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

The Ringer’s Bill Simmons is joined by Cousin Sal to recap the Texans taking down the Steelers to wrap up the wild-card round before previewing the Texans-Patriots matchup (1:52). Then, Chuck Klosterman joins the pod to talk about his new book, ‘Football,’ and the evolution of humans' relationship to the sport (35:44). Host: Bill Simmons Guests: Cousin Sal and Chuck Klosterman Producers: Chia Hao Tat and Eduardo Ocampo 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 PNC Bank. In today's sports, everyone is constantly trying to outdo each other. Trick formations, infield shifts, constant rotation changes. Yet it's proven time and time again that strong fundamentals are the thing that will lead you to victory. Banking, no different. While everyone else tries to outdo each other, PNC Bank just keeps going right down the middle with steady, calculated money moves and the financial wins just keep coming. PNC Bank, brilliantly boring since 1865, brilliantly boring since 1865 is a registered mark of the PNC Financial Services Group, Incorporated.

• 0:35Bill Simmons?

  PNC Bank, National Association, Member, FDIC. The Bill Simmons Podcast brought to you by FanDuel Sportsbook. We're also brought to you by The Ringer Podcast Network, which has the Rewatchables, a movie podcast that I host. We're putting it up on Tuesday this week. We did What Lies Beneath, so go check that out wherever you get your podcasts, including on video on Spotify. Coming up on this podcast, Cousin Sal and I are going to talk about the Steelers Texans game, the end of Aaron Rodgers' career, what this means for the Patriots this weekend, and a whole bunch of football subplots. And then BS Podcast Hall of Famer Chuck Klosterman is here, and we're going to have a wide-ranging,

• 1:18Bill Simmons?

  really fun conversation about 100 years of football. That's all next. We're going to take a break, and then Cousin Sal. The Bill Simmons Podcast is presented by FanDuel. FanDuel's got it all. Same-game parlays, quick bets for jumping in live. They have your way. Go check out your way. You can build the bet that fits your play your way. Plus, don't miss out on the NFL playoffs, one of my favorite times of the year all month long. Download the FanDuel app or head to FanDuel.com/BS to get started. Get ready for the playoffs. Let's go. Must be 21-plus, present in select states, 18-plus in DC, Kentucky and Wyoming.

• 1:55Bill Simmons?

  Game problem, call 1-800-GAMBLER or visit RG-Help.com, call 888-789-777, or visit CCPG.org/chat in Connecticut.

• 2:32Bill Simmons?

  All right, we're taping this Monday night, right after Steelers Texans. The voodoo has run out, cousin Sal. No longer will we have Aaron Rodgers in the playoffs. We might not have him in the NFL. His career ends on a pick six. I don't know if that's the bigger storyline of the game, that that might be it. Is it Mike Tomlin might be done with the Steelers? Or is it, whoa, Houston, let's take them seriously. What is it for you?

• 2:57Speaker 01

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

• 3:11Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't want to end up on the Houston bulletin board as a Pats fan.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  You did it with the Chargers. It worked.

• 3:18Bill Simmons?

  Well, the CJ Stroud performance, I mean, we, we had the Houston's defense outscored Pittsburgh 14 to six. The defense turned it up and Rogers, all the stuff, anyone who bet against them any week of this season. And then got, got, uh, got it turned on them and you go, oh my God, how did I lose that? And then it like all came back on them this game, like all the garbage 40 yard passes that turned into a pass interference. Nope. The pass that gets tipped up in the air and the guy catches it. Nope, hit the ball, hit the ground. Uh, it just was, it's, it's like their luck ran out. They stayed at the table too long. The people were, they were vacuuming underneath them at three in the morning as they're playing blackjack and they're just getting smoked by the dealer. It was time to go.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  And the dealer could have beaten them even worse, right? Like that could have been like a 44 to six game if Stroud didn't, oh yeah, like four fumbles in the first half. He recovered two of his own. He couldn't make any, he had no eye contact with the center. I don't know what was his fault or the center's fault. I think they met during the national anthem or something like, I don't know. He just like, look at the guy's ass. You'll see when the ball's coming. Like he's never looking at the ball, but it didn't matter. You're right because, and I hate Aaron Rodgers and he did. Bad. He was like 4.8 yards per attempt or something. Um, and throwing tantrums on the sideline, all that stuff, but that defense was, I mean, he didn't have it. He was like in a dunk tank for three hours also, right? Like they were just attacking and the strip sack was going to happen one way or another.

• 4:45Bill Simmons?

  Well, one of the playoff manifesto rules is don't overreact to a big playoff win from the round before. I think people are not going to now overreact to this Texans defense, which was admittedly really, really good. That was a pretty shaky Steelers offensive line, a quarterback that couldn't move, a wide receiver who did not seem to Metcalf, who did not seem to be on the same page with Rogers anymore. They couldn't run the ball. And with all that said, it was seven, six, Stroud was, it felt like falling apart in sections. And it just felt like a classic Steelers game that they were going to somehow win nine to seven. Or 13 to 12 or so, you know, some ridiculous score. And you'd be like, oh my God, how did they win that?

• 5:25Bill Simmons?

  It was all the makings. And then Houston, you know, to Stroud's credit, as bad as he was, he made that huge throw when they were only up one. When it seemed like he was ready to turn the ball over again, all of a sudden he hit somebody for 49 yards. It felt like that turned the game. They got a field goal. They got some space and the D turned it on. But I, I'd be careful with people thinking now that this defense is going to go 2000 Ravens. You know, next week, Drake Bay is going to actually be able to move around unlike Rogers today.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  I think it'll be a similar game to next week, to yesterday, like Chargers. I think the Texans will score more, but I think it's going to be like in the 1914, 1916 range. And you're going to hope to get a lead and you know, nice little break for you again. Nico Collins, I mean, couldn't even. That, that was, you know, of all the fumbles and everything else, that was the worst play probably for Houston. That pass to Collins, not open, by the way, can being treated for a concussion. He definitely has one, didn't walk off the field. I mean, let's just, let's see his availability for week one in 2026.

• 6:27Bill Simmons?

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

• 6:59Speaker 01

  It is interesting that people are all over this Monday night game and obviously it equates to more money for the league, right? Having a Monday night playoff game, but you could do three Saturday, three Sunday and then not have to worry about one team getting more rest. And in the case of a concussion, it really is a big deal, right?

• 7:17Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  Like the difference between a six or seven day rest could mean the world, could mean if the guy's out for the year or not, you know, as is the case for Nico Collins.

• 7:27Bill Simmons?

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

• 7:32Speaker 01

  I swear to God. I swear to God. I bet Houston. I swear.

• 7:35Bill Simmons?

  Oh, you did? Okay.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  I did. Yeah, because we were 0-4.

• 7:38Bill Simmons?

  I only had the Steelers and one T's.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  We were 0-4 in Ringer 107 and we had the Steelers. I'm like, oh, we're going 0-5. And so we did. And I, uh,

• 7:46Bill Simmons?

  So I went 0-5 too and my record in Ringer 107 now is 40 and 55. I went 2-4 with my picks, but somehow went 0-5. And now it's like, I want to go the other way. I want to make history. What's the worst record I could buy? Like this, this season is now a throwaway. I have years in the past where I've done well. I just didn't have it this year. It's fine. It's like the Chiefs. Chiefs have done really well in the past. They had a shit season this year. I want to see how bad this can get. I'm not changing my process. I'm not doing the George Costanza and going the other way.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Good.

• 8:18Bill Simmons?

  I'm just going to keep it going and see what I end up with. Cause this, we did terrible in over unders. We did terrible in this Ringer 107, or at least I did. And it's like, I just want to throw this shit year away. I'm going to come back next year like Rocky and Rocky IV. I'm going to be lifting logs. I'm going to be, uh, I'm going to go on vacation with my wife and my alcoholic buddy, whoever that is.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  You got a client that she was from.

• 8:41Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Multiple alcoholic buddies.

• 8:46Bill Simmons?

  Oh, man, there's a joke both of us want to make. I'm not gonna do it.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  So many, so many.

• 8:49Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, so many jokes.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  We should do 20 minutes on this.

• 8:51Bill Simmons?

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

• 8:56Speaker 01

  Listen, 11 and 0 is great for the playoffs, right? There's 11 games.

• 9:00Bill Simmons?

  Now there's 12.

• 9:01Speaker 01

  12 and 0 is the ideal. 12 and 0 is the best you could do.

• 9:04Bill Simmons?

  Oh, no, it's 13 and 0. 6, 4, 2, 1. Yeah, 13 and 0 is the ideal.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  13, okay. So 13 and 0 is the best, but yeah, but 0 and 13 is the second best thing you could do. I mean, that's pretty remarkable.

• 9:17Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, the problem is I had in real life, I had the Pats. Like when I did the straight up picks, I had the Pats and I had the Panthers. In Ringer 107, I had the other four losses and then I did the Pats as a parlay with the over, which didn't hit. So I went a legit 0 and 5.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 9:34Bill Simmons?

  Regardless, uh, can we talk about more likely to be back?

• 9:39Bill Simmons?

  Give me the odds for on Fanduel, Rogers or Tomlin? Who's favored in the more likely to be back on Pittsburgh next year?

• 9:45Speaker 01

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

• 9:51Bill Simmons?

  Let's do all the odds, even though Fanduel has none of them.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 9:54Bill Simmons?

  All right, both back, I'm gonna say plus 600.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 10:00Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I think that's high. I don't think Rogers comes back.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  Oh, I think it should be, I think it's like 15 to 1 that they're both back.

• 10:07Bill Simmons?

  So higher, you think it's less realistic?

• 10:09Speaker 01

  I think one of them's probably 4 to 1 and the other's probably, I'm gonna do the math wrong, but maybe 2 to 1. I mean, Roger, Tomlin's more likely to return, I would think. You don't think so?

• 10:19Bill Simmons?

  I think Tomlin's more likely to return and we do this with coaches. I did this with the floor on last night's podcast with you. And I'm like, this has to be it. And then today they're like, yeah, they're talking extension.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:31Bill Simmons?

  No hard feelings over an entire decade of terrible playoff stuff. But I would think. This is it for Rogers. But anyway, so you say, all right, we'll meet in the middle. So we'll say 10 to one as a parlay for that.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so.

• 10:46Bill Simmons?

  So, and you think for Tomlin, like plus 150, he's not back?

• 10:53Speaker 01

  I think only because it's the Steelers and there's pride and everything else. And, you know, they could, if there's a team that's going to turn their back on the fact that he's 0-7 in his last seven playoff games, it's Pittsburgh. And also, I think I'm at-

• 11:06Bill Simmons?

  That's a tough list, by the way. Did you see that list? And now it's him and Marv Lewis at the top. I forgot Marv did the seven straight before we never saw him again.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:15Bill Simmons?

  Pretty hard.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  That was bad news. Yeah.

• 11:17Bill Simmons?

  Seven straight losses is tough.

• 11:20Speaker 01

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

• 11:30Bill Simmons?

  I just think if you're really thinking about it, if you're him,

• 11:35Bill Simmons?

  you're going back to a night like tonight where you're just, you're under siege. You're like, did you ever see that movie, The Grey with Liam Neeson? The plane crashes and the Wolves are just starting to, starting to kind of hone in on the guys. And there's just too many of them.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:52Bill Simmons?

  And one guy near the end, there's like three guys, sorry spoiler, like there's like three guys left. One guy just gives up. It's like, fuck this. Come get me. Wolves, come get me. I can't fight this anymore. That's kind of how I felt with Rogers in the fourth quarter is like, I just, I had Wolves come, just come eat me alive.

• 12:08Speaker 01

  I think you're right. Yeah.

• 12:10Bill Simmons?

  I did something physically, he can, he can't move at the speed you have to have in a game like that.

• 12:15Speaker 01

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

• 12:29Bill Simmons?

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

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:36Bill Simmons?

  The QB was bad.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  We should talk about the running game, which I think should maybe concern you a little with this week coming up. They did have 164 yards at what he marks.

• 12:45Bill Simmons?

  We can stop that though with that run. He's got to throw on us to beat us, I think.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  Okay, but I mean, this run game kind of came out of nowhere.

• 12:53Bill Simmons?

  For the Texans.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  You have to, you have to, right. You have to kind of prep for it a little bit. Yeah.

• 12:57Bill Simmons?

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

• 13:19Speaker 01

  Now I'm going to get confused for neither of them coming back.

• 13:22Bill Simmons?

  They're both gone.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  Uh, so I would think it's minus.

• 13:27Bill Simmons?

  I would say that's like minus, minus 125 range?

• 13:31Speaker 01

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

• 13:42Bill Simmons?

  So if I'm Tomlin, I, I want the Atlanta job.

• 13:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:49Bill Simmons?

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

• 14:15Speaker 01

  That's what, that was one of my. My hot take for 26 was one of them, aside from you eating pizza like in three weeks, is that Tomlin does go to Atlanta. But.

• 14:25Bill Simmons?

  Oh, interesting.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  What, what about this?

• 14:28Bill Simmons?

  Baltimore? You like the NWA move? This is what Billy Gill was pushing.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, that's right.

• 14:33Bill Simmons?

  He was pushing the, yeah, the Hogan joining Nash and Nash and Hall, just ripping the mask off.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  What if he did do the TV for a year, took a year off, he's been at it for a while.

• 14:44Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  We could almost guarantee which teams are going to need coaches next year. Cincinnati is going to need a coach.

• 14:50Bill Simmons?

  I don't want to work for a cheap team. I don't want to work for the Jets, own two.

• 14:53Speaker 01

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

• 14:59Bill Simmons?

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

• 15:13Speaker 01

  That was my, yeah, the Ravens would be good too, but the Falcons was like, hey, that was my thing.

• 15:18Bill Simmons?

  Can he do the Ravens though? And that's like a huge, that's like you going to work for like Fallon.

• 15:26Speaker 01

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

• 15:29Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, that would be.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  That's a lot.

• 15:30Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I can't imagine anyone doing that.

• 15:34Bill Simmons?

  You, I just can't imagine he's just flips, flip sides in the AFC North. And then comes back to Pittsburgh twice a year. You go to the NFC, you have a little distance.

• 15:45Speaker 01

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

• 15:52Bill Simmons?

  If I were him, and in general, like, how long is a football coach supposed to stay with an NFL franchise?

• 15:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:59Bill Simmons?

