Nico’s Gone, Iconic Bad Trades, Baseball’s Comeback, Lane Kiffin, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and the Power of Boredom With Chuck Klosterman

The Ringer’s Bill Simmons is joined by Chuck Klosterman to react to the Mavericks firing Nico Harrison months after trading Luka Doncic (3:04). Then, they take a look at a possible Anthony Davis trade before discussing parity in MLB, coaching in college sports, and much more (40:47)! Host: Bill Simmons Guest: Chuck Klosterman Producers: Chia Hao Tat and Eduardo Ocampo Get Gameday Deals all season long only on Uber Eats. Order Now. The Ringer is committed to responsible gaming. Please visit⁠⁠ www.rg-help.com⁠⁠ to learn more about the resources and helplines available. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Bill Simmons?

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Excitement is in the air. That's right. It's the start of NBA season. I can't wait to get together with friends, share some Michelob Ultras and watch Tip Off. Plus, as the official beer sponsor of the NBA, Michelob Ultra is getting you closer to the action with experiences that make you feel like you're courtside to actual courtside tickets. Enter now for a chance to win at michelobultra.com/courtside. Michelob Ultra Courtside 26 to 27. No purchase necessary. Open to U.S. residents 21+ Begins on October 1st, 2026. Ends on June 30th, 2027. Multiple entry periods. See official rules at michelobultra.com/courtside for free entry. Entry deadlines, prizes and details. The Bill Simmons Podcast is brought to you by The Ringer Podcast Network, where you

• 0:44Bill Simmons?

  can find a new episode of the rewatchables that went up Monday night. We did Snake Eyes, which is a really, really, really fun 1998 movie. Yet another awesome 1998 movie directed by Brandon DePalma, starring Nick Cage. As Sean Fantasy said on the podcast, it was a safety off performance by Nick Cage. He is just, uh, just going for it the entire time. Really fun movie. So, uh, you can check that out wherever you get your rewatchables podcasts. Um, hey, I wanted to, I wanted to bring something back for 2026 for this podcast. Uh, obviously I did this when I wrote, uh, I did this for the first couple of years of

• 1:24Bill Simmons?

  when we had this podcast on The Ringer. And, um, now I'm going to try to get it going again, maybe on Tuesdays, but I wanted to bring the mailbag back. I wanted to lean on the listeners for some fun questions and, uh, you can email us questions at [email protected]. B S podcast 33 at gmail.com. Uh, send them in. I'm going to have somebody go through them. Send me the best, the best, uh, possibles and then I'll go through and, and try to make it a running thing either on Tuesdays or Thursdays, uh, maybe near the holidays, but

• 2:05Bill Simmons?

  also really thinking for 2026, especially when this podcast ends up on, on Netflix, probably I think in mid-January. So I want to have some sort of extra gimmick. I miss doing the mailbags. It's just pure laziness why we haven't been doing them. Uh, I haven't had time to, to really go through all the emails, but I'm going to get some help and I'm going to bring it back. So the mailbag is coming back. It's not a big announcement, but it's an announcement. It's not as big of an announcement as the Mavericks firing Nico Harrison less than 10 months after he made the Luka Doncic trade. We're going to talk about that and a whole bunch of other things with BS Podcast Hall of Famer Chuck Klosterman, who hasn't been on in a while. We have a lot of topics.

• 2:47Bill Simmons?

  I have some sense of where this might go, but then, as always with Chuck, you just never know. And it's next. We're going to take a break, then bring in Pearl Jam. This episode of the Bill Simmons Podcast is presented by State Farm. Having insurance isn't the same as having State Farm. It's like needing the protection offensive guard on the football field, but getting an elementary school crossing guard. Sure, they're both guards, but you can only trust one to keep your quarterback safe when the game is on the line. So don't settle for just any insurance when you can have State Farm like a good neighbor. State Farm is there.

• 3:45Bill Simmons?

  All right. The BS Pod Hall of Famer Chuck Klosterman is here. We are going to talk about a bunch of stuff. One thing we did not have on the docket was Dallas Mavericks GM Nico Harrison got fired about two hours before we started taping here at 10 o'clock Pacific time. And we never talked about this trade and all this stuff on the pod. So he's getting fired not even 10 months after he made this trade, which when the trade happened, everybody automatically was like, wow, this is one of the worst trades of all time. This is inexplicable. Why didn't he shop it? Why would he trade Luca? Why did he underestimate the fan base? And then somehow it worked out even worse than it seemed like in the moment. Davis has played nine games out of like a possible 44.

• 4:31Bill Simmons?

  And the Mavs are terrible. The fans are enraged and they finally had to dump this guy before we even got to Thanksgiving. Can you remember another sports situation like this since we've been alive?

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know. I have to think about that. It's interesting. The GM is under so much, you know, the fire, like, like his, the awareness of the GM of the Mavericks is higher than the vast majority of their roster, which is Right. I mean, I'll tell you what, though. Okay, obviously, the trade didn't work. I'm not going to sit here and be like, ah, well, I'm the opposite. Actually, it was, but I do think he was treated somewhat unfairly, and it was, to some degree, his fault for not explaining this better, because there is a way to explain this trade that does not seem as insane as it does now. Yeah. All right. What's that way, then?

• 5:22Speaker 01

  Well, okay, so they go to the finals in 2024, and Luca plays great. He's like, he's like 28, 9 and 8, I think, during that playoff run. But they barely beat OKC, and then they kind of got run by the Celtics and clearly couldn't compete with them. So if you're him, and the idea is, the real goal is to win a championship, not to be good, not to be competitive, not to be interesting, not to make money, to win a championship.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  I can understand the thinking being like, we need to go in a completely defensive direction. Which he said. And Anthony Davis is, you know, I mean, obviously, Luca on a scale of 1 to 10, he's a 10 on offense, maybe a 5 or 6 on defense. When he's healthy, Anthony Davis is like

• 6:10Speaker 01

  7, 8 on offense and 8, 9, 10 on defense. So I think that he looked at this and like, we gotta just completely reconstruct this team, because it didn't, we did, we did the best that we could with what we had, with our best player playing awesome, and we could not do it. So we've got to sort of recreate this. They say like, why didn't they throw Austin Reeves in there? I think at the time, he was like, that's not, he's part of the system that's not going to work. It's like either all shooting or all defense. Yeah. As it turned out, it was a mistake. This did not work, and, you know, and everybody who said it was going to be terrible proved right. But You know, okay, so no one talks about him letting Jalen Brunson leave that much because everyone seemed to think you're supposed to let Brunson leave at the time. Now, if they hadn't done that, the team is completely different.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  There's a lot of things, I feel like, that could have made this a completely different situation. But he kind of made that mistake that a lot of GMs do, which is when you make a trade, you're almost supposed to behave like, I'm not going to say anything. I'm just going to let everything play out and I'll be proven right. He should have been more on the offensive and said, this is doing this because we're not going to win a championship the way we're, with the trajectory we're on. We got to change things. And I think that would have seemed a more reasonable. It's, it allowed people to kind of think all these crazy things that he was trying to actually just move the team to Vegas and all this stuff. I, I mean, yes, obviously, I'm not trying to say it was a good trade now. It didn't work, but it wasn't as insane as people responded at the time.

• 7:41Bill Simmons?

  Right. Well, he, he did leak out the defense stuff and he was saying the defense wins championship thing. He probably didn't say, he probably didn't come hard enough on it.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  There's nothing else you could have said, right? There's like, no, like that had to be the reason, but he wasn't very definitive in his defense of this decision, you know?

• 7:58Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, because he's, he's like too cool for school. I mean, there are so many things wrong with the trade and we talked about all of them when it happened. Basically that they didn't shop it. This was the only suitor, that it was the only suitor because if word leaked out that they might trade Luca, the fan base would have revolted. So he's trying to sneak it by the fan base, basically. Can I get this deal done without this leaking? Because if, if it leaks out, I won't be able to do the deal because the fan base will revolt, which probably should have been a red flag for him in retrospect. Like, yeah, you're doing a trade that the fan base is going to revolt. That might not be a great idea. But that, the bigger thing for me, he didn't get enough in the trade, which everybody said at the time. I, whether you like Reeves or not, he has to be in it because at least he's an asset.

• 8:41Bill Simmons?

  But he was banking on Davis, who as we've seen, and he's, you know, he's had some bad luck. Like he got poked in the eye, right? Now he has to wear goggles. He's had some wear and tear over the years, but he's banking on this guy who is a big guy heading into like the, the, he's, he's already in his early 30s, heading toward his mid 30s. When we see the history of the league. These six foot 11 and up guys, as they hit 32, 33, 34, they can get really gamy in a whole bunch of different ways, right? Versus Luca was in his mid twenties with a whole bunch of scenarios where he could have actually gone up a level. And that was the part I didn't understand. You're, you're buying almost past performance and giving up future performance

• 9:24Bill Simmons?

  with this age piece of it that was stupid, along with all the other stuff.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  And everybody who said the trade was idiotic was right. Okay. Time has proven it was a bad move, but I just, I think this is tricky because the way trades are considered while they're happening is very different than the way they're considered retrospectively. And this is what I mean by that. Okay. So when the Thunder traded James Harden, okay, who won that trade?

• 9:53Bill Simmons?

  Uh, the Rockets.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  Okay. But at the time, the trade was made, the idea for both teams was we're doing this to win a title. That is our motive for making this move. And it didn't happen. Now, ultimately, the Thunder down the road do win. So if we look at this of all being dominoes that line up and kind of moving in these kind of capricious arbitrary ways, but kind of ending in the present, the Rockets didn't win that trade. The Rockets did not win a championship by, you know, by getting hard.

• 10:25Bill Simmons?

  Came damn close.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  It seems like that they won the trade because obviously he had this amazing career. And what was given in return did not really, you know, amount to much. But if the goal was to win a title, the goal failed. So if the initial idea about the trade is to win a championship, that needs to be the same criteria you use when considering it in retrospect.

• 10:51Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, that's fair. Well, so Kyrie blew out his ACL right after the trade and AD got hurt.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 10:56Bill Simmons?

  So if you're Nico.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  That was a good acquisition he made that everyone thought was crazy.

• 11:01Bill Simmons?

  True.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  Many people questioned the idea of him getting Kyrie and that proved to be a smart move.

• 11:06Bill Simmons?

  I really respect your Nico Harrison zag. I didn't think it was possible and you're, you're zagging in a way that I, it's new territory. It's like watching somebody climb some mountain that's never been climbed.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  What I'm just saying is that it was that go to trade was a mistake and time has proven that it was. I do think to some degree he was treated unfairly. And I think that the idea of the fan base turning on the guy being the motive for firing him. Well, if for whatever reason they start the season six and two or whatever, everything is different. The fan base will then all of a sudden decide, oh, this was brilliant. He got us Cooper flag with this backdoor in Nostradamus thing. It's, it is strange to take the side of someone who just got fired for obviously making a horrible decision, but that's what I'm doing. Like I, I, I sort of do see the reason behind it. And I just think the pile on against this guy was kind of cheap.

• 12:03Bill Simmons?

  Well, so.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  Anything about him as a person. I don't like, what, what is he like as a guy? Not that that should matter in terms of how we gauge this decision, but what's he like?

• 12:11Bill Simmons?

  Very well respected in the NBA community. I mean, I had a whole shoe background and when they hired him, I think people thought he was like.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  Shoe background is big thing is that he blew it with Steph Curry.

• 12:23Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, but I mean, every, everybody's got one of those probably. I think he was respected as a relationships guy. Like he had relationships with agents, players, people on other teams, and he was somebody that could rejuvenate them. I think like when I look back now that it's almost 10 months later and you look back, this was really, we don't think Luca can be the face of our team trade and what's the best we can do? And almost like we might be getting one over on the Lakers if we get this trade for him now because they don't realize what they're buying. But the part they missed, which I said at the time was like, You're lighting a fire under somebody who the one thing that you could kind of ding him on was,

• 13:07Bill Simmons?

  well, he's not in great shape yet. He's a little bit of a diva. Like all things that by trading him, you're just lighting this massive fire under him to be like, oh, I'm going to fucking show you. So it was like the greatest thing that ever could have happened to him, which people said, including me at the time. And that was the part he didn't factor into the trade. Like, what is the potential of what I'm giving up? What happens if this guy goes up a level, which is what's happening?

• 13:30Speaker 01

  I would take two things to that. One, here again, in retrospect, you are right. So I can't say like, that was, you know, a crazy thing to think, but I think it is difficult to make a move or not make a move based on the intangible abstraction of whether or not this guy will care more if this happens. If this guy will take this in some personal way and he'll lose a bunch of weight and care more. I mean,

• 13:52Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, but that's part of sports though. You have to factor in human nature and motivation.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  That's a good, that's a point in your favor that like, that's the kind of thing he's supposed to think about. The other thing is I do think he probably became fixated on Anthony Davis, that he thought, this is the only rim protector who can feasibly score 33 points as well. Like, I can get the most on both ends of the floor from this guy if he's healthy. And I'm going to gamble on that because I think a lot of these guys, it's like, you know, and you, I'm sure will agree with this. There are so many GMs in all sports whose only goal is putting themselves in a position where they can't do anything that will get them immediately terminated. That if they can always sort of create this.

• 14:39Bill Simmons?

  By the way, Chuck, that's, that's life. That's like the content industry right now. That's like a bunch of media executives that name a company. They just don't want to have, they'd rather not have a win or a loss. They would just rather kind of cruise along and not actually take a risk on anything.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  And is that good or bad?

• 14:55Bill Simmons?

  That's bad.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  That's bad. And I would say that the idea of a guy thinking, maybe we can win the title in two years. If all of these gambles come together. I mean, that makes that gets a guy fired and it did, but it's like a

• 15:10Bill Simmons?

  But the real problem is he didn't make the best possible trade. So if he's going to shop Luca, you shop Luca and maybe Utah comes out of nowhere and says, we'll give you Lori marketing and 10 first round picks. Like you just don't know until it's like, it's like selling something to your neighbor over putting it in on eBay or something like you're just basically guessing that's the what the price is. You don't know.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  Like here, here's a comparison to me in this situation. Yes, they should like should have Reeves in this deal or whatever they could have got marketing all these different guys. You know, teams, uh, this happens, I guess, more at the college level in football, but they kind of run the shotgun all the time. Right. And then they get down inside the 10 and they're still in the shotgun and you're like, what are you doing? Why are you doing this? And it drives you crazy. Texas Tech used to do this all the time. It would drive me insane. Well, here's the deal though. If you say our philosophy is this, how is this, we play in this way. We go shotgun all the time. We go fast all the time. We never eat clock. It's not what we do. You can't say like, oh, but when we're inside the five, we flip this, you gotta stay to the

• 16:11Bill Simmons?

  Now we're a power running team.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  So if he looks at this and he's like, okay, you we throw in Austin Reeves, maybe what Austin Reeves offers, which is, you know, he's averaging 30 points a game this year. He's a great offensive player, but maybe he was like, this is not the kind of guy that we want for what we're doing going forward. We need a different kind of

• 16:28Bill Simmons?

