The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz - PTFO - The Crying Game: A Scientific Voyage into the Tear Ducts of Caleb Williams and Bill Belichick

Episode Date: April 23, 2024

A viral video of a weeping Caleb Williams, the top prodigy in this week’s draft, “scares the sh*t out of a lot of NFL teams.” So correspondent Dave Fleming breaks out the tissues — and a stack of research — to discover what the science of crying disproves about the pseudo-science of scouting; why a Super Bowl locker room was like a scene out of “The Notebook”; and how even the Darth Vader of football (allegedly) choked up. Plus: Domonique Foxworth names names — and changes our basic understanding of the most masculine of sports. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre and today we're gonna find out what this sound is. He was crying before we left the tunnel a half-empty Cleveland Browns guaranteed win. Right after this ad. You're listening to Giraffe King's Network. So Dave Fleming, I am not proud of what about to tell you, but I am not a crier. I grew up Roman Catholic, all boys education. I walk around and my tear ducts, my my soul is in a state of clench. Well that makes us the perfect couple for this because I bet I'm in the 99th percentile for adult male criers across the world.

What's the sort of thing that triggers you into shedding tears? I have personal things that I've gone through, but I think it's trained me to... I'm comfortable with crying. There was the Netflix... It was recently, it was called One Day. Imagine one selected day struck out of your life and think how different its course would have been. This couple that they meet each other, they're soulmates, they meet each other in college,

but they keep missing each other. And it's one day every year for their entire relationship until they finally get together and then tragedy ensues. So I just need you to know that Dave Fleming really did not intend to describe the NFL draft just now, even though he did, by giving us this plot summary of a Netflix series that sounds terrible. I have not seen it, admittedly. But I have been thinking about a different tragically desperate once-a-year ritual where people dream of settling down with a mysterious college student who almost invariably breaks their heart.

And the number one pick in the NFL draft this year is going to be this University of Southern California student named Caleb Williams. And if you watch tape of Caleb Williams, what you will see pretty immediately is that he can run and throw like Patrick Mahomes. And he can also do that thing that quarterbacks do, where he brings plays back from the dead. Williams has time, he gets the four man rush, back fiddling, scanning, now running out of time,

circling back, joystick on the move again. Are you kidding me? Caleb Williams, dancing, cutting, mesmerizing, run by the quarterback, finally dragged down at the 20. It's a highlight reel tonight. One of the biggest problems with Caleb Williams, it turns out, was also captured on video. And this was right after USC

lost to the University of Washington last fall. And it's actually the whole reason I asked Dave Fleming, who is a journalist that's covered two dozen NFL drafts and can consequently smell front office bulls**t from miles away to help me report this story. Because one of the biggest problems with Caleb Williams is this clip of Caleb Williams crying. Caleb Williams jumping up and laying in the arms of family there.

Yeah, tough night. Battle. Sure did. He knows the reality of what a third loss means. That's tough. But as brilliant as his two years will be in L.A., it's not going to result in a Pac-12 championship. Yeah. Played well, led his team in all he could. This came up a bit short.

The announcers there, I would characterize their tone as uncomfortably polite. What did you see there? Spell it out for us. When he starts heaving, when he's, it's the full body convulsion crying in his mom's arms. He's jumped into the stands after the game. Right. Watching it now, I'm not proud of it. And I think you can be supportive of men showing their emotions in the way they want. But that still left me feeling a little weird. Yes. So the context here is it's November 4th, 2023.

This is last season. USC has just lost to Washington. 52 to 42. USC is now 7-3 for the season here. And Caleb Williams has jumped into the stands and in the first row there are his parents and He is being I would say like just visually being cradled Right. I mean that's not an exaggeration. No, no, no, no, and and they have to his mom is holding him and As his body is fully convulsing There's a piece of paper that is very conveniently located where she shields him like a privacy curtain.

