Transcript of So Long, Rodgers, Plus a Football History Deep Dive With Cousin Sal and Chuck Klosterman

The Bill Simmons podcast brought to you by Fandil Sportsbook. We're also brought to you by the Ringer podcast Network, which has the rewatchables, a movie podcast that I host. We're putting it up on Tuesday this week. We did What Lies Beneath. So go check that out wherever you get your podcast, including a video on Spotify. Coming up on this podcast, Cousin Sal and I are going to talk about the Stealers-Texan's game, the end of Aaron Rodgers' career, what this means for the Patriots this weekend, and a whole bunch of football subplots. And then, BS podcast Hall of Fame, where Chuck Klosterman is here. We are going to have a wide-ranging, really fun conversation about 100 years of football. It's all next. We're going to take a break, and then Cousin Sal. The Bill Simmons podcast is presented by Fanduel. Fanduel has got it all. Same game parlays, quick bets for jumping in live. They have your way. Go check out your way. You can build the bet that fits your play, your way. Plus, don't miss out on the NFL Playoffs, one of my favorite times of the year, all month long. Download the Fanduel app or head to fanduel.

Com/bs to get started. Get ready for the play. Let's go. Must be 21 plus, President Select State, 18 plus in DC, Kentucky, and Wyoming. Get in a problem, call 1-800 Gamble, or visit rg-help. Com. Call 888-789-777, or visit ccpg. Org/chat in Connecticut. All right, we're taping this Monday night right after Stewards Texans. The voodoo has run out, Cousin Sal. No longer Will we have Aaron Rodgers in the playoffs? We might not have him in the NFL. His career ends on a pick six. I don't know if that's the bigger storyline of the game, that that might be it. Is it Mike Tomlin might be done with the Steelers, or is it, whoa, Houston Houston. Let's take them seriously? What is it for you?

Oh, I don't think it's Houston, let's take them seriously because the last 25 minutes of that, you were licking your chops. You loved that Houston was coming. I mean, you'd rather have the Steelers, but that Houston team was a disaster, aside from defense, right?

Yeah. I don't want to end up on the Houston bulletin board as a Pats fan. You did it with the chargers. It worked. Well, the CJ Stroud performance. We had the Houston's defense outscored Pittsburgh 14 to 6. The defense turned it up. And Rodgers, all the stuff, anyone who bet against them any week of this season, and then got it turned on them. And you go, Oh, my God, how did I lose that? And then it all came back on them this game. All the garbage 40-yard passes that turned into a pass interference. No. The pass that gets tipped up in the air and the guy catches it. No. Hit the ball, hit the ground. It's like their luck ran out. They stayed at the table too long. The people were vacuuming underneath them at 3: 00 in the morning as they're playing blackjack, and they're just getting smoked by the dealer. It was time to go.

And the dealer could have beaten them even worse, right? That could have been a 44 to 6 game if Stroud didn't... They had four fumbles in the first half. He recovered two of his own. He couldn't make any... He had no eye contact with the center. I don't know what was his fault or the center's fault. I think they met during the national anthem or something. I don't know. He just like, Look at the guy's ass. You'll see when the ball's coming. He's never looking at the ball, but it didn't matter. You're right. I hate Aaron Rodgers, and he was bad. He was like 4. 8 yards per attempt or something, then throwing tantrums on the sideline, all that stuff. But that defense was... I mean, he didn't have it. He was in a dunk tank for three hours also. They were just attacking, and the strip sack was going to happen one way or another.

Well, one of the playoff manifesto rules is don't overreact to a big playoff win from the round before. I think people are going to now overreact to this Texan's defense, which was admittedly really good. That was a pretty shaky Stealers offensive line, a quarterback that couldn't move, a wide receiver who did not seem to... Metcalf, who did not seem to be on the same page with Rodgers anymore. They couldn't run the ball. And with all But as I said, it was 7-6. Stroud, it felt like falling apart in sections. It just felt like a classic Stealers game that they were going to somehow win 9-7 or 13-12 or some ridiculous score. You were like, Oh, my God, how did they win that? It was all the makings. Then Houston, to Stroud's credit, as bad as he was, he made that huge throw when they were only up one, when it seemed like he was ready to turn the ball over again. All of a sudden, he hit somebody for 49 yards. It felt like that turned the game. They got They got a field goal, they got some space, and the D turned it on.

But I'd be careful with people thinking now that this defense is going to go 2000 Ravens. Next week, Jake Bane is going to actually be able to move around unlike Rodgers today.

I think it'll be a similar game to yesterday, like Chargers. I think the Texans will score more, but I think it's going to be in the 19, 14, 19, 16 range, and you're going to hope to get a lead. And nice little break for you again. Nico Collins. Just couldn't even... Of all the fumbles and everything else, that was the worst play probably for Houston. That pass to Collins, not open, by the way. Being treated for a concussion, he definitely has one. Didn't walk off the field. Let's see his availability for week one in 2026.

Shorter time, too, because we go from Monday night to Sunday. The Pats have González, who's also in concussion protocol, their best cornerback. He goes in concussion protocol. Houston's going into this game like, oh, crap, if they win, who do we have on Colin? So now it seems like both of them probably aren't playing. I think usually it's a week. Sometimes if it's seven days, sometimes the guy will sneak back. So González has a little bit of a history that Colin seems really far fetched that five and a half days later, he's going to be playing in a playoff game.

It is interesting that people are all over this Monday night game, and obviously it equates to more money for the league, right? Having a Monday night playoff game. But you could do three Saturday, three Sunday, and then not have to worry about one team getting more rest. And in the case of a concussion, it really is a big deal, right? The difference between a six or seven day rest could mean the world, could mean if a guy is out for the year or not. As is the case for Nico Collins.

Why do you have a demeanor that suggests that maybe you lost some money on the dealers today?

No, I swear to God. I swear to God. I bet Houston.

I swear I did. Oh, you did? Okay. I did. Yeah, because we were 0 and 4. I only had the dealers and one tease.

We were 0 and 4 in Ringo 107, and we had the dealers. I'm like, Oh, we're going 0 and 5. And so we did.

I went 0 and 5, too. My record in Ringo 107 now is 40 and 55. I went 2 and 4 with my picks, but somehow went 0 and 5. Now it's like, I want to go the other way. I want to make history. What's the worst record I could buy? This season is now a throw away. I have years in the past where I've done well. I just didn't have it this year. It's fine. It's like the Chiefs. Chiefs have done really well in the past. They had a shit season this year. I want to see how bad this can get. I'm not changing my process. I'm not doing the George Kistanza and going the other way. Good. I'm just going to keep it going and see what I end up with because we did terrible in over-unders. We did terrible in the Springer 107, or at least I did. It's like, I just want to throw this shit year away. I'm going to come back next year like Rocky and Rocky 4. I'm going to be lifting logs. I'm going to go on vacation with my wife and my alcohol buddy, whoever that is.

You got a client to choose from. Yeah.

Multiple alcohol buddies. Oh, man. There's a joke both of us want to make. I'm not going to do it. So many. So many.

We should do 20 minutes on this.

But yeah, I'll be back next year, and I don't care how bad it gets this year.

Listen, 11-0 is great for the playoffs, right? There's 11 games. Now, there's 12.

12-0 is the ideal.

So 12-0 is the best you could do.

No, it's 13-0. 6, 4, 2, 1. Yeah, 13-0 is the ideal. Thirteen.

Okay. It seems impossible. Thirteen is the best. But yeah, but 0 and 13 is the second best thing you could do. I mean, that's pretty remarkable.

Yeah. The problem is, in real life, I had the pats. When I did the straight up pics, I had the pats and I had the Panthers. In Ringer 107, I had the other four losses, and then I did the pats as a parlay with the over, which didn't hit. So I went a legit 0 and 5. Regardless, can we talk about more likely to be back? Give me the odds on Fandil. Rogers or Tomlin, who's favored in the more likely to be back on Pittsburgh next year.

It's so funny. I had written down parlay that they're both back with the Steelers.

Let's do all the odds, even though Fandil has none of them. Our All right, both back, I'm going to say plus 600. Oh, really? Oh, my God. I think it's high. I don't think Rodgers comes back.

Oh, I think it should be. I think it's like 15 to one that they're both back.

So higher. You think it's less realistic?

Yeah, I think one of them is probably 4 to 1, and the other is probably, I'm going to do the math wrong, but maybe 2 to 1. Tom one is more likely to return, I would think.

You don't think so? I think Tom one is more likely to return, and we do this with coaches. I did this with the floor on last night's podcast with you, and I'm like, this has to be it. Then today they're like, yeah, they're talking extension. No hard feelings over an entire decade of terrible playoff stuff. But I would think this This is it for Rodgers. But anyway, so you say, All right, we'll meet in the middle. So we'll say 10 to 1 as a parlay for that?

Yeah, I think so.

And you think for Tomlin, plus 150, he's not back?

I think only because it's a steal The Steelers and there's pride and everything else. If there's a team that's going to turn their back on the fact that he's 0-7 in his last seven playoff games, it's Pittsburgh. That's a tough list, by the way.

Do you see that list? Now, it's him and Marv Lewis at the top. I forgot Marv did the seven straight before we never saw him again.

Pretty hard. That was bad news.

Seven straight losses is tough.

I wouldn't be surprised either way. I'd be surprised if Rodgers came back with the Steelers. That said, he's probably still one of the top 32 quarterbacks in the league.

I just think if you're really thinking about it, if you're him, you're going back to a night like tonight where you're undersearch. You're like, did you ever see that movie, The Gray with Liam Neeson? The plane crashes and the wolves are just starting to hone in on the guys, and there's just too many of them. And one guy near the end, there's three guys. Sorry, spoiler. There's three guys left. One guy just gives up. It's like, Fuck this. Wolfs, come get me. I can't fight this anymore. That's how I felt with Rogers in the fourth quarter. It's like, I just thought, wolves, come, just come eat me alive. I'm done. I did something. Basically, he can't move at the speed you have to have in a game like that.

Working backwards is like, this is how it's going to be. Kind of best case scenario. We make the playoffs, we have a home game. It's freezing out. It's effing freezing out. It's at night, and I have a mean defense, top-rank defense, coming after me.

I'm going against an offense with a terrible offensive line and a QB that might melt down, and he did. He melted down. The QB was bad.

We should talk about the Running game, which I think should maybe concern you a little with this week coming up. They did have 164 yards at Woody Marks.

We can stop that, though. You got to throw on us to beat us, I think.

Okay, but this run game came out of nowhere. For the Texans. You have to prep for it a little bit.

True. Marks was good. The problem with Marks, and I had him on both fantasy teams, he would just be out of the game. He would have a good first quarter and you'd be like, Whoa, Woody Marks. And then all of a sudden, that was it. You never saw him again. He actually played the entire game this time around. So we think the odds of neither of them coming back to Pittsburgh, what would you put them? Rogers and Tomlin.

Now I'm going to get confused.

For neither of them coming back. They're both gone.

So I would think it's minus.

I would say that's minus 125 range.

Yeah, right in there. I probably contradicted myself here, though. But yeah, right. One's like minus 350 and one's closer to even.

If I'm Tomlin, I want the Atlanta job. That job is still open. They're interviewing people. As we've discussed many times in this pod, I thought that team was legitimately talented. They shot themselves in the foot. They lost a bunch of dumb games. They have a really good nucleus. They're in a weird division that I don't think is good. He could switch conferences, start over, give them that energy you need when you finally have a good coach again. And that would be my preference for him. Giants would also be fun.

My hot take for 26 was one of them, aside from you eating pizza in three weeks, is that Tom Wendell does go to Atlanta.

Oh, interesting.

What about this?

Baltimore? You like the NWA move? This is what Billy Gill was pushing. Oh, yeah, that's right. He was pushing the Hogan joining National Hall, just ripping the mask off.

What But if he did do the TV for a year, took a year off. He's been at it for a while. We could almost guarantee which teams are going to need coaches next year. Cincinnati is going to need a coach.

I don't want to work for a team. I don't want to work for the Jets, 0-2.

I'm just trying to It's always going to be six or seven teams right in there. What was it, eight this year?

I would argue the Giants' job and the Falcons' job are legitimately good jobs. And I think the Ravens with Lamar, if you can get his head straight a little bit, I think that's also a really good job. To convince him to actually be in the field.

That was my idea. The Ravens would be good, too. But the Falcons was like, Hey, that was my thing.

Can he do the Ravens, though? Can he do it? That's huge. That's like you going to work for Fallon.

Yeah, we'd have to redo the trader bracket, I think, if that happened.

Yeah, that would be. That's a lot. Yeah, I can't imagine anyone doing that. I just can't imagine he just flips sides in the AFC North and then comes back to Pittsburgh twice a year. You go to the NFC, you have a little distance.

If the Ravens take him on and he loses, that's an extra embarrassment, right? I don't even know if it's worth it for them.

