The Press Box - What is TV Doing to College Football? Plus, the New Rule of Celebrity Profiles.

Episode Date: July 12, 2022

Bryan and David are back to talk through the ongoing college football realignment conversation. They discuss the two superconferences, which networks are profiting, how this disrupts the collegiate experience, and what could happen to smaller teams and conferences (5:29). Later, they introduce a new “rule” of journalism where they predict the success of the director’s upcoming film based on their celebrity profile, then touch on Matthew Barry leaving ESPN (34:45). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week, and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up, everybody? Are you tuning in to the Challenge USA on CBS? Well, tune in to me, Tyson Apostle, as I break down each and every episode with my co-host, Amelia Weddemeier. I'm also a contestant on the show, which gives you all the insider scoop. Amelia, how stoked are you to do this? Tyson, I'm freaking excited. I cannot wait to sit my butt down every single week to watch the show, then come here and recap it with you on the Ringer Reality TV podcast. David? What's on your mom? mind today? Well, I know this is, I know you know about this. News came across the wire yesterday that Matthew Berry, fantasy football expert, is leaving ESPN. I don't believe he's announced where he's going yet. And I believe we'll probably have more to talk about in terms of what this means later

in the show. But as I was prepping for that segment, it occurred to me that I didn't know what Matthew Barry did at ESPN anymore. Like I know that he hosts fantasy football podcast, the TV stuff, whatever. But I don't know, as I was like, was he like an editor of record? Did he have some higher standing there, like on the docket? And so I Googled it to try to find the answer. And that led me to another wonderful edition of Adventures in Google Questions. I love this segment so much. All right.

So if you search for what does Matthew Barry do, it doesn't get much. doesn't get you anywhere. But it does lead you to some interesting other questions, such as, how much money does Matthew Berry make? Not a lot of solid answers there. I'm guessing the answer that will be changing presently anyway. What is Matthew Barry's real name? Kind of an odd one there. It turns out the answer is Matthew Barry. How old is Matthew Barry? Okay, it's a little bit more like in line with something someone would ask. Where did Matthew Barry go to college? It gets a little bit sticky in here because there's an actor named Matt Berry who plays Laslo on what we do in the shadows. And so there's, you know, there's some people who were searching

for him and Matthew Barry and it all gets kind of tangled up. But I'm pretty sure most of the following are related to the original Matthew Barry question and not not getting too much into what we do in the shadows weeds. How do I contact Matthew Barry? Some pretty standard stuff. Then it gets into some nice tangents. What is Field Yates's real name? Also Field Yates. How tall is Dan Orlovsky? Okay, that is publicly available information since Dan played in the NFL. Where did Savadia Bell go to college? Probably related.

Who is the lady on fantasy football? Also probably related, who is the girl on ESPN? The answer, according to Google questions, is Mina Kimes. Do girls play football? We're going to keep going down this path. There's a little bit more, this is a little bit more appropriate for the podcast. How much do ESPN reporters make? What are that myself sometimes?

Yeah. Good question. According to Google, $85,000 annually, I don't think that's the mean. Back to the matter at hand. How did Matthew Berry get famous? That's a good question. There's actually a pretty substantive answer there. You can Google it yourself.

Who invented fantasy football? Is fantasy football legal? Can I sue someone for fantasy football? Football winnings? Do I have to report fantasy football winnings? Is fantasy football gambling for tax purposes? More or less, yes is the answer. Will Draft Kings send me a 1099?

The answer, I believe, is yes. If you make more than $600 in a calendar year, does gambling winnings affect social security? And then at this point in the search, you kind of realize why Matthew Berry might have wanted out of this hamster wheel. So I just stopped searching there. I like the older fan checking in.

Exactly. My social security. Yeah. A lot of good questions there. The origin story, that makes total sense. Mm-hmm. The kind of sweaty tax questions make sense. I wonder if the people who are asking about the legality of it are like players who are

suddenly overcome by, you know, a conscience, a guilty conscience. Or if it's like their moms who are trying to figure out if their kids are going to to J. You could imagine like your mom or my mom or Matthew Berry's mom getting online just being like, is my son an illegal trade? You know? But yeah, there's a lot of good questions there. What do we think the average age is of the person who typed in what is the name of the lady on the fantasy football show using that particular language? Oh, man. Probably, you know, probably first time, long time in terms of Google. You know, this is their probably people have been around for a while and haven't typed a lot of questions into the Google box.

Coming up on today's podcast, what is happening to college football? A lament from two Texans who knows something about it. We introduced the Tad Friend Rule of Movie Journalism. You're going to love this one, David. The worst lead ever. And as mentioned, a fantasy guru is leaving ESPN. All that more on the press box. A part of the ringer.