So she understands too that this is sort of uncomfortable or strange and is trying to protect him by covering. That was really telling too that the mom understood how good field awareness. She had very good vision there And then he just sort of let go it felt like a nativity scene An activity scene come to life in the stains of a college football game I gotta say I saw the dad the dad was kind of doing a Pablo what I would imagine is a Pablo pat It's like okay

100% not totally in tune with my real emotions. But on top of that, I reached out to a guy who's really well connected, a former scout really well connected across the NFL with GMs in front offices, and I was blown away by his reaction. What did the scout tell you that you can report? I hated it. Hated it. He would scare the sh** out of me if I was working for a team. Raw emotion is great, but Caleb's thing? That was ridiculous to me. That threw up major

red flags. You just lost a game in the middle of your fucking season and it was like your third loss in the Pac-12 and you went hugging on Mommy and crying in Mommy's arms and it just seems really freaking weak and nuts. And I will tell you, he scares the shit out of a lot of NFL teams too. The book on him is he's just kind of a weird kid. One GM told me it's like if Prince played quarterback. Look, I don't know him from Adam. I do not know him, but to me that looked weak as shit, really fragile. And so this is part of why I wanted to do this episode, is because as much as I want to be the enlightened person,

I want to acknowledge what seems different about this, it's telling that like NFL scouts feel this, random bloggers feel this, talking heads feel this. We have never seen this! It just looked like he was in a fetal position while he was on on the wall and all it took was his mom putting her arm under his legs and she's like literally holding her child like a baby. Definitely wanted the weakest moves, if not the weakest move I've ever seen by an athlete. 12 year old just struck out for the first time in Little League type shit.

But it's like, man, it kind of keeps me from wanting to hang out with him, to be honest. Okay, yeah, I'm not hanging out with a dude who paints his nails. If you are on a boat, wouldn't you want your captain, if it's slowly going down, to be the calmest, coolest head on the boat? Caleb Williams, to sum it up, he's soft,

he's a crybaby. And I implore any NFL scouts to keep this pathetic scene in mind when concocting their idea of what a leader on an NFL team looks like. Gronk feels this for the record here. I can definitely see this being a 50-50 split. I was kind of split with myself as well. I was like, all right, that's a little bit too much. Like, why is he crying? But then at the same time I'm like, maybe he's a mama boy

I don't normally take my emotional cues from Rob Gronkowski, but in this case, I think a lot of us felt the same way It's like we we're not sure how to process this Yeah But I feel like Gronk is probably on some level taking his cues from the guy he played for right the Hall of Famer Bill Belichick the most emotionally withholding dad in the history of America, I would argue, is that dude. This is a thing that this organization hasn't had these sort of issues in the past. Yeah, but we're on to Cincinnati. Bill, do you think, do you imagine Tom's age and the draft on the...

We're on to Cincinnati. Do you think having a 37-year-old... We're on to Cincinnati. Do you think having a 37 year old... We're on to Cincinnati. Well, I hate to sort of break it to you, but going all the way back to a couple of Super Bowls and things that I've witnessed in person and gone down the rabbit hole on, Bill Belichick might just turn out to be more like Caleb Williams than any of us really want to believe. So we have to get to that, that investigation. We have to get to, I think, a scientific understanding of what we're all doing here as both the humans who cry and the humans who observe the criers. And then also we should talk to the football people and they can explain how much

behind the scenes actually can be made fun of or not. Get your tissues ready, Pablo. The simple act of crying has confused scientists for centuries. I don't know if you know this, but humans are the only creatures on Earth who will secrete tears because we are in our feelings. Because we're sad, because we're happy, because we just lost to the University of Washington. All of that is lost to the University of Washington. All of that is unique to the human condition. And no less in authority than Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary theory, wrote a seminal text in 1872 that was titled The Emotional Expression of Man and Animals. And Darwin could not think of a single logical evolutionary reason why human

faces would involuntarily leak this salty water at emotional moments. Charles Darwin actually declared weeping to be, quote, purposeless, end quote, which makes him not totally unlike that anonymous NFL scout that got interviewed by Dave Fleming. I want people not watching on YouTube or the Draftings Network to know that you've made a mess of my desk. You have a sheaf of papers here full of research and scientific literature. This is edited down too. I could have gotten it all the way over there too.

The basic question that I needed help with was, why do we cry at all? And so who answered that question for you? We went to a renowned psychiatrist and professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Her name is Lauren Bilesma. I was looking through some of the articles and things you sent me and just, this fascinates me, right?