  Right? Even Andy Reid burned out in Philly and then went to KC and rejuvenated. But by the time he ran his course in Philly, he was done. Belichick ran his course with New England. Like it's going to be somewhere between 10 and 20 years for the really, really good coaches. He goes to the Giants, that's the best coach they've had since Tom Coughlin's nose would turn like bright maroon.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:21Bill Simmons?

  You know, I miss those days. I miss seeing him in the freezing cold.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  That was good.

• 16:25Bill Simmons?

  So Steelers had 175 total yards today.

• 16:30Bill Simmons?

  But this is a weird game. We're gonna remember it as 36. I genuinely thought the Steelers were gonna win up until that 50 yard pass. And as soon as they went up 10 sacks, I felt like the game was over unless the Steelers could pull their garbage, whatever.

• 16:44Speaker 01

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

• 16:56Bill Simmons?

  Well, our buddy Hench texted us that his initials stood for choke job. This was, he, he took a break from his 1778 take down of, of the French.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  Four hours of American Revolution talk with that one, that one punt. Good job by you.

• 17:12Bill Simmons?

  It was pretty sad. All right.

• 17:16Speaker 01

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

• 17:20Bill Simmons?

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

• 17:23Speaker 01

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

• 17:29Bill Simmons?

  I watched, I watched the Pats game again.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 17:34Bill Simmons?

  So we came on right afterwards. We're going live on Netflix.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:39Bill Simmons?

  And basically.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  By the way, are we on YouTube today?

• 17:41Bill Simmons?

  No, no, we're still on Netflix.

• 17:43Speaker 01

  Oh, good, good.

• 17:43Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  All right.

• 17:45Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, we're right next to that John Bernthal show with the his and hers.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  Oh, all right.

• 17:50Bill Simmons?

  Which is, I gotta say, a little bit on out of time with Denzel Washington's Corner. I don't know if you saw that movie from 20 years ago.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:59Bill Simmons?

  I just, the real ones will know. It's a little, it's a little on the corner. I still, I enjoyed it. I support my guy Bernthal.

• 18:07Bill Simmons?

  I watched the game again, and I don't think we were positive enough about how good Drake was in the second half. His stats were great. He had like a 140 QB rating. He was like 11 for 14. He had the scramble yarders. Really, the only play he missed was the touchdown to the tight end. But I do think it was one of, I think it was a young QB who kinda sucked in the first half. And then in the second half, got his sea legs. Now you move to next week with how fast that Houston defense is gonna be, but, but he can actually move around and try to create plays. The problem, I don't think they have Matt Collins again next week. And the receivers just didn't seem like they were open yesterday.

• 18:49Bill Simmons?

  I don't think it's gonna get any better tomorrow. So it feels like it'll be around the same game unless they can run on them. Do you think they can run on them?

• 18:55Speaker 01

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

• 19:17Bill Simmons?

  He definitely played for us. There's no question he would be on the field. It's weird that Houston's another team that the Pats have owned really this whole century and the Chargers were another one where it's just in my head. I'm like, whereas like I was talking to, I was talking to somebody about Denver and Buffalo, like if the Pats were able to go into round three, would you rather play Buffalo at home or go to Denver? Buffalo at home brings Josh Allen, the best player in the week. We probably didn't even, we probably weren't even superlative enough about yesterday.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:51Bill Simmons?

  The Pats are 0-4 in the playoffs in Denver. Do you know that?

• 19:55Speaker 01

  Is that what it is?

• 19:55Bill Simmons?

  Ruel Jones, safety. I think that was 87. The Jake Plummer game in 2005, one of the most ridiculous losses in the history of the franchise. I don't think we got a single call the whole game. Champ Bailey running 100 yards, Ben Watson knocking him out of bounds, ball clearly goes through the end zone. They call it out at the one. Still mad about that game. The third one, I think Gronk was out in Denver when Peyton Manning had a good team. And then the fourth one, they lose 20-18. Brady makes the best throw of his career. They're down eight, driving 2016. It was the noodle arm Peyton Manning year where they end up winning the Super Bowl, but he's got the noodle arm.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  And that was a Gronk two-point conversion.

• 20:38Bill Simmons?

  Gronk two-point conversion, they didn't get it. Brady, I'm convinced was concussed for most of that game. And it was just kind of a game from hell. Yeah. And those were the four times they played in Denver. And in general, LA is to kick our ass. And in general, we always lose to Denver.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:57Bill Simmons?

  Except for the T-Bo playoff.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  LA. He's not LA. He's not.

• 21:01Bill Simmons?

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

• 21:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do what as a fan?

• 21:15Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, as a fan, like who's your team?

• 21:16Speaker 01

  The players don't give a crap.

• 21:17Bill Simmons?

  No, I'm just saying for you, for us.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  The coaching staff has changed three times over.

• 21:20Bill Simmons?

  I'm not saying it's rational.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  No, no, yeah, no, I don't want to see the Packers.

• 21:24Bill Simmons?

  So the Packers are your team?

• 21:26Speaker 01

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

• 21:41Bill Simmons?

  And then all the other teams.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  Since Jerry Jones. Since all the other NFC teams, yeah.

• 21:46Bill Simmons?

  The thing that makes me feel good is I, as I said last week, I do think Drake has greatness in him and wasn't great in that first game. And I actually like that. And Vrabel called him out, like in a, in a good coach way. It was just like, yeah, he made a lot of mistakes, blah, blah, blah. He's got to take care of the ball better. Like, I think he's going to really push them this week. Push May to be like, hey, there's more in there. We got it. We need it this game. Houston's great. We're gonna need you.

• 22:14Bill Simmons?

  And if it's him versus Stroud and the defenses can be relatively equal and we're home, I like the May chances, but he's got to be a little better. So you think there's 2000 Ravens potential with this Houston team at all or no?

• 22:28Speaker 01

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

• 22:44Bill Simmons?

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

• 22:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, stupid.

• 22:51Bill Simmons?

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

• 23:04Speaker 01

  I think the most important thing you did yesterday was like reestablish playoff dominance, especially like defensively at home.

• 23:12Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  Like, and now like make everybody a little nervous to come to you.

• 23:16Bill Simmons?

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

• 23:58Speaker 01

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

• 24:05Bill Simmons?

  No, the best one's Rams Seahawks, right?

• 24:07Speaker 01

  Rams. Well, no, it's Niners Seahawks.

• 24:10Bill Simmons?

  I mean, I Niners Seahawks.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:11Bill Simmons?

  No?

• 24:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. Rams Bears is probably going to be interesting because that team is ridiculous, that Bears team. And then I guess Bills Broncos. Man, they're all good. I like them all.

• 24:22Bill Simmons?

  Now Rams Bears is the best one.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  Is it the best one?

• 24:26Bill Simmons?

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

• 24:31Speaker 01

  What's your league? This league?

• 24:32Bill Simmons?

  The NFL. Heard that today.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  That's all it takes?

• 24:35Bill Simmons?

  That was what it turned out, first take. Caleb Williams is really good. We'll see, we'll see if it can keep going for him. Top five seems strong.

• 24:46Speaker 01

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

• 24:52Bill Simmons?

  Maybe he's right. Who knows?

• 24:54Speaker 01

  I don't think it's Caleb Williams. I don't think it is.

• 24:56Bill Simmons?

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

• 24:59Speaker 01

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

• 25:11Bill Simmons?

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

• 25:15Speaker 01

  There's nobody else?

• 25:16Bill Simmons?

  May has to be above Caleb, right?

• 25:18Speaker 01

  That's fine.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  Jeez, Ryan Clark may have done it.

• 25:24Bill Simmons?

  Ryan Clark, I apologize in real time. You may, maybe you're right.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  No, honestly, I, I still, so you don't put Stafford. I know you hate staff. You have to be down on Stafford.

• 25:34Bill Simmons?

  I would have Stafford ahead of Caleb Williams at this point.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  Stafford's ahead of Caleb Williams. I, I put my guy ahead. I mean, Dax in the playoff, you know, stuff of their record.

• 25:41Bill Simmons?

  Alright, there's a case at least.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  It's okay.

• 25:44Bill Simmons?

  I mean, he's not. Back in this.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  He's not 10th. Good job, Ryan Clark.

• 25:46Bill Simmons?

  I mean, the guy was on ESPN for 12 straight hours today. We gotta give him props.

• 25:51Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 25:52Bill Simmons?

  Gotta come up with stuff. I think he really was. I think he was on for 12 straight hours.

• 25:55Speaker 01

  Was he really?

• 25:56Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 25:56Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 25:57Bill Simmons?

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

• 26:04Speaker 01

  Well, they fired everyone. They have like three guys left.

• 26:06Bill Simmons?

  That's true. They had to, yeah.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:08Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, they have to, to come back. Alright, so we gotta guess the line.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Okay. I have it written down. Um, you, if you get this.

• 26:16Bill Simmons?

  I haven't seen it.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  I'm up two to one. I'm up two to one in games. If you get this, you tie me and therefore win the season for the first time since all the way back in 2024.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 26:32Bill Simmons?

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

• 26:36Speaker 01

  Okay, one and a half.

• 26:39Bill Simmons?

  What'd you have?

• 26:40Speaker 01

  Here's what I had.

• 26:40Bill Simmons?

  Don't cheat. What is it? I can't do that.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  I had three.

• 26:44Bill Simmons?

  Patriots by three, okay. Definitely not gonna be three. It's gonna be lower than that.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  It's two and a half.

• 26:51Bill Simmons?

  Oh, you beat me.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  I live to see another week.

• 26:53Bill Simmons?

  Son of a bitch.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  Well, I was even thinking of going higher. They were three and a half against the Chargers.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  I, I don't know. I, I thought maybe Houston, by the second quarter, I was like, if this is, this is how Houston's gonna present themselves, maybe the Patriots are worth more here.

• 27:11Bill Simmons?

  So CJ Stroud isn't one of the top five quarterbacks in the league?

• 27:16Speaker 01

  Not according to Fandel.

• 27:18Bill Simmons?

  No. Um, man, that seems high, Sal. I don't know.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  No.

• 27:25Bill Simmons?

  You don't think so?

• 27:27Speaker 01

  You would, so the Chargers were three and a half, right? All week?

• 27:31Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  No, that's fine.

• 27:35Bill Simmons?

  Did Hertz, so Hertz drops out of the top five. Mahomes is still there.

• 27:41Bill Simmons?

  Is Lamar out of the top five? Lamar has to still be in there.

• 27:44Speaker 01

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

• 27:49Bill Simmons?

  Herbert's out. This is, even the nerds are threatening to turn on Herbert now.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  I know.

• 27:55Bill Simmons?

  I will say Caleb is in the top five and maybe top three of my team is playing you or I bet against you. You're down seven, but I'm completely terrified because you're capable of any throw.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:09Bill Simmons?

  Right? Like, there's no way to ever feel, if he was in on Pittsburgh today, down 14-6, he wouldn't have given up on the game like he would have with Rogers.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 28:18Bill Simmons?

  Like, this guy could do, who knows?

• 28:21Speaker 01

  Uh, definitely top five more exciting. I put him maybe ahead of Lamar in that department, like more exciting. He could pass Lamar next year, anyway.

• 28:29Bill Simmons?

  I love the fucking crazy arms. Like, Elway was like this, we've only had a couple dudes. Dudes that can throw when their feet aren't set or when one-

• 28:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:38Bill Simmons?

  When they're up in the air.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 28:41Bill Simmons?

  The scrambling's great, too, but then there's other type, you can watch them for a half hour and the ball's just bouncing around all over the place.

• 28:48Speaker 01

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

• 28:55Bill Simmons?

  Play Tyson Bajin for-

• 28:57Speaker 01

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

• 29:02Bill Simmons?

  Well, the Rams defense definitely, uh, I wouldn't say is gonna shut them down. They'll give them a pass rush, but you can throw on them.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  Right. So what did they do here, real quick? Let's talk about this. So, um-

• 29:17Bill Simmons?

  You talk about the TV schedule?

• 29:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the Bears-Rams, we're coming on after Bears-Rams Sunday, right? A little earlier than normal.

• 29:25Bill Simmons?

  Yep.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  Um, the Bears played Saturday and the Rams played Saturday. So why do you have to move, why do you have to move that to Sunday? Whereas you're, who's getting screwed here?

• 29:39Bill Simmons?

  I would say.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  Like the Texans are, I don't, I don't, I don't understand this here.

• 29:45Bill Simmons?

  So Buffalo, Denver is the first game. San Francisco, Seattle is the second game on Saturday. Houston, and that has, kinda has to be because that's, uh, west coast, I guess. Although Denver's, I guess, west coast as well. Houston, New England. And then Rams, Bears, 3:30 Pacific, so we'll be coming on at like 7 o'clock. That's great for us.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. No, good for us.

• 30:10Bill Simmons?

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

• 30:13Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 30:14Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  Well, maybe we'll just keep it rolling.

• 30:16Bill Simmons?

  Really tough, tough, tough, tough Landman season.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  Well, you ruined it for everyone with Jon Hamm's plight. That was it, yeah.

• 30:25Bill Simmons?

  I don't, I'm starting to wonder if Taylor Sheridan can write seven shows at the same time. This is, there's been cracks, cracks in the armor for this one.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  We know seven's the number, the big number.

• 30:34Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I think seven simultaneous shows is too hard.

• 30:38Speaker 01

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

• 30:44Bill Simmons?

  Listen, the Niners are just happy to be alive.

• 30:47Speaker 01

  I know.

• 30:47Bill Simmons?

  Next to that, uh, that electromagnetic practice center fiasco thing they have going. They're probably just excited to go to Seattle.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  I wonder if that's true.

• 30:56Bill Simmons?

  Can we go today? Can we, can we leave on Wednesday to get out of here?

• 31:01Speaker 01

  You talked about how we wrote together on Jimmy Kimmel Live that first year. Remember that big cancerous box over our head that was just buzzing?

• 31:08Bill Simmons?

  Oh, yeah.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  All day long?

• 31:09Bill Simmons?

  Yes.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  Remember that thing?

• 31:10Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Probably full of asbestos, all that stuff.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:13Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 31:13Speaker 01

  We turned out all right, right? No.

• 31:15Bill Simmons?

  I think so. Can you, I was thinking the Shaky's game on Saturday, which we always joke about. The first game around when we call the Shaky's game. There should be a name for that first game on Sunday, that the 12 o'clock PT start.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  For this round coming up?