Podcast Network. Hello Media Consumers, Brian. Curtis, David Shoemaker, producer Erica Servantes here. David, we can tack a media angle or two onto this, but mostly I just want to talk to you about what the hell is happening to college football. Our pal Kevin Clark has a very good column up on the ringer.com today about this. He writes, college football, I believe, is not built on TV markets and cable sub-fees. It is built on crisp, perfect fall days and.

pure spite. Now, fact check here from two or actually three Texans who watched college football games in that state in August, September, and even October. Not sure I would use the word crisp. More like stiflingly hot. I got some of the best sunburn of my life sitting in the stands of football games. Maybe it was that way in Miami. But Kevin's right. Pure spite is what this is about. And the changes that have started happening in college football late last month and last summer and even before that put all of this at risk. You know the big news, David. We are now going to two super conferences because USC and UCLA last month left the PAC 12 to go to the Big 10. This follows my alma mater, Texas and Oklahoma, leaving the Big 12, the embattled Big 12, you might say.

to go to the SEC, where they will play their natural rivals like South Carolina and Mississippi State. Schools I've spent absolutely no time thinking about. What is your take on all this before we get too deeply into the media weeds here? Wow. It has a ring of inevitability to it, right?

And I think that there's a degree to which college sports are not follow at least the the back room aspect of college sports is the business of college sports is weirdly underreported in the mainstream right the degree to which we understand the NFL salary cap and not the interworkings of the NCAA is is a pretty big pretty big gap between the two you know and and so I think that with a lot of the people who know who follow what's going on closely, it just sort of seems like there's a little bit of a shoulder shrug. This is a story that you could have halfway reported or halfway theorized years ago. And so in a lot of ways, the mainstream, the more casual audience isn't getting the full

service of like how just like wow, how like nuts this is, right? Because it really is a huge deal coming from, I mean, we're old, we're getting old, but this would have been, despite the fact that I said you could have seen this coming five years ago, this would have been like unthinkable when we were in college. And, you know, but the way that, I mean, I think the NCAA sort of made its bed in a lot of ways, but just the general way that sports have become such big business, you know, such a, such commerce in America and the world, I think that, that to have imagined that college sports would have been sheltered or cordoned off from that, it would have, is naive.

and in some ways, this is a sort of probably the most straightforward means of getting to a more market-centric version of college football, right? Absolutely. I mean, I say this is a University of Texas alum. For most of my life,

the University of Texas has been trying to destabilize college football. Back when we were in high school, they left the Southwest Conference. along with Baylor, Texas A&M and Texas Tech and joined and formed the Big 12. Then about as soon as Texas got to the Big 12, they started trying to leave the Big 12, eventually getting the Longhorn network and making the conference into this weird mess, and then other teams left the Big 12. Now Texas and Oklahoma are leaving behind Baylor, Texas Tech, and others,

and going to the SEC, despite not exactly being part of the American South. So this is a long road from 1994 to 2022. Again, I say this is a Texas alarm and a Texas fan. We did a lot of this. This was that I only use the word we when I'm taking blame. This is this is on Texas. They've been trying to do this. You're exactly right.

This is the logical endpoint or near endpoint, who knows what's going to happen next of teams trying to cut ties with historical rivals and get a better deal. Texas almost went to the PAC 12 a couple of years back to play USC, which is weirdly now part of a collection of schools in the Rust Belt. Think about that for a second. Well, you make a lot of good points there. I think that the audience for this podcast might have stuck on one thing that you said. that I think we should just take a quick sidebar to delve into.

Because I agree with you. Texas is not traditionally part of the American South. But there are many people, particularly those who come from above the, well, let's just say north of the Mason-Dixon line, who would disagree with that, at least without having thought about it too much. You're absolutely right, so let me clarify. If you go to a Texas message board or if you had gone to one before this most recent announcement last summer, you would have seen Texas fans insisting that they are not part of the SEC. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

The way football is administered there. They're not yet. Maybe a lot of academic standard boasting about we're not one of those schools. Mm-hmm. So that's maybe the more exact way to say it than the American side. No, no, but I do think it's true. I mean, I think you can sort of, you know, there's a, there are definitely some, some borderline southern states, you know, states that are literally kind of on the border

that are sort of semi-southern and semi-not. You know, I'm looking at you, Missouri. Obviously, on the East Coast, it gets a whole lot messier, too, because you got Washington, D.C., and they're sort of being northern right in the middle of a lot of southerniness, but whatever. And a lot of states are sort of different pieces of a whole. Texas is sort of its own thing. nominally part of the southwest as well, but more than anything, Texas, and its size warrants,

a distinction is Texas is Texas. Texas is, you know, this is, even before a country was divided along party lines and everybody was constantly at odds, I knew very, I know a lot of very, like, cool-headed, liberal folks in Texas who would tell you that if Texas tried to secede, they'd fight on the side of Texas in a heartbeat, right? I mean, it's just, the Texas is its own thing. Well, if I can blow your mind here, when we were in high school, there was a football conference, a fairly major football conference that just consisted of Texas teams. Yeah, and that's the way a lot of people think it should have stayed. Seems like that might have been desirable for a lot of people. Oh, wait, never mind, we're going to go join a bunch of teams in the Midwest.

