The Press Box - Live From Radio Row With Chris “Mad Dog” Russo and ESPN’s Adam Schefter

Episode Date: February 9, 2022

Bryan is live on Radio Row talking with Chris “Mad Dog” Russo from SiriusXM to discuss his career as a sports-radio host, the difference between local and national radio, what it’s like covering the Super Bowl, and more (0:19). Later, Bryan is joined by ESPN’s Adam Schefter to break down his and Jeff Darlington’s Tom Brady retirement news. They then talk through Schefter’s past Super Bowl experiences and what he has planned this time around (22:33).  Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Chris Russo and Adam Schefter Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Listen up all you New York fans. Veteran New York sports talk host, John Dostrompsky gives his unique take on all the big stories in the Big Apple and beyond, including guest conversations, gambling picks, and reactions from you, the listener. Check out New York, New York with John Dostromsky on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to Pressbox live from the Super Bowl. Brian Curtis here along with producer Erica Cervantes. Now, as many of you know, I am serving as the official. anthropologist of Super Bowl Radio Row this week. And I wanted to bring on a couple of media types who've showed up here in Greater Los Angeles so they can tell us just what they're here to do.

We'll get to ESPN's Adam Schaefter and his Tom Brady retirement scoop in just a second. But let us begin with a man who was just announced this morning as a new sparring partner for Stephen A. Smith. He is the sports radio host, Chris Mad Dog, Rousseau. Russo was the co-host of Mike and the Mad Dog on WFA and starting in 1989. For the last 14 years, Russo's famous fast talking voice has been doing a solo act on SiriusXM. I talked to the Mad Dog yesterday after he churned out three hours of sports radio.

And as we sat next to each other in Sirius's green room, I almost felt like I was interviewing an athlete after a game. All right, champ, how do you make a good sports radio segment? Here's Chris Rousseau. All right, sitting here on the very fancy serious XM set at Radio Row with Chris Rousseau. How many Super Bowls is this for you? You know, I got my first one was Super Bowl 24. So that was San Francisco and Denver, 5510-N-Niners. That was the culmination of the 89 season.

So that was January of 90. And I missed the one last shirt and go for COVID. None of us went. So how many is that? That's 25. About 31 of these silly Super Bowls. That's a lot of Super Bowls. The first big radio row that I remember, because the first three or four, it was just four or five stations.

The first big radio row is the Buffalo Dallas game in here. The game was at the Rose Bowl, 5217. That was the first one that I remember where there was like a ballroom at a hotel where we did some, you know, we had about four or five stations do the shows. You know, they had it sort of like about seven or a bunch of tables. Other than that, it was basically just one guy in a lobby, and then somebody else on a second floor. It was like four or five stations. That was the first one when there was some juice, the 92 one.

And the idea was that local stations all over the country would come here and you would do what, sort of hype the Super Bowl for a week, talk Super Bowl? Guests. I think the whole idea really is the availability of the guests. I think, you know, plus it's sort of at least a piece of Americana. That's a factor as well. but the fact that it's basically a convention for football. And I think you get a chance to get people on here

that you never get them on during the course this season. For instance, I'll do Russell Wilson one day this week. I never get Russell Wilson on. So I'll go to the Super Bowl. And if I get four or five of those kind of spots, each one 10 or 11 minutes where I can do a good interview with, that makes it worthwhile. So you get Wilson and Justin Herbert

or if you get blank the owner of the Falcons, It's worth coming for those things. So that's what, plus the fact, who doesn't mind getting out of the cold weather in the middle of New York, you know, in the middle of January in New York City? Now with Russell Wilson, okay, so he's going to do a bunch of interviews. He's very careful with what he says. How do you work that so you actually get something out of him? That's a good question. I catch his mood.

I would probably bring up his first Super Bowl when they beat Denver. I will have to get to the play with the Patriots. I won't do that right away. but if you have Russell Wilson next to you and it's the Super Bowl you have to talk about the interception you know you got an audience there

that wants to hear that I've never asked him that but you can't ask that right away so you have to try to make him feel comfortable in a seven or eight 10 minute spot you know how good he is Hall of Fame and you figure do you want to stay in Seattle you look for areas where he feels comfortable and then Russ

do you regret the pass the play you know And remember, they took the whole team in the Hawaii after the play to get it out of their system and not many people probably would know that. So I will bring that up to them and that might impress. I know this guy knows he's talking about

and as a result, give me something. So I always look for a little angle that might get a little more out of the interviewee than normal. That kind of softens up, a tough question. But you never ask him a tough question, especially the guy who doesn't know you and he doesn't know me.

