Will Cain Country - Cain On Sports: Will Jim Harbaugh Stay A Hero Or Become A Villain At Michigan?

Episode Date: January 26, 2024

On this edition of Will's Friday sports episode of The Will Cain Show, Will sits down with the former Golden State Warriors Beat Writer for ESPN, and House of Strauss Substack founder, Ethan Strauss, to discuss the biggest stories around the sports world.   Story #1: Will Michigan continue to celebrate Jim Harbaugh, even if he leaves a trail of wreckage on his way out to Los Angeles?  Story #2: Is the NFL and its fans rooting against black quarterbacks? Are they rooting for Josh Allen? And are white, European players experiencing backlash in the NBA? Story #3: The WWE is the new tent pole for Netflix. What does this mean for the future of streaming services? Story #4: How important are stars to every sports league? Story #5: Picks and predictions for the NFL Conference Championship Round.   Tell Will what you thought by emailing [e-mail]   Follow Will on Twitter: @WillCain Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, Dave Richardson here. Between rallies and sell-offs, bulls and bears, markets move fast. It can be hard to keep up. Join me on the download podcast as I chat with investment experts from all around the world to help you make sense of what's happening in the markets and the global economy. Go to the download on Spotify to get the latest episode and to subscribe. One, even if he leaves wreckage in his wake, will Michigan always celebrate Jim Harbaugh? Two, is the NFL and its fans rooting against black quarterbacks?

What's going on with Josh Allen? And what if we do the reverse? What about white players in the NBA? Three, WWE, the new tent pole for Netflix. Four, how important are stars to every sports league? And five, predicting this weekend's outcome in the NFC and AFC championship game with the publisher of House of Strauss, Ethan Strauss. It's the Will Cain podcast on Fox News Podcast.

What's up and welcome to the weekend. Welcome to Friday. As always, I hope you will download, rate, and review this podcast wherever you get your audio entertainment at Apple, Spotify, or at Fox News podcast. hit subscribe. And if you want to watch this podcast live Monday through Thursday at 12 Eastern time or on demand, including this episode of the Will Kane podcast, go over to YouTube, search the Will Kane Show, our homepage on YouTube, and hit subscribe and you'll get all the clips, the interviews, and the full episodes of the Will Kane Show. We have a guest today that is a

thinker and a fair thinker in the world of sports, the vast majority of the sports media industry is unreliably biased and biased in one direction. But Ethan Strauss, the publisher, the editor, the founder of House of Strauss, I think is a fair arbiter. That doesn't mean he's conservative. It doesn't mean he's liberal. It just means that he's looking to get it right. I often read his columns at House of Strauss, and I enjoy our conversations when he comes here on the Will Kane show. Today, we talk about race in the NFL, in the NBA, the legacy of Jim Harbaugh, and predicting the outcomes of Chiefs Ravens and Niners Lions this weekend in the NFL. Here is Ethan Strauss.

How old are you, Ethan? I am 38. Yeah, so you're millennial. So, like... I am. I think what you're supposed to be doing is holding a little tiny mic like this with a string on it. That's what I see like Taylor Lorenz and everybody doing, like this. Oh, yeah.

I didn't know that was the style. This is my lov mic for TV hits. I'm supposed to sit here like this. and talk like this. That's how I see all TV hits now, or not TV hits, social media posts, this. You know what gives me anxiety that this ever happened to you? When I was doing SportsCenter hits back on the day,

I never got it molded into my ear, the ear piece. And I just have this distinct memory of being on the court in Minnesota. And I'm live on SportsCenter, and I could just feel it slowly sliding out of my ear and having to fake the rest of the segment without hearing whatever the sports center anchor was saying on the other side of things. You guys can go ahead and hit record.

Did I record locally? Should I have like not a outlet behind me? I don't know. No, I want this on air. So you had to deal with your IFB audio piece in your ear, slowly sliding out, which all of us who have ever done, media or television know exactly what you're talking about here's my question why didn't you just

reach up and press it back in this this look which by the way i think bill himmer on fox news does unnecessarily when he's at the wall he'll reach up as though he's getting a message through his ear or maintaining his earpiece but i learned quickly early on ethan i'm not afraid to just reach up and put that thing back in yeah uh that's what i should have done i don't know why i think i was just overwhelmed. It was that feeling of being on live television and now Will I have more of an understanding of some of those clips of a TV host

being a diva. We've all seen the famous ones, the Bill O'Reilly do it live, Keith Oberman, wild tales about him. And you hear about people who might be a little less hot-headed, sometimes getting a little bit mean.

There's a story about Bernie Johnson who's the nicest guy in the world that stuck with him about uprating a producer but you kind of get it because there's this almost animal visceral tear when you're out there for the world to see and it's all going wrong and you have to maintain this veneer of uh you know that that's that's not an easy thing to do so i don't i don't have i don't have sympathy for for those it's not just that it's will kane man of the people always mr nice guy it's uh it's look things go wrong and you've got

the Bill O'Reilly clip, there are stories about O'Brien. There are stories about Rosie O'Donnell. My favorite one, which we used to play when I was on ESPN, is Lawrence O'Donnell, screaming at his producers about the hammering, that there's hammering going on inside, on another floor. And he yells, that control room is out of control. Stop the hammering. And you got to go look it up on YouTube, but Lawrence O'Donnell's meltdown is. the most hilarious of all of them. Here's what I learned, Eden. You talked about your earpiece slipping out during a hit at an NBA game, and you didn't have a molded earpiece. I hate the molded earpiece. And for those watching or listening, who are not familiar with inside TV talk,

it's like they take a little gum, like, you know, molded plastic that's soft, and then they kind of stick it in your ear, and then they pull it out, and it hardens, and it becomes this thing that's shaped to your ear and it doesn't fall out. I hate them because I always feel like I'm underwater. I don't like losing all ambient sound but for what's coming through the IFB. So I've always rejected them.