But considering where we are now and where Texas is now and now we're all sort of part of this bigger culture, CSEC makes some sense for Texas. If it makes sense to an outsider, it should make enough sense for the school. I just don't, I think if it's, I mean, if you have two, I mean, listen, we're going into, we're going to one or two options here, right? And at some point, just like Texas has tried to cut ties every time they've been somewhere, is it, I mean, what's going to be their motivator? The amount of money they make, right? The Longhorn Network profits or whatever, however they decide to, however they decide to cash in the most, right? And that's how I think that's, that's going to be the motivator for most of the schools involved. I think that's why

what's happened with college football and specifically with Texas makes me feel so empty because it's for money that's going to the athletic department. So people who are Longhorn fans say, well, our school is one of the winners here. And I'm like, what did Texas win? Did Texas win any football games over the last 10 years? Not many. Did Texas qualify for? for the SEC, one of the soon-to-be two super conferences, because they were just so good at football for the last decade? Nope. They qualified because they're a really big school

that's the flagship university of the state of Texas, one of the biggest states in the country. Oh, okay. So you mean we didn't make it on merit? Yeah. You can say past merit, but we didn't make it on recent merit at all. USC's, by the way, exactly the same thing.

They haven't done anything since Pete Carroll went to the Seahawks. But they get to go to the Super Conference because they're a big brand and they're in a big market. God, I hate that word. And that's why they qualify. So that's what's so funny about this. I mean, this reminds me of all the times that Texas was losing so many games and I went on the message board and people are crowing about the revenue national championship. I didn't get any of that money. I didn't, I didn't, I'm not going to remember where I was.

My pals, Adrian, Alicia, all my college pals hugging and and slapping high fives when we won the Revenue National Championship. Meanwhile, we won seven games or five games or whatever it was that year. Who cares? So I understand. And again, people will say, well, you've got to go to the super conference because the TV money has gotten so out of whack. And you need the more TV money because then you'll be able to compare. compete, then you'll be able to recruit better, build those amazing facilities to get recruits. I get all that.

But let me just say that at this stage, winning feels incredibly empty. Winning feels like we won because of some, you know, structural advantage over Texas Tech or your alma mater, Baylor, not because we actually won football games, which is the fun kind of winning. well you mean you won by being in this position right they won by being the university of texas right by by getting by getting the offer yeah i mean you know that's not so dissimilar from where like bailer was when the big 12 started although probably more morally defensible a little bit of a novelty for baylor to be in the morally defensible position um but yeah i mean it's they you know there were a lot

of teams, when you build the Big 12, there are a lot of teams like that. They kind of had their app sort of paying their way in, right? You kind of, you needed the money and the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, someone to stomp for homecoming. You know, that's how, that's how, that's kind of how we felt. But you're right. I mean, Texas is going to bring in the revenue to the SEC. They're going to be a part of the thing.

And presumably, I mean, I think the hope would be, obviously that, that, that, that you recruit. It helps you revitalize the football program, all that kind of stuff. I just think, but I just think, but I just think. I agree with your broader point about how sort of empty it all feels. I mean, you know, rivalries, rivalries come and go, I mean, or at least historically, depending on the ebbs and flows of the power of a team,

although there's been a little continuity over the- Kind of, but in college football, the thing is they kind of hang around for a long time. Sure. I mean, I know, I mean, I'm all four rivalries, but I think that you'll find, you know, people who are, interested in it, we'll find new ones, right? You'll still see, Oklahoma. But see, this is the thing.

I just think when I got to the University of Texas, 1996, first of all, we should be honest, I went to the University of Texas for a lot of reasons, but probably the biggest was the football team. Yeah. I remember there was an orientation early on before we got there and you could pick, do you want to tour the journalism and communications department or the sciences or liberal arts? And I was like, no, no, I want to go on the stadium and athletic facilities tour. I would like a preview of where my seat will potentially be in the stadium when I'm here on Saturdays. And that's not a joke. I remember just thinking about college and looking.

It's like, oh, Texas has a home game with Notre Dame in 1996. Sounds great. Yeah. Sounds good. And by the way, absolutely no regrets about that decision, even on those ridiculous grounds. So I see people that went to the Ivy League. I don't feel any jealousy. I feel sorry for them.

