The Right Time with Bomani Jones - Diante Lee on Super Bowl Expectations, Will Darnold lead Seahawks over Patriots, Rooney rule dishonesty | 02.06

Episode Date: February 6, 2026

Bomani Jones is joined by The Ringer's Diante Lee. First, they discuss the upcoming matchup between the Seahawks and the Patriots and why Diante believes Seattle has a significant edge in this game. Later, they discuss Sam Darnold's incredible career turnaround and wonder why people aren't honest about his early struggles. Later, they discuss the pressure the Philadelphia Eagles face this offseason and what people continue to get wrong about the Rooney Rule Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the right time, a wave original. My name is Beaumani Jones. Thanks for listening wherever you get your podcast. Thanks for watching us on YouTube. Subscribe, like, rate us, review us, give us five stars. You only give us four stars. I'm inclined to believe you are a hater. It is Deontay Lee Friday.

Coming to us live from, you are actually in San Francisco right now. I am in San Francisco right now. It's chilling in downtown SF, man. It's been a while since I've been here, too. So it's good to be back. Even though that game is not in nobody, San Francisco. At all, at all. I just want people, if you have never been to the Bay Area,

to look up downtown San Francisco to Levi Stadium. And I want you to look at that long-ass blue line, if it's blue, all right? Because chances are it's going to be a lot of orange and red in there, all right? There's a big logistical problem, I think, we're having the Super Bowl out here. You know, there are a lot of broad terms in geography. I am from Houston, which is a broad term. 100%. However, like, New York.

is a broad term, but if you are coming in to visit New York, it narrows very quickly, right? Right. But I feel no term is broader than Bay Area. 1,000%. Bay Area means a lot of things. And people like, y'all are from the Bay. Those of us who ain't even from there know you need to be a little bit more specific. Way more specific.

I was just talking to somebody yesterday, like, if I walked up to a random Super Bowl goer and asked him if they had ever heard of Hayward, California, chances are they have not. If I asked about Vallejo, they probably only know it because they E40 or kick to sneak, right? You know, like this is, it is way too nebulous the term

for the amount of cities and areas that it's in. I was actually talking to a native yesterday and they're like, you know, San Francisco and the Bay Area is really a place for locals. I think that that's a lot of California when you kind of talk about it, right? You kind of mentioned it with New York City.

I think L.A. is the same where it's so sprawling that when you say L.A., people can get whatever image they have of L.A. and you're probably accurate based on where transients and tourists come. But for the most part, out here in the Bay, you've got a bunch of hills that ain't nobody trying to walk, right? You got a bunch of areas that don't nobody know about out here. You got bridges going in all kind of different directions. So, you know, I think it's hard if you are not a California, not a native Californian, to figure out exactly what it means to be

in the Bay Area and even in San Francisco specifically. So this is my thing about this Super Bowl, right? Obviously, San Francisco. and Oakland are not the same city, right? But like, again, being from Houston, where Houston, the north side and the south side, those are really like two, if you said they were two different cities, they would be two different cities that would be big enough

to be different cities. Only one of them would have the teams, right? But they would, but, you know, I feel like if you said San Francisco and Oakland were in the same city, you could sell the argument, right? 100%. very different places.

But if they were under the same city limits, you can sell the argument, much like all the five boroughs in New York City, right? Yeah, I think that's great. I think that's a great way to kind of think about it. And then just shooting off from Oakland, you know, Berkeley is Oakland adjacent, but not Oakland. Yeah, you can sell out of it.

Alameda is its own thing. Right. But what I'm saying is you cannot sell San Jose as being the same city as those other places and they get roped into what they call it Bay Area. Like I went once, I did a talk once at Santa Clara University and you fly into San Jose to go to Santa Clara. I've been in the Bay Area before. I've been to San Francisco.

I've been to Oakland, okay? San Jose might as well have been 500 miles away, dog. It might have been, it might as well be Eureka. What's the other one y'all got up there? Petaluma. It might as well have been one of those as far as I was concerned. And that's where the Super Bowl is more or less. Absolutely.

It's funny. You bring that up. I think that that's kind of inherent to the California experience, right? Like, people say you from someplace and then they ask more identifying questions, and they are quick to tell you that where you're from is not the place that you just said you're from, right? All you got to do is say the wrong thing about being from L.A. And somebody will let you know, that's the valley. That ain't from where we're from.

Brother, I thought. The Bay Area is just like that in that regard. I thought I was going to graduate school in L.A. I was going to Claremont. Yeah, see. And I just can't. all you need to know about Claremont was when I moved there, they ain't had BET on the cable.

And on that note, we have an actual factual Super Bowl, man. Like, we are here. We're probably getting to some other NFL too because something else happened with the Eagles that all the football people keep telling me as a giant deal and we may need your help in explaining it as you prepare to wreak more hell upon Nick Siriani. But the more I think about this Super Bowl,

Bowl, I feel like, and it's unfair because we all know how hard it is to get to a championship in any sort of way. But it sure does feel like the Patriots got there without really doing that much. And I know that's not fair to say, but it can feel that way at some points. I feel like I watch Seattle beat the breaks off San Francisco and then like win a game that what may have been the Super Bowl, right, the NFC championship. Right. I feel like the Patriots played one half against Denver and that's all it took, right? Right. And, you know, the game against the Texans, they were playing.

C. De Stryl was playing for them. Right. The charges had me at left tackle, you at right, you know, so they was running to the right, but still, you know. No, I'm with you. It's funny, like, I was talking to our buddy Charles McDonald about that yesterday, right? Like, you bring it up to a Patriots fan and, of course, they're going to get cagey, and they say, hey, we played three elite defenses on the way to the Super Bowl.

and you did, you got your ass kicked by all three. Somehow you find yourself here. Yeah, they scored 10 points against Denver. I mean, it took Jared Stidham literally losing his mind on one play to decide that football game. All right, it took five CJ Stroud turnovers. And Drake made dropping a ball a whole bunch on his own before you guys were able to pull away in that game.

