The Press Box - How We Talk About Football, Coach Tim Walz and the State of the Campaign, and the Art of Curious Podcasting with Pablo Torre

Episode Date: September 6, 2024

Hello, media consumers! Bryan kicks off the show with a preview of his latest piece on the ringer dot com, How Fox Threw Tom Brady a Hail Mary and Won (0:45). Then he welcomes Pablo Torre and they discuss the following: How the media talks football these days (7:05) Tom Brady being recast as an announcer (18:13) The democratic rollout of Tim Walz (31:29) Pablo’s podcast, ‘Pablo Finds Out’ (43:43) Plus David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Pablo Torre Producer: Brian H. Waters Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Tara Palmeri. I'm Puck's senior political correspondent and host of Somebody's Got to win. Brought to you by The Ringer and Spotify. The 2024 election has been upended with Joe Biden off the ticket and Donald Trump facing a new challenger, Kamala Harris. If you want to hear what the insiders are really saying about the race, join me Tuesdays and Thursdays as I break it all down with lawmakers, journalists, and political strategists. We'll go deeper than the headlines to the anxieties at the highest levels of power. And of course, we'll chew over all the hot political gossip as we head into this historic election. Be sure to follow. Somebody's got to win at Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, media consumers.

Welcome to Press Box. Brian Curtis of the Ringer here, along with producer Brian Waters. Pablo is going to join us in just one second. But I wanted to start with a few thoughts about one, Tom Brady. Tom Brady, the broadcasting man of the hour. It's going to call his first game Sunday on Fox. It's Cowboys versus Browns. And right now at the ringer.com, I have a new story up called How Fox Through a Tom Brady, Hail Mary, and One,

which has new details about how Fox landed the biggest free agent in broadcasting. I'd love you to read it. But before you do, I'm going to give you three thoughts on Fox's courting of Tom Brady. Thought number one, Brady is going to start calling games on Sunday. But if you remember, Fox actually signed him two years ago in 2022. 2020 was the year that NFL broadcasting went completely crazy. Joe Buck and Troy Aikman left Fox to call games at ESPN on Monday night football. Mike Tariko was ascended on NBC, which meant that Al Michaels was out. He wound up going to Amazon. The other thing that happened in 2022 is that

Tom Brady fake retired from football. Remember, he was going off to spend more time with his family, and then 40 days later, he said, actually, I'm going to go spend one more season in Tampa Bay. One interesting takeaway from me while I was reporting this story is that Brady going to Fox revolved around that fake retirement. Remember, Fox had lost Troy Aitman to ESPN. They needed an announcer right then to call games and call that season. Super Bowl. Brady doesn't retire for 40 days, Fox never would have pitched him on being an

announcer. And by the time Brady was actually done with football the next year, Greg Olson or someone else has that job. Brad Zager, who's the head of production of Fox Sports, told me it was only because he was retired that we threw that Hail Mary. All right, that's thought number one. Thought number two involves Greg Olson. You know Greg Olson. He's the ultimate heart hard luck announcer, everybody said. Because Fox signed Tom Brady in 2022, Brady didn't actually take the job for two years, and Olson slid in there as the interim number one guy. And he turned out to be great. Better than almost anyone on the outside, if they're being honest, thought he would be. And then, of course, he had to give up the job for Tom Brady.

Another thing I learned while reporting this story was how important Greg Olson was to the whole Brady operation. Fox, both as they were letting Eggman walk out the door and throwing the Hail Mary to sign Brady, knew that Greg Olson could do the number one job. Fox, alone among networks at that point in history, believed that Olson, despite a relatively low profile, was good enough to call a Super Bowl, which he proved he was. There were a lot of weird rumors during that period. What's Fox doing? Do they have a plan? Are they trying to cheap out? Well, Zager told that Fox was either going to go get Tom Brady or they were going to give the job to Greg Olson.

Nobody else was ever considered. All right, thought number three, the recruiting video. Yeah, there was a recruiting video used in the courtship of Tom Brady. Two years ago, Fox had a secret meeting in a hotel. Two executives showed up. They were going to meet Brady. They were going to pitch him on the job. And they wanted to make their pitch just a little bit more interesting.

So they made a recruiting video. and showed it to Brady on an iPad. Now, what do you put in a Tom Brady recruiting video? Well, you want to make sure that you have the idea in there about how much Fox loves football. You want to make sure that you have pictures of Tom Brady's friends who are already at Fox, like Gronk or Aaron Andrews. You want to make sure to remind Brady that Fox,

despite being the NFC network, showed Brady's first Super Bowl. in 2002, and showed one of Brady's most memorable Super Bowls, the big 25-point comeback against the Falcons in 2017. When I talked to Brady for this story last week, he quoted lines from the video to me, which shows that it made something of an impression. Fox also made sure that they put in the fact that they were the network that showed Michigan beating Ohio State for the first time in a decade back in 2021. They had this narration. Starting this season, the eyes of the world will be upon you. They're talking to Brady here. To build a new legacy, become the face of a network dedicated to giving you every resource possible to succeed with it. The video ended with a familiar

