The Press Box - Takes on Tony Romo, the Halftime Show Invasion, Sideline Reports, and Tom Brady's Retirement U-Turn. 

Episode Date: January 31, 2022

Bryan and David begin the pod by reacting to all of the pronunciations of the word 'Bengals' by TV and sports radio personalities. They then analyze Tony Romo's announcing performance, (3:17) Andy Reid's clock management, (10:47) and the unfortunate CBS half-time show during the Bengals-Chiefs AFC Championship game. They wrap up the pod by dissecting every chapter of Saturday's chaotic media mishandling of Tom Brady's botched retirement announcement (19:21) and look forward to the bevy of hastily assembled Bengals and Rams profiles being written for Super Bowl week. (34:52) Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Producer: Erika Cervantes Production Assistance: Chris Sutton Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Let's help everybody. I'm JJ John G. And I'm Jason Gough. And if you haven't heard, the ringer has gone local. I'm bringing the fire. I'm bringing the rain from the big apple with my show, New York, New York. And I'm reping Shy Town with my new show The Full Go on All Things Chicago. We've got episodes three nights a week with all the reaction to the local teams and guests.

Plus bonus episodes around all the big games and storylines. So whether you're uptown, downtown, downtown, in the burbs, or a transplant. Make sure you follow New York, New York, and the full go on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. Hello, media consumers, Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker of The Ringer here. This is the press box. We are joined by producer Chris Sutton, sitting in for Erica Servantes. David, does this count as an emergency press box podcast? It was pulled together quickly if that counts as an emergency.

I'm not exactly sure how we're defining these things at this point. But sure, emergency adjacent. The emergency here is that you and I have about 20 things to get off our chest about a day, of NFL football. Yeah. And we feel that by noon tomorrow, even you and I will be looking at each other going, why were we so worked up about the CBS halftime show?

We won't remember. But we remember right now. Note number one, after two conference championship games today, which produced the Super Bowl matchup of the Cincinnati Bengals and the Los Angeles Rams, this is why people love football. No, I'm just kidding. That was everybody else's note last week.

Real note number one, David. I think we have a problem with the national sports media, and the problem is they are not quite sure how to pronounce the mascot of the Cincinnati NFL team. How would you pronounce the mascot of the Cincinnati NFL team? The best answer I can give you is not Bengals. That's what always comes to mine, not the band from the 80s. So I would go Bingles, but even that, I say with a little deliberate, marbledy mouthness

just in case I might be getting it wrong. The Bengals. You say Bengals? I say Bengals. Well, during the game today, I don't know if you heard this, but Tony Romo was giving us a lot of bangles. There were a lot of bangles, and as I was cruising around sports radio this week, I also heard a lot of Bengals.

We're all over the place on this one. It's the Bengals. I know they haven't been in the Super Bowl in 30-plus years. It's been a long time. There's some accents out there. You and I are pro accent. We used to have them ourselves.

The Cincinnati Bengals. Yeah. I think I'm now guilty of this too. I think that, okay, Bengals is wrong, but I think we do see the hypercorrective and go all the way to bingle. Gingles. Because you're so worried about not saying bangle. Yeah, but I'm like listening to Mike Gulloch Jr. on ESPN Radio driving around L.A. this week.

I'm going, did he just say bangles over and over again? again. It's very funny. Yeah. Well, you know, it's been a long time. Maybe they should just give it up. Maybe they should just go, maybe they should just be the Cincinnati football team. And, you know, we'll all be comfortable with that. Game one today was the Kansas City Chiefs versus the Cincinnati Bengals. And after that game, we must have the second half of the Tony Romo conversation. Ooh, let's do it.