Like I said, I think the charges are just kind of dead in the water going in, evidenced by the fact that they immediately fired their offensive coordinator after that football game. All right. So I do think that I would never say that a team's road to the Super Bowl is fake because there's just so much attrition that goes on in this, right? That I will always kind of give at least a little nod or a little kind of a little kind of acknowledgement to what it takes to get there. But I was looking up yesterday on true media that they have only run 40. plays on offense where they were trailing by more than eight points all year.

Wow. And I started going back, right? Because I'm like, historically, what does this mean? So over the last decade, there were only three other teams that did this. The 2015 Patriots who were lost to history because they ended up going to a bunch of Super Bowls again after this. This is a team that lost Denver in the AFC championship game. People should go back and watch that team, that offense.

We're talking about prime Rob Kronkowski. We were talking about fresh Tom Brady, all right? And they were a wagon before running into Denver. You had the 2019 49ers, which was at that point in time, the best offense outside of the chiefs in football. And then the 2023 Ravens, who might be the most impressive of the three, because they played nine teams that made the playoffs that season. If you think that the 2025 page is the same team that I just mentioned with those three, then we are looking at two entirely different sports.

They're not the same as what we are typically used to getting in the Super Bowl, especially out of that conference. So I think the stat we've seen, and I can't remember exactly what it was, but I don't think, do they have, did they have the weakest schedule by opponent's record of all time,

or are they just in the mix of teams that were there? I want to say they're in the mix. Okay, because I know the worst for a very long time was the 99 Rams. Right. And also on that list is the 72 dolphins. Okay.

for those of you who were too young to remember it, the 99 Rams looked like a video game. Like they looked like nothing we had ever seen before. The 72 Dolphins, obviously the only team to go through the regular and postseason, undefeated and untied, right? They were, that was the middle team of a run of teams that went to three straight Super Bowls and won two. I'm saying all that to say at no point did we ever say this about the New England Patriots, right?

The things that I'm saying about those other teams, that's never the way that we felt about them. And again, we're all acknowledging you got to do something in order to get here. But I've watched this team play these playoff games. And at no point did they look impressive, right? The most impressive thing that they did was the stones on that Josh McDaniels to run that bootleg for Drake May to get that first down to ice the game. But what am I saying? The most impressive thing they did was not let him throw the ball. And granted, it was in the crazy snow, right? So I I don't want to sound like a hater, but you saw it and I did too. Absolutely.

You know, I think about, I think about the 2015 Panthers, right, the KMNVP season. They were able to kind of beat up on a mostly down NFC South that year. But you get to the playoffs and you kick the shit out of the Seahawks and you kick the shit out of the Cardinals, who were the next best team in the NFC. And by the time you get to the Super Bowl, it's like, we're not going to talk about how light your schedule was when you were undefeated for the first 14 weeks of the year or whatever it had been, right? Because we got those signature moments.

that just hasn't happened. And I think it's fascinating and people don't know what to do with this team because it's rare that you get this kind of pathway to a Super Bowl for a team that is going to have one of the top two candidates to win MVP. The guy who might be holding the MVP trophy, never had an MVP caliber moment in the playoffs up to this point. And now you're playing maybe the best team in football, in the team that when people ask me as I've been walking by,

the one that I continue to kind of couch by saying, I don't want to be the asshole and say that the source, and say that the Super Bowl is going to be a blowout. But I watched that other team play. And who they have beaten to get here is a hell of a lot more impressive than what we've seen from New England. Well, quarterback postseason runs are interesting because, I mean, it's going to come down to this one game sample that is in front of us. So we are evaluating May on a three game sample. Sam Darnold, if we were to have evaluated him really previously on about a six or seven game sample,

had been poor until he got to go against. I mean, the Rams defense, they're not quite to make a wish foundation, but they do make dreams come true, right? And they had him looking good. But I think about those 2020 bucks, the last Tom Brady championship. And people won't remember this, but that was not a strong postseason run. No. Tom Brady, right? Like, he made some plays.

I don't want to pretend like he didn't do anything, but he didn't play well in that run. They got to the Super Bowl, and he certainly played well enough, but it was in part because it looked like the Chiefs had nine people on offense. 100% That's still the most, people think that this is just what the kids call it glazing. No, man, it is possible,

but Halls put up the most impressive performance I had ever seen in that game. We'll never see that again. I don't know what the outcome was. We will never see that again from that position. I've never seen a quarterback look like that, right? Like, you're a basketball guy. You've seen those NBA efforts where somebody says,

hey, 41 shots is what I got to do to not lose by 50. Then 41 shots it is. And I'm going to shoot 32% from the field, right? And hopefully we can just hold on long enough. We don't really see that in the NFL context. And that's exactly what that game is. It looked like a high school situation where some guy is really, really just like almost like those clips of Zion with his high school team.

Except those clips are always him and his merry band of white boys against another merry band of white boys. And it was just Zion. But you know what you see this happen where there's like some monster guy that's on one team and it's nobody else. When we get to our break, I'll give you the comparison that. I would make to this that would work for California football. But it's the one dude that's all.

And you play it against the number three team in the state. Absolutely. And the only person that's good is you. That's what it looked like. Absolutely. It's when your discipline team that run the wishbone get to the state championship. Now you've got to see the team from the large metro area that got all the athletes. Yes.