Brady soundbite. You know what? Ring is my favorite one? My favorite ring is the next one. To which the narrator of the Fox video responded, welcome to the next one, Tom. Now, that video was not the reason that Tom Brady chose to go to Fox. There are 37.5 million other reasons he ultimately wound up calling Cowboys Browns this Sunday. But it's an interesting curio that tells you something about how networks try to appeal to people who already have all the money and fame they'll ever need. Story is called How Fox Through a Tom Brady Hail Mary in One. I'd be delighted if you read it. Now on with the show. Folks, as Joe Biden used to say, Pablo Torres here, he is the host of the podcast Pablo Torre finds out, which is excellent. And as Pablo himself,

has noted the pot has both featured the host smoking athlete branded weed on the air and won an Edward R. Murrow Award for sports reporting. Pablo's here to talk about football and politics and the legacy of the late great CBS newsman. Pablo, welcome back to the press box. It's great to be here. I want to dedicate my appearance today with you to corn pop, wherever he may be. That's a very, very good callback. We're doing politics in a second, but since we're talking four hours before the Chiefs Ravens NFL season opener. Yeah. And you just published an episode about this today.

I want to start with this idea. What have you noticed about the way people in the media talk about football these days? Yeah, we are performing, and I use we royally there. I am not one of the foremost NFL film grinders, but I certainly consume them. And we broadly, as an industry, are performing the theater of complexity, I think. we are all somewhere between like an airline pilot who is saying a bunch of stuff that feels reassuring to the passengers and or

you know my parents doctors who when they wanted to say stuff to me that I couldn't understand would just start using like Latin names for body parts and I'm like this does not help me it kind of makes me feel like I'm in good hands as it were but I don't understand what the fuck's happening and I feel like that's so much of what NFL media is like. I am nodding because I think this is what smart people sound like.

And I think it's going to be okay, but I really couldn't tell you truly if it is. Are you like me where you're listening to an NFL podcast? You love what you're hearing. You are nodding along as you say and you are actually getting like 30 to 40 percent of what they're talking about. Yeah, I feel like I am through osmosis able to tell you all about spider twos and why bananas and mesh. The word cloud of the NFL podcast I've listened to over the last five years, I know to talk about mesh and mesh points. But, you know, pressed for further clarity, I tend to realize I feel like I'm mostly just

sort of doing karaoke. And I just wonder, and I did an episode with Nate Tice about this, in which I sort of invade against and also lament how I think we've missed the point here, which is that understanding and getting smarter about stuff is not the same as sounding smarter about stuff. As much as people want to accuse me of doing literally the same thing. I just want to clarify it. I try to be self-aware. I get it. And maybe this is just the shoe being on the other foot. So interesting because there are almost two worlds now. There's NFL podcast world and then there's NFL broadcast television world. And the Twain rarely meet, at least when it

comes to pregame shows and games on Sundays. So you listen to like Greg Olson, he is explaining football in a ton of detail. He is talking about football in a schematic way. He's almost never using jargon at all. In fact, his producers are going, please don't do that because every rando watching this is going to lose you and is going to tune out because they're not going to know what you're talking about. Yeah, I believe the NFL is a special distinctly American institution.

in 2024. It is a thing we all love the most, watch the most, and yet we love nothing more that we also understand less. And so to me, the Greg Olson reminder of like, hey, there are a lot of normies out there. Millions upon millions. You are preaching in the biggest tent left in American life. Everything else is fragmented. There is no place where we can be inside of a room, literally or metaphorically with other people who do not vote the same way, think the same way, eat the same way, listen to the same music, watch the movies, any of that. except for this shared thing we have, which is this football game. And so if you can preach to both sides of the congregation, all sides of the congregation,

and you can speak to them in their language, isn't that the point of communicating? It is the thing that I sort of rhetorically find myself saying as I try to keep up with what is happening as someone is breaking down the exes and o's of something that I have lost them on five minutes earlier. That is a trick, isn't it? You've had your own travels in the basketball analytics work. world. Yes. But the talent is to take a thing, understand it at the molecular level, and then explain it at the, and here my knowledge of physics sort of runs out, but explain it at the

non-molecular level at the big object level. Well played. To everybody. That strikes me as the thing. But it is funny to me when we look at the networks, because they're trying to satisfy two audiences, right? An audience that gets farther and farther apart. People that are raised on other people grinding tape and people that are just like, I like football, man, show me the cool football show. Right. And look, I do believe, and this is the difficulty of it, right?

The hardest thing to do is what you just explain, which is speak one language at a depth that is inaccessible to all but the most expert people and then make it accessible to the broadest possible swath of the country. And the needle we're threading here is, of course, and I relate to this challenge, in lots of other genres and topics.

It's how do you take something that is complicated and simplify it? How do you take something that feels like it's more than just check out all the homework I did? You know? And I think that, and I confess that I also am almost certainly projecting various neuroses and insecurities that doctors are actually required to diagnose here. But I do think that as somebody who did not play sports professionally, in any meaningful level, let's just be frank about that, right? I'm always trying to wonder, when am I losing credibility with people who know what they're talking about?