If I were him, and in general, how long is a football coach supposed to stay with an NFL franchise? Even Andy Reid burned out in Philly and then went to KC and rejuvenated. But by the time he ran his course in Philly, he was done. Belichick ran his course with New England. It's going to be somewhere between 10 and 20 years for the really, really good coaches. He goes to the Giants. That's the best coach they've had since Tom Coughlin's nose would turn bright maroon. I miss those days. I miss seeing him in the freezing cold.

That was good.

So Stealers had 175 total yards today. But this is a weird game. We're going to remember it as 36. I genuinely thought that Stewards were going to win up until that 50-yard pass. And as soon as they went up 10, 6, I felt like the game was over unless the Stealers could pull their garbage, whatever. Right.

I mean, we were at one point saying, Jeez, CJ, just take a knee and punt, right? Because it was that bad for Rodgers and stuff. And that was probably around the third quarter. But yeah, then he completed that pass. It was like, game.

Our buddy, Hinch texted us that his initial stood for joke job. I loved it. He took a break from his 1778 take down of the French.

He made up for four hours of American Revolution talk with that one fun.

Good job by you. It was pretty solid. All right.

What are you thinking? Forget about the line for a second, but what are you...

I'm ready to move on. I'm ready to move forward.

Are you more confident before this game, the opponent, the next game, or after the game now?

I watched the Pats game again. So we came on right afterwards. We're going live on Netflix. And We're basically watching- By the way, are we on YouTube today? No, we're still on Netflix.

Oh, good.

We're right next to that Jon Bernthal show with the His and hers.

Oh, all right.

Which is, I got to say, a little bit on out of time with Denzel Washington's corner. I don't know if you saw that movie from 20 years ago. The real ones will know. It's a little on the corner. I still enjoyed it. I support my guy Bernthal. I watched the game again, and I don't think We were positive enough about how good Drake was in the second half. His stats were great. He had a 140 QB rating. He was 11 for 14. He had the scramble yarders. Really, the only play he missed was the shutdown to the tight end. But I do think it was a young QB who sucked in the first half and then in the second half got his sea legs. Now you move to next week with how fast that Houston defense is going to be, but he can actually move around and try to create plays. The problem, I don't think they have Matt Collins again next week. The receivers just didn't seem like they were open yesterday. I don't think it's going to get any better tomorrow. So it feels like it'll be around the same game unless they can run on them.

Do you think they can run on him?

I don't know. I don't think it'll be like today where just everything fell into place because the Steelers just lost whatever edge they had. But I do wonder if Christian Kirk, Collins being out is really rough. But Christian Kirk might be as good as all of your receivers. I don't know. I mean, not when Diggs is hot.

He'd definitely play for us. There's no question he would be on the field. It's weird though. Houston's another team That the Pats have owned, really, this whole century. The Chargers were another one where it's just in my head. Whereas I was talking to somebody about Denver and Buffalo. If the Pats were able to go into round three, would you rather play Buffalo at home or go to Denver? Buffalo brings Josh Allen, the best player in the week. We probably weren't even superlative enough about yesterday. The Pats are owned for in the playoffs in Denver. Do you know that? Is that where it is? Ruline Jones, safety. I think that was '87. The Jake Plumber game in 2005, one of the most ridiculous losses in the history of the franchise. I don't think we got a single call the whole game. Champ Billy running 100 yards. Ben Watson not getting mad at bounds. Ball clearly goes through the end zone. They call it out at the one. Still mad about that game. The third one, I think, Gronk was out in Denver when Peyton Manning had a good team. Then the fourth one, they lose 20 to 18.

Braided makes the best throw of his career. They're down eight, driving. 2016, it was the noodle arm, Peyton Manning year, where they end up winning the Super Bowl, but he's got the noodle arm.

That was a Gronk two-point conversion.

That was two-point conversion, they didn't get it. Braided, I'm convinced, was concussed for most of that game. It was just a game from hell. I lost a lot on that. Yeah. Those were the four times I played in Denver. In general, LA used to kick our ass. In general, we always lose to Denver.

Except for the Teebo play-off. But for the Teebo play-off, LA. He's not LA. He's not batting.

But do you use the baggage, even though these are all different guys, all we're talking about are uniforms, but there's certain teams, you're like, because Denver is like that for me.

Yeah. What, as a fan? Yeah, as a fan.

Who's your team?

The players don't give a crap. No, I'm just saying for you. The coaching staff has changed three times over.

I'm not saying it's rational.

No, I don't want to see the packers.

So the packers are your team?

Well, the 49ers for sure. I mean, that goes back forever with the catch and everything else. And Dak screwing up a snap with no time left and all that stuff. I can go back, back. So I guess it's the 49ers. And then everybody else. Yeah.

And then all the other teams since Jerry Jones is been doing it.

There's all the other NFC teams.

The thing that makes me feel good is, as I said last week, I do think Drake has greatness in him and wasn't great in that first game. I actually like that. Vrabel called them out in a good coach way. It was just like, yeah, he made a lot of mistakes, blah, blah, blah. He's got to take care of the ball better. I think he's going to really push them this week, push May to be like, Hey, there's more in there. We got We need it this game. Houston's great. We're going to need you. If it's him versus Stroud and the defenses can be relatively equal and we're home, I like the May chances, but he's got to be a little better. You think there's 2000 Ravens potential with this Houston team at all or no?

I think Stroud has to be better than he was. I don't know if that's good or bad for the Patriots, but I think you got to get a lead. I texted you. I wasn't understanding what you doing. You were texting me some local Boston, what you talked about last night.

I texted one of the radio hosts doing the classic glass half empty tweet about the game.

Yeah, stupid.

Yeah, but that's what they're going to do all week. This Houston defense That's the way the pats looked, Will Campbell on the left side. They're just going to run him over. And by the time the game starts, you're going to think they should be 10 point underdogs.

I think the most important thing you did yesterday was reestablish playoff dominance It's especially defensively at home. And now make everybody a little nervous to come to you here.

Well, there's some good video stuff with Vrabel. Apparently, the Monday meeting before the game, he looked at Milt Williams and Barmore, the two big nose tackles. Milt Williams, when he's in the game, the defense has been good. And he's like, It's January. You know what January means? Big dogs. It's time for them to show up and stare those guys down. And everyone was like, Whoa. And it was this His theme all week, Big Dogs. So then when they made play as Milt Williams got the last sack, and he's like, The big dogs are here to eat. He was doing all that. So they've been really pushing it. He knows how to push the buttons and get certain guys going. I wonder if he uses that with the offensive line this week. A little nobody believes in us.

I don't know if it's the best. I'm trying to think if it's the best one. They're all good. They're all very solid, I think.

No, the best one is Ram Seahawks, right? Ram's.

Well, no, it's Niner I mean, nine are Seahawks. No? Yeah. Ram's bears is probably going to be interesting because that team is ridiculous, that bears team. Then I guess Bill's Bronco. Man, they're all good.

I like them all. Now, Ram's bears is the best one.

Is it the best one?

Ryan Clark said on ESPN today that Caleb Williams was now a top five quarterback in the league.

Which league?

This league? The NFL. Heard that today. That's all it takes? That's what it turned out first take. Caleb Williams. Really good. We'll see if it can keep going for him. Top five seemed strong.

Well, now I'm going through it in my head now, and I hesitate to put anyone at that five spot now.

Maybe he's right.

Who knows? I don't think it's Caleb Williams. I don't think it is.

Do you think he's... I'm looking at my QB pyramid.

What does this mean? Who you trust more? Mahomes is still there. Allen is still there. Lamar is still there. Burrow is the one I'm not even sure about at four anymore. I'll I'll put your boy there at four.

I'm happy to put Caleb over Burrow for now after that weird Burrow season we had.

There's nobody else?

May has to be above Caleb, right?

That's fine. Sheesh, Ryan Clark may have done it.

Ryan Clarke, I apologize in real-time. You may be right.

No, honestly, so you don't put Stafford. I know you hate Stafford.

You have to be down on Stafford. I would have Stafford ahead of Caleb Williams at this point.

Stafford is ahead of Caleb Williams. I put my guy ahead. I Dax in the playoff.

All right, there's a case, at least.

There's a case.

Ryan Clark is back in this. He's not at 10th.

Good job, Ryan Clark.

How did he do? The guy was on ESPN for 12 straight hours today. We got to give him props. That's right. Got to come up with stuff. I think he really was. I think he was on for 12 straight hours. Was he really?

Yeah. Wow.

He was on first take. He was on NFL Live. He was on all their pregame halftime stuff. It was an amazing job by him.

Well, they fired everyone. They have three guys left. That's true.

They had to... Yeah, they had to go back. All right, so we got to guess the line.

Okay. I have it written down. If you get this- I haven't seen it. I'm up two to one. I'm up 2 to 1 in games. If you get this, you tie me and therefore win the season for the first time since all the way back in 2024. It's been a while.

I have the Patriots favorite by one and a half in New England over the Texans.

Okay, one and a half.

What did you Here's what I had. Don't cheat. What is it? I can't. What is that?

I had three.

Patriots by three. Okay. Definitely not going to be three. It's going to be lower than that.

It's two and a half.

You beat me.

I love to see another week.

You beat me. Son of a bitch.

Well, I was even thinking of going higher. They were three and a half against the Chargers. I don't know. I thought maybe Houston... By the second quarter, I was like, If this is how Houston is going to present themselves, maybe the Patriots are more here.

So C. J. Stroud isn't one of the top five quarterbacks in the league?

According to Fandel. No.

Man, that seems high, Sal. I don't know. No. You don't think so? You have to.

So the chargers were three and a half, right? All week?

Yeah.

No, that's fine.

So Hertz drops out of the top five. Mahomes is still there. Mahomes-out. Is Lamar out of the top five? Lamar has to still be in there.

Don't take him out because Caleb Williams had a great fourth quarter yesterday, the other day.

Herbert's out. Even the nerds are threatening to turn on Herbert now.

I know.

I will say Caleb is in the top five and maybe top three of my team is playing, you are a bet against you. You're down seven, but I'm completely terrified because you're capable of any throw. Yeah. There's no way to ever feel... If he was in on Pittsburgh today down 14, 6, he wouldn't have given up on the game like he would have with Rodgers. That's true. He would have been like, this guy could do... Who knows?

Definitely top five, more exciting. I put him maybe ahead of Lamar in that department, more exciting. He could pass the bar next year anyway.

I love the fucking crazy arms. Elway was like this. We've only had a couple of dudes. Dudes that can throw when their feet aren't set or when they're up the air. The scrambling is great, too. But then there's other time you can watch them for a half hour and the ball is just bouncing around all over the place.

It needs like two hours to settle in. It's just weird. I was thinking of him as a closer. Could he Mariano Rivera this thing? Or they just use him in the fourth quarter?

Or does he actually need- They put Kuyzen Bajent for- Yeah.

Does he need the first two hours to get it out of the system so that the fourth quarter is good?

Well, the Rams defense, definitely, I wouldn't say is going to shut him down. They'll give him a pass rush, but you can throw on them. Right. What did they do here?

Real quick. Let's talk about this.

You talk about the TV schedule?

Yeah. The bears, rams. We're coming on after bears, rams Sunday, right? A little earlier than normal. The bears played Saturday and the rams played Saturday. Why do you have to move that to Sunday? Whereas who's getting screwed here?

I would say- The Texans are...

I don't understand this here.

Buffalo, Denver is the first game. San Francisco, Seattle is the second game on Saturday. Houston. That has to be because that's West Coast, I guess. Although Denver is West Coast as well. Houston, New England. Then Ram's Bear's, 3: 30 Pacific. We'll be coming on at 7: 00. That's great for us.

Yeah. No, good for us.

Seven o'clock PT, right before the Landman season finale.

Oh, wow. Well, maybe we'll just keep it rolling.

Really tough, tough, tough, tough Landman season.

I don't know about- You ruined it for everyone, with Jon Hamm. It's plight. That was it.

I'm starting to wonder if Taylor Sheridan can write seven shows at the same time. There's been cracks in the armor for this one.

We know seven is the number, the big number.

I think seven simultaneous shows is too hard.

The Seahawks had 13 days off and the Niners have six or five.

Listen, the Niners are just happy to be alive. Next to that electromagnetic Practice Center fiasco thing they have going. They're probably just excited to go to Seattle. I wonder if that's true. They're like, Can we go today? Can we leave on Wednesday to get out of here?

You talked about how we wrote together on Jimmy Kim Alive that first year. Remember that big cancerous box over our head that was just buzzing all day long? Yes, I did. Remember that thing?

I did. Probably full of asbestos, all that stuff.

Yeah, we turned out all right, right? No.

I think so. I was thinking the Shakeys game on Saturday, which we always joke about, the first game around one we call the Shakeys game. There should be a name for that first game on Sunday, that's the 12: 00 PT start.

For this round coming up? Yeah.