And this is very, very inside baseball, but I don't like the smooth ones that slip out of ear exactly like you just said. So I go for the rib-deer piece for your pleasure, you know, it's got the accordion style and it just kind of stays in there and everybody asks me when I go on do you have your own earpiece? No, please give me the rib deer piece. All right, well I didn't know any of these details.

I did know it was interesting because I thought that I would, I had made it when I was on SportsCenter, right? Because growing up, I mean, sports center is a big deal. And what was interested in me, Will, is that it became rather clear pretty quickly that I was just talking into the background noise

of everything, nothing I said really resonated. And all I could do, all I could really do to make a cultural impact would be to have some terrible gaffe where maybe I accidentally said a slur or who knows what. Everything else, total ephemera. Some of the things, some of things you said on first take, they would actually cause a headline and there'd be a discussion. But when you're just doing those hits where you're standing in front of something, I remember ESPN had me during the Kevin Durant free agency extravaganza of 2016, I would just march off to Oracle Arena and stand in front of it for days on end. And it's this odd feeling of what am I even performing? What am I even

doing here? None of this matters. This is so strange. I'm wearing a suit and I'm talking into a void. And I know it's going somewhere, but I've got no feedback telling me it's going anywhere. All right. Ethan Strauss, the proprietor, the publisher, the editor of House of Strauss on substack. Go subscribe. It's an excellent read. Has been a friend of this program. A one-time colleague at ESPN, we're going to hit a lot of stories, including race and quarterbacks and the NBA. Is there a bias against black quarterbacks? We're going to talk about Netflix and the W.W.E. But I want to start with this. Jim Harbaugh is now the new coach of the Los Angeles Chargers. What I'm curious about

your perspective on this is not so much the potential future success of Jim Harbaugh, but the potential future failure of Michigan. Michigan is soon to be surely rated through the transfer portal. Michigan is under the cloud of investigation of things that happened under Jim Harbaugh. What I'm curious, Ethan, is do you think having just won the national championship, there is anything that could happen in the near future that will tarnish Jim Harbaugh in the minds of Michigan? I don't think so. I think they were so starved for it, and they'll always cherish what he did.

And I think you've identified this odd difference, this dichotomy, that he leaves this program at the college level that a lot of people deeply care about for a program at the pro level that really almost nobody cares about. I grew up in San Diego. I grew up a huge San Diego Chargers fan. I think the NFL and Spanos, who owned a team, they made a miscalculation that they could move to L.A. And because it's the same TV market, they would just retain all those fans. That's not really the case. The people I grew up with don't really follow the chargers like they did. San Diego, I know if you're from the East Coast, it seems like it's right next to Los Angeles.

Here's a little rule that people on the West Coast, they overestimate the difference, the distance between East Coast cities. and people on the East Coast, they underestimate the distance between West Coast cities. L.A. is about a three-hour drive. It's not the same place. You don't feel like you're from L.A. when you're from San Diego. So I think it's unfortunate. It's symptomatic, a guess, of college often killing the Golden Goose that they would make things difficult for Harbaugh because he was a star. It's a blue-chip star program. College football is kind of having a moment right now. And it seems like it's such a shame for them to lose that to an NFL franchise that most people in Los Angeles just really don't care about. I didn't know you were from San Diego.

So that makes me want to run a theory by you that I've had for some time. I find San Diego fascinating. I went to college in Los Angeles. And I went to San Diego a few times because I played water polo and we go down there and play the University of San Diego. And I always confuse UCSD with USDA. But I've been to San Diego. And it's, everyone loves San Diego. But I also find it a little bit of a black hole within California.

Yes. And there are other cities like San Diego. I think San Antonio is the comparable city in Texas. And what I mean by a black hole is, is people don't seem to move to San Diego or move away from San Diego. When I went to Pepperdine, I met guys from, from Northern California, all over Los Angeles. Orange County. I met guys from Central Valley, from Fresno. I had teammates from all these places. I did not meet a lot of guys from San Diego. And after the fact, I don't have a lot of college friends who moved to San Diego. And I would say in Texas, it's a little bit similar.

You don't, when you're, I went to law school at the University of Texas, and I had buddies from Houston and East Texas, much smaller towns from Beaumont, from Longview. I have friends from Waco. but I don't know a lot of guys from San Antonio, and nobody I know of really moved to San Antonio. Now, there's comparables, there's things you can identify. Like, they're both big cities, by the way. It defies numbers. Really high Latino populations for both cities, both military towns as well. So, and this may be the case.

I'm not as familiar, even though I lived there for 15 years with the East Coast. And I don't know if East Coast guys would be like, yeah, that's how I feel about Philadelphia. I don't know if that's the case, but I think it's weird San Antonio in San Diego. Yeah, I'd also say there's a San Diego accent that nobody really cares about or identifies as such. There's something called the speech accent archive where they have everybody from around the world who speaks English, read a grocery list. So you can pick up on the different intonations and the differences on that baseline. The guy from San Diego is he's listing the grocery items, he goes, instead of saying six snow peas, he goes, six snow pays, it's got whatever you want to call it.

And when I call it an accent, people go, oh, a Spacoli accent, like Fast Times at Ridgemont High. And it's just, well, yes, that was a movie where Cameron Crow went to a high school in San Diego and based the entire movie off of it. But San Diego is not culturally relevant enough to have an accent. So even if everybody I grew up with talked like this, it's not really part of a regional dialect, you know, even if it's very distinct. So it is a bit of a black hole. You do have this sense. The neighborhood I grew up in, the novelist Raymond Chandler said of it that it's a nice place for old people and their parents.