And so in between a discussion about the clutch gene, which is not a real gene, a non-scientific concept, and let's give you the most dissected, granular, molecular analysis of what the bills just did against the chiefs on Sunday, in which, you know, I'm going to impress, I'm going to impress Brandon Bean, but lose, you know, the median viewer. I think there's something in between there that the best do and they do well. And we have more of that now. We have more of everything now, but we certainly have more of that. There are people that I love who do this. Nate Tice being one of them, which is why I asked him. But man, there's a lot of just of there's a lot of people who aren't explaining it to me well enough, I fear.

The other thing I thought about while listening to your pod was just the way that journalism business has changed. You and I came up in an age where one of the skills, maybe the great skill, was to be a generalist so that a magazine editor could look at Toray or look at Curtis and be like, I'm going to sick you on any subject and you will be able to come back with a readable piece of journalism about that. Now the world is more oriented. to, hey, you are going to pick a single subject, often a niche subject, and you are going to be the enthusiastic nerd king or queen of this subject. And you are going to invite people down the rabbit hole. So they will follow you all the way down this thing. Right. That is very, very, very different.

And I think that gets to what you're talking about and how we got here. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Tony Cornynycher has this phrase, which he means, I think, self-effacingly, I take it though as almost a lost art, which is how can you be a mile wide and an inch deep? And I want to be deeper than an inch, as it were. Ideally. Don't clip that. Don't clip that. But you know, you get my drift.

You get my drift. The idea is, yeah, I would like to be able to speak to all sorts of things to be a guide that you summon on an ad hoc bespoke basis who can investigate something and come out of the rabbit hole with like, hey, here's what I learned. As someone who didn't know about this, let me explain it. let me explain to a bunch of people who I presume don't know or didn't know about it either. But the generalist thing, you're right.

Like, dude, the idea of a magazine being able to be itself a big tent is so, is so antiquated as all these have died. Right? Like, Vanity, the New Yorker would write, you'd read John McPhee on oranges, right? I'd one part and then, you know. Part two, part three. Yeah, certainly. Or even just Sports Illustrated, right, which is the home that I used. to have. Now the specialty, the rise of the specialty industrial complex in which you are majoring

in something and you're not a liberal arts journalist anymore, so to speak, literally and perhaps figuratively as well. Yeah, I used to, and again, I confess to some sort of snobbery back in the day about this. Like, oh, that's these athlons, you know, like whatever. Like, pick your blue ribbon guides, right? Like, yeah, you can go nerd out over there. I'm here doing the big stuff, you know, for the big audiences. And the internet has inverted, you know, the content funnel, Brian, where you're trying to play to niches that are, as you say, ever deeper as opposed to something that is maybe a mile wide by design. I remember in the 2000s, this was seen as a threat, right, especially when the baseball stat guys came around. Oh, wait a second. Oh, in order to

understand baseball, I have to be able to talk about it in a specific way. And there are a lot of older sports journalists who are very threatened about that. But then the argument kind of became moot because the specialty thing just became the media. It ate the media, which is, again, they're upsides and downside to that. But it's like it is now not an argument anymore. No one cares. No one's like, oh, let's fight about this because it's over. Everybody won.

Yeah, well, yeah, data won. The war is over. If you are wandering in a field in Japan, arguing about the clutch gene, you can rest now. Your side has lost. The war has ended. But I do think, you know, it's interesting, right? So I came and I think you very astutely intuited this very early in this conversation as somebody who tried to become fluent in analytics. And by the way, qualified for a miraculous window of time as like the analytics nerd guy on like ESPN.

Because I was like, you know, going to Sloan and reciting statistics and research. And then immediately in the way that you do when you go to college over time, get outclassed by the actual nerds who I don't know, actual math and actually were engineers about stuff. And then I was like, I should stop pretending that I can be this. I do recognize that at a certain point, once data wins, and once the people who run the sport start talking a certain way, you know, I remember talking to Boogsciambi about this on my show, who's for my money, the best play-by-play guy in baseball. But he talked about why does he incorporate certain statistics in baseball that maybe do need

be a listener, the viewer, to catch up a bit on like why he's doing it. It's because the people who make decisions in baseball don't give a shit about RBI's anymore. And so you got to sort of pivot. And so again, we're talking about a

way to bring an audience along with you as opposed to leaving them behind and waiting for them to catch up. But I do I get the argument when it comes certainly to a parallel topic, which would be how to use and talk about data. Since we're talking about the way we talk about sports. I want to know what you make of Tom Brady. Seven-time NFL champ, giant Hertz car ad making

cultural entity being recast as an announcer. Yeah, yeah. He is the sort of famous and obviously unparalleled athlete who you just want to hear what he has to say about topics related to the thing he did. You know, I just, this is a brief tangent, but forgive me. I just watched the entirety of Cristiano Ronaldo's YouTube channel. Okay. And I was like, I wonder what this guy's up to. I've never heard him really or wanted to hear from him really, but he is so superlative. Not quite the Tom Brady equivalent.

But I was like, what is he doing? And I was like, oh, I'm uninterested in, I don't care about any of this. But when he says stuff like the English Premier League is the hardest league in the world, I'm like, interesting. Because it's a guy who did it at the highest level, being able to compare and rank things. So from that perspective, I'm like Tom Brady has a lot, a lot of leash that I'm going to give him when it comes to how interesting it is for him to say just basic observations. But in terms of is he going to be good at this, I think that I think so much of this job as Charles Barkley has taught us is about like, is this guy a good hang? Is he somebody that you want to invite into your living room?