Oh, wait, you didn't have Saturdays. You didn't have all your Saturdays in the fall planned out like that. You didn't have this awesome thing that would happen once a week and two thirds of the time would be on your campus. I did. And it was great. It was as fun and as amazing as anything I did in four years of college. And to the point about rivalries, I just felt like,

I remember seeing quote unquote old people. at football games who are now like as old as you and I are. And I would look at them and I'd be like, it's funny because you were here in like 1983 or you were here in 1977. And your four years, you got to see Earl Campbell win a Heisman trophy. You got to see something terrible. I'm in the Texas football and a coach get fired. My four years, I got to see Ricky Williams win a Heisman trophy.

It was a great ahead of me. I got to see Mack Brown get hired and revitalized the program. I got my special four years, but what is connected us is like, you felt the same way about Texas Tech fans as I do. You felt the same way about Baylor fans as I do. Even with the conference change, you had this particular feeling about TCU. And people always focus on the big rivals, right?

Oklahoma, Texas A&M, Arkansas back in the day. Okay, but you had feelings about everybody in that old Southwest conference. And then later, after a time, I think everybody in the Big 12. Kansas State. I have a very particular feeling about Kansas State that's different from the feeling I have about Oklahoma State. So now what you're telling me is we're just going to switch that out for Ole Miss and we're going to switch that out for LSU. Now, some of those games will actually be much bigger than going to Stillwater every two years. But it doesn't replace it. And I don't think you can just replace it willy-nilly. And it will be the same. At least it won't be the same to me.

Yeah, it's true. I mean, they could just have a, you know, just make up a fake red rival rival or whatever. Just call it. Just make it like the Brazos Bowl or something and everybody show up and wear like old-timey costumes. The Brazos Bowl was Baylor, by the way. I know. I'm just trying to think of a river in Texas. But yeah, it was, yeah, I mean, you're right.

Nothing's ever going to replace it. And it's just like regional, right? It's very particular. Well, you talked about the Ivy League students who you, you know, you feel sorry for. Have you ever told the story about the Duke kids at the sports bar in this podcast before? No, you want, let's do that. Early in our days in New York, Baylor was not, I was not trying to carry my Baylor fandom on with me. They were really bad.

It was not, you know, wasn't wearing Baylor T-shirts around, not really my thing. they eventually got good I had to reconcile my feelings that's a whole different story but I Brian would of course go to this you know whatever sports bar was like the hosting the Texas

game in New York City every Saturday there are usually several bars but you know we picked the one and they would do it up they do this all over sports bars in New York but obviously they have like that there's all the NFL teams

that there's Giants and Jets bars but you can also very easily find a Pittsburgh Steelers bar or a Dallas Cowboys bar or whatever and just be around your like-minded fans. So there'd be bars that just had the Texas game on, specifically from this block, they'd drink specials for the Texans. They played the Texas fight song over the intercom every time they scored a touchdown so that everybody could stand up and do the longhorn

symbol and chant along with the, I mean, every school in Texas has these silly in the South, has these silly touchdown ritual chant type things. Duke, not exactly the same kind of South. So the next, because of the way the football is scheduled, obviously after the Texas game, they have to reserve, I mean, there's a different game that's being featured in that bar. And this week it was a Duke football game. Duke fans, not a very good football program, not a very notable football program, but I'm sure a lot of, you know, very goodhearted people who are looking for a excuse to get together and have a good time on a Saturday afternoon. But the Texas game is running long, so the Duke kids are all, I mean, it's like a hundred people

crammed in the entryway of this sports bar. waiting for the tables to empty out so they can go take their seats. And they're all just sitting there talking, having a good time, trying to do the best they can to pass the time. And in the closing seconds of the game, Texas scored a touchdown. Like they were already way ahead, but they scored a touchdown. The fight song starts blaring over the PA system. Everybody in the bars stands up with the long horns up and starts chanting.

And I looked over at the Duke group, and you would have thought that everybody in the bar, was like hailing Satan. Like they were so, they were so shocked and like viscerally uncomfortable with this celebration. Oh, it was so good.

It was worth every Texas game my sat through just to see those poor kids witness, witness the excitement of football at its finest. And don't you think that celebration was 20% louder because we could see the Duke guys sitting over there? Yeah.

All right, everybody. for real this time. Let's show those guys what a real football program does. Oh, my gosh. It was always a little awkward for me to know if I should stand up and join it. It's like, do I take communion when I go to a Catholic church or something? You know, is it easier just to just go with the flow, even if that's the wrong answer? Yeah, it's very, very weird.