• 31:31Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:32Bill Simmons?

  Clearly, that's where they want to stick the worst game every time. Cause the Saturday one's a little later. Starts 1:30 Pacific. It's going into primetime East Coast. So you want to put a good one there. Second one is an official primetime. And then, uh, that 12 o'clock PT Sunday game. You kind of.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  I think that's a good ratings.

• 31:55Bill Simmons?

  Getting rid of that one.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  Spot though, isn't it? Oh yeah. 3 o'clock Eastern?

• 32:00Bill Simmons?

  Well, but the.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  That's what you're talking about, right?

• 32:01Bill Simmons?

  Sunday nights, Saturday and Sunday night are the two best games.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  The nights for sure. So yeah. Yeah, the nights for sure. But now it's network. So that that Seahawks game's a Fox game. Um, oh, your game's an ESPN ABC game. Interesting.

• 32:18Bill Simmons?

  So we get Buck and Aikman?

• 32:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:21Bill Simmons?

  Oh. Oh, that's amazing.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, you get Buck and Aikman. That's what I'm seeing on ESPN.

• 32:27Bill Simmons?

  So we get Romo, Romo doing Buffalo, Denver.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:32Bill Simmons?

  We have Brady doing the Niners Seahawks. Oh, this would be good.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  This is good.

• 32:41Speaker 01

  And then Peacock is, uh, is going to be Tirico and Collinsworth Rams Bears. I love it. Football's so good.

• 32:48Bill Simmons?

  Like Matthew Stafford. He's not even looking at him, Mike.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  My Caleb, what did you hear what Bill said about him throwing all contorted in the air? He's right.

• 32:58Bill Simmons?

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

• 33:02Speaker 01

  He's top five in my book.

• 33:05Bill Simmons?

  All right. So game, so the Lions we have now for next week. Since we did them yesterday.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 33:12Bill Simmons?

  Buffalo, are they favored yet?

• 33:16Speaker 01

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

• 33:18Bill Simmons?

  Buffalo's now favored.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 33:20Bill Simmons?

  Minus one and a half.

• 33:23Bill Simmons?

  Seahawks minus seven and a half.

• 33:25Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 33:26Bill Simmons?

  Patriots minus two and a half.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 33:30Bill Simmons?

  Rams minus three and a half. It feels like there's

• 33:37Bill Simmons?

  a seven pointer.

• 33:40Bill Simmons?

  Using the Broncos up to plus eight and a half. The Seahawks to minus half. And the Patriots to plus four and a half that I'm already eyeing.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  Were you the only home team to win this week?

• 33:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, right?

• 33:57Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  And so we expect.

• 34:00Bill Simmons?

  No, the Bears, the Bears were a home team.

• 34:03Speaker 01

  The Bears were a home team. Sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. No, count that. Yeah. Two, two out of six. And so now this is, uh, getting even up here.

• 34:11Bill Simmons?

  All right. So long, Aaron Rodgers.

• 34:13Speaker 01

  That's it. I mean, you know what? One more thing. I'm just looking at this now. And I, I should probably start up a GoFundMe right this second for how much I'm gonna lose on the Indiana Hoosiers, Seattle Seahawks money line parlay. That's it. It's coming.

• 34:31Bill Simmons?

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

• 34:45Speaker 01

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

• 34:48Bill Simmons?

  Use that as your anchor?

• 34:50Speaker 01

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

• 34:55Bill Simmons?

  Sounds great. Was that what you need to recoup?

• 34:58Speaker 01

  That's, and then I'll be halfway back. Yeah.

• 35:01Bill Simmons?

  Uh, do you think Baby Doll watched us on Netflix last night?

• 35:04Speaker 01

  Oh, interesting. Did not comment on it. So I have to say no. You, once in a while he'll comment and even then you don't even know if he watched it. But today he didn't even comment.

• 35:15Bill Simmons?

  There's a theory going around that Baby Doll, or your agent, Jimmy's agent, my sometimes agent, my agent hibernation. There's a theory that he's retired.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  Really?

• 35:27Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. That's like the word on the street. It's not an official retirement, but it's an unofficial retirement.

• 35:33Speaker 01

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

• 35:38Bill Simmons?

  Maybe it's not true.

• 35:42Speaker 01

  See if it goes through.

• 35:43Bill Simmons?

  Find out. We, uh, you're gonna be back on Sunday night with me. So we'll be earlier on Sunday night. It looks like around 7 o'clock range.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 35:50Bill Simmons?

  And we'll have an answer for that. We'll have an answer for four games. We'll have an answer for whether in ring or 107, we could go for the 0-13.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  Let's do it. It's easy.

• 35:59Bill Simmons?

  I just wanna be 0-13, whether it's 13-0, 0-13, whatever it happens. I'm happy to do it.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  People something to fade. That way they know, right?

• 36:07Bill Simmons?

  That's the thing. People like, oh, your record sucks. It's like, cool, bet against me.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  That's all.

• 36:12Bill Simmons?

  I'm laying the blueprint. Just if you think it's so funny, win some money. Go ahead. Knock yourself out.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  There you go. That's your Johnny Cochran moment.

• 36:19Bill Simmons?

  Great to see you. We're coming back, taking a break. Come back with Chuck Klosterman right after this. This episode is brought to you by WeatherTech. Whether it's a pumpkin spice coffee that goes splat in your seat, or a weekend tailgate that leaves your trunk full of gear and who knows what. You're going to want WeatherTech in your vehicle. Whether you call it fall, autumn, or spooky season. Whether the mess is your fault, the kids, the dogs, or the weather's fault. You're going to want WeatherTech for American-made floor liners and a cargo liner that laugh in the face of fall weather. Visit weatherTech.com today. This episode is brought to you by Workday. Guessing is for game shows, not your business, especially when your margin for error is zero. Workday is the enterprise AI platform for HR, finance, and IT with a deep understanding of your organization's context and guardrails.

• 37:03Bill Simmons?

  So every AI action is permission-aware, giving you accuracy 24/7 and the ability to not just get work done, but get it done right. It's a new Workday. All right, so we're going backward in time. Chuck Klosterman is here, BS Podcast Hall of Famer. We're taping this late morning Pacific time. He has a book coming out called Football. And ironically, this is probably the best football time right now, where you have the semifinals of college. You have the NFL playoffs. We just had five games. There's about to be a six playoff game tonight. It's like football, football, football. Ratings are the best it's ever been. You and I have both been football fans our whole life. And then you decided, I'm going to write an entire book about my complicated relationship with football.

• 37:47Speaker 02

  Yes, that is what, that's exactly what has happened, Bill. That's exactly what it is, you know?

• 37:52Bill Simmons?

  I nailed it.

• 37:52Speaker 02

  I've been thinking about this stuff for 40 years now in my life. I think I've been thinking about it very consciously for about 20 years. And I just, I finally did it. I mean, there's been a bunch of books where I've kind of talked about sports here and there, but this is the first time I was like, okay, this is what it's about. This is a book, you know?

• 38:13Bill Simmons?

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

• 38:51Speaker 02

  Well, it wasn't like that for me. It wasn't an incident in that way, you know. I mean, the Kaepernick thing is mentioned in the book. I mean, the CTE stuff is in the book, certainly. But I think it had more to do with the fact that I just, I'd always wanted to do a sports book. And, and you and I have talked about this a lot over the years. I think that maybe as a game, we both prefer basketball, like the purity of basketball, the idea of basketball. I, I think if someone said like, what is the greatest game? I would say basketball as a team sport. But football is so much more important. It weirdly matters to me so much more than the other sports. The actual application of the game itself, like what I'm actually seeing and experiencing.

• 39:37Speaker 02

  And about, I think about 20 years ago, I just kind of made this decision that like, I'd like to write a book about football that was all encompassing, that it was, it was about sort of, you know, it was about players, it was about teams, but it was really sort of about the idea and the meaning of this. And as football evolved into this thing, that is not just the most popular sport in the United States, but more popular than all the sports in the United States, really. I mean, like I mentioned earlier in the book, how in 2023, of the top 100 broadcasts on television in the United States, 93 of them were football games, pro football games, and then like three or four more were college games.

• 40:20Speaker 02

  There's nothing else like that. I mean, I'm a person who's kind of interested in the monoculture. I always have been. And the only elements of the monoculture left in the United States are football and Taylor Swift, I guess. Like, that's really it. So I just, you know.

• 40:34Bill Simmons?

  Landman, I think would be the third one.

• 40:36Speaker 02

  Well, we, landman?

• 40:40Speaker 02

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

• 41:16Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 41:17Speaker 02

  And I have, you know, this isn't perfect, but it's close, closer to what I imagined in my mind than most of the books I've done. But what I wanted to do and what it ended up being is similar, you know?

• 41:30Bill Simmons?

  Well, it seemed like you were spilling all of your football thoughts.

• 41:33Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 41:33Bill Simmons?

  You're just trying to get them all down with some sort of structure through like, basically like nine different topics and trying to hit as many things as possible. And there were some, how much do you want to spoil?

• 41:44Speaker 02

  Well, I don't, I don't care, really. I mean,

• 41:46Bill Simmons?

  Okay.

• 41:47Speaker 02

  I, I, a little bit, I guess, but not in a bit. You know, it is very interesting how the world is now. Like, you know, when that book Abundance came out last year?

• 41:56Bill Simmons?

  Okay.

• 41:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. Now, that seems like a book I would read, right? I never did read it, although I feel completely informed about it because I heard it on podcasts like nine different times. Like, sometimes I think that the way things work now is you write a nonfiction book and, you know, maybe 150,000 people read it, but most people experience it through this, through these kind of like these ancillary moments of people discussing the book. So I understand that there are people listening to this podcast who I think would be prime people to buy this, and they probably won't. They'll be like, I just don't, I don't buy books anymore. It's really hard to sell books to men particularly. So if you want to talk about specifics of the book, that's fine. I, I don't mind, you know?

• 42:39Bill Simmons?

  I was psyched that I had to read the book because you were coming on and plus I wanted to read it and it forced me to read. And as we discussed, I usually read stuff on my iPad now because we're older.

• 42:48Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 42:50Bill Simmons?

  But I think part of the issues with books these days is that it's so much easier to just kind of consume other things that don't take as much brain power as a book, which I think is, you and I have talked about this offline a bunch. I think is the most alarming thing when I think about people under 30, because it's not just that, it's not just like, oh, people got to read more. It's like, When you read, you learn about the past. And the only way to know how to prepare for what's coming in the future is to learn from the mistakes of the past. And if you're not reading and you're just watching like, you know, the craziest clips of all time on Twitter, Instagram or wherever, you're not going to learn backwards. And that's the part that scares me the most.

• 43:33Bill Simmons?

  That's how you and I both, I think we both had a lot of time by ourselves when we were kids. And I read everything and I just don't feel like I would have done that if I was a kid now.

• 43:42Speaker 02

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

• 44:28Bill Simmons?

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

• 44:50Speaker 02

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

• 45:21Bill Simmons?

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

• 45:36Speaker 02

  Well, the, the basic premise, the most basic premise is this, which is that. Football is probably the most popular thing we have in the country right now. And there's a sense that this is just how it's always gonna be. You know, but nothing is like that. In fifty years or a hundred years, the world's gonna be different, populated by different people. And football, it may, you know, it might, it probably won't completely disappear, but it's gonna radically recede and will not be the center of the world as it is now. And when that happens, people in that time are going to explain or try to explain what it was. Uh, you know, in the same way that people now sometimes try to describe,

• 46:17Speaker 02

  you know, the meaning of Roman gladiators or, or the meaning of jazz or these things, you know, that from the past that are still around, but they're kind of, and it never works. Those, it's always wrong. Like, cause you're, cause people are always basically projecting the present onto the past. They're taking, this is how we think about things now. So therefore this was the failure of this thing in the past. Cause it's also always sort of framed as a failure. The thing ended, so something must've went wrong. And I know that's gonna happen with football. I can, I can see it already. I can see people just preparing for this almost unknowingly. That when football starts to change and starts to become less important and moves away, they're going to say, well, like, well, this was, this was why that happened.

• 47:01Speaker 02

  This was, this is what football meant. And I'm trying to describe what football means now and why it sort of became the thing that it is. I mean, if somebody said to me, what's the best way to describe the last half of the 20th century? Like 1950 to 2000, you need some vessel to sort of use as the way you describe that. I would use football, which is why a lot of this book in some ways will seem like it's a little bit, I wouldn't say mired in the past, but involves the past. I mean, most of the things discussed in this book, many of the players, not all of them, but a lot of them are players who are retired now or things that have happened already.

• 47:39Speaker 02

  Um, and, uh, I feel as though the future is not designed for football to dominate the way the past was.

• 47:50Bill Simmons?

  You know, obviously, I agree with you. What's interesting about that is you could say from 1888 through about 1975, baseball was the sport that explained everything the best. Right? And then, so with football, I would, you could almost, there's an overlap for a while. But one of the points you made in this book is that at some point, football grabbed the America pastime title from baseball. And some of that was unforced errors that baseball had. Other things were that football just became way more popular. Fantasy football came in. They figured out how to just put more games on. Like you mentioned in the book, how you watched two and a half games a week. I was, there was the early game, and then

• 48:35Bill Simmons?

  there were usually a doubleheader on one of the networks unless the Pats were playing. So it was sometimes three afternoon games, but maybe usually two, plus the Monday night. I was in the same boat as you, could maybe stay up till Cosell. And then we experienced it through football highlights from the pregame show on CBS. There wasn't ESPN back then. Football cards, magazines, books, Sports Illustrated. Like, we're just kind of grabbing any piece of it. And I think what's changed so much since now that we're in our 50s is football's just everywhere all the time. It's like, think of how many channels it's on now.

• 49:12Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 49:13Bill Simmons?

  You have a game on Amazon, NBC, Fox, and CBS. We have five playoff games in four spots. And you could see every piece of it. You could see the highlights right away. I can watch after a Patriots game. I can see Mike Vrabel greeting every player as they run back in the tunnel. And then I can watch the locker room speeches everyone give. And I can do this within an hour of the game. And if you had explained any of this to us in 1978, we would have been, our brains were sort of broken.

• 49:38Speaker 02

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

• 50:02Bill Simmons?

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

• 50:15Speaker 02

  Well, but here's the deal. That seems like a positive.

• 50:20Speaker 02

  But it is a problem for any sport focused in that way around people.