Clearly, that's where they want to stick the worst game every time because the Saturday one's a little later. Starts 1: 30 Pacific. It's going into primetime East Coast, so you want to put a good one there. Second one is an official primetimer. Then that 12: 00 PT Sunday game, you I think that's a good rating spot, though, isn't it?

Oh, yeah. 3 o'clock Eastern?

That's what you're talking about, right? Saturday and Sunday night are the two best games. The nights for sure.

The nights for sure. But now it's network. That Seahawks game is a Fox game. Oh, your game is an ESPN-ABC game. Interesting.

So we get Bucket Hakeman?

Yeah.

Oh, that's amazing.

Yeah, you get Bucking Akemen. That's what I'm seeing on ESPN.

So we get Romo doing Buffalo Denver. We have... Katie doing the Niners Seahawks. Oh, this is good.

This is good. And then Peacock is going to be Tariko and Collinsworth, Ram's Bear. I love it.

Football's so good. Matthew Stafford. He's not even looking at him, Mike.

Mike, hey little boy. You hear what Bill said about him throwing all contorted in the air.

He's right. In the air. He's 12 feet up in the air, Mike, just whipping a 50 harder.

He's top five in my book.

All right, so the lines we have now for next week since we did them yesterday. Buffalo, are they favored yet?

I'll go back to it. Yes, they are.

Buffalo is now favored. Minus one and a half. Seahawks minus seven and a half, Patriots minus two and a half, Rams minus three and a half. It feels like there's a seven pointer Using the Broncos up to plus eight and a half, the Seahawks to minus half, and the Patriots to plus four and a half. That I'm already eyeing.

Were you the only home team to win this week?

Yeah. Right? Yeah. And so we expect- No, the bears were a home team. The bears were a home team. Sorry.

Yeah, right. I'll count that. Two out of six. And so now this is getting even up here.

All right. So long, Aaron Rodgers.

That's it. I mean, you know what? One more thing. I'm just looking at this now.

And I should probably start up a go fund me right this second for how much I'm going to lose on the Indiana Who's yours?

Seattle Seahawks Moneyline Parley. That's it. It's coming.

What is that going to be? So Seahawks minus 390. And then we have Indiana minus 350. It's minus 163. So you use that as the anchor and you'll put that with a third team all over the place?

No, minus 163 is fine. So 48,900.

You wouldn't even use that as your anchor?

Yeah, because 48,900 to win 30,000. That's good, right?

Sounds great. Is that where you need to recoup?

And then I'll be halfway back.

Do you think Baby Doll watched us on Netflix last night?

Oh, interesting. Did not comment on it, so I have to say no. Once in a while, he'll comment, and even then, you don't even know if he watched it.

But today, he didn't even comment. There's a theory going around that Baby Doll, your agent, Jimmy's agent, my sometimes agent, my agent, hybridization. There's a theory that he's retired. Really? Yeah, that's the word on the street. It's not an official retirement, but it's an unofficial retirement.

That's not good for me because I just wrote him a quarterly check at the end of December.

We'll see.

Maybe it's not We'll see.

We'll find out. You're going to be back on Sunday night with me. So we'll be earlier on Sunday night. It looks like around seven o'clock range. That's right. And we'll have an answer for that. We'll have an answer for four games. We'll have an answer for whether or Ringer 107, we could go for the 0 and 13.

Let's do it.

It's easy. I just want to be 0 and something, whether it's 13 and 0, 0 and 13, whatever it happens. I'm happy to.

We'll get people something to fade. That way they know, right?

That's the thing. People are like, Oh, look at your record It's like, Cool. Bet against me. That's all. I'm laying the blueprint. Just see if you think it's so funny, win some money. Go ahead. Knock yourself out. There you go. That's your Johnny Cochrane moment. Great to see you. We're coming back, taking a break. Come back with Chuck Closterman right after this. All right, so we're going backward in time. Chuck Closterman is here. Bs podcast, Hall of Famer. We're taping this late morning Pacific Time. He has a book coming out called Football. Ironically, this is probably the best football time right now where you have the semifinals of college. You the NFL play-offs. We just had five games. There's about to be a six-play-off game tonight. It's like football, football, football. Ratings are the best it's ever been. You and I have both been football fans our whole life. And then you decided, I'm going to write an entire book about my complicated relationship with football.

Yes, that's exactly what has happened, Bill. That's exactly what it is. I nailed it. I've been thinking about this stuff for 40 years now in my life. I think I've been thinking about it very consciously for about 20 years, and I finally did it. I mean, there's been a bunch of books where I've talked about sports here and there, but this is the first time I was like, Okay, this is what it's about. This is the book.

So was it the Kaepernick situation? Was it CTE? What was the tipping point where you were like... Because I remember for me, I had, and I was writing for Grantland at the time, and it was early 2010s, really worried about the NFL and what it said about me that I loved it so much with the way that they were treating the players, the schedule, the concussion stuff that they were doing the plausible deniability of. And it was just like, Man, this sucks. I don't feel good about this. Then for some reason, the mid-2010s, I just rolled over and accepted it. I was like, You know what? I love it.

Well, it wasn't like that for me. It wasn't an incident in that way. The Kaepernick thing is mentioned in the book. The CTE stuff is in the book, certainly. But I think it had more to do with the fact that I'd always wanted to do a sports book. You and I have talked about this a lot over the years. I think that maybe as a game, we both prefer basketball, the purity of basketball, the idea of basketball. I think if someone said, what is the greatest game? I would say basketball is a team sport. But football is so much more important. It weirdly matters to me so much more more than the other sports, the actual application of the game itself, like what I'm actually seeing and experiencing. I think about 20 years ago, I just made this decision that I'd like to write a book about football that was all-encompassing, that it was about players, it was about teams, but it was really about the idea and the meaning of this. As football evolved into this thing, that is not just the most popular sport in the United States, but more popular than all the sports in the United States, really.

I mean, like I mentioned earlier in the book, how in 2023, of the top 100 broadcasts on television in the United States, 93 of them were football games, pro football games, and then three or four more were college games. There's nothing else like that. I mean, I'm a person who's interested in the monoculture. I always have been. The only elements of the monoculture left in the United States are football Taylor Swift, I guess. That's really it.

And Landman. Landman, I think would be the third one. What would it be?

Landman? I don't know. I mean, this is something I've been thinking about, like I said, for four decades, really seriously for two decades. When I brought the idea up to my publisher, they were not enthusiastic. I don't know what they thought the book was going to be, but it's not the book I think they imagined in practice. I think they seem pretty happy about it now, and I'm happy about it, which I don't often say about these things that I write. I mean, if we went back and listened to the podcast that I've done with you whenever I have books coming out, I generally feel like they're terrible. That's just the nature I am. The closer a book comes to publication, the worse I feel about it. This isn't perfect, but it's close, closer to what I imagined in my mind than most of the books I've done. That what I wanted to do and what it ended up being is similar.

Well, it seemed like you were spilling all of your football thoughts. Yes. You're just trying to get them all down with some structure through basically nine different topics and trying to hit as many things as possible. And there were some... How much do you want to spoil?

Well, I don't care, really. I mean, a little bit, I guess, but not in a bit. It is very interesting how the world is now. When that book Abundance came out last year, okay, now that seems like a book I would read, right? I never did read it, although I completely informed about it because I heard it on podcast nine different times. Sometimes I think that the way things work now is you write a non-fiction book and maybe 150,000 people read it, but most people experience it through this, through these ancillary moments of people discussing the book. I understand that there are people listening to this podcast who I think would be prime people to buy this, and they probably won't. They'll be like, I just I don't buy books anymore. It's really hard to sell books to men, particularly. So if you want to talk about specifics of the book, that's fine. I don't mind.

I was psyched that I had to read the book because you were coming on and plus I wanted to read it and it forced me to read. And as we discussed, I usually read stuff on my iPad now because we're older. But I think part of the issues with books these days is that it's so much easier to just consume other things that don't take as much brainpower as a book, which I think is, you and I have talked about this offline a bunch. I think it's the most alarming thing when I think about people under 30, because it's not just like, oh, people got to read more. It's like, when you read, you learn about the past. And the only way to know how to prepare for what's coming in the future is to learn from the mistakes of the past. And if you're not reading and you're just watching the craziest clips of all time on Twitter, Instagram, or wherever, you're not going to learn That's the part that scares me the most. That's how you and I, I think we both had a lot of time by ourselves when we were kids.

I read everything. I just don't feel like I would have done that if I was a kid now.

It's an interesting thing. Okay, so there's this belief that nobody reads anymore. Now, I don't think that's actually true. In a weird way, I think people might be reading more than they ever had in their life because they're constantly staring at their phone. What they're not reading are books. Okay. The problem with this, if there is one, I guess things change and you just got to accept that the world changes, is that anything that's through the internet or through the media in the present tense is really a prisoner of the present. It doesn't really exist with the idea that the past happened. It doesn't really care that much about the future outside of tomorrow.

Well, wait, let me interrupt that for a second because we saw this happen this weekend, and we see this happen all the times in sports now when there's a really good weekend. People are like, That's the best weekend we've ever had. And it's like, Was it? Do you want to go through the last 50 years and actually try to figure this out? But it's just present big hyperbole one way or the other, and that's how things get consumed for the most part now.

Yeah, and maybe that's understandable and natural. But I can't change in some ways the person I I like writing books. I like books. I just am the age of the person who does, I guess. And that's the only way I really would have felt comfortable doing something like this. What's in this book, it wouldn't make sense as a sub stack that I do over time. It's this thing. It's this thing.

Or like a narrative podcast where you do each chapter, you interview people. Well, all right, I'm going to spoil a couple of things. The basic premise of the you think football is not going to exist in the way that it does now in 50 years.

The basic premise, the most basic premise is this, which is that football is probably the most popular thing we have in the country right now. There's a sense that this is just how it's always going to be, but nothing is like it. In 50 years or 100 years, the world is going to be different, populated by different people. And football, it probably won't completely it's going to radically receive and will not be the center of the world as it is now. When that happens, people in that time are going to explain or try to explain what it was in the same way that people now, sometimes try to describe the meaning of roaming gladiators or the meaning of jazz or these things from the past that are still around, but they're gone. It never works. It's always the always wrong because people are always basically projecting the present onto the past. They're taking this is how we think about things now, so therefore this was the failure of this thing in the past because it's also always framed as a failure. The thing ended, so something must have went wrong. I know that's going to happen with football.

I can see it already. I can see people just preparing for this, almost unknowingly, that when football starts to change and starts to become less important and moves away, they're going to say, Well, this This was why that happened. This is what football meant. I'm trying to describe what football means now and why it became the thing that it is. If somebody said to me, What's the best way to describe the last half of the 20th century, like 1950 to 2000, you need some vessel to use as the way you describe that, I would use football, which is why a lot of this book, in some ways, will seem like it's a little bit, I wouldn't say mired in the past, but involved the past. I mean, most of the things discussed in this book, many of the players, not all of them, but a lot of them are players who are retired now or things that have happened already. I feel as though the future is not designed for football to dominate the way the past was.

Obviously, I agree with you. What's interesting about that is you could say from 1888 through about 1975, baseball was the sport that explained everything the best. With football, you could almost... There's an overlap for a while, but one of the points you made in this book is that at some point, football grabbed the America pastime title from baseball. And some of that was unforced errors that baseball had. Other things were that football just became way more popular. Fantasy football came in. They figured out how to just put more games on. You mentioned in the book how you watched two and a half a week. There was the early game, and then there were usually a double header on one of the networks unless the pats were playing. So it was sometimes three afternoon games, but maybe usually two, plus the Monday night, I was in the same boat as you could maybe stay up through Coselle. Then we experienced it through football highlights from the pregame show on CBS. There wasn't ESPN back then. Football cards, magazines, books, Sports Illustrated. We're just grabbing any piece of it. And I think what's changed so much since now that we're in our 50s is football is just everywhere all the time.

I think how many channels it's on now. Absolutely. You have a game on Amazon, NBC, Fox, and CBS. We have five playoff games in four spots, and you can see every piece of it. You can see the highlights right away. I can watch after a Patriots game. I can see Mike Vrabel greeting every player as they run back in the tunnel. And then I can watch the locker room speech does everyone give? And I can do this within an hour of the game. And if you had explained any of this to us in 1978, we would have been... Our brains would have broken.

Oh, absolutely. And we would have wanted it. We would have wanted what it's described, even though I don't know if necessarily the way it's working out is better for the consumer. But just to go back to something you had said earlier, it is an interesting thing. Football was more popular than baseball in the '70s. It already had passed it, but we didn't think of it that way. We still looked at baseball as the American pastime, and football was this other thing.

Do you feel like football had stars in the same way that baseball did? I think that was the one difference where it felt like Pete Rose, Reggie Jackson, and a couple of those guys were just bigger than any football player except maybe Stalback.

