A Shocking Lakers Sale. Plus, the 20 Best and Worst Youth Sports for Parents With Cousin Sal.

The Ringer’s Bill Simmons reacts to the sale of the Lakers to former Disney CEO Bob Iger and businessman Josh Kushner. Then, Cousin Sal joins the pod to help Bill break down his Youth Sports Parent Rankings and have a quick Parent Corner. (0:00) Intro (2:19) Reactions to the Lakers sale (30:33) Youth Sports Parent Rankings (01:37:41) Parent Corner Host: Bill Simmons Guest: Cousin Sal Producers: Chia Hao Tat and Eduardo Ocampo Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at https://ChatGPT.com by selecting Work mode. Available on Plus and Pro plans The Ringer is committed to responsible gaming. Please visit https://fanduel.com/playwithaplan to learn more about the resources and helplines 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.

• 0:06Bill Simmons?

  The Bill Simmons Podcast, brought to you by The Ringer Podcast Network. I had a rewatchables for you on Monday. We did the Italian Job, me and Van Lathan and Chris Ryan. Super fun pod. And in fact, we're doing two rewatchables this week. So we have another one coming on Thursday. It's a one for us, but I also think it's in the running for best rom com of all time. It is About Last Night with Rob Lowe and Demi Moore. It came out 40 years ago. It's a really important movie and a fun one to talk about. It's on Netflix right now. So if you want to watch it before we do it, go check it out. But we're gonna do it About Last Night, me and Chris Ryan and Malle Rubin. And that's gonna be up Thursday night. So two this week. And then on Monday, the re-speed.

• 0:48Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, the re-speed is happening. We did speed. It was one of the first ones we ever did. And now we are doing speed again. So that is what the schedule is for rewatchables on this podcast. At the top, I want to talk about this crazy Lakers sale. I'm just gonna solo that part of everything I'm hearing and all my thoughts. Going to just dump them on you. And then Cousin Sal is coming on because this is something I've wanted to do this whole summer. And it's finally time. The the youth sport parent rankings from 20 to one. These are my rankings only. What I think the worst to best youth sports all the way through high school are for for parents. And

• 1:35Bill Simmons?

  so it's probably not going to be liked by everyone who listens to this pod. But that's the thing. It's an honest conversation. And these are all my thoughts. And I can't wait to go through them with Sal. So that's what we have in the docket today. We're gonna take a break, bring in Pearl Jam, and then my thoughts on the Lakers. This episode is brought to you by PayPal. The holiday rush is coming, and you can get ahead of it with PayPal. Shop your favorite online stores with PayPal this season, like eBay for collectibles, Fanatics for teen gear, Walmart for tech. Check out the flexibility to pay now or pay later and split your payments with Pay in four with no interest, no late fees. Shop now with PayPal. Paying for subject to

• 2:18Bill Simmons?

  approval. Learn more at paypal.com slash paying for PayPal, Inc., NMLS 910457. This episode is brought to you by 7up. Okay, this one's a case for conspiracy bill. Let's bring them in. Ever noticed lemon is everywhere from lemon recipes to lemon scented cleaning supplies? And when it comes to lemon lime sodas, why is lemon always first? There's a reason. A shadowy organization called the A Lemonade has been padding the stats, keeping big lemon in the lead for decades. But let me tell you something. The sip is about to be flipped. 7up is fighting back, swapping lemon lime for their new lime lemon soda. Now lime comes first. 7up flipped the sip.

• 3:26Bill Simmons?