And of course, in a booth specifically, which is different from what Barkley did, can he be a musical instrument? in an orchestra with Kevin Harlan in this case. And I don't know. Kevin Berkhart, by the sorry, the Berkarts, the Kevins, I apologize.

Many talented Kevins in broadcasts. Many, many, many such Kevins. But yeah, but look, the other thing about Brady being just so famous, by the way, is that it's funny. Back in the day, you would retire from sports

and it'd be like, I wonder where I'm going to see this guy now. And as an athlete, of course, you would die a second time. right? And every athlete dies twice, you know, retirement being the first one, maybe the most painful one in some regard. And now Tom Brady was an influencer before he retired. Tom Brady is so omnipresent that the idea of there's not, the idea of novelty here, that's what's God to me. I know now what he sounds like and feels like and what he's into. And so that part to me,

the oversaturation of Tom Brady in our media economy. He's on panels. He was, you know, he's just everywhere. And I'm like, that part seems like a disadvantage when it comes to how much do I want to watch this guy and listen to him.

In terms of actually knowing what he's thinking and feeling or what he feels about football, you got that from the Tom Brady roast. You got that from an Hertz ad. Where have you been divining this? Yeah, I would say that it's mostly because, I scroll Twitter and I get opinions from Tom Brady.

And the source of them are unclear to me, but I'm like, oh, Tom Brady thinks quarterbacks don't know what they're doing anymore or they're not as good as they used to be. Or I just saw him at the fanatics panel. Brian, you didn't watch the YouTube video of him and Stephen A at the fanatics panel where Tom Brady was trying to name five quarterbacks and got to three of them and kind of tapped out. And I was like, yeah, all right. I wonder if he's saving the good stuff for us when he gets to Fox.

So anyway, maybe, and to your point, though, maybe it is the feeling of his omnipresence more than the volume of his opinions that has been communicated to me. But yeah, less novelty, I guess, is where I land as an instinct on that. I'm fascinated by the aggregation of Tom Brady. Because from that fanatics event you mentioned, he says Daniel Jones in interception in the same sentence. And the audience is like, whoa, right? He just busted Daniel Jones.

I was just picking a quarterback. I was just doing something. That's going to be him for three and a half hours every week. Right, right, right, right. So this is the thing about what does it mean to sit as Tom Brady, as LeBron James would do, to sit ex-cathodra, basically, and have these papal announcements of like the saying two words close to each other and people ooing and awing and praying,

making the sign of the cross, you know, about, I cannot believe that he just did this. This means a lot, doesn't it? Doesn't it mean a lot? And at a certain point, I just, I just, I guess this is, this is sports, this is politics, this is media,

where it's like, if you can get so many opinions from everybody and everybody, through aggregation, is being presented to you as the most hot take version of themselves, how long does it last? That's the expiration day question that I have. I'm going to be so into it early on. And then I just wonder when we build our tolerance to Tom Brady has a mildly spicy take about a quarterback. But he's a long runway, as I say.

He's a long runway. And there'll be a lot of those clips too that won't just be him busting Daniel Jones, but him explaining a play in a very Tom Brady way using that football brain. And it will go back to topic one where everybody's like, ooh, look at that. He's doing what Ben Solac did, except it's Tom Brady. Brady. It's a little tiny boost. This is amazing. It is funny. It's like if Tom Brady could do what Ben Solek did, he would be a star. It's fundamentally what's what's happening here.

Can he can, dude, I think. Can he keep up? Can Tom Brady keep up with the solex of the world? That's what I'm asking. Right. How, how nerdy is he going to talk to us? And look, again, it's, we, we are in that ex-catheter way. I challenge the people who are going to, and I, again, I got into this originally because there was a viral tweet as per the conversation here, in which a video from Hard Knocks started circulating around the internet of Drake May auditioning for the New York Giants and Brian Daibble basically being impressed by the big words that Drake May said. And I'm like, it's totally good that Brian Daibble is approving as a football. offensive mind, all of that. He's approving of the IQ here. But the people who are cooing at this,

I'm like, do you know why this is impressive? Do you really know why this is impressive? And that's where I'm like, I feel like we've gone too far, baby. If we can be pop psychologist for a second, why do you think Tom Brady wants to be an announcer? I think. So I have a theory about this, And it does go back to Charles Barkley, which is that all of these guys grew up watching television. And they realized that true fame, as much as it is to be, what is it, as much as it is to be the man in the arena, you know, marred by sweat and blood, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There is such power in media. You know, this is a corollary to the Elon Musk theory of like, why does he care about Twitter and Twitter? media, it's because he's actually consuming it and his ego is actually being manipulated,

as he would allege, or at the very least being engaged in ways that he should ostensibly be beyond as anybody who's actually in the media fears, which is like, are we just gassing ourselves up to the people who really do this stuff care? I am proud to report that they care so much more than they should. So much more than they should. Brian, you know this, billionaires, the titans of industry obsessively are doing a version of reading their mentions. They can't get enough of it. And I think there is this intoxicating idea of true power being behind a microphone, which is, again, a corollary to the other theory about why all of these guys are starting podcasts.