Okay. We had the first half of this after Tony Romo called the Kansas City Chief Buffalo Bill's game. And he was really really. good. The game was incredibly exciting. He was kind of letting the excitement of the game reverberate through him. I was trying out some ideas on you. I don't know if you knew I was trying out ideas on you so I could write a piece about

Tony Romo this week. And then Tony Romo comes out today. Ooh, not so good. Not so good in the last minute of regulation when the chiefs are going down, trying to either tie the game or win the game. And Tony Romo just wasn't making sense. We

were almost in the Phil Sim zone of a few years ago. Oh, no. Yeah. Yeah. Where you're talking and I'm listening and I'm going, I don't know what he's trying to tell me in the last couple of minutes of this game. So this was my thesis of the article and tell me if you think I'm right about this. If you have a great offensive, explosive football game, Tony Romo is your guy. Yeah.

Because the other night, he was fantastic. I think he was so giddy and giddy worked. I was like, I want somebody being giddy about how great this matchup between Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen is. If you have something that's a little more hirky jerky like the second half of Chiefs Bengals, listen to me over-pronouncing Bengals now, it doesn't work. It doesn't work because all those crazy noises he makes and improvisation and giddiness, it substitutes for him actually analyzing the game,

lot of the time. And you're left with this guy calling the game and you're like, I'm not learning anything right now. You're just kind of emoting and you're not teaching me anything about what's going on. Yeah, it's sort of a tempo, a vibe. He's a vibe. Yeah, and I think that it makes a certain sense, right, that like our finest memories of Romo go hand in hand with these like absolutely breathtaking football games.

And the fact that he can elevate that makes it so much more of a, I mean, that's what's going to stick in your memory, right? I mean, and there was a little bit of, I mean, when you get to the, I don't know what he's trying to tell us. He had a little bit of gunslinger him as a quarterback, right? When you watched these, he got compared to Brett Favre in the early days. You watch the, yeah, I mean, you watch Tony Romo play, and you could say this about Favre, you could even say this about, you know, a great late, like Aaron Rogers or something like that. You see him force passes. Well, you say force because just the bullshit that he cranks out without really trying that hard works 75% of the time or more.

And so when he throws one that just everybody in the world can see, he's just like thrown in the chest of the linebacker or whatever. But it's just like it was the same no look nonsense that got him this far. They all just look kind of, you can see he's just sort of like mystified, right? He's like, why did the magic just stop? Because that's all that I haven't really been trying. It's not like I broke any rules that I've been adhering to up to this point. And I think there's a little bit of that you heard today too, right? It's just like at some point, Tony Romo is not going to be careful out there.

If Tony Romo is going to go out and call the game and say, like, oh, this is a different situation. I have to switch up my footing. I have to switch up my tempo. I have to switch up my foot. If you give Tony Romo too many rules, he'll watch me defend him. If you give too many, too many rules, he's not going to be Tony Romo. No. So that's the magic is that he doesn't play by the rules.

Right. But there's sometimes, just with Tony Romo the quarterback, where preparation is just as important as going out there and making the magic happen. you get prepared, you get yourself ready, get yourself locked in, and then you go make the magic happen. And there's a lot of times when he calls a game where it feels like he's just winging it, just like when he was a quarterback.

He's happiest when he's improvising rather than looking at his sheet and figuring out, okay, here's what I learned by watching a ton of tape this week, here's what I'm going to say, here's what's happening in front of me and how that relates to like a larger story. Yeah.

You get the sense it's a lot of one and not the other. Yeah, it's true. But how do you fix it, though? I mean, what's it? Like, is there, like, if you don't give him more rules, then what's the, do we just, is this what we live with? Is there a model where you have to, like, bring John Ketna and off the bench? Because. Dach Breska. Throwing him around too much?

Dach bruska. No, I was good. But I'm saying, John Ketna was there for a minute. He might be literally available for this role now, but, like, what's the move? Does Nance just have to take over? So that's the weird thing. I don't think Tony Romo has really gotten better in the five years that he's been an announcer. I think we love the magic in year one because it was,

he was predicting plays. He was talking at weird times, which by the way, I'm still all four, but I think he's very much the same guy now. And then you see these games where you can't just be, hey, I'm rolling with the magic.

