all that stuff. But I think what the magic is, is putting all that under one roof. Either it's in a Twitter account, it's on a website, however you want to do it, or some kind of Snapchat

SportsCenter show. Because that's how people kind of want to consume it now, right? They just don't actually care about 20 full minutes of NBA highlights, but they'll watch this and then a funny thing and then this and this. And yeah, I think we want variety more as much as anything. We're doing, not to toot our own horn, but we're doing this weekly show, NBA Desktop, with Jason Concepcion. That's basically what you're just talking about. It's just a bunch of shit thrown into a seven-minute thing, and he bounces around, and it's all kind of the fun stuff

that happens in the league. I really think it could be a daily show. It's like, I would rather watch this than, than sit through sports center and watch the, the 25 minutes of highlights that get spread out over the course of an hour. This is just like, what stupid shit happened? Did somebody make a three after their shoe fell off? Did who's mad at who? What gossip is out there? Whoa, that's a crazy tweet by that guy. And it's, it kind of catches you up on, uh, just kind of the, the weird part of the NBA, which I think is the part we're all in love with right now. Hold on.

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All right, Jason, go ahead. Brian, I have a Marshall McLuhan-y kind of question to ask you, which is that let's all acknowledge that we saw the poop video of the Philadelphia Eagle. I didn't. I didn't click on it. I didn't click on it. Oh, you didn't? No, I knew what it was. I wasn't click on it I didn't click on it I knew what it was I wasn't clicking on that no

well a horse unburdened himself during the celebration in Philadelphia and a young gentleman in a school jersey goaded by the crowd partook and my question for you Brian is

if we did not live in the era of social media and camera phones and immediate affirmation on busted coverage at Barstool and myriad other websites, does that man eat that poop? Ooh, that's a great question. I think the answer is no, probably, right? I guess there's a further McLuhan-esque question of if he does eat it, does it really exist, right, if it's not on camera or something like that? to Shoemaker on the Press Box this week, I'm amazed at how the post-championship celebration slash riot slash whatever it is has become content. You know? It's like it's just the same way that like, you know, oh, there's this terrible day at the end of the NFL season where we fire all the coaches, and then all of a sudden it becomes an ESPN show

with Morton Schefter sitting there on their Blackberries. It's like, it's Black Monday, everybody. Welcome. I thought that happened. It has now happened to the post-Super Bowl thing where it's like, oh, all right, everybody, camera phones out. Here's all the 50 funniest things Philly fans did after the game. I was just really weird. Let me tell you something.

If you think it's bad now or weird now, wait till the next generation comes of age. Cause I watch it with my kids. First of all, my kids love the horseshit video. Huge, huge fans, big reaction. My kids watched the ringer 360 we did.

And now I think Michael Bauman is some sort of American hero for his performance in that whole thing where he's screaming like a bad man. They were like, who is that guy? Why haven't you invited him over? That's just where things are going. People like crazy. That's what they want. And I think it's going to be interesting to see that chasm as that keeps going between this whole world that's going on over there, the barstoolization slash Instagram slash all this stuff versus this really conventional world where Chris Collinsworth and Al Michaels are wondering what a catch is for five minutes and doing it in the most normal way possible. And

that way is starting to feel older and older. Speaking of old. Yeah. Speaking of old, wait for this segue. Chris Berman. We have not talked about this since he came back. I did talk about it on my podcast. Chris Berman came back with Tom Jackson. It was phenomenal. It was. He's simultaneously worse than ever, but greater than ever. And I loved it. And I loved having him there after the Super Bowl. And it felt like having my uncle at Thanksgiving that I haven't seen in a while. Like, he's a little crazy. He might talk about Trump. He might bum out the table. But he's fucking funny as hell. And I'm used to him.

And I understand him. And it's okay. And that's what it was like to have him back. Should Chris Berman come back? Where do you guys stand on this? He might've voted for Trump too, by the way. I think, I think he, I think we might need to bring Chris Berman back. Me too.

I felt like when he retired, there had just been 10 years of just grinding him down again, not unfairly, right. For doing the same jokes and the Gary U.S. Bonds references and stuff like that. But like, there's something about that that's really magical right and maybe it's maybe it's twice a year is that when we need him no just championship i want him back yeah i want him back i want him back on nfl i i still say what you want about the guy the home run derby all the stuff that has been beaten to death.