There is something about this job being the coolest one. And Charles Barkley, I would say, is just the ultimate case study in it looking like the most fun possible and maybe not that hard, even though, of course, it is in many ways torturously difficult. Yeah, especially in Brady's case. I mean, that's, I think, way different than the Sir Charles case where it's like, hey, I'm here. I might have watched basketball.

I might actually watch this game that's on Turner right now live. That might be my, you know, study. Like, Tom Brady's got to work. Like this is people who are going, well, he's making $37 million a year, just a ton of money. But it's like, you know, per hour, that's pretty. probably a pretty low yield for Tom Brady right now. Like, I think he could just make more doing other things than studying all the time, traveling, working on Thanksgiving.

So there's got to be some something about the pulpit, as you say. Yeah, yeah. There's also, I think, maybe just the more Occam's razor explanation, which is the guy did FTX ads. Maybe he just has a sort of almost like first generation immigrant fear that he's going to lose all his money. and he's just like, I need to get, the iron's hot, I need to do whatever I can to make as much as I possibly, possibly can earn. Because I don't know why you would spend your time doing all of these things

that he is seemingly doing if he had other options. But look, you're right about, I think, play by, even in how I'm talking about it, play by play by play. I'm always reminded by, again, like people like Boob who are like, does he know the names? You know, like, does he know that? You can't just call it. him like 47.

Like part of this is actually... Tommy Romo does, yeah, but go ahead. Well, Jim. Yeah. You can just outweigh it by just saying your partner's first name a lot. Look, having to study is not beyond Tom Brady's capacity. No, not at all. That's what he loves too, by the way, studying, prep, you know.

Yes. And I think he's going to impress all of us by getting all of his homework done. But in terms of, you know, This is the thing that, you know, Romo got dinged by by former lions of the industry, right? How good is he at storytelling? How good is he at weaving these narratives through the game so that you're not just impressing the people who want to do Tom Brady cosplay as a football nerd? But are people who are like, oh, this is this is the thing I'm now emotionally invested in. So that's one part of this is fascinating because Tom Brady, like me and like you, grew up watching John Madden.

And he is very aware. First of all, he has John Madden's job now, which is kind of cool. But he is very aware. John Madden called his first Super Bowl when they beat the Rams. I'm very aware of him. And John Madden was the ultimate example of a guy who understood football at a molecular level, who was studying it harder than other people who were broadcasting at the time. But then when he got on the air was,

storytelling was being funny was like, look that look at that Gatorade bucket over there. And you just immediately forgot that he was teaching you football at the same time. So that's Nirvana, right? The gold standard. No question. Talistrating, you know, being silly, being self-effacing.

You know, that's the other thing too, right? And I don't know how much, I think Brady has revealed himself through it. By the way, so the roast, like what did the roast accomplish? What did I learn about him was something that you alluded to earlier? I learned that he wanted to be tenderized publicly into a form of likability. Boom. There it is.

That's what's here, right, besides the 37 million. He has scoreboard over humanity, but humanity is not totally convinced that he is human. So he's going to bring him, let himself get brought down a peg at the roast. He comes on television. We're seeing him talking in a more normal setting. We've seen Kevin Burkart making some jokes. That is on the table for him, potential.

Yeah, it's a hell of a kink, by the way, to be the guy who is so good, so handsome, so all of this stuff, so manicured and himself edited. facially, let's say, into just this version of, oh, optimal, optimal American quarterback, and then realize I need to be made fun of by a bunch of comedians that I've never heard of before to prove that I can do the thing that John Madden did naturally, that Charles Barkley did naturally, which is be laughed at and enjoy it at the same time. And it's, look, among those with egos, of course, this is not a given. It's really hard. Anybody who's done any form of television knows this.

but it is shared by the people that I consider the best practitioners of it. Because it means that you are not just papal in your proclamation. You're also in the pews. You're one of us. And Brady is going to have to prove that too. We've had way more Pope content on this pod than I thought coming in a poplar. That's what people want from me. People are, they've been demanding.

What does Catholic education really do for you at this point in your life at age 38? And it's tortured bet, of course. right, let's see what you can get in in the segment here about politics. Because you did an episode back in August about the Democrats rallying around Tim Walls, who we are now obligated to call Coach Walls. That's what he's called. What did you make of the rollout of Coach Walls? Unsubtle.

Unsubtle. As unsubtle as unsubtle as Derek Henry being handed the ball 50 times and just like ramming it down your throat. And I got why. I am not in the business of at this point when it comes to cosplaying as a campaign strategist. I'm not in the business of trying to, you know, prove intelligence, frankly. I'm in the business of, wait a minute. If football is what we'd, if it's what we've described it to be already, the lone big tent in America, is there a lane here for the Democratic Party to seize

where they get to be the party of football? And I believe that in their unsettledity, they have revealed that they see this too. They see this schematic advantage to now quote, another Catholic-educated person, Charlie Weiss, I believe, talking about how, oh, wait a minute, we see a possibility on the field here that others don't. And the reason why, I would say the right, broadly speaking,

Donald Trump's Republican Party has seeded it is probably because they don't actually love sports in the way that a total normie like Tim Walls does and has. Like Brian, part of my part of my like unsolicited campaign advice

would be just have Tim Walls somewhere in America just like naming guys. Just name some old baseball players. But let's remember some guys campaign. It's, Let's remember some guys again.