  All right, we're recording this part of the podcast around lunchtime Pacific time. I am in California where the Lakers just got sold again for the second time in less than two years in the single most shocking franchise sale in the history of the National Basketball Association, which is almost eight decades old at this point. Nobody saw this coming. There was no inclination, no inkling. There were no whispers. I never heard one thing about this. The Lakers and the Dodgers, who were both owned by Walter, were being for the last year morphed together into basically one super franchise. There was a lot of talk about redundancy and people who had the same jobs and it was going to be a zero sum game, that the two organizations were going to mesh in

• 4:11Bill Simmons?

  all of these different ways. There was real fear in the NBA that with the bus family who had owned the Lakers forever, that were basically a mom and pop operation presiding over one of the three biggest franchises in the league, that we went from the mom and pop side to now these cutthroat analytics, tons of money, searching for every edge, and the Lakers becoming the same kind of franchise that the Dodgers became, who just won the last two World Series and spend crazy amounts of money and have found every single possible edge you can find in Major League Baseball, to the point that we're about to have a long lockout next year because of basically what's happened with the Dodgers and a couple other things. So the thought was that this guy

• 4:55Bill Simmons?

  was going to preside over. But there was a couple whispers just about what was going on with this guy became a topic this summer in Los Angeles. And I'm thinking in the rich guy circles too, because there was a report that he had had either a mild or a legitimate stroke in 2024. He was being investigated by the Department of Justice, and there was some possible insurance fraud. There were always whispers about how did he come up with as much money as he came up with to buy what I think is 78% of the Lakers. He'd already had it on the piece. And he had to shell out, I think, close to $5 billion to buy the rest of it. And there was always talk that he got

• 5:38Bill Simmons?

  Middle Eastern money for that. Did the league know that ahead of time? Where did he get it? This is a bigger question about what's happening in professional sports leagues now, how people are paying for these giant, giant, giant franchises. The craziest thing about this story is what Ramona Shelburne reported, that Bob Iger and Josh Kushner, Josh Kushner is the one who bought the team. He is, he has thrived. They have, you know, investments everywhere. And he is, I think, in the younger class of really, really, really rich people. He's one of the richest. And he has Bob Iger on his team, who just left Disney. And Iger and Kushner are buying the Lakers together. That really means that Kushner is paying for almost all of it. Iger is going to run the Lakers. Have

• 6:22Bill Simmons?

  thoughts on that in a second. That they called Mark Walter over the weekend, supposedly on Sunday, and asked if he'd be interested in selling him, basically just tried to start Godfather offering him. And it ended up being for $12.5 billion. The Sparks were not involved. And Bloomberg, before I started recording this, reported that he had been in talks with investors to raise money to pay down the loans he was being investigated for. And there's a bunch of conspiracy theories that come out of this. But let's, I'll go in order of the things that I thought were interesting with this. One was that Iger and Kushner were considered to be the favorites for the Vegas

• 7:06Bill Simmons?

  team. And the Vegas team, the number had always seemed to be, the league was hoping to get 7.5 billion. That was the number that they had said. That's the number they sold the owners on. The owners voted to allow the expansion talks to happen, but they didn't vote on expansion. And I think the big sale for Adam Silver was, if we do expansion, I will be able to get $15 billion from the two teams, which then because they don't have to share with the players, every one of the 30 NBA owners would get a piece of that. So everybody gets a check for $500 million if that

• 7:45Bill Simmons?

  becomes the number. What they didn't expect was Vegas became even livelier than that. You had the Celtics setting the precedent. Chisholm bought the Celtics for just over $6 billion. But it was actually more than that, because he had to buy out partners. The final number ended up being around, I don't know, maybe 73, 74 billion, somewhere around there. The Celtics are worth less than Vegas, apparently, because a bunch of people wanted Vegas. And then this turns into what I always talk about on the, whenever we talk about rich people buying sports teams, it becomes, you know, the eBay auction where two people want the item, and they just kind

• 8:25Bill Simmons?

  of get crazy. Well, people wanted Vegas for a bunch of different reasons. I don't really personally understand a lot of them. I don't really understand why Vegas even has to have an NBA team, or why they would have moved another team there. People wanted Vegas. And at some point, Iger and Kushner were like, well, if we're gonna pay, I've heard the number is over eight and a half, and it's between eight and a half and nine now. It's what they think they can get for Vegas. Those guys are like, if we're gonna pay that much, let's make one more run at the Lakers. So they get 78% of the Lakers. I think that's the number. It's 77, 78, somewhere in there, because the bus family and a couple other investors still in small pieces. For 9.5 billion, basically, that's what they're shelling out. And maybe they have to buy out more people. Maybe

• 9:10Bill Simmons?

  the bus family is like, you know what? We want to be dragged into this too. So how are they gonna pay for this?