You do feel like you're a little bit retired when you're there. Even if you're not in Hawaii and you're not literally on an island, you do feel as though you're cut off from the culture. and whatever is going on, which I think when I was younger I thought was a curse and now I might think it's a blessing and consider moving back. But it's just not, it's not part of the mix. And it's not a thinky town. Even if many people there are obviously smart, it's not really a place where people are as ambitious. It's a place where people are trying to have a good time, which is why so many love San Diego. But if I'm totally honest, it might just be a little. bit too sleepy and a little bit too decadent for me. All right. So back to Harbaugh, I think that you're right. I tend to agree. I don't think that Michigan fans will ever look back and resent Harbaugh. I think if there was an opportunity to resent Harbaugh, it was the easy in or easy out for years as he flirted with the NFL. But he delivered. He did the one thing that he had to do, which was win a national championship.

And I do think that we're also in this moment of martyrdom in our greater culture. And No matter what happens to Michigan, surely they wouldn't require them to vacate the national championship. But no matter what happens to Michigan, Harbaugh will be able to become the martyr. And he'll be defended by Michigan Wolverines fans. You know, he'll be on this show coming up in the next week or two. But like, you know, Dave Portnoy will never let that happen. Just like Tom Brady would never become the villain of Deflategate, he would be the victim.

you know, Portnoy and the rest of Michigan Wolverines fan base will never let it be that Jim Harbaugh is the villain. He will be the martyr for whatever happens in the future. Totally agree with that. And it sounds corny, but you can't take the moment away. I mean, you can't take the million dollars away from Dave Portnoy that he bet on the playoff game before the championship. I mean, that's still in his pocket no matter what. So whatever Harbaugh did was what he needed to do. and the memory of it will last a lifetime. Even if they vacated, it's just who cares.

If the NCAA punished Reggie Bush as they did, are those highlights not awesome? I think that's how people view it. And I'm not sure why it's on the one hand a little bit punitive. On the other hand, Lucy Goosey, and there are no rules. It's just in a very strange state. And again, it's odd that they would lose hard about this moment because college football is one of the few things you can point to in sports and say that's on the rise. So I wonder if it kills the sports momentum just a little bit.

All right. There's Jim Harbaugh to the Los Angeles Chargers. I want to get into this. You have many friends within media. You have friends who are now friends of the House of Strauss, Substack, and podcast. And some of those friends who are former colleagues of mine as well, have forwarded a theory that the league is rooting against the existence or the top tier of NFL quarterbacks all being black.

Bomani Jones talked to you about this recently. It's something he's tweeted a lot about. He's talked about on his programs. And that many within the NFL and media rooted openly for Josh Allen because he is white. Now, I'll say at the outset, this Ethan. And I think this take is beyond wrong. I think it is 180 degrees in a ridiculous direction of reflecting reality. I don't think people – I honestly don't think people care.

I don't meet many fans that even bring up Lamar Jackson or Patrick Mahomes' race or talk about Josh Allen. And the argument obviously is going to be, well, that's always under the surface. And if it's subconscious or you wouldn't talk about it, well, what an unprovable. what an unapprovable thing to say. I can't, how do I rebut that proposition? But I, in fact, I think, our friend Bobby Burrack at Outkick has written about this. If anything, I see the opposite, rooting against Josh Allen. I see that take said aloud, rooting against Josh Allen.

I don't know anybody who's rooting against Lamar Jackson or Patrick Mahomes or C.J. Stroud or any black quarterback in the NFL. Yeah. I think they're, hmm, I just had Beaumani on. We were talking about Josh Allen, but I don't know if we totally got into this aspect or dimension. There might have been a little bit of it. It's funny because I remember when Rush Limbaugh was briefly on, I think, Sunday night football for ESPN, which just goes to show you what a different time the mid-2000s to early 2000s were and how conservatism was more part of the mainstream culture. I mean, don't get me wrong. It was very controversial. And it ended abruptly, and here is why. Limbaugh said that there is a media sensitivity for black quarterbacks in regards to Donovan McNabb. And it caused such a firestorm that they ultimately ended the Limbaugh experiment. Now, what's funny is looking back at that, I feel like it might be more true today than when Limbaugh said it. And I also feel like the sensitivity to what you're saying, is maybe less necessary or less understandable currently than when Limbaugh said it way back then. I do think most people just don't care. I don't think it informs a lot of the assessment of quarterbacks currently. But it's difficult to know these things. It's all subjective. So I could have a difference of opinion with Beaumani about how everybody feels about Josh Allen

or Brock Purdy or anybody else. And it is unfalsifiable. We can't just hold up racism Geiger counter to the situation and get a reading on it. So it is very difficult. But I'm more on the side that it's just less of the assessment and there's almost a front lash happening currently where it might even be more part of the assessment that people are anticipating that the public is a bunch of knuckle-dragging small-minded people who can't see through superficial appearances and they're almost like going too hard the other way. And it just all confound. and pollutes the conversation about NFL quarterbacks, which is a complicated conversation to begin with where we don't have full understanding or information and have no idea how good

these guys are half the time, even without the racial component, confounding at all. You know, and it's just anecdotally, but, you know, I live in the world. I live in Texas. I grew up in a small town. I don't know that I've ever heard someone say, wow, you know, or even reflect a sentiment. Forget saying it out loud. Reflect a sentiment of, wow, I don't like that all these best quarterbacks in the NFL now are black. I've just never anecdotally encountered that sentiment. But on the other hand, and look, I don't think a lot of these guys would say just from their own perspective that I was their friend, but I was friendly with many of these guys, including Dominique Foxworth, who openly said he rooted against Josh Allen.