I want to turn this around to you because you and I have been united by conference since, again, since 1996, since our freshman year of college. and Baylor has been better for the most part than Texas has at football over the last decade. Baylor won a national championship in basketball. And yet for the aforementioned reasons, Baylor does not currently have the invitation

to one of the two super conferences. How do you feel about that? Well, I feel like there's, I have a hard time getting too worked up about it, one way or the other. I mean, Baylor is a school that is, like, grown by leaps and pounds the time that I was there, and the programs, budgets have grown by leaps and bounds as well, not without a lot of controversy attending it. And, you know, you get to see the, you get to see the argument play out in real time about whether or not, like, all this added profit really benefits that it has a trickle-down effect on the rest of the university.

But setting that aside, I don't know. I mean, you tell me, my assumption is going to be that there will probably be a few more invitations to the SEC and Baylor always finds its way to wiggle into a situation like that. You know, if it really is going to be two conferences, there are going to be some land grabs, almost literally, I guess. But then I assume that if there's really two power conferences, there has to be some, there has to be some mechanism for every other school to have a way into the conversation, right? be, is there, I mean, will there be the field with the best team from the rest of the college world get an opportunity to, to, to play against the, you know, the schools in the mega conferences?

I don't know. I mean, I guess they wouldn't have to. And it probably wouldn't be in the SEC or the, you know, Big Ten's benefit to let any, I mean, probably the best move. I mean, the smart thing for them to do would be to starve out, starve out the rest of the country, right? Just to pretend that a Baylor team, even if it was. better, the best team in the country didn't exist, but, but I don't know, history hasn't really worked out well for people who did that. Well, that's the part of this. It's really unclear and sort of brings us to the TV part

because we know the college football playoff is going to expand. It's currently at four teams. And it's going to go way up. Could go to eight, could go to 12 weeks. It's unclear where it would go. Now, I guess in one scenario, somewhere down the line, you have two super conferences who feel they are so super that they feel they are all of college. football. The champion of our domain is the champion of everybody, which, by the way, is kind of like old college football used to be, right? You win the SEC, you win the Southwest Conference, you go win the Cotton Bowl and you plant your flag and say, we did it. Yeah, national champs. National champs or just conference champs. Yeah, and we're satisfied with that. Probably a more likely scenario is there's a big playoff, and the SEC and the Big Ten under this scenario just reserve a bunch of seats at the table. a bunch of slots in that playoff for them.

Well, like, like, I mean, like, they actually have will negotiate that like 10 of the 12 seats will be theirs. Well, that's probably maybe not that many, but this is where we are, right? Where the power is, well, if we have, if we're the schools that have all the best,

a lot of the best teams in college football, how do we use that power? Do we use it to just say, okay, we'll participate in the new playoff, but the price of our participant, patient is we get X number of slots or whatever it is. That all remains to be determined. But I know Kevin Clark wrote about this today. A lot of people have written really smart pieces about it, but let me play Dodo here for a second. Why do these two conferences need the NCAA?

Well, they don't. Like if they just each had a champion and those two champions, then they could just, those two champions could play each other on January 1st and they could just take all the money. They don't need the NCAA. And to your question, of like, why don't we know more about the inner workings of how the NNCA has tried to administer college football over the last several decades? One answer is, well, they haven't, and they didn't administer anything or administer anything effectively enough. And that's part of what got us here, is you didn't have a governing body. And as Kevin points out in this piece, I think, well, you certainly didn't have a governing body of people that love college football or love college

sports and are thinking of it from that perspective. So I, I don't know. I don't know what's going to happen. We also have to understand that there's probably a lot of money to be made for a big, big playoff that includes lots of teams, not just a handful of teams. So the SEC, the Big Ten, and the other conferences will want to sign up on that too. I also find it's like an interesting subplot here. I was listening to Paul Feinbaum a couple weeks ago and he was talking about, well, the Big Ten expanding is being driven. everybody thinks by Fox. So if we think of college football used to be big and diverse enough that every network would basically have a little slice of it. NBC has Notre Dame and CBS has the SEC game of the week and on and on. But if you're ESPN and you're about to inherit the whole SEC, well, you're really happy to have Texas and Oklahoma Cup because the thing you're

inheriting is about to become even better. Fox, which has a slice of the big ten. writes, same reason. Okay, if we supersized the Big Ten, then we're in on something. And then as Feinbaum said on his radio show, which is that was interesting, this is now Fox's attempt to get into the playoff. Right now ESPN shows all three games of the college football playoff. Well, if it's a bigger playoff, what if it becomes like the NFL where it's multiple networks showing different parts of the playoff? So that's a whole separate chess board too. that if there's a bigger playoff,

is it more networks in there? Is it just ESPN as it currently is? ESPN obviously wants to control as much as they can. Does the network like CBS, which is losing the SEC game of the week here in a couple of years, one in? Are they going to be able to find a way in? Is it going to be the Big Ten game of the week?