Yes. That would be the campaign slogan that I have. Because it just, it's like, it just is this immediate, again, look, it's cynical, but I believe it's a real thing. How can you connect with people who are in the crowd? People who do watch sports, who do want to feel like you are like them, naming some guys. I would like to see J.D. Vance try to name some guys. No chance.

Absolutely no chance. He could name some guys. guys. It's funny, isn't it? Because we always talk about authenticity, like the political idea of authenticity. And of course, the Republicans are trying to do that to Kamala Harris in their different ways. But sports fandom is such an easy test for people that are actually sports fans. Donald Trump is like, Mike Tyson came to my office. And I think, okay, not a sports fan. Tim Wall's like, I was a decontor. Like, okay, you, you win, sir. You passed our test. Well, this is where, you know, if there's anybody who should ignore the discussion that I tried to articulate at the top of this episode with you, it is Tim Walz. Just like, do it all. Nerd out, jargon out, throw it all out there, right? Like, if you want to prove your bona fides, however, you do it. Absolutely do it. But I think that the underrated thing that you say is, you know, Johann Santana. And just like, wait for the call and response.

of just like people naming dudes, right? Just, just it's, it's a version of what he's already doing, which is going to, uh, various like diners in America or, or chain restaurants and calling out like the local sandwich in Nebraska. Yes. Or ordering donuts yesterday. Like I can order donuts. J.D.

Vance cannot capably order donuts. But let me tell you, I can. The lowest bar is, and this is like something that I learned, of course. And again, I am a first generation Filipino American who does not have anything in common with so many football fans throughout America, demographically, let's say. But, but you put me at a wedding reception and I've done this literally, like, oh, you're from Arkansas. Let's talk Razorbacks. Let's just name. Let's remember some guys, Brian.

Felix Jones, go. Do it. Darren McFadden. Let me give you a take. Nolan Richardson. Hell yeah. 40 minutes of hell, baby. It's true.

The Democrats messed up by doing when we fight we win instead of just doing Johann Santana from the podium of the DNC. That would have brought the house down. There's still time. I want to advise them,

depending on the publication of his podcast, there are debates left. I just think you should attempt this. I think that Tim Walls, particularly, should do the thing which sports fandom,

if sincere, enables you, empowers you to do, which is make small talk. The thing that J.D. Vance could not do at a donut counter. You say this is unsettled and obvious, and I completely agree. I am also amazed at how effective it has been. If you look at Walls's fave, unfaves, better than any candidates in the race. His past misstatements, nobody cares. He is impermeable at a certain level to GOP. attacks. Donald Trump's response has been, you were just a coordinator. I'm like, let me introduce

you to NFL podcasters who fetishize the coordinator's not the head coach, dude. That's where real football is done. Are you surprised at all about how effective it's been? No, no. I did love that part, the whole like, but you're just an assistant. And it's like, oh, you don't know ball. You don't know the beginnings of ball. And the, the, the, the, the, the, so the, the, the, the, so the, the, the, the, ability thing. On some level, I do want to acknowledge what we're describing, which is that Tim Walls is Kamala Harris's DEI candidate, right? Like, this is a true balancing of the ticket, which she needed, of course, she was that

for Biden in ways that were also unsettled, given her performance electorally, you know, as to why she was the bottom part of the ticket. It was for identity reasons. and now she needs that as well. And so to me, I'm not surprised that it's working, that it seems to be working. I just think they should do more of it. I think that there is no limit to how effective this could be, given that, again, sports seems to be, look, if we're talking about culture war, if politics has become culture war, if Donald Trump's main terrain of combat is culture, because he doesn't know what a tariff is and doesn't know. how to provide whatever child care legislation,

blah, but whatever the new headline is, right? If his terrain is culture war, why would you be seating as the opponent the largest, most populated vector of culture left in America? In that way, it is like three points

is worth more than two. It does seem to be a bit, like, let's just, let's just shoot a million threes because the statistics show that it's advisable mathematically. When you talked about Tim Walls on the pod, Mehtaimes was on.

And she made a very good point about Walls showing this different kind of coach masculinity that somehow then traveled into the right-wing bad actor sphere of American life, which I don't care about it. What I am so struck by is that that vision of a kind of new coaching masculinity is one we now read it in every profile that is written of a coach

of Sean McBay of Lane Kiffin this week on ESPN. he's talking about a sobriety, they want to project that too, right? Like they're, I mean, you can, you and I could go find some Lombardi-like fossils rattling around in the NFL or in college football, but most of them want to be like Tim Walts. They want to be an enlightened guy who's thinking about athletes a different way, who's thinking about the strains of the job in a different way. That's fascinating to me, that that has become, that, that didn't, that was not the case

when we were kids, but that has become the sort of dominant coach, you know, projection onto the world. Yeah. Do you remember reading, you know, whether it's Bobby Knight, you know, the rabbit hunter, the de Ford store, whatever, you can pick your version of masculinity that used to be enshrined and point out how that's not okay anymore. And I think a part of it is because, let's also be frank demographically, a lot of the people who have microphones in the mainstream, on the media, in the media, do. We do like to acknowledge how masculinity, emotion is evolving, should be evolving to the point where it does seem so persuasive that it is something to be spammed over and over again by people who are maybe cynically trying to reintroduce themselves for image rehabilitation reasons and or