And it's just, but they just got that one running back. And every time he get the ball, you'd be like, yo, he only got three. yards right there. But did you see the spin that he put and the stiff arm that he hit him with right absolutely. That's the kid that's going to Rice or Stanford, right? He's going to be the ones doing go pro and something other than sports, but he's great for the high school level. Yes, yes. I mean, that's what the homes look like in the course of that, just like what else am I supposed to be doing here, right? Like, what about where, you know what? This also happens at high school, and not so much anymore, but it used to be where you'd have a running back that was bigger than

the lineman. Mm-hmm. Yes. Right. Actually, I got a perfect, I got a perfect, I got a perfect story for that. I went to go see Royce Freeman, who went to school in the Imperial area of Southern California. So we talk in desert land. And I watched him come and play a private Catholic school. So this is very much the exact kind of situation that you're describing here. And the second I saw him get off the bus for warm-ups, I was like, ah, that's what Oregon looks like. I need to take a picture of this to show the rest of the high school players what the difference is between this kid and the scene that might end up going to win a state championship because he's bigger than their state.

starting guard. It happens. It happens. But I mean, you, you make it interesting, you talked about Seattle. Like, we've seen them. When they look good, they look good. And especially when they can run the ball. Like, and it's in a way that's like, I don't understand why they can't run the ball. Because what I've watched them, they haven't able to run the ball. But it's like they look like they should just be able to run on anybody. Like, what's the hold up there? I don't know. I think that it's one of those kind of weakling things, right, on offense, especially you start talking about offensive line, right, that the worst of the group ends up negatively impacting the team a lot worse than the best players in that unit can positively impact them.

Because if you look at their tackles, Abe Lucas and Charles Cross, they look pretty good in this system. They're big guys, right? They block pretty well. Gray's able, I would say, is probably one of the best rookie linemen that we got out of this past draft class. But I'm right there with you. You think about this is the Shanahan scheme, which is supposed to be able to take scrubs

up front and be able to get movement. And they run the play calls that are supposed to work against the defensive looks that are supposed to work. And it's two yards. It's four yards. It's six yards when it could have been 20. I think that this might be one of those games, though, where you get that Kenneth Walker hits the edge untouched for 30, 40 yards

because there is just a significant speed difference between the way that Seattle plays on offense and what New England looks like on defense. So you know, you don't even feel good about their defense. I really don't. I really don't. I really don't. I think that the AFC championship game,

had they actually gone and beat Bo Nix, I might have felt a little bit differently because then you would have beaten Sean Payton with the quarterback that he trusts, right? I might have believed it a little bit more. But this is a team that has played in the snow twice against two very bad offenses and has gotten the gift of a whole lot of turnovers.

You watch them on a snap-by-snap basis, and I think that some of this is reflected when you ask like Seahawks people who have been around the team, what the feeling in the locker room is, what the feeling is coming out of practice. And just about everybody there for as gracious as they'd like to be, we'll let you know, like, we watched the film,

you watch the film, and you tell me what you think is about to happen. And usually when you hear that from a football player who has been programmed over years to be as deferential as possible to their opponent, and kind of let you know where things stand. I don't think that anybody would be surprised if Seattle comes to kicks their teeth in all Sunday. When the team that talks like that says,

watch the film, that's when you get nervous. Like, I don't know if you know the story on 06, Florida won the SEC championship game. I think they played against Arkansas in that game. They won it. And then whoever their film guy was, whoever was tasked with like watching Ohio State and Ohio State had run through the nation

undefeated that year, right? The film guy comes up to Urban and looks at him. And Urban's like, so what you got? He says, two touchdowns. He's like, what do you mean? He's like, we're going to beat them by two touchdowns. Like he said just simply by watching the film, it was clear that they were going to win that game by two touchdowns.

And of course they won it by four, I want to say. But that was just what they got off dabble. So when somebody says something like that, it's like, ooh, the thing that makes it interesting to me about this Seattle team is, and I think for most of America, this is probably the case. Part of it, I guess, is because of so much of the discussion around Sam Darnel, because he's somewhere between famous and infamous because of the kind of interesting nature of his career. I don't feel like we know very much about who these other people are

who are on this team. Like I even felt like with the Legion of Boom, by the time we got to a Super Bowl with them, even though it was really like the second year of that run, in part because he had Marshawn Lynch, I think in part also just because Richard Sherman had talked himself into our consciousness so much that we paid attention to everybody else. We knew who the dudes were, who were on that team. I don't feel like we really know who these dudes are that are on this team. they've been apparently the best team in the NFL. Well, and I mean, there's no mouthpiece there. It's not that they don't have a Richard Sherman.

They don't have any mouthpiece at all. Because outside of Sherman, then, you still have Michael Bennett, who was a talker, right? He's interesting in his own right. You have Russell Wilson, who just has a public persona, even at that stage in his career, right? Because we had spent so much time with him at the college level. Right. You have Marchion. You had, you know, you had Golden Tate at a point in time there.

You had Pete. You had Pete, right? So, like, everything never. projecting at that time is if you're not looking at us, we're going to make sure that you look at us and give us a certain level of respect or we're going to force it up out of you. I do think with the Seattle team, some of this comes down to coaching too, right? Like you hear Mike McDonald talk and it's like, that's a schemer. That's not a guy who was walking in trying to win your hearts and mind over with some

inspirational speech. He's going to tell you, you line up here, you do this and you're going to win. And I think that the players have kind of adopted that as well. The same is true of Clint Kubiak, right? like Clint Kubiak ain't getting in front of the microphone and giving you a Sean McVeigh-esque, you know, three-minute answer on why he made a certain decision. He's just going to show up with the pencil, put it on the paper, and you go do what it is that I drew up. And I think that the players kind of come across that way as well.