I still think there is nobody more fun after a night of football to do the whole, go through the highlights with the music and I'm just used to it and I like it and it's just better than whatever else is out there. Just show me anyone out there that's

more entertaining after a game, after the Super Bowl, the awkward transitions with the players. Berman's trying to do highlights and Jay Ajayi is sitting there and he's trying to weave him in. Like, I just love it. I'm just used to it. Now we sound really old. Well, isn't this just what happens with all culture? You know, you probably weren't watching Spice Girls when they broke through.

But now you find a Spice Girls reunion kind of amusing and adorable. And there's an audience for it. And why not have Berman Classic? It makes a lot of sense just from a business standpoint. I like this because you see

nostalgia culture is now like pretty much two-thirds of the music concert business and you look at like yeah 100% you look at the top 25 for like most successful tours, biggest grosses, most sold out football

stadiums and it's all people that we thought were washed up 20 years ago and people just the familiarity and the nostalgia of not just that but like these serious channels that are from these little eras. Like you look at the serious channels who has their own channel right now. It's the Eagles channel. It's the Billy Joel channel. It's Bruce Springsteen. It's, it's a Pearl jam. It's all people that started their careers at least 25 years ago or more. And here's my thought. Brian, are you sitting down, Brian?

I am, in fact. Because there was a rumor, and I had heard rumors about them bringing Dan Patrick back. Wow. Wow. And I don't think it'll happen. But if they had given the 6 p.m. SportsCenter every night to Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann, would the ratings have gone up? Yes. 100 percent.

One thousand percent. Yes. Nostalgia. I think it's time for sports. Well, I think one of the great things about announcers, too, right, is that they get to work a really long time. Right. Chris Berman, I'm looking at his Wikipedia page, is 62 years old. Wow.

That's young. I would have gone older. Yeah, I would have guessed 70. That's a decade plus younger than Al Michaels. So, of course, he's got juice left in the tank. Yes, yes, absolutely. I love this idea. Not to dampen the enthusiasm,

but I worry a little bit about the alchemy of you know modern sport with you know nostalgic voices right i mean when you go to see the eagles okay you're not wanting to hear the eagles play their new shit right you want to hear hotel california you want to hear the long line you want to hear all that stuff, right? And that is one of the tricks, I think, with nostalgia is that you have to sort of stay trapped in that older era. And can you do it with sports in the same way? Does Chris Berman narrating over a 2018 football game still hit you the same way it did in 1993?

I don't know. I don't think it works for play-by-play and color as much as it would for something like Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann. I think it would work. I don't think it would work a lot of the time, but I think for that it would work. I think it would work if Kornheiser and Wilbon had left PTI five years ago and they just brought them back.

ESPN's at an interesting point right now because that A-Rod signing, to me, told me that ratings is now a priority again. And it's weird to say that ratings weren't a priority before, but I'm not 100% sure they were. I think it was more of the public perception of we're trying all kinds of things. We're super committed to diversity. We're going to try. It's super important that we have a female, uh, announcer on Monday night football, and we're trying 6 PM sports center with two young black hosts, stuff like that. I think it has now shifted and it's that this is now a ratings business again. And I don't know if that's coming from Iger,

but this is now about what can we put on the air that gets ratings period. And if the sports center on ESPN two in the mornings doesn't get ratings, guess what? That's going away. If Greenberg show that launches in April, if that thing's a disaster and people aren't watching it, guess what? They're not keeping it on for four years. They are all about what gets ratings, how do we drive people to the OTT service,

and how do we kind of evolve? But most of all, how do we succeed? And I think that's going to be fascinating to see how it unfolds. Look no further than what Fox just did for Thursday Night Football, the most derided night of sports programming in sports history. I mean, this was a franchise that privately, virtually every network executive would tell you they wish the NFL killed because they felt it was diluting the quality of the product.