• 9:19Bill Simmons?

  Private equity, when you have a sale like this can only cover up to 20%. So 9.5 billion, they can get private equity for, I don't know, almost two. That means they have to cover 58% of this, which is 7 billion somehow. Iger, who made a ton of money at Disney and is probably worth, you know, he's probably worth over a billion dollars. He's not, doesn't have that kind of cash. But Kushner does, and Kushner is at Thrive Capital, which has had big investments all, all, all over the place. They were in on SpaceX and there's something bigger going on with some of the money that people are throwing around right now that I want to talk about in a second.

• 9:59Bill Simmons?

  But Kushner is going to be the money guy for this. Kushner, Josh Kushner, brother of Jared, who is in the news a lot. Now you have Trump ties. Talk about that in a second. The Kushner-Iger combo. This is an incredible coup for Iger. And if you remember, when, when he was still at Disney and he was trying to figure out whether he wanted to leave or not, he thought he was getting the Chargers in the mid 2010s. And there were always stories about that he misplayed it, that he was a little too, let me tell you guys how, how this could work and, and was a little too full of himself in the NFL owner meetings. And the owners are basically like, who the fuck is this guy?

• 10:44Bill Simmons?

  And steered the Chargers away from him and he didn't get it. And he thought he was going to be the figurehead of the, the second LA team. Didn't happen. Ends up, he has a great first exit from Disney, hands it off to his handpicked successor, Bob Chapek. Can't really figure out what to do. COVID happens and he starts undermining Chapek. This has been covered ad nauseam all over the place, including on Matt Bell and his excellent podcast, The Town. And as some Disney stuff's not going great, all of a sudden he's lurking again. There's some undermining that has been, I'm sure somebody's going to write an awesome book about this. And he ends up undermining his own successor and coming back to Disney triumphantly, we think. Because it didn't turn out to be that triumphant.

• 11:29Bill Simmons?

  Iger 2.0 at Disney did not go great. And I don't think, you know, it was a little like Jordan on the Wizards, to be honest. And then, then last year, the stuff that happened with Kimmel and Kimmel Show and, and Kimmel almost getting fired, I think was, I'll just tell you, like for, in California was really bad for Iger. It was the first time, it's like your, your wife is running the school of journalism at USC and you're somebody who's famously stood up for free speech, all this stuff. Now you're running for the hills on this. And I don't think that was great. He kind of had this pretty flat re-exit out of Disney. I would say unceremonious is a fair word, even though he made a lot of money.

• 12:10Bill Simmons?

  And he just was, you know, obviously wanted one last act, but what was it going to be? Which was going to be the Vegas team. Now he's getting the Lakers. Now he's gonna, I assume he's going to be the one running the Lakers. What an incredible next act for him, right? This is, of all the teams you can own, NBA, NFL, baseball, you name it. This is the highest profile team you can own if you want to lean into the profile. You're sitting courtside, you're charging everything, you're determining where everyone sits. You're now the power broker, the same way Joe Lacob, who wasn't as rich as a lot of the people that were coming to his Warriors games during the heyday of the Steph era,

• 12:53Bill Simmons?

  was still the guy in this room that had all these, you know, the head of Oracle, the head of Facebook, name anybody. It was still like, well, you're coming into my house and sitting in my seats. It's a, it's a real thing from an ego standpoint. And now it's going to be Bob Iger, who has suddenly revived his career yet again. Incredible career. He's been counted out a bunch of times and it's happening again. Okay. What does this mean for the Dodgers, Lakers and their organizational alliance? Nobody knows. Walter spent the last year integrating the two organizations and trying to turn them into one bigger organization. Well, Iger and Kushner aren't going to go for that. So

• 13:36Bill Simmons?

  is Magic still going to be involved? Magic thought he was going to be involved with the Lakers and Dodgers together. Is he involved anymore? Are they going to want him? Are they going to need him? Who knows? What does this mean for the future of the Dodgers? If Walter is basically flipping the Lakers and grabbing the cash, does that mean the Dodgers could be potentially in danger as well? We'll see. What does this mean for Walter's future as a businessman? And somebody who everybody thought had the deepest pockets possible, but is now flipping franchises because either he thinks he's in trouble or needs the money. Not great. Couple bonus things out of this. And again, I'm taping this. It's lunchtime. So things might have changed when we had to find out more information. What happens to the LA Sparks?