And when you think about Sam Darnold, for a guy who has had an opportunity to fail as many times as he had, and I think that you made this point on social media as well, we would typically kind of have a tighter grasp on like who that guy is off the field, what his motivations are like, how he reacts to, you know, all the things that he has been through in his career. I honestly, had he not been a USC guy, I don't think I would have ever heard his voice prior to making this Super Bowl run. And it seems like everybody there is kind of cool with it being being that way. Only thing I ever heard him say, I did not hear him say. And that was when he said he was seeing ghosts. Seeing ghosts, right.

Right. That's the only time. Also, Mike McDonald, if I was the security guard at that stadium, he better wear his his lanyard everywhere. because if he tried to walk past me without, hey, hey, hey, hey, hold on, partner. You and the polo. Oh, phone, partner. Well, yeah, we, uh, where you, uh, hey, I'm in a hurry. I got to get to the, hey, hey, everybody got to get to the game, partner.

Yeah, yeah, you know, you can get a head, you can get, uh, the headphones anywhere, a big dog. Show me some ID. Absolutely. And then you can step to the side with me real quick. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, because somebody talked to him right now. Exactly. Because it's white man, think I'm going to just let him buy.

I don't know, you know, I don't know for who he's saying is. Um, I would have no idea. I was making the point about Darnold where I just everybody and I'm curious you especially someone who works in coaching and people who don't know Deontes a high school football coach. I just felt like we got so revisionist on Sam Darnold appearing like how could the Jets let go of Sam Darnold? Were you here?

Exactly. He was bad. Like there was no way. And look, a guy like him at his size with his talent, I think they got a third round pick for him or something like that. could always go find somebody to try again on him. No, no, no, you could not. But everywhere he went, he was treated with a very particular sort of optimism of like, oh, no, we feel Kyle Shanahan, what's Kyle Shanahan did it, right? Like, Kyle Shanahan doing that is like when, when a musician

that's really famous or really big, like the Beatles talking about Chuck Barry, now all of a a sudden, everybody got to get down with Chuck Barry. Because the Beatles said Chuck Barry was that dude, right? And then they jumped in the time machine and they went and did it. I felt like that was when Kyle Shanahan said that about Sam Darnold, like maybe he needed to go do that about Trey Lance. Like, anyway, sorry, going all over the place. My point simply being, Sam Darnold was not good in these other places

and he fell apart last year from Minnesota, like a team that already, look, they got it wrong with McCarthy, but the mistake was not letting Sam Darnal go. Right. Even this year, Dominique talks about this. They did have not coached Sam Darnold like they think. Sam Darnold is that guy, right?

He is a starting quarterback. Nobody made him. mistaken letting him go. It's just worked out very well for Seattle. And somewhere in this, Gino Smith's got to be like, you know, I could do that, right? I mean, 100%. Like, I feel like, like, no shade to Sam Darnold and not trying to do too much to big up Gino Smith, who had a terrible year with Oakland. But something tells me, Sam Darnold would be terrible to. I mean, we saw that with the Jets, right? We saw that with the Jets. I think that the comp that I kind of drew a couple a week ago coming out of the conference championships is like,

I think that this is the closest that we're going to get to Brad Johnson in this era, a guy who was benched basically everywhere he went before he got to Tampa. And when he got to Tampa, people were looking at John Gruden like, you left Ridge Gannon to make this guy, you're starting quarterback, and you're telling me that this team is going to go win a title that way. And then he shows up and does literally just enough to get them over the hump. Right, right fast for the younger people.

Yes, you left Ridge Gannon, two-time first team, all pro and one-time, MVP. Sounds crazy to say now, but it happened. And it was not, y'all got to go watch. And it was real. Yeah, y'all got to go back and watch Rich Gannon. Okay. That's a name that I think, you know, how we had social media would have been a meme by the end of his career.

But you talk about prime Rich Gannon. That motherfucker was slinging the rock, okay? At a time where slinging the rock was not as widespread as what you might say. You know what? It was also at a time where a guy like Rich Gannon, he was another one, hung around for a really long time. Absolutely. But like, it was a quarterback time where a guy. like Rich Gannon because, you know, one thing John Gruden

loves is a quarterback that ain't that good. And he found, wound up with the right guy just good enough, but not that good at the same time. Which means that you got to do what the hell I say. Yeah, I've got to throw to Tim Brown and Jerry Rice. Just throwing it out there. There you go. I mean, you're talking about the last best years

of Tim Brown, too, when he was always open and Jerry Wright's, like you said. So yeah, I think that, I think Brad Johnson is probably the closest comp you can come up with. And it's funny, it's funny. I was looking at some of the, some of the recent games he had before he entered the playoffs, right? Because he's been on this street of not throwing any interceptions and not losing any fumbles.

I'm like, man, this is very similar to the quarterback that ended up winning a championship last year, right? I thought he was going to say Jimmy Garoppolo. I mean, and it's in that, it's kind of in that realm too during that 2019 run, right? Where the guy's not turning the ball over. And now all of a sudden, things do look functional because your quarterback is not literally handing the football game away. And I would say it's funny because usually you get to these games.

games and you start asking like, all right, is the old guy going to show back up? But this comes back to what we were talking about earlier. The level of competition that they just had in the NFC championship game is about as tough as it's going to get for any team, you know, who was making a playoff run this season. And if you were able to beat the Rams with Matt Stafford playing the way that Matt Stafford had been playing, I got to feel like Sam Donald, you can come out here complete 19 passes for 219 yards, two touchdowns. Both of them happening within the five-yard line, and you'll get Super Bowl MVP,

and nobody is ever going to remember a single snap of the game that you just played. That's kind of where I think we're at with this team, and I think it's a fascinating place when we start talking about the hierarchy of quarterbacks and what it takes to be a Super Bowl-winning quarterback because the A-list guys will not have won either of the last two. You know what's going to be really funny is that if Seattle wins this and Sam Darnal is Super Bowl MVP. Now, to be clear, no one was looking for their version of Jalen Hertz

after the two Super Bowls that he went to. But there's going to be a discussion about how somebody needs to go find their version of Sam Donald after this with nobody even having any idea what the fuck that means. What are the supposed to find somebody that we think is sorry? Right. Right? We're just supposed to go find.