Are they going to buy a slice of the Big Ten rights and put Ohio State versus Indiana on in the afternoon? Well, and then if we do have these two superpowers, right you have these i mean and i'm counting the the the conferences and the networks backing them uh in this equation how long is it going to be before texas or you know or notored you know before there's another notary name how at some point it's there's going to be some somebody else in the mix right at some point cbs or someone's going to come calling and just be like well we'll just who's the who's the top team in the country what if we just paid alabama a trillion dollars

to jump ship. I got an idea. And then you guys figure the rest out. The Longhorn Network will devote a cable channel to one school and it'll be so good and our programming will be so scintillating that it will justify the establishment of this network. No, I don't know. I mean, it's a big, I don't know.

By the way, you made a point earlier about change is inevitable in some way. There was a lot of college football back in the old days. And by old days, I mean, like a couple of years ago, that was really. crap to use a wrestling reference and I know sometimes the folks at red it get mad at us for using too many wrestling references on here but college football especially early in the season was kind of like the old w wf superstars where it was all squash matches mm-hmm Alabama versus directional school ohio state versus directional school Texas versus directional school and you had weeks where it was really tough to find more than a couple of good games mm-hmm it's gotten better in

recent years. But again, what these conferences are promising, whether that's actually real or not, everybody always takes the worst example. Hey, UCLA is going to be playing Rutgers. That sounds really random. Okay. But also USC is going to be playing Ohio State. So part of the promises

here is if we have super conferences with lots and lots of good teams in it, we're going to be able to deliver lots and lots of good matchups. Not just one week, but every week. Or at least interesting matchups. And that is look, more good college football games is something that every single college football fan

forever has wanted. I was fine with the old system, but, you know, sitting there, again, in a very non-crisp Texas day watching Texas, you know, toy with a directional Louisiana school, and it's 45 to 10, that had its limits. That was, you know, and then, of course, Texas almost lose to the directional Louisiana school, which would make it even worse. All right, David, let's do the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are always gratefully received. This week, David, we considered tweets about Aaron Rogers's new tattoo. Okay, so now he's okay with needles.

But this week's runaway winner, which was submitted to this podcast by just about everyone, was about Elon Musk. Musk, who is the father of a previously unknown set of twins born last year, is now saying that he's trying to get out of buying Twitter. It was an overwork Twitter joke

to write Elon Musk pulls out for the first time ever. Saw it a lot. If you think we're going to ask for a taste check about that one, congrats. You made the overwork Twitter joke of the week. By the way, really amused to see a New York Times article channeling your Google questions called How Many Children Does Elon Musk Have? We need a new game.

Google Questions or New York Times headline. David in the notebook dump, I would like to introduce a new rule of journalism for you. This isn't a solid rule of journalism, but it's more of a guide. Okay. I thought of this when I saw a profile. recently in the New York Times for about Taika Watiti. Did you happen to see this profile? Oh, yeah.

What was it? What's the rule? Well, let me explain. Taika Watiti profile ahead, of course, of his new movie, Thor, Love and Thunder. So it comes out. It's written by Dave Vitzkoff. I really enjoyed the profile. I'm like, hey, look at this.

Director, cool director, good piece. Really enjoyed it. Then I start to see the reviews for Love and Thunder trickle in. Yeah. And let's just say they were a little underwhelming, especially by the standards of Taika Watiti, who is a very loved director and who Thor Ragnarok was one of everybody's favorite or least funniest Marvel movies.

So I think we need a new rule, which is called the Tad Friend Rule of Celebrity Profiles. Okay. And the rule goes like this. If you see a particularly good celebrity profile ahead of a big movie or television show, there's a chance that the television show or movie is going to suck. You think the access is given to compensate for what is certainly going to be a poorly reviewed film? Well, that's what's interesting.

I think, yes, that if there's. a weaker film that the studio is probably more interested in putting their people out there. I say this is a person who wrote a profile of George Lucas ahead of Red Tales. So I think that's out there. There's probably also a law of averages thing happening here where it's like Taika Watiti has made two or three really good movies in a row. He was in The Mandalorian. And then at some point, which is what gets everybody excited about him.

hey, we like this guy. This is good. Good director. Somebody I'm excited to see. And then it's just law of averages that they're going to make a bad movie. Yeah, no, it's definitely like an editorial board law of averages effect too, where there's a lot of times that people, subjects like that don't reach a sort of critical mass of like we should definitely write about them until just like a second too late. You know, someone would come.