  But he's still an asset. That's like, it's still somebody you could flip for more stuff. That's the issue with that. Yeah.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  And that's, and so you could have flipped him for something else, you know? Yes. I here again. It's like, I'm like somebody here being like, oh, actually it was a great idea to go into Vietnam. It made a lot of sense for it. It's like, I, it didn't work out. Okay. I'm fucking, it didn't happen. Right? So, so I'm not saying that like, actually what you think you saw is an illusion. It made the trade. It was a bad trade. It failed. I'm just saying the reasoning behind it was not as insane as people behaved, particularly in that first 48 to 72 hours after the trade happened.

• 17:07Bill Simmons?

  Well,

• 17:07Speaker 01

  People just sort of lost their mind. And I feel like that, like this idea of winning trades, like you don't know until these things play out, you know? I mean, we gotta talk about it because this is what the job is, talking about this shit. But it's not a good way to do it because the criteria changes from, are we going to win the championship by making this move to in retrospect, who got more value out of this move that both want us nothing?

• 17:33Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, but there's another piece to this, which is the sports fandom connection. It's same thing that the Red Sox had with Mookie Betts, and this is happens over the years. Like we even, I remember when I was a kid, the Mets traded Tom Seaver to the Reds, and I didn't care about the Mets. But as a little kid, I was like, holy shit, they traded Tom Seaver, like he is the Mets. How can you trade the face of your franchise for what you got back? Which was basically like Doug Flynn and I forget who else was in that trade. But, uh, but I think that's the, that's the piece that I think people can over and over again underestimate. How much fans give a shit? How much fans get attached to somebody that's somebody who maybe doesn't make that much money?

• 18:15Bill Simmons?

  They bought their kid a Luka Doncic jersey for $200 and then the kid, the guy gets traded two months later. Like little things like that, they just missed. It's a lack of connectivity. It's a lot of lack of connectivity to the fan base and what they actually care about, which is like, I think the fan base actually cared more about just having Luca in their life for 15 years than actually winning the title. They gave everybody the choice and then like, all right, 5% chance you win the title, but you keep Luca for 20 years. Or 90% chance you win the title with Davis once. I think all the Mavs fans would be like, we'd rather have Luca and the puncher's chance and that's it.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  That I think that probably is true. You know, one thing about the Portland Trail Blazers is that for many, many years, they never really put themselves in a position where they could realistically win a title. But the fan base liked the team because they're always competitive, you know? And I do think that, I mean, that's, you know, when I was, okay, so I have a ton of friends who are huge. I like Minnesota Viking fans, right? Because I'm from, yeah. And we sometimes sort of had this discussion. Would they prefer what the?

• 19:26Speaker 01

  Minnesota, the Vikings have been over time, which is the most successful franchise not to win a Super Bowl, I would say. When you say-

• 19:33Bill Simmons?

  Oh yeah, decade to decade, no question. They're always kind of relevant and in the mix and just can't actually get over the hump.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  And then it was like, would you rather have that or all these other possibilities of teams who won a championship, but for the most part have been down. And I think for the most part that they prefer the way things have worked out. They prefer having a good team all the time, overtime. It almost feels as though they've had championships in a weird way, which-

• 19:59Bill Simmons?

  You're talking about like consistent relevancy.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 20:03Bill Simmons?

  Versus like that one, like the Florida Marlins 2001 title or whatever, or 2002, whatever year that was, when they kind of bought the title and then gutted the team.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  I mean, in the year they went 15 and one and got beat in the NFC Championship by Atlanta, that was obviously a heartbreaking, you know, you would say like a gut punch loss or whatever. And yet there's a memory of that season that is positive in their minds. Like they remember how awesome that was or whatever. So even though it didn't end with a championship.

• 20:31Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  It's though they feel the franchise is, and maybe it's the exact same thing here. Like maybe particularly in a place where basketball is, you know, by far a secondary concern, where it's, you know, where, you know, the high school football matters more in Dallas than the NBA.

• 20:47Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  And it made me be like, well, it's just nice to have a competitive franchise. It's nice to always have a good team or whatever. It's nice to have something fun to look forward to. And that would be, that obviously is what they should have done. Like here again, looking back, that obviously would have been a better move. I did not expect the response to be what it was, but it would be strange to hire a GM. And if he came in and he was like, well, my number one priority is sort of making sure the fan base is enthusiastic and happy. Doesn't matter how we finish. I want the fans to feel good about this. Well, that's actually a very reasonable kind of strategy. I don't think you would hire a guy who says that, right? If his number one thing isn't, we're going to win a title, that's what a GM is supposed to say.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  My job is singular. I am here to put together a roster that wins us a championship.

• 21:39Bill Simmons?

  Well, do you think-

• 21:42Bill Simmons?

  You know, like if you were the Mavericks GM and you called me and I was like your one phone call, yo, I gotta throw this by you. Let me ask you about this and beyond like how dumb the actual trade is. There had to be somebody in his life who'd have been like, dude, they're gonna hate you if you do this trade. Like you, you have to go to the games. Everyone knows what you look like. You're gonna have to sit in the arena and everybody's gonna hate that you traded their favorite player. And if this doesn't work out and it's not quite as good as you think, or Davis gets hurt, or Luca goes to the Lakers and he's awesome. There's like seven different scenarios I can present to you where you become the most hated

• 22:22Bill Simmons?

  person in Dallas since 1963, basically. That's how you would be perceived. You won't be able to go anywhere. It won't be fun for you to go to dinner. It won't be fun for you to go to the games. It won't be fun for you to go into a convenience store and buy gum. Name any scenario with you in Dallas and it's gonna suck. So you sure you want to do this? You have to be really convicted in the trade to be like, nope, you don't understand. If we get Davis, people don't understand how awesome he is and I'll take the heat if he's not. And I just don't think it was that it was even remotely a slam dunk to risk all that other shit.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  Did you happen to watch this Martin Scorsese documentary that was just on?

• 23:00Bill Simmons?

  I still haven't. I'm due.

• 23:02Speaker 01

  Well, the same situation can be said about him making the last temptation of Christ. He had this idea that this is what I want to do and I think this is what I gotta do. I'm sure there were people in his life saying like, don't do this. Like it's gonna change your perception among the people who currently like you the most. Like Christian, you know, it's like he's, he's sort of tied into a world with sort of very traditional views and his audience are people who have sort of, you know, artistic reactionaries or whatever the case, however you want to look at it, you know, but he was like, I gotta do it. And if you want to be great, you gotta do those things. You can be good by listening to advice, but to be great, you have to ignore it and take the gamble, you know? So I

• 23:46Bill Simmons?

  Except in this case, when you're trading Luka

• 23:48Speaker 01

  I didn't think I'd come on here and support Nico Harrison today, but I guess I

• 23:51Bill Simmons?

  Oh, you're supporting the concept of it. You're not supporting.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  Or at least like to me, uh, I can imagine a scenario where things work out differently. And this is remembered as a brilliant decision, but that's not going to be what it is, right? It's not how it's going to be. So I'm not

• 24:07Bill Simmons?

  Well, that's what he'll tell people 10 years from now. Be like, look, Davis got hurt. Kyrie got hurt. I don't think I was wrong. He can move into that mode pretty fast. I don't think I was wrong. I think the team we put together actually would have been really good. And we never saw it and we'll never know. I had, um, I was thinking about like growing up. And then through our childhoods, when we cared about sports and we had no internet, way more time to just think about dumb historical shit. There were always these trades that kind of levitated above all the other trades. Or the Babe Ruth thing was more of a sale.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 24:44Bill Simmons?

  But, um, it's a short, I was trying to think of the worst trades of my lifetime. And Herschel Walker always gets mentioned first, right? Then Minnesota gave all this stuff to Dallas and it was really the wrinkle of the trade where if they just waved all these players, they got all these extra picks.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, that was, it was really a trick in the, in the

• 25:03Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, it was.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  Like they, like they

• 25:05Bill Simmons?

  They hoodwinked them almost.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  Did not believe that they would actually cut all those guys.

• 25:10Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  Like he was like, they're not going to cut everybody. And it was like, yeah, we're cutting them all. And we get the pick and that was, I mean, that, that really was on him.

• 25:17Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. But fundamentally, when that trade happened, people were like, holy shit. The Vikings got Herschel Walker. They gave up a lot, but Herschel Walker is awesome. Like, you know, in the moment, it was not crazy.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  I, I mean, I might be wrong about this, but I'm pretty sure I'm not. In the first game he played, or maybe it was the second game, I think it was the first game, they put him in to return the kickoff.

• 25:39Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  And his shoe came off and he still had this huge return. Like, I don't know, I think he scored, but it was a big return with one shoe on. And I remember all the Viking people being like, this is it. This is it. We did it. This is the, this is it. Like, well, this is the thing that we did.

• 25:54Bill Simmons?

  So it's a defensible bad trade.

• 25:55Speaker 01

  And now, well, it's defensible, not, not if you look back on it, if you look back on it, it would probably was certainly the most meaningful trade in modern NFL history.

• 26:07Bill Simmons?

  No question.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  Yes, there's no question about it.

• 26:09Bill Simmons?

  But when it happened, you can see it. When, I mean, the worst trade in the history of the NBA.

• 26:16Bill Simmons?

  Somehow isn't the Luka trade. I think that's the most indefensible trade. The worst trade ever. It wasn't even the Nets' fault, but the ABA NBA merger happens.

• 26:26Bill Simmons?

  They have to pay this big premium to join the NBA and they, and they basically don't have money. So their choice is like, we can join the NBA, but we're going to have to sell Dr. J. And they sell him to the 76ers for $3 million to basically, because they had to, because that was the way to keep the franchise alive. Cause NBA teams didn't make money back then, but fundamentally just selling Dr. J. As you're entering the NBA when he's in the prime of his career, there's no worse trade than that.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  I guess trading Jabbar, okay. So that was like for Brian Winter, I think Junior Bridgman.

• 26:58Bill Simmons?

  Junior Bridgman, Dave Myers.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Um, and also Kareem was kind of forcing it, but.

• 27:03Bill Simmons?

  But defensible because he was going to be a free agent in a year and they knew they, they weren't getting a compensation for him. So they kind of had to do it. So the, another one like this, so the Broncos trade for John Elway. Who is like the best quarterback prospect of the eighties. Doesn't want to play for Indianapolis, rightly so. Like it's pretty smart that he didn't want to go there. And he's like, basically puts his foot down. I don't want to go there. So they trade him for a quarterback named Mark Herman. Chris Hinton, who was one of the best left tackles in the league and a 1984 first, and that's it. And they get John Elway for two decades, basically. And I think that's actually a worse trade. Than Herschel Walker, but the, the catch is he didn't want to go there. And he wasn't going to go there and he was going to go play baseball and they, they were kind of hamstrung, right?

• 27:47Bill Simmons?

  So there's a reason for that.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  And now we did not want to go there, but if that trade was discussed. Two years after it happens, everyone was like, Elway's not going to make it.

• 27:58Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, there, there, like, that was like, he was, he seemed at the time like a super athletic guy. Remember there's like footage of him, he lined up behind the guards to the center one time. And it was like, there was all these, you know, he was kind of getting pushed into playing and it didn't seem like it was going to work. And then.

• 28:13Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  Then all of a sudden it took a. Terrible relationship. Now, obviously as it turns out, you know, it, it would have been, uh, he won two Super Bowls and he's a Hall of Famer and all of these.

• 28:24Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. All of a sudden he was in the AFC title game. Seabird of the Reds, we mentioned, which had a lot of the same DNA, the Luka trade. Where it's like, you're just trading somebody. That your entire fanbase loved and in Seaver's case, won titles with, right? Won the 69 title with, made the 73 World Series with, most beloved Met ever, they traded him. The Deshaun Watson trade was really bad. And I think we knew it was bad when it happened and they guaranteed his contract, they gave up all these picks. That really was the worst NFL trade of all time, not Herschel Walker?

• 28:54Speaker 01

  I, I would say for what you gave up, if you put the, if you add the money into it.

• 28:58Bill Simmons?

  Cause you had the money and the, and the, and the off the field stuff, which had already happened.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:03Bill Simmons?

  And a fanbase going, wait a second, we don't even want to root for this guy. You traded all this stuff for him and you get, so that's actually the worst NFL trade. Then the Pierce Garnett trade to the Nets, which I think was way more defensible when it seemed like Prokhorov was just going to spend basically money like the Dodgers are spending now. And, you know, they gave up three firsts, they gave up a pick swap in 2017, but it just seemed like they were going to have the highest payroll in the league every year. So who cares about the picks? They got rid of Gerald Wallace's, it was semi-defensible in the moment, then a year later, Prokhorov's like, I don't want to spend money anymore. Now you don't have those picks. And then the only other one is the, the most famous NBA one for years was that Parrish McHale trade. It was Joe Barry Carroll, the number 13th pick was Ricky Brown.

• 29:46Bill Simmons?

  For Parrish and McHale, Parrish was, you know, wasn't really Robert Parrish at that point. He, he was the equivalent of, I don't know, like a better Deandre Ayton right now. McHale was the third pick, Carroll was the best college player. Was semi-defensible, this Luca one is the first one that even as it happened was hard to defend.

• 30:04Speaker 01

  Along in that same situation, I think getting Dennis Johnson for Rick Roby, probably.

• 30:10Bill Simmons?

  Oh, that was amazing, but there was like, there was some cocaine sun stuff at the time and DJ was one of the names. So I think they got him on a discount. The point is you go through all these trades in history and there's always one yeah, but and this Luca trade didn't have a yeah, but coming out of the gate, everybody was like, why did they do this? You know, it was like the immediate mass reaction and then it just somehow got worse. So I really think it has a chance to be remembered. I don't know if it's the worst trade ever, but it'll be mentioned forever. This will be when 50 years from now, if we still have professional sports in a country and a society and they're like, what were the worst trades ever? This would be mentioned.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  If it will, if the Lakers win a title for sure. If they don't win a title, I don't know. I don't know if that, I don't know what will happen.

• 30:56Bill Simmons?

  I don't, I like your little twist on that.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Like you say, there was no, when I say this was, there was, they were Harrison was kind of treated unfairly. I'm not saying that it was like, it was treated unfairly because people didn't realize it was actually a good deal. I feel that people over amplified the degree to which it was unbalanced. I mean, and here again, it's a weird statement to make when all of those people have been proven right. It is strange for me to make this argument now. I realize that. But I, what I'm saying is at the time, I feel like he or someone else in the media could have made a very justifiable case for why the chances of them winning a title increased with this move.

• 31:39Bill Simmons?

  And here's the, here's the problem with the increased thing. Cause I went to all those finals games. They lost the first two in Boston. Game three, it felt like they were probably going to win and Luca fouled out with five minutes left. Which if you're going to hang Luca, don't get kicked, don't get, don't foul out of the fucking game. But then the offense went to Kyrie and I was in the stands going, oh my God. Like this is, this is like a Shakespeare moment where Kyrie, this guy that all the Celtics fans hated. Cause he kinda, you know, kinda didn't want to stay on the team, promised he was going to be there, didn't. Now this guy's going to cook us in a game three, we're going to lose game four, we might blow the series. I never felt like that series was safe until the second half of game five.

• 32:21Bill Simmons?

  The point is they were pretty close to winning the finals that year. So you can't really use the, oh, well, we can't win the title with Luca.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  Wait a second, wait a second.

• 32:30Bill Simmons?