I need to find somebody who's failing where he's at. What exactly is that going? Yeah, you know, you know what that is? That is just advocate. What you're saying is never give up, right? Basically. Don't give up, don't ever give up. And if that's the case, you know who I'm going to say everybody would need to go look at?

Two guys did. If it's don't give up, don't ever give up. Trey Lance and Anthony Richardson. I knew those are going to be the two. I knew those are going to be the two. I knew those are going to be the two. Hey, look, I feel like Tray Lance never, Tray Lance never got a chance, right?

Like I think Anthony Richardson, you could argue got a chance it didn't do much with it. Trey Lans had some bad luck and just weird old Kyle, Kyle Shadhan, another guy who prefers his quarterbacks not be good. Absolutely. And it's going to be interesting when we start talking about a guy like, you know, Jackson Dart, maybe I have decade from now, especially if things go poorly in New York.

He's going to be the exact kind of quarterback that I think would fit that description of like, just talented enough for me to close my eyes and convince myself that this is a guy that we can win. win games with and let's build something around them and ask him not to blow the game for us. And I do think that, you know, in this era now where these quarterbacks are making so much money, we are going to see teams, I think, especially to your point of Sam Donald wins this, who genuinely convinced themselves that a better pathway to winning a championship is having a Baker Mayfield, a Daniel Jones, a Sam Darnold, and hoping that you build literally the best

defense in football than trying to just go get a really, really good quarterback. I mean, there just aren't that many of them. And you know what? We're going to take, we're going to break here and come on the other side of it because I want to ask you this again from a coaching perspective because I have a theory on this that I feel like may be too simple, but I want to get your read on it coming up next. Listeners, think back to a first date where you were really interested in someone. You probably asked them important questions like, what are you looking for? Well, the same goes if you're hiring. You definitely want to address key questions first to see if someone could be right for your role.

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Hope is here. Visit gambling help line, ma.org, or call 800327-50 for 24-7 support in Massachusetts, or call 18778, Hope N.Y, or text, Hope N.Y in New York. All right, we are back with DeAte Lee. And we're talking, you know, it's always a time to talk about quarterbacks and quarterback development. And I find that people like me can very often. these are people who are not football players and not, you know, of that world.

It's real easy to point at all these things that we think are stupid in the ways that positions are coached, evaluated or whatever it is. And we're like, hey, man, they don't, like, nobody knows who's going to be a good quarterback. Da, da, da, da, do. Look at the draft. Look how many times they miss, so forth or so on. And the thing I hear people say most often is that quarterback is the worst coach position, yet no one seems to really offer a solutions for how to coach it better.

My hot take is it's really. hard to throw a 10 pound thing of air down the field in a spiral with a million things going on. There simply aren't that many people who are capable of doing this at the level that we ask them to do it. I would go as far as to say that that talking point, which I heard all the time growing up, right, especially you think about like the late 2010s as the Brady's, the Rothersbergers, Matt Ryan, all those guys are phasing out, right? And we're kind of in that in-between phase where the young guys hadn't really taken over the league.

That phase where they didn't realize you needed to have some wheels in order to play. Exactly. Right. And so they basically doomed a whole generation of white dudes because they didn't tell them it was okay to run. Shit, I mean, you think about those drafts between 2013 and in 2018. I mean, it is a wasteland of quarterbacks. You can go farther back. Like, you take it back to 2005.

Post-2005, you'll pop up with a Matt Ryan and a Matthew Stafford. And, but overall, it's nasty in there. Dark days. Dark days. Some Christian ponder's in there. Blake Gabbard. Blaine Gabbard, sorry. Blaine Gabbard.

Blake, Boris. Same guy. Exactly. Different year. But I bring that up to say, like, I would say that today, that talking point has never been more asinine. I would actually say that quarterback coaching has never been better when you look at just what the baseline is over the last two to three seasons of where these guys are.

You can speak to this, you know, you can speak to this because you have a longer view of this than I do. A quarterback like Baker Mayfield does not get to get to Tampa Bay. If they're bringing you to Tampa Bay, every year, we're looking to replace you, right? Like, I got to see in my childhood, I saw Trent Green get treated like he was the gum on the bottom of every team's shoe, everywhere he went. Today, a guy like Trent Green would be somebody that they're saying, oh, we can coach that up and get nine wins out of that guy, right? and people would be confident and happy about it. I think that we have definitely, I think there was a time where that was true.

I think to your point, a lot of this is inviting people into the rooms to play quarterback, to work with quarterbacks that weren't being invited into the rooms decades prior, right? I think that getting more athletic guys, getting black quarterbacks in the mix has been a big, I think has been a big piece of this as well

and what that has done to reshape people's priorities at the position. But ultimately, I think that we're in a great spot. with quarterback development and quarterback coaching. The problem is, like you said, there aren't going to be more than a dozen guys at best who can do what we're asking people to do, right? And this is in a time where quarterback has never been safer to play. Receiver has never been safer to play.

It's never been easier to protect the passer than it is right now. And we still are maybe topping out at about 10 to 12 guys in a given year that genuinely look like they are difference makers at this position. Yeah, like the argument that I make or the point I make is, hey man, them dudes was running the ball all the time back in the day. It wasn't just because they were uncreative, right? Now, granted, it was also a different set of rules then. Right.