Well, but here's the deal. That seems like a positive, but it is a problem for any sport focused in that way around people. See, football is a real advantage of many things, but one of the real advantages it has us, is that the players are almost faceless. We're always watching this clash of colors on the field. The uniforms, it's a warlike simulation where the 20 Most popular players in the NBA now are more famous than the 20 most popular non-quarterbacks in the NFL, for sure. They're more recognizable. And that seems like a benefit. If you're the NBA, you're like, This is great. We have all these personalities. But the thing is, personalities disappear and people's feelings toward them change. What matters is the thing itself. The reason football is so dominant is not because of the individuals. It's because of the collective. It's because the sport is what people like. You had mentioned this thing with batheball. It is interesting. So football starts late 19th century or whatever, and then it intersects with the rise of television in the 1950s, and that is what makes it happen.

The famous Colts Giants game, that really kicks it off, and then we're just off.

I mean, that's the marker we use. But it really goes beyond that. Because certainly, when you're inventing a sport in the 19th century, when you're inventing college football, television doesn't exist. When television as a medium was being created, there was an idea that, oh, we can show sports on this. But it was like, we can show the Kentucky Derby on this. We We can show baseball games on this. Football was not the... No one looked at television and thought like, this will be the perfect machine to broadcast football. And as it true?

Wasn't that boxing, though? Boxing, too. I feel like boxing was the most important TV sport.

Yes, absolutely. I mean, all three of those sports, when television was created, I think would have been like, this box will let us do. But one of the big arguments I make early in the book, and the reason it's the first essay is because in many ways, that's the most important, is an incredible coincidence happened, is that football is better experienced through television. And television, for a whole variety of semiotic reasons, the best thing it can do is show you a football game. The way it's designed, the way the passive experience of watching television works, it's just ideal for football. And this is why football became the thing that it did. It's this enforced marriage to television that ended up being the best possible thing for both sides of the equation. That's why when I say football was more popular than baseball in the '70s, we were still operating from this idea that what mattered is what we said mattered. So if we say baseball is the national pastime, it was. But at some point that changed where the consumer had more control than the person dictating what the meaning is. And football now is so pervasive that it informs the lives of people who don't care at all.

It's a cliché thing to say, but really, as somebody's into the monoculture, it's just football and Taylor Swift. That's it. All that rest is gone. That's why I would say football is really a way to understand the last half of the 20th century. I'm not sure it'll be the best way to understand the 21st century.

Well, there's some genius things that they added, too, with it. When you think about the football we watched in the '70s '70s versus where they are now. Part of the problem with football was if you came into a game, you didn't know what the score... This seems like so basic. I know. You wouldn't know what the score was for 20 minutes, and then they might flash the graphic. They're like, Oh, the Browns are winning. Be one of those, they gradually realize, Oh, we should put the score on the bottom. When you're watching, especially on the old square TVs with the Reception's Not Awesome, you never knew what was the first down. You couldn't see the ball sometimes. You couldn't see like, replays of what happened. Did the guy catch it? So they add instant replay. They add all these things that make you a participant in the game, even though you're not playing. I have opinions on all the strategy on both sides. I think I'm smarter than half the coaches, even though I'm clearly not. I'm debating whether this was a penalty, whether he caught this. Why did they call it this way that time when they caught it the last time?

Baseball lost a lot of that with the stat revolution. All of a sudden, there weren't many arguments because you couldn't be like, Ohtani shouldn't bat first. That's ridiculous. So fast guy should bat first. I was talking with my friend Kevin Hinch the other day about when the '78 and '79 Red Sox, we had Rick Burleson and Jerry Remy at the top of the lineup because they were the fast guys. And their on base was like 290. I was like, well, of course they should be at top of the lineup. But now if you redid that Red Sox lineup, Fred Lynn would clearly bat first.

Yeah, it's very weird. It's like for somebody my age, it was very weird to see like a Connie batting first. I was like, what?

It It's weird. So baseball solved all this stuff. But football, I feel like we've never really totally solved. We still have games like that weird Pats Chargers game where it's just like the chargers can't figure out how to block these guys. It's like the basic things that were still happening in the 1930s. And that's, I think, why it still works.

The things you're saying are all true, but I guess I feel like it's something even much bigger than that. I mean, okay.

Oh, no question. I'm just saying that I think that stuff helps.

But what I'm saying is, okay, so One thing that's often mentioned, particularly by people who don't like football, is a very famous Wall Street Journal article from 2011, where these guys studied these pro football games and they were like, Do you know in a three-hour telecast of an NFL game, there's 11 minutes of action? You're sitting there for three hours and there's 11 minutes of action. Now, if somebody was inventing football right now for the first time, there was no way that would get through the pitch meeting. If they said this is a three-hour sport and there's actually about 11 minutes of action, people would say, That's insane. No one's going to sit through that. Nobody wants that. That's a huge flaw. But it's not a flaw. As it turns out, 11 minutes is the perfect amount. Because these things you're talking about, they happen in between play. Phase. Football has this accidental upside, which is super intense, hyper-action in this small window of time, maybe seven seconds. And then there's This time when you can think about what you saw, what you will see next, what was the meaning of that? Maybe the analyst will describe what we actually saw in a way that we couldn't comprehend.

Or maybe I'll hate the analyst and think he's an idiot. Sure. Either way, I win.

Or you can think about something else. You can talk to somebody about something that's not involved with the actual football game, or you can talk about the football game. This experience, which seems like it should be a mistake. It should be a mistake that's something that lasts that long has that little amount of action. This That is one of these things that... It's one of the many counterintuitive things about football, in that the TV experience is great despite the fact that it would never get through a focus group. The fact that somebody said, The main view you will have in a football game, most of the time, will not show you all the players. You will not be able to see the free safeties. When the quarterback drops back and throws the ball, you will have a moment where you will have no idea if the guy is open or covered. These things that seem like they should be problems actually create this internal psychological tension that makes this experience so enriching. I really believe that football, the reason that it is the best thing television has ever been built with, is because even a bad football game is weirdly watchable in a way that isn't true about other things.

Like the very apex, the greatest final four game or an extremely tight World Series in the ninth ending, those are as good as any football game. At the apex, it's all shared. But at the bottom, a bad football game is still better than a bad almost anything.

Then you throw in gambling and fantasy football and other things you might have, and that's even better. Yeah, two things on that. One, the 11 minutes. It's 11 minutes, but there's so much to discuss between every play. It doesn't feel like 11 minutes. But you notice it when I have the Sunday set up and I have the six games going at once, it's always amazing how many games are either in commercial or not. You can actually watch six games at once because there's so little action in all the games that you can, for the most part, get a feel for every game. Sometimes two games will have something happening at the exact same time. But for the most part, you really can watch six games at once.

But you're in an insanely specific situation, Bill.

You are in terms of both people who love football. I get it, but I'm just saying that's one of those things where it's like the 11 minutes, you really feel it. You couldn't watch six basketball games at once. It would be It's possible. It's true. You watch the Red Zone on Sunday, and then you watch the Sunday night game. Red Zone is another one. It's not thrilling. Red Zone is just constant boom, boom, boom, boom, boom in reverse where basketball is constant. But then when we get to the last four minutes, what happens? It becomes too slow. There's too much time. There's timeouts, there's instant replay reviews, and there's not enough action. And we're constantly going, Come on, just start. And that's why when we watch the World FIFA Championships or the Olympics or something, and there's a real pace to the games, we're like, This is much better. Why can't basketball be like this? In a weird way, they have the opposite problem.

One of the things I talk about in this book is how There are three types of sports. There's the one sport that is like basketball, soccer, hockey, to some extent, auto racing and boxing. They're hypnotic.

They're constant moving.

Because it's action that's It's perpetual. It never stops. So you can almost be hypnotized by it. When the action is great, of course, you're thrilled. But even the second quarter of an NBA playoff game can get dull sometimes. You can check out. There are other sports that are almost totally intellectual and cognitive. Base, golf. These sports where most of what you're watching is thinking about what could or could not happen.

Golf is a great one for that.

It's actually everything you see When you're watching golf, it's like a set up, prolog for what you hope will happen at the end. Then the third one is football, which is unlike the other two in the sense that it is like the second version where there's lots of stoppage of play and there's lots of consideration of what could happen, what happened earlier, all of these things. But in the moments of action, it is so hyper kinetic that it feels as though you're watching something very that's moving fast. It doesn't feel slow in the way some of the other cognitive sports do. And football is unique in this. Football takes the best qualities from these two kinds of sports and makes it into one sport. And again, this was completely accidental. No one planned this. Nobody thought to themselves that the way football operates will be ideal for this television medium, and it clearly is. And even if someone wants to argue with me, if someone wants to say, Oh, there's many things that are actually better on TV or whatever, it's like, The evidence sure suggests the opposite. The evidence suggests that people would rather watch football than anything.

In 2024, the numbers were a little bit changed because it was an election year. But people still watch the Super Bowl more than they watch the election results. I mean, there's no comparison to this in other countries. Soccer is the sport of Europe. In In many countries, it's almost like their combination of football, basketball, and baseball, and hockey altogether. And yet we would never see in Norway that 93 of the 100 most watched events were a sport. I mean, people in Japan love baseball. It would never be a situation where 93 of the 100 most watched Japanese broadcast are baseball. America is different in a lot of ways. This is one of them.

Well, it's funny that football has evolved perfectly as the decades has evolved, whereas other sports have not. I think about tennis, and there's no fault of tennis, but the players just became more durable during matches. You have these matches that are five and a half hours, five hours, four hours and 48 minutes. It's like the players outgrew the sport in some ways, where I actually think they could probably think about changing the rules. I'm not sure anyone wants be there for five-hour matches.

That was always McEnroe's thing, is make him go back to wood rackets.

Or make it four games a set or something. I used to love tennis more than I do now. Now I watch Wimbulton and I watch US Open, and that's really it. But for the most part, I don't want to spend five hours watching a tennis match.

Although this is another thing that complicates this conversation. Could tennis find a way to become more popular in the way that baseball found a way to make some real changes? I mean, baseball is a better experience now on TV, though, because the last World Series is evidence. But yet something like tennis or track or any of these things, they don't really need to be this thing that 80 million people care about. They can be their own thing and they can evolve in their own way. But now football can't do that anymore. Football can only get bigger. The NFL can only expand, and that's what makes it fragile. That's why at the end of this book, I talk about this idea of how football could collapse. Right now, that seems insane. Right now, it seems more likely that football would swallow up every other sport, and that's all we would have. But nothing works that way. People change. The world changes.

It was the only part of your book that I disagreed with vehemently.

Really? So you agreed with the part about Tom braided and Jim Thorpe?

No, it was just when you talked about how commercial money, not to spoil, but commercial money was going to go away and they wouldn't be able to replace it. I actually think they're always going to be able to find a way to replace the money. And you're already seeing it now. You never could have predicted the streamer stuff. They'll keep making the schedules longer. They'll keep selling these one-off games. And I just think as long as the ratings and the interest are where they are, the money is going to come from however people consume it. And what the real thing we've learned is that people, you mentioned this earlier, it's more fun to stay home and watch all the games it is to go to a game. It's the only sport where you can definitively say, Why would I go to the game? I'd rather watch it because it's more fun to watch it at home.

There are many reasons to go to a pro football game or a college football game, but one of them can never be, I want to see the game better. That It could never be it. The two things I wanted to say before we move on to this, though, it's like this thing you say about how as long as there's interest in the sport, they'll find different ways to pay for it. That's possible. I think certainly in the way we are now, let's I would say advertising disappeared tomorrow. I think that the NFL could sell these games a la carte.

But why would advertising disappear, though? It's never going to disappear. People are always going to have to tell other people about their product.

But here's why I would say this. The reason I think that at some point, the idea of commercial advertising, particularly, is going to disappear. Because we don't have any proof that advertising works now. The only thing we know about advertising is that it can introduce people to a product that they've never before experienced. So if someone has never had a Budweiser and they see a commercial for Budweiser, it introduces that in their life. But if they see a thousand Budweiser ads, it's not necessarily going to make them want to drink it more. So advertising is already a gamble. It's just the best thing that we have if you're a company or a corporation. It's a little tautological, too, because it's like, well, we advertise a lot and our company is successful, so we put more money into advertising and it stays successful. I think that there is going to be a realization in the in the future that advertising is a lagging indicator of everything and that the amount it costs, not just to create ads, but to pay for them, to pay whoever, Fox or Prime, whoever is showing them, isn't worth it. And that's going to be a sudden sea change.

There's going to be this sudden realization that what these platforms and these networks are paying for this sport, it's not going to work. Suddenly, there's going to collective bargaining agreement, and the amount of money is not going to go up for covering the NFL. It's going to go down. And there's going to be a work stoppage. And the bigger thing here, Bill, and this is the key point, is that I think the human relationship to football is already starting to change. And 40 years from now, which is two generations, the average person, their only relationship to football will be, It's an entertaining distraction that's on television. And if there's a work stoppage, they're not going to care. If there was a work stoppage now, people would lose their fucking mind. They'd be like, What am I going to gamble on? What am I going to do on weekends? How do I live? When the strikes happened in the '80s, and football wasn't as big as it is now then, but it was big. And people were like, We want these games back. We need these games back. I can imagine a time in 50 years when this happens, and the person who consumes football does not have a hard time living without it.