  They were in the, they were in the vicinity.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  Luca played as well as he could. They got beat four to one in the finals and really should have lost to OKC in the semifinals of the West.

• 32:38Bill Simmons?

  Well, that, yeah, the OKC series was a fifty fifty.

• 32:41Speaker 01

  They really should have lost.

• 32:41Bill Simmons?

  We had the perfect team to play him though in the finals.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  When he fouled out, wasn't that the one where he was sitting on the floor yelling at the bench? And then like Winhurst talked about after the game.

• 32:50Bill Simmons?

  How immature he was.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  Knows what he's talking about. He was in a position basically saying like, this isn't going to work if this guy is this way. And was there any indication that this guy was going to be different than that way unless he changed locations, you know? Or I guess.

• 33:04Bill Simmons?

  This would be hilarious if, as we're talking about this, Nico came out of your back room and just patted you on the back and said, thank you, Chuck. Thank you for being my one defender.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  I know exactly what's going to happen because it's always happens when I go like, it must be weird being you and having this audience of so many people that of course you encapsulate some of the stupidest people on earth. But then I mean, and you get real smart people too. Like sometimes they'll be like, oh, this person listens to our podcast. And I'm like, that person listens to the podcast? But there's a much larger chunk of just like, I, it would, you have a higher tolerance for that than I do. Like, or maybe, maybe you just got used to it. I mean, here's actually, this is something I got to bring up to you. I promised some guys to bring this up to you. So I was at this humanities symposium in North Dakota a couple of weeks ago.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  It was, and the theme was about the culture of the 1980s. And you know, I'm the speaker at this thing and I'm doing all my bullshit, you know, slow cancellation of the future. I'm talking about the past and all these things. Here's what people want to talk to me about. This is the main thing that they want to ask me about after this symposium. First of all, does Bill Simmons actually believe Rocky III is the best movie of the eighties?

• 34:21Bill Simmons?

  That was a question to you?

• 34:22Speaker 01

  Yes. Did you say that? Did you make that statement? I was like, it seems like something he might say, but I was.

• 34:28Bill Simmons?

  The best movie of the eighties or the best Rocky movie?

• 34:30Speaker 01

  The eighties, they claim you insisted was Rocky III. Now you could have, I said, like, maybe he was being sardonic.

• 34:36Bill Simmons?

  No, I didn't, I didn't say that. I might've said most entertaining movie of the eighties.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  You are, yeah. Because I was like.

• 34:43Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't know if I would have made that case.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  Do you believe it's the best of the Rocky films?

• 34:47Bill Simmons?

  I did, well, I think it's the most rewatchable.

• 34:49Speaker 01

  Okay, okay.

• 34:51Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I think Rocky one's probably the. The quote unquote best one, but I think Rocky III is the most entertaining start to finish.

• 34:59Speaker 01

  Okay, well, so then the conversation morphed into this and it seemed like the kind of thing you might have real input on. If Rocky Balboa was a real person and then he died, in his obituary, what part of his career or what part of his personality is believed? Like, what is considered the most important or memorable aspect of his career if he were a real person and then passed away?

• 35:26Bill Simmons?

  That he ended Apollo Creed's undefeated heavyweight championship streak, came out of nowhere, improbable rags to riches story, captured the heart of the nation.

• 35:39Speaker 01

  More so than beating the Russian in Russia and convincing the crowd in an exhibition to, say, USA, USA in the Soviet Union.

• 35:50Bill Simmons?

  Oh, you think that would be the lead that he ended the Cold War?

• 35:53Speaker 01

  This was the crux of it. That's the first thing people brought up. And then they were like, but it was an exhibition. Like, and I can't remember, would it have been televised in the United States? Is there footage in the movie?

• 36:03Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, they show it. They show his kids watching.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  Okay, so how did that happen?

• 36:06Bill Simmons?

  Because he says, "Where are my kids? They're staying up late." Yeah, he says.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  The Soviet Union allowed, like, who covered it?

• 36:15Bill Simmons?

  You know, there's a lot of holes in Rocky IV. He didn't get paid for it. It's unclear who profited from the pay-per-view, even though probably, I would say, tens of millions probably watched. Where'd the money go? Did there split? There was no promoter. It was an exhibition. There's a lot of questions. They've never really been answered.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  What, if we, if we use just the scripts, the fights we see?

• 36:39Bill Simmons?

  So you're saying like, we, we take this as Rocky, his whole career was a real career. You're saying him beating Drago in an exhibition, but maybe turning the Cold War is mentioned above him being a rags to riches story who beat Apollo Creed, ended the streak?

• 36:53Speaker 01

  That was sort of the central aspect of the debate over this. Other people, I think, brought up the idea, would, would it be seen as a very sad story because of the end of his life? The way we look at Sonny Liston or something? That even though in the movies, it is portrayed as positive?

• 37:09Bill Simmons?

  No, because think of Mike Tyson. Like, if Mike Tyson dies.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 37:13Bill Simmons?

  What's the first like sentence? What's the blink snapshot of his career? It would be like Mike Tyson, the most feared heavyweight of the 1980s, who won his first whatever and was the youngest champion, heavyweight champion of all time. And then his career ended in disgrace.

• 37:31Speaker 01

  He was in prison.

• 37:32Bill Simmons?

  Comma, his career ended in disgrace after he went to prison and bid a Vander Holyfield and lost all his money and a whole bunch of other things.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  Although it sort of seems like now his story is kind of a redemptive story, right?

• 37:45Bill Simmons?

  The fact that he's still alive is, I think, redemptive.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  You know, or, or, or he's kind of become something very, very different. Because we were just talking, it's just interesting to me always to talk about fictional things as if they were real and how, what the response would be. You know, it's like, um, you know, if they discussed, if Rocky died now as a person, would there be a discussion about the racial overtones of his rivalry with Creed now? Which would not have been talking, you know, would that, would that be brought up? Like, oh my God, even the New York Times, like that, the guy who like, who won a Nobel Prize for like, you know, discovering or being part of the discovery of like the DNA. And like in the headline, it kind of mentions that later in life, he said like some racist or sexist things or whatever. It was very, it's like, I'm sure he didn't expect that was going to be part of his obituary.

• 38:35Speaker 01

  So I wonder if that would happen now with, if, if, if Rocky, the real person died, if that somehow would be.

• 38:41Bill Simmons?

  I would say the Clubber Lang part would probably have like the stronger racial overturns than, because Creed was like a beloved, you know, he kind of trained, he was like Ali, he transcended all that stuff. I would say Creed was definitely more, more that Rocky III tapped into that a lot harder, I think, even though Creed was on Rocky's side.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  The strangest thing about Clubber Lang is I remember at one point, he's giving an interview in the movie and his thing is, you know, I live alone, I train alone.

• 39:09Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  But he's a boxer, so he never spars? How can a boxer train alone? Like a boxer more than anyone needs someone to train with him. Is he just hitting the heavy bag?

• 39:19Bill Simmons?

  I think he was probably being, uh, probably exaggerating a little bit. Let's take a break and then we got to talk about baseball. The Bill Simmons Podcast is brought to you by FanDuel. This NBA season on FanDuel, it's all about the boost. Game days mean your chance to boost your bet, make every play pay off. That's right. All customers get a 50% profit boost on NBA parlay and SGP bets. So I'm going to Denver Clippers on Wednesday night. The Clippers are not doing well this season. They really match up nicely with Denver and I feel like this can be a kitchen sink game for them. So I'd probably do Clippers underdog money line with the over with Harden to do well,

• 40:04Bill Simmons?

  with Dick Batum to hit like a three or two, something like that. Lock in your bets, boost your odds. Make every night count with FanDuel, official sports betting partner of the NBA. Head to FanDuel.com/BS to get started. Must be 21 plus, present in select states or 18 plus and present in DC, Kentucky or Wyoming. Opting required. Rewards are non-maturable. Restrictions apply, including bonus and token expiration leg requirements and max wager amount. See terms at sportsbook.Fanduel.com. Game, problem, call 1-800-GAMBLER or visit rg-help.com. Call 1-888-797-777 or visit ccpg.org/chat in Connecticut. This episode is brought to by Uber Eats. Every football season, the same thing happens. The game somehow makes everybody really hungry.

• 40:48Bill Simmons?

  Quarterback scrambles clearly a sign for breakfast burritos. Yeah. Turnover suddenly deserted 2:00 PM doesn't sound so crazy. Wing formations, well, those can only mean buffalo wings as if they're ever not in play. Even the goalposts start looking suspiciously like french fries. It's almost like football is sending a message to eat more food. Yeah, the good news, Uber Eats makes those cravings easy to satisfy with game day deals all season long. From wings and pizza to chips, drinks, and even last minute grocery runs. Don't sleep on those. You'll find savings on all your favorites delivered straight to your door. Order now on Uber Eats. Can I say one more thing about Anthony Davis before we move on?

• 41:31Bill Simmons?

  Just because it's timely and I'd like to just get on the record on the pod. What's interesting is they trade Luca for him and he's the centerpiece of the trade and he's important for Nico. And he's clearly, when he's helping one of the best 15 players in the league. But now it's had even more wear and tear. He makes a ton of money. They've changed a lot of the trading rules. So a lot of the teams you could think he could get traded to, they can't even do the trade because they can't take his giant salary back. I went through it today. I can only find a couple of teams that would even make sense. On top of the fact that, you know, he's that, they're not going to send him to a place where he's going to be unhappy because they don't do that in the NBA. If you have a disgruntled superstar, not worth it. So it's really, like, I was thinking, oh, you know, it'd be really fun is, is Davis for LaMelo.

• 42:17Bill Simmons?

  Like, just like, the Mavs get this young point guard, they play with flag, Charlotte gets a big man. And then it's, then you, you start unpacking, it's like, well, that trade can't happen because they have to, they can only take one player back for Davis. Charlotte have to send three to make salaries work. Davis would be unhappy in Charlotte. They'd have to trade him. Charlotte's not going to do that. They want to tank. So that blows up. Really, the only teams are the Knicks and the Warriors. And then it comes down to desperation. The only team that would actually be desperate enough, because they're near the end of the line, is the Warriors. Which leads me to Butler, who makes the exact same amount of money as Davis. So you could trade them straight up, I think, if I understand the rules.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  Is this, is this going to happen or is this you're speculating? It's like, is the idea that Davis is getting traded? Are they planning?

• 43:03Bill Simmons?

  I'm just getting a bunch of texts today from different people going, well, now the Mavs are going to blow it up. They'll trade AD. And we do this with the NBA, but they've changed the rules so dramatically. And these guys make so much money. It's like, well, actually cross off eight of the 10 teams you thought AD would go for. Here are the actual teams. And it's basically the Knicks and Golden State. If you're the Knicks, I don't know if you trade Towns for him. This town spreads the floor for you. Davis, all the wear and tear, who knows? But I think Golden State would be the one team near the end of the line that could talk themselves into it. Because they're kind of, they're not, they're not on the level of OKC in Denver. And, you know, they could give Butler and some first round picks. Butler goes to the Mavs, play him with flag. They have the centers. Like, it's just something in my head that I thought would make sense.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  If you have, if you have Kyrie, flag, and Davis, don't you at least want to see what happens when?

• 43:52Bill Simmons?

  I think that's how this plays out. Yeah.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  I mean, I would want to see what happens first. I mean, that.

• 43:57Bill Simmons?

  I'm just, I'm just telling people, this is the blow it up scenarios. There's not a lot of blow it up options. So, all right, let's talk baseball.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 44:07Bill Simmons?

  The pitch clock saved the sport, true or false?

• 44:11Speaker 01

  Uh.

• 44:14Speaker 01

  Singularly, or did they contribute to it?

• 44:18Bill Simmons?

  So you're saying it was the biggest factor? You would say singularly?

• 44:21Speaker 01

  It's the biggest factor, I think, but I wouldn't say it's the only factor.

• 44:27Bill Simmons?

  Agree, okay.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  Also, I, I, so the sport is saved now, where we've, we've made the decision, baseball is saved. We've had like seven podcast conversations where we talked about baseball being dead. Are we now of the position that it's saved?

• 44:40Bill Simmons?

  The viewership of that World Series was bonkers.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  Crazy, but this is what I think.

• 44:44Bill Simmons?

  And anecdotally, September and October, there was more baseball talk going on than in any time in my life since the early 2000s.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  I'll tell you what, it's the most I enjoyed watching baseball since the 1991 series between the Twins and the Braves.

• 44:57Bill Simmons?

  That was, think about that.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's.

• 44:59Bill Simmons?

  Or like oh, three, oh, four was the last time I felt like baseball kind of took over the country with the narrative. It's like oh, three, everybody, the Bartman game and the Yankees, Red Sox, like, we just haven't had anything like this in 20 years.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  What is, what is likely going to happen is a lot of the people who watch this World Series and have suddenly changed their opinion about baseball, are they going to start watching it again next April? And they'll be like, this is not what I remember because playoff baseball now seems more different than the regular season now than any other sport. It used to be that, and like the NBA and in hockey, now it's in baseball. What I think could happen, my kind of new theory on this is that baseball, Major League Baseball, is going to overtake the role the NCAA basketball tournament had about 15 years ago. Which is that people don't really follow the regular season, but then they become obsessed with the tournament.

• 45:54Bill Simmons?

  So you get their pools, they watch, they do the weekends, they go to sports bars.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  And they convince themselves during the NCAA tournaments that they actually still know about college basketball. Like, there's enough ways that you can cheat with the internet to actually seem as though you know what's going on in college basketball without watching it. And then you get into the tournament and you're like, oh, this guy and that guy and all the, then you can also kind of fall back into all like the classic pageantry stuff. I think that's going to happen maybe with baseball, that people will not care that much during, you know, outside of regionally during the regular season, but they'll be like, okay, baseball playoffs, this is great. Because I mean, that was really. They got, you know, it's gonna be hard for another World Series to match this, you know?

• 46:37Bill Simmons?

  But the playoffs before, the rounds before were great too. Like it really, so I think I've been thinking about it a lot because something clearly shifted. And I do think the pitch clock helped, but I also think like having the Dodgers, what they did, right? They spent all this money and they ended up, they make the Betts trade. They finally get Otani into a playoff situation. They get Yamamoto, who's incredible. They get Freddie Freeman from the Braves and they have Will Smith, homegrown catcher, right? They have that, that's their five, but they also have enough money to spend on these different expensive starters. Like they, they, they just have enough money to spend. They're basically making this giant

• 47:21Bill Simmons?

  blockbuster movie and they have enough money to spend on like, oh, this is a small part for the Attorney General. We'll get Laura Linney. Like they just, it doesn't matter. Um, but they're, they've won two in a row. They won in 2020. And they're like a legitimate dynasty now, which I think people like. I really do. And I'm not the first person to say this, and I've talked about this on pods before. I think I've, I've talked about this with basketball forever with how desperate they are to have more parity and make it have teams not dominate. I personally like domination. I like having the bar for all the other teams to try to beat.

• 48:03Bill Simmons?

  This is what we grew up with. This was Celtics Lakers in the eighties. This was Cowboys Steelers in the seventies. And this was the Bulls in the nineties. And I just personally like it more. I like having like the bar you have to climb to beat. This is what college basketball used to be like. This is what we've had in college football the last 20 years. And I think baseball has figured out the best because nobody's going to beat the Dodgers because they've actually figured out how to spend, how to grab this far east connection where they're always getting the best. Now who's the next guy from Japan? They're probably getting them. And now this is the team to beat on top of like you have Judge in the, in New York.