But throwing the ball is really, really, really hard, right? And dangerous. That's kind of like what happened to mid-range jumpers in basketball. Well, it used to be that they could close line you. Right. So you might want to stop 15 feet from the basket and take this nice, safe jump shot. Exactly. And you thought about that?

This floater means that I get to stay standing, okay? Like, we talked about this the other day, talking about Michael Irvin. Hey, man, well, Michael Irvin is like, I played when there was pain. It used to be a whole different game over there. Like, I don't know if you remember this. So when Steve Atwater went in the Hall of Fame a couple years ago,

I was like, what is his video going to look like? Because it's just going to be a series of things that you can't do anymore. Like, it would be like running to Steve Atwaterville before he goes into Hall of Fame would be like running Amos and Andy's greatest hits. Hey man, we can't tell those guys and jokes. We don't say this stuff out loud no more. People don't put

microphones up for people who say this stuff. No, no. We would have been deep platform. And to think, in the time of Atwater, there were also dudes like Andre Dirty Waters who we said, hey, you're going too far, buddy. Atwater was not going

too far. You think about that in today's context. I mean, I was watching when a chart, I think Tony Jefferson lit up Travis Kelsey, one of those receivers late in the regular season, and the same again, the fact that my homes got hurt. And the outcry I saw on social media was like, oh, man, this is about as clean as it gets.

By the spectrum of safety catches a wide receiver crossing the middle of the field that don't see him coming, this is about as good as it gets. I grew up with Sean Taylor, okay? I saw Bob Sanders be willing to risk your life and his to knock. you down. I once watched Sean Taylor and in retrospect

this is the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen when he took the punter out into Pro Bowl. Oh, 100%. Buddy, buddy. Rest in peace, but it was the Pro Bowl man. Like, like first of all, I don't know why you guys were running a fake punt or anything like that at the Pro Bowl. I think that Sean Taylor's

counter was I felt disrespected. Yeah, you play it with me. You're like, I'm not me out here. Yeah, you can't provide that man the opportunity. to do what he did in that moment. Absolutely. Can't put it on the board.

But yeah, but if quarterback is so badly coached, man, why everybody getting all this money? Right. Like, I just, doing all these things, it just seems impossible. And I just don't think that people can grasp is that somebody figured out

that if you can get one of these three, four, five dudes who could do it, we can set the world on fire and everybody keeps trying to make every quarterback into one of those three, four, five dudes. Right. As opposed to, like you say, the Baker-Mayfield situation. And look, they've always been guys like that.

And teams have figured out how to coach and build a team around. The best football team I believe that I have ever seen was the 1991 Washington team. Mark Rippin was their quarterback. And if you don't know nothing about Mark Rippin, it's not your fault. Right.

I would say that those early 90s, Washington teams were about as close as you could come to like a perfectly constructed football team. You go back and watch the Brown of football that they were playing. It was beautiful. And they didn't ask very much out of their quarterback. So I think that you're right.

And I think that the other thing that's happening, because we're seeing more successful with these kind of mid-tier to below-mid-tier guys that becomes problematic is we keep trying to drop the threshold lower. That's really what the issue is, right? Like when I see Tuotunga Vailoa, who I think is a functional quarterback, but people try to convince me that he's in the same conversation as the people that I would conventionally believe are top 10 quarterbacks, that to me is a reflection that, A, we have come a long way would develop in the position,

and B, people still don't know what the hell they are watching. when it comes to this position. When I see people talk about Michael Pinnock before he had blown out his knee this past year and try to convince me that that is going to be a franchise changing level quarterback. My buddy, I've watched Atlanta for all my life. You have had franchise changing quarterbacks.

You judge him up against Farr, Vic, and Ryan, and you tell me that that's the same thing that we're looking at in this guy. And it's just not. And then I think there's a name that I won't mention on this podcast, I think for everybody's sanity, who a lot of people are trying to convince themselves will be the next franchise quarterback

who just got a new head coach. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. We're talking about Northeast Ohio. Oh, oh, the other one. The other one. The other one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, and I think that this is.

Boy, man. He and J.J. McCarthy, I think, are like the ultimate reflections of maybe the threshold has dropped so low that we were trying to convince ourselves that literally anybody can be let up in this club. Hey, man, I've never seen a broader consensus of people down on somebody quite like the world is down on J.J. McCarthy.

I mean, outsiders, I mean, insiders, everybody's down on him. I ain't heard nobody sound as there are people like me and you who get frustrated with the conversation around Sodor Sander, but we don't, even though neither of us thinks he's that good, we don't like talk bad about him. Right. They talk bad about him. Crazy about that, man. They talk crazy about that.

man, which is a wild swing because he was, from a college football perspective, as close as you would have seen at that level to what we've seen in the NFL with Josh Allen. And I think that you've done a really good job of pointing out that there's a lot of wishcasting that happens with certain quarterbacks about wanting them to be successful. Yes. I think the JJ walked into the league with that kind of groundswell behind him. Some of that is parball kind of stamping you as a guy right before you get to the league and you get with Kevin O'Connell, who we all view, I would say, as a good quarterback developer, given what he's gotten out of Kirk Cousins before he went to Atlanta, what he got out of Sam Drono before things went sideways this past year.

And I think everybody kind of looked up after about a month and said, oh, no, this ain't it. Completely out. Completely out. Completely out. And I can't say I blame him because I watch them and I'm like, oh, that's Zach Wilson. I've seen you before. It's that bad. It's Zach Wilson-esque.