Just to no end. I'm not a football expert, by the way, so you might have to explain some things to me too. She has studied crying probably more than anyone else in the United States. It is kind of surprising that given how important and ubiquitous a phenomena that crying is, like pretty much everyone has cried at some point in their life. It is surprising there isn't more research on it. It's gotten somewhat better in the past, you know, 15 years or so since I got into this area, but there's still remarkably few people around the world that are studying it. I wonder if you get tired of hearing that Darwin's, he was so critical of it. Why do you think that?

Well, he wasn't, he just didn't know. He couldn't find the reason that people cry. So he concluded that tears didn't serve any purpose, that it was just sort of an incidental, purposeless secretion of tears. It didn't really have any function. It was just sort of an incidental thing. So I don't know that he was critical,

but just that he didn't understand what the functions were at the time She studied the psychophysiology behind crying Evolutionary theories suggest that the reason we evolved tears was to elicit help from others Starting with when we're babies and we're listening to help from our mother or other caregivers And then as we get older it becomes kind of repurposed to getting help from others in our social environment. She told me it's based on four million years of evolution.

Yeah, that's not great for Caleb Williams' Scouting Report. Oh, it's fine, he's just like four million years worth of babies crying for their mom. Yeah, and the real red flag to NFL teams and NFL Scouts was who he cried to and who he cried with. It's weird that he's crying to his mom. It's weird that he's crying after a meaningless loss.

But it's even it disturbs us. He if he's gonna cry, right, you should be crying with your teammates. Right. We're your family now. Exactly. We're your football family. That's supposed to matter the most in the context of this game. And it's immediately, then they flip that to

what's wrong with this guy that he didn't cry in his lineman's arms? Why did he go fetal position with his mommy instead of his teammates? It's about who you look to for help. Did you watch the Caleb Williams clip? Yeah, yeah, I did look at that one just before. I mean, that one seemed a bit more intense

than I would usually see in football because usually it's more like you see some tears running down their face. I think I could see why there might have been more backlash there because it did seem more childlike in that way and not something we typically see. It did seem like he lost more control than we typically see. Some people might turn to their teammates

when they're crying and you know he turned to his family but I have seen others where they're sort of like getting hugs from their teammates or their coach and you know where it does seem to kind of facilitate that bonding. And I think maybe for the first time in my entire career the Scouts lined up with the science. But in terms of why this is really happening, like biologically inside of Caleb Williams, what are we even able to say about that? Like why is he doing this? Why can't he control himself, in other words?

This really, this is the fascinating payoff for why we went down this rabbit hole because the science of crying is telling us exactly the opposite what the the NFL front offices are. There is some evidence that crying when it first the peak right before crying starts is sort of like where you have the most physiological arousal like the most what we call like the fight-or-flight response or sympathetic activity or your heart's like beating faster you you're breathing faster, that sort of thing. And then crying sort of marks that transition to more parasympathetic activity, kind of the rest and digest system. It's more commonly known as kind

of that marker of going back to homeostasis. So the science backs up Caleb on this. It's incredible. It is a signal from our body that it's like Caleb cared so much about this basically random regular season game that his body, it short-circuited on him. I mean, how do you, if you're a scout and this this bulls**t is what we hear all the time about, we want guys who love the game. Yeah, you have that dog in you. Yeah, we just want guys who live, breathe. And all of a sudden now they're dinging him

for something that the science actually says. Is the biggest proof that you care as much as we want you to. Welcome to NFL scouting. Basically. Is there any scenario where that kind of a reaction, that kind of crying, is a sign of like weakness or instability or something that like an evaluator should be worried about? I think we'd only be really worried if it was impacting their functioning. Like maybe if he like stopped in the middle of a play and went to go cry and didn't finish

the play, then we'd be pretty concerned. Like if it's impacting your work or your social relationships, that's how we evaluate any mental health disorder. But if it's not getting in the way of anything, we wouldn't necessarily be concerned about it. And he clearly had really intense feelings on that moment. If someone were to say like maybe their child died or they're in a war zone looking on some horrible, you know, scenes of destruction,

we would never judge someone to cry like that in that scenario, but it was a football game. So maybe people might've seen it as a bit of a stream reaction. Yeah, I find it interesting, right, that fans are the fans who trash their TV and throw it out the window are like, oh, Caleb Williams lost control of his emotions.