I'm emoting. I'm feeling this game. Ooh, Jim, this is fantastic. And it doesn't work. And you're like, no, no, no, you have to do something else right now. You know,

you have to, what you tell Tony Rom with the quarterback, you have to do the checkdown pass right now. We have to just check the ball down, right? You have to be a normal announcer for just a second. By the way, even the predictions have gotten kind of funny. I don't know if you noticed this, Cowboys 49ers game when he called it a couple of rounds ago. At the end of the game, he's like, Jim's like,

they're going to run out of time. And Tony Graham was, don't worry, they're going to have time to snap the ball and throw it into the ground and stop the clock. Oh, wait, no, they don't. They don't have enough time. The game's over. And I was like, wait, you just predicted it on TV. eight seconds ago that they would have enough time and now they don't. And then at the end of the Bill's Chiefs game, he said,

oh, Jim, they just threw the touchdown to Travis Kelsey, but I think they're going to reverse this on a replay. This is the end of the game, David, in overtime, the dramatic final play. And then Nance has to come on and say, actually, they're not going to reverse this. The game is over the Chiefs of one, one of the most exciting NFL games of all time. So now even the predictions are sort of like he's kind of taking us on the ride with him. Yeah, that's exactly right. He's taking you through the ride of the quarterback in the game, where you're just like, I think I got it. Do I have it? Do I'm not? Maybe we need to be ready

to get back on the field and then the game's suddenly over and the, you know, someone's interviewing you on the sideline. I'm not sure that's really that helpful for the viewer, but it certainly puts you in the moment. It's such a conundrum because he's not bad. He is an A-level number one announcer to me. And there's certain games like last week where I came off being like, I really enjoyed that. That was really good. And then I think if you looked at Twitter today, even grading for the thing where everybody hates whatever announcer is calling the game in front of them, there were a lot of people, including myself, who came away from that game going,

what was that? What was he saying? He's taking us through this exciting final drive and then the Cincinnati drive in overtime. I don't know what this guy's trying to tell me. And that's a bad thing when you're an announcer. John Kittner, by the way? Do you know what he's doing right now? Do you have an update?

I'm going to guess high school football. Oh, that is correct. Boom. But you would not believe where he's a high school football coach. Oh. He is the head coach and athletic coordinator at Burleson High School. What? Near Fort Worth.

One of our old high school rivals, rival I use that term loosely. Burles in high school and Burleson, Texas. Way to go, John Kittna. John Kittna. CBS is waiting for your call. Big moment, David, for the sports media. during the aforementioned Chiefs Bengals game, we had Andy Reed clock management come back as a content item.

It's one of those things that even people who don't know anything about football know that Andy Reed has trouble managing the clock. But remember, the Chiefs got that miracle field goal last week in 13 seconds with two fantastic play calls. And we're like, I don't know, has this been taken off the table for even someone like me who doesn't really know that much about football? I can't complain about Andy Reed wasting. Guess what happened today?

He wastes a time out in the first quarter. They get really cute right before halftime, and instead of getting an easy field goal, they don't score at all. Yeah. And they lose an overtime to the Bengals, and they're not going to the Super Bowl. Well, I guess we should have seen it coming, right?

We should have seen it coming, but don't you love when you have that little fact like that, that everybody can just repeat? Yeah. And you sound smart, even if you really don't know that much about the game itself. Yeah, because for all the grief he's given, I mean, I think we should probably assume that, like, 95% of human beings would be bad at clock management if that was their job. You know, that's why most of those people aren't coaching football teams.

But it's crazy. And it's just one of those things that's going to hangar in his neck forever, right? He kind of had it chook, and now it's back. And now I don't think it's ever going to go away. This is just the thing we know about Andy Reid, the mustache and that. He had it chook for a week. One week. It just happened to be one of the most exciting NFL games of all time.

13 seconds of miracles. The clock management thing when we're watching a game, all of us together is fascinating because everybody understands it. Yeah. Like you can, again, you can bring in somebody

who's not watched a lot of American football and they're like, wow, there's only 40 seconds left and that dude isn't calling time out. That guy is mismanaging the clock. And we into all the terminology. We just have all of it down pat. It's easy for the announcers to dig in on because it's kind of a binary thing.