You never ask a tough question like that right out of the gate. You want to make him feel comfortable, let him enjoy it, talk about himself. I got a kid at Wisconsin. Maybe I'll talk about Wisconsin football. So he went, you know, he's right now. He's at Wisconsin. So I can talk badger football. He transferred there from NC State.

So maybe I'll do something like that just to warm them up to the whole situation of, you know, this will be a little something different. But my job as an interviewer, though, is to get, I got to ask, you got to ask him about that Seattle. You've got to ask him about to play. He's been asked a million times, but you've got to ask him about to play. Do it a nice way, but you've got to ask. Do you like athlete interviews?

Because I've talked to a lot of sports radio hosts who say, you know, I'm done with athletes. They never say anything on my show. It's hard to get stuff out of them. A lot of truth to that. They are much better when they're retired than when they're playing. It depends. The quarterbacks are usually pretty good and they're significant. So you like the quarterback interview.

But, you know, to get an offensive guard on, or to get a inside linebacker on who doesn't know Chris Rousseau from Adam, and most of these young athletes don't know anything about Sirius or me. You know, an old guy, who the hell am I? They don't know. You know, they're not bouncing around and listening to me. So from that standpoint, those are tough interviews. They don't want to do it.

They're here because they're selling a brand. It's a seven or eight minute spot. You know, they're just trying to get out, you know, no harm, no foul. So that interview, he gets a little tedious. You got to do a couple of them because you never know. you might get something that's a gem, but those interviews are tricky, and you're right,

the younger athlete doesn't really love to talk to the media anyway. They got their own media deal, and so that becomes a little tricky. So, yeah, I'm a little, like, for instance, I'm going to do Justin Herbert this week, and I just talked to the NFL, the Florio show with Sims,

and they had him on today, and I said, was he good? He said, listen, we asked him about the, you know, the Rams, you can't be rooting for the Rams. Super Bowl, your Chargers, oh, it's good for Los Angeles. That's not the answer I want.

You know, the fact that it's good for the city. You're on a Chargers. What do you care about the Rams for? You wouldn't ask a Jet fan, do you want the Giants to win a Super Bowl, right? So you've got to learn to get something out of the guy that you're interviewing. That's the key to it. If you get a gem out of something, it's good stuff.

Not all the time, some of the time. You mentioned the product plugs here on Radio Row. So how do you handle the athlete who insists on getting the detergent? You can do two things there, bro. You can do the first thing you do is you get out of the way right out of the bat. You can get that out of the way where you can do his plug

and then he relaxes and he's better. Or if you know he's rushed for time and you can tell, you can sense it, PR person looking at his watch. You don't do that and you get some football out of him and you throw that in at the end because they're never going to blow you off until they've heard the spot being promoted.

So you have to think, look at the, better get a little sense of the area, get a little, read the room properly and figure out which way to go. If you think that he can stay a little while, maybe you get out of the way, you relax him. If you think he's going to be rushed, get the football questions, and then throw that in at the end. This is the veteran savvy of 30 plus years of sports rate. You know, there's something to that. I've been doing this a long time. In this environment, I'm doing it a long time. I mean, maybe 30-something Super Bowls. And, you know, I like the old

player and I always try to make sure that I have something for the older player who comes in here to explain to him, give him a sense that he's not talking to some idiot. You know, I had Jim Brown three or four years ago. Right away, Jim knew that I was going to be good. And as a result of that, he gives you a better spot. My job is to give the listener a good interview. And by doing that with a player, an older player, if I know something about his career that 99.9% of the guys doing the interviews this week don't know.

I'll get a leg up and give me a better spot. I've talked to some sports hosts who don't like callers anymore. They do it by text or the tweets. They just don't do any audience interaction altogether because they just don't want it. Where do you stand on call? Well, a lot of the hosts who don't like the calls, remember, they got a group of people with them

who sort of supply their call content. You know, Dan Patrick's got a group of guys. Pat McAvey's got a group of guys. Cowards got somebody there. I don't have anybody there. It's me. So as a result of that, I need some people, fan-wise, to fill some blocks. Now, I got a six-minute block, okay.

I got a nine-minute block here, a four-minute block there. Other hosts who are in that situation, they can go to their ensemble cast to do that. You know, Dan's got four or five guys who kind of act as his callers. I don't have that. So that's one of the reasons why I have to, while I go to the course. The other reason is it's sports talk. It's sports fans talking to other sports fans. And I think the caller appreciates the good caller, appreciates the opportunity to get his opinion across.