Now, I don't know if that's because, I don't know why. I don't know why. But the the way this conversation seems to me this this conversation is is grounded in origin stories so so lamar jackson was doubted in the beginning and it was famously by bill polion there's a clip going around right now um by calling coward i may have doubted i don't remember my take i may have doubted um lamar jackson's potential to be exactly what he's turned out to be which is an NFL MVP probably twice over and it was there was talk should he be a wide receiver and a lot of that and it's in the clip going around about coward is because his completion percentage was under 60 percent and that's a bad sign for a prospect for an NFL quarterback but you know who also had that same um same profile

is Josh Allen yeah Josh Allen had a completion percentage under 60 percent and I remember Dan Orlovsky at the time being on my show on ESPN saying you don't learn how to raise your completion percentage you're either accurate or you're not it's usually baked into the cake by the time you finished college. And so people doubted Josh Allen. And I think that race got baked into these things, in part, again, because of origin stories, I'll never forget the Josh Allen draft story of, you know, his tweets when he was 14 years old. And I actually don't remember the details, but I think he was quoting modern family. And I don't know if he used the N word, but he said things. And then the indictment was Josh

Allen is racist. And it's because of these origin stories, I feel like it just turned Lamar Jackson and Josh Allen into proxies for black and white. Yeah, the proxy part that's key because I remember, I don't know if it was Foxworth. I'm talking about this extemporaneously, but I remember there was something about how Josh Allen is the quarterback for people with dog avatars, which some of the people watching or listening might wonder what we're even talking about. It becomes this deep media conversation about how white people who are kind of red state Americans often have a dog in their avatar or who have racial animus of a dog in their avatar. And so then you're having this weird conversation about a guy that's based on your impression of the people who like the guy.

And it just, I think, goes to show you how social media really maybe was not fantastic for the objectivity of media in the analysis of things. Because you get on there, you feel like you're part of a team, you feel like somebody else is part of the other team. It's just this great mechanism for tribal thinking. Because when you're analyzing Josh Allen, I think for the most part, it should be an analysis of Josh Allen. Now it's possible to then look and go, well, people support him because of X or people don't support him because of why. I think we're having that conversation, but the proxy aspect to what you're saying did become this huge thing. Now, here's what's complicated. Well, here is what is a little bit complicated and hard to admit.

When it comes to entertainment, it might not be the unhealthiest thing in the world to have some of these sorts of tensions play out in an arena as opposed to in real life. We all know in boxing, boxing trades in this. They trade. in this sort of ethnic battle and this sort of proxy war to get people's emotions up. And you could say that's unhealthy and that's bad. But you could also argue that there's a catharsis to that. And it's better that people get the rocks off tribally watching a boxer than actually fighting each other in the streets.

You're saying like you put two fighters in a ring and white people root for the white guy and black people root for the black guy? Yeah, I mean, the comedy movie, the Great White Hope or the Great White hype, I can't remember it was called with Damon Waynes was that sort of like that sort of plotline and like that's how boxing operates you saw a little bit of that with Caitlin Clark and the very white Iowa college basketball team against an opponent who was more coded as black in LSU and it was just overwhelming the conversation about the whole thing but it was a big number and a lot of people watch. So it's a little bit complicated to talk about how we don't want racial tribalism,

we don't want racial bias, but at the same time, in entertainment, maybe A, it draws a lot of attention and gets a lot of people watching, and then B, perhaps it's cathartic. Perhaps it's not bad for society. I don't know. Well, okay, so I understand what you're saying academically. Like, I don't know that I've read, but I certainly heard about studies that if you took a young kid, I don't know, you know, with no, the idea always is that racism is taught you're not born racist. But if you took a young, young, very impressionable or not yet impressioned child and put them in front of a television and you had one basketball team that's black and one basketball team it's white, that he would root for the team that more closely resembles himself. Now, I don't know if

that's true or not, but I've heard about those kind of studies, but I don't think that's good. I don't think it's cathartic. And in fact, this is what I think is so great about sports. And this is where the NFL actually becomes, I think, the most racially evolved sport is that you hide, you know, our superficial characteristics underneath an even more superficial characteristic, is our jersey, our helmet. And then I think the tribalism of rooting for laundry is cathartic. I think that's good. I think tribalism is instinctual to humanity. And I think that to assign it to something as trivial as the Dallas Cowboys against the Philadelphia Eagles, I think that is cathartic for society. Yeah, I think there's something to that as well. And what you're saying also

has a lot of validity that the magic of sports, maybe it can channel some of that racial animus. And then there are other disputes, by the way, that it channels. The public school in UNC versus the hoity-toity private school in Duke, for instance. Although there is a little bit of racial coding to anything Duke, it seems, and there's a proxy there. But even regional tribalism, Ethan, Tim Brando was on this show, and he said, you know, college football comes down to my way of life is better than your way of life. So it's like the tribalism of geography, Texas versus Oklahoma. Yeah, it's that as well. And people attach those things to it.

And to what you're saying, yes, it cuts across those lines. And there's something amazing about being in a stadium and it's people from all walks of life. And they're united. They're high-fiving each other. They don't care about their differences. And it unites people. But it also sometimes channels these differences. And it kind of makes a little bit of like a story out of it.

And when you have that, it does make it a bigger event. It's not always racial. I mean, you know, it's a funny thing. The most watched Western Conference playoff games in NBA history involve the Sacramento Kings. That's odd, right? You would think it would be two big markets because you get maximum amount of people from both those markets. But no, it's because the story of glamorous Los Angeles and the Lakers going up against,

against hard scrabble Sacramento, that's a good story. And people pour a lot of their own baggage into it and attached to it. And so, yes, to what you're saying, the superficial tribalism of laundry can cut across some of these differences, but also when it aligns with these differences, it can become a bigger event and maybe even a cathartic one. Okay. So on that note then, So the implication is that the quarterback club or the top tier of the quarterback club was a white club and that it is being it is being disrupted by the success of these black quarterbacks. That's the implication. And that there will be this pushback in the popularity of the NFL. That's the thesis of me of these guys.