Are you calling time out? Are you not calling time out? Sure, and there's no real dispositive, right? I mean, it's like, yeah, he's mismanaging the clock. Well, even if the play goes off, you know, even if the team ends up winning, it doesn't mean he didn't mismanage the clock. It just means they overcame the bad clock management. There's no real downside in accusing someone of having bad clock management

if you're announcing if you're calling a game. The CBS halftime show, David, today. Normally not something we pay a lot of attention to. Mm-hmm. But it was fantastic today because it being the conference championship game, CBS and Fox said, we don't want to have our halftime show in a remote studio. We want to have it right there next to the field. And Jim Nance and Tony Romo were even teasing it right before halftan.

Look at that set over there. That set is going to blow up and transform into the halftime show set right here next to the field. You will have immediacy, these otherwise milk toast opinions that people will be offering in turn and halftime will be happening right next to the field. But wait, what they didn't count on was that country music superstar Walker Hayes was performing right next to them. So J.B., James Brown, introduces the halftime, and he's starting to set up Phil Sims, and we're hearing the guy over the PA go, Grammy nominated artist. And I'm like, wait, did Phil Sims get nominated for a Grammy? like the streams were crossing

and then they couldn't talk because they were being drowned out by the music. Have you ever seen anything like that in your life? Not on a television broadcast. I mean, no, it's sort of inexplicable. Did we get to the bottom of what happened? Did Walker Hayes? I swear to God, these country musicians,

there's just some sort of name generator that they're all coming out of, all these names are coming out of at this point. Did Walker Hayes start early? No. Was he supposed to wait until they were done? or do they just not... I would love to see, like, the, read the oral history of this

or watch the documentary of, like, how close did the two sound checks come to, like, intersecting each other and, you know, realizing that this was a terrible idea that wasn't going to work. It's just amazing. Yeah, and it's amazing because when you see national television that just doesn't work on a fundamental level, it's not the, like, hey, this is bad TV. We see that all the time, especially in sports,

but we're just like, I cannot hear what the... people are saying because someone is making music right behind them. Kind of an elemental thing. Do you think, if not for the fact that they were on TV, not do you think, how many of the people in the CBS halftime show would have stood up and said, turn that shit the fuck off? Do you know who I am? You want to try to pick who would do that? Do you think Phil Sim seems like a pretty mild guy?

Do you see him standing up and saying that? Bill Cower? I don't know. maybe if he took his glasses off Sims is like old different dude Bill Cowher was a coach Boomer Asiason I'd say Boomer yes

Bumer's a radio guy now I mean he's he's gotta have that sort of passion He was kind of laughing about it during the show Like he was the only one being like By the way nobody can hear us whenever Because J.B. was just soldiering on

And going to them all you know And they do that funny halftime thing Where they all talk in turn But they never talk to each other They all give slightly different opinions About what just happened With highlights playing over them Oh, yeah.

And they kept going to Boomer and he's like, well, nobody can hear me, but just give his little spiel. And then he would come back around and we'd have to keep doing the loops, going to like the weave all the way through them again, even though we could not hear them. Yeah. Because of the country music superstar Walker Hayes. Well, you know what the problem was there. What was that? Bad clock management. Oh, see?

See? See? There we go. It's back. Well, David, that wasn't the only bad. clock management going on during network halftime shows because the Fox crew was also in the stadium see how cool this is they were in the stadium they were on the field waiting their big half time moment and if I have this right there was a group called the chain smokers that were

performing at halftime of the Rams 49ers game also threatening to drown out the Fox halftime crew so we did it again in the late game the halftime shows will be moved to the party parking lot for the 2023 conference championship game. Maybe they should just put half of the giant desk in a studio and the other half of the giant desk on the field.

So if they need to just throw to the studio, there will be people there waiting for. Well, the funny thing was nobody missed what was said during the halftime show. Like no fan on Twitter was like, hey, I want to hear this. Right.