Sure, there are some guys who are blowhards who don't care, you know, just want to go on the air and just to go on the air. But the thoughtful sports fan has something to add. And if you handle those fans well, you'd be better off as a host. This is the original idea of sports radio that's similar to when you came on in the 80s. It was like, I have an opinion. I don't have a place for it. And I'm going to call the sports host and give it to them. 100%.

I was in Jacksonville and Orlando. I didn't go to Super Bowls. I didn't have millions of guests on. I didn't have a lot of folks that I could call to put on a phone. So I had to rely on calls to keep everything going. And the first job I ever had, well, second job I ever had was in Orlando, Florida. And they took me off the air. in 86, 85. They, they moved me to weekends. I was doing Monday through Friday, six to eight for three

years. They moved me to weekends. Do you know the calls were so upset? They threw a roast in Disney World. I had 15 calls give me a roast because they appreciated the interaction with the talk show host. So I haven't forgotten that. Calls, and I had another, I had a GM once who didn't like the idea that I put a call on who stuttered. Wow. And he said, Chris, you wouldn't hear a DJ

put on a scratchy record. I said, Mike, he's a person. He's not a record. I got to give him a chance to talk. So fans sense that decency and you get a better phone call. So you went from years of WFA

to hear on SiriusXM. You've been here a long time now, by the way. Yeah, I was like 14 years. That's a long run. I would think national radio would be a lot harder to do

than local sports radio. How do you work that? There's two different ways to do it. The local radio is good because you never have to rely on topics or a phone call scenario because you've got your teams. And if you're in a big market like New York, you can always get a Nick call, a Net call, a Met call, a Yankee call, a giant call, a jet call.

You can do draft from here to Kingdom Come. So you never have a dry period. While on national radio, you might, because not everybody cares. Like, for instance, you know, yesterday. There wasn't much to talk. I wasn't here. I was home. There was no games over the weekend of note. So it's a, it's a harder show to get everybody caring about the same topic. When you're doing local radio, your listener base

is all, is interested in what everybody else is saying. When you're doing national radio, the guy in Walla Walla doesn't care what the guy in Oklahoma City is saying. Or the guy in San Diego may not be, not care what I care about. In New York, they all care about the same thing. They care about the local teams. So it's a positive and a negative. The positive. The power. Positive is you have flexibility. You can do what you want. You can mix it up. The negative is there are times that you've got to be a little more creative

because of the fact you don't have that hometown team to rely on. Yeah, I would think like week after the Super Bowl. That's when it gets tricked. Well, yeah, this first week will be good. You know, the game will get you two or three days. But you're right. There will be a three to a four week period there before selection Sunday where the show will get a little, we'll get harder.

And remember, the NCAA tournament is fun. It gives you content, but the NCAA tournament doesn't give you calls because nobody knows the teams. College basketball is a niche sport. You know, if Auburn, I'll give you an example,

you know, how many people in America think know anything about Auburn? They know something about Auburn and Auburn and maybe in a little, in the SEC, do you think somebody in Bloomington, Indiana, has seen Auburn play? So it does, everybody's seen the Chargers play, everybody's seen the Bengals play,

everybody's seen the Dolphins play. They haven't all seen the teams in the college. So the NCAA is good because it gives you content things to talk about, but from a call standpoint, it doesn't carry it. It's amazing. Yeah, how important is being live for you? Because, you know, we're now in this world where people do podcasts, but podcasts are taped and podcasts are edited.

Much of podcasts are easy, is you can edit, you can do it at your own will, you can figure out a topic and do your thing. Podcast is not daily. Going on the air every day for three, four hours, whatever might be, every day, not once in a while, not when you feel like it, when you set up three good interviews, anybody can do that. Going on the air every day for three hours and making that needle move, that's hard, much harder than a podcast.

I do podcast too. Podcasts are easier because you can set the template. Can't do that on radio. So radio is much more of a grind on a day and down. I'm doing 250 shows a year. that's a little harder than doing a podcast a week. So the radio is harder. I talk about that with Stern a lot.

He agrees. The radio is harder than a podcast. Now, I understand the podcast is the real thing now. That's all people, they don't go to the radio as much anymore. They go podcasts, but radio is harder. Daily, daily basis. Making of the punching the clock aspect of it. Yeah.

I mean, I think, you know, I mean, okay, it's Wednesday at 430. I've been on the year for three days already. There's nothing going on. What the hell am I going to do at 505? I got an hour to fill. I can't take any more calls today. I have no guests. What am I going to do to make people interested?