It wasn't, you know, it wasn't fun to put on. It wasn't fun to do for audiences. Audiences hated it. And yet here, Fox is flying through the gate with a record-busting deal, $3.3 billion over five years. For the reason you cite, it rates. It just does. And regardless of how much we all hate it and pile on it, it's going to give you a bigger number than anything you could possibly put on that hour. So it justifies its cost. And I think that really is where it's still going to be at. What do you think, Brian? Yeah. I mean, I just looked at the ratings the other day for the primetime ratings. I think there's that football

finished number three and four overall. Yeah. It was number one and it was number three and four and you're like wait wait so audiences hated thursday night football again the games were all terrible again were they were they really that terrible um yeah and by the way to your point bill about espn chasing numbers what have the networks done when they're chasing numbers now reboots right will and Grace is back. Murphy Brown is back. That's it. Like, oh, Dan and Keith are back, right? You know, I think that's the, that's totally would be in keeping with the times. Pete, the networks are either rebooting things that they already did, or they're just ripping off ideas that already happened. Like The Resident is a good show. My wife watches The Resident. She loves The Resident. The Resident is

basically the first year of ER or the first year of Grey's Anatomy just with different doctors. There's no real science to it. It's a doctor show built around a young doctor who's got issues with women, but he's got a good heart and he's a little hot-headed. I've seen that character for 40 years. But it works. And bring it back. And, and, uh, I think with sports sometimes, especially with the six o'clock sports center, which I still think could work, but with the six o'clock sports center, that's got to hit everybody.

And you have to, uh, you you're coming off this giant PTI audience and there's a way to reach a lot of people with that show that they just have not made the right decisions for. And now a lot of the people who made those decisions aren't there anymore. I think the one thing, I don't have all the details yet on what this Fox and the RSNs and all the stuff that's happening on that

and this merger that's going to happen. I think the thing that is out there for them, that could be a really cool show that I've always wondered why it wasn't a show. And I think this was a big failing by FS1. You can talk about the money they've spent doubling down on that Horowitz philosophy of just people arguing. The biggest mistake they made, they have all these different RSNs at NBA games. And people like my dad watched the Celtics pregame show, right? They're just watching Brian Scalabrini talking to Abby Chin about,

is Marcus Smart's hand getting better? What's going on? The show that's sitting there is bouncing around all these different locations, right? It's like a whip around show. Well, didn't they try to do that? They did it. The MLB network did it where they whipped around to all the different spots. Right. NBA. Literally had a show called, uh, uh, called, uh, America's pregame, which I believe a big chunk of it was flipping around the RSN to their pregame announcers.

What's going on. Right. But that was an NBA that to me, that wasn't even marketed like an NBA show for me. It's like, I want NBA it's going on. Right. But that was an NBA. To me, that wasn't even marketed like an NBA show. For me, it's like, I want NBA. It's 6.30 East Coast time. Games are starting soon. Boom. Let's go to Boston and find out what happened with Marcus Smart's hand.

Hey, let's go over to Charlotte and see if Nicholas Batum's going to play. And it's just like this constant get me ready for all the games. I don't know. I think that would work. And I think when, uh, maybe that's the future of 6 PM sports center. Once they get all these RSNs, I don't know. I still haven't, nobody's really been able to explain to me how they're just going to incorporate thousands more employees and all this Fox content. We'll see. Hold on. We're gonna take a break. We've been talking about this on the BS podcast

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Winter Olympics starts on Friday. I say this every four years, and now I'm saying it with as much passion and gusto as I've ever said it. I've never cared less about the Winter Olympics. I know I said this four years ago, and I'm pretty sure I said this in 2010, but now that the NHL players aren't going, I over under, I might watch five hours. I don't know what, what's your over under for how many hours you're going to watch Brian.

I'm man. I am exactly with you. I'm just, I'm as out as I've ever been. And I feel it's been a gradual process. And I feel other years I was kind of out until like day two. And then I got sucked in, happily sucked in and gotten the drama, but five hours sounds about right to me. Jason. Well, I'm really psyched to get on that 15 hour flight tomorrow. Oh no, you're going, hold on, we got to stop you. Can't you smuggle

marijuana on the plane and get arrested to try to get out of it? Can you do anything? Can you start an incident? I'm flying with the Journal of Benco and I'm just going to have them knock me out with a hammer when we get off the runway. I feel like this is

a story that repeats itself, as you said, every four years or so that the relevancy of the Olympics is shrinking. Also, these ongoing sprees of corruption, doping, we had a horrifying scandal involving USA Gymnastics and the

U.S. Olympic Committee. It's been mostly bad news for a very long while with these games. And I think the public is fed up. I still think, though, it's one of those, you know, as we spoke about with Thursday Night Football, it is a diminishing returns question for networks. I mean, if you agree with the idea that the Olympics are basically whatever NBC decides they are in this country, then it's packaging. Then it's something that's going to win the night. Olympics are basically whatever NBC decides they are in this country. Then it's packaging.