We'd have that conversation in ringer meetings. We'd be like, what do I write about this person? and they'd be like, you know what, if we'd said that six months ago, the answer would have been really smart and yes. And now feels a little bit overdone, you know? Yeah. And the timing might just be wrong. Mm-hmm.

And again, if it's going to be on the occasion of their lousy movie or so-so movie, let's get that out a couple of weeks before the lousy or so-so movie comes out so that we can have kind of two different content streams here. Hey, Tycoa-Watiti, love them. Great quotes. Second content moment. Ooh, movie not so good. movie not as good as we wanted it to be.

Now you might ask David, why did I call this the Tad Friend rule of celebrity profiles? I was going to ask, yeah. Tad Friend, long time New Yorker staff writer, absolutely one of my favorite journalists on the planet. When I grew up, I want to write a sentence, a sentence as good as a Tad Friend sentence. He's amazing. So amazing, so smart, so funny, such a good writer. But a couple of years ago, I noticed that often he would have a celebrity profile, and I'd read it and drink it up and then realize that the movie that the profile was pegged to would turn out to be a dud. Let me give you a few examples.

Ben Stiller, you might remember he wrote a really good profile about Ben Stiller. Peg to The Secret Life of Walter Middy. Steve Carell, very memorable profile. Peg two, dinner for schmucks. Anna Ferris for What's Your Number? We can keep going. Director Andrew Stanton for John Carter. Director Harold Ramos for the Ice Harvest.

Oh my God. Director Darren Aronowski for Noah. She's got decent reviews. Again. Oh, my God. Now, when I say pushed out because they know the movies of Dudd or all that stuff, I have no idea. I have no idea what went on in how these PR things get done.

David's Koff and Ted Frank get to profile lots and lots of famous people. So I don't know if there's any direct connection. I'm just saying you see a particularly rich and rewarding celebrity profile. Yeah. Keep your guard up. Keep your guard up. Enjoy it. Because in a week or two or a month or two, if it's a New Yorker, you might see a movie that isn't what you wanted to be.

Well, I'm glad it's that and not the Tadfrey and Curse. Like that could have, that would have been, that would have been the other way to go. about this. Because it's not a hard and fast rule. Probably some exceptions. I think even Ted Friend has some exception. I'm just saying. You set up Matthew Berry leaving ESPN, David.

What do we think about ESPN losing its fantasy guru and more broadly what Matthew Barry has done with that role at the worldwide leader? Well, talk about inevitability. It's a little bit surprising he's still there. I mean, on the one hand, there is no greater authority because of his history, also because of his role at ESPN, on the subject of fantasy sports. We're in a world that has now an infinite supply of fantasy sports talking heads, right? So in some sense, he's very replaceable, but it's exactly because there's so many of them that he has a significant. role, right? Because there's so much assembly line talent that somebody with like a little bit of

name recognition and backstory and actual credit, you know, credibility in the field, for someone like him that goes a really long way. He's been doing it for a long time. He's been the face of ESPN fantasy sports forever. I mean, forever. But at the same time, we've seen the moves that ESPN has made over the years. And you would probably be surprised. You probably would never, you wouldn't have been surprises of any point over the past decade

or certainly the past five years if they had let him walk just to replace him with, you know, replacement level talent. And, uh, uh, balanced that against the fact that I don't know what he's going to do. I know he's done some,

according to Google, done some writing and producing on the side. But, certainly you wouldn't be shocked to find out that he was, you know, cashed a big check to go to work for a startup, a draft king sort of place or whatever, an online casino. I mean, nothing would shock you, right? That's why I was a little surprised when I saw Andrew Marchand saying NBC was an early option.

Oh, well. Because I really was thinking, finally we've gotten the casino hiring the guy that you know, I've been talking about with the various insiders of DSPN. Yeah, it just seems like I think it would have, I mean, that's interesting. It could be in BC. I just think basically, regardless of whether or on he would ever,

he was going to go work for draft kings, certainly there's been a job offer along the way, and you balance that sort of offer against what ESPN, you presume, you know, presumed ESPN cost cutting, and you just would have assumed there would have, this breakup was inevitable, and it's kind of surprising it held together this long, and maybe that would be the reason why it is surprising, right?

Because they lasted this long in a relationship, you know, and she keep going. And fantasy is clearly something. You know, still a big deal for ESPN. Maybe that's changed a little bit as ESPN has become more of a streaming company than cable company and dot com company. I do want to ask you this. Use the word authority to talk about Matthew Berry. How much of his success do you think is his authority?