I think that's what Bomani has said. When the opposite seems to be true in the club of the NBA and openly so, you know, again, this is a guy that I was very friendly with that we haven't spoken a long time. Kendrick Perkins, like, openly rude against Nicola Yolkich. Like, I think he said that, you know, I don't want him to be the NBA MVP. I don't want him to be the face of the league. He's a white European. And it seems to me like if there's any racial club that is being sort of guarded or monitored when it comes to sports, it's the club of the NBA. Okay, well, I think you might have even underrated what Perkins did.

I think he flipped the MVP discussion. I think it changed what people were expected to do in voting Yokic MVP, and it kind of made it a little bit of, well, you're doing something unseemly, perhaps, if you're doing that, and it swung to Embed. So it was kind of amazing as a moment. I think sometimes there is this weird projection where... So just to clarify, you're saying, now I'm remembering as you're talking, he said if you vote, did he say if you vote for Yokic that you're racist? He was saying, he did not. necessarily say that, but he'd strongly, I wouldn't even say he implied. He was just making the case that the reason it was what it was had something to do with how he looked, and I believe he referenced Steve Nash. I'm talking about race extemporaneously, which is, you know, just dancing between landmines, but that is my recollection of what happened. It did seem to have an effect. Now, both of them are pretty worthy MVP-level guys, to be sure, but Yokic then validated the status

with one of the all-time playoff runs. Yeah, I think there can be projections sometimes where you're almost more defensive because you think everybody's being unfair but you're being unfair while you're being defensive like that maybe fighting a battle that is generations old or one generation old. And maybe this is the difference of opinion sometimes

where it seems like it's very taboo in media to even admit to progress on this front or an evolution on this front. It seems like that's something that you're not supposed to even concede. And the NBA is getting strange because on the one hand,

as you're saying, on the quarterback front, fewer quarterbacks, I guess, recently are white. But then the NBA, as you're observing, more NBA stars are specifically Eastern European.

And I think what's interesting about that, Will, is that the public, including the white, American public doesn't seem to really attach to these guys. And so the idea that race is just the predominant factor that people care about, I think gets at a blind spot of a lot of people in media and even the people running these leagues, which is nationalism. Yes. Nationalism matters. Patriotism matters. You know what a blind spot is, in my opinion? I think one blind

spot is that a lot of black people in America do actually feel a sense of place in this country and feel more of an attachment to American players than players from elsewhere, which is not me making a pejorative judgment at all about anybody. I think that's fairly natural. It's certainly true of white people in this country as well. And I think that's underrated by an Adam Silver, the commissioner of the NBA, who's saying, we're going to globalize everything. We're going to make money off all these countries and the people in this country are going to care just as much about these players. I think it's easy to say when you've got a lot of frequent flyer miles and maybe take some private jets that, hey, it's all one small world out there. I think to a lot

of people, they relate to Americans because they are American, which is true all over the world. You know what the biggest sporting event in the world is? It's the World Cup. I mean, this is part of how people relate to things. And so I think that can be just such an underrated dynamic. And so I think whether you're black, white, or any other group in America, there's just more of an inclination to feel some sort of just relationship and be able to connect with a player from your own country who speaks your language, who has similar cultural reference points. And I think there's a lot of discomfort in media with admitting that and with conceding that because it just sounds like, I don't know, anti-immigration sentiment or xenophobia. It's just true. It's just true.

It's hard to relate to some of these guys. I'm lost it further. It's true and it's good. Patriotism is good. It's good to feel pride in being American. These are not just something to be tolerated. This is something to be celebrated because that's the ultimate tribe that is supposed to bind us. America. And I was thinking through when you were talking, look, Dirt Novitsky is one of the most beloved athletes in the history of the city of Dallas. I mean, I would say, I don't know that he's fully at the level of, say, Roger Staubach, but, and maybe, maybe, maybe Troy Akeman, but he's right there. He's right there with Troy Aikman. And Michael Irvin, he's on a Mount Rushmore for Dallas. And by the way, Luca is really.

really appreciated in Dallas. And I'm sure Yokic is really appreciated in Denver. But I think your point is taken in that you don't achieve national celebrity in the same way. Like, Dirk never did. We know that. We talked about it. Like, Dirk never became, for as good as Dirk was, he's not as famous as Kevin Garnett, you know. Yeah. And he's better. He's a better basketball player than Kevin Garnett. That's an opinion, but I think it's pretty well-founded. He's better. But he's not as, He's not as famous or popular or celebrated nationally because he's not American. I think Kevin Garnett is better. That's number one.

That's just putting that take out there. No. The second take is that Dirk was about as American, as a guy from somewhere else could be, he spoke perfect English, he was hilarious. Some of these guys where maybe they're sort of learning it at the beginning, they have a translator. It's nothing against them, by the way. They're just from somewhere else. They happen to be great. This is not a critique. It's just reality. And it's an uncomfortable taboo topic because I don't know why. I don't know why just admitting that maybe baseball would be more popular if it had the percentage of Americans in it that it had 30 years ago versus right now where many interviews are done through a translator. I think that's just an admission of reality. But it's something that makes people a little bit squeamish to talk about, that there is some sort of shared bond.

between countrymen that has something to do with how popular things are. Everybody talks about why is the NFL so popular? Why is the NFL so popular? Why is college football so popular? And they talk about the scarcity. They talk about the violence that's so appealing to people. All true. But the most taboo aspect to bring up is it's very American. It's very American. And that is something that works in. Let's see, what country? America, That works very well. These other sports have almost been extravagantly advertising the idea that they don't want to be here, that they don't even care. I was at a finals a few years ago, and Adam Silver was talking about how they're working with China to try to make their Olympic team perform better.