Then it's something that's going to win the night. It's still going to, you know, I think NBC loves it, but it's going to win every night of the two weeks that it's on from Pyeongchang. So, yeah, but the idea of it having the kind of mind share that, you know, it did when we were younger. But let's not forget, let's not forget, Bill, the 1980 Winter Olympics, you know, the great Russia versus USA game, on tape delay.

It was on tape delay, seven hours delay, I believe. Yeah. So it's not like what we remember nostalgically was exactly perfect either. Well, we only had three channels back then, too. I think a couple obstacles this time. The no NHL thing, I think is going to hurt the fact that it's in, um, that we're going all the way to Korea, a place that doesn't have snow.

And, um, no, they have snow. They have this place has snow. Like real snow or fake snow, actual real snow that they did not have to import from other countries. It is quite cold there.

Oh, no, this is the first cold winter Olympics we've had in years. Oh, all right. I'm back in on that then. Figure skating still plays. That's going to work. Curling every four years has a moment for one night. Yeah.

Downhill skiing, fun to watch. That's about where I'm getting off. I don't know. What else am I missing? Katie Couric. Katie Couric's triumphant return to the Matt Lauer list, Winter Olympics coverage. So Costas is basically like, fuck this, I'm out of here.

I'm out. Yeah, this is basically like, fuck this, I'm out of here. I'm out. Yeah, this is Perico's first Olympics. Costas is like, you've hired me for the NFL and the Olympics, and I'm not going to do the NFL or the Olympics. Power move! He's out. Unbelievable. It's amazing to me.

I never thought he'd walk away from that stuff. I never thought it. Especially the Olympics, right? That's his, that's his thing. That's been his thing since like 88. I want to say it's his first Olympics. I got to get him back on a podcast.

I got to know what's going on with him because first of all, you try getting pink guy in Russia. Okay. I know he really, he suffered. I think I don't, I'm not a hundred percent sure, but I'm 99% sure.

That could,ell was like, get that guy off. You're not putting Costas. You're not having Costas host the Superbowl. Get, get out, get him out. He is not going near the Superbowl. I don't need his little lecture about concussion awareness and, and Brandon Cook's going out in the first half and Costas lecturing everyone at halftime about concussions.

He's gone. No way. If you ever want to see football again, he's gone. He's been saying that for years too, the concussion stuff. And I wonder if that one that was in, I was like, no, October, November, right. At the university of Maryland was, was the final deal, but he, and I don't know if he just wants to do it. He didn't seem like he wants to do it anymore. He just doesn't see,

which is that what the true surprise to me is that Bob Costas doesn't want to do it. Right. Yeah. You know, that Bob Costas doesn't want to be America's host and sit up there, pink eye be damned, norovirus be damned in South Korea and go up there and do that job. That's, it seems like the job he was always done and job he was built for. I'll tell you what I'm really excited about. Jason and Ben Cohen, really, they're having their own Olympics for who could find the quirkiest, weirdest story and write a 1600 word piece about it. You know, you've groomed Ben Cohen a little bit. You've helped him out. You've shown the way a little bit.

Now this is really a teacher against the pupil type of situation. I don't know. I have Ben Cohen as like a minus 140 favorite. the idea that just traditional sports coverage is completely passe, that everything nowadays has to be quirky. The more esoteric, the better. Look at how the NBA is covered on a day-to-day basis now. The stuff that actually happens on the court is almost inconsequential to whatever sort of goofy minutiae you can find with locker room dynamics of trades or free agency moves, free agency moves that are probably never going to happen a bazillion years. It's almost become like telenovela, soap opera kind of stuff. And it doesn't, is it,

is it a fad or are we really going to be talking about, you know, peanut butter, peanut butter and jelly sandwich affectations for years? I blame Twitter because I think some of the stuff that's being written now is being designed for the 280 character. Here's why Brian Curtis really went to Australia.

He loves kangaroos. And that's like, what? Brian Curtis loves kangaroos? And you click on it. No, no, no. Brian, you would tweet you that I went to kangaroo. No, I went to Australia and saw some kangaroos and you click on it. No, no, no. So the way it would go, Brian, you would tweet you that I went to kangaroo. I know I went to Australia and saw some kangaroos. Thanks. It's so true though.