Wait, do people really do that? I'd be more concerned about the people who threw their TVs out of the window than, than him crying. If I were to give my professional opinion. I do now just want to send her like about, I don't know, two dozen videos of like Cowboys fans. Oh, and by the way, we've already reserved a spot in her crying lab for you later. Amazing. Pablo. So, but the person I actually want to put into that crying lab though is the person you mentioned before

Like Bill Balachek, right? I'm now imagining the human brain I'm imagining crying as the point of peak intensity that says to everybody Look how much I care about this so much so that my body is making me quit But I also can't imagine Bill fucking Balachek actually crying, dude. So in February of 2008, I'm at the Super Bowl where the Patriots, they're 18-0, they blow their chance at literally immortality.

Yes, to the Giants, the first time. Brady steps up, throws, downfield, broken up. Two seconds left as the Giants take over. In the locker room afterwards, I'm at that game, I'm in the locker room, and the weight of what they had just sort of lost out on hits everybody Including our man Bill Belichick. Wait. Okay. So what did you see phlegm? Well, that's a good question because Because I you know all the things the research that we stirred up the all the rabbit holes that you sent me down Made me remember being in that locker room And so I'm getting feedback from everyone who was in that room that it was like Belichick was choked up.

Belichick was close to tears. Belichick was, and it's important for what we're doing our study on Caleb, we need to know if the Darth Vader of the NFL cried, then it's okay for everybody to cry. If his comp is Bill Belachick on some level, this is news we could use. And so I reached out to a really good friend of mine, Seth Wickersham, who is probably one of the foremost experts and has studied the Patriots.

Wrote the book. Right. On the Patriots. Yeah, knows and has spoken to probably more than anyone. And we were at that game together, we were in the locker room together, and then basically after debating this back and forth, what we agreed upon was... Yeah, what's the threshold?

We can confirm moisture around the eyes as far as we can go. So the question of is moisture tears? Sometimes on this show we put a lot of work into stupid things. We take stupid things very seriously. Yes. I just want people to understand how much legwork we put into just getting the ability to say with confidence there was moisture because we asked, I mean, how many people did you talk to? Oh, dozens. So I've returned from this particular rabbit hole. This is another piece of paper with just many names written on it.

Yes, I have my homework assignment finished, Pablo. And I made a list and I'm sure I probably left some people off But I mean the list of people that we reached out Basically with the question have you ever seen Bill Belichick cry? I mean it got to that point And the first person that I asked that to was Roosevelt Colvin who was a linebacker Old-school linebacker on the Patriots on that team. Yes. And he responded something like, LOL, never seen Bill cry. And that is the response we basically got from everybody. I'll just go down the list, right? We've got Seth, we've got Chad Finn, who is a reporter in Boston.

We've got Stacey James, the longtime PR VP at the Patriots. What did the PR person say, the official mouthpiece of Belichick once upon a time? This is so funny, right? Because there's a taboo element to crying, right? Especially in football. Of course. But he got right back to me and was like, no, Bill is, Bill's, I've never seen Bill cry.

Even when Bill told the team that his father had died, the players cried and the players got emotional, but, but Bill didn't. Classic, classic Belichick. Yeah. And the players got emotional but but bill didn't classic right classic Belichick. Yeah, I reached out to a longtime Associate and close friend of Bill Belichick's who confirmed immediately never seen Bill cry I will also point out another Reporter replied are you kidding me sociopaths don't cry Well it got to the point where I had to DM. I was like, all right,

Teddy Bruski, did you ever see Belichick cry? And he said, can't say I recall BB shedding tears over the game, period. Like immediately. Like, no. Yeah. So, the closest we got was Moisture Around the Eyes. I also talked to Ian O'Connor, who wrote 500 pages. Another book. Right. On Belichick. You know, I searched that book.

There are four mentions of the word tears in those 500 pages. And Ian O'Connor and Tom Curran, they both sent me further down this stupid rabbit hole, Pablo. This is my life now. By recommending they said, oh, check out the 30 for 30 called Two Bills. Yeah, this is the Bill Parcells, Bill Belichick doc they made.

Right, and it's basically a scene of him in the depths of old Giant Stadium, cinder block offices, where he used to grind through tape when he was a nobody with the Giants. You think about that and who you were back then. You have a different perspective on it. Yeah.