It is Zach Wilson. I watched the win those couple games late, you know. He was out there when they want them, you know. he was out, correct. He was out there when they won them. Just like, you know, Zach Wilson was out there when Robert Sala was putting together

great Jets defenses for a couple of years. I want to ask you right fast about the Eagles. They just, their offensive line coach just left. Now, it seems like their new offensive coordinator wants to hire his own full-on staff. But you football people really looked at this as a bad news situation for the Eagles.

It 100% is. even know if there's a way to spin it positively, you know, and I think that, A, they're like, there's a lot of complation happening because there's so much up in the air with Philadelphia, right? Like, there's the AJ Brown storyline, which we probably won't even get to for another week or two, right, as they kind of assess what the trademark is going to be, because I do think ultimately he's going to be moved. There was a good week where people in Philadelphia were wondering whether or not Vic Fangio was going to retire his defensive coordinator. And then your offensive line coach says, and I think that this is very important that he said, I am not retiring.

My time with the Eagles organization has come to an end, right? And then I went and I read Tim McManus at ESPN and some of his reporting, I thought was really painted what was going on with this coaching regime and about his negative light. Much more negatively than I would say anything I would have said, right? Because you're talking about a guy who has been running the run game, who has developed guys like Jason Kelsey, Lane Johnson, Jordan Milata. I mean, these are three people. people, Lane Johnson maybe notwithstanding because he was kind of a physical freak coming out a college at the time in terms of speed and size and all that. But Jordan Milata is an international pathways guy.

And Jason Kelsey is one of the smallest offensive linemen that we have ever seen become a Hall of Fame player ever. And you took the ability to design the run game away from that guy, right? To the point where he said, I don't even want to be here no more after I've been here for a decade, decade and a half. I don't know how you could spend this positively. And I think, again, it kind of points what we've been talking about in my few appearances here, which is that you've got a head coach that I just don't think has a tight enough grip on the wheel.

And worse than that, it feels like every time they fail, people start looking at Nixiriani and saying, you don't get to talk to me like that, which is crazy for a guy who has the winning percentage that he has and the Super Bowl appearances that he has. It feels like everybody walks at that building and feeling like, I can take a lot of shit from a lot of people. I'm not that guy. I also want to point out that Trayton A.J. Brown is like trading the doctor because he said you got cancer.

Right. What's happening? Like you fired that man for being right. Because I think every time he does that, by the way, he's never mad. He's never disrespectful to anybody when he does it. You just listen to it and you're like, no, it checks out.

I can't, I can't argue. How are you going to argue that? When the man touched the ball, the offense looked good. In the last two years where he hasn't touched the ball a whole lot, we keep asking what the hell is wrong with this offense. I'm not saying the correlation and causation are the same. I'm just looking at the trend lines. That's all I'm saying.

Him read that book on the sideline will never be, not be the funniest thing I have ever seen in my life. I agree. Like, think about how bad it has to get for you to reach the point where you like, here's what I'm going to do this guy. Not just any book, one of them self-help. Yes.

find your best inner self type of books. Somebody going to ask me what's going on over here. Somebody going to ask me what we need to know, right? Well, to ask you this also, well, I was thinking about it. We talked about the Rooney Rule earlier this week. You'd be coaching, you'd be black, you're doing both at the same time. Obviously at a different level. But I'm curious, though, because football is still football, right?

And you're still going into some rooms, I'm sure, where people have to get themselves, like, wrapped around the idea of you. What I do think is interesting is that I've noticed in the NFL that in the last few years, black defensive coordinator hiring. I, like, with my eyes, I see that going up, right? Like, I see moves being made there. Man, they ain't trying to let a brother call no plays. Like, I talked about how this is the era of the boy genius. And the only black boy genius I could think of on offense that's ever been was Brian Johnson, who was the officer coordinator at the university of Utah at 25, but nobody's ever let him call plays two years in a row.

Right, right. And he might not get that shot, you know, like, I've thought about that, obviously, for a while. Once I became a coach in 2016, that was always the thought of mine is where I want to take this, what the trajectory looks like. And I knew two things for certain that was going to change my trajectory. A, I wasn't about to be doing all this round-the-clock recruiting shit that college coaches do, right? So that kind of wiped that off the board for me. You also weren't going to make me no running backs coach. You ain't going to make me no running backs coach and make my recruiting area the greater Houston. an area, right?

Or, you know, going to South Louisiana because you don't got nobody else on the staff that can go in these rooms and talk to these moms and daddies, right? And I knew another thing was if I wanted to get to the NFL level, that the best pipeline to set your trajectory as high as possible is not afforded to somebody who looks like me. They ain't letting your black ass touch quarterbacks and they ain't letting your black ass touch that play sheet, right? Or even offensive line, right? Exactly.

That was always my thought. Now, I do think there are more black quarterbacks, black quarterback coaches across the league than I would have imagined. But then you got to look at who they're connected to. And it's typically us looking out for us, right? Gerard Johnson is in a great spot in Houston right now. But if he leaves Houston, you are now leaving a black head coach, black quarterback combination, right?

That is a tough selling point, I think, across the league for reasons that have nothing to do with Gerard Johnson, who should be. be, you know, the kind of quarterback of a Sean Manion is getting coordinated looks. I don't know why Gerard Johnson can't be set on a similar trajectory. And I think, and I was listening to your show actually earlier this week when you pointed it out, I think that the other piece of this that people really have to grapple with in our line of work is how they talk about the damn rule. Because I think that this was an abject failure in my estimation by the media and how we talk

about the Rooney Rule specifically and the way the teams are interfacing with that rule. I should never read a tweet ever that says this team is now free to pursue interviews with the candidates they want because they met the quality they met the requirements of the Rooney rule. That's not the spirit of the rule. That's not why it's here. But what it does do is identify exactly what this rule is in ain't, right? It's one of those kind of saying the quiet part out loud, right, which is not new information for people who pay attention to this. but I do think that as we see regression happening socially across all these different spaces, I think that it is definitely showing up in the coaching field.