• 50:25Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 50:25Speaker 02

  See, football has a real advantage of many things, but one of the real advantages it has is that, you know, the players are almost faces. You know, we're always watching this clash of colors on the field, the uniforms are, it's a warlike kind of simulation where the person, the, the 20 most popular players in the NBA now are more famous than the 20 most popular non-quarterbacks in the NFL for sure. They're more recognizable and that, uh, and that seems like a benefit, right? If you're the NBA, you're like, this is great. We have all these personalities, but the thing is personalities disappear and people's feelings toward them change.

• 51:05Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 51:05Speaker 02

  Matters is the thing itself. The reason football is so dominate dominant is not because of the individuals. It's because of the collective. It's because the sport is what people like, you know? You had mentioned like this, the thing with baseball is kind, it is interesting. So, you know, uh, uh, football starts, you know, late 19th century, whatever. And then it intersects with the rise of television in the 1950s. And that is what makes it happen.

• 51:33Bill Simmons?

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

• 51:38Speaker 02

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

• 52:09Bill Simmons?

  Well, wasn't that boxing though?

• 52:10Speaker 02

  Boxing too.

• 52:11Bill Simmons?

  I feel like boxing was the most important TV sport.

• 52:13Speaker 02

  Yes, absolutely. I mean, all, all three of those sports, when football or when, when television was created, I think would have been like, this, this is what this box will let us do. But one of like, one of the big arguments I make early in the book and the reason it's the first essay is because in many ways it's the most important is an incredible coincidence happened is that football is better experienced through television and television for a whole variety of kind of semiotic reasons, the best thing it can do is show you a football game. The way it's designed, the way the passive experience of watching television works, it's

• 52:54Speaker 02

  just ideal for football. And this is why football became the thing that it did. It's this kind of enforced marriage to television that ended up being the best possible thing for both sides of the equation. That's why like when I say like football was more popular than baseball in the seventies, but we were still kind of operating from this idea that what mattered is what we said mattered. So if we say baseball is the national pastime, it was. But at some point that changed where the consumer had more control than the person dictating what the meaning is. And football now is, you know, so pervasive that it kind of informs the lives of people who don't care at all. Like they're just, it's a cliche

• 53:36Speaker 02

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

• 53:54Bill Simmons?

  Well, there's some genius things that they added to it. When you think about the football we watched in the seventies versus where they are now, like part of the problem with football was half the, if you came into a game, you didn't know what the score, this seems like so basic.

• 54:09Speaker 02

  I know.

• 54:10Bill Simmons?

  You wouldn't know what the score was for 20 minutes and then they might flash the graphic like, oh, the Browns are winning, you know, be one of those. They gradually realized, oh, we should put the score in the bottom. When you're watching, especially on the old square TVs with the reception's not awesome, you never knew what was the first down. You couldn't see the ball sometimes. You couldn't see like replays of what happened. Did the guy catch it? So they add instant replay. They add all these things that kind of make you a participant in the game even though you're not playing. I have opinions on all the strategy on both sides. I think I'm smarter than half the coaches, even though I'm clearly not. I'm debating whether this was a penalty, whether he caught this. Why did they call it this way that time when they called it

• 54:53Bill Simmons?

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

• 55:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's very, it's like for somebody my age, it was very weird to see like Otani batting first. I was like, right. It's weird.

• 55:31Bill Simmons?

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

• 55:47Speaker 02

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

• 55:55Bill Simmons?

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

• 55:58Speaker 02

  But what I'm saying is like, okay, so one thing that's often mentioned, particularly by people who don't like football, is a kind of a very famous Wall Street Journal article from 2011, where these guys studied these pro football games and they were like, do you know, in a three hour telecast of an NFL game, there's 11 minutes of action. You're sitting there for three hours and there's 11 minutes of action. Now, if somebody was inventing football right now for the first time, there was no way that would get through the pitch meeting. If they said this is a three hour sport and there's actually about 11 minutes of action, people would say like, that's insane. No one's going to sit through that. Nobody wants that. That's a huge flaw. But it's not a flaw. As it turns out, 11 minutes is the perfect amount.

• 56:41Speaker 02

  Cause these things you're talking about, they happen in between plays.

• 56:46Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 56:46Speaker 02

  Like there's, like football is has this, like this, this accidental upside, which is super intense, hyper action in this small window of time, maybe seven seconds. And then there's this time when you can think about what you saw, what you will see next. What was the meaning of that? Maybe the analyst will describe what we actually saw in a way that we couldn't comprehend.

• 57:09Bill Simmons?

  Or maybe I'll hate the analyst and think he's an idiot.

• 57:12Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 57:12Bill Simmons?

  Either way, I win.

• 57:13Speaker 02

  Or you can think about something else. You can talk to somebody about something that's not involved with the actual football game, or you can talk about the football game. This experience, which seems like it should be a mistake. It should be a mistake that something that lasts that long has that little amount of action. This is one of these things that like, like it's a, uh, uh, one of the many counterintuitive things about football and that the TV experience is great despite the fact that it would never get through a focus group. The fact that somebody said, the main view you will have in a football game, most of the time will not show you all the players. You will not be able to see the free safeties. You know, when the quarterback drops back and throws the ball, you will have a moment where you will have no idea if the guy is open or covered.

• 57:57Speaker 02

  Like these things that seem like they should be problems, actually create this sort of internal psychological tension that makes this experience so enriching. I really believe that football, the reason that it is the best thing television kind of has ever sort of been built with, you know, the best is because even a bad football game is weirdly watchable. In a way that isn't true about other things, like, like the very apex, you know, the greatest final four game, or, or like, you know, an extremely tight world series in the ninth inning, those are as good as any football game. At the apex, it's all shared, but at the bottom, a bad football game is still better than a bad, almost anything, you know?

• 58:38Bill Simmons?

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

• 59:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:08Bill Simmons?

  Right? Sometimes two games will have something happening at the exact same time. But for the most part, you really can watch six games at once.

• 59:14Speaker 02

  I mean, but you're in insanely specific situation, Bill. You are not like most. You are not like most people who love football.

• 59:21Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I get it, but I'm just saying that's one of those things where it's like the 11 minutes, you really feel it. Like you couldn't watch six basketball games at once. It'd be impossible.

• 59:30Speaker 02

  It's true. You watch the red zone on Sunday and then you watch the Sunday night game and.

• 59:34Bill Simmons?

  Red zone is another one. Red zone is just constant boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. But here's the other thing. The, so you compared it to basketball. Basketball has, you know, the 11 minutes problem in reverse where basketball is constant. But then when we get to the last four minutes, what happens? It becomes too slow. There's too much time. There's timeouts. There's instant replay reviews and there's not enough action. And we're constantly going, come on, just start. And that's why when we watch like the world FIFA championships or the Olympics or something, and there's like a real pace to the games, we're like, this is much better. Why can't basketball be like this? So they, in a weird way, they have the opposite problem.

• 1:00:13Speaker 02

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

• 1:00:28Bill Simmons?

  They're constant movement.

• 1:00:29Speaker 02

  Cause it's action that's perpetual. It never stops. So you can almost sort of be hypnotized by it. And when the action is great, of course, you're thrilled, but even, you know, the second quarter of an NBA playoff game can get dull sometimes. Like you can kind of check out. There are other sports that are almost totally intellectual and cognitive. Baseball, golf, you know, these sports where most of what you're watching is thinking about what could or could not happen. You know?

• 1:00:55Bill Simmons?

  Golf, golf's a great one for that.

• 1:00:56Speaker 02

  And you're, and it's, it's actually sort of everything you see when you're watching golf. It's kind of like setup, prologue for what you kind of hope will happen at the end. Okay.

• 1:01:09Speaker 02

  And then the third one is football, which is unlike the other two. In the sense that it is like the second version where there's lots of stoppage of play. And there's lots of of consideration of what could happen, what what happened earlier, all of these things. But in the moments of action, it is so hyperkinetic. That it feels as though you're watching something very intense and and that's moving fast. It doesn't feel slow in the way some of like the other cognitive sports do. And football is unique in this. Like football takes the best qualities from these two kinds of sports and makes it into one sport. And again, this was completely accidental. No one planned this. Like, nobody thought to themselves that, you know,

• 1:01:53Speaker 02

  the way football operates will be ideal for this television medium. And it clearly is. I mean, and even if someone wants to argue with me, if someone wants to say like, oh, there's many things that are actually better on TV or whatever. It's like, the evidence sure suggests the opposite. The evidence suggests that people would rather watch football than anything. Like, you know, it's like, like in in 2024, the the the numbers were a little bit changed because it was an election year. But people still watch the Super Bowl more than they watch the election results. I mean, there's no comparison to this in other countries, right? You know, soccer is the sport of Europe. In many countries, it's almost like their combination of football, basketball and baseball and hockey all together.

• 1:02:35Speaker 02

  And yet, we would never see in, you know, in in Norway, that 93 of the 100 most watched events were a sport. I mean, people in Japan love baseball. It would never be a situation where 93 of the 100 most watched Japanese broadcasts are baseball. Like, this is, like, America is different in a lot of ways. This is one of them, you know?

• 1:03:00Bill Simmons?

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

• 1:03:31Speaker 02

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

• 1:03:35Bill Simmons?

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

• 1:03:48Speaker 02

  Although this is a, this is another thing that sort of complicates this conversation. I mean, could tennis find a way to become more popular in the way that baseball found a way to make some real changes and becoming, baseball's a better experience now on TV. The last World Series is evidence, you know?

• 1:04:04Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:05Speaker 02

  But yet something like, you know, tennis or track or any of these things like, they don't really need to be this thing that 80 million people care about. Like they, they can be their own thing and they can kind of evolve in their own way. But now football can't do that anymore. Football can only get bigger. The NFL can only expand and that's what makes it fragile. That's why like, you know, at the end of this book, I talked about this idea of how, you know, football could kind of collapse. Right now, that seems insane. Right now, it seems more likely that football would swallow up every other sport and that's all we would have. But nothing works that way. People change. The world changes. And

• 1:04:46Bill Simmons?

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

• 1:04:49Speaker 02

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

• 1:04:54Bill Simmons?

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

• 1:05:37Speaker 02

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

• 1:06:06Bill Simmons?

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

• 1:06:12Speaker 02

  Okay, but here's, here's why I would say this, okay? The reason I think that at some point advertised, like the idea of commercial advertising particularly is going to disappear. Because, you know, we don't have any proof that advertising works now. The only thing we know about advertising is that it can introduce people to a product that they've never before experienced. So if someone never had a Budweiser and they see a commercial for Budweiser, it introduces that into their life. But if they see a thousand Budweiser ads, it's not necessarily going to make them want to drink it more. Okay? So advertising is already a gamble. It's just the best thing that we have if you're a company or a corporation. It's a little tautological, too, because it's like, well, we advertise a lot and our company is successful. So we put more money into advertising and it stays successful.

• 1:06:56Speaker 02

  I think that there is going to be a realization in the future that advertising is a lagging indicator of everything. And that the amount it costs, not just to create ads, but to pay for them. To pay whoever, you know, Fox or Prime, whoever is showing them, isn't worth it. It's like, it's, you know, and that's going to be a sudden sort of sea change, right? There's going to be this sudden realization that what these platforms and these networks are paying for this sport. It's not gonna work. Suddenly, there's going to be a collective bargaining agreement. And the amount of money's not going to go up for covering the NFL. It's going to go down. And there's going to be a work stoppage.

• 1:07:40Speaker 02

  And the bigger thing here, Bill, and this is the key, the key point is that I think the human relationship to football is already starting to change. And in 40 years from now, which is two generations, the average person, their only relationship to football will be it's an entertaining distraction that's on television. And if there's a work stoppage, they're not going to care. If there was a work stoppage now, people would lose their fucking mind. They'd be like, what am I going to gamble on? What am I going to do on weekends? How do I live? But I mean, I gotta have, you know, you know, when the strikes happened in the eighties, you know, that was, and football wasn't as big as it is now then, but it was big. And people were like, we want these games back. We need these games back.

• 1:08:22Speaker 02

  I can imagine a time in 50 years when this happens and the kind of person who consumes football does not have a hard time living without it. And that's what the thing that we cannot possibly, it's hard to visualize that now. Like it's, it's very difficult to visualize a world where people aren't like us. But of course there will be in the same way that we're different people than the ones who lived 50 years ago and probably could not believe that horse racing would ever disappear.

• 1:08:49Bill Simmons?

  I want to keep going on this, but ironically, we have to take a break to hear from our sponsors. 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 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 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.

• 1:09:33Bill Simmons?

  Now that's a solid game plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

• 1:09:38Bill Simmons?

  So you mentioned horse racing as a sport that was absolutely massive and then declined in public interest year after year after year, basically starting, I would say in the 90s, right? Somewhere around there.

• 1:09:51Speaker 02

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

• 1:09:57Bill Simmons?

  70s was a renaissance when we were kids.

• 1:09:59Speaker 02

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

• 1:10:28Bill Simmons?

  Or you're an addictive gambler owns horses.

• 1:10:31Speaker 02

  Sure, sure. That's the third category.

• 1:10:33Bill Simmons?

  But the, the horse racing thing, it really was, like, if you go back, what do you, like, if we ranked the sports in 1928?

• 1:10:44Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 1:10:45Bill Simmons?

  It's horse racing, boxing, and baseball in some order, and I think football's probably fourth?

• 1:10:51Speaker 02

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

• 1:11:03Bill Simmons?

  I think football was fourth, and then I think it started to nudge horse racing out probably in the 40s.

• 1:11:08Speaker 02

  Probably, probably, I mean-

• 1:11:10Bill Simmons?

  Cause it's only a spectator sport in the 20s.

• 1:11:14Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:11:15Bill Simmons?

  And boxing you could do on the, that boxing was a big radio sport, so was horse racing. So probably, and then by the 50s, I think it switches. The boxing, um, who was the guy that died in the ring?

• 1:11:27Speaker 02

  By, from Boo Boo Mancini or?

• 1:11:30Bill Simmons?

  No, no, in the, in the 60s, I'm blanking. Emile, Emile Griffith?

• 1:11:36Bill Simmons?

  Killed Benny the Kid Paray, whatever that happened on live TV and that seemed like that was some sort of weird tipping point for boxing is like people started to go whoa, what's going on here?

• 1:11:46Speaker 02

  Are you sure that's what made it happen? Because that's like a modern view of that. I don't know.