20 years later. Do it! I probably wouldn't have thought it would turn out like this. Oh he's so close. That I'd be standing here, you know, like this. like this that I'd be standing here you know like this you know I was just trying to do it establish my coaching career be a good coach win some games and we want a lot of them here voice this is a great is this history it's a great organization do it come on yeah it's hard not to get choked up about it here do it damn I spent a lot of hours on a clench cry you

bike go through three or four games and the next team we're gonna play. It's a lot of... a lot of hours here. Awww! Come on! I had never seen that before until just now. If you just listen to it, you listen to his breathing, he gets, there's a choked up-ed-ness and there is a linguistic tell. Yeah, we even got the sort of the hopscotch-y,

the, it was like, so I don't, I mean, I don't know what is the physiological rules that constitute crying. We came as close as humanly possible. some constipated ducks right in this way I kind of relate to Belichick honestly like watching him fight it like watching him as trying to just like not get pinned by his parasympathetic nervous system I know it wasn't interesting to the he was subconsciously was he was rubbing his own neck then he turned away like I don't want to too, he was subconsciously rubbing his own neck, then he turned away

like, I don't want to do this, he tried to walk away. And I think the other thing that's really important that ties into what we've been talking about, he's almost broke down in tears. He's talking about going over grinding through game film. That and okay, but that matches what he loves and what he intensely and physically loves about the game Was that kind of shit? So it's very clear to me that maybe the only thing that's more uncomfortable than watching someone cry in his mommy's arms is watching Bill Belichick try not to cry while thinking

about grinding film for Bill Parcells. And it reminds me, given the work we put into just getting to that, that shred of moisture, which may confirm the moisture that you recall seeing, that we need to talk to somebody who is less in their head about this. Because there are players, I am told, who are, you know, willing to actually speak freely on the record and I have a feeling they're probably less awkward. But like I got the trigger response of like I want to go give Bill Belichick a hug. It did feel like watching your dad cry his hardest to not cry in front of you.

Yes, yes. I genuinely felt sad for him in that situation watching that where it was like, oh man, just have a good cry. Which gets to the question of like, okay, he's the boss, okay? That is the guy who sets the emotional temperature for the NFL at large when it comes to how players are supposed to act. And yet, as somebody who's covered the league forever, there's an interesting paradox, right? I have been telling people for years that there is a ton of crying in the NFL. Ten times more than anybody would ever imagine.

Especially at the Super Bowl, the Super Bowl locker rooms at the Super Bowl after the game, it is like a group reviewing of the movie, The Notebook. Everybody's bawling. People are crying because they're happy. People are crying because they're sad. People are crying because it's over. They're jumping into each other's arms. It hides in plain sight.

So I think it's a little bit about what we don't want to see. And yet, it's not easy to get someone to be like, yep, bald continuously. Even the attempts to just confirm stupid little details has even been met by brick walls all over the place. It's just not easy for guys to even really reflect on necessarily. And yet, I found someone, and of course this person,

was down to actually give us the truth on this. Dominique, I've summoned you back onto the show because of course I, of course I did. It was only a matter of time before I said, hey, you tell me about what it was like to do the thing that I never did, and tell me about the fluids you did it with. But thank you for being here.

No problem, buddy, Happy to be here. I called up Dominique Foxworth to give us a sense of like, okay, who are the people that you have seen personally cry? And what does that say about who does the most crying in the hardest most masculine of sports? Hopefully I'm far enough away. Statue of limitations. Okay to name some of these names. These are the names that you want to hear. The people who cried, who I saw crying,

and I saw most broken up over wins and losses, were the Hall of Famers, the superstars, the all-time greats. And it wasn't even crying after losses. I remember a Thursday night game when I, after I signed my contract and I'm in Baltimore, we went to Cleveland playing Thursday night game. The Browns are terrible. They seemingly always are terrible. We're standing in the tunnel about to go out on the field.

I look over and I see Ray Lewis with his eyes full of tears and tears start flowing down his face. I've always looked at this particular moment. It like stands out to me because he'd already won a Super Bowl. He'd already established himself as like, this is an early career Ray Lewis. He'd already won a Super Bowl. He'd already established himself as probably the best linebacker of all time.