That's hard. Podcasts, you plan it. You're never in that situation. So you will find a lot of great podcasters and not great talk show hosts, but a great talk show host will always be a good podcaster because podcasts are easier. I can interview anybody for 25 minutes, 30 minutes and put them on. That's simple. But to do it every day, day after day after day,

that grind mentality is harder. What about the feeling, though? The feeling of doing something that's going to be recorded and put out, even in a couple of hours of the next day, versus the feeling of you are speaking into a microphone and your voice is going out.

You've got to be much more careful when you're speaking into a microphone, especially in this day and age, because, you know, one slip up and you can be gone. So you have to be very, very careful of what you're going to say and you've got to edit yourself

when you're doing a show and you try, in my case, to stay away from those topics that are no-win topics, gun control, not that you go there anyway, you know, you try to stay away from topics where there's no correct answer, you know, because all you're going to do is you're going to tick off one side of the other and it's a mess. You get a lot of calls, but that's what you're going to do. Remember, I try to look at the radio, I got fans who are Republicans, and I have fans who are Democrats. The trick for me is to do a good show where the listener doesn't know.

whether I'm a Democrat or Republican. So that's what I try to pinpoint. And again, you have to be careful because on podcast, you make a mistake, you added it out and away you go. You go back and listen to it before you throw it out there. You can't do that on radio.

It's out there in the ether. It's out there in the ether. Much harder. But beyond just being cautious, what about the feeling of speaking into a life? Yeah, I think there's, I don't look at it that way to me because the podcast that I've done

have been a more of a historical basis. And so from that standpoint for me, I kind of look at it as radio is radio, it's radio, but there is something about being live. You know, podcasts, I can figure out the day where I can get myself pumped up when I got to do this podcast interview. I can set my emotional metabolism

where I'm ready to do the show. You know, radio every day at 3 o'clock, you know, there may be days and not that into it. Oh, geez, I got talked to me. What the hell am I going to? God, this show's never going to end. You don't have that feeling on a podcast because you pick your time.

So that live aspect of it is more rewarding. Here's something about radio that's good. When you start a radio show in the middle of the week on a nothing in a day of March when nothing's going on, and you say it on a Wednesday at 3 o'clock, geez, how am I going to get through this show today? And when the radio is done at 6, you said, boy, that was a hell of a show today.

That is something that you enjoy because you created something out of nothing. So you enjoy that. And I've had days like that where I said, my God, what a hell am I going to do? and a caller might trigger it, a surprise guest might. Now, for instance, today, show wasn't going great today. First day here.

So I had Doug Krakurion on who wrote for the L.A. examiner forever. And you know who he gets on the phone for 20 minutes? Jerry West. Wow. So you got Jerry West on at 505 talking to you about L.A. and playing for the Lakers and everything else. And nobody in America had Jerry West on today. That's the last thing I thought of when I thought of Doug Krikurion.

at one o'clock. And West is on, it turns out to be a good spot. Those surprise guests are great. In a podcast, you plan it. Radio you don't. It's the spontaneity of it's fun. It's more enjoyable in a lot of ways when you're successful. You've got a very famous voice and I think an excellent voice. How would you describe what your voice sounds like? Unique, unique. As my old program director, Gene Burns, who since passed away, W-O-R-R-K-O-N Boston, great host said, the great thing about your voice is, whether you like it or not, when you hear it driving around, it's going to be something that you're going to remember. It's not a voice where it goes one ear or not the other.

Either going to like the voice or not like the voice, but you're going to remember the voice. As Letterman told me the first time I've ever was on back in 91, he said, look, he said, you know, the first time I heard you, Mad Dog, I could not believe. I said to my wife, look, they've given Donald Duck a show. but you know what i'd rather be donald duck than somebody he doesn't know because he knows who donald's duck's voice sounds like so you know the voice you got to have a good voice on radio

and for better or for worse the voice that i have is unique which helps you mentioned the grind will there ever be a morning where you wake up and say i don't want to do any more that's when that happens i'll quit can you imagine it yeah i love sports so much there's always something going on i can't imagine it now um and plus the first of fact, you got to remember two, if I do quit, what am I going to do? I mean, you know, you want something, you know, you want to be able to hang your hat on something every day where you, you know, you want to be able to feel good about yourself that you made it a contribution on a day and day out basis. And radio does that for me. So I can see myself quitting the other things that maybe I do,