And that's what the thing that we cannot possibly... It's hard to visualize that now. It's very difficult to visualize a world where people aren't like us. But of course, there will be in the same way that we're different people than the ones who lived 50 years ago and probably could not believe that horse racing would ever disappear.

I want to keep going on this, but ironically, we have to take a break to hear from our sponsors. So you mentioned horse racing as a sport that was absolutely massive and then declined in public interest year after year after year, basically starting, I would say, in the '90s, right? Somewhere around that.

I would say it started decreasing in popularity, probably in the '40s or '50s. In the '70s, when there was just these- Seventy's was a renaissance.

We were kids.

There was an incredible run of horses, right? But even those horses. People unironically argue, like Seabiscuit was as popular as Babe Ruth. That wasn't the case for Seattle Slou. Seattle Slou wasn't as popular as Reggie Jackson or whatever. It already started to change to the point now where to be a horse racing fan signifies something very specific. Either you are an addictive gambler or you own horses. That's basically it.

Or you're an addictive gambler who owns horses. Sure.

That's the third category.

But the horse racing thing, it really was... If you go back, if we rank the sports in 1928, it's horse racing, boxing, and baseball in some order, and I think football is probably fourth.

I mean, fourth. It's an odd thing that people love to bring up this thing of the three biggest sports 100 years ago. They never go to the fourth one. Was football the fourth most popular sport?

I think football was fourth. Then I think it started a nudge horse racing out probably in the '40s.

Probably.

Because it's only a spectator sport in the '20s. Boxing, you could do on the... That boxing was a big radio sport, so it was horse racing. Then by the '50s, I think it switched. The boxing, who was the guy that died in the ring?

Was that from Booba Mancini here?

No, in the '60s, I'm blanking. Emile Griffith killed Benny the Kid Paré, whatever that happened on live TV. That seemed like that was some weird tipping point for boxing is People started to go, Whoa, what's going on here?

Are you sure that's what made it happen?

Because that's a modern view of that. I don't know if- No, I think that's when it happened. I think that was a big public reckoning with what are we watching? It was the first time that it happened with boxing. I think that was the fight. Then Ali spiked it up again in the '70s. Then when we saw Ali in the '80s, that probably wasn't always- I mean, obviously, Max Kellermann or whatever would be a better person to talk about this.

But it's like the decline of boxing is very complex. It has a lot of different aspects as to why corruption, the way the fights has changed. There's a really great... I don't know if you ever listen to this podcast, Hardcore History. This guy, Dan Carlin, has an amazing episode about how boxing is the one sport that all experts basically agree is the only one where the guys would lose the guys of the past. And that even many of the things boxers did in the past can't even be done now. There's no one to train them. And because the weights don't change, guys stay in the same weight class. A boxer from the past would beat a boxer from the present in all likelihood now. So boxing is its own thing. The decline in baseball is something we've talked about, and I think it's It's nuanced.

Yeah, we've talked about it.

But there are some wide brushes that can be made. Horse racing is the easiest to understand, to me, at least. That was just like there was a time when we had a relationship to horses, and there's a time when we didn't. So we were watching We're watching something now that's alien. We're watching these things that we... I would guess that there are people listening to this podcast who have many, many people who have never touched a horse, have never actually had their hand on the horse. I would guess maybe the majority of the people listening to this podcast.

But your case in the book was that horse racing was so much more popular in the first part of the 20th century because people actually spent a lot of time around horses.

They still cared about horses.

Even if they didn't care He used them for transportation.

Well, yeah. In the year 1900, even an urban area like Chicago was called the city of Horses. There were horses everywhere. If you had a blue collar job, horses did the work. Maybe You didn't have a horse, but your dad probably did. Your grandfather almost certainly did. The country was more rural. So the idea of just running into a horse was come. The idea of encountering horses was not some surprising thing. It would probably be surprising if you leave this podcast and saw a horse. That might be enough for you to tell everyone you know, you will not believe what you saw was a horse on the street or whatever. So I think that is a huge part of it. And that's why I made this comparison to what I think is going to happen with football in that it is increasingly becoming something that people only watch, that they would never let their kid play. They didn't play themselves. Their father didn't play. They It's this thing that is an only... It's a mediated experience only. When a mediated experience only disappears, it can be replaced with other media. That seems like an obvious thing to say, but it's true.

I don't think the way people feel about football is going to continue. I think that in many ways, people our age are at the tail end of this. There's still some people younger than us, but for the idea that it's a normal thing. Like a normal thing to... I don't think you played high school football, but you probably went to high school football games. It was like it was in your world.

Yeah, because I think I don't know if I agree with you on this one because I think it's more realistic that football will evolve and there will be different forms of football at the same time. And you're already seeing this with the flag football stuff. That's a different thing, though. No, I know. But I think some stuff is going to shift that way. So your basic premise is right, but I don't think football necessarily goes on the major decline. I think it'll just shift where some people will just be like, oh, high school football is just now flag football. Or it's like no hitting. And that's just where we are 50 years from now.

I think this is why it's a complicated but interesting thing. It's like there are some components of football that have to be there for football to be what it is. Nobody watches, or very few people, I would say, watch football as a blood sport. Very few people watch football hoping to see guys just get rocked and get carried off in stretchers. That's not how it is.

There might be- Yeah, but it's recently It's 30 years ago. I think that was a component.

Well, there was some of it there. But even then, there was always this idea that what they liked about football was the game itself. But for it to be meaningful, there has to be the risk of real injury. That if you take... That what is interesting about football is not necessarily or just entirely what you're seeing on the field. The guy's running a post, the quarterback's rolling right, they're pulling these guys. That's interesting, right? But they're doing it in this incredibly dangerous scenario. And as you remove that danger, the meaning of the thing that you like changes. A guy, say, a guy is going to climb Mount Everest. He doesn't want to die, but it's meaningful because he could. Football has that. Football needs to have an element of violence and of danger, not because the violence is what we like, but the violence changes the meaning of everything else. As football moves away from that, they say, We could play flag football, right? It would be just as exhilarating to see Pukinaku or whatever run a pattern without the idea that he's going to get his head knocked off when the ball comes in or whatever.

But it's not the same. And that's what I think is going to change. I think the idea is going to be that we're going to just completely bifurcate this, where there's going to be people who watch football and people who play football, and they have no relationship at all, no interaction whatsoever. Football players are all going to come from the same places. The only places in America that say that we're going to stay with this. This is part of our identity and our culture. And that makes it perilous. It makes it precarious, I guess. The idea that there is this thing that people are supposed to care about, even though it has no meaning to them in a personal individual way. See what I'm saying?

I do. I just think you got to throw in the... As long as college football and college scholarships exist, I think there's going to be a huge part of the country that still cares about being good and whatever the before high school football, high school football, can I get somebody to pay for my college by playing football?

We're in a very fascinating time to have this specific point. We sure are. Okay. So let's say, I don't know when our first podcast was, 20 years ago. If we would have said, You know what's going to happen in about 20 years? Indiana is going to be the clear favorite to win the national football Championship, and Nebraska is going to be 16 and 0 in basketball, and they could win the Big Ten. What? Big Ten? None of it makes sense. None of it seems possible. Now, in the short term, these things NIL stuff, portal stuff, is going to slightly boost the popularity of these college sports because now people in Indiana are able to watch football in a way for the first time in this way. Anytime you professionalize something, it does have a short-term benefit, a short-term game. But for time, I do think this is probably going to be a disaster for college sports.

I wouldn't even use the word probably. I think we're headed that way already.

I think you just trying to say that there'll always be places, though. In Tennessee, they'll always care about Tennessee volunteer football, and maybe that is true.

But I'm talking about as a high-end sport that competes against the NFL and all these other places, it's so poorly governed right now. We're getting to the point where people are in the playoffs and they just leave their teams? Or they decide they're transferring. You have guys in a secondary of a team that's in the final four just transferring. Be like, Okay, guys, good luck. You're done as a sport if that keeps happening.

It's not even poorly governed. It's ungoverned.

It's ungoverned. It's a Wild West.

Now, in the present moment, we can't really blame these guys. You can't look to a kid, and I saw today or whatever, I think the Arizona State quarterback is transferring to LSU, I think I saw this morning. I'm sure he's going to get a ton of money for doing that, and he's going to be a high-profile person. So you can't look at that kid and be like, Why? You can't blame him. You have to do what's best for... Every person has to do what's best for them. You can't expect them to think about the long term health of the sport. You can't put this on coaches. You can't put this on anyone. You can't expect them to think about things in the future. But these things are going to be detrimental in the future. People are going to have a less relationship with college. We've already seen what happened with college basketball when guys only played one year. It was like we didn't have a relationship to the best guys. It's like you'd see a player and he'd be gone or whatever. Football is now... I mean, all sports are doing this, I guess, basketball as well, have done such an amplified version of this.

We have guys from the G League now going back to college, football players playing on seemingly somehow six different- What about the guy in Kansas, Darren Peterson, who's got a huge N-I-L money and then got hurt?

Then there was rumors that he was just going to be done and keep the money. Then he came back and he Whatever happens, he's only going to be there for six months anyway. I just feel like all the stuff that's happening in college this decade is confirming how stupid college sports were for a long time and everybody was in complete denial with it. It was like these athletes are getting exploited. Everybody's making so much money for them. These guys should be more empowered. Well, now we empowered them, and now it's like Wild Wild West, and there's no middle ground, and there's nobody to figure out the middle ground. That's the thing that maybe there's other parts of America that work like this. But this is unsolvable because nobody's going to solve it. Nobody's going to be empowered to be able to be like, Okay, here are my ideas. Everybody's got to listen to me. Can you imagine? Even in the Cowboys dock, when Jerry Jones was like, Fuck it, I'm just going to do my own deal with Nike. Everyone's like, Whoa, you can't do that because he broke out of the 32 team code that was there.

College has no code.

The NCA, as it turns out, was just a bunch of letters. They really They have no ability to do anything.

Other than just prevent people from playing was seemingly their only ability to do anything.

I also think that the way these things are perceived... Okay, so you remember some years back, it was like, I believe it was the Northwestern football team. They were the first team who was going to unionize or whatever. This is before guys were getting NIL money and all this stuff. There was this move where I think this perception that's like, Well, that's good. These kids are doing this? This is unfair. They're being exploited. We looked at college football players the way typically a laborer, somebody who covers labor, would look at coal mines and coal miners or whatever. Suddenly, the idea of having a free college education and being able to have this life was a complete ripoff to these guys. That somehow, if you went to Notre Dame or whatever and you played football and were the hero of the town and got a degree and all these things for free, that was now seen as like, you got jammed. You did not get what you were worth because technically you weren't. Technically, someone like Tim Tebo or Johnny Manzell was certainly making more money for these universities than they were getting back. So it's like I say, it's understandable that any college athlete would be like, Okay, how can I get...

I got to take care of myself. You can't expect that person to think about college sports in general. But who's supposed to think about college sports in general? Who is it? Who I actually got this idea.

I've been getting a bunch of good, good, mailback questions about how to save college sports. The best idea that I've heard that I think is really tough to refute is this seems like the perfect system for relegation where you have maybe it's 24 teams in there, like for college football. It's like the top 24, 16 get to advance, maybe eight are in the playoffs, the other 16 get to stay at the top level. The bottom eight that didn't make it now drop down to the second level. The top eight move up. However you want to do the numbers where basically we have a top, top level that everyone want to be at. Other teams have a chance to move into that level and there's a clear disparity between the levels, and that top level makes the most money. They figure out how to make it so that it's split better between the players and the coaches and the universities. And maybe that works. Whatever is happening now with the conferences?

What's the goal of that? You said to save college sports. What is the goal? To keep them popular? I don't know if the huge risk that in the short term, college sports are going to become less popular. That just seems to me like hyper professionalizing it.

Yeah, but that's my point. I think we should. What is the point of having these conferences? We have conferences. The whole point of college sports conferences was that they were regional. It was like the Pac-10, these kids are in college. We They don't want to have them traveling all over the place. So they're going to play the schools that are closely approximate to where they live. And now you have UCLA flying to play Penn State and all this crazy shit. What's the point of that? So if we're going to hyper professionalize it, let's actually do it.

But okay, I get, but I don't want that to happen. Okay, so all these things- Has the ship sailed, though? Well, it has, but I'm not going to be here and be like, It's sailed, so therefore the ship is fucking great. The ship has sailed, and it's awful. It's bad that this happened. Now, I guess what you're arguing, it's not a bad argument. You just got to keep going forward. And then I would say, Well, keep going forward. Don't even make the guys playing for these schools go to school there. Just let these colleges pay people to represent the university. I guess that would be just as interesting.