And this like mundane ass game for me, for me, for me, this is a mundane ass game. So for him, like this has, he was so intense that he was in tears. He had worked himself up to a point That he was crying before we left the tunnel a half empty Cleveland Browns guaranteed win And I just remember thinking that obviously Physically were different but this is also why we're different. Like I can't get there emotionally.

And I've seen that for other great players and Ed was also somebody who was like incredibly emotional a lot of times. Ed Reed. Yeah. Arguably the greatest at his position. No argument. And he is like, I mean, Bill Belichick would agree.

He is not an argument. He is like I mean, Bill Belichick would agree. It's not an argument. These are two greatest enterpositions and they were so emotionally invested. I think Terrell Suggs fits in this category also of someone who would have more aggressive emotional swings based on the outcomes

of games. And I think this had something to do with how good they were. Me and all the rest of the mediocre football players, no crying. We were crying. I never cried as a result of a game in NFL. I've given up game winning touchdowns. I've made incredible game winning plays. None of them have ever moved me to tears, but you know what would have made me cry?

If I tore up my knee the year before my contract, I'd have cried my eyes out then because that was about me. It's direct proof of the theories that we're working off of, which is it was everything to them. And the tears are proof of that. Because you literally can't cry. Your body cannot cry unless you are pushed to the brink emotionally and physically, that's the only thing that can make you cross the bridge to parasympathetic response. So it's Ray Lewis is like, I mean, again, can you have a better example of the science that we're talking about?

One in six doesn't define who you are. What defines who you are is what you do when you one in six. What the man you will fight for. Just everything you got today, not because of the schoolboy, but because when this game ends, you have a brother to call for life. No, you gave everything you had. That's why you play as a raver. That's why you fight as a raver.

What was fascinating to me was Dominique sort of acknowledging, I can't cry, I'm not going to cry because it doesn't mean the same thing to me as it meant to Ray. So this gets to a theory that Dominique presents us because Dominique is also very self-aware, right? And he's saying, look, yeah, I played seven years in the NFL as a cornerback. Yes, I was in all these locker rooms organizing them as the president of their union. I know the landscape of the league, all of that is so. But also, he has a theory about who cries the most and who doesn't. And so he continues to sort of like lie on the therapy couch for us.

My theory on the reason why these like all time greats and super important, significant players are the ones that are crying is because they've never been confronted with that business side of football. They still have that childlike pop Warner feeling about a family because they got Dre got drafted in the first round and was great from the time. And the team always wanted to keep him and they never drafted anybody over him. And he never felt like it was in jeopardy. So I feel like and this is my theory is same thing for quarterbacks. And I feel like their connection to the game and to the team and to the passion of it. connection to the game and to the team and to the passion of it.

It is never been eroded by the ugliness of the experience of the mediocre guy. And they still feel that way. And I, and I jealous of them for a number of reasons, but that's one of them. It connects exactly to the research that we've done, which is their teammates and everything, the sport of football remains one big family for them. And so of course they'd be more likely to cry because they're around family. And from an evolutionary standpoint, they're more comfortable.

If they're gonna cry and signal for help, you do it in front of people who care about you enough to respond. And then somebody who understands the business of the game. It becomes a realist and or a cynic. Right. Those people aren't your family members. Your family are your family members.

Obviously, you can look at any of the great players lives and things off the field and on the field have been difficult for them in many ways. But I do think that the way that I had to confront my career mortality a number of times earlier, it like shrinks whatever space I have in my heart for that like genuine, beautiful Hollywood style. Right, Friday nights, Friday night lights level. Yeah. Sabic. Yeah. That that I miss it. I loved it. It was great. I

remember crying at my last high school football game because it did feel like those guys, me and those guys, it was something special. It felt like in those moments, nothing mattered more. And I remember like looking back on it. I fractured my elbow senior year. And I was playing. It was the dumbest sh** ever. I was the best player in the state, maybe, or at least on the team in the county. We had nothing to play for. We weren't going to win the championship. But these are my guys. This matters matters had I been confronted with the

same choice in later years or in college or an NFL be less likely to do it and it would be more based on how is this going to impact my career not gotta be there for my guys.