And it's just, that's a strange thing. You're an American commissioner of the National Basketball Association, and you're so hungry for a superstar to really pop in China that you're, you're trying to make their Olympic team succeed. There seems to be no focus in the NBA on trying to get the best possible players from this country outside of Team USA basketball, but the NBA doesn't seem to care. So I feel like you get what you emphasize. They say that all the time in sports. Whatever you're emphasizing is what you get from your team. Some of these leagues, they want to expand. I mean, the NFL is looking a little bit like that too. They're looking to Europe. They feel like they need to grow, but it's not cost-free. The more you emphasize trying to

succeed in other places, the less you might succeed in your own place. I'm glad you brought up baseball. By the way, at the risk of running long, I just want to follow my curiosity where this conversation leads. I had a conversation last night, as I often do, one of my son's soccer practices. And we were talking about the prospects of collegiate soccer. And I was talking to this dad, And I said, yeah, I mean, I watched the national championship game between Clemson and Notre Dame. I looked at the rosters. And for example, Clemson, it's like everybody is from somewhere else. Everybody is from Europe or Africa.

And very few American players. And I get that. I played a sport in college that recruited internationally water polo. It recruits from Eastern Europe, a lot of the same guys that are good, same countries that provide us NBA players, provide the world's best water polo. But I started thinking, like, why? You get into a competitive rat race, and I know why the coaches do it. I know why the programs do it. You want to be better, but that doesn't help American development.

It doesn't help us be better at creating American soccer players. It doesn't make the sport, maybe it's what we're discussing right now. It may not make the sport more popular. I'm not sure, like, why American colleges would go so heavily into international talent as opposed to developing domestic talent at their society. sport. Yeah, I think one might be easier than the other, and that's part of it. And to what you were saying, it does become an arms race. It's just interesting that it almost seems like it is taboo to try to grow it at home. And that's something that makes people squeamish in a boardroom. And yet some of these far flung ideas that did not work, I think the most underrated story to bring it to the NBA is what a flop their whole China project was. I mean, they spent so much money, so many resources trying to get the next Yao Ming, and they couldn't even get a guy to be in the league.

And you think about how much time and energy could have been spent growing the game in the United States, maybe streamlining AAU into something that works hand in hand, or just doing the hard work. How about this? The NBA has effectively tried to destroy college basketball. I think that's an underrated story. Adam Silver wants to cut off the pipeline. He doesn't want college basketball to be the feeder system to the NBA. And I get it, by the way.

It's not like college football where they play on Saturdays, the pros play on Sundays. It works hand in hand. But the G League that they've created, G League Ignite, this other pipeline has not really worked. And then college basketball has been diminished at the same time. If time and energy could have spent on aligning college basketball and the MBA's interest, maybe having rules that are more similar, you could have had something that helped everybody. Instead, they were on this China adventure and there's such a thing as opportunity costs. And I just think there's this thing that happens. I call it the undecided

whale in business, where the more a company really seeks to grow, right? You've got an embedded growth principle in a corporation. The more they focus on this whale they could potentially get out there versus their core customer-based. I think we see it in multiple industries and companies. I worry about that with the NFL. They're looking at these whales out there in Europe. I mean, the NBA was going, oh, my God. I mean, we're rich right now.

But if we could get China, oh, my. And so they stopped doing the hard work of looking at the country. They get the most of their dollars from the country that basketball just was cultivated in. I mean, we can call basketball America's sport just as much as we could call football America's sport. They stop caring about it and they drift towards the undecided whale. And it's often how some of these corporations and sports go wayward. That's actually what my take was. You put it in better and better words. That's what my take was when it came to Taylor Swift. I just, I even worry, the NFL's trying to be too much for everyone. And they're not in charge of

Travis Kelsey's dating life. But that what, you know, showing Taylor Swift so gratuitously on the screen, that's fine. It's harmless until it turns off your core constituency. You can't be everything for everyone. You need to have your core constituency. I'm going to allow you time for one rebuttal before we move on to our third story. The modern day NBA rests on a foundation that can probably rest most comfortably on the shoulders of one man, Dirk Novitsky. He revolutionized the positionless basketball. He drug the big man out to the three-point line. He didn't play defense like Kevin Garnett,

but he is a revolutionary player. And for that alone, for that alone, he's better or more, he's more important than Kevin Garnett. Okay, so that's a different argument right there. And it is true. I've been around advanced scouts. For those you don't know,

they're basically spies hired by these teams. to send the top plays to their own team and they have this rule called Novitsky where all your rules have to be changed. The way basketball was played had to be changed on the basis of what Dirk could do shooting with his size. It just flipped things in this granular way

that would be hard to get into. So they would call it Novitsky conditions, right? So yes, he influence-wise is ahead of Kevin Garnett. But Kevin Garnett is one of the greatest defensive players of all time. And so I care about defense. I believe it's half the game.

I think it doesn't get its due. And so I would have to put KG narrowly ahead of Dirk while conceding your point that Dirk is more of a revolutionary figure in the sport. Cloak yourself in the nobility of defense. We'll be right back with more of the Will Cain podcast. What we may be witnessing is the end. end of the American Empire. And with that, Canada has never been more vulnerable. Gloves off is a podcast about the threat to Canada's sovereignty and what we can do about it.