Like a minor league, almost.

Exactly. But I don't want that to happen. I liked it when they were... I want them to be different. I I don't want Saturday and Sunday to feel the same to me.

Yeah, that's fair.

They increasingly do, because all these other things are going to happen to the game itself because of this. What's great about college football? Many things, but one of them is that the diversity in the way teams played was a huge spectrum. You might see a team playing like the flexbone, and they're playing an air-aid team, and it's like this collision? One thing you saw with the SEC we see over the last 10 or 15 years is those teams fundamentally play the same because they had all these great players in the same way in the NFL. That once you can't do it. A lot of the things that I think that you might see is like gimmicky in college or like a system quarterback. Can't work in the NFL, right? There's too many good guys. Like a Mike Leach system or whatever would not have worked maybe in the NFL because people would just take these things away and stuff like that. But in college, that still existed, right? It It was a neat thing to see. It was neat to think about how maybe football on the West Coast and football on the Southeast and football on the Midwest is fundamentally different.

And that the players you see are fundamentally different. Even though recruiting is national, Most teams are recruited regionally. I mean, that's going to be completely over now. You say this relegation thing. Let's say we did that. We have 24 teams, and the bottom eight teams get relegated. A kid is still going to basically be, at this point, be persuaded to go to one school over another, not because of whether or not they might get relegated, whether or not they're at the top. It's like, what check is bigger? I mean, that's I know this guy in Indiana, he's brilliant for a lot of reasons. But the reason that gets to good coach is because he's the best at evaluating talent and finding margins.

That's what Belichick thought he was going to be good at. And maybe he still will be, but he thought that was the advantage, which you're basically the 33rd NFL team, was how he phrased it.

But even that, let's say he was. Let's say he had... Let's say Belichick was the best evaluator of talent or whatever. It's still like, do we have the money in our coffers to pay for these guys? That's what it really comes down to.

But here's the problem with the money part. The NIL, we've already seen the boosters who it seemed like a good idea the first couple of years are not going to keep committing money to it because you have the Ohio State situation where they Would they get like 35 million dollars worth of NIL and then they lost anyway. And it was like, Hey, can you write us another check this year? It's like, No, I'm good, actually. Thanks.

It's a weird way. It's like some people are listening to this conversation and they're like, You want these kids to be the equivalent of indentured servants. You don't want them. It's a weird argument to make. No. They're always supposed to argue. Everyone feels like they're supposed to argue on behalf of the player. What is best for the player? And I understand I understand that. I understand that. I understand that thinking. But it's really the institution that matters. It's every player in orchestra. It's every program in orchestra. What is best for all of those things? And that's just an impossible thing to deal with. So I do think what's going to happen, say, with college sports, I do think there is going to be this temporary spike in interest. I'm sure to someone living in Bloomington, Indiana, this is incredible. They maybe have liked football their whole life, but not like this. It's going to expand these things into places that weren't traditionally hotbeds for these things. So at first, it will seem like, I think everyone's interested in this National Football Championship. But over time, It's going to change the thing that we liked originally.

That's why we were talking earlier in this conversation about why I think football's benefit and advantage is that personalities do not drive it. Teams drive it. The idea of football is what drives it. Whereas on the NBA, it's not that way. Now, celebrity drives the NBA now.

I think you're missing one thing with college, though.

Which is?

First of all, we've turned into haves and have not that's more than ever with college football. It's more glaring than it's ever been. You might have a James Madison type of outlier every once in a while. Then what happens? They make the playoffs and the guy immediately gets hired by UCLA and we won't see them again. I wonder When you think about the cost of having a football team from a scholarship standpoint and how you have to match those scholarships on the other side, I just feel like more and more universities, the liability, concussions, how much it costs to do a program, the way people transfer around, how much depends on a coach and how much of a good recruiter he can be, how many laws he can bend his way around. I think we're going to see more and more colleges at the mid-level just be like, Fuck it. And then we're going to turn into the higher-end colleges playing football and then div 3. And that's just where we're going to go.

Football pays for every other sport, though. That's the thing. I mean, even if you look at the Mac or whatever, it's like if you're at Marshall or whatever. It's like the fact that you have those match in games on Tuesday, that's what's paying for the Marshall women's team in basketball, for the track team. So it's going to be hard for college to say we're going to dump football.

But are people going to care about those games as much when we become more about the haves and the have nots, then there's only 20 teams that you really need to watch every college football season. Everybody else is over there.

I think what you're describing, I actually think the opposite is going to happen.

You think it's going to be better for those teams?

Well, because that's what you're describing is how college football was for most of my life. Great. Alabama and Texas, they had down years. But for the most part, when I was a kid, the teams that were great in college football were still that late. Now, Now, who are the haves and haves? Indiana was a have not forever. Now they have it as long as they got this coach and as long as they can pay for it. Nebraska was a have not in basketball. Now they're undefeated. They were a have in football, but now they're not. Now they lose their quarterback. I think that what's going to happen is it's going to be more like... I mean, one of the reasons the NFL is so successful as a massive creation is because every six or seven or eight years, your team It should be good. The whole thing is designed for that, through the draft, through the parody, through all the salary cap, all those things. If you follow a football team for 40 years, there should be at least three or four times when you're in contention for a Super Bowl.

Unless you're the Jets.

Unless you're the Jets because they've just done everything wrong. And yet it still is not unfathomable to imagine the Jets being good in three years. It could happen. That could happen.

Probably unfathomable Rashaun Fentacy. A couple of things you had in this book that I just want to go quick because we're not going to go for seven hours here. You talked about the concept of goats in football and came to the... I'll spoil this chapter because I liked it, but also I don't want to spoil too much of the book. You're basically like, the goat should be somebody that created the ground, that obviously we're going to keep getting better and better at sports as the years pass. And braided is the goat because it was a recency bias. Or people think he's a goat. Because recency bias, he played, he had the most success at the most important position we've ever seen. But the odds are there's going to be another braided. Jim Thorpe comes in, did things nobody could have ever imagined, created the template for where we were going to go, and that should be the true definition of a goat.

That's an interesting chapter in the book because the amount of football players named in that essay- You had eight goats. I think might be more than in any other chapter in the entire book, the number of things about football I discussed. And yet, ideologically, it's just about the idea of how greatness is measured. I think that the modern person thinks about greatness for the most part incorrectly, in the sense that whoever is the greatest player in the present, in theory, is the greatest player of all time because of the way training changes and nutrition changes.

It's like cars. The 2026 best Porsche is probably better than the 1976 best Porsche.

When you're talking about the greatness of anything, and there are exceptions, and I'm sure you're going to pick some up as soon as I say this, but when I'm thinking, if someone asked me, what is the greatest whatever in anything, any subject, what I'm trying to do is think of what is the earliest incarnation of greatness that's still present in the modern version? It's like the earliest version of something that was great, indisputably great, that still exists in every version that comes after. My argument with Jim Thorpe- So it's like the earliest version of something that was great, indisputably great, that still exists in every version that comes after.

And my argument with Jim Thorpe-So it's like a prototype goat.

Well, a little bit. I mean, because otherwise, the argument over greatness- It's go ground zero. It's meaningless.

I like goat ground zero is where you're going, right?

I guess. That way I would be, yes, I could have called that, I guess. I think that that is the way greatness needs to be considered. We always want to think of the future, but greatness comes from the past. It's like the building blocks of these things. I use the Beatles as the example in this book, unsurprisingly. What makes the Beatles so great is that not only what they did, but what they did is still completely present in all the pop music that came after. Now, granted, sports are different. Sports have a greater objective element than a subjective element, and people talk about this. To me, it really came down to Jim Thorpe or Jim Brown, because I think the argument could be made that the sport Jim Thorpe was playing had no relationship to the sport we have now. Whereas Jim Brown, we're playing, we have the platoon system, we're wearing face masks, it's a little closer. But when Jim Thorpe played, it was an 11-on-11 sport, touch downs for six points, a first was 10 yards, there was passing, there was strategy, all these things were there. The rudimentary elements of football were there, and he was the first great player, and that makes him the great player for us.

So by this argument, Bill Russell is to go to basketball.

Well, that's a really interesting one because I do think that in the same way that football has these different hinge points, it does seem to me like there was a real hinge point in basketball with the NBA-ABA merger and the addition of the three-point goal in this period in the late '70s. I think that basketball dramatically changed. The idea that it added a way to score that had never before existed, an extra point for a three-point goal. So I think from that way, you could really look at basketball having these two chunks. In the first chunk, I think it probably would be Wilt Chamberlain. And I think in the second chunk, it would be Michael Jordan.

Well, Well, Chamberlain, if you like losing at the end of the season. Sure.

I mean, the thing is that you factor in. I think you actually overemphasize the- Wins and losses? The outcome as opposed- Titals?

As opposed to- Titals?

As opposed to the process, yes. Yes, I do.

But the same Jim Thorpe argument you make in the book for pages is the exact same argument you can make for Bo Russell. He introduced the entire concept of defense, fast break, something running through a center and everybody running off them. Everything they did in the late '50s and early '60s became basketball, and he won the title over here.

I think you could absolutely make a very strong argument that if you had to pick one of those guys to be on your team, Russell would be the guy to pick. The fact that every time they squared up against each other, it seemed like Russell got the better of him, despite the fact the rosters weren't really the same. No, I debunk that.

The rosters were just as good.

I totally understand that. What I'm talking about is the archetype of of the basketball player, the ability to do the rudimentary elements of basketball, score the ball, rebound the ball, pass the ball, play defense. Move up and down the court. I believe, and I wrote this in your book, I believe that Wilt Chamberlain, with a different mindset, could have been Bill Russell. I do not believe Bill Russell, with a different mindset, could have been Wilt Chamberlain. I don't think that. Now, in the same way that I disagreed with it when it was in my book. So you think that if Bill Russell had been a more selfish, self-oriented- I just think he did what he-but it's going to 100 points in the game?

I just think he figured out the best, how do I win a basketball game? How do I use my teammates? How do I use opponent's deficiencies against them?

Within the context of- How do I win?

Yes.

Basketball is a team sport, so you could make the argument that his ability to to figure out what was the best way to do this within the confines of this five-on-five game or whatever, we can't discount that. You can't discount.

If we were doing Ground Zero, Goats, Thorpe's for football, I think Russell's basketball, and Bay Bruce, obviously, baseball.

I would say those two, but Chamberlain instead of Russell, I guess.

All right, I'm discounting Chamberlain. And then Hockey.

Hockey gets tough. I think Gretzky is the greatest hockey player of all time, even though by my logic here, it should be Bobby Orr or somebody. But like I said, there's always going to be exceptions. There's no theory on greatness that's so air tight, that there are no flaws, unless the only argument that is would be someone who makes the argument that the greatest person in every medium is whoever is the greatest right now because humanity always advances. So somebody could make that argument, and then you can't really disagree with that. You can't. But I don't believe it.

You talked about Moss. You talked about how you thought Moss- He was the best player that I ever saw.

To me, Randy Moss was the greatest football player I saw with my eyes.

The four best football players I ever saw were Randy Moss, Jerry Rice, Lawrence Taylor, and Tom braided, and not in that order. I actually think Jerry Rice, if you could just give me a receiver for their career- Absolutely. And I'd have the best chance to win. It has to be Jerry Rice. Moss, you made the point, Moss had these gifts. That year, he was on the pats. Those first two months, it was like, I've never had an experience like that as a fan. There was something, he passed a stadium test, too. If you went to actually see him in a game, it was unforgettable to just watch him run. He was the only football player I've ever seen where it actually seemed unfair that he was to the defense that he was out there.

I mean, this book, in some ways, it's like a book of criticism about a sport, the same way that you. So the rules, I admittedly, are my rules. So like with the Jerry Rice and Randy Moss, for a career, no question, Moss is great. For a season. Or no, for a career, Rice is better. For a career, Rice is clearly better. For a season, Rice is better. I think potentially for an important game, Rice is better. But for a play, nobody He's better than Moss.

Well, you wrote about my favorite Patriots play of all time, which was an incompletion.

I think it was third down. I think it was the incompletion I ever saw in my life. Yeah.

Giants Superlives at the game. Everyone in the arena knew it was coming. They double-teamed them. He ran as fast as he could for 60 yards. Braided threw it, I think, 75 yards or some crazy thing, and it just missed him. It missed him by an inch, and it was absolutely conceivable that he was going to catch it.