Brian would be like, are kangaroos showing the NBA players the way toward a new blah, blah, blah? Like that's kind of NBA Twitter now. How to manage their sleep on the road we'd have to combine some kind of like with kangaroos in there with the kangaroos i i this is totally right i i joke with vera danny chow in the office and say that twitter is the cheapest date in sports journalism you know anything you write gets retweeted 200 times i've've accidentally fallen into NBA Twitter a couple of times. And it's the most welcoming place on earth, right? Oh, you wrote something funny and

cute and quirky and kind of a crazy angle about our league. We love you. Yes. Good job. Write some more of these things. Write them long form maybe. And I agree with you. They're reverse engineered. I feel like the pieces to some, are reverse engineered to play on Twitter. Absolutely. Brian and I, Jason, you missed it, but we were talking about what we want to talk to. Let's make this the last topic and then we're going to go. How the NBA is being covered now is the most celebratory it's ever been covered. And I think more and more, even the people that are the most sourced and are breaking the most news are doing it so carefully in a way not to antagonize anybody. Everybody has

their three or four killer sources. Everybody's kind of in different camps. We see a lot of the local writers have cozied up to GMs more than we've ever seen. And there's just not a lot of the local writers have cozied up to GMs more than we've ever seen. And there's just not a lot of, not a lot of like really super hypercritical thought. Now I'm not talking about like the, the, the, uh, hot take slash first take slash LeBron is a choker. I'm not talking about that. I'm just talking about people are very careful now not to antagonize relationships. I think we've seen that more than ever. So there's that, but then there's also this celebration thing that seems to be happening. You feel it on basketball Twitter. And I've done it a couple of times too, where it's like, I love basketball. Isn't this

the best? It's like, we've all turned into Bandini Brown hyping the NBA and, uh, and, and almost all of it's justified, but it's just a weird place for the league. The league has, I don't know how much they've done this, how much they have mastered this whole narrative. But, man, it's like when you think of where the NBA was seven, eight years ago versus now, it's like every night is an orgasm about something that's happening on league pass. Very strange.

Why do you think that is, Jason? I mean, I think partly it's a new generation of reporterhood coming in on League Pass. Very strange. Why do you think that is, Jason? I mean, I think partly it's a new generation of reporterhood coming in that might be coming from an enthusiast standpoint. And Bill, let's not forget your Oppenheimer role in all of this, too. You have been

a tremendous enthusiast for the sport of basketball for many years now, and a lot of people who are coming up have been influenced by that. Seeing the profile you basketball for many years now. And a lot of people who are coming up have been influenced by that, seeing the profile you built for yourself by saying no to the sort of traditional boundaries and guardrails of sports coverage. So I blame you entirely. But the biggest thing here and the sort of most spoken mirrors BS part of it is

all this is a distraction from the fact that the gold state warriors are probably going to win the championship in four or five games i think there's a lot of just screaming and yelling that's going on that's sort of up the fact that there's really not a real threat against one of the most powerful basketball teams of all time yeah i guess he's been probably them a little bit of a run in the conference semifinals, but there's just so much noise for a season and for a league that's not terribly competitive

at the moment. And I think that's the story that's not getting said because it's not really fun to go on television and say, like, you know what? We know what's going to happen the third week of June.

Yeah. What do you think, Brian? I think that's right. I think that's right. I think that's right. I think the same thing. It's like, but I think NBA Twitter and NBA writers have kind of done this amazing thing where they've sort of said, you know, we're going to talk about, I feel like I've heard so much about the Milwaukee Bucks for the last three, four years, you know, a team that

has no consequence in anything. And I'm just like, but that's, that is kind of the magic of it, I think, too, and the good part of it is people are like, let's consider it. Let's think about the Bobcats. Let's think about the Raptors some more. Let's write about them. And I think Jason's right. It's from NBA, because the NBA was the smallest league,

I think writing, the current crop of writers came from so many places, the places we worked, the ESPN satellite things, a lot of bloggers, right? The sort of Zach Lowe thing, the Woj thing that you just have so many different styles and so many quirky styles. And that sort of made it what it is today. I think the worst thing that's happened is, and I think it's happening mostly, man, this is really an old guy on the couch podcast. I think it's happening mostly because a lot of the people are younger, but people aren't using any historical context when they talk about the stuff that's happening now. You know, like I think there's people that really do think LeBron is the goat, but, and, and their argument would basically be, well, Jordan,

he won six rings, but it's not all about rings. Here's the math and all that stuff. But when Jordan ascended to his apex, there was no argument about whether he was the GOAT. Everyone was like, that guy's the best ever. There's no question. We're not even debating this. And it's really tough to hear. I've noticed this a lot.