but I don't see myself quitting radio. It'll be your enjoyment of sports that keeps you going. Absolutely. The big game. There's nothing I like better than the big game. I love the breakdown. the big game. I can talk about a big game for hours. I think it's always interesting in our business because some people are propelled by sports and some people are prepared by the medium in your case radio. So where does it fall with you? Both. Both. I'm propelled by the sports because sports keeps you going. I need the sports every day, but I love doing a radio. I know how to make that radio sink. I know how to go out there and create something out of nothing. And that's what a good talk show host has to learn how to do. Anybody can do a show on Monday after the Super Bowl. It's what you do

the following Monday when there's no Super Bowl. That's the hard show. And so that is, you know, last year I worked President's Day and it was a slow day as you'd expect, doing it from my third floor. And I got my CNN book about the presidents. And I started to rank, just read out loud some of the presidents and ranked them, you know who called Christy, half hour on the presidents. Wow. That's the sort of thing I enjoy doing. Those sort of surprises. Chris Christie, cold call you. Him and I have friends anyway, but he called that day. He was driving around. He heard what I was in about the presidents. He's a good historian. He called up. And we went through some of the great presidents. You know, they had JFK 9 and Lyndon Johnson NIST. And we ranked the presidents. It killed the hour. Good hour. Now, did a lot of people listen on President's Day? It wasn't sports. Who knows? But to somebody who did listen, it was a good spot. That's amazing. You had nothing. You're going to power rank the president. Yeah, Parah Rank the top 10.

It was the book that came out that Parahranked them in all sorts of different categories, and it came up with a list. So I went through that. It was President's Day. So it made sense to go do a little something like that. So I did that. And Christy calls in to contribute. That's a big, that's a big help.

That's a segment out of nothing right there. A segment out of nothing. That's what you, and you do that enough times, you can do it well, you feel good about yourself. Chris Rousseau, thanks for coming on the press box. Always a pleasure. Thank you very much. I appreciate you coming. Thanks for having me.

I appreciate it. From the other end of the media spectrum, I bring you ESPN's Adam Schaefter. We've done a few press box segments on Adam Schaefter this year. He was in the news again last week because along with ESPN's Jeff Darlington, he broke the Tom Brady retirement news and then waited the better part of 72 hours for Brady to confirm it, and very odd if ultimately triumphant position for a reporter to be in. Schefter and I talked about Tom Brady. We talked about exactly what he does during Super Bowl week.

and why he's taking a plane flight home during the game. Here's Adam Schaefter. All right, Adam, before we talk about Super Bowl week, I got to ask about your Tom Brady retirement scoop. When did you first start working on that story? Well, what I would say is Jeff Darlington and I wrote a story the week before where we said that his future was up in the air, which I think at that point came as a little bit of a surprise to people.

So, I mean, look, there are certain people in the league that you're always checking up on, so to speak, right? Tom Brady would be at the top of the list. So it's just one of those things that you're always making calls. And it was on our radar before when we first ran the story about his future being uncertain. And there were certain things, obviously, that you're hearing. And it comes to focus. And Jeff did a great job. And the news team of ESPN did a great job. And it was quite an adventure. So that's a big one. So how much of that, how much does that story consume your life during that period. Did you go to sleep thinking about Brady's retirement and wake up thinking about Brady's

retirement? You know, honestly, these jobs, whether it's Brady or a head coaching hire or anything that's happened in the last month, this NFL season, the last month has been crazy. I was saying to one of my bosses today, think about this. Now, usually we have all the head coaching hires done by divisional playoff round. and usually it's a 17-week season. We don't usually have an 18th week. We don't usually have a double-hatter on ABC and ESPN,

which necessitate pregame shows that day. We don't usually have a Monday night wildcard playoff game and wildcar round that necessitates flying across the country to Los Angeles. So in the midst of what ordinarily would be just a very busy time in the NFL calendar, you mix in all these other things. and honestly, it becomes overwhelming and relentless.

And I love my job. I couldn't imagine doing anything else. I'm not qualified to do anything else. But when you say the Brady story, in all honesty, all these stories, they just kind of lay with you and sit with you. And I think anybody in any line of work, if they're conscientious about their job, they're constantly thinking about something,

particularly something that's important, right? But there were nine teams that were making head coaching change, nine teams that were firing coaches or stepping down and having coaches stepped down and coaching searches going on to hire new people. It was a lot. It was just a lot. So, yeah, I mean, the Brady story, of course. It, you know, and it came on a day where there was a snowstorm in New York, so I'm out

shoveling snow in the midst of making calls, you know, as we're finally in the snowstorm. So it was, yeah, it was a little bit nutty. But like I said, I think I would say that this is the most unprecedented, crazy six weeks in the NFL season. Like I said, the hires, I didn't finish that thought. The hires are usually done by the divisional player front. We just got the last hire an hour ago, and it's February 6th. So usually I'm catching my breath, conference championship weekend. Oh, it's nice.