• 1:11:51Bill Simmons?

  No, I think that's when it happened. I think that was like a big public reckoning with what are we watching? It was like the first time that it happened with boxing.

• 1:11:58Speaker 02

  And then boxing was popular, it didn't spike.

• 1:12:00Bill Simmons?

  Then Ali spiked it up again in the seventies. Yeah. And then when we saw Ali in the eighties, that probably wasn't obvious.

• 1:12:06Speaker 02

  I mean, obviously Max Kellerman or whatever would be a better person to talk about this, but it's like that, the decline of boxing is very complex. It has, it has a lot of different aspects as to why corruption, the way the fights were, you know, the way, the way fighting has changed. Like, like there's a really great, I don't know if you ever listened to this podcast, Hardcore History. This guy, Dan Carlin, has an, is an amazing episode about how boxing is the one sport that all experts basically agree is the only one where the guys would lose to the guys of the past. And that even many of the things that, many of the things boxers did in the past can't even be done now. There's no one to train them and because the weights don't change, you know, guys stay in the same weight class, a boxer from the past would beat a boxer from the present in all likelihood now.

• 1:12:51Speaker 02

  Um, so boxing is kind of, it's kind of its own thing. Okay. The decline in baseball is something we've talked about and I think it's like it's, it's, it's nuanced, but like you can, there are some sort of kind of wide brushes that can be made. Horse racing is the easiest to understand. I mean, to me at least. I mean, that, that's, that was just like, there was a time when we had a relationship to horses and there's a time when we didn't. So we were watching something now that's alien. We're watching these things that we like, like I, like I, I, I would guess that there are people listening to this podcast who have many, many people who have never touched a horse, have never actually had their hand on a horse. I would guess maybe the majority of the people listening to this podcast.

• 1:13:32Bill Simmons?

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

• 1:13:41Speaker 02

  They still cared about horses. I mean, even if they didn't have-

• 1:13:43Bill Simmons?

  They used them for transportation.

• 1:13:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, you know, yeah, if you, in, in the year 1900, even an urban area like Chicago was called the city of horses. There were horses everywhere. If you had a blue collar job, horses did the work. Maybe you didn't have a horse, but your dad probably did. Your grandfather almost certainly did. Like, you would have been, you know, the, the country was more rural. So the idea of just running into a horse was common. You, the idea of encountering horses was not some kind of surprising thing. It would probably be surprising if you leave this podcast and saw a horse. That might be enough for you to tell everyone you know. You will not believe what you saw was a horse on the street or whatever. Um, so I think that is a huge part of it. And that's why I kind of can make this comparison

• 1:14:27Speaker 02

  to what I think is gonna happen with football, in that it is increasingly becoming something that people only watch, that they wouldn't, you know, they would never let their kid play. They didn't play themselves. Their father didn't play. Um, they, you know, they, that, it's this thing that, that is an only, you know, it's, it's a mediated experience only. And when a mediated experience only disappears, it can be replaced with other media. You know, that seems like an obvious thing to say, but it's true. Like, I don't think the way people feel about football is going to continue. I think that in many ways, people our age are kind of at the tail end of this. There's still some people younger

• 1:15:09Speaker 02

  than us who, it's, you know, but for the, for the idea that it's like a normal thing, like a normal thing to, uh, you know, like, like, you, I don't think you played high school football, but you probably went to high school football games. And you just, you, it was like, it was in your world, sort of, you know?

• 1:15:26Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, cuz I think, I don't know if I agree with you on this one because I think it's more realistic that football will evolve and there will be different forms of football at the same time. And you already seen this with the flag football stuff.

• 1:15:38Speaker 02

  That's a different thing.

• 1:15:39Bill Simmons?

  These seven, no, I know, but it's, it's, I think some stuff's gonna shift that way. So your basic premise is right, but I don't think football like necessarily like goes on the major decline, or I, I think it'll just kind of shift where some people will just be like, oh, high school football is just now flag football, or it's like no hitting. And that's just where we are 50 years from now.

• 1:16:03Speaker 02

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

• 1:16:27Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, but it's recently, it's 30 years ago. I think that was a component.

• 1:16:30Speaker 02

  Well, it may, it's, there was some of it there. But, but even then, there was always this idea that like what they liked about football was the game itself, but for it to be meaningful, there has to be the risk of real injury. That if you take, that, that if there's, that what is interesting about football is not necessarily or just entirely what you're seeing on the field. The guys running a post, the quarterback's rolling right, they're pulling these guys like, that's interesting, right? But they're doing it in this incredibly dangerous scenario. And as you remove that danger, the meaning of the thing that you like changes. Like, it's, a guy, say a guy's gonna climb Mount Everest,

• 1:17:13Speaker 02

  right? He doesn't want to die, but it's meaningful because he could, right? Football has that. Football needs to have an element of violence and of danger, not because the violence is what we like, but the violence changes the meaning of everything else. So if, as football moves away from this, like moves, you know, they say like, we could play flag football, right? You know, it would be just as exhilarating to see, you know, Pukunakour, whatever, run a pattern without the idea that he's gonna get his head knocked off when the ball comes in or whatever, but it's not the same. And that's what I think is going to change. I think the idea is going to, that we're gonna just completely bifurcate this, where there's going to be people who watch football and people who play football, and they have no relationship at all, no

• 1:17:56Speaker 02

  interaction whatsoever. Football players are all gonna come from the same places. The only places in America that say that we're going to stay with this, we're going to, this is part of our identity and our culture. And that makes it perilous. It makes it precarious, I guess. The idea that there is this, this thing that people are supposed to care about, even though it has no meaning to them in a personal, individual way. See what I'm saying, kind of?

• 1:18:21Bill Simmons?

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

• 1:18:39Speaker 02

  Okay, we're, we're in a very fascinating time to have this specific point, okay?

• 1:18:43Bill Simmons?

  We sure are.

• 1:18:44Speaker 02

  Okay, so like, let's say, I don't know, when our first podcast was, 20 years ago, if we would've said, you know what's gonna happen in about 20 years? Indiana is gonna be the clear favorite for the, to win the national football championship, and Nebraska is gonna be 16-0 in basketball, and they could win the Big Ten. What? Big Ten? None of it makes sense, right? None of it seems possible. Now, in the short term, these things, NIL stuff, portal stuff, is going to slightly boost the popularity of these college sports, because now people in Indiana are able to watch football in a way for the first time in this way.

• 1:19:24Speaker 02

  Anytime you professionalize something, it does have a short-term benefit, a short-term gain. But with your time, I do think this is probably going to be a disaster for college sports.

• 1:19:37Bill Simmons?

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

• 1:19:42Speaker 02

  Well, you just kind of said that there'll always be places, though, like in Tennessee, they'll always care about Tennessee volunteer football, and maybe that is true.

• 1:19:49Bill Simmons?

  But I'm talking, I'm talking about as a high-end sport that competes against the NFL and all these other places. It's so poorly governed right now. We're getting to the point where people are in the playoffs and they just leave their teams.

• 1:20:01Speaker 02

  Well, yeah.

• 1:20:02Bill Simmons?

  Where they decide they're transferring. You have like guys in the secondary of a team that's in the final four just transferring. It'd be like, okay, guys, good luck. Like, you're done as a sport if that keeps happening.

• 1:20:12Speaker 02

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

• 1:20:14Bill Simmons?

  It's ungoverned. It's the Wild West.

• 1:20:16Speaker 02

  So, you know, and now, in the present moment, we can't really blame these guys, right? Like, you can't look to a kid and, you know, like, I saw today or whatever, I think like the Arizona State quarterback is like, he's transferring to LSU, I think I saw this morning. I'm sure he's gonna get a ton of money for doing that. And he's gonna be a high-profile person. So you like, you can't look at that kid and be like, ah, why? You can't blame him, right? You have to do what's best for, every person has to do what's best for them. You can't expect them to think about the long-term health of the sport. You can't put this on coaches, you can't put this on anyone. You can't expect them to think about things in the future. But these things are going to be detrimental in the future. People are going to have a less relationship with college.

• 1:21:01Speaker 02

  We've already seen what happened with college basketball, when guys only played one year, okay? It was like we didn't have a relationship to the best guys, you know? It's like you'd see a player and he'd be gone or whatever. Football is now, I mean, all sports are doing this, I guess, basketball as well, have like, done such an amplified version of this. We have guys from the G League now going back to college. Football players playing on seemingly somehow six.

• 1:21:29Bill Simmons?

  What about the guy in Kansas, Darren Peterson, who's got a huge N I L money? And then got hurt.

• 1:21:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:38Bill Simmons?

  Then there was rumors that he was just going to be done and keep the money. Then he came back and he's whatever happens. He's only going to be there for six months anyway. I just feel like all this stuff that's happening in college like this decade is confirming how stupid college sports were for a long time and everybody was in complete denial with it. Right. It was like these athletes are getting exploited. Everybody's making so much money for them. These guys should be more empowered. Well, now we empowered them and now it's like Wild Wild West and there's no middle ground and there's nobody to figure out the middle ground. That's the thing that, you know, maybe there's other parts of America that work like this, but this is unsolvable because nobody's going to solve it. Nobody's going to be empowered to be able to be like, okay, here are my ideas. Everybody's got to listen to me.

• 1:22:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:22Bill Simmons?

  Like, can you imagine? Like even in the Cowboys doc, when Jerry Jones was like, fuck it, I'm just going to do my own deal with Nike. And everyone's like, whoa, you can't do that because he kind of broke out of the 32 team code that was there. College has no code.

• 1:22:36Speaker 02

  Well, no, it had like, the N C A, as it turns out, was just a bunch of letters. They really have no ability to do anything.

• 1:22:45Bill Simmons?

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

• 1:22:50Speaker 02

  I also think that the way these things are perceived. Okay. So you remember some years back, it was like, I believe it was the Northwestern football team and they were like the first team who was going to unionize or whatever. You know, this is before guys were getting N I L money and all this stuff.

• 1:23:06Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:07Speaker 02

  And there was this move or I think this perception that's like, well, that's good. These kids are doing this. This is unfair. They're being exploited. There we kind of looked at college football players the way typically a labor, you know, somebody who covers labor would look at like coal mines and coal miners or whatever, you know, like suddenly the idea. Of having a free college education and being able to have this life was a complete ripoff to these guys that somehow if you played for you went to Notre Dame or whatever and you played football and were the hero of the town and then got a degree and all these things for free, that was now seen as like you got you got jammed. You did not get what you were worth because technically you weren't. Technically you were someone

• 1:23:49Speaker 02

  like Ting Tibo or Johnny Manziel was certainly making more money for these universities than they were getting back. So it's like I say, it's understandable that like that any college athlete would be like, okay, how how can I get I gotta take care of myself. You can't expect that person to think about college sports in general, but who's supposed to think about college sports in general? Who isn't? Who's like the

• 1:24:13Bill Simmons?

  I actually got this idea. I've been getting a good a bunch of good mailbag questions about how to save college sports. And the best idea that I've heard that I think is really tough to refute is this seems like the perfect system for relegation where you have maybe it's 24 teams in there like for college football. It's like the top 24 16 get to advance, maybe eight are in the playoffs. The other 16 get to stay at the top level. The bottom eight that didn't make it now drop down to the second level. The top eight move up however you want to do the numbers where you're in basically, we have a top

• 1:24:55Bill Simmons?

  top level that everyone would want to be at. Other teams have a chance to move into that level. And there's like a clear disparity between the levels and that top level makes the most money. They figure out how to make it so that it's split better between the players and the coaches and the universities and maybe that works.

• 1:25:12Speaker 02

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

• 1:25:29Bill Simmons?

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

• 1:25:55Speaker 02

  I mean,

• 1:25:56Bill Simmons?

  So if we're going to hyper professionalize it, let's actually do it.

• 1:25:59Speaker 02

  But, okay, I get, but I don't want that to happen, right? Okay, so like, I don't, all these

• 1:26:04Bill Simmons?

  Has the ship sailed though?

• 1:26:05Speaker 02

  Well, it has, but I'm not going to be here and be like, it's sailed, so therefore the ship is fucking great. The ship has sailed and it's awful. Like, it's bad that this happened, right? Now, I guess what you're kind of arguing is not a bad argument. You've got to keep going forward, right? And I would say, well, keep going forward. Don't even make the guys playing for these schools go to school there. Just let these colleges, like, you know, pay people to represent the university. Well, you know, I guess that would be just as interesting.

• 1:26:31Bill Simmons?

  Like a minor leagues almost.

• 1:26:32Speaker 02

  Exactly, but like, I don't, I don't want that to happen. Like, you know, it was,

• 1:26:39Speaker 02

  I liked it when they were, I want them to be different, you know? I like, I don't want the NFL, I don't want Saturday and Sunday to feel the same to me.

• 1:26:48Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, that's fair.

• 1:26:49Speaker 02

  They increasingly do, because all these other things are going to happen to the game itself because of this. Like, what's great about college football, many things, but one of them is that the diversity in the way teams played was a huge spectrum. Do you mind seeing a team playing, you know, like the flex bone and they're playing an air raid team? And it's like this collision. One thing you saw with the SEC over the last 10 or 15 years is those teams fundamentally kind of play the same because they had all these great players in the same way in the NFL. That once, you know, you can't do it like a, a lot of the things that I think that you might see is kind of like gimmicky in college or like a victim quarterback, can't work in the NFL, right?

• 1:27:31Speaker 02

  There's too many good guys, like you can't, you can't, uh, the, like a Mike Leach system or whatever would not have worked maybe in the NFL because people would just take these things away and something like that. But at college, they still, that still existed, right? It was a neat thing to see. It was neat to think about how maybe football on the West Coast and football in the Southeast and football in the Midwest is sort of fundamentally different. And that the kind of players you see are kind of fundamentally different. They're, that even though recruiting is national, most teams kind of recruited regionally. I mean, that's going to be completely over now. Like you say, this relegation thing. So let's say, let's say we did that. We have 24 teams and the bottom eight teams get relegated.

• 1:28:12Speaker 02

  A kid is still going to basically be, at this point, be sort of persuaded to go to one school over another, not because of whether or not they might get relegated, whether or not they're at the top. It's like, what check is bigger? I mean, well, like that's, that's why this guy in Indiana, that's just, he's brilliant for a lot of reasons. But the reason I guess he's a good coach is because he's the best at evaluating talent and finding bargains.

• 1:28:38Bill Simmons?