I've noticed this not just with basketball but with everything where it's a lot of hyperbole. We're the greatest ever, best ever. This is the best playoffs ever. That's the best playoff game ever. And nobody is seeming to put this in any context. We've had a lot of great playoff games. We've had a lot of great players.

Kareem was probably the third or fourth best player of all time. And on Kobe Bryant night, Magic Johnson goes up and says, Kobe's the greatest Laker ever. Like, I don't know if Kobe's in the top three for that conversation, but people are, you know,

the under 40 probably think that's true. And trust me, he was not. But I have noticed hyperbole. Everybody trying to blow an experience that we're all watching in the moment as like the most unbelievable thing that's happened. And maybe that's just where we're going these days. What do you guys think? Yeah.

I mean, I think part of it, you have to look at it holistically too, across sports that, you know, football, let's face it, there's a lot of unpleasantness to football. There's a really sort of, you know, lingering darkness about the future of the sport and the long-term health impact of the sport. Basketball doesn't have those kinds of issues. There's a constant

storyline nowadays of when is the NBA going to inevitably surpass football as the most important sport in America? I think it's going to take a generation at least. But that belief, that narrative is out there. I also think that, you know, basketball has been very canny.

The NBA and Sixth Sense Silver have been very canny about, you know, again, sort of letting the social media sharing fly, but also embracing kind of the new thinking around the sport. You look at, you know, baseball, for example. It took a whole generation for the sport to finally come around on the idea of analytics being the game changer and a lot of resistance, not just from the teams, but from sports writers saying, this is all BS.

But now no one sits around and says, oh, I think free-point offenses are a terrible idea. Maybe Phil Jackson does. But there isn't that kind of resistance. If you're a young person covering the game and thinking differently about the game, you're being validated by the whole sport. So that, I think, is a reason for enthusiasm. I got to say, though, that swung too far, though.

I think the way that we're using advanced metrics now in basketball is out of whack with how the teams use it. The difference with the baseball was that the smarter teams were using the advanced stats as ways to find talent, and it was working, and they were just ahead of us, and then we caught up. In basketball, everyone I've talked to about this talks about how small the sample sizes are

and how carried away a lot of the media members get with like, oh, he's shooting 48% from three. And meanwhile, he's 26 for 50. And the stuff with the five-man lineups and the off-on stuff and the offensive, defensive ratings, they're interesting. But the teams don't really rely on that stuff as much as I think people think. And if anything, I think they don't really trust the numbers until it gets to like the 60, 70 game mark. It's just it's the swings can be too wild.

And I thought the apex of this was whoever wrote that piece about Kawhi Leonard's actually not that good on defense. It's like, all right, we've gone crazy. This is lunacy. Whereas like in baseball, you have these stats that just cut and dry. I tell you how some, how good somebody is, right? Mike war, Mike trout. He's better. Mike trout, Bryce Harper. We couldn't really argue about that because the math would give us the conclusion. There's no real nuance to it in basketball. There's actually way more nuance than I think a lot of people are giving you a credit for. And I, I, I think it's swung the wrong way, but I also think it doesn't really matter because like when I had Steve Kerr on my podcast, it's like, what do you look for

in a box score after a game? And he's like opposing field goal percentage turnovers and assists. It's like, he's not like, Oh, how did our five man lineup do today? What was Sean Livingston's plus minus? He doesn't give a fuck. He cares about, he cares about those three things. And that's not like an old school way to think. I still think some of the advanced metrics are great. And I think they've learned a lot, but I think once we get into evaluating players and five man units, you really have to take, you have to treat those numbers with a certain amount of caution. And what I'm seeing, some people aren't.