I wanted to hear what those guys said. In fact, I saw some message and said, you know, this was a slight improvement on the normal halftime show. Can we get the change? Mainsmokers and Walker Hayes back next year. I had one funny note for you from the late game. It concerns a sideline report from Tom Rinaldi.

Okay. So you know we do these sideline reports. And you know the ones where they have a note. They have a note they would like to get out before the note becomes moot. Tom Rinaldi's note was that Debo Samuel, 49ers wide receiver, has been standing up for his quarterback. Jimmy Garapolo, aka Jimmy G. A lot of criticism about Jimmy G.

And after that last pass tonight, there's going to be a lot more criticism about Jimmy G. But in the first half, it was still possible for him to show the tweet on the screen, the Debo Samuel that said, hey, look at Jimmy G's record, back off. He's my quarterback. On the very next play,

Jimmy G. led a wide receiver right over the middle so that the wide receiver was blown up by the Rams defensive back. I mean, blown up. That pass that you just can't throw. The receiver was Debo Samuel. This was the next play.

We got the note out just in time. Because you imagine if they've gone to Rinaldi while Debo was lying on the field? You know, like with the trainers coming out and said, well, Debo Samuel lies on the field, we'd like to show you the great tweet he sent out in support of Jimmy Garapola this week. My God, that would have been fantastic.

Just to have, maybe it would have been a better tidbit, right? He's been out there defending him all this week, and look where that got him. Our main topic today, David, actually happened on Saturday. It was the Tom Brady retirement U-turn slash social media fiesta. Now, the first important thing about this was that it happened on a Saturday. And you and I are not NFL writers. but we know a bunch of them. And that's the day off.

Oh, yeah. That's like, look, man, my Sunday's crazy, my Monday's crazy, and then I'm in Super Bowl mode. This is my day. And at 1129 Pacific time, Jeff Darlington and Adam Schefter of ESPN tweeted out the news that Tom Brady, as Darlington put it,

is retiring from football after 22 extraordinary seasons, according to what he called multiple sources. So the first thing that happened was the race to get the tribute tweet to Tom Brady out. You know, because some people on sports Twitter make jokes and some people, some people go big. Well, when something big like that happens, you know, jokes are all good and well. But if you get, if you hit the sweet spot with that tweet in remembrance, that appreciative, something about him being the goat with just like four cool pictures of him attached of just the right moment in time,

you can get a lot of impressions. you know, a lot of people just mindlessly retweeting that. That could, you know, be your biggest tweet of your life. I thought about you speaking of art because there was a lot of really weird art. There was one that just had like drawings, renderings of all the sports goats together. And it was like Babe Ruth and Muhammad Ali and then Kobe was on it. And people got mad that Kobe was on it. I was like, really is Kobe even the Laker goat?

So that we got to a weird discussion. But here was my favorite tribute tweet to Tom Brady When we were still in tribute mode It came from Mike Greenberg, aka Greenie. Are you ready for this? If there was a Mount Rushmore of American sports history, Tom Brady's face would be on it.

Okay. And do you know what happened after he tweeted that? I'm trying to imagine what direction this was going to go. He penned it. He pinned the tweet. There's a Mount Rushmore of American sports history. Tom Brady's face would be on it. not sure what was the American sports history, was the history part, was the American and the

history part supposed to qualify it in a way that made it less controversial? I'm trying to, that's like, I don't know why all three of those words needed to be there. If you wanted to say he's on the sports Mount Rushmore. Or the American sports Mount Rushmore. American, yeah, we're not counting Pele or whatever, like, okay. But yeah, what was the history? Isn't that, isn't that the entire point of a Mount Rushmore that you're like engaging with history? Yeah. I kind of read it as, you know, how we always, and we're going to talk about it a minute, how the NFL scoop sausage is made.

This is kind of how the sports radio segment sausage is made. If I had my Mount Rushmore of American sports, it would be Tom Brady, Muhammad Ali, Babe Ruth, and Michael Jordan. Whatever, pick somebody. What's your thing? 1-88-A-ESPN. Hit me up. What is your sports rushmore?