• 48:40Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 48:40Bill Simmons?

  You have Soto with the Mets. You have Bryce Harper and Schwaber with the Phillies, you have Roman Anthony now with the Red Sox, all the big markets have a guy. And I'm all for it, man. I really feel like we're headed to a good place.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  Okay, first of all, you said, so they're a dynasty now. Now, weren't you kind of skeptical of people who called the Kansas City Chiefs a dynasty?

• 49:00Bill Simmons?

  Well, they've won three in, three in six years or five?

• 49:04Speaker 01

  Well, if you said 2020, that would be three in.

• 49:08Bill Simmons?

  I guess the difference with them and the Chiefs is, the Chiefs was always, you know, built like the Patriots, where you have these little five-year windows in the NFL and then the cap gets you.

• 49:16Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 49:17Bill Simmons?

  With whatever the Dodgers have now, they're always going to be the favorites to win the World Series for the rest of the decade, no matter what happens with the team they have.

• 49:24Speaker 01

  I mean, I think what people love the most, and to some degree, the NFL is the only league that can really create this scenario, is parity with a dynasty.

• 49:36Bill Simmons?

  Where that.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  Right. That there's a ton of parity in the league. And there is that one team that's sort of one level above. That's kind of, that's the ideal situation. I mean, like, you know, say like, you know, when like, so like, we always talk about the Lakers and the Celtics in the 80s, they were doing for dynasties, but there wasn't a ton of parity. I mean, you went down to the Bucks and the, you know, there's, there was a level with like, you know, the Rockets.

• 49:59Bill Simmons?

  Bucks pissed in the Mavericks for a couple of years.

• 50:01Speaker 01

  In the NFL right now, I mean, that is, the Pete Rozell idea of creating parity has worked to such a full extent. I mean, they're, the worst teams in the NFL are still, have some guys that are, like, it's really rare to think of that, this is, this team can't compete, you know, it's like, so that's kind of maybe, you know, the idea of baseball having this situation, I, I, it doesn't seem like they have created parity across the league.

• 50:34Bill Simmons?

  No, they had, you need the dregs, which is, I wrote a column about this once. To have great teams, you need bad teams. And this is why I hate the NBA lottery so much, because you're constantly rewarding the bad teams for being bad, but you're putting the most talented players in bad situations and then wondering why they've been disappointing. You know, you're putting. Guys who have a chance to be awesome, but they're playing on a 18-win team. And very rarely can you flip that around. Like even LeBron, when LeBron went to the Cavs, that team was awful for years, you know, and it was like, but that was why I was so interested in what would happen with Cooper Flag and the Mavs, because with Kyrie and AD, they actually had a chance to be good right away, which is basically what happened to Larry Bird

• 51:18Bill Simmons?

  and Magic. Those guys went to teams where they were good right away. Jordan had the opposite. He went to like a mess of a team. It took five years to get there. But I think I still like it because I still like when you have, football has it with the quarterbacks, right? It's Mahomes and Allen. Those teams are always going to be good. Hopefully Drake May now at the Patriots are always going to be good. The way the Eagles have built their team, they're going to be good for at least the rest of the decade. So maybe you have three or four kind of bars that the rest of the league has to get through. Baseball might have seven.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  Are you one of these people who would be like, let's abolish the draft? And let just the guys come out of college, sign where they want to sign, and we enforce a hard gap? And so if somebody like, you know, Chet Holmgren's coming out or whatever, he can take X amount of dollars for teams that are in the cellar. Or he can take a little less money if he wants to sign with a more established team. Do you want the draft to exist? Do you want?

• 52:14Bill Simmons?

  I want the draft to exist. What I don't, what I don't want is for teams to be able to be in the lottery for three, four, or five straight years with top five picks. That's what the NBA has to change.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  The old way. How about the old way?

• 52:27Bill Simmons?

  I just think like, if you win the lottery, you shouldn't be able to get a top three pick the next year. I would just put that rule in right now. You don't, shouldn't be rewarded for being bad over and over and over again.

• 52:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. I just kind of.

• 52:41Bill Simmons?

  If you have a top three pick, maybe you can't pick higher than four the next year. You know, like little, little wrinkles so that teams get penalized at least a little bit for being awful. Like, I think what the Nets did. They're the most disgusting of all the teams, right? They had five first round picks last year. They blew all of them and they don't care at all. They're not even the second most important team in New York. The Liberty, I think, are more important. I think that people who own the Liberty and the Nets probably care more about the Liberty. And they're just like a way station for incompetence at this point. Kind of hoping that they'll stumble in this draft that's coming up. There's these three like legitimate franchise guys in it. And they're just kind of keeping their fingers crossed to get one of those three guys.

• 53:26Bill Simmons?

  And that's their entire strategy. I think that sucks. I'm done with that.

• 53:29Speaker 01

  I mean, we talked about this years ago, the whole idea of like, you know, the process as it was, it used to be described.

• 53:36Bill Simmons?

  Which would turn out to be a disaster.

• 53:37Speaker 01

  Well, except that it actually worked exactly as it was how it was supposed to work.

• 53:44Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, they never made it past round two. They won two playoff series.

• 53:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, but the players didn't pan out, but they did the thing that it was intended to do. They had Ben Simmons, they had Embiid. Both those guys were seen as.

• 53:56Bill Simmons?

  They got the false pick. Yeah.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  It faults it here you go. And like it just so, so the, it did actually do the thing it was supposed to do, which is negligible increase your luck of getting into somebody great. Like it's like, it doesn't, it's not, it's a, it's a strange strategy. It's just like, it's, it's well, maybe not strange. It's just slightly increasing the possibility that you will find the guy who changes everything. And they did that. They actually got that.

• 54:24Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, but here's, here's the thing with the Sixers though. And this is what we learned retroactively and why I don't think teams will ever do that again. They build a losing culture, but they put these young stars in the losing culture and told them it didn't matter if they won or lost. And I think it had real ramifications for those guys. I think for Simmons and for Embiid, those guys have had really bizarre careers, you know? And I think even some of the stuff they value has been Simmons was like, thought he was a super duper star. The team wasn't winning anything. And I still don't know what happened to him when he basically bailed on the team. And then Embiid, I just think has had a really strange career where it really seems like he values the.

• 55:06Bill Simmons?

  Individual stuff over the team stuff. And we've seen him like even little stuff like I'll play Jokic, but only if it's in Philly versus playing in Denver. Like you can't be like that and be the face of a team and the best guy on a team. And I think you've just learned bad lessons when you're in a bad situation, you know?

• 55:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess that's true. I mean, and you're saying that if he gets drafted somewhere else, you think maybe he's a different person. That's always.

• 55:29Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, well, think about like Tatum had one of the best, Tatum and Brown had two of the best situations you ever could have walked into where they go into a team that's also had just signed Al Horford that had Isaiah Thomas looked at with him and the team was pretty good and was like in the Eastern Conference Finals and those guys are rookies getting a taste of it, going against guys. They're, they're in winning situations with good crowds. And I would say that had a great effect on them, you know, a really positive effect. It's also unusual. That's not usually how it goes. But if you're just saying like, I'm going to put one guy in this Philly situation and one guy in this Boston situation, which guy will learn better habits and have a better career? You had bet on the Boston situation.

• 56:12Speaker 01

  Oh, totally. I mean,

• 56:13Bill Simmons?

  You know?

• 56:14Speaker 01

  You know, you, you, in the NFL, you see this with young quarterbacks all the time. I mean,

• 56:19Bill Simmons?

  Sam Darnold, that's the best example of all of them because he's actually talented.

• 56:23Speaker 01

  You know, what, what is, you know, it's, it's very often, as it turns out, it's like, you know, the, the cliche now is that nobody knows anything in the NFL about drafting quarterbacks. Everyone is, you know, which all guesswork, we can't predict anything. And it certainly seems that way. And yet, when a lot of these guys get into a good situation, they end up becoming pretty close to what the original description was.

• 56:51Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 56:51Speaker 01

  You know, but whatever the original idea was, there's, it's kind of, I can't remember what year it was, but the year, uh, like he came out, Lamar Jackson came out and Josh Allen came out and Rosen was in that draft and Baker Mayfield. Like we did a podcast and we talked about this. It's very interesting how we were in some ways. Amazingly correct and in some ways amazingly idiotic, most notably me claiming Baker Mayfield should be moved to slot receiver. That was what I said in that podcast.

• 57:21Bill Simmons?

  You said that?

• 57:22Speaker 01

  Well, because everybody was saying about.

• 57:24Bill Simmons?

  He would have been an amazing slot receiver.

• 57:26Speaker 01

  They were talking about Lamar Jackson and it was sort of like, he's such a great athlete, but you probably never be a quarterback. Maybe you move him to receiver or something. I was like, I don't think that should be the case at all. He's the best of these guys in my view.

• 57:35Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 57:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh, it's like, maybe Baker Mayfield, maybe, maybe like, he could be like, you know, like an Edelman type figure, like coming out of Kent State. Well, we liked, you know, we liked Lamar Jackson. We liked Josh Allen. Like you had seen him like in a target or something and talked to him and you were like, he's a good guy or whatever. And like, he sort of had a good understanding of him and, and that worked out. Uh, and, but like Rosen, I remember the guy from UCLA. I think I was like, that he actually might be the best, you know?

• 58:02Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  And now, obviously that was wrong.

• 58:05Bill Simmons?

  He was out of the league in two years.

• 58:06Speaker 01

  What if he goes somewhere different? Who knows? What if he goes to, you know, what if, I, if he didn't went to Baltimore, it'd be hard to imagine what happens, but you know?

• 58:15Bill Simmons?

  We've, I feel like we've talked about this a bunch of times, but it is hilarious that in 2025, we've come no closer to figuring out what's going to make a good quarterback. We have, we have decades of data and tape and analysis. I think people are getting better at it. Like even somebody like McShay, who, who is with us at the Ringer, I think he's done a really good job the last few years. He's been pretty on it. There's some stuff that I would look at that is almost like non-football stuff when I would look at these guys. Cause I remember thinking a lot about this stuff with Drake May and it's stupid stuff. That's probably, you know, on brand for me, but like the fact that he was a little brother. The fact that he stayed at North Carolina for an extra year when he just could have transferred when, you know, it seemed like the team was going to suck.

• 59:00Bill Simmons?

  There was like, there was like good guy, good teammate, leader kind of traits that were there. But it, it also helps that he's fucking really talented, right? And that's the thing.

• 59:12Speaker 01

  I think the thing.

• 59:13Bill Simmons?

  You didn't really know until you saw him in the NFL.

• 59:15Speaker 01

  The thing you said before probably is the biggest factor, which is this, it's situational. It really is the situation you're in. When Jared Goff was coming out, do you remember what the criticism of him was? Small.

• 59:27Bill Simmons?

  Wasn't it? Yeah, small hands and kinda dumb, right?

• 59:30Speaker 01

  Well, he went to Cal. I mean, it's like I.

• 59:33Bill Simmons?

  I thought he made like dumb decisions or there was some people weren't sure about his decision making.

• 59:37Speaker 01

  Um, I just remember it was that he had, he had small hands and they were, they were sort of like, you know, and there was like, when it rains, the history, you know, it's like, well, okay, sure, sure. You know, it's like, maybe, but you know, he was actually not terrible with the Rams, got into a Super Bowl and has had a very good career. Um.

• 59:58Bill Simmons?

  You know what's funny? So I was watching randomly watching the NBC pregame show the other day, which I don't usually watch, but I, I wanted to see the highlights because I was on a plane and I didn't catch everything. And they had Jason Garrett interviewed, uh, I think it was Jason Garrett interviewed Sam Darnold. I think that's what it was. Was that what it was? Maybe it was two weeks ago. I can't remember. But it was Jason Garrett reading Sam Darnold, his scouting report of Sam Darnold.

• 1:00:27Bill Simmons?

  And going through this stuff that he had and Sam Darnold was like, yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah, you nailed me there. And a lot of it was stuff like, he's so competitive, he can be his own worst enemy and things like that. And they were just talking about it. And of course they did it in that pregame style where the thing just, they zoomed through it really fast with a bunch of edits and footage. And I was like, I could have watched this for 20 minutes of somebody going through their scouting report of somebody who's like clearly made it as a pro and been like, all right, so what did I get right? Well, it was like, this is like the best segment ever. And it was like a minute.

• 1:00:59Speaker 01

  It is interesting. Like there was one, I remember it was kind of going around online. It was like the scouting report on Kobe Bryant coming out of high school.

• 1:01:07Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  And it was like eerily accurate. Like it was amazing. Like the things they said about him that were good, of course were plentiful, but even the negative things were all right. It was like. I mean, it didn't say that, but it was like, close to be like, you know, could face legal issues in Colorado. Like it was so specifically specific about what his life ended up being. So some of them are dead on, you know, some, yeah. But also, a lot of scouting stuff, though, is like, very aphoristic, though, thing, too. So like, if you're saying like, oh, this guy, he's like, you know, so competitive, he might be his own worst enemy. Well, that's, okay, so that's technically a criticism, right? So is the idea that he should become slightly less competitive or caliber?

• 1:01:51Bill Simmons?

  Slightly less of his own worst enemy?

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's not, it's a pretty, it's like giving a job interview and saying, what's your weakness? It's like, oh, I care too much. It's like, well, thanks for nothing. You know what I'm saying?

• 1:02:02Bill Simmons?

  One thing I've learned, at least with the NBA, and I think this probably goes for football, for a quarterback, too, is, like, if I ran an NBA team, I would never take the guy, like, with a high pick that I'm really betting on, like, potentially even betting my job, where I didn't get the feedback that this guy was like, an incredibly hard worker. I just think that, to me, that would be a non-negotiable. Even like, I've started to do some work on the 26 NBA draft, because it's really like, potentially a generational draft with these, with these guys. It's really nuts. And I'm fascinated by this Kansas kid, who really might be the best two-guard prospect.

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  They compare him to Jordan. That's the comparison I've seen.

• 1:02:42Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, like, he's the first one we've had at two-guard, who can be credibly mentioned with, like, Vince, like, what Vince was like, coming out of high school and at North Carolina, and Kobe, what some of the stuff people are saying about him coming out of high school, and then Jordan at UNC, like, there's some stuff with him. But one of the things that people have been saying is, like, this kid really gives a shit, like, he really works. This is the Cooper Flag thing. Cooper Flag is like, I'm gonna, I have a weakness, I'm going to work on this until I fix the weakness. And I do think for the NBA, you need to be that way. I don't, I don't think you can really succeed at the highest level unless you're wired that way.

• 1:03:21Speaker 01

  I mean, you could be right. I mean, for me, I feel saying someone is a really hard worker or a workaholic in a scouting report is less meaningful than the detriment of questionable work ethic. I feel like people will rarely say questionable work ethic unless they have a pretty clear reason for arguing that. But people will say great work ethic because it's just something you say. Like, it's just talking about guys' level of competition, you know, their need to win, all that stuff. That's true, certainly, sometimes. And sometimes it is just something people say. But when they say something on the negative side, that

• 1:04:01Speaker 01

  usually means, you know, something motivated them to do that. Like, people are not really motivated to say positive things, except to occasionally seem the most enthusiastic. That's another thing I've noticed about how like, the ranking of prospects has changed, that there is now almost a competitive world within that sort of, you know, paradigm, where like, somebody's like, well, to be remembered about this, I have to be the most excited about Ace Bailey, or I have to be the most...