And when you leave a coaching carousel where over a quarter of the league turns over, and the most color we got at head coach is a child of Lebanese immigrants, and I love Robert Salah. In this league, after what I thought was some small steps towards progress, I think that there is a lot that we as media members need to do to be able to hold these people feet to the fire because what happened, I think, over this past iron cycle is about as close to unacceptable as it gets given where we've been and where this league likes to lie to us and tell us that it wants to go.

And I think the media point leads to something that we always have to remember and I think people misunderstand is that when white people are talking about race, they talk into each other typically, right? Like it's races. It affects their lives. And for the media people, they white buddies that they call it up to talk about this stuff are like, yeah, yeah, yeah. So now we can go ahead and we can get in the streets and we can do whatever. And never for a moment do they stop and think. People view the rule to me as, like I say,

as an impediment as opposed to you could use this as an opportunity. And this is why I always say when they blame the rule, they're so off is that back in the day, Mike Toblin got hired because he got one of those interviews with Miami and then the word got around that he had killed it. And the stimulus were like, yo, well, let's do that. The only people that went from doing that are the teams in the NFL. They have the ability to do that. They just like, now, he only feel like doing none of that no more, apparently. And the stakes is so high here where it's like, hey, man, don't y'all want to, like, Vance Joseph, who was doing a great job as the defensive coordinator with the Broncos. He did not do a good job as the head coach of the Denver Broncos.

But at this point, you would think that somebody else. Like, he figured somebody would let him be the same job on the coaching. You know what I'm saying? Well, if he was on the other side of the ball, he is a head coach a year ago, if not too. years ago for the work that he's done. When Rahim was like, hey, put me on offense, dog. That's the only thing that's going to work. And then I think it was the Falcons where the defense got so bad that they had to, come on back.

And they had to put it back at defensive coordinator. And then he got lucky he got to go work kicking with back Vey. Exactly. I mean, and that's to the point of you have to be lucky enough to get into the network that they care about now. Rahim happened to be in Tampa Bay when Kyle Shanahan was in Tampa Bay. Tadda, under Gruden. So now you've got just enough of a connection now where people can say,

and I think that for him, I don't know, I don't want to say this about him because it reduces his own qualifications, but I do think based on the way that we've seen owners and GMs make these hires, I think a lot of Rahim getting these shots is you get us access to the tree that we want to get access to, but we don't have other ways to pluck at it otherwise. You get Rahim, you get a Zach Robinson, who ended up failing as an offensive coordinator, but he at that time was the next hot shot offensive guy that can go call plays.

here, right? I think that that is a problem that we're all going to have to deal with. And I think that it's fair, it's fair for us to ask not just these owners and GMs, but these head coaches. I like Sean McVeigh as a person. I think that he's a very earnest, you know, coach. I think that he is about the right kind of stuff when it comes to player development. I think it's fair to ask why his offensive staff looks like his offensive staff, right? I think that that's 100% fair to ask. I think that Kyle Shanahan has done a pretty good job with trying to diversify his staff. And most people who go that work, that are people of color, work on the offensive staff, end up getting a shot.

Mike McDaniel, for whatever jokes I might have about Mike McDaniel, you know, he did go get a shot. He gave Mike McDaniel the most important part of his offense, which is the run game. They had a great run game and he ended up getting a head coaching look as a result of it. But some of the rest of these guys, the Lefleurs, the Kevin O'Connell's, a lot of people have respect for his coaches. I think that if we are going to improve this, that fire, I think needs to trickle down to them as well. We need to ask exactly why the coaching pipeline that they acknowledge, I got them the gigs that they've got coming up working with quarterbacks working as an

offensive coordinator why it is that their staff always ends up looking the way that it does on a year-to-year basis. All right. Last question for you. What is the funniest name that you could imagine turning up in Epstein Files? Oh, that's a great question. That's a great question. The funniest.

Hmm. Funniest and legitimate, not like, the tip line, all the tip line stuff. Who have any name. That don't matter what the name is. Honestly, just because she has been so unhinged over the last couple weeks, my first thought went to Nikki. Honestly, that whole young money, that whole young money conglomerate would be the funniest

for me personally, right? Because then you get all the people who are in their little fan bases falling out. That's a great question, though. What about for you? Who would be the funniest thing? Well, my original one was Tim Tebow. now I just thought of another one. Oh, that's great.

Yeah, now I just thought of another one. Ringo Star. Just look up and Ringo in there. Try to make it happen. Hey, man. I do think. I think that I think the Ringo would be a funny one. I think that I'm,

I would like to see what the dynamic looks like on the opposite end of it. You were talking about it with the Tish family, right? And you got to go home and go sit at that dinner table. Somebody going to ask some questions for you. I would like to see what the gender dynamics would look like in reverse. I want somebody to walk in and be like, hey, so that's really what you went to, huh, lady? Yeah, okay. This is how we rock it when you're out of home, when you're away from home,

when you're on them trips? So that's how you wound up having dinner with Bill Gates, huh? Right. Okay. No, no, no, no, no, it's cool. It's cool. It's cool. It's all good.

I guess I got more to, I have more to learn about you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know what? Multitudes. You can tell you multitudes, don't you? Nasty-assie-nast-a-nast. Nasty ass. That is Deiate Lee. Check him out at the Ringer.

Talking about football, my man, enjoyed a week in San Francisco. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks, Bob. All right, ladies and gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us here on The Right Time. We do this four times a week. Ryan Brumley handles everything behind the scenes. Thank you, sir. Hit the voicemail line 3-2, 3-3-5-6-7-67.

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