That's a segment, right? Yeah, the sports radio aspect of it is key because it just has an unlimited number of iterations, right? That, like, you really can take callers for the next three hours, the whole length of your show, and they all have something a little bit different. It's also the Mount Rushmore thing, and I've engaged in numerous Mount Rushmore's in my time. But the Mount Rushmore thing is like, it has like all this built-in static, right? It's like people argue about it, but people don't get mad about it in the same way. because there's too many moving parts, right? It's like, you can say, especially if you're just announcing one,

you're like, I'm not committing to my full Mount Rushmore, but I'm going to tell you, Tom Brady's going to be on it. And everyone's like, okay, well, even if I don't think he's the best quarterback of all time, you might have Joe Montana on there as well. Like, I don't know what your Mount Rushmore is going to say. Jim Brown, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, for a lot of different reasons,

it would have been a lot more, it would have been a lot more bold to say, farewell to the greatest football player America has ever the world has ever seen right I mean that would that would have somehow been it's a it's a narrower and yes more specific and it would just seem like you were I mean you're really taking a stand I don't know man none of this seems very bold

the best football player ever then we don't we're okay with Colin Tom Brady that or at least like you know sure okay yeah sports rushmore actually makes it kind of a lesser thing as you say, you don't even know who's on the list. Sure. Give me the list and then we can have our segment. Okay, that was the first part of Tom Brady-Paloosa.

Then there was the but wait part. It started, I don't know if this is where it started, but it really sort of came to life when Mike Silver, veteran NFL reporter, tweeted this. Tom Brady contacted Buccaneers GM Jason Light and told him he has not yet made a final decision on retirement. disputing the ESPN report.

Light is respecting Brady's process and waiting for a definitive answer whenever it comes from the quarterback. Another tweet from Jenna Lane of ESPN. Works at the same company as Adam Schaefter and Jeff Darlington. Tom Brady hasn't informed the bucks that he's retiring. Bruce Ariens told me he hasn't. Not even close to making up his mind yet. He told us.

So you got Bruce Ariens on the phone. He hasn't even made his mind up yet. But then they went to Tom Brady's dad, Tom Sr., who is a talkative sports dad, he told Kylin Mills that his son is not retiring, quote unquote. Brady Sr. says an online publication started circulating an unsubstantiated rumor. I'm not sure we consider ESPN to be an unsubstantiated publication. Tom Sr. further said to Mike Garty, this story, Mike, is total conjecture. Tommy has not made a final decision one way or the other,

and anybody else that says that he has is absolutely wrong. Sports dads are so mystifying, especially when the son is in his 40s, right? I mean, I find it really hard to imagine coming to a spot in my career where somebody would just call the Reverend Shoemaker and just be like, is David actually leaving the ringer? Is this what I'm reading, correct? Your dad just speaking off the top of us out on the ringer,

on the record. Well, you know, David has not made a full. final decision yet. The awful announcing is running with this story, but this is, this is incorrect. This is conjecture. Let's not run away with this.

So a really weird thing happened and people were, I think it was Danny Kelly was joking about this on Twitter is all of a sudden, the gears of NFL media just stopped. Because, you know, hey, I got a text from Air HQ like, hey, you got a column, Brian? Got anything? Tom Brady just freaking retired on a Saturday.

We got to go here, man. And then all of a sudden it was like, oh, it sure seems like he's really going to retire. Like it doesn't, you know, Adam Schefter and Jeff Darley, they're not, I don't think they're wrong about this. But the fact that the story was kind of put in this on a hold essentially, everybody just stopped. And so like what would have been this big retirement party for Tom Brady, oddly on a Saturday and oddly right before the conference championship game. just froze. And that's where we are right now. It weirdly becomes a matter of, like, respect, right?