• 1:04:33Bill Simmons?

  Right, right.

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  Whatever, you know, it's like, you gotta have some like, real strong, strong, strong, strong take. And that does skew these things, because that's how you get into this problem of like, these guys seem like busts immediately, and they should have never been in the position to, to be viewed as potentially generational. I just...

• 1:04:55Bill Simmons?

  Well, we also, I, I, this sounds really basic and dumb, but I swear, we don't think about it enough, how much a kid can change from the age of like, 18 to 23. Like I say, with my own kids, like, you just, you change, you get older, all of a sudden, you have confidence. It's like, what, what happened there? And to try to project when somebody's, think about these basketball kids, these kids are 18 and 19, and try to project even just what they're gonna be like as human beings at age 23, is kind of a crazy process, but we do it anyway.

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  I mean, okay, the United States is dominated by people from about nine to 12 universities. Almost everybody in the elite world comes from about these nine or 12 places, which is essentially saying, things are dictated by people who are incredibly oppressive 16-year-olds.

• 1:05:50Speaker 01

  Like they were incredibly impressive when they were 16 and then they were able to get into Harvard and they were able to get into Yale and Princeton and these places. And then somehow that education is the validation for the position that they start their life and where they end up. But what we're really talking about is this, like they're not a formed person. Not only is there a huge difference between 18 and 23, think of the difference in you between 20 and 30.

• 1:06:17Bill Simmons?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  Like it's, it's almost, the person I was at 30 had no relationship to the person I was at 20 and probably wouldn't have even liked that person. Like, you know, it's like, so to view somehow the early part of my life as a way to understand the middle of my life. I mean, in, in sports, there's no other way, right? We gotta get the kids coming out of college and guys peak early and all that stuff. But yes, totally true. That's exactly right.

• 1:06:47Bill Simmons?

  Do you think if baseball has another strike? I was thinking about, we always say in real life, history repeats itself. Right? It's like, oh, here we go. We did this already. And baseball, having a lockout or a strike or however this is probably going to play out, which I think is going to happen right as they've captured the zeitgeist for the first time in a real way in 20 years. Just feels like the most baseball thing ever for that to happen.

• 1:07:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, a little bit, a little bit.

• 1:07:16Bill Simmons?

  This is what we've, this has been our entire life, right? Every time it felt like baseball was going great, there would be something stupid happening.

• 1:07:23Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, you know, they just, there's, it's, can you sustain a league in the United States without a salary cap? I don't know. I guess they're doing it and it's, it certainly seemed to work great in the playoffs. But I will, you know, here, it's, there's so much chance, Bill. I mean, it's like, okay, so if for whatever reason, the World Series went five games this year. We're not talking about it. I don't care that much. I don't know.

• 1:07:55Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  And then I'm not every person, but it's like, you know, if that happens and then you're like, ah, you know, the World Series ratings were kind of down again, and now there might be a strike. We'd be like, ah, it figures. Baseball's dead. But we used to say, but now because there was this transcended seven game series, you know, that game that went to like the 18th or whatever, you know, I'm watching this thing and I'm like, they're gonna have to start having position players pitch, but like Otani can just go in. Like, you know, all these, all these things were so interesting. And plus, you know, it's like,

• 1:08:27Speaker 01

  you know, it's like a tiny, like he gets kind of shelled and like, he thanks the umpire, like tips his hat to the umpire while he's leaving the field and like, you know, and like Yamamoto is like, I'll pitch four games in a row if I have to. It's like, there were some things in that I was like, boy, you just don't see this from American athletes anymore.

• 1:08:45Bill Simmons?

  The Yamamoto thing was the most unbelievable thing in a while.

• 1:08:48Speaker 01

  People were sort of like, you know, it was, I think the conventional wisdom is, you know, among the people I knew, it's like they were kind of rooting for Toronto or whatever, but like the Dodgers did to some degree, those two guys particularly just kind of win me over. Like, you know?

• 1:09:01Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I agree. Um, one more break and then we got to talk college football. This episode is brought to you by Expedia. You know how at the end of the season, your team goes to Cancun, sometimes earlier than expected, sometimes after blowing a 3-1 series lead, but what if you went to Cancun with Expedia? Save up to 30% when you bundle and save. You can book the flight or the hotel now, then book the rest later. In all fairness, though, hopefully your team doesn't go to Cancun. One, two, three, Cancun. Or if they do, you go with them. Expedia, the one place you go to go places. Sign in to save. Savings vary. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Football has a play for just about everything, and whether it's a flea flicker or a tush push, you need a plan that fits your unique

• 1:09:44Bill Simmons?

  situation. That's why State Farm takes the time to get to know you, so they can help personalize coverage for your life and for your budget. Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. All right. I texted you for pod ideas. You texted me back. One thing you were excited about were all the insanely great coaching job openings in college football and why those jobs actually aren't that great. So what did you mean?

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  They're not. It's not that the jobs aren't that great. They're just not as great as they used to be. Like, you know, you look at Florida and, you know, LSU and Penn State and, you know, Auburn and all these sort of these, these great jobs. But what is weird now is something has been completely removed from college football coaching, which is charismatic recruiting. Like, you know, that used to be the big thing, that a guy could go into someone's kitchen, talk to the kid and his dad and his mom. And it's like, he was different. Like, you know, I don't know if you've read, you read Barry Switzer's autobiography, Bootlegger Boy?

• 1:10:49Bill Simmons?

  Oh, from like the 90s?

• 1:10:51Speaker 01

  One of the things he talks about in that book, which I just will always remember is that whenever he was recruiting a kid, he had this thing he did. He would first walk through the back alley behind their house to see what kind of beer was in the garbage. Like, what kind of, like, what bottles were in there? And that way, when he went into the house, if the dad said, like, "Do you want a beer?" He'd be like, "Only if you drink Old Milwaukee."

• 1:11:15Speaker 01

  He'd always, he'd always only want exactly what the guy drank. Now, that's in some ways manipulative, but that really is someone like, "I understand how to relate to people like on their level," you know? Now, that's not how it is. Now, in this same situation, he comes in, drinks Old Milwaukee, convinces the dad he's a great guy, gets the kid jacked about going to Oklahoma, and then the kid says, like, "Well, what's the offer, though? Because Georgia Tech offered $340,000." That's all it is now. So now, it is completely switched away from being the kind of personality that can convince a kid to go to your program to talent evaluation.

• 1:11:56Speaker 01

  Like, can you see a guy who's a backup for oldness at tight end, who then you can grab in the portal by just writing a bigger check? Like, it really is a professional-

• 1:12:08Bill Simmons?

  Well, that was, that was what North Carolina was, when Lombardi was saying how they wanted to be the 33rd NFL team. And it's like, they're, they're basically, "We're not a college program. We're like a professional portal program," which I think is what they've created, just in general with the sport, right?

• 1:12:23Speaker 01

  To to I mean, to some extent, sure. I mean, it's definitely like it's it is way different. Now, I mean, the SEC is not as dominant as it used to be. And there's a lot of people being like, oh, see, now that everybody can play players, they don't have the advantage anymore. But I don't think that's what it is. It's just that the SEC used to have so much depth at every position. And now that's just impossible. Now to be like a great special teams player for Georgia means that like you can start maybe at outside linebacker for Indiana. And then there's, you know, it's like you can make these moves. And I it has like so to have like the Penn State job now or the Florida job, like these marquee jobs that is like you get there. That's the whole deal. I don't know how much of an advantage you have.

• 1:13:08Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:13:09Speaker 01

  I don't think that whoever takes the Penn State job is going to have an advantage over Indiana. Like I just, I don't think that will be the case. Unless that they can just, you know, do something very simple, which is raise more money, like just have more money to give these guys. And that really changed like, so that also means that while these jobs aren't as good as they used to be,

• 1:13:33Speaker 01

  a lot of random jobs could be great. Like if you get, if you get a job at like Liberty and Liberty says like, we're going to do what it takes to, you know, to get these guys, you might as well be at Florida. You see this with BYU's basketball program. BYU like took a kid from Duke, just they just like we gave him a bigger number. So I am very interested.

• 1:13:53Bill Simmons?

  Well, they went further than that. They moved the kid from Brockton, our own AJ DeBansa from Massachusetts. And they moved him in there before he was even done with high school, moved him to a place in Utah.

• 1:14:03Speaker 01

  What is kind of interesting about these college jobs is obviously the guy everyone wants is Lane Kiffin. But.

• 1:14:09Bill Simmons?

  Which is hilarious.

• 1:14:11Speaker 01

  Well, why is it hilarious?

• 1:14:12Bill Simmons?

  Because he it's been just been a roller coaster ride for Lane over the years, right? At one point, it seemed like his career was over. Now he's the guy who's in the most demand.

• 1:14:20Speaker 01

  The last super likable coach that still exists, right?

• 1:14:24Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

  And at the, you know, in college football at least. But like, I don't know if Florida and LSU will wait for him because they're going to go to the playoffs. They're probably going to win a playoff game. Like, so I don't know if LSU and Florida or like Penn State, even if they would be in the running for that, are willing to wait that long. So I do think it's possible that he could end up at Auburn. If he leaves, but also I hope he doesn't leave because he has really rehabilitated his reputation as like a guy who now like loves living in Oxford, Mississippi. It would kind of change everything back if he leaves like if he especially if he left like in the middle of the year or the day after they lost, it would be like, it'll be like, oh, God damn it. Like again, but you know,

• 1:15:09Bill Simmons?

  Do you think we're ever going to see like what we grew up with, with Bear Bryant and Paterno and these coaches that are just at the same place forever unless they break the rules and they have to get shoved out? That's gone.

• 1:15:20Speaker 01

  I mean, well, I mean, the sport's different now. I mean, they've, they've, they've made college football a professional sport. It's not the same. And those examples particularly like, it's going to be hard to see someone in that position at an elite program that way because you can never be down. But you can't have, you know, it, you, someone can coach that long at like, you know, like Missouri or Utah or one of these places, you know, that if you're just good every year, occasionally make the playoffs. But if the expectation like at LSU, I mean, what was Kelly's record at LSU? 34 and 14 or something like that? It wasn't that he was terrible. He had a Heisman Trophy winner. Every year they came in with the potential to possibly go to the national championship or at least make the

• 1:16:02Speaker 01

  playoffs. I mean, if that is the annual expectation, you can have one down year, two down years, you're means you're in trouble. Third year, you get fired. Yeah. So the idea of their like, even like a Saban like coach, that will never, I don't think that will happen again. Lane Kiffin, if he were to make a commitment to Ole Miss, could have that kind of career. He could be there the rest of his life because the expectation is slightly lower than the other SEC schools and he would have been, and he will have success both now and in the future. So, you know.

• 1:16:33Bill Simmons?

  Do you care about buyout stuff and shit like that? When they're like, Brian Kelly, they're negotiating this buyout. He wants the full, like, it's funny that this is just like a category of sports reporting.

• 1:16:42Speaker 01

  Did you see what they're doing now on with the Brian Kelly situation? Now they're claiming LSU, at least that's what I saw yesterday. LSU is claiming, we haven't officially fired him yet. So therefore we can now fire him now for cause.

• 1:17:00Bill Simmons?

  Oh.

• 1:17:01Speaker 01

  In which would case would that just changes the buyout situation? I mean, he's obviously hard lying it. He's like, it's like $54 million and he's like, pay me. You know, like I'll sit around and do nothing for two years, you know? And they don't want to do that. I think that they assumed that he would be the kind of guy who'd be like, I'm going to talk to Penn State right now. But he's not doing that. So.

• 1:17:21Bill Simmons?

  Right. So what's your, give us your grade for the state of college football right now? Are you happy with it?

• 1:17:27Speaker 01

  On the.

• 1:17:28Bill Simmons?

  This is your favorite sport? Just everything? The whole experience? Is it, are you pro? Is this good? Is this what's happened this decade been a good thing?

• 1:17:36Speaker 01

  On the field, I would say it's still an A or A minus almost every week. I mean, in terms of the health of the system, C minus and getting worse. I mean, in short term, it is fun that Vandy is good. Like it's neat to see that, you know, it's like, like.

• 1:17:53Bill Simmons?

  And Indiana.

• 1:17:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. You know, like, like these, these games are great. I mean, there was like a, this last Saturday, there was a whole bunch of like, kind of surprisingly sort of through, it didn't look like the world's greatest slate when I looked at ESPN, but like there were a ton of good games. Like, you know, I.

• 1:18:11Bill Simmons?

  The Indiana game was incredible. That was like one of the best sporting events of the year.

• 1:18:15Speaker 01

  It was, I mean, probably the catch of the year. And then the Iowa Oregon game was real interesting because Iowa was like, was like just at their utmost Iowa. Like this last drive, they got to go 93 yards and they can't throw the ball. But of course they completed deep one. All of these things happened. They made it kind of a really fun day. So I still, I mean, in terms of being a consumer, I would watch that over anything. But I know what's going to happen. Like, I mean, in the short term, professionalizing a college sport does kind of spike its popularity because it, you know, pro sports appeal to the casual fan more than college sports do. But that erodes over time, particularly if the kind of professionalized college version just becomes like kind of.

• 1:19:03Speaker 01

  A less good version of the NFL and that is what's gonna, I mean, my fear what's gonna happen in five years is that all these teams are gonna play the same. And like the idea of someone like, you know,

• 1:19:15Bill Simmons?

  Shotgun, throw the ball that time.

• 1:19:17Speaker 01

  You know, an option team playing an air raid team or something is just going to be over. It's all gonna kind of be like, you know, in the same way that for the most part, the NFL is that, you know, that, that the teams are different, but they're much more similar than different by like, you know, by factor of 10. And in college, there's still real diversity and there's a regional quality to it and the conferences play differently. And I think that's all gonna be gone. And of course that's gonna be disappointing, but I mean, I just, I, I, I don't know. Maybe I'll, I'm sure I'll still watch it. I'm sure I'll never.

• 1:19:52Bill Simmons?

  Have you heard about, have you heard about this five year eligibility rule that's getting batted around?

• 1:19:57Speaker 01

  What is this?

• 1:19:57Bill Simmons?

  That people think might happen? Basically, instead of a red shirt thing and whatever happens with that, it's just like when you go to college, you have five years to play sports.

• 1:20:09Speaker 01

  Who wants?

• 1:20:09Bill Simmons?

  You can play out, you could start off five years. You can play, you go to Duke and play basketball for five straight years.

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  Is this because the extra, people thought the extra year for the COVID stuff was good for the kids or what would?

• 1:20:21Bill Simmons?

  I, yeah, I think, and especially like, like in the D3 level, you play four years, you go to grad school, you could just play for one more year after that. I think people like that.

• 1:20:30Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I, I think I've said this before, but I, I very much believe this. So I think that we are now less than five years from the SEC and the Big 10, at least for football, breaking off from the NCAA and they're gonna start their own thing. And when that happens, I don't think the players will need to go to those schools. I think the quarterback for Alabama can represent Alabama. He can certainly go to school if he wants.