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

• 1:28:47Speaker 02

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

• 1:29:01Bill Simmons?

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

• 1:29:21Speaker 02

  But we don't even, in a weird way, it's like, some people are listening to this conversation. And they're like, you don't, you want these kids to be the equivalent of indentured servants? You don't want them to, it's like, it's a weird argument to make.

• 1:29:33Bill Simmons?

  No.

• 1:29:33Speaker 02

  Always supposed to argue, everyone kind of feels like they're supposed to argue on behalf of the player. What is best for the player? And, you know, I understand that. I understand that. I understand that thinking. But it's really the institution that matters. It's the, it's every player in orchestra. It's every program in orchestra. What is best for all of those things? And that's just an impossible thing to deal with. So I do think what's going to happen, say, with college sports, I do think there is going to be this temporary spike in interest. I'm sure to someone living in Bloomington, Indiana, this is incredible. Like this is like, they maybe have liked football their whole life, but not like this.

• 1:30:12Speaker 02

  This is, it's going to expand these things into places that weren't traditionally, you know, hotbeds for these things. So at first it will seem like, oh, like I think everyone's interested in like this national football championship, but over time it's going to change the thing that we liked originally. That's why when we were talking earlier in this conversation about like, why I think football's benefit and advantage is that personalities do not drive it. Teams drive it. Like the idea of football is what drives it. Whereas on the NBA, it's not that way. Not person, you know, celebrity driving the NBA now.

• 1:30:51Bill Simmons?

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

• 1:30:53Speaker 02

  Which is?

• 1:30:55Bill Simmons?

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

• 1:31:40Bill Simmons?

  just be like, fuck it, you know? And then we're going to turn into like, the higher-end colleges playing football, and then like div three.

• 1:31:47Speaker 02

  Possibly.

• 1:31:48Bill Simmons?

  And that's just kind of where we're gonna go.

• 1:31:50Speaker 02

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

• 1:32:10Bill Simmons?

  But are people gonna care about those games as much when we become more about the haves and the have-nots, and there's only 20 games, 20 teams that you really need to watch every college football season, and everybody else is kind of over there?

• 1:32:21Speaker 02

  I think, I think what you're describing, I actually think kind of the opposite is gonna happen.

• 1:32:26Bill Simmons?

  You think it's gonna be better for those teams?

• 1:32:27Speaker 02

  That's what you're describing is how college football was for most of my life. Great. Alabama and Texas, and they had down years, but for the most part, when I was a kid, the teams that were great in college football were still that late, right? You know? Now. Who are the haves and have nots? Indiana was a have not forever. Now they have it. As long as they got this coach and as long as they can pay for it.

• 1:32:51Bill Simmons?

  And then he can.

• 1:32:51Speaker 02

  Nebraska was a have not in basketball. Now they're undefeated. They were a have in football, but now they're not. Now they lose their quarterback. You know, it's like, um, I think that what's going to happen is it's going to be more like, I mean, one of the reasons the NFL is so successful as the mass, you know, creation is because every six or seven or eight years, your team should be good. The whole thing is designed for that through the draft, through parity, through all the salary cap, all those things. Like you're, if you follow a football team for 40 years, there should be at least three or four times when you're in contention for a Super Bowl.

• 1:33:30Bill Simmons?

  Unless you're the Jets.

• 1:33:31Speaker 02

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

• 1:33:42Bill Simmons?

  Probably unfathomable to Sean Fennessey. Um, a couple of things you add in this book that I just want to go quick because we're not going to go for seven hours here. You talked about the concept of goats in football.

• 1:33:54Bill Simmons?

  And came to the, I'll spoil this chapter because I liked it, but also, uh, I don't want to spoil too much of the book. You're basically like, the goat should be somebody that created the ground. That obviously we're going to keep getting better and better at sports as the years pass. And Brady is the goat because it was a recency bias and, or people think he's the goat. Cause recency bias, he played, he had the most success at the most important position we've ever seen. But the odds are there's going to be another Brady. Jim Thorpe comes in, did things nobody could have ever imagined, kind of created the template for where we were going to go. And that should be the true definition of a goat.

• 1:34:34Speaker 02

  I mean, that's, that's an interesting chapter in the book because the amount of football players named in that essay.

• 1:34:40Bill Simmons?

  You had eight goats.

• 1:34:41Speaker 02

  I think might be, might be more than in any other chapter in the entire book. The number of things about football I discussed, and yet ideologically, it's kind of like just about the idea of how greatness is measured. And I think that, uh, the modern person thinks about greatness for the most part incorrectly in the sense that.

• 1:35:06Speaker 02

  Whoever is the greatest player in the present, in theory, is the greatest player of all time because of the way training changes and nutrition changes and.

• 1:35:14Bill Simmons?

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

• 1:35:21Speaker 02

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

• 1:35:56Bill Simmons?

  So it's like a prototype goat.

• 1:35:58Speaker 02

  Well, a proto, a little bit. I mean, because otherwise, the argument over greatness.

• 1:36:02Bill Simmons?

  Or it's goat ground zero.

• 1:36:03Speaker 02

  It's kind of meaningless.

• 1:36:04Bill Simmons?

  Goat. I like goat ground zero is kind of where you're going, right?

• 1:36:08Speaker 02

  I guess. That way I would be, yes, if I could have called that, I guess. I just, I think that that is the way greatness needs to be considered. It has to be like, we always want to think of the future, but greatness comes from the past. It's sort of like the building blocks of these things. I use the Beatles as the example in this book, not, you know, unsurprisingly, sort of like what makes the Beatles so great is that not only what they did, but sort of what they did is still completely present in all the pop music that came after. Now, granted, sports are different. Sports have a greater objective element than a subjective element, and people will talk about this. I, to me, it really

• 1:36:49Speaker 02

  came down to Jim Thorpe or Jim Brown, because it could, I think the argument could be made that the sport Jim Thorpe was playing had no relationship to the sport we have now. Whereas Jim Brown, you know, we're playing, we have the platoon system, we're wearing face masks, a little closer, but.

• 1:37:09Speaker 02

  When Jim Thorpe played, was an 11 on 11 sport, touchdowns for six points, the first round was 10 yards, there was passing, there was strategy, all of these things, like, were there. Like, like, like, the rudimentary elements of football were there. And he was the first great player, and that makes him the great player for us.

• 1:37:27Bill Simmons?

  So by this argument, Bill Russell is the go-to basketball?

• 1:37:29Speaker 02

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

• 1:38:13Bill Simmons?

  Wilt Chamberlain, if you like losing at the end of the season?

• 1:38:15Speaker 02

  Sure. I mean, the thing is, that you factor in, you, I think you actually overemphasize the...

• 1:38:23Bill Simmons?

  Wins and losses?

• 1:38:24Speaker 02

  The outcome, as opposed...

• 1:38:26Bill Simmons?

  Titles?

• 1:38:26Speaker 02

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

• 1:38:29Bill Simmons?

  But, but you, the same Jim Thorpe argument you make in the book for pages is the exact same argument you can make for Bill Russell. Like, he introduced the entire concept of defense.

• 1:38:40Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:38:41Bill Simmons?

  Fast break, but something running through a center and everybody running off them. Everything they did in the late 50s and early 60s became basketball.

• 1:38:49Speaker 02

  I mean, I think you could...

• 1:38:50Bill Simmons?

  And he won the title every year.

• 1:38:51Speaker 02

  I think you could absolutely make a very strong argument that if you had to pick one of those guys to be on your team, Russell would be the guy to pick. The fact that though every time they squared up against each other, it seemed like Russell got the better of him, despite the fact the rosters weren't really the same, but even...

• 1:39:04Bill Simmons?

  No, I debunk that. The rosters were just as good.

• 1:39:07Speaker 02

  I totally understand that. What I'm talking about is sort of like the, the archetype of, of the basketball player. You know, the ability to do the rudimentary elements of basketball. Score the ball, rebound the ball. Pass the ball, play defense.

• 1:39:24Bill Simmons?

  Move up and down the court, okay.

• 1:39:26Speaker 02

  I believe, and I wrote this in your book. I believe that Wilt Chamberlain with a different mindset could have been Bill Russell. I do not believe Bill Russell with a different mindset could have been Wilt Chamberlain. I don't think that. Now, I, I, I, you know, in the same way that, that, that.

• 1:39:43Bill Simmons?

  I disagreed with it when it was in my book.

• 1:39:45Speaker 02

  I mean, so you think that if, if Bill Russell had been a more sort of selfish, you know, self oriented.

• 1:39:53Bill Simmons?

  I just think he did what he.

• 1:39:55Speaker 02

  Scored 100 points in a game.

• 1:39:56Bill Simmons?

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

• 1:40:06Speaker 02

  Within the context of.

• 1:40:07Bill Simmons?

  How do I win?

• 1:40:08Speaker 02

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

• 1:40:21Bill Simmons?

  So, you know, if we were doing ground zero goats, Thorpe's for football. I think Russell's basketball and Babe Ruth's obviously baseball.

• 1:40:29Speaker 02

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

• 1:40:33Bill Simmons?

  All right, I'm discounting Chamberlain and then hockey.

• 1:40:37Speaker 02

  Hockey is one I.

• 1:40:38Bill Simmons?

  Hockey gets tougher.

• 1:40:39Speaker 02

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

• 1:41:09Bill Simmons?

  Well, you.

• 1:41:10Speaker 02

  But I, I don't.

• 1:41:10Bill Simmons?

  You talked, you talked about Moss.

• 1:41:13Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:41:13Bill Simmons?

  And you talked about, uh, how you thought Moss.

• 1:41:16Speaker 02

  Player that I ever saw. I might, like he, to me, Randy Moss was the greatest football player I saw with my eyes.

• 1:41:21Bill Simmons?

  So the four best football players I ever saw. Were Randy Moss, Jerry Rice, Lawrence Taylor, and Tom Brady, and not in that order.

• 1:41:30Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:41:32Bill Simmons?

  And I actually think Jerry Rice, I would have, if you could just give me a receiver for their career.

• 1:41:36Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:41:37Bill Simmons?

  And I'd have the best chance to win. It has to be Jerry Rice. Moss, you made the point, Moss had these physical gifts. That year he was on the Pats, those first two months. It was like, I, I've never had an experience like that as a fan. And there was something, he passed the stadium test too. If you went to actually see him in a game. It was unforgettable to just watch him run. And it just seemed, he was the only football player I've ever seen where it actually seemed kind of unfair.

• 1:42:06Bill Simmons?

  That he was, to the defense, that he was out there. Right?

• 1:42:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, this, this book is, it's like, in some ways, it's like a book of criticism about a sport, you know? The same way that you.

• 1:42:15Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:16Speaker 02

  So the rules, I, I admittedly are my rules, right? So like, look at Jerry Rice and Randy Moss. For a career, no question, Moss is great. For a season. Or no, for a career.

• 1:42:28Bill Simmons?

  Rice is better.

• 1:42:30Speaker 02

  For a career, Rice is clearly better. For a season, Rice is better. I think potentially for an important game, Rice is better. But for a play. Nobody's better than Moss.

• 1:42:44Bill Simmons?

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

• 1:42:49Speaker 02

  It's, it's.

• 1:42:49Bill Simmons?

  I think it was third down.

• 1:42:50Speaker 02

  I ever saw in my life. Yeah.

• 1:42:52Bill Simmons?

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

• 1:43:07Speaker 02

  And it was just, it was, it's, it played seemed to last 18 seconds. It was, it was so, it was just, I can see in my mind right now. But like, one of the things I talk about in this, just briefly, it's not a big part of the book, but, you know, so, uh, my son. When he would play foot, uh, football at recess in like third grade or fourth grade. The kids would talk about mossing people. Okay?

• 1:43:28Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:29Speaker 02

  It in fact, took a post-it note and wrote mossed on it and put it on his forehead. So when he scored a touchdown, he could lift up his bangs and say like he mossed his opponent. None of these kids knew who Randy Moss was. None of them. They didn't even know that the moss term had a Randy in front of it or whatever. And to me, that's like, this is somebody who's transcended the game, right? This is somebody who, like, it's not, Randy Moss was not the first receiver who was ever fast and a great jumper with great hands, who did these things. But he became the definition of this thing. This thing that kids want to do, right, when they play receiver, they want to moss people. They want to use like pure athleticism to simply outcatch, if you think that's a term, their opponent, you know? That's meaningful to me.

• 1:44:13Speaker 02

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

• 1:44:47Bill Simmons?

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

• 1:45:26Speaker 02

  Like, I mean, you know, with, with Rice, you know, he plays with these two great quarterbacks, but then even at the end, I mean, like-

• 1:45:34Bill Simmons?

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

• 1:45:41Speaker 02

  You know, you, you know, absolutely. I mean, you know, I, I, I think that it would be, you could still make, you know, cause you can use different arguments for this. I mean, that's one of the things, like I, uh, there, there are different ways to think about these things. I'm presenting my way of thinking about this.

• 1:45:56Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:57Speaker 02

  But, uh-

• 1:45:57Bill Simmons?

  Well, the one thing, the biggest thing I learned was that I might've known this and forgot was that Roger Staubach was your only true sports hero.

• 1:46:05Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, I, I see, I think it's, I just think it's weird to have a hero as an adult. Like, like, I, as a, as a, as a, as a man, I shouldn't see another man heroically, even if they're doing heroic things. It's like that just nowadays.

• 1:46:19Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:46:19Speaker 02

  You need heroes when you're eight. The hero, your hero when you're eight is your hero for life. So Roger Staubach is my hero for life. Um, you know, and the, the sort of thing that I talk about is I feel extremely lucky that that's how it worked out because it could have been anyone. And in many ways, Roger Staubach, to me, represents the best possible hero.

• 1:46:45Bill Simmons?

  You could have picked OJ Simpson. That would have been terrible.

• 1:46:47Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Yes. You know, you know.

• 1:46:51Bill Simmons?

  Say, OJ, pull the car over. 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 the 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.

• 1:47:35Bill Simmons?

  This episode is brought to you by Viori. When it comes to clothes that score high in both comfort and style, Viori is my MVP. Sunday performance joggers, oh yeah. They have the perfect, I could watch a game and then go out to dinner vibe. And the Meta Pant, that's my number one, I need to look like I tried option. Get 20% off your first purchase at viori.com/simmons and discover the versatility of Viori clothing. Exclusions apply. Visit the website for full terms and conditions. Just quickly to go through, uh, stuff because we got to run soon. You, you have chapters that we didn't talk about, about simulations, football coaches, the white-black thing, uh,

• 1:48:14Bill Simmons?