It was just... It was... It played seem to last 18 seconds. It was so... It was just... I can see it in my mind right now. But one of the things I talk about in this, just briefly, it's not a big part of the book. My son, when he would play football at recess in third grade or fourth grade, the kids would talk about mossing people. The kid, in fact, took a post-it note and wrote mossed on it and put it on his forehead. So when he scored a countdown, he could lift up his banks and say he mossed his opponent. None of these kids knew who Randy Moss was. None of them. They didn't even know that the Mossed term had a Randy in front of it or whatever. And to me, that's like, this is somebody who's transcended the game. This is somebody who... Randy Moss was not the first receiver who was ever fast in a great jumper with great hands who did these things. But he became the definition of this thing, this thing that kids want to do when they play receiver, they want to moss people. They want to use pure athleticism to simply out catch, if you think that's a term, their point.

That's meaningful to me. When you see someone do that in a game, when you're watching just any football game and you see a guy do that, it's like he mossed him. That's like a Randy Moss type thing. And I would argue that whenever you see anyone running the football, you're seeing Jim Thorpe. That the essence of that, the essence of being faster and stronger and more agile and more nimble than your opponent in this real DNA of the sport, I think it probably does go back to that.

Yeah, I'm really possessive about the race thing because I think sometimes with this legacy stuff, and this is one of the reasons I wrote my basketball book a million years ago It was like, some people live on, other people's don't. And some of it has to do with what happened after their careers. Did they stay on TV? Did they stay in the limelight? With social media now, are there clips easily caught into, Randy Boss was a problem, and you just watch these amazing highlights. Rice was the best receiver I ever saw. Moss was the scariest receiver I ever saw. But if I had one game, how do you not take Rice? He was always open. That about the quarterback was.

With I should know he plays with these two great quarterbacks, but then even at the end.

Then he goes to the Raiders when he's 40. But he's also playing during a time when you could still get hit pretty hard over the middle and get your head taken off.

Absolutely. Absolutely. I think that you could still make... Because you can use different arguments for this. That's one of the things. There are different ways to think about these things. I'm presenting my way of thinking about this.

Well, the one thing The biggest thing I learned was that I might have known this and forgot, was that Roger Stalbach was your only true sports hero.

Well, yeah. See, I just think it's weird to have a hero as an adult. As a as a man, I shouldn't see another man heroically, even if they're doing heroic things. It's like that's just how it is. You need heroes when you're eight. And your hero when you're eight is your hero for life. So Roger Stalbach is my hero for life. And the thing that I talk about is I feel extremely lucky that that's how it worked out because it could have been anyone. And in many ways, Roger Stabek, to me, represents the best possible hero.

You could have picked O. J. Simpson. That would have been terrible.

Absolutely, yes.

It's like, O. J, pull the car over. Just quickly to go through stuff because we got to run soon. You have chapters that we didn't talk about, about simulations, football coaches, the white-black thing, CFL three downs versus NFL four downs, which I thought was fun. The football coaches almost felt like that could have been its own book. I think if anything has not changed about football over the years. I think golf's never changed. You can watch a 1979 Masters on YouTube. By the way, they have all the old Masters on YouTube, and you can watch them. It's exactly the same. Everything, the rhythm about it, the course, it's like you're in a time machine. Boxing, for the most part, is basically the same. It's just two guys in a ring trying to beat each other, and we have rounds and a referee. I think tennis, when you think about sports like that, those sports have evolved and changed. Hockey's changed, basketball's changed. Horse racing is probably the same. But when I think about football, Football has changed in every possible way, except the coaches still have this outsize something. I'm watching what happens now with Vrabel and the Patriots, and it's like, we had a terrible coach last year, and the team was a disaster.

He came in, culture, the guy bought into the guys, built certain guys up, stuck with guys that maybe he shouldn't have stuck with, and just flipped it around. I watched this happen with Belichick, and now I've seen it. I've seen it happen twice with the Patriots coach. It's still the most important guy other than the quarterback, and that has never changed.

Well, okay, that's never changed. But coaching does have more impact in football than almost any other sport because it's a hierarchical thing. I mean, the fact that every single play is being 98 100% of plays are being dictated by somebody in a booth, transmitted down to the sideline. So they really can't control it. But to me, the more fascinating thing is this. I would say in practice, football coaches have actually changed quite a bit. There's a lot of coaches in the NFL now. I can't really say that I remember a guy like that when I was young, especially among the younger offensive minds, the Rams, the Vikings, these things. However, the caricature of the football coach never changes. The idea you're a big sports movie guy, the way a football coach is presented in a sports movie does not waver. It doesn't matter if he's presented positively or negatively. They still have the same central qualities. Only a used car salesman, that's the only job that has more of a shared idea of what the personality of the person is like compared to the football coach. I mentioned how there was the movie All the Right Moves, and there was the TV show Coach, and it's the same guy in both.

In one, he's a good guy, in one, he's a bad guy. But the way he acts is the same. It doesn't really change. We can see the things the football coach does in different ways. I mean, that's why I have what Kamala Harris thought was going to happen if she takes a guy who was a... Picks a veep who was a former high school football coach. I think she believed, well, people are just going to accept that these things about football coaches apply to him, too. It turns out that was not the thing to do. But if somebody said, Hey, say your daughter came home and she's like, I got a new boyfriend. And you're What's he like? She's like, Well, he's like a football coach. You would instantly have an idea of what he must be like. You would instantly have an idea of what he- Yeah, be like, Charismatic.

Don't trust him. Probably full shit. I don't trust Or maybe be like, it's not the outcome, it's the process or whatever.

You know what I mean? These things that they believe about how to live. It's like Some code they abide by. Yes. The weather never affects them. It's like all these certain things, things they believe that you can't be a football coach if you don't believe it. Oh, Yeah.

Well, and there's so many bad coaches in all sports, but it feels like they can do the most damage in football. They can single-handedly... Because football, fundamentally, it's not that fun to play. You're getting the shit kicked out of you, and you really have to buy into the team and the concept of giving yourself up for the greater good. If you have a coach that you either hate or doesn't get you to buy into that, you end up like the Eagles this weekend, where you have A. J. Brown is like, I'm fucking I'm not even talking to the press. I'm done.

I do feel, we've talked about this many times in the past, I do feel that you are unfair to coaches.

Oh, there's no question.

So you agree, but why would you keep doing it if you agree?

Well, because I get passionate about this stuff. Listen, there are some really good coaches, and then I think there's a bunch of coaches that are either mediocre or worse that do most of the damage during these playoffs, like we saw in that Green Bay Chicago game, that it's impossible to lose that game if you're the packers. And they were poorly coached, and that's why they lost.

Can I give one... I just want to say my point of why I feel at times, you and Sal and some of the guys are unfair to coaches, right?

Yeah.

I feel like you look at what they do on Sunday as 90% of the job when in fact- No, I don't feel that way. That's 20% of the job.

No, here's where it's unfair. I think it would be really hard to stand on the sideline with all that stuff going on and be able to concentrate on all the stuff you need to concentrate on to win a game. Whereas when I'm on the couch and I can be like, Why would you throw on second down when your job is to kill the clock? He's worrying about, are there 11 guys in the field? What defense? And I think there's so much stuff going on. Sometimes you can just miss shit. Sure. But on the couch, you don't miss anything.

But it's more than just that the job on Sunday for three hours is more complicated than it seems. Those three hours are the culmination of everything else. And I think that a lot of times people will be like, why is this guy still getting hired? Why are they still hiring this guy? It's because, yeah, they do have some bad o'clock management. There's these mistakes that they make going for 4,000 or not going for- Yeah, they have a flaw. But there's all of these things that make them a good football coach that are completely divorced from the game we see.

There's also a media narrative thing that I think We're watching him right now with John Harbaugh. John Harbaugh was going to get fired before Lamar took over from Flacko, like halfway through that season. It was like he was done in Baltimore that year. Lamar came in, saved his job, and then he rode the Lamar train for, I don't know, six, seven more years. Then he finally gets fired because he can't really click with Lamar in the right ways, obviously. Now he's the number one coaching for agent. It's like, this guy almost got fired in 2017, and I have no idea how good of a coach he is. We just got to watch him. Some people think he's one of the best five coaches in the league. Other people are like, we'll see in the second team. We just thought Pete Carroll go to Vegas. It was a disaster. I don't know. It might be a situation where there's only four or five good coaches, and that's it. Shana and clearly has proven that no matter what's happening with this team or his roster, he can still compete.

It would seem to suggest that the job he has done this year is maybe the best job anyone has done in the last...

Yeah, he is now unassailably. You could have picked him apart for the comebacks and for his record earlier in his career, but now he's there.

What do you think about this new story about how the reason the Niners are all getting injured is because they're next to this electromagnetic plant.

That's even perfect for you.

Okay.

Oh, my God. No, you were one of the first people I thought of when I read that because I was like, I can imagine Chuck reading this entire thing and then googling for another two hours about what's... I mean, the crazy thing is the story comes out and then Kittle tears his Achilles two days later. Like, yet another one. I don't know. I think there's something to it. How much? If I was a player in the Niners, I'd be like, We're not playing until you move the practice facility. Really? Yeah.

So you think there's a lot to it. You don't think there's... As a player, you would say, I'm speaking for the team. We need to change our practice facility.

I would, wouldn't you?

I mean, I don't know. Is it possible?

Why are they by far the most injured team?

They are the most injured team. Are they by far the most injured team?

I think he said they had by far the most tendon ligament damages. Anyone in the league- Who said this? This guy who did the I'm not going to give you a piece about it.

I mean, but let's see the list. Let's see what's the difference between them, one and two, and what's the difference between one and 14.

All right, so sign me up for way more research on a fascinating topic.

Because what would it mean that Because there's obviously many different ways to get... So what is the idea that... I'm not even disagreeing with it. I've brought it up. But is the idea that there's an electrical charge that is weakening?

It's weakening muscles and tendons. The bigger thing is why- What about the people who work in there?

The people who work... That would be like, are they constantly... Do they go to urgent care more than the other... These are other things you have to look into, I guess. I don't know what... It's a crazy story, but it's straight.

I would say it's the most what the fuck story we've had in sports in a while. When the way it was laid out, I was like, This is unbelievable. How did they not know all this was happening? But this is the shit that used to happen in the 1960s, right?

How did they not know? How would they know? How long would it take you before you put that together? That wouldn't certainly be the first thing. If I had an injury-plaged team, if I was coaching the Seahawks or whatever, and we had a ton of injuries, certainly my first thought wouldn't be like, Is there anything built around the stadium that could affect the physiology of my employees? Who would fucking think of that? It's interesting that it's the story. I don't know. What is your stance on microplastics in general?

A real thing I'm concerned about with the turfs. I would think about that when my daughter was playing soccer when she was little. We would see these turfs with the pellets. I'm like, I know those are bad for people.

Yeah, but what about every other extension we have with plastic?

To me- Oh, you're talking about like in bottles and shit. To me, it's microplastics.

Either microplastics is just something we're talking about because we need to talk about shit, or it's too late. It is over. I mean, what percentage is plastic? I mean, it's like, yeah. Right.

On a scale of 1 to 10, cigarettes where they knew something was wrong for a long, long time and kept, No, no, it's fine. Then after by what? The '70s? By the time we were teenagers, we were like, We know cigarettes are really bad. They were still running ads for them in the '60s.

But there was also no one People knew if you smoked your whole life, you coughed a lot. The first time you smoke a cigarette, you cough. There had to have been. I wasn't alive during that period, but there had to have been some understanding that smoking is not healthy. It is smoke.

My mom died of lung cancer at age The military gave people cigarettes because it'll calm your anxiety, whatever.

I had a teacher, a chemistry teacher. Her mom told her when she was in high school, Start smoking. It'll keep you thin or whatever. So yes, we thought it totally differently.

So I wonder with microplastics 50 years from now, we're like, holy shit. Remember when these idiots had water and water bottles? We're just inhaling plastics?

It might seem like that. It's hard to...

Wait, I have one more thing before we go. This is a short one, but you wrote about Vince Farragamo in this book.

A little bit.

It got me all excited to just rekindle my fascination with Vince, who had a nice little run there, took the ramps to the Super Bowl.

I didn't know you were a big Vince Farragamo fan.

We never talked to him. It was a fascinating rise and fall. It goes to the CFL, bombs, comes back, but it made me look at his pro football reference. It was one of the most entertaining 40 seconds I spent in 2026 so far. His last couple of years, he threw eight touch downs and 28 interceptions in his last three years. And it's like, you can go in these 1980s deep dives and you'll see some of the worst stats.

He also came back from Canada and had a 400-yard passing game.

I know. He was good the year he came back. And then it was like...

I think prior to leaving one year, he led the NFL in passing touchdowns, and he was terrible with the Elowitz. It It is an interesting...

What are some of the- Because now a bad year is like, Gino Smith throwing 15 picks. It's like, oh, my God, Gino was so bad. Can I show you Steve Grogan's pro football reference in the 1980s?

I mean, nothing is crazier than just looking at the trajectory of completion percentage. When we were kids, you want your quarterback to complete half his passes. You could not have a job like that. Now, what are some other great 40-second moments you've had this year so far?

That was way up there. Okay, what else? What else?