• 1:20:57Bill Simmons?

  But not actually go to class if he doesn't have to.

• 1:20:59Speaker 01

  There will be, there will be no obligation that he be an enrolled student. So I, I mean, I think that's almost certainly going to happen and everybody will know here's what's going to happen. Every, I refer to everyone like me is going to bemoan this, but there's also going to be a lot of people being like, this is progress. Why should he have to pretend to go to school? He deserves to make money because he's making the university so much money and it's going to be seen as kind of naive and reactionary to not support this. That's going to happen. And then a lot will be like, that's crazy. How can it be that I'm watching the university of, you know, South Carolina and only 40% of the roster is enrolled in school and people will be like, you're, you don't get it. You don't get it.

• 1:21:43Bill Simmons?

  The quarterback works full time as a bartender at the local sports bar.

• 1:21:49Speaker 01

  Do that. You'll just live on campus. You don't have a great life.

• 1:21:53Bill Simmons?

  Who's been your, who's your team of the year so far in college football? Cause you, you float around. You're like a nomad. You'll just root for anybody. Who's, who's been your team? Who captured your fancy?

• 1:22:02Speaker 01

  I'll root for anybody. I mean,

• 1:22:05Bill Simmons?

  Who captured your fancy?

• 1:22:06Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I, I, I really like Notre Dame's team this year, but I kind of like them every year. I like their run game. Um, I am very interested in Ole Miss. Now with Saban gone.

• 1:22:17Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, it feels like you're becoming a Kiffin guy. That's the feeling I'm getting.

• 1:22:21Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Um, and especially now with Saban gone. That's kind of who I'm rooting for. Um, uh, in, in, in the South. Uh, there's a, in the Big Ten. I mean, the coach from Indiana is truly a jerk, but it, it, it makes for an interesting situation and I'm not going to root for Ohio State. So it's like, you know, um, I,

• 1:22:47Bill Simmons?

  UNC? Any, any really interest in UNC?

• 1:22:49Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I really wanted that to work. Like I was really, I, you know, I watched that first,

• 1:22:54Bill Simmons?

  It's coming on. It's getting better.

• 1:22:55Speaker 01

  Drive of that game. I was like, but, uh, I mean, I just, I, I think that this is what I think has happened, you know, that so.

• 1:23:10Speaker 01

  What is sort of like the, the, the, one of the vortex central ideas of like the coaching personality? The coaching personality is that I love to coach and it doesn't matter who I'm coaching. I would coach a Pee Wee football team and I would care as much as I would coach in the high school team and I'd care about a high school team as much as I would care about a college team and I would care about that as much as the NFL. Coaching is teaching. I'm an educator. That's what matters to me. All I care about is like what I'm doing in the moment. And I think Billcheck got to North Carolina and he's like, oh, I guess I used to be that way. This doesn't seem the way I remember it. I can't tell these kids what to do and they don't seem to know anything. I gotta teach them everything.

• 1:23:52Bill Simmons?

  All that might transfer if they're unhappy.

• 1:23:54Speaker 01

  Because when he took the job, say with the Browns.

• 1:23:58Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:59Speaker 01

  I think Billcheck was still the kind of person who would have been like, I, I like coaching the Browns. I would just assume, you know, Coach Maslin High School.

• 1:24:07Bill Simmons?

  It's a Belichick impersonation.

• 1:24:08Speaker 01

  Well, I just felt that.

• 1:24:09Bill Simmons?

  I didn't realize I was on the docket today.

• 1:24:11Speaker 01

  I'm not Chris Ryan. I can't do this shit. Okay. So I'm just, I just kind of felt it. But like, so I can't do it. I can't, I get, I, my British accent is terrible. But I think that when Billcheck was with the Browns, at that point in his life, whatever age he would have been, that would have been what? How many years ago now? 30 years ago. I think he would have been the kind of person who no matter where you would have put him, if you'd have put him in a powder puff football league, it would have been, I care about this more than anything else. But he's an older man now. He's went through a lot. He's had the experience of being, you know, the most talked about person in all of sports for moments, like him, they, you know?

• 1:24:51Speaker 01

  And now he's in this situation where it's like, well, can I win the ACC or whatever? It's like, I, I, I think that it's hard for him. To get motivated to be himself. And I don't think, I think he's, I think in a way it's probably a bummer to realize that. It would be like if, you know, okay, so I start writing because I just love writing, right? I'm a writer before I ever get anything published. I used to just sit in my bedroom and write stuff, you know? And then now it works out, you're a journalist, write a bunch of books. In my mind, I'm still like the person in high school who just writes because he loves to write. But now all of a sudden, I couldn't sell books. My mentality would say, go out in your

• 1:25:33Speaker 01

  office and write. You just love writing. But maybe it wouldn't seem the same to me. Maybe the idea of writing for nothing except myself, all of a sudden, wouldn't seem the way it used to be. When I actually became someone who could do it or whatever, like, you have, you have to just love it to be good at it. But once you get rewarded for that, maybe it changes. I mean, I worry about this. Like, I, I worry if I actually have the same drive that I had thirty years ago or forty years ago. I don't know. Yeah.

• 1:26:10Bill Simmons?

  So you think Belichick being on like a four and five UNC team, just wakes up one morning and he's like, I don't know. Well, I don't know if I'm enjoying this anymore. And I've done everything I could do in coaching and maybe this is it.

• 1:26:24Speaker 01

  Here's what I think is more like it. I think there was a time when he would have woke up in the morning and he'd have been, we're four and five. What can I do to make this better? Now, maybe he wakes up and he's like, I want some toast. You know, is the coffee ready? Like, he's not, it's not that he, he doesn't, he's not like he's consciously being like, I don't care. It's just that it's not consuming him. Like, you know, when you're consumed by something, whether it's a job, or a person, or whatever, you know, there, everybody's had this in their life, where there's like, you know, maybe a time in your life when the first thing you thought of When you woke up with this person you were dating and when you went to bed at night, you were thinking about this person. And I was just like, it wasn't, it was just a-

• 1:27:07Bill Simmons?

  I'm like that with coffee.

• 1:27:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

• 1:27:10Bill Simmons?

  When I fall asleep, I'm like, I can't wait to have coffee tomorrow morning. And then when I wake up, I'm like, oh, I'm gonna get to make coffee.

• 1:27:15Speaker 01

  And that would be a totally great mentality if you were trying to become a major coffee entrepreneur. Like you would be like, that's who I need to be. That's the person I need to be. I need to be the somebody thinks about coffee when I wake up.

• 1:27:28Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:28Speaker 01

  I mean, that's because, you know, if you want to be good at something, it can't be that you think about it a lot. You need to think about it all the time, even when you don't want to. And that is the key. And that's a hard thing to sustain when you're someone who's lived and had that many experiences. He said, he's had so many experiences in football. I'm sure sometimes this seems like, this isn't the same. Like this is, you know, it's just not fun to do this in the way it used to be fun.

• 1:27:55Bill Simmons?

  I cut out a piece, we did the rewatchables, me and Ben and Sean last week. We cut out a piece we ran last week on this podcast about filmmaking and creativity. And I was, we were arguing about it and we're obviously all good friends about, I was saying like, I worry sometimes that there's too many distractions, that it's going to ultimately hurt creativity because I think of the way I grew up, where a lot of times I read a book or wrote something just because I didn't have anything else to do. And I would be like, I got two hours here. Maybe I'll try to write a column. But now, if you put, I don't know, 18 year old, 19 year old me in this situation now, I'd be like, I'll go on Instagram and go check that out, or I'll go on Twitter,

• 1:28:40Bill Simmons?

  or I'll go on some message board, or I'll go on the Celtics Reddit to see what they're saying. And now I've just killed two hours, but I didn't do anything that actually I have something to show for it. And I do worry about that with this, with the under 25 generation. I'd sound like the old guy, but I think sometimes the, the best ideas I ever had, the best things I ever wrote,

• 1:29:03Bill Simmons?

  just in general were, came out of like, I, my brain was just going because I was at a stoplight. I wasn't on my phone. I was just kind of staring at a tree and all of a sudden thinking about blank. And got an idea and I'm like, oh, that would actually be a good idea. And now I wonder if, if, if people have that in the same way because they're always moving on to something that keep, that captures their attention. When they're bored. Does that make sense?

• 1:29:28Speaker 01

  I would say the greatest detriment to American culture right now, I mean, in terms of what we're talking about, arts, entertainment and stuff like that, is the systematic elimination of daydreaming.

• 1:29:44Speaker 01

  The people used to daydream all the time. That used to be, you had to, like, it wasn't, it wasn't like, you know, i- i- if you were, you had to go to the bank and you had to wait in line and there was nothing to do while you were waiting. So you just had to think about things and that, you know, I, this is gonna make me sound weird or weirder than I am, but like, I, I forced myself to do this. Like, I, I have chunks of the day where I just lay there and don't do anything, just so I can't, just so I can.

• 1:30:14Bill Simmons?

  Just to use your brain?

• 1:30:15Speaker 01

  Well, to just let my brain just sort of go, just like, let's like, let it, you know, think about anything without something providing stimulation back. I mean, that's, that's also like, you know, this thing you're talking about, people have talked about this since the big, you know, since the beginning of the advent of the printing press. The face of it's like, people will be less creative now because they can just read the Bible or whatever. And then it was like, oh, well, radio and then television, all these things. It was like, these things are gonna stop us, but here is kind of what's different. Reading is like a, like a, like a troop, like a, a responsive thing. You read something and you gotta kind of imagine it in your mind. It's an active experience. Okay.

• 1:31:00Speaker 01

  But then all these other things we move through are passive and we have really accelerated that part of it. That like where people are like sort of looking on their phones or whatever the case. I mean, phones are always the easy thing to use, but that's what everyone uses. And there is a passivity to it. Because you don't have to imagine what you're consuming. It's a visual image. Or you don't even have to read what you're reading about because they find ways to sort of repackage it and tell it to you faster in sort of a simpler format. So

• 1:31:35Bill Simmons?

  Or you listen to it over reading it. You listen to an audiobook, whatever.

• 1:31:39Speaker 01

  And I just, I think that the idea of sort of just sort of kind of spacing out and just kind of letting your mind go, I think that's really, but, but just totally gone. Like my, my kids can't handle it. My kids cannot handle boredom, you know? I often think, you know, it's like, like we've really become like a, like a real secular society. But I think one of the benefits to when it was a more sort of religious society was it forced people to be bored. Like, you know, I, I would go to mass and I would sit there and you would just have to sit there for an hour or whatever, you know? And I think that

• 1:32:19Speaker 01

  was really good. It's like really good to force people to be bored, you know? And we've removed that from

• 1:32:26Bill Simmons?

  You know where we haven't removed it? If you take a flight and the wifi is down and you thought like, I'm gonna go on the wifi, I'll watch a show or I'll do, I'll go, but now you're just stuck on this flight for four hours. You didn't bring a book and you're like, oh shit. And guess what? Sometimes that can be okay, especially if you're a creative person.

• 1:32:47Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, this, this is kind of a thing, right? Raw dogging flights, obviously. It's a weird, strange they picked the term raw dogging for this. But so there's this idea that you go on a flight, you don't watch TV, you don't listen to anything and you don't read. And why would this happen? Right? Why would, why would people do this by choice? And it's because

• 1:33:09Bill Simmons?

  They force themselves to do work. Yeah.

• 1:33:11Speaker 01

  No, I think that there's something in subconscious about us that craves this. Like that, that for some, you know, that, that people are confused. I flew four hours and I didn't read anything. I didn't watch anything. I didn't listen to anything. Why do I feel good? They don't even know why. It makes no sense. They expect to come off the flight and say like, that sucked. The TV didn't work and I didn't bring a book and I just had to sit there. And yet that's not what's happening. They're proud that they did it. And feel good about it. So I, I mean,

• 1:33:44Bill Simmons?

  It's an achievement to be bored.

• 1:33:45Speaker 01

  This podcast, I've supported Nico Harrison and I was like, people should do nothing. It's good for him. So I guess

• 1:33:51Bill Simmons?

  Be bored.

• 1:33:52Speaker 01

  What's going to be third? Yeah.

• 1:33:54Bill Simmons?

  All right. Quick break. This episode is brought to you by Fire TV. You ever sit down ready to watch the game only to search and scroll endlessly? If so, you need Fire TV. It shows you are live games from your favorite teams all in one place, right on the home screen. No more searching. Just sit down and turn on Fire TV. Separate subscriptions may be required. Feature and content availability may vary. This episode is brought to you by Searchlight Pictures, WildHorse9. John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell, I like those guys, star in the sharp-witted comedy thriller from Academy Award winner Martin McDonagh. Writer-director of The Banshees of Inisherin and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Set in the 1970s, filmed on location on Easter Island,

• 1:34:38Bill Simmons?

  Malkovich and Rockwell play CIA agents Chris and Lee, who are caught in a dangerous game of secrets and survival. Also starring Steve Buscemi, another one of my guys, Parker Posey and Tom Waits. WildHorse9 is being hailed by critics as a revitalizing shot of pure entertainment and easily one of the best films of the year. Don't miss WildHorse9, only in theaters November 6th. Get tickets now. I talked about this on Sunday on the pod. I went, I took the train from Boston to Stanford with, with my daughter.

• 1:35:09Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:35:10Bill Simmons?

  And we both had an iPad on and we watched this Peacock show at the same time. And that's all we did for the entire thing. We watched the show and we talked about it. And I was thinking when I was a kid, going back and forth between Connecticut and Boston, because my parents were divorced. And I'd be on the Amtrak and I'd bring like a book and a notepad, right? And I'd read, read the book for some of the time or I'd have a newspaper. And then I'd have this, and I'd write like parts of short stories or fake sports columns, like just whatever to kill the time for three hours. Those were kind of the only options, but it also like made my brain work in, in these ways. Like I remember in college, this is, I didn't have a computer until my senior year in college.

• 1:35:51Bill Simmons?

  When I had, I wrote a sports column every week and I'd write it longhand. I would go to a Dunkin' Donuts and I would get a giant iced coffee and I would write out ideas for the column and then I would start writing it in fucking cursive. I would write out the entire thing, go back into the newspaper office and then type in the column. And that seems like that happened in like the 1890s. It seems like I was like a cast member on, uh, on what was the Yellowstone spinoff? 1893, whatever, 1888?

• 1:36:21Speaker 01

  The year, I know that.

• 1:36:22Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Like that, that seems like a million years ago, but that was how, whatever my weird process was.

• 1:36:27Speaker 01

  You know, you will often make jokes about like your fingers not working. Do you miswrite?

• 1:36:32Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:32Speaker 01

  Like, I, I gotta, I'm always surprised. Like, okay, so you put that basketball book out. It's like an 800 page book about a sport. I don't know how many weeks it was on the top of the bestseller list. You were in a position where you could have written whatever you wanted for the rest of your life. You could have said, I want to do a book of poetry. It would have

• 1:36:51Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:51Speaker 01

  $400,000 for that. So how did you not keep doing that? Like you could have written a book about anything you wanted and then you just stopped. Now, I understand some people are listening to this and they're like, well, because he moved into podcasting and that's actually much more relevant to what was happening in the world and he'd rather dominate this space than that. But, but don't you, do you ever regret that you didn't continue writing?