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the merger between the WW and the UFC. And part of that was the announcement of a $5 billion project with Netflix to start streaming WWE on Netflix. I talked about this in last week's sports exclusive episode, The Will Kane Show, with Jake Crane from The Daily Wire, like just counted up together how many different streaming services we buy because of sports. And it's easily half a dozen. I can't remember all of them

but I like soccer so that puts me into two or three streaming services I've got YouTube TV I of course have Netflix and Prime First I think this is I've heard rumors by the way there's going to be some consolidation

for the sports fan there's going to be some bundling back to old cable style but second I think this is a big moment it was a necessary moment for Netflix Hmm I'm thinking

why do you think it was a necessary moment for Netflix? Why necessary? I feel like they don't have to do this. I feel like they're fine. This feels like a dabble. I think that sports are the tent pole of a streaming service. I think the live element of anything is the tent pole of a streaming service. And from around that live element, you can produce other content.

So I subscribe to Peacock because I'm going to watch. English Premier League soccer, right? I already had it by the time the, what was it, Chief's Dolphins game, was on Peacock. So I didn't have to do whatever else didn't go subscribe very quickly. But now I'm in the system and I'm saying, oh, what else does Peacock have? Oh, they have Oppenheimer. Oh, they have this. But I would never have known or cared to enter their gates if it had not been for the draw of the live stream sports.

Netflix has inertia because it's the first one. We all subscribe to it. But there was a moment there where Netflix content was like, it's not that good anymore. It's not that much to find. And I think WW is much bigger than people appreciate. And I think it creates that tent pole for them to then put, you know, shoulder programming that wouldn't have brought someone in, but will keep them around now that they came in because of WW. Okay.

I feel what you're saying. I call this on my site House of Strauss subscribe today. the peacockification of the sports landscape and how it's going to change everything. You like peacock because of the soccer, but a lot of people subscribe because of that football game between the Chiefs and the Dolphins.

Now, it did so well by industry expectations that everybody wants a piece of doing something like that, of having a big event that draws people in that then they can shoulder, as you said, all this other content

and build up the habit. So now ESPN and these other channels with their theoretically more abundant streaming services are looking for, what's my event? How am I going to get people into the tent, as you say? So I think that's going to have huge ramifications in the industry and downstream culturally. I think it's good for sports like football

where they can sell their events for even more money because there's this idea that you can get people to not only have the ads, but to double dip as a streaming to get a paywall situation in there. But the resources are not infinite. The pie is not infinite. So I think it might be really bad for some of these inventory sports like the MLB, the NBA, and hockey long term, because I don't know of those sports, at least of the regular seasons, can command a paywall. That's, and I've seen you write about this on House of Strauss. Inventory sports are, are interesting. It's a completely

different model than appointment programming. And actually, I'm going to use this to transition into story number four, and that's the power of stars. Were you a wrestling guy? No, no. I was a little Lord Fauntleroy fancy pants, San Diego Beach community who had no idea how popular wrestling was. Yeah, well, I had my moment.

I think a lot of kids had their moment, you know, whatever it is, you know, rowdy, Roddy Piper, Hulk Hogan, because I'm old, and then, you know, I wasn't as attuned to the new generations got in through the rock or whatever. But what, W.W.E. It's always surprising to people because my friend and co-hosts Pete Hegseth, who loves politics in a way that I don't love politics in terms of the horse race and the gamification of politics said to me, there are so few things in life that are both unpredictable and consequential. He said sports is unpredictable but not consequential and elections are consequential and unpredictable. Wrestling defies that because it's not unpredictable. It's scripted. And yet it gets this massive audience who I think is more of a sports

fan-based audience than is a soap opera drama audience to buy in. And I think that just has has to be in the end because of the power of stars. Like, they can develop and maintain stars. The NFL is about Joe Montana, Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Patrick Mahomes. That is what it's about. The NBA, Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Steph Curry. And that's the problem for boxing and the UFC. They don't maintain stars. You can't name them. In UFC, it's because they lose because it's such a competitive sport, boxing for a variety of reasons. Very few people can name the stars the way they once did with Ali or Tyson. And so I think that's what works for the WWE. It's the constant existence and creation of stars. And to what you're saying, there are probably, there's probably

more of an overlap between WWE fans and sports fans than fans of the Olympics and sports fans. the Olympics is always this strange product where people who don't normally watch sports tune in I've always been fascinated by it because it is sports and yeah they can cultivate it and do it intentionally in the WWE UFC it's so interesting to me

because it's almost like the only way these guys get heat on them and get noticed is by saying things politically that might appeal to Red America that piss the media off to the point where they're shining a light and at some point it started to feel a little bit contrived to me.

At some point, it's just, okay, this trick is not working the same way maybe it did at the beginning. And this can't be the only way that the UFC generates interest and gets content. But that's become part of it. You know, it'll become part of the cultural conversation, which to me almost seems like it's in lieu of the organic interest to what you're saying, the ability to create stars on its own merits. Yeah, I read your column on Sean Strickland and the pushback on his comments in UFC. Have you ever been to a UFC event? No, I'd love to go. I'd love to check it out. I've not been.

You should go to one. You should see UFC. And I'll say I've never been to wrestling, but I'm going to go to WrestleMania in April at the invitation of the Rock. and they're cultural moments that can easily be a blind spot for if you haven't been. It's something else. Like, it is something else to be there and see the passion of those fans. I'm really interested to see that when it comes to wrestling. But, you know, I think that so back to the inventory sports where I made this transition and talking about stars.

it's interesting how many people have constantly predicted the rise of the NBA, dating back to my time of DSP and would it eclipse the NFL. It's just never even come close. No. We see the top 100 broadcast came out just like a week or two ago of 2023. And like, what is it? Was it 90 were NFL games? Four were college football games.

Two were political events and one was the Oscars. And the NBA just doesn't come close. And they have the star. I mean, in LeBron still. They're not suffering from the lack of Michael Jordan, although he's not Michael Jordan. But they have too much inventory. It's a volume game and it waters down the product. And that makes it probably hard to your point to ever be the tent pole of a streaming service.