  CFL three downs versus NFL four downs, which I thought was fun. Um, the football coaches almost felt like that could have been its own book. And I think if anything has not changed about football over the years, like I think like golf's never changed. You can watch a 1979 Masters on YouTube. By the way, they have all the old Masters on YouTube and you can watch them. It's exactly the same. Every, everything, the rhythm about it, the course, it's, it's like you're in a time machine. Boxing for the most part is basically the same. You just two guys in a ring trying to beat each other and we have rounds and a referee. And I think tennis, when you think about sports like that, those sports have evolved and changed.

• 1:48:59Bill Simmons?

  Hockey's changed, basketball's changed, horse racing's probably the same. But when I think about football, football's changed in every possible way, except the coaches still have this outsized something. Like I'm watching what happens now with Vrabel and the Patriots and it's like, we had a terrible coach last year and the team was a disaster. He came in, culture, the guy bought into the guys, built certain guys up, stuck with guys that maybe shouldn't have stuck with and just kind of flipped it around. And I, and I watched this happen with Belichick and now I've seen that. So I've seen it happen twice with the Patriots coach. And it's still the most important guy other than the quarterback. And that has never changed.

• 1:49:38Speaker 02

  Well, okay, that's never changed, but coaching does have more impact in football than almost any other sport because it's a still hierarchical thing. I mean, the fact that like every single play is being, not 98% of plays are being dictated by somebody in a booth transmitted down to the sideline. You know, so it's, they really can't control it. But to me, the more fascinating thing is this, I would say in, in practice, football coaches have actually changed quite a bit. There's a lot of coaches in the NFL now. I can't really say that I, I remember a guy like that when I was young, especially among kind of the younger offensive minds, you know, the Rams, the Vikings, and these things. However, the caricature of the football coach never changes. The idea, you're a

• 1:50:22Speaker 02

  big sports movie guy. The way a football coach is presented in a sports movie does not waver. It doesn't matter if he's presented positively or negatively. They still have the same central qualities. Only a used car salesman, that's the only job that has more of a shared idea of what the personality of the person is like compared to the football coach. You know, I, I mentioned how like, you know, there was, um, you know, there, there, you know, there's the movie All the Right Moves and there was the TV show Coach and it's the same guy in both, you know? Um, and in one, he's a good guy, in one, he's a bad guy. But the way he acts is kind of the same. It's like, it's like, it, it doesn't really change. Like, we, we can see that the things a football coach does in different ways.

• 1:51:07Speaker 02

  I mean, that's why I kept like, you know, like what Kamala Harris thought was gonna happen if she takes a guy who was a, you know, picks a Veep who was a former high school football coach. I think she believed, well, people are just gonna accept that these things about football coaches apply to him too. It turns out that was not the thing to do.

• 1:51:23Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:24Speaker 02

  But, um, but you know, it's, it like, if, like, if somebody said like, oh, hey, uh, you know, you're, you're, say your daughter, uh, came home and she's like, I got a new boyfriend and, and you're like, what's he like? And, and she's like, well, he's kind of like a football coach. You would instantly have an idea of what he must be like. You would instantly have an idea of what he-

• 1:51:44Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I'd be like charismatic, don't trust him, um, probably full of shit.

• 1:51:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:51:50Bill Simmons?

  Well, I don't trust his intentions.

• 1:51:51Speaker 02

  Well, like, or, or maybe be like, you know, it's, it's, it's not the outcome, it's the process or whatever. You know, like you think like these kind of-

• 1:51:59Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:00Speaker 02

  These things that they sort of believe about how to live, uh, you know, it's like, like-

• 1:52:06Bill Simmons?

  Right. Some sort of code they abide by.

• 1:52:08Speaker 02

  Yes. And, and like, you know, the, the weather never affects him, you know? Or, and it's like, it's like all these certain things that like, things they believe that like, you can't be a football coach if you don't believe it, almost, you know?

• 1:52:21Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Well, and there's so many bad coaches in all sports, but it feels like they can do the most damage in football.

• 1:52:28Speaker 02

  Well, yeah.

• 1:52:29Bill Simmons?

  They can like, single-handedly, cause football fundamentally- It's not that fun to play. You're getting the shit kicked out of you and you really have to buy into the team and the concept of giving yourself up for the for the greater good, right? And if you have a coach that you either hate or doesn't get you to buy into that, you end up like the Eagles this weekend. We have A.J. Brown's like, I'm fucking out. I'm not even talking to the press. I'm done.

• 1:52:53Speaker 02

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

• 1:53:00Bill Simmons?

  Oh, there's no question.

• 1:53:01Speaker 02

  Well, you say you agree that, but why would you keep doing it if you agree?

• 1:53:06Bill Simmons?

  Well, because it's, it's, I get passionate about this stuff. I, listen, there are some really good coaches. And then I think there's a bunch of coaches that are either mediocre or worse that do most of the damage during these playoffs, like we saw in that Green Bay-Chicago game. That it's like impossible to lose that game if you're the Packers.

• 1:53:23Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:53:24Bill Simmons?

  And they were poorly coached and that's why they lost.

• 1:53:27Speaker 02

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

• 1:53:35Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:36Speaker 02

  I feel like you look at what they do on Sunday as 90% of the job. When in fact.

• 1:53:46Bill Simmons?

  No, I don't, I don't.

• 1:53:47Speaker 02

  That's 20% of the job.

• 1:53:50Bill Simmons?

  No, here's, here's where it's unfair. I think it would be really hard to stand on the sideline with all that stuff going on and be able to concentrate on all the stuff you need to concentrate on to win a game. Whereas when I'm on the couch and I can be like, why would you throw on second down when you're just, your job's to kill the clock? He's worrying about, are there 11 guys in the field? What defense? And I think there's so much stuff going on, sometimes you can just miss shit.

• 1:54:13Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:54:14Bill Simmons?

  But on T, on the couch, you don't miss anything.

• 1:54:16Speaker 02

  But it's more than just that the job on Sunday for three hours is more complicated than it seems. Those three hours are the culmination of everything else. And I think that a lot of times people will be like, why is this guy still getting hired? Why are they still hiring this guy? It's because, yeah, they do have some, they bad o'clock management or there's these mistakes that they make going for fourth down or not going for.

• 1:54:39Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, they have a flaw.

• 1:54:40Speaker 02

  But there's all of these things that make them a good football coach that are completely divorced from the game we see.

• 1:54:48Bill Simmons?

  There's also a media narrative thing that I think, we're watching right now with John Harbaugh, right? John Harbaugh was going to get fired.

• 1:54:57Bill Simmons?

  Before Lamar took over from Flacco like halfway through that season, they was like, he was done in Baltimore that year. Lamar came in, saved his job, and then he rode the Lamar train for, I don't know, six, seven more years. And then he finally gets fired because he can't, can't really click with Lamar in the right ways, obviously. And now he's the number one coaching free agent. And it's like, this guy almost got fired in 2017, and I have no idea how good of a coach he is. And we just got to watch him. Some people think he's one of the best five coaches in the league. Other people are like, eh, we'll see in the second team. We just saw Pete Carroll go to Vegas and was a disaster. So I don't know, I may, it might be a situation where there's only like four or five good coaches and that's it. Shanahan clearly

• 1:55:40Bill Simmons?

  has proven that no matter what's happening with this team or his roster, he can still compete.

• 1:55:45Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, it would, it would seem to suggest that the job he has done this year is maybe the best job anyone has done in the last.

• 1:55:51Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, this is, this is like, he is now like unassailably, you could pick them apart for the comebacks and for his record earlier in his career, but now he's there.

• 1:56:00Speaker 02

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

• 1:56:08Bill Simmons?

  And then Kittle blows out of the Achilles.

• 1:56:10Speaker 02

  That seems perfect for you. Okay.

• 1:56:11Bill Simmons?

  Oh, my God. No, I, you were one of the first people I thought of when I read that because I was like, I can imagine Chuck reading this entire thing and then Googling for another two hours about what's, I mean, the crazy thing is the story comes out and then Kittle tears his Achilles two days later. Like yet another one. So I don't know. I think there's something to it.

• 1:56:32Speaker 02

  How much?

• 1:56:32Bill Simmons?

  I would, if I was a player in the Niners, I'd be like, we're not playing until you move the practice facility.

• 1:56:37Speaker 02

  Really?

• 1:56:37Bill Simmons?

  Like, yeah.

• 1:56:39Speaker 02

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

• 1:56:47Bill Simmons?

  I would, wouldn't you?

• 1:56:49Speaker 02

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

• 1:56:52Bill Simmons?

  Why are they by far the most injured team?

• 1:56:54Speaker 02

  Okay, they are the most injured team. Are they by far the most injured?

• 1:56:59Bill Simmons?

  I think they, he said they had by far the most tendon ligament damages than anyone in the league.

• 1:57:03Speaker 02

  Who said this?

• 1:57:04Bill Simmons?

  This guy who did the long piece about it.

• 1:57:06Speaker 02

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

• 1:57:14Bill Simmons?

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

• 1:57:18Speaker 02

  Because would it, what would it, would it mean that this is hurt? Like, because there's obviously many different ways to get, so what is, what is the idea that, that? I mean, I'm not even disagreeing with it. I've brought it up. But is the idea that there's an electrical charge that is weakening tend? What, what is?

• 1:57:39Bill Simmons?

  It's like weakening muscles and tendons. I mean, the bigger thing is why?

• 1:57:43Speaker 02

  Who work in there, the people who, I mean, that would be like, you know, are they, are they constantly? I like, do they, do they go to, you know, to urgent care more than other? I think these are other things you have to look into, I guess. I don't know what, it's just, it's a crazy story, but it's strange, you know?

• 1:57:58Bill Simmons?

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

• 1:58:13Speaker 02

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

• 1:58:43Bill Simmons?

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

• 1:58:53Speaker 02

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

• 1:58:57Bill Simmons?

  Oh, you're talking about like, like in.

• 1:58:58Speaker 02

  To me, it's microplastics.

• 1:59:00Bill Simmons?

  And shit.

• 1:59:00Speaker 02

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

• 1:59:09Bill Simmons?

  Well, so.

• 1:59:09Speaker 02

  Is wrapped in plastic? I mean, it's like.

• 1:59:11Bill Simmons?

  Right. On a scale of one to 10, like cigarettes where they knew something was wrong for a long, long time. And kept kind of, no, no, it's fine. And then after, by what, the seventies?

• 1:59:24Speaker 02

  Well.

• 1:59:24Bill Simmons?

  By the time we were like teenagers, we were like, we know cigarettes are really bad.

• 1:59:28Speaker 02

  But like.

• 1:59:30Bill Simmons?

  They were still running ads for them in the sixties.

• 1:59:32Speaker 02

  But there was also like a certain, like no one, like people knew if you smoked your whole life, you coughed a lot. And the first time you smoke a cigarette, you coughed. There had to have been, I wasn't alive during that period. But there had to have been some understanding that like smoking is not healthy. It is smoke, you know?

• 1:59:48Bill Simmons?

  And my mom died of lung cancer at age 51.

• 1:59:51Speaker 02

  The military gave people cigarettes because it's like it'll calm your anxiety, whatever. I had a teacher.

• 1:59:56Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:56Speaker 02

  A chemistry teacher, her mom told her when she was in like high school, start smoking, it'll keep you thinner, whatever. So yes, we thought it was totally different, you know?

• 2:00:06Bill Simmons?

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

• 2:00:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:00:14Bill Simmons?

  Inhaling plastics?

• 2:00:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it might seem like that. I just, it's hard to.

• 2:00:18Bill Simmons?

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

• 2:00:27Speaker 02

  A little bit.

• 2:00:28Bill Simmons?

  And it got me all excited to just kind of rekindle my fascination with Vince. Who had a nice little run there, took the ramps to the Super Bowl.

• 2:00:38Speaker 02

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

• 2:00:40Bill Simmons?

  It was just a fat. It was a fascinating rise and fall, goes to the CFL, bombs, comes back, but it made me look at his pro football reference. And it was one of the most entertaining, like 40 seconds I spent in 2026 so far. His last couple of years, he threw eight touchdowns and 28 interceptions in his last three years. And it's like, you can go in these 1980s deep dives and you'll see some of the worst stats. You know, like

• 2:01:07Speaker 02

  No, he also came back from Canada and had a 400 yard passing game.

• 2:01:11Bill Simmons?

  I know he was, he was good the year he came back and then it was like

• 2:01:14Speaker 02

  I think prior to leaving, one year he led the NFL in passing touchdowns and he was terrible with the Elwitz. It is just, it is an interesting, can I, what are some of the

• 2:01:23Bill Simmons?

  Cause now a bad years is like Geno Smith throwing 15 picks. It's like, oh my God, Geno was so bad. It's like, can I, can I show you Steve Grogan's pro football reference in my, in the 1980s?

• 2:01:34Speaker 02

  I mean, nothing is crazier than just looking at like the trajectory of completion percentage.

• 2:01:39Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 2:01:40Speaker 02

  There was, when we were kids, you, you want your quarterback to complete half his passes and you could not

• 2:01:46Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:46Speaker 02

  Job like that. Now, what were some other great 40 second moments you've had this year so far?

• 2:01:51Bill Simmons?

  That was way up there.

• 2:01:53Speaker 02

  Okay, what else? What else?

• 2:01:54Bill Simmons?

  Revisiting.

• 2:01:55Speaker 02

  Very specific tight window that

• 2:01:56Bill Simmons?

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

• 2:02:30Speaker 02

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

• 2:02:47Bill Simmons?

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

• 2:02:49Speaker 02

  But you know, it is, it's an interesting deal. A few years ago, it was like, must've been like the anniversary of Super Bowl III for some, some anniversary. So they were showing the Joe Namath Colts, Jets, Super Bowl, you know, on, on, they were replaying it. I can't remember if it was on ESPN or ESPN classic or whatever it was, you know? So I watched that, you know, and it is, it is kind of mind blowing. Like late in the game, okay, it's like Baltimore's down like 16 to seven. There's like three minutes left, they're huddling every play. They're not, they don't use the shotgun. It's like, you're watching this, you're like, how could this, how could this be the way it was? Like, like, like, do they, like, the only difference is the offensive lineman, like, jogged a little faster to the line of scrimmage?