• 1:37:15Bill Simmons?

  I don't regret it, but I, I, I really miss it. And I don't, I don't, the reason I haven't wanted to do it the last seven, eight years is because I just don't feel like I could do it at a level that I'd ever be happy doing it. I always say it's like golf. It's like these people that have to play golf a few times a week to be good at golf. And if they're just playing every once in a while, they're so unhappy because they know what they should be doing, but their body can't remember what to do. I, I feel like with the writing, you, you just have to do it every day. It's the only way I could be successful at it. It's, I, it's the repetition of being in the habit of doing it day after day after day. That I think for me, some people aren't like that. For me, that was what it was.

• 1:37:58Bill Simmons?

  And you know, all these different career choices you make, I don't have the ability to do that anymore. So I would have to give up something pretty major to be able to do it. With that said, I have been thinking about writing a book.

• 1:38:10Speaker 01

  Oh, really? Okay. Well, yeah. This is a difficult question, but like you said, I totally understand you saying, I don't feel like I could do it at the level to which I would be comfortable with or which I would find acceptable. What specifically do you mean by that? Like, what do you think that your writing now would lack? That would stop you from being comfortable publishing it? Because it's, I mean, I'm always uncomfortable when I publish things. So it's like, you know?

• 1:38:34Bill Simmons?

  I think it's more the process. Cause I remember the happiest I was ever with, with writing was when I was doing my basketball book, which was like a suicide mission, basically trying to do the book the way I did it with doing all the other stuff I was doing. But I wasn't a habit of really writing for three and a half, four hours a day, like every day. I didn't have another choice. And I remember like, I got to the point where I felt like I could flick a switch and just write whatever I wanted for like three, four hours. And be like, all right, I'm going to go to this place and I'm going to do it. And, and I know it's going to be at the level I want it to be. And I never really got back to that spot.

• 1:39:13Bill Simmons?

  I had moments, I remember like the first year at Grantland, I felt like I got back there for like a year with the process. I remember I came back from Boston after LeBron killed the Celtics in that game. And I wrote a column on the plane that I think was probably one of the best things I've written. And I wrote it on the plane. I had like four hours to write it. I was, you know, frantically typing when I had to send it when I landed. And I just knew I could do it because I had had enough reps. That's the stuff I just, it would be so hard for me to do it now. I don't know how to do it.

• 1:39:44Speaker 01

  But look what you just said. That you hadn't done it in a while. You did it one time in a four hour window.

• 1:39:51Bill Simmons?

  No, no, I'm saying when I did that, that was because I was writing all the time.

• 1:39:55Speaker 01

  So, so what would happen if you did that now? What would happen if you tried that now? Do you think?

• 1:39:59Bill Simmons?

  I'd probably, I'd stare at an empty, I've tried a couple of times. I'd stare at the empty document for two hours, like kind of even remembering. The process of putting your brain in your fingers.

• 1:40:11Speaker 01

  What book are you considering writing? This is like, I'm breaking news. I feel like I'm.

• 1:40:15Bill Simmons?

  No, you're not because I'll never do it. No, I had an idea. I had two different ideas for a book. I'm not going to mention them.

• 1:40:21Speaker 01

  You won't even, okay.

• 1:40:23Bill Simmons?

  I'll tell you offline.

• 1:40:24Speaker 01

  Oh, okay, okay. I mean, I'm curious. I don't mind you not telling me here, but I, I'm a little surprised that you said that. I thought that was you were like, I'm done with that world.

• 1:40:33Bill Simmons?

  No, I had a book after the basketball book that I really wanted to write. And I just got too busy and I didn't do it. But I had it all sketched out and I didn't do it. I'll tell you about it after.

• 1:40:43Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:40:43Bill Simmons?

  But I had it. I had literally, John Walsh still mentions it to me almost anytime I talk to him. Cause he's the, I think the one person I told about the book.

• 1:40:51Speaker 01

  So it's a sport.

• 1:40:52Bill Simmons?

  And he was excited. Wasn't really a sports book.

• 1:40:56Speaker 01

  Okay, okay.

• 1:40:57Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. I'll tell you after. But I think the biggest issue, the mistake I made with the basketball book was it was just too long and too hard to do. It was like three years of my life and it was, it should have been like two books. I should have spread it out.

• 1:41:11Speaker 01

  Why? I disagree entirely.

• 1:41:13Bill Simmons?

  So you. Well, cause I just could.

• 1:41:15Speaker 01

  It actually became the book you imagined and it sold incredibly well. It was.

• 1:41:19Bill Simmons?

  I know, but I wish I had done part one and part two of it. And then spent more time on it versus like doing, just trying to rush to meet a deadline. I still have so many things I would change about it at this point.

• 1:41:29Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, it's tough to do a book like that, particularly like when you're, you were talking about some players who were still active. Because there's no way you can write about things in the present tense without the book in all likelihood becoming dated, even if you're right. Even if everything you say about those guys is correct, things just change. So that is hard, like it would be hard for you to write a book like that and not say to yourself, well, I would change this or I would change that. I mean, it's really interesting.

• 1:41:57Bill Simmons?

  Well, but there's a scary moment when you're doing a book like that. And I'm sure this has happened to you with at least one of the things you wrote. Where at some point you're completely lost in whatever you had in your head, the book should be. And you've done a lot of the work already, but you're now in an abyss. You can't get out of it. You can't see the finish line, but you've already done all this work and there's nobody who can help you. It's like, you're the only person. In a weird way, that's probably what I miss the most about writing is like, when you're the only person who can solve the problem. And it has to be you, or else the thing's not going to get solved, right? But at the same time, it's so scared. It's all you think about. It's like, to do it correctly, it has to be like, the only thing you're thinking about. You're thinking about it when you're in the shower, when you're in the car,

• 1:42:42Bill Simmons?

  when you're making a tuna fish sandwich, whatever it is. It's just like, fuck, I gotta figure this out.

• 1:42:46Speaker 01

  That's what it is. I mean, like, when you do rewatchables now, it's almost like, to use a musical analogy, it's almost like you guys are kind of like making rumors, right? Like, you're people, you're kind of throwing ideas off each other, you're using your-

• 1:42:58Bill Simmons?

  Which I love. It's really fun to do.

• 1:43:00Speaker 01

  You're using your relationships to kind of create stuff. There's a producer outside, there are all these things. Writing is like being Prince. You write the songs, you play the songs, you produce the songs. It's just you.

• 1:43:11Bill Simmons?

  Like Billy Corgan making Siamese Dream. You're like, I'm just gonna redo all the guitar and drum and bass and everything.

• 1:43:17Speaker 01

  If you were smashing pumpkins in rewatchables, that'd be like, you would go back and like, you would like, you'd do voiceovers for like, things he says.

• 1:43:24Bill Simmons?

  I'm gonna do a different voice for Sean. I don't like how he said this. I'm gonna get an actor. Yeah, so there's, there's stuff I do miss about it. Now that my kids are older, there might be more time, but I'd have to give up something. I don't think I could do it at the, the level I'd want to do it. You know, like that, I admire the way that you've stuck with, you know, you, like, you have two books, two books that came out. And how many, what's the span of time between the two books?

• 1:43:51Speaker 01

  Well, next year, I have a book in January and a book in the fall. And then weirdly, they're re, this is talking about weirdness. They're re-releasing Fergie Rock City in the summer for the 25th anniversary.

• 1:44:02Bill Simmons?

  Wow.

• 1:44:02Speaker 01

  And it's strange, because I haven't looked at that book since I wrote it. You know, and I'm kind of, it's weird to think about it, but that's, you know.

• 1:44:09Bill Simmons?

  Jesus. Yeah, but you'll, and you probably, you finished two. Now you're thinking about what the next one is.

• 1:44:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:44:19Bill Simmons?

  I'm really interested, the book I'd want to read from you, or maybe it's just a piece, is what's, are bands just dead? And why did bands have a shelf life in music and rock? What, what was, how did we have, like, when, when I was a kid? And we had the, that whole Beatles era of rock bands. But then we had all of this other, like, the bands that became classic rock. And then all of these other bands, like Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles. We just had bands and the unity of a band and people getting together. And it's just how you made music. And why is that seem like it's not gone? But how did that just, how did that era just end?

• 1:45:03Speaker 01

  Okay, it's like, you know, like, Tame Impala right now, I could say is like a band, or like the War on Drugs, or a lot of these bands. It's like, they, they, they're still like, you know, they're, they're coming up with new ideas. And like, people are really into geets right now, as in, you know, is it?

• 1:45:17Bill Simmons?

  Geets is a big one.

• 1:45:19Speaker 01

  Still happens, but it's no longer the center of the culture. And that's mainly what we're talking about, is that it's receded from that. And part of it has to do with, you know, the formal limitations of rock music. I mean, rock music, for whatever reason, sort of made this decision that a band is going to be one or two guitars, a bass player, a drummer, possibly someone on keyboards, possibly someone doing another instrument that will sort of, you know, change the texture, and then vocals. And the songs are all going to be between three minutes to five minutes, unless you want to go further and you become prog rock, or you can become extra short and you kind of become like a novelty, like Stormtroopers of Death or whatever.

• 1:46:01Speaker 01

  So there's all these sort of formal limitations to a high degree. I think we used them all up. I mean, I know that seems insane to say, but there have been, there were so many bands from 1964 to, you know, 2004, whatever it was you used, that like, like the sheer number of music that was produced during that period. Sort of consumed a lot of the potential ideas you can create for a three or four minute song. And then there was the fact that this, all this music was also accessible initially, physically, but then through the internet digitally. And therefore, everything has become

• 1:46:43Speaker 01

  to some degree retro. Like, everything that comes out now, to some level, is informed by music that existed in the past in a pretty direct way. And, you know, and not just, and not the music that had just come before it, and not just like the classic records that everybody sort of steals from. The idea that, that there is, it is almost impossible to imagine that the most interesting thing that happens in popular music would come from a band playing rock music at this point. It just doesn't, it just doesn't seem like that's still available. But, you know, and the culture changed to, the interest in rock culture changed and disappeared, you know, that was a big part of it. You know, going

• 1:47:25Speaker 01

  to, going to a rock show had a lot before and after the band played, that was a meaningful time. And that's kind of gone.

• 1:47:35Bill Simmons?

  Nathan Hubbard has a theory that all of the chord combos and beat combos have basically been done in all of these different rock, rock songs, that everything becomes derivative of something that already exists, which is part of the issue now. Like, basically what you said about all these different combos have already happened with the four people in a band that would be in a band.

• 1:47:58Speaker 01

  I think a lot of people said that happened in the 1980s.

• 1:48:03Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:48:04Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm seriously, because it was like, you know, so much of what is considered rock music is still completely traceable back to 1955 to 1967. I mean, like, so, there is so much of what we view as like, what is supposed to be in rock, and what makes something heavy, you know, what makes something, you know, sort of, you know, psychedelic or whatever, like, that's all been established. So I think it's, like, it's not that it just happened now. It's just that these things occur, and they're lagging indicators. Like, really, like, rock music achieved full self-awareness of itself in the early 90s.

• 1:48:49Speaker 01

  That was really the end of sort of the idea of formal invention in an ideological way for rock music, but nobody realized that for 15 more years. Like, we went through a long iteration of like all the New York bands, like the Strokes and stuff, and the White Stripes, and all these things. Radiohead is in this, you know? It did not in any way feel like it felt like it was a vibrant rock form. Like, it felt like it was still something that was, you know, formally inventive and extremely interesting. And yet, in a lot of ways, soon as the rock artists, particularly like the grunge era artists, became self-aware about what they were doing, what meant to be a rock star,

• 1:49:31Speaker 01

  and sort of what this sort of said about your fan base and all this stuff. I mean, all art ends when it reaches self-awareness, and that's what happened to that.

• 1:49:41Bill Simmons?

  I think '02 to '06 or '07 was a really great time, and I felt that way as it was happening.

• 1:49:48Speaker 01

  I think there are-

• 1:49:49Bill Simmons?

  And that was the last really exciting time for music.

• 1:49:51Speaker 01

  I think there are, there are many people who, who, who, I think, very justifiably argue that a lot of the music that's being produced in rock, you know, right now, and in metal right now-

• 1:50:02Bill Simmons?

  It's like it's back.

• 1:50:03Speaker 01

  It's excellent. It's just that it has, it's, it's, it's sort of now like being like a connoisseur of these things. It's sort of like saying, it's like, being like, I know the most about jazz in 1985 or whatever. And people are like, well, what do you mean? Like, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, well, there's still jazz artists happening, and these still, they're doing it. It's, it, so, you know, like, especially when you and I talk about these things, we always talk about them in a macro way. Like, everything we talk about is sort of in the widest possible lens. Like, what does it mean to the world in general? But of course, if we would really drill down to the specifics of this, in the same way that like you do with the NBA, like, like when you low-talk and stuff like that, the

• 1:50:45Speaker 01

  things you're talking about, um, uh, aren't really applicable to most people who follow basketball.

• 1:50:52Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:50:53Speaker 01

  I mean, even when you talk about like, like, you know, uh, getting like a, you know, league pass or whatever. I think for most people, the idea of getting league pass, even though it's not that expensive, is kind of insane since 90% of the time when I want to watch an NBA game, the guys aren't playing anyways. Like the, the, the number of times that I watch a basketball game, I want to see, and both teams are operating in full strength, happens so rarely, it's almost like I gotta text eight people. That's like, oh, I'm watching the Warriors and the Nuggets and everyone's playing.

• 1:51:26Bill Simmons?

  Needs to be an automatic text, yeah. No, they need to tell you like, hey, three days from now, the Nuggets will be playing all their guys. Get ready on Wednesday night.

• 1:51:35Speaker 01

  I'm in a fantasy league with, I got 15 guys on the roster, 10 of them are technically on the injured list. Like, you know, to some degree, it's just.

• 1:51:45Bill Simmons?

  Nah, it's been, it's been ruined. The, I was talking to my son, my son really likes the Smashing Pumpkins.

• 1:51:51Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:51:51Bill Simmons?

  My son is like, really is on the cutting edge of all the modern music. Like he knows everybody has all the hip hop, all the, basically all that world. Like that's his music, but there are some older bands that he likes and he really likes Smashing Pumpkins, mainly because I was probably playing them in the car. But I was thinking like, when, so I'm in high school and there's a certain kind of music I like, but there's only like between 10 to 15 years of it to go back and get, like when we're buying like CDs and call them compact discs, calling up CDs in 1985, like, ah, gotta get more music. I'll get, ah,

• 1:52:31Bill Simmons?

  get the best of sticks. You know, there just weren't a lot of, weren't a lot of albums, right? And there's only like maybe 12 years total of all the music I like, or 13, whatever it is. And now I look at him in 2025 and there's 60 years of music for him to go through, not to mention like he also likes jazz and different things. And, I almost wonder if we even need new music the way we did. There's so much old music, like you could kind of live on that. It's almost like having leftovers in your fridge forever. You just go back into any decade and find awesome stuff, you know?