are sincerely that way. And so my thing with the Walls thing is that I believe that that is plausibly him. I am so deeply cynical about politics as a concept that I don't know for sure. I believe it is plausible, though. I am persuaded for the time being. Its effectiveness is less in question. That is where I am totally confident advising it politically. Now, when it comes to, you know, when it comes to the Dan Campbell's of the world, these guys, where it's like, oh, hey, Dan Campbell doesn't just advise you to gnaw on the kneecaps of your opponents, he also likes to cry. And that, that feels, I think that is, again, I don't know for sure that that that is definitively the real Dan Campbell, but it seems from afar like it is. And I think that this is definitely a default

archetype in terms of what we want now from a coach. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. And Absolutely. Exactly two months from today until Election Day, which is unbelievable. What else has stuck out to you about the campaign so far? Man. How Donald Trump is the aging athlete. He's Patrick Ewing in a Sonic jersey. He is, you know, pick your sad photograph, your sad, remember some guys trading card of this feels like he's. he's at the end and a lot of people around him, of course, need him to not be. But you just watch

him enough, which I still do. I should confess that as well. I still do. I do click. He just doesn't have it. And that's the, look, that's the, again, what's the big advantage that has not yet been hammered electorally? It's that Biden has gone. The argument can plausibly be made that the other guy is totally just out of it. And I think that's left here on the table to be seized from a campaign strategist's perspective. But look, I also recognize, you know, the first episode of my show I ever did, Brian, was an interview with Dan Lebitard, my boss and friend, about the interviews he would do with Trump on ESPN radio as a call-in guest. As a call-in guest, And so some part of me is always going to appreciate and laugh at, frankly, the incoherence.

Right? There's a difference between being a coherent person who's with it on top of it and also being an entertaining sports radio caller. And I think Trump can still have the latter for a long time. But at a certain point, the question of, to bring it back to another metaphor of who do you want flying the plane, I do hope that this is just terrifying viscerally if we see it enough. And I don't think it's been highlighted enough just yet. Perhaps at the debate on Tuesday, we will see glimpses of what you're talking about. Let's talk about your pod before you go.

Pablo Torre finds out, so the basic unit of podcasting, the one you are participating in right now is a couple of people hitting record and talking about a thing. You do that sometimes, but your pod often has a very different bent. Why'd you want to do something different? Because the easy, cynical sort of framework is because no one else is stupid enough to do it. And if we do it well, it can pay off and be differentiated and we'll have our own niche. What if we can be a generalist with a niche because of the structure and format of a docu-style feature conversation thing? Right? That's the easy strategic answer to this.

The other answer, though, is that I love it and it reminds me of magazines. It just enables me to write in ways that I don't otherwise because I am a person trapped in a screen gas bagging into a microphone professionally. And also because I think there are ways to tell stories that are better if you do have the capacity to structure them with reporting. And so truly, like, the thing that I settled on that I am so proud of is that the name of the show is sort of the skeleton key for understanding it. I am using journalism to report and solve mysteries. Mysteries of small, tiny things like does Troy Aikman know that he looks like the white JZ? The answer is yes, it turns out. To big things, like, is Olympic fencing really the most corrupt sport that exists right now?

And is that a problem? And how does this connect to Vladimir Putin? Right. So just like the gamut on top of the athlete weed stuff and the secret NICS recruiting video, for LeBron that happened to have the Sopranos' like lost cutscene in it. So the point being that it enables me to be miles wide and if I can, through my own neurosis and desire to do magazine style work, go deeper than an inch into this stuff, then I think I've developed the job that feels like something that I authentically want to do and might be decent at doing.

let me give you some of the other topics. Yankees' wife swapping in the 70s, Nicola Yokic's obsession with harness racing, I mentioned athlete branded weed, David Foster Wallace and Michael Joyce. These all feel, if we're going to go with the magazine metaphor here, like what you pitch your editor after you've done,

after you've had a big success. Okay, I wrote the big, down the middle profile on, you know, Yokic. I got this other thing. Yeah.

I have enough cash in the bank. Can I spend it all on that? Is that fair? That's probably, I'm going to quote that and put it in the about page of the podcast's home, home landing site. Totally. It's so funny, man. The Sports Illustrated cover, of course, is this thing that I think about all the time still as this emblem of what used to be. And I'm like, the first cover story ever wrote was embarrassing in retrospect.

it was a Cowboys Training Camp Postcard, basically, about Miles Austin. Oh my goodness. Let's remember some guys, Brian. Miles Austin. So that was the cover. Of course, that was not a cover I got because of anything having to do with how good the story was.

It was a cowboy. It was a receiver. I think it was dating allegedly Kim Kardashian at the time. And it was training camp. That was my first SI cover. And it sort of just, it taught me like, that's the one, again, not to be. sound like some highfalutin Hollywood guy, but like that's the one you do for them.