If it had been like a... I feel like if it had been an incorrect report that was just... If it was just some random dude on Twitter that shot off a tweet that somehow gained traction, I feel like there would be more... I feel like the wheels would be turning faster than they are just because

the Brady family was just like, just, you know, hold on dudes, you know, like, hold on everybody. Because now everybody's like, well, we can't really, like, it seems like the entire football media is firmly of the impression that Brady's about to retire. But out of respect to his process or whatever he had, his original intentions, we're all just going to pretend the story doesn't exist until he climbs up on a podium. Exactly. And also, look, this is the kind of scoop. This is not some dangerous. This probably came out earlier than what Tom Brady wanted. A lot of people on a lot of people are going, Tom Brady definitely, I think I said Nora Princiotti's saying this, definitely wants to make like a video or some kind of, you know, multimedia thing or his podcast with Jim Gray or whatever is.

He wants to release this on his own terms. And ESPN is their right to do is putting the information out there sooner. But this is not like dangerous information. Like it's not like, like we're going to know. in a week in a couple of days. Well, and ESPN's in a weird spot too, because even, you know, they're, I don't know how reliant they are on Tom Brady's, you know, blessing.

But, but whatever, I mean, just in a very linear way, like whatever content he produces is going to be their content, right? I mean, that's how, like, they replayed that dumb video that Ben Frickin Rathlessberger made last week. They just, like, up and down every show all morning, you know? I mean, it was like that's, it literally is their content. And it's a lot more interesting to watch that than to just have somebody report it, even if they're first.

Not to mention that they are making a documentary series with him right now, which by the way, Gotham Chopra, who's ahead of that thing, just tweeted one of those emojis that looked like somebody who was kind of like embarrassed or upset. That's funny. Yeah. Some more funny parts, David. TB12, the Tom Brady Company,

tweeted out, thank you for it all. Tom Brady and then deleted the tweet. Hmm. So they're not ready to say goodbye either. So if everybody's, so the ESPN documentary part of it is really intriguing because yeah, Brady wants to do this on his own terms.

And there was a lot of speculation that he wanted to do it at least a week later because he got a big chunk of his signing bonus on February 4th, which at this point just sort of becomes guaranteed anyway. I mean, I don't really have.

I can't find it hard to imagine the books are going to, like, litigate that, but we would see, we'll see, I guess. But, like, if the, if the footage or if his own multimedia project of whatever it is, makes it clear that he'd come to this decision before he actually went public with it. I mean, it'd be hard to sort of whitewash that, right? So, I mean, if it's clear that he had decided by Saturday, then what are we to make of the whole hubbub? Well, I mean, if you're the bucks, And you clearly want Tom Brady to come back for another season since he just led the league in passing yards and touchdowns this year and was still really good. I don't think you'd be that upset if you were like Tom Brady decided to retire.

He is currently making a multimedia experience that he's going to announce it with, but he just hasn't called us yet. You'd be okay with that, I think. Sure. Let's just put the, but set the bucks aside. I mean, how does this reflect on all the reporters out there have just called, you know, a C-E. or, you know, because we're going to wait for Tom Brady to announce it or do it on his own terms. But if his own terms actually indicate that he had functionally retired already when we were all talking about it on Saturday, doesn't that put everybody in a weird spot?

Well, I guess it depends on what functional means because, like, he hasn't filed a piece of paper with the NFL. That was also reported on Saturday when everybody was scrambling around. So retirement for him at this point is a state of mind. that I think at the end of the day, somebody knows, but in order for us to actually move forward with it, Tom Brady has to get in front of a camera or his Twitter account and actually say it, or otherwise we're just kind of in the state of limbo where we all go, look, Shafter and Darlington are right.

But we sort of have to sit here and wait for Tom Brady to actually tell us he's retired before we go from 98% sure to 100% sure. And by the way, Tom Curran of NBC Sports Notes, Tom Brady is out of the country and plans to be abroad next week as well. And that's like a 1970s reason not to be clarifying your future. Wasn't like LeBron abroad during his last free agency? It just feel like being abroad, which by the way, being abroad you've never been closer in human history. No, Twitter still works wherever Tom Brady is.