Exhale. there wasn't any of that this year. It was really hectic and busy. With the Brady story, are you competing more against other reporters who would break that? Or are you competing with Brady who is at some point going to announce

the news about his future plans? Or ourselves, just to make sure that we're doing the best job we can. Right? So I try not to think about that. I just try to do the best job I can on any of these stories, whether it's Tom Brady or,

one of the coaches being hired or the Super Bowl or wherever it is. I mean, you know that people are doing things. You know that people will be reporting on Tom Brady. You know, Tom Brady will be reporting on Tom Brady, but that's not what drives you. So you and Jeff Darlington tweet out the story on Saturday. Within hours, there are statements from Brady's agent Donnie from his dad, from the bucks, the essence of which is either somewhere Brady hasn't decided or he hasn't told us he decided or maybe he decided, but the only official word will ever get is from Tom.

Brady himself. When you heard those statements, you thought what? I wasn't expecting that that day. I mean, to me, you know, Jeff and I had worked hard on the story. We had the story. We felt like we knew the story. And so it was just, I think you were taking aback by all that. Like, what? Okay. So again, we knew what we had done. We knew the process we went through. we felt good about that. And, you know, I think what you also think about at a time like that, if I'm being honest, is I don't know if you've ever had a story like this, Brian, where you could report on a story that you know what's happening.

And then you could say, hey, Brian Curtis is planning to go for a steak dinner tonight. And it gets out. And you're like, I didn't want it out that I was going to a steak dinner. I'm changing plans. I'm going to go have Mexican food tonight now. And it just changes the dynamics. That happens. hey, this team's planning to hire this coach.

We didn't want anything said about that. We're going to, you know, let's look at this. By the way, the Texans, I think, were planning to hire Josh McCown. And then Brian Flores filed a lawsuit. Kind of change the dynamics the equation. So you could have said at the beginning, the Texans are planning to hire or interested in hiring Josh McCown. And then things happen.

So that's, I don't care what story it is. Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, any football team. That's always a concern, I think, not just for me, but for any reporter in any line of work doing their job. Does that make sense? Sure. But you're thinking maybe the dynamics have changed with this story because of what we reported at that point? I'm not saying that they had changed or we're going. It's a thought you always like, will this, will this change the dynamics?

Like, we believed, we reported he was retiring. We know we believed it to be soon. Okay, does he say, you know what? You know, we do this at my time. You don't know how that's going to alter the dynamics of the equation. Any time with any story, whether it's Tom Brady or the Brady Bunch. Like, you just don't know. What were the next 72 hours like while we all waited for Brady to make it officially official?

You know, we felt good about the reporting, but I was aware of all the noise out there. Like a couple of times I got on Twitter to post a story about a coaching search or whatnot. You go on Twitter and you see something, oh boy, I think probably a good idea to stay off social media right now. I mean, you know, that's true. And so we were aware that there were a lot of critics out there, a lot of noise. But again, we felt we felt good about our story. And that's why we went with it when we did. I don't feel this way, but I saw a couple of prominent people say this.

I wanted to get your thoughts on it. Some people said, why can't Schaefter and Darlington just let Brady break this news himself? What's your response to that? Again, our job is to be reporters. And there have been people that have complained that, oh, you're just getting information from teams. You're doing an event. So I don't understand. So I'm supposed to not wait for the teams.

I'm supposed to be ahead of the teams, but then I'm supposed to wait for certain people. Certain people get exempt from the news. Like, which way is it? Right? Like, our job is to report. Tom Brady is the greatest football player who's ever been. If you knew that the greatest football player, whoever played wasn't playing again, I'm sure a lot of reporters would just say, you know what?

I'm just going to sit back. Thank you for letting me know. I'll let Tom announce that when he's ready. Let's talk about Super Bowl week. Do you remember your first of these as a young reporter? Yeah. The first Super Bowl that I ever went to would have been in January of 1995. It was the 49ers and Chargers. It was in Miami. And that was when I was very young. 94. So I would have been at that point in time, I would have been 28 years old. Is that right? 94. Yeah. 20. That is the first one I went to? Yeah. First one I covered in person would have been 1994, 95. I would have been 28 years old. and I remember because 49ers offensive coordinator was a young, brilliant mind by the name of Mike Shanahan. And my job was to stake him out because the Broncos wanted to hire him.