What do you think, Brian? I just think when you talk about, you know, the greatest series ever and LeBron's a goat and, you know, the league's on the rise and this is historic. I see a much, I also see a much older sports writing thing, which is that we all want to be there

at the historic moment, right? We want to be there at the historic moment, right? We want to be there at the death of baseball. We were people talking about the death of the NFL this year. Like really? Is the NFL dead? You know, and the NBA is kind of the inverse of that, right? It's fun to imagine or to declare you're at this historic moment where you're seeing the greatest player of all time. You're seeing the league as good as it's ever been. You know, you're seeing the birth of

this and this and this, and that's just like a, it's a sports writer thing. And it's probably also just a journalist thing. And it's also, when you look at history and how people perceive history, it's amazing how much staying on TV helps some of these guys, you know, like Barkley, if he just went away after he played, would be considered like, yeah, he was really good. He went head to head with MJ, won an MVP. He's one of the best 25 players ever. We wouldn't think about him any more than we think about Rick Barry, you know, or, uh, I'm trying to think of like Bob Pettit. He would just be on these lists and because he's on TV and they're constantly rehashing his career and making fun of him for no rings. His career

is actually feels like it was more important and influential than it was. And it was really important and influential. Isaiah Thomas being on TV now helps people constantly be reminded that this guy was one of the best point guards ever. Paul Pierce being on TV now, it's a reminder that he was the 08 Finals MVP. Other guys, Steve Nash, nobody's really thought about him in five years because he's intentionally kept his distance. If Steve Nash was on ABC and ESPN all the time, I actually think he would get more credit for, oh, that's the guy. This is why basketball is where it is.

And they'd be talking about it over and over again. So I do think that matters. We've got to run. Any final words? I don't have a parting shot. That's okay. I'm officially a lazy sports writer because I didn't bother to do a parting shot. But I have a question for Brian.

Brian wrote, among the many great essays he's written about sports media, you wrote the definitive piece about the talk-about question. Yes. It happens at all press conferences now, like talk about that decision in the fourth quarter, coach, and so on. But, Brian, I feel talk-about has now been eclipsed by the everyone's a cameraman era of the sports press conference from. It's astonishing to me.

I mean, it used to be, you know, there was a real bifurcation between the print guys and the camera guys. The print guys would wander in there with their shitty tape recorders, and the camera people would be in the back elbowing. And now everyone's got their camera up. And you see Doug Peterson interviewed after the Super Bowl, and there's 37 people holding up, more than 37, there's 50 people holding up their iPhones recording Doug Peterson interviewed after the Super Bowl, and there's 37 people holding up, more than 37, there's 50 people holding up their iPhones recording Doug Peterson's remarks.

And I wonder, as I watch this, where is this video going? Is this just going into everyone's live streaming this simultaneously, or is this a new way of recording things? Because we can check out body language. I don't get it, but I'm sure you've seen it and how strange it is now to just see every one video recording every, uh, athlete and coach interaction. Yeah. We've gone from, you know, Dick Young shoving the camera guy out of the way to Dick Young

would be holding his phone, right. And filming the interview at the locker himself. You know, it's funny too. And I think there's something a little sad about it. There's some, there's some, especially at a Superbowl, right. Cause there's just a lot sad about it. There's some, especially at the Super Bowl, right? Because there's just a lot of random media people and you're like, are you really going to use this? But you know what? We've also had this, the new, like Anthony Slater, right?

Like part of his job in addition to writing stories is I'm going to get the like 20 second bite, throw it on Twitter, like in five seconds from the locker. And just aggregate locker room interviews in this way that I don't think we've seen done before. And it's, it's, that's kind of fabulous and it's kind of interesting. Yeah. Fellas, we did it. East coast, Jason Gay, West coast, Bill Simmons. What, what coast are you in Brian? Uh, uh, Oceana. I don't know. Oceana coast. Are you ever coming back? Are you going to come back, Brian?

I'm coming back. I'm coming back in a couple weeks. Are you sure? I'll be back. Absolutely. I thought after another NFC East team won the Super Bowl that we'd never see you again, that that would be it. You would have snapped.

It was a nice time to be in a different hemisphere. Let's put it that way. All right. Thanks, guys. Always a pleasure. And if you wanted to listen to the other sports reporters that we've done there in my archives, thanks to zip recruiter, the smartest way to hire my listeners can try it for free at zip recruiter.com slash BS. I might pipe on the, uh, ringer NBA show on Wednesday in case, uh, any crazy trade stuff happens. If not, we're doing

a blowing out the ringer NBA show on Thursday, trade deadline. And then I am doing a podcast Thursday afternoon playing off the trade deadline. Unless it is just the all-time dud of a trade deadline, then I don't know what I'm going to do. I'll just call Chris Berman and ask him to come back. Thank you guys.

This was fun.