Forty seconds. That's a very specific tight window.

No, I was just trying to think of under a minute. Just really, that was probably number one. Yeah, Steve Grogan, when I was a kid in 1981, which was an eight-game season, seven touch downs, 16 interceptions, and 54% of his passes. It was like normal. Because back then, when you're a quarterback, they're diving at your knees. You could hit every wide receiver over the middle. It was like, if you had a quarterback that was 22 touchdons, 12 picks, 58% completion, that guy was probably an all-pro, right?

Well, yeah. The one thing I want to say about this, because I know, So a lot of this book, in some ways, I can hear a person listening to this podcast or hopefully reading the book and being like, Okay, so this guy, he's convinced that everything was better in the past than it is now.

No, you didn't. I don't think you did that at all.

But it's It was an interesting deal. A few years ago, it must have been the anniversary of Super Bowl 3 for some anniversary. So they were showing the Joe Namet, Colts, Jets Super Bowl. They were replaying it. I can't remember if it was on ESPN or ESPN Classic or whatever it was. So I watched that. And it is mind-blowing. Late in the game, it's like Baltimore's down 16 to seven. There's three minutes left. They're huddling every play. They don't use the shotgun. You're watching this, you're like, How could this be the way it was? The only difference is the offensive lineman jogged a little faster to the line of scrimmage. And I was like, You could score twice. How could you do this? So it is incredible how as much as people like me and people like you, we long for the past in a way and how much we loved it. Then when you actually experience, you're rewatching, what is this? Everything has improved. It just feels terrible.

I was talking to Sal about that this weekend because we're both following this guy on Twitter. I think his name is Kevin Gallagher. He posts all these old pretty clear videos of- No, I follow him, too. Yeah. It's the 50th anniversary of this game. It's the 40th, 50th anniversary of this game. So during the playoffs, he's been posting all these payoff moments, and some of them, I won't say I've forgotten. I just haven't thought about it in a while.

There was a lot of Vince Ferragamo stuff on there.

There was some Vince in there, three That stuff was the one that probably beat him in '78, and then the Rams up said him in '79. He had the Hollywood-Henderson interception, touched down on there? So they showed the Mike Renfro play, which as a kid was this incredibly important moment in my life that just came and went. I was a Patriot fan, not a Houston fan, but I didn't like the Stealers and the Raiders because they were in the AFC. Those were the teams we had to beat. So they became the villains for me, those two teams. I just rooted for anyone to try to beat them. And Renfro catches this. It seemed like a countdown, and they huddled, and they ruled no countdown. Now, the Stealers fans would say that wasn't like they would have won the game if he caught it. But it was still a really important play that Houston ended up losing, and it felt incredibly unfair. And it was the moment when instant replay, the ball got going. But I remember where I watched that game. I remember how I felt. I remember being really upset, even though it wasn't my team.

And now that That stuff's fixed. Now it's a catch. Now they look at it for two minutes and it's overturned, and Houston has a better chance to win the game. So I don't... Of course, things are better now. If you're a Houston fan, the Patriots lost on the Sugar Bear Hamilton, rough and the Passer, which wouldn't be able to be reviewed. The rent front thing would have been reviewed.

But the thing that you just said, you said, Of course, it's better now. That's an example to me of why things are worse now. Why? You just talked about something that happened to you when you were probably, what, nine 10 years old. That was nine, yeah. It lives in your mind, right? It also means all this. It was this critical miss call that solidified the Steeler's dynasty, stopped Houston from going in the Super Bowl with all those good old Campbell teams. They never went or whatever. Bum Phillips never went to... Okay. Now, that would have been overturning. They would have got the right call or whatever. But to me, the other thing is better. I say this on every podcast.

So you'd rather have the pain- I hate instant replay in every way.

I think it is absolutely insane that the evidence it takes to overturn a catch or a drop on second eight in the first quarter of the game is greater than the evidence needed to give the guy an electric chair. You don't need to kill a guy. You don't need an indiscutable visual evidence to prove that guy before we execute him. But in football, I think it does not add... Because they still get things wrong. There's still elements of instant replay that don't work. It slows the game down, and it also, to me, forces me to remember, there is something silly about this. It's like guys are playing the game. Humans are playing the game, but humans can't officiate it. We need robots. We need technology to do it. Because even though people are playing, it's so important whether or not Renfro catches that pass that we need to...

It So you're a human error guy.

The human error is part of it. In the same way, it would be like... I mean, it just happens sometimes. The only time that I am not against instant replay is I don't mind it when it's, was a basketball released before or after the light comes on at the end of a half or end of- Just look at it quick. Yes. Because that's like, it's the last play, this is it. But the idea like instant replay and officiating reasons obviously damaged basketball, the last two minutes of a basketball game deeply, particularly the idea of plays that throughout the entire game would be officiated one way, but because we have video evidence, they go the other way. If I hold a basketball in my hands and you punch it, technically, yes, it does touch my pinkie finger last. That's obviously out on you. But when I watch a football game, it's like they talk about, remember the Rams and the Saints a few years ago, with this interference call late in the game. It's like, that's just part of it. It happens.

Basketball happens, too. They'll miss a goal tend or they'll miss something that can't be reviewed. It's like, hey, we all move on. We moved past it. The Renfer thing was a little different.

Sometimes you'll hear people be like, Well, when the playoff starts for any sport, why does the division winner get a bot? It should just be a straight recording of the record. So in the NBA, It shouldn't matter if you won your division or whatever. It shouldn't matter. But that's what it is. We designed it this way. This is the sport. It's like we're not trying to answer. We're not trying to solve a problem. We're trying to create something that is interesting and alive and meaningful and can be used in different ways and helps us understand ourselves in the world. We don't need to find the best possible truth in all of these cases because it's already It's a fictional world. It's a simulated thing. Nothing really important is happening, but we love it anyways. So why do they got to fix this thing that we love to make it more, I don't know, objectively true?

This is what your book's about. It's like the constant quest of solving things, perfection, innovation. How do we get better? One other thing I found out in that Kevin Gallagher thing, how much I enjoyed the really horrible weather games. I don't feel like we have those I regret. Houston just going to Pittsburgh and it's just freezing rain. They lose 34 to 5. It's like zero degrees. That weather could have been a chapter.

No, that was the one chapter that I regret. I I built the book was the right length. But I would have liked to write something about it because this is another thing that sets football apart from other sports. It's not indoors. We never delayed the game or stopped the game. I guess we were for lightning. But the weather is part of it, and it changes the way we think about what makes a football player good, what makes a quarterback good. If a quarterback can't play in the cold, even though he may never face the cold for years, some seasons, a guy never has to play in the elements. You talk about watching six games at once. I guarantee you the game you watch the most during a blizzard is the snow game. It's just a Immediately.

Well, you can see it from it passes the bar test where if there's a TV on and there's snow, everyone gravitate toward the TV. Almost like there's a hockey fight or something. They put it in HD, it looks even better now. It looks amazing.

It'll be like some Friday night and all of a sudden, I'll get a text, and it'll be someone that says, Turn on Wyoming and Colorado State. It's a blizzard. I know what it's going to be. I know it's going to be that. One thing- Well, maybe that could be your next book. Well, I can't remember. I always thought that would be a really great documentary.

Right, I remember. We talked about that.

But it's very difficult for you to do that because it's hard to get the rights to these football games. It's like, only the NFL Network could do it, it seems like, and it's a strange thing. I also feel like one thing, but I feel that in a lot of sports, they've made a mistake now and they can't go back and fix it, which is that they'll delay a football for lightning. If there's a lightning strike within a 15-mile radius of... I think that they looked at this wrong. They didn't realize that 15 miles in every direction is this huge expanse of space. But they can't go back because if they said, actually, it would be better if it was a 10-mile radius or whatever, and someone gets killed by lightning, they'd be like, You actually changed this law. But that was one thing that they did to improve safety. Because very often, these delays, they clear everybody out of the stands, and it's a disaster.

It's pretty bad. The book is called Football. When does it come out?

It comes out tomorrow? Will it be, I guess, phase the 12th, the 19th.

Are you doing a little- A week from tomorrow. Okay, so next week.

Or a week from today. If this is running up Monday or a week, it comes out next week. If someone orders it on Amazon or whatever, it'll probably be come before that because the books are already done.

Are you doing any little tour stuff or no?

Yes, I am. I'm doing New York, Philadelphia, and then interestingly, Harrisburg, and then I'm flying home. Then I'm doing Kansas City, Louisville, Chicago, and then I'm doing Portland and Seattle. It's an interesting collection of towns.

That's a fun town.

I'm looking forward to it. But my life makes it real hard to go to these places. Even when you talk about being able to watch six games at once, that's one thing about your life that I am envious of. Because it's your job and just the work you're living, you can watch everything all the time. My whole life, all fall and all winter, is just a process of me trying to see these games I want to see, which I then never remember. It's with very few There was a bunch of years ago. I sometimes think of this. There's this concert movie about LCD Sound System. Yeah, you were in it. Yes, okay. We filmed that documentary, and it's before their last show, which is on Saturday at Madison Square Garden. They're like, Oh, you want to come to the show? You can get these great seats or whatever. But that Saturday was the day of the final four. I already had plans to watch the final four in basketball. So I was like, No, I'm not going to go. I've seen Elsy Netzsche. I've seen him a few times anyways. I don't know if I can remember who played that day.

I think it was the year Wisconsin was really good. Maybe Wisconsin had one loss, but I'm not sure. So I did this movie, did not go to the big final show where I probably would have got to sit in the front row or something because I had to see these basketball games, and I don't remember them now. It's just all gone. It's It's so weird how that is. Isn't it how I care about these sporting events, and I know you do, too, so much.

Well, it's the anticipation of the game.

I would say we have pretty good memories for these. I would say the likelihood of you bringing up something or me bringing up a sporting event from the past, the likelihood is pretty high. The other person is going to be like, Oh, yeah. And yet for the most part, I'm just constantly because there's something about me that just wants to see every game. This last weekend, I watched college football Thursday and Friday, I could see those. I was able to see the games on Saturday. But then on Sunday, it was my daughter's birthday and all these things. I was planning that party, and then I took my son to play Magic of the Gathering somewhere. I'm doing all these different things. I'm following the game on the radio and my phone and stuff like that. I can't imagine what it's like to be you in some ways, where it's just like, I just go out and I watch everything all the time.

The weirdest one for me was when my daughter was into the club soccer stuff, having Sundays where I was at games as football was going on and trying to do this with my phone and try it. But yeah, my whole thing is I just constructed my life. So if I'm going to keep doing this, I'm going to do it at the highest possible level, I can do it. I just have to do it this way. But the one thing that's happened, and maybe it's a little age wear and tear, I found myself drifting more to four games this year. Versus six. I found it was harder for me to concentrate on all six in the same way. So you don't have two TVs on or like you... No, I was just going with the pure multi-view. I started to go upstairs into our little theater place and just watching the four box on the multi-view and then having my iPad going, knowing if I had to switch things. And I found that could concentrate on everything better.

Well, I feel like you can absolutely justify watching every sporting event that happens. I mean, you You're the sports guy.

How do I justify it? I don't know if I could justify it to my wife.

Storage Tech is playing Vandy this weekend. I got to see it. What's my argument for that? I don't really have one.

Yeah, but you said in your book, you were talking about there's two six and two teams on a Thursday. I got to watch this. It's a great night.

I'm drawn to it. It's this dark thing. It's like, how can I get out of every other aspect of my life to see this? It's crazy because I know I'm not going to remember it. I know it It's just going to go, poof. It's going to be early.

We have to go. The book is called Football. It comes out next week. I like the title. I really enjoyed the book. Obviously, I enjoy everything you do, but I really had a good time reading it.

Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate you promoting it. I know you don't do a lot. You do not do a lot of this.

But you're a special case, though. You're a 20-year Hall of Famer for us. I know.

Well, yes, but still, you wouldn't need to do it, and I appreciate that you did.

No, come on. All right. Good to see you, Chuck. All right, that's it for the podcast. Thanks to Cousin Sal. Thanks to Closterman. Thanks to Gehow and Eduardo and Jack Wilson and Chris and Kevin as well. We will be back on this podcast on Wednesday. Stay tuned. We're doing four this week, so we have another on Wednesday, another on Thursday. Don't forget about the rewatchables. If you like movie podcast, that is coming on Tuesday with What Lies Beneath. I will see you on this feed on Wednesday. Must be 21 plus on President Select States for a Kansas in affiliation with Kansas Star Casino or 18 plus in President DC, Kentucky or Wyoming. Gambling problem, call 1-800 Gamble or visit rg-help. Com. Call 888-79-7777 or visit ccpg. Org/chat-in-connect or mdgamblinghelp. Org in Maryland. Hope is here. Visit gamblinghelplinema. Org or call 800-327-5050 for 24/7 support in Massachusetts or call 877-8 Hope, N-Y or text Hope, N-Y in New York.