So I was doing everything I could to track him down. It's funny, knowing Mike now the way that I do, you know, to think you're chasing smoke. Like, he's never going to tell you anything, even if you get him. So these are the things you can look back on. laugh about. Pat Bowlin showed up at the 49ers team hotel the Monday after and a mustache and a hat to go try to hire Mike. And so that was the first one that I went to. I also remember the night before the game, I was out in Miami. It was probably the last time I've ever done anything like this professionally. But I remember getting back. The sum was already up. The newspaper, which was delivered

to your door back in those days, was already on my doorstep. And I said, well, that's not a good sign. if you're getting back and the newspaper's already on your door. That point, you've made a mistake. And so I got ready to go cover the game. The 49ers won. I pursued the Mike Shanahan to the Broncos angle.

That day, the next day, he was hired a couple of days later. And Mike changed the fortunes of the Denver Broncos franchise. What is staking out Shanahan entail? You're like literally following him around, looking for him and trying to get him alone.

What is that? Yeah, just trying to get him to give you whatever insight he can into whether he would or wouldn't take the job. And, you know, you're calling people close to him. And, you know, again, I was thinking about this the other day. It's really amazing. I covered the Denver Broncos 16 years. And I was of the mind that I was just going to be a newspaper beat reporter for the rest of my life. And if that was the case, I was perfectly good with that and very happy. I thought I'd be in Denver doing that. And I started covering the Denver Broncos in 1990 for the Rocky Mountain News. And I think about the privileged honor that I've

had in covering so many of the people that I did back then. For instance, Ed McCaffrey was a wide receiver. Ed McCaffrey's son Christian McCaffrey used to show up a camp. He was up to my knee and I'm not very tall to begin with. And the McCaffrey boys, the four of them would be running around. I got to see Christian McCaffrey and his brothers, Dylan and Luke and Max back in the day, all going want to do their own things in football. I got to see Mark Schloreth and his son Daniel and went out to go pitch for the Detroit Tigers. I got to see there was a ball boy for the Denver Broncos,

whose father, his stepfather was the Broncos video director by the name of Gary McKeown. And that ball boy was a guy by the name of Mike McDaniel who just got hired as the Miami Dolphins head coach. Kyle Shanahan would show up and hang around. A young kid who was playing football at high school, Cherry Creek High School in Colorado. And Kyle Shanahan's now coaching.

in the NFL. And so I was around all these people that went on to achieve all these great things in addition to all the great people that I got to cover on a day-to-day basis. So it was such a blessing for me to be in that environment, to be around all the people that I did, to get to know all these people. So you get to see people and learn what they're like. And again, upon learning those things, I now recognize that when I show up Miami to try to stock Mike Shanahan, that those efforts are going to be largely unsuccessful. I'm not going to get very much of anything. But you don't know that at the time, I'm a 20-something-year-old reporter, and you just try to do the best job you can,

and you don't understand how the business really works. And so there we go. As we sit here in 2022, the scoops you're looking for this week, are you thinking about the game primarily? Are you thinking about free agency coaching, all that kind of off-season stuff that has now already begun? I never know what I'm looking for, to be honest with you, because things just kind of show up,

like when we have known that Alvin Camaro was going to get arrested in Las Vegas after the Pro Bowl, but we have known that the Texans were going to shift their coaching search and wind up powering a man who is not even on their initial list in Lovie Smith. The Tom Brady story that went on, right? What goes on with Tom Brady now? Like, what does he do? There are all sorts of stories.

And by the way, I could give you a list of 10 things that I'd be monitoring and 10 other things will happen while I'm monitoring those other things that render those things in complete. We're doing last week, what would I have? told you if on the day that Tom Brady retired, retired, and ESPN is doing NFL live for two hours, and we get into the 4 o'clock hour at 410, the news breaks that Brian Flores has filed a lawsuit for racial discrimination in hiring practices, and Tom Brady on the day is retiring, is not mentioned in the final 55 minutes of NFL live. What have I told you? What were the chances that happened? What kind of

story, what kind of meteor would have to hit the earth to have Tom Brady not mentioned in a show on the day he was retiring. Yeah, I think that's off the board in Vegas. Right. Right. Do you, are you interested in hobnobbing with coaches, agents, people like that during Super Bowl week, or have you gotten to the point where you're just post hobnobbing and everything's on the phone? Yeah, the hobnobbing thing, you know, actually, I'll tell you a very thrilling thing for me last week. You know, I had to go to Las Vegas for the Pro Bowl. And from the Pro Bowl, I debated, well, do I go back east? Do I go to L.A. Monday and Tuesday? We're not on the air in California until Wednesday. So what do I, I'm like, you're kind of stuck in no man's land. Like you can fly back,