• 1:53:06Speaker 01

  I would guess, I mean, every person is different, but in general. The idea of the time something is released matters much less, I get the sense, from younger consumers to younger consumers. Like, something being released now, something being released eight years ago, something being released thirty-eight years ago, they're all accessing it in the exact same way, right? There's no, because there's no, there's no physical music culture as much now. It's not like, it's not like you were, say, you would have been into, like, The Cure or whatever. It's like, you would have hung out with, like, goth people, and there would have been this whole kind of world.

• 1:53:38Bill Simmons?

  I like The Cure, I did not hang out with goth people.

• 1:53:40Speaker 01

  Well, but I'm just using it as an example. I mean, you were into Styx, I guess, you'd be hanging out with a lot of people, like, who loved AOR music or whatever, and you'd talk about Foreigner, and you'd talk about Boston, and, you know, that's like, you'd have this kind of, like, kind of world. Now, that's not really how it is, it's like, sort of, all music is equally accessible. And, you know, what you were describing, kind of, sort of, like, there wasn't that many albums. Like, I remember, sort of, the opposite experience, where there was a limited amount of money. So, it's like, you know, I, for, I've said this a million times, but it's true, like, for a very long time, I had four cassettes, and then I got a fifth cassette. This is, like, eighth, ninth grade.

• 1:54:23Speaker 01

  And it was absolutely impossible for me, as a kid who was completely into metal, to be like, "I'm gonna go back and buy the old Aerosmith records." Like, I couldn't have done that, there was no way. Or particularly, "I wanna buy some unpopular Alice Cooper records, just to understand." That didn't happen, right?

• 1:54:40Bill Simmons?

  That's good. By the way, I was in the same boat, I probably only had, like, thirty CDs. But it was a question of, like,

• 1:54:45Speaker 01

  There was a normal

• 1:54:46Bill Simmons?

  There weren't that many choices.

• 1:54:48Speaker 01

  It wasn't strange to be somebody with thirty CDs, it was strange to be somebody with hundreds.

• 1:54:52Bill Simmons?

  Well, remember how important the greatest hits albums were?

• 1:54:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:54:55Bill Simmons?

  Because you'd be like, "Oh, I get the most possible versions, or most possible songs from this person I kind of like." Like, I remember the Bad Company greatest hits, like, this is great.

• 1:55:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, the people

• 1:55:05Bill Simmons?

  So glad they put off, I never had a Bad Company album.

• 1:55:08Speaker 01

  I used to buy a lot of live albums, because the live album would encapsulate the last three or four records. You're just mentioning, you know, like, Bad Company now, it's gonna, so, like, you know, so Bad Company's going on the Rock Hall, are you, are you aware of this?

• 1:55:22Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I saw that. I was surprised they weren't in there already.

• 1:55:25Speaker 01

  Okay, so well, I guess I have another, this might be another strange take. Okay, so, okay, so, so I mean, I think I probably, I'm guessing, like Bad Company more than most people who are listening to this podcast. And I mean, I've owned some Bad Company records. Okay.

• 1:55:40Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:41Speaker 01

  Um, you know, like, uh, um, you know, Pat Benatar, I think is in the Rock Hall now. And Foreigner.

• 1:55:49Bill Simmons?

  Pretty good four-year run.

• 1:55:50Speaker 01

  Foreigner.

• 1:55:50Bill Simmons?

  Pat Benatar.

• 1:55:51Speaker 01

  You know, like, and you know, I definitely probably like Foreigner more than the average person in 2025, you know, Ozzy Osbourne got in as a solo artist, and Stevie Nicks got in as a solo artist, and, you know.

• 1:56:04Speaker 01

  So all these are, so I'm not criticizing these bands, but I'll say this. So the Rock Hall never actually described like what bands are included, or like, what's the reason a band gets in?

• 1:56:17Speaker 01

  But I did feel like there was an unspoken understanding of what bands are not going to get in. And to me, it seems like it's artists like that, like people who are commercially successful, relatively formalist, straightforward bands, bands that got a lot of attention in the world since. People bought their records, people went to their shows, but it doesn't seem like that's like a Hall of Fame career to me. I mean, if you're going to have a Hall of Fame about rock music or pop music, however you want to see it, it seems like you should be able to say something about the artists more than it was like, oh, there was good records, a lot of people liked them.

• 1:57:01Speaker 01

  Like, it doesn't seem like Foreigner. I just don't understand, like, what is the reason Foreigner is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? And here again, I say this as someone who likes Foreigner. Like, I like, I like, like those.

• 1:57:15Bill Simmons?

  By the way, this, this happened in the Basketball Hall of Fame, same thing. The bar of who is a Hall of Famer, because I think, and I think it's the same reason for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, they want to induct like six, seven, eight people a year, right? And at some point, they don't have the six, seven, or eight anymore. So all of a sudden, and listen, Michael Cooper killed the Celtics in 1987 in game four. He was the best defender at that position of the eighties. I never thought he was a Hall of Famer, but now he's getting in. People like that are getting in versus like, the concept of the Hall of Fame is like, Tim Duncan's a Hall of Famer. You know, the, Allen Iverson is a Hall of Famer. Like, like the best 50, 60, 70 people in a sport are Hall of Famers. And then we could argue about everybody else.

• 1:58:00Speaker 01

  To me, a Hall of Fame is more meaningful if there are years when no one gets in.

• 1:58:05Bill Simmons?

  Totally.

• 1:58:06Speaker 01

  You know, but like, it's just, it's very, it's just odd to me. And now with the Rock Hall, anybody who gets in, gets to vote, right? So like, you know, like, so like, all the guys at Def Leppard are voting now. And like, all the guys and all these, and that, and that's definitely going to, you know, expand this to bands that would, in the past, we would not have perceived as being sort of like, kind of, you know, canonical groups. I mean, that's, I guess that's what I like. I, I kind of feel like if you're in the Rock Hall, you should either be a canonical act, or you should be an act who did something that mainstreamed or invented an idea that kind of went everywhere, you know? Or that

• 1:58:48Speaker 01

  during the time you existed, you were kind of the most important act that was happening. And I, it doesn't seem like that's how it is now. Now, now, the Rock Hall, kind of like the Basketball Hall of Fame, has become a situation where not getting in is more meaningful than getting in. Like, if you're, if you're a band who, who's not in the Rock Hall, like Motley Crue, whatever, is not in the Rock Hall, and they'd be like, well, why are we not in if Def Leppard is in? Or if, you know, if, like, what, what, what, what separates this? It's like, or like, why the replacement?

• 1:59:19Bill Simmons?

  So basically, if you've had success for seven, eight years, you're now in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?

• 1:59:24Speaker 01

  Well, but, yes and no. I mean, I, Boston's not in the Hall of Fame. If you're gonna pick one of these faceless A-

• 1:59:31Bill Simmons?

  Boston's not in the Hall of Fame?

• 1:59:33Speaker 01

  I'm 99% sure that they're not.

• 1:59:35Bill Simmons?

  Wow.

• 1:59:36Speaker 01

  And to me, like-

• 1:59:37Bill Simmons?

  So Bad Company got in before Boston?

• 1:59:39Speaker 01

  What?

• 1:59:40Bill Simmons?

  Bad Company got in before Boston?

• 1:59:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:59:43Bill Simmons?

  It's kind of shocking to me.

• 1:59:43Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I think that there's some people who say Boston really has like one and a half records, but I mean, there's more hits.

• 1:59:49Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I'd say three.

• 1:59:50Speaker 01

  That are great. I mean, plus the thing with Boston is that record was a bedroom album. It was produced by one guy by himself in his house. He did it himself. It is the best sounding home recorded record in the hit group music. That to me, put that in a Hall of Fame or a museum, you know, like the achievement of, of the creative process of making that first Boston record would justify its induction. I don't like, you know, it's like, obviously like I like Ozzy Osbourne. I like Stevie Nicks. I love Black Sabbath. I love Fleetwood Mac. They get in with in Black Sabbath and Fleetwood Mac. I don't really understand why they're being or why they were inducted as solo artists.

• 2:00:34Speaker 01

  Can you really look at their solo career and say like, this is a, uh, the, the, like, it's important that these records happened, you know?

• 2:00:43Bill Simmons?

  Well, Stevie Nicks, I think, I mean, she did have a couple of albums and a couple of hits, but she's the Fleetwood Mac piece of her career is, I think she already got in for the Fleetwood Mac.

• 2:00:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're good solo career. Ozzy had a great solo career. Crazy Train, Flying High Again. There's a bunch of the songs that are great, but it just, to put it in a Hall of Fame now seems like it's just a.

• 2:01:05Bill Simmons?

  Well, I have the answer for this one. It's literally because they want to have the seven eight new members every year so they can have the ceremony and the telecast. And they're never going to be like, hey, we've run out. Hopefully we'll have some more down the road. Like they're just going to put in seven more.

• 2:01:22Speaker 01

  Ceremony like in the Barclay Center. So we have to induct Rush and we have to induct Kiss or whatever, because they'll fill the place. But I mean, Rush definitely should be in the Rock Hall. But, uh, you know, it's, I don't know, but that's just bad. You mentioning Bad Company made me think of that again now. So now I've, I'm pro Nico Harrison, pro boredom, anti Bad Company, I guess. This is the aggregate of this conversation.

• 2:01:45Bill Simmons?

  And pro, you think Bonds and Clements should be in the baseball Hall of Fame?

• 2:01:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:01:49Bill Simmons?

  I've been, I've been on the record for 20 years saying, I don't know what we're doing.

• 2:01:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:53Bill Simmons?

  But there, there's some veterans committee now where they might be able to get in and I don't even think people care anymore because it's been so long and.

• 2:02:01Speaker 01

  Although in a sense, I mean, like over time, it helped Pete Rose not to get in the Hall of Fame. Like it helped because it's like every year the Hall of Fame induction happened. People talked about Pete Rose every single year. If he would have just got in, people have been like, oh, questionable decision with this gambling situation. And that would have been, he'd just be a guy in there. So like sometimes not getting in is to your benefit.

• 2:02:26Bill Simmons?

  Well, we never got to talk about the Chair Company and Pluribus, two shows that you love. So if you want to do, you want to do 60 seconds on that?

• 2:02:33Speaker 01

  I want to say a brief thing about the Chair Company and Pluribus, which I like, I felt television has been real down for the last six or so months, and these two shows are great. And the reason they are is because they're, they're kind of doing something that kind of had been lost for a while. The Chair Company is the rare example of a show outside of like the Nathan Fielder stuff, where I literally have no idea what's going to happen in these episodes with even, you know, like it is really surprising to me when I watch a television show and I don't kind of see what, like where they're going or what's going to happen, or, or even if I don't know the twist, I see a twist on the horizon. This show is not like that. Like I, I, I do not know scene to scene what's going to happen.

• 2:03:19Speaker 01

  And the thing about Pluribus, and I've only seen two episodes of this, but it, they're great.

• 2:03:24Speaker 01

  What is interesting about this show is that, um,

• 2:03:30Speaker 01

  it seems like it clearly must be about something. And yet that is a debatable concept. Like it seems like it's about AI, but maybe not. I mean, there's some people I think who see it as like a statement against woke-ism. And I think there's some people who think actually it's like a pro socialist message. Like, you know, like, like there's a whole, like, you, this show, because Vince Gilligan does things in an apolitical way, people assume there must be a secret political meeting in there and they can just kind of inject anything. And he's done a brilliant job of making that possible. Plus, he's one of the last guys who at least cares like what the TV show looks like on your screen.

• 2:04:14Speaker 01

  Like, he's not just like, I'm going to show, like, what would be an interesting way to show a woman driving as opposed to, I'm just going to have a shot of a car for two seconds so we know she got from point A to point B. It's like, he's trying, like he is, you know, he is trying ideas, you know?

• 2:04:31Bill Simmons?

  Two good ones. They're both on my list, as is the Scorsese doc.

• 2:04:37Speaker 01

  You will like that. You will really like that.

• 2:04:39Bill Simmons?

  So this, and I haven't seen the Netflix, the Garfield assassination show yet, but I've heard they kind of stealth released it. The Game of Thrones guys are EPs on it and Tom from Succession is in it. There's some really good actors in it and supposedly it's great.

• 2:04:56Speaker 01

  It's about President Garfield?

• 2:04:58Bill Simmons?

  It's a four-episode drama slash, I think it's a little bit funny too, about the assassination of James Garfield.

• 2:05:09Speaker 01

  I didn't even know this was happening.

• 2:05:10Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, they did the weirdest thing. They didn't publicize it at all. And I think they wanted to be word of mouth, but I already have a couple of people in my life who were like, this is fucking incredible. And I wonder, could this lead to like some sort of Ryan Murphy type situation, but like on a high-end caliber of like taking historical things and just like four-episode, whatever, because I'm all in. If that's how we can learn about American history, I would be excited about it.

• 2:05:36Speaker 01

  Like a real like tabloid version of squeaky from trying to kill Ford.

• 2:05:41Bill Simmons?

  But this is like high-end, well done.

• 2:05:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, that could be real good, you know?

• 2:05:45Bill Simmons?

  Right. So we'll see if that goes. Chuck Klosterman, plug, plug some pre-orders for your books.

• 2:05:51Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:05:52Bill Simmons?

  Or please plug one of them.

• 2:05:53Speaker 01

  My football book, my football book is coming out in January. It's very difficult to sell books now, so I appreciate you having me on here and allowing me to say this. And I will, I'll come back. I'll actually come to LA in January. We can talk about it more.

• 2:06:06Bill Simmons?

  We're gonna do one in person.

• 2:06:07Speaker 01

  You have the book? Did you get it?

• 2:06:08Bill Simmons?

  I have the book.

• 2:06:09Speaker 01

  Okay, good, good. Okay.

• 2:06:12Bill Simmons?

  Good cover. Haven't read it. It's on my holiday list. I will read it before we do the podcast.

• 2:06:17Speaker 01

  Take your time. Yeah.

• 2:06:18Bill Simmons?

  I just went through the freaking gauntlet of NFL and NBA starting at the same time.

• 2:06:23Speaker 01

  Well, yeah.

• 2:06:24Bill Simmons?

  So I was trying to just survive October.

• 2:06:26Speaker 01

  You know, it's, it's hard to find the time to do, it's like what Jim Croce says. It's like, you don't understand the things you want to do until there's no time to do them.

• 2:06:39Bill Simmons?

  Jim Croce, one of my first favorite music artists.

• 2:06:41Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, there's Jim Croce songs. I was walking in the rain, walking the dog the other day, listening to this music. It's like, those songs at times are too emotional to be available to me in the day. Like, I don't want to think about some of these things that like, you know, and like, they're real memorable and everything's a visual picture. And like, some of them, like, you know, Rapid Roy or whatever are just kind of fun. But there's a lot of songs that are like, they're, this resonates deeply with, you know, too much, too much emotion.

• 2:07:10Bill Simmons?

  Chuck Klosterman, a pleasure as always. I'll see you in January.

• 2:07:13Speaker 01

  You got it.

• 2:07:14Bill Simmons?

  Thank you. All right, that's it for the podcast. Thanks to Chuck, thanks to Gahal and Eduardo. As always, I'm going to be back on this feed on Thursday. And don't forget about the new rewatchables that went up. Snake Eyes, don't forget about the mailbag, [email protected] if you want to send a question for a future mailbag segment. I will see you on Thursday. Go Patriots.

• 2:07:56Bill Simmons?

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• 2:09:00Speaker 02

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