• 2:03:29Speaker 02

  And I was like, yeah, scored twice. What, what, how could you do this? So it is sort of incredible how, as much as people like me and people like you, like, you know, we sort of like long for these, the past in a way, and how much we loved it and how, you know, and then when you actually experienced, you were like, rewatching, like, what is this? Like, this is, like, like, everything has improved. It just feels terrible. I mean, that's

• 2:03:55Bill Simmons?

  I was talking to Sal about that this weekend because we were both following this guy on Twitter. I think his name's Kevin Gallagher. He posts all these old, kind of pretty clear videos of

• 2:04:04Speaker 02

  No, I follow him too, yeah.

• 2:04:05Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, it's like, it's the 50th anniversary of this game.

• 2:04:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:04:09Bill Simmons?

  It's the 40, 50 anniversary of this game. So during the playoffs, he's been posting all these playoff moments and some of them, I won't say I've forgotten, I just haven't thought about it in a while.

• 2:04:17Speaker 02

  There was a lot of Vince Ferragamo stuff on there, a lot of the

• 2:04:19Bill Simmons?

  There was some Vince in there.

• 2:04:21Speaker 02

  Stuff was the, you know,

• 2:04:21Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 2:04:22Speaker 02

  The one that Cowboys beat him in like 78 and then the Rams upset him in 79.

• 2:04:25Bill Simmons?

  He had the Hollywood Henderson interception touchdown on there.

• 2:04:28Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:04:29Bill Simmons?

  So they showed the Mike Renfro play.

• 2:04:31Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 2:04:32Bill Simmons?

  Which as a kid was this incredibly important moment in my life that just kind of came and went. And I'm not, I was a Patriot fan, not a Houston fan, but I didn't like the Steelers and the Raiders because that, they were in the AFC, those are the teams we had to beat. So they became like the, the villains for me, those two teams. I just rooted for anyone who tried to beat them. And Renfro catches this, seemed like a touchdown and they huddled and they ruled no touchdown. Now, the Steeler fans would say that wasn't like they would have won the game if he caught it.

• 2:05:02Bill Simmons?

  But it was still a really important play that Houston ended up losing and it felt incredibly unfair. And it was kind of the moment when instant replay, the ball kind of got going. But I remember where I watched that game. I remember how I felt. I remember being really upset, even though it wasn't my team. And now we just, now that stuff's fixed.

• 2:05:22Bill Simmons?

  Now it's a catch, right? Now they look at it for two minutes and it's overturned and Houston has a better chance to win the game. So I don't, of course, things are better now. You know, like if you're a Houston fan, the Patriots lost on the Sugar Bear Hamilton roughing the passer, which wouldn't be able to be reviewed. The Renfro thing would have been reviewed.

• 2:05:40Speaker 02

  But the thing that you just said, like you said, of course it's better now. That's an example to me of why things are worse now.

• 2:05:46Bill Simmons?

  Why?

• 2:05:46Speaker 02

  You just talked about something that happened to you when you were probably, what, nine or 10 years?

• 2:05:51Bill Simmons?

  That was nine, yeah.

• 2:05:52Speaker 02

  Lives in your mind, right?

• 2:05:54Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:54Speaker 02

  It also, it, it means all this, you know, it was, it was this, this, this critical miscall that sort of solidified the Steelers dynasty, stopped Houston from going to the Super Bowl with all those good old Campbell teams. They never went or whatever, bum Phillips and everyone's, okay. Now that would have been overturned, you know, they would have got the right call or whatever. But like, to me, the other thing is, is better. I mean, I, I, I say this on every podcast.

• 2:06:19Bill Simmons?

  So you'd rather have the pain?

• 2:06:20Speaker 02

  I hate instant replay in every way. I think it is absolutely insane that the evidence it takes to overturn a catch or a drop on second eight in the first quarter of the game is greater than the evidence needed to give the guy an electric chair. Okay, God, you kill a guy. You don't need indisputable visual evidence to prove that guy before we execute him, right? But in football, I think it is, it does not add, because they still get things wrong, right? There's still elements of, of instant replay that don't work. It slows the game down and it also, to me, forces me to remember like, there is some kind of something silly about this. It's like guys are playing the game.

• 2:07:04Speaker 02

  Humans are playing the game, but humans can't officiate it. We need robots. We need technology to do it because even though people are playing, it's so important whether or not Renfro catches that pass that we need to like, I, I just, I.

• 2:07:21Bill Simmons?

  You, so you're a human error guy?

• 2:07:22Speaker 02

  The own, yeah, human error is part of it. In the same way, it would be like, um. I mean, it just, it just happens sometime. The only time that I am not against instant replay is I, I, I don't mind it when it's was a basketball released before or after the light comes on at the end of a half or end of

• 2:07:42Bill Simmons?

  Just look at it quick.

• 2:07:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, because that's like, it's the last play. This is it. Like the, the idea of it, you know, but the idea like instant replay and, and officiating reasons obviously damaged basketball, the last two minutes of a basketball game deeply, particularly the idea of plays that throughout the entire game would be officiated one way, but because we have video evidence, they go the other way. If I hold a basketball in my hands and you punch it, technically, yes, it does touch my pinky finger last. That's obviously out on you, you know, I'm, but when I watch it like a football game, it's like, you know, they talk about, remember that, that, oh, like the, the Rams and the Saints a few years ago, like with this interference call late in the game. It's like, you know, that, that's just part of it. It happens. It's like I

• 2:08:29Bill Simmons?

  Basketball happens too, where they'll miss a goaltend or they'll miss something that can't be reviewed. And it's like, hey, we all kind of move on. We move past it. The Renford thing was a little different.

• 2:08:38Speaker 02

  Like, like sometimes like you'll hear people be like, well, when the playoffs start for any sport, why does the division winner get a bar? Like it should be, it should just be, you know, a straight recording of the record. So in the NBA, it shouldn't matter if you won your division or whatever. It should matter. Just, you know, it's like, but that's what it is. We designed it this way. This is the sport.

• 2:08:58Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:59Speaker 02

  Okay. It's like, we're not trying to answer. Like we're not trying to solve a problem. We're trying to create something that is sort of interesting and alive and meaningful and, and can be used in different ways and helps us understand ourselves in the world. We don't need to find the best possible truth in all of these cases because it's already a fictional world. It's a simulated thing. Nothing really important is happening, but we love it anyways. So why do they got to fix this thing that we love to make it more? I don't know what objectively true.

• 2:09:34Bill Simmons?

  Well, this is kind of what your book's about. It's like the constant quest of solving things, perfection, innovations. How do we get better, better? One other thing I found out in that Kevin Gallagher thing, how much I enjoyed the really horrible weather games. I don't feel like we have those anymore.

• 2:09:51Speaker 02

  You know, I I regret.

• 2:09:53Bill Simmons?

  Houston, Houston just going to Pittsburgh and it's just freezing rain. They lose 34 to five. It's like zero degrees with that. That weather could have been a chapter.

• 2:10:02Speaker 02

  I know. I that was the one chapter that I regret. Like I felt the book was the right length. And but I, I, I would have liked to write something about it because this is another thing that sort of sets football apart from other sports. It's not indoors. We never delay the game or stop the game. I guess we were for lightning. But you know, it's like, uh, uh, like the weather is part of it and it changes the way we think about what makes a football player good. What makes a quarterback good? If a quarterback can't play in the cold, that, you know, it's a, even though he may never face the cold for years. Some, some seasons, a guy never has to play, you know, in, in the elements, but like, like it's so who you, you talk about watching six games at once.

• 2:10:45Speaker 02

  I guarantee you the game you watch the most during a blizzard is the snow game. It's just immediately, you know?

• 2:10:52Bill Simmons?

  Well, you can see it from it passes the bar test where if there's a TV on and there's snow. Everyone will kind of gravitate toward the TV, almost like there's like a hockey fight or something like, oh. I mean, plus like in HD, it looks even better now. It looks amazing.

• 2:11:06Speaker 02

  You like some Friday night and all of a sudden I'll get a text and it will be someone that says like, you know, turn on Wyoming and, and Colorado State. And I know.

• 2:11:13Bill Simmons?

  It's a blizzard.

• 2:11:14Speaker 02

  I know what it's going to be. I know it's going to be that, you know? Um, and it's like, uh, is it, uh, one thing.

• 2:11:20Bill Simmons?

  Well, maybe that could be your next book.

• 2:11:22Speaker 02

  Well, I can't, I mean, I always thought that would be a really great documentary.

• 2:11:27Bill Simmons?

  Like, right. I remember we talked about that.

• 2:11:30Speaker 02

  Very difficult for you to do that because it's hard to get the rights to these football games. It's like only the NFL Network could do it. It seems like, and it's like, I don't, it's a, it's kind of a strange thing. I also feel like one thing that I feel that, that in a lot of sports, they've made a mistake now. And they, they can't go back and fix it, which is that like, you know, they'll delay a football game for lightning. If there's a lightning strike within a 15 mile radius of.

• 2:11:56Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:58Speaker 02

  I think that they they looked at this wrong. They didn't realize that fifteen miles in every direction is this huge expanse of space, but they can't go back because if they said like, actually, it would be better if it was a ten mile radius or whatever, and someone gets killed by lightning, they'd be like, you actually changed this law. But like, that was one thing that they did to kind of like, you know, improve safety. I don't because very often, like, the these delays, you know, they clear everybody out of the stands and they can stay. It's like, it's kind of a disaster. It's pretty bad. The book is called Football. When does it come out? It comes out, uh, will it be, I guess today's the 12th, uh, the 19th? Are you doing a little? A week from tomorrow. Okay, so next week.

• 2:12:42Speaker 02

  A week from, if this is running up, Monday or a week, comes out next week. Like, if you, and if you ordered, like, if someone orders it on Amazon or whatever, it'll probably come before that because the books are already done, you know? And you're doing any little tour stuff or no? Yes, I am. I'm doing New York, Philadelphia, and then interestingly, Harrisburg, and then I'm flying home. And then I'm doing Kansas City, Louisville, and Chicago. And then I'm doing Portland and Seattle. So it's an interesting collection of towns. Like, those are fun towns. Yeah, my, my, oh, I'm looking forward to it. But my, my life makes it real hard to, to, to, to go to these places. Even like, you talk about like, being able to like, watch

• 2:13:27Speaker 02

  six games at once. Like, that's one thing about your life that I am envious of. It's like you, because it's sort of your job and you're just the work you're living, you can watch everything all the time. My whole life, all fall and all winter, is just a process of me trying to see these games I want to see, which I then never remember. Like, you know, it's like, it, it, with very few exceptions. I mean, this is, you know, there was a bunch of years ago, I, I sometimes think of this, like, there, you know, there's this concert movie about LCD Sound System. Yeah. And I'm in. You were in it. Yes, okay. So, so we filmed that, we filmed that documentary, and it's before their last show, which is on Saturday at Madison Square Garden. And they're like, oh, you want, you can come to the show, you know, you can get these great seats or whatever.

• 2:14:14Speaker 02

  But that Saturday was the day of the final four. I already had plans to watch the final four in basketball. So I was like, no, I'm not gonna go. I've seen, I've seen Elsie, I've seen him a few times anyways. Like, you know, I don't know if I can remember who played that day. Like, I think it was the year Wisconsin was really good. Like, maybe Wisconsin had one loss, but I'm not sure. Oh, like, so I, I didn't go, I did this, I did this movie, did not go to the big final show where I probably would've gotta sit in the front row or something because I had to see these basketball games. And I don't remember them now. I don't, it's like, it's just all gone. It's, it's so weird how that is. Isn't it how like, like, I care about these sporting events and I know you do too, like so much.

• 2:14:57Speaker 02

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

• 2:15:40Speaker 02

  Where it's just like, I just go out and I watch everything all the time, you know? And that's, you know?

• 2:15:46Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, the weirdest one for me was when my daughter was like really into the club soccer stuff, having Sundays where I was at games as football was going on and trying to do this with my phone and try it. But yeah, it's, I, my whole thing is I just constructed my life. So if I'm gonna keep doing this, I want to do it at the highest possible level I can do it. And I just have to do it this way. The one thing that, but the one thing that's happened, I'm sorry, and maybe it's a little age, wear and tear. I, I found myself drifting more to four games this year. Versus six.

• 2:16:22Speaker 02

  So you.

• 2:16:22Bill Simmons?

  I found it was harder for me to concentrate on all six in the same way.

• 2:16:27Speaker 02

  So you don't turn two TVs on or like you.

• 2:16:30Bill Simmons?

  No, I was just going with the pure multi-view. I started to go upstairs into our little theater place and just watching the four box on the multi-view and then having my iPad going, knowing if I had to switch things. And I found that I could concentrate on everything better.

• 2:16:45Speaker 02

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

• 2:16:52Bill Simmons?

  Well, I could.

• 2:16:52Speaker 02

  How do I justify?

• 2:16:53Bill Simmons?

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

• 2:16:55Speaker 02

  Storage Tech is playing Vandy this weekend. Like, I gotta see it. Like, what's my argument for that? I don't really have one. I so I'm just so it's.

• 2:17:02Bill Simmons?

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

• 2:17:09Speaker 02

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

• 2:17:24Bill Simmons?

  We have to go.

• 2:17:25Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:17:26Bill Simmons?

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

• 2:17:34Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate you promoting.

• 2:17:36Bill Simmons?

  No, it was great.

• 2:17:36Speaker 02

  I know you don't do a lot. You do not do a lot of this and I'm very aware.

• 2:17:39Bill Simmons?

  Case, though. You're a 20-year Hall of Famer for us.

• 2:17:41Speaker 02

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

• 2:17:45Bill Simmons?

  No, come on. All right. Good to see you, Chuck.

• 2:17:47Speaker 02

  Good.

• 2:17:49Bill Simmons?

  All right. That's it for the podcast. Thanks to Cousin Sal. Thanks to Klosterman. Thanks to Gahal and Eduardo and Jack Wilson and Chris and Kevin as well. We will be back on this podcast on Wednesday. Stay tuned. We're doing four this week, so we have another on Wednesday, another on Thursday. Don't forget about the rewatchables. If you like movie podcasts, that is coming on Tuesday with What Lies Beneath. I will see you on this feed on Wednesday.

• 2:18:29Bill Simmons?

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• 2:19:10Bill Simmons?

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• 2:19:54Bill Simmons?

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