I think it does. I mean, look, I think Amazon would love to get some playoff games. I think if I had to predict what's going to happen with the next TV rights deal, it would be rolling it back with TNT, ESPN, and maybe Amazon gets. some playoff games because the playoffs i mean that's that's more event than inventory right i mean that has some consequence there is some flab on them the playoffs are overlong for the mb yeah this is this is an issue that i think everybody understands intuitively which is if you dilute the product it's funny right there's almost like a a cultural conversation versus a dilution conversation

they overlap right we can see the exact same thing with marvel where there's this argument that Marvel, they went too woke, that's what's repelling people. But there's this other argument that they just made too many of them, and that's what's repelling people. And maybe both things can be simultaneously true. And maybe there's some connection between the two, because you'll often get these arguments that the NBA politically turned people up. I think that that definitely happened in 2020. But I also think the NBA backed away from a lot of that. But they still have this more structural problem of just having too much inventory to the point where players are load managing and taking games off, and it sends a signal to the customer that

it's all part of the noise in the background, and they don't have to pay attention. So what you have to do, I believe, is start making some hard choices. And maybe it's not going to burn you with this upcoming media deal. But I think long term, the sports that are event-based are going to survive and thrive and the sports that are inventory-based and do not change are going to have tough times in the future. I love the analogy to Marvel. Too much

and watered down quality. And you can argue the quality is because they went woke or they also just made worse shows and shoved more of them out there. Nobody cares anymore. There was a time when a Marvel television series was like, wow, we got to see that. I don't even know what they're doing now.

I have no idea how many or what subject matters or what characters, and that's a shame because that means they've burned up the stars. Finally, number five, the games this weekend. I know you don't often get into the prediction game, but let's walk through the two championship games together. You have Patrick Mahomes against Lamar Jackson, the Ravens against the Chiefs. It does seem to be a year where everyone, this is against the narrative.

I think everyone is actually pulling for Lamar Jackson. I think everybody's rooting We have an instinct Because they're sick They're sick of Taylor Swift Is that the theory? That's the reason Also America loves underdogs

You know, you're talking about tribalism earlier in the Kings We just like underdogs And so we want to see Mahomes get beat I mean And he's not a villain Everybody loves Mahomes But it's just like

All right I'd love to see the giant go down Yeah I think Lamar Jackson's also just very likable I love that he sometimes wears that shirt That says nobody cares Work harder

I think that's a good message for everybody. It's a good one for me to internalize. So he's likable, even if he goes back and forth with his team about the contract. And even if some people might be defensive on his behalf, I don't think he's annoying. I think he's a pretty cool athlete to root for. I agree. People like to root for the underdog. They sometimes don't like what they get.

They're rooting for the underdog and the underdog wins. And they're going, yeah, I kind of wanted that. I kind of wanted the big, bad Belichick Brady Patriots in the Super Bowl. I didn't actually want them to fail that early. And so I think you're probably right. I'm guessing people are going to be rooting for the lions against the team I'm rooting for in the 49ers, and it's going to be America versus the 49ers, and I can't wait for that.

It's a great product. I mean, I just on a personal level, because I was covering the NBA, I was a beat reporter. I did not have the time to just follow the NFL. And so like Rip Van Winkle, I'm waking up to what America has been engaged in for years and years and years and going, hey, this is pretty good right here. The stakes of it, the drama of it.

I mean, oh my God, the end of that Packer-Niners game. Maybe the NFL will make a mistake here and there with how they shepherd their product, but it's a pretty hard thing to screw up. All right. So I am rooting for a Ravens' line. Lions Super Bowl. I am for both underdogs. I want

I want Chiefs Niners. That's what I want. I want the repeat. Yeah, but I want I want the rematch this time without Jimmy Garoppolo. That's what I want. Plus, my home is chasing history. I mean, it's just interesting. I just find it, I mean, I'm a little

bit biased, but that's what I want. I'll tell you what I want. I'm more scared of the Ravens than I am the Chiefs. That's the reality. You are? From a Niners perspective. Yeah. If the Niners win, and it's an if, The Ravens defense, I think, is underrated to bring it back to do a callback. Defense does not get its due. Offense is sexier.

The Ravens defense looks historically great, and it seems like we barely talk about it. And so they scare me more than the Chiefs, even if the Chiefs have multiple Super Bowls. So that's the opponent I prefer. Well, have you seen the Super Bowl conspiracy theories, the Super Bowl logo conspiracy? I have. I've seen that in part. because it preceded the Aaron Rogers' Jimmy Kimmel dustup was his talking about the, yeah. That's what led into that.

The colors in the logo are the NFL's scripted plan for the Super Bowl. And it goes like five years back and it does correlate. And this year, the Super Bowl logo is red bleeding into purple, which suggests Niners Ravens Super Bowl. I mean, it was very impressive by the NFL to have the rain reached torrential levels. as Jordan Love attempted his final drive of the Niners Packers game just to disrupt him. It was like out of the Truman show, when to stop Truman from reaching the end of his world. They've got rain going on. But that's what makes the NFL great.

You know, the other leagues, they can't even hope to compete. The one thing that puts a nail in the coffin of the conspiracy that the NFL is scripted is they would certainly script the Cowboys into the Super Bowl over a 30-year period. I would think so. The ratings would be insane. Uh, subscribe at House of Strauss. It's a great read. Cover sports, covers media. Uh, covers it from, I think, a very, um, balanced cultural point of view, which is a rarity in, in media. I always love talking to you, ma'am. Thank you, Ethan Strauss. Enjoy it as well, well. Thanks so much. There you go. I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Ethan Strauss. Again, go to House of Strauss. Subscribe. I think it's one of the better places you'll read if you were interested in sports and sports media. That's going to do it for me today here on the Will Kane show. I'll see you again next time.

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