Like I am really good or, you know, seem really good at telling you how to pick your fantasy football team. And how much of it is him inhabiting the character? of the guy telling you how to assemble your fantasy football team. Being good at television and podcasting and being like, this is the kind of person who's not just, again,

assembly line name on a screen, who you should draft, but just actually being like an entertaining presence. Well, I think it's probably more the latter from a practical point of view. But that said, I think with fantasy sports,

you have to be a lot more right than you do even to be, if you were like one of the old games, gambling guys. Maybe, you know, the gambling market is obviously shifting a lot right at this very moment, but like, you know, people joke about it. Nobody kept track of like the picks on the NFL pregame shows or whatever, you know, and, and, and, uh, or ESPN, um, people really care a lot about the, about their fantasy teams and they're, and you better believe that if Matthew Berry says, you know, trade this, get rid of this guy and they do and he goes on to, you know, rush for 500 yards

the next game, they're going to remember that and hold that against Matthew Barry, probably forever, you know? And so I think that the margin for error is lower than just about anywhere else. I mean, you do have to take being right very seriously. But it is the authority thing. And he is incredibly entertaining. I mean, in some ways, he sort of, like, defined the style of how fantasy sports is broadcast, as podcasted, is talked, you know?

and just between regular human beings the way it's talked. And that that kind of authority is hard to, it's hard to describe. Yeah, I guess that's another way of asking the question, not just how much of his stature is built on one versus the other, but what did he change more than the other one? See, we're going to look back and say, well, he changed the way we picked fantasy football teams,

or are we going to say he changed, he went as far as you could possibly go with this character, you know, with this, with this role and turn this in from somebody who's, hey, there's a person who's part of a giant sports website to, there's a person who's a legitimate podcast star, occasional TV star, big star in the world of a media company through the world of fantasy. Yeah. I mean, it's a really good question. And it'll be really interesting to see, I mean, listen, this is, you have the network, you have the star, you know, there's infinite number of examples in history of things like this.

It'll be very interesting to see how significant as influences it is next stop because, you know, who made who is going to be the undercurrent of every discussion we have about him and going forward. Before we go, I would like to read you a bad lead.

Oh, please. This came to me from the Twitter account of writer Jonathan Katz. This was a New York Times A1 story, an analysis story, also known as a thumb sucker, or used to be known as a thumb sucker in newspaper world. I'm going to read you this lead, David.

I want you to react appropriately. This is about the end of Roe v. Wade and abortion rights in America. Quoting, pressed by Supreme Court decisions diminishing rights that liberals hold dear and expanding those cherished by conservatives, the United States appears to be drifting apart into separate nations

with diametrically opposed social, environmental, and health policies. Call these the disunited states. It sounds like a really difficult to comprehend version of like the Twilight Zone introduction or something.

Whoa. Pressed by Supreme. I'm reading it now because hearing you say it, I was like, maybe it makes more sense in print. It does not make more sense in print. The disunited States. See, we live in the United States, but now... Well, and it was determined that it was really important that we get to the disunited

States coinage, not quickly, but in only one sentence, right? Because that thing that came before it is a one-sentence monstrosity. Boom, the disunited States. All right, it's time for David Shoemaker guesses the strained pun headline. Yeah. Tuesday's headline about the Minnesota Timberwolves big bet was go bear or go home. Today's headline comes from Steve Holesapel, Intermodal Motorist and K.M. McFarland, all of them valued listeners. It's from Forbes.

It's one of those bad Thor reviews, I mentioned. And David, that's all you're going to get. What was Forbes's strain pun headline? That's all I'm going to get is. Like, God of... Thor is part of this. God of blunder. A Thor.

Let's put on Thor. Thor loser. Dude. Is that it? Thor loser. My gosh. See, people think David sees these beforehand. He's just gotten really...

This is the 10,000 hours rule now. David has had 10,000 hours of guessing Strain pun headlines. I can't believe that happened. Yeah. Well... He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. is production magic by Erica Servantes.

We got a fun interview going up tomorrow here at the press box, David. Ooh, what is it? Went down to a city that's meaningful to you that you spent a lot of time in. Charlotte, North Carolina. Oh, yeah. And I went over to the ESPN studios over there and interviewed a sports radio host, Paul Feinbaum. Oh.

Speaking of college football. Speaking of someone who's benefiting from the constant rise of the SEC? The constant rise of the SEC? Oh my gosh. He did two days of realigned, but before he went on vacation. And a long time listening to this Fine Bomb show, you could just tell he was savoring every minute of it. I mean, this is the slow time of year

if you're hosting a college football themed radio show. And all of a sudden you have USC going to the Big Ten Paul Feinbaum. We talked about his days in print journalism, the early days of his radio show in Birmingham, and then all the way through ESPN, NIL, realignment. That's coming tomorrow.

And then David and I are back Monday with more lukewarm tics about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.