Now what about the one for me? And left my own devices, Brian, I'm doing a lot of stuff for me. Yeah. These are ones for you. These are ones for me. I just hope that people, uh, what they find contagious about it is that the energy and passion I have because I am making the choice for myself in that way, um, is something that they can also, uh, enjoy either vicarious. or because they're also curious about this thing, even if they didn't know about it before. I guess the premise is, if you trust me as a pseudo-21st century magazine editor,

you open up the thing and you're like, I don't know what's going to be in here, but oh my God, I cannot wait to read about oranges. In three parts, it turns out, right? A multi-part series, no doubt. To be continued next week in the New Yorker. If I can leap into your mind

like we leapt into Tom Brady's mind, working for MetaLark. I feel you loving the idea that you can talk explicitly about sports and politics and the intersection of these worlds and that your bosses aren't saying, hey, Pablo, tread carefully. They're saying, yes, yes, Pablo, run toward the flames. You are, you are in the right place. Am I right or wrong about that? I feel like they have, I'm in the player empowerment era, Brian. I'm in the player empowerment era. I'm in the player empowerment. era. Yeah, I feel like the mandate here is to be the best version of yourself. And that is both, I want to be clear about this, an abdication of responsibility as my boss. That doesn't really help. It doesn't help. It just makes me stress out about work all of the time on an episode to

episode basis. But at the same time, it is what I have been craving as somebody who has worked inside of places in which the newsroom is an org chart full of people with territorial claims to things and demands to be included in these conversations, whereas I can just start tumbling down a rabbit hole and be like, I think we can print this. You know, it's just a very A to B with some, again, with some, I think, nods and and consultations with people that I want to help make me better and the show better. But largely it's that. It's that I have the power to do it.

I run a newsroom that is a small cubicle of people that I get to go send off in the world to do stuff. And that, by the way, just working with like effectively the facto correspondence. You know, again, I'm not, I am not Brian Gumble. I am not saying that we are real sports. But I am saying in a world in which real sports does not exist anymore and drugs are popular now. what if I was in the middle of the Venn diagram? I miss that episode where Bernie Goldberg and Brian Goebel were sampling the athlete-branded weed. We really missed out in a big moment in real sports history.

I think Bernie Goldberg would have loved getting magic John Stone, which was one of the strengths. All right. Last one for you, Pablo. Last time you were here on the press box psychiatrist couch, we did talk about writing, about being trapped in the box, being due to your success in multimedia, what Jamel Hill has labeled a quote unquote former journalist. Do you, do you still pine to write things, to write books, to write articles, that stuff? I, I, it remains the Catholic school guilty conscience that is telling me you should do this.

because when you're talking about how you're running a magazine, you're not really writing. You're talking. And in fact, you're writing to sound like you're not writing, which is a weird trick of writing for a narrative sort of podcast thing. So the answer is, yes, I do feel that. But I also am, you know, just the story that I'm working on right now, which I will not spoil because I'm that kind of a guy, it's one of these episodes that is so writing intensive. that for me to say to you,

I should be writing more after I've spent a week like being mad at myself for not writing well enough while still writing. I'd like to think that I'm checking the box that makes me, for now, for now, Brian Curtis,

you know, sleep at night. We've straddled the two worlds between writing and talking like Greg Olson straddles the worlds between X's and O's and Normy football fans. I got it. It works for me. All right, the pot is Pablo Torre finds out.

We will be watching it. We will be looking at your substack, Pablo. Thank you once again for coming out on the press box. Brian, I appreciate you having any at all curiosity about me still after Dog Me for this long. All right, it's time for the second weekly edition of David Shoemaker guests is the strained pun headline. Yeah. Monday's headline about a season-ending injury suffered by a Gonzaga player was Wing Stopped. Today's headline comes to us from Seth.

Summerfeld. It's from the Billings Montana Gazette. Up there in Reed Point, Montana, David, there's a thing called the Great Montana Sheep Drive. Oh, sounds fun. They run the sheep through the streets.

Not sure it inspires any Pampona-style chaos, but it looks like a very fun event for the whole family. So it's a big deal, this sheep event. I want you to think about Shakespeare titles as you ponder.

What was the Billings Gazette's strained-pun headline? Shakespeare. It's a big deal. That's our basis. Much ado about nothing. Where are we going from there? Much ado about fluffy. Much ado about fluffing.

Much ado about sheep. It's just sheep is we going on here? It's sheep. You, Ram, much ado about bleed. What if we think of sheep meat? Oh, much ado about mutton. That's great. Much ado about mutton.

That's a fantastic headline. I don't think I made it past the paywall far enough to see if the sheep indeed become mutton at the end of the sheep driver. Much ado. about button. That's the press box. I'm Brian Curtis. Productions of magic by Brian Waters. We got David Shoemaker back in the hot seat on Monday. We got so much to talk about. We're going to have a big review of everything from the NFL's opening weekend from Tom Brady to the Brazil game. We're going to have a preview of Tuesday's debate with Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. That's going to be a lot of fun. And speaking to which, our second pot of the week, it's going to run Wednesday,

September 11th. So a day early, Harris Trump debate reacts with our official politics reactor, Benji Sarlane of Semaphore. Cannot wait for that one. And you know, there will be more bookworm takes about the media of a fantastic weekend.