be home for a day and then fly back across the country. Or I could just say, you know what? I'm, I said, I'm just going to take it easy and fly to L.A. on Monday. I'll do the podcast with Brian Curtis. We'll call into that. We'll get that done. While I was thinking of taking the prolonged route away from home, the time with the most amount of time away from that, I said, you know what, let me move up my flight back. So I was supposed to take a 1 a.m. Red Eye after the Super Bowl back to New York that got me in at 9.30 in the morning. And so we have a pregame show. Sunday morning. We're doing the show from Disneyland. I looked into the flights. I found the flight. I booked a flight home after the show. So I'm not even sticking around for the Super Bowl. I'm flying home. I'm going to watch the Super Bowl on the plane. And I am so happy about getting to like just sit on the plane on a cross-country flight with nothing to do. That's going to bide my time. I'll be home that night. I'll sleep in my bed. I'll wake up on Valentine's. Day with my family. I'll be able to take my daughter to school in the morning on Monday.

And so to me, that's awesome. So I am all fired up about taking an earlier than the 1 a.m. Red Eye flight home that gives me an extra day in New York on Monday. So when you ask me if I'm hobnobbing and what I'm doing, I don't know. Like, we're here at Disneyland. So to me, there's not much hobnobbing going on. Now, there are a couple of things that I have to do in LA. I'll drive down or up. I don't even know what I'm doing. I have no way to up. I'm driving up. I'm driving up to LA. And yeah, a couple of things I want to do, a couple of dinners, some people to see. But honestly, this is a week where I normally, it's a crazy week, but I still haven't had the time to decompress that I usually got

after the divisional playoff round because of all the craziness of this year. Like I said, the longest period of intense NFL stuff that there's ever been. Because even free agency will last a couple of weeks. The draft coverage is a couple of, this has been going since roughly Christmas. So take the last six days of December, 31 days in July, 6, 6, 11, 45 days. It's been like a 45 day sprint of just busyness. every day mixing in all these things. I find the plane thing hilarious because there's a tiny number of people in this country

who would schedule a plane flight during the Super Bowl, and one of them happens to be you. I don't have to show up to the airport on Monday morning when it's packed. Like I would bet my plane's going to be empty going home. You're looking for time rather than sleeping in a red eye and being wiped out the neck. You know how many red eyes we had with West Coast trips? this year, we had Monday night games. We had two or three in LA, one in San Francisco, one in Vegas, one in Phoenix, one in that. Like, I've taken so many red eyes this year, and they render you worthless the next day. But it's the best way of doing it so that you don't lose a day. So now,

I'm going to fly home during a game that I would watch. I'm going to sit back, you're going to watch the game, and be home that night, not have to deal with the crowds on the plane, crowds at the airport, we like, Brian, we like simplicity and convenience. That is simplistic and convenient. And you will, really, you won't be working during the game. You're not going to be sending messages doing that kind of stuff on the plane? Yeah, I mean, yeah, maybe so. Okay. So it's not totally watching the game. You'll be working. But, but my work at that point is done. Like, we're there to do the shows all week, the pregame show, make sure nothing crazy happens, make sure that, you know, Barrett Robbins doesn't show up in Tijuana or Ikey, you know,

or Stanley Wilson's not on the floor of his bathroom or Eugene Robinson's not found the night before a game. So, like, they're always crazy things, right? So if that hasn't happened and our pregame show is over and NBC is taking over the coverage for their pregame show, have at it. I'm flying home. Adam Schifter, thanks for coming on the press box. Brian, I appreciate you have me.

fun. Time to get back to enjoying Disneyland. All right, thanks to Mad Dog Gruso and Adam Schaefter. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic, as always, by Erica Cervantes. Now, you might have heard me say that David Shoemaker and I are going to be recording an instant reaction podcast right after the Super Bowl. We're going to tackle the TV show, the announcers, the commercials, have some more notes from Radio Row, et cetera, et cetera. I think, I think we may be doing the show in such a way that you can listen to a us live.

So watch our Twitter account for information on that. Imagine Brian and David with no editing. Ooh, that's going to be fun. We'll be back with more lukewarm takes about the media. Live! Have a fantastic weekend.