Yeah, but being abroad is just like the, what, it's like the large-scale version of just putting out of the office on your on your Google calendars and nobody at work bugs you for an hour or whatever it's just like well if you can say the word abroad then everyone's just like okay with that and they just you know are gonna just like put a just say we'll be back in a week so you think that excuse still works abroad i am abroad and unreachable even in this age where your iPhone will ring wherever you are in the world pretty much well i mean i think it's it's transparent but it's also just like just enough of a sort of holding I mean, I think people are just willing to accept that. Oh, he's a broad.

Tom Brady's a broad. He'll let us know when he gets back. So it's like the last kind of figly, like official fig leaf. Yeah. Because, you know, in the old day, it's like, oh, he just can't come to the phone right now. Remember that was a thing? He's indisposed, something like that. And you're like, well, I am texting this person.

And whatever they're doing, they can text me back if they want to text me back. But you're saying, I'm abroad as the last kind of veil we can drop over it and say, okay, he's not, he cannot come to the phone right now. Yeah, because I think even it evokes something, it evokes a pre-internet world, right? It's just like, we love to get in touch with Tom Brady, but he's in a gondola. You know, and like, there's no, no one would bring a cell phone there. This is, he's at the Coliseo with an old-fashioned camera with a big flash on top and he's taking pictures of his family, standing by the ruins.

Yeah, he's, you know, he's off-line, man. It's enviable. Yeah. I would like to be abroad and unreachable. But here we are. One last funny thing, Dave, before we move on here. So I mentioned Jenelaine of ESPN. She's the one who gets Bruce Ariens to say Tom Brady hasn't retired, not even close to making up his mind yet.

Okay. On the record, Bruce Ariens told me, quote, he hasn't not even close to making up his mind yet. then Jeff Howell of the athletic tweets Four minutes later Tom Brady called the Bucks late this afternoon to inform them He's not even close to making a decision about his retirement According to a source So it's the same scoop with the same language

But one is attributed on the record to Bruce Ariens And the other is to a source Presumably with the Bucks I just thought that was funny And they popped out on my Twitter feed At the exact same time Yeah it's weird than that happens couple of minutes away.

It's like, hmm, who could this be? All right, David. Super Bowl week officially begins in a week. This is where we take the week off from daily football, actual football, and go back to a week of content getting ready. Yeah. Getting those profile. What RAMs profile are you working on if you're an NFL writer?

You have some time to sort of like you take a breath. see what the big story you want to tell is and then turn it in late. Yeah, I mean, it's always less time than it seems like. You also, you know, all the NFL folks, I don't know how many are traveling this year. I think a fair number, but this is also the time, this is also the phase where you, you know,

get halfway through writing your previews and then you get on a plane and forget about it for 48 hours and have to crank it out at the last second or whatever. But yeah, it's a, all the going to the Super Bowl becomes, you know, part of the experience. I also think the Bengals being in the Super Bowl is interesting because I guarantee everyone's list of Bengals story ideas was a lot shorter in Evernote than their list of chief story ideas.

Yeah. Or even Ram story ideas. This isn't a team that's been in the Super Bowl in three decades. This is not a team that people really thinking was going to make the Super Bowl this year, right? They're kind of a year earlier, two years too early by our normal rhythms of this thing. So then it becomes, what do we say about the Bengals? How do we do this? Right? What's, what's my story idea there? That's the true scrambling that's happening right now in NFL newsrooms across the country. Yeah, I mean, and 98% of the pitches involve Andrew Whitworth, right? I mean,

is there, I wonder, that guy's entire, I mean, not that he wasn't incredibly high, had an incredibly high-queue rating for an offensive lineman to begin with. But I guarantee there's like 100 reporters out there that have holding notes, you know, with Andrew Woodworth's agent who were just like, you know, that piece we talked about in December? I actually kind of like to get that one going again. Yeah, Andrew Woodward is going to be a busy guy. But Haifitz already did it. No, I know. It's off the table.

I'm sorry. Too late. Yeah, well, a lot of people probably wish they had that one to do over. Doors closed. He is David Chewmaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Chris Sutton sitting in for Erica. David and I are back later this week, or I'm back later this week. David and I are back the next Monday. Live from Radio Row with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.