• 14:19Bill Simmons?

  WNBA hottest it's ever been, and in some ways coldest it's ever been with some of the stupid dialogue about the league, but hottest from players, valuations for the franchises, the new media deal. LA Sparks not in the sale. So does that mean Mark Walter is going to hand that over to Magic? Is Magic going to buy it from him? They're trying to tank and get the number one pick because people think if they get it, Juju Watkins is going to come out after her USC season. So what happens to the Sparks, which I would say is one of the four best teams to own in the WNBA? That's one. Two, you saw Jeff Schwartz, who's one of the most successful agents of this century,

• 15:04Bill Simmons?

  came out right after with a statement saying, quote, incredible, the Lakers sell for 12 billion. Now it's 12.5. Yet teams won't spend on older vets because of current CBA rules. Thank you, union. So all this is going to do is exacerbate all of this post-CBA remorse that basically everybody has except for the owners, because it turned out awesome for them. All it did was supercharge franchise values. It cut down their costs. They can't, they kind of protected themselves from themselves. And meanwhile, you have Anthony Simons making 6 million a year in the Sixers when he's a $50 million player. So it's, so that's going to start to bubble up too.

• 15:46Bill Simmons?

  Why do we have a second apron but franchise valuations are going the highest they've ever been? That's going to be a dialogue. And the third thing, I was surprised how many threads I was on today that somebody mentioned this to me. Bob Iger, big Chris Paul guy, big Chris Paul guy. When I was at ESPN, the two guys that he loved were Chris Paul and Chauncey Billups. I don't think Chauncey is going to be involved with this Lakers sale. That's one of my big predictions. You can pencil, pencil him out. Chris Paul, who just retired, trying to figure out what to do next. I just feel like he's going to be involved in this and a lot of people do. Could this lead to Chris Paul running a team before LeBron James? We're going to see. What does this mean for Rob Pelinka?

• 16:31Bill Simmons?

  Are they going to push him out? You think Bob Iger wants to do with Rob Pelinka? Could you see him put his own people there, including Chris Paul? Keep an eye on Chris Paul. Okay. Conspiracy Bill, we're going to bring him in for this. Best Mark Walter conspiracy theories I've heard. I can't vouch for any of these. I'm just telling you what's going around. Health wasn't great. Had to, had to get out. I think that's a fair one, considering we know he had medical issues. About to get completely fucked in the insurance fraud case. Somebody texted me. Maybe. Had a ton of Middle East money in the deal. I think that's true.

• 17:15Bill Simmons?

  And the Middle East investors wanted the money back. It's a conspiracy. I don't know if I believe that, but I like it. That sounds like a movie. The other part of that conspiracy could be he had more Middle East money in the deal than Adam Silver realized and Adam Silver wasn't happy about it. This is why we bring in Conspiracy Bill. He's just, he's laying out the landscape for you. And then the biggest conspiracy going around right now that Mark Walter sold to this Kushner-Iger group because Kushner's brother has major Trump ties and Trump controls the DOJ and the Kushner connection. That will get them to call the FBI dogs off. That is even too hot for Conspiracy Bill.

• 17:58Bill Simmons?

  Who knows? It might be pieces of all of those things. It might just be this guy's, it might be as simple as, I'm really worried about my net worth. I just need to flip this asset and make money and I got a godfather offer from these guys that really wanted a team. Last piece is the most interesting. You've heard variations of everything I just talked about. If you're looking at the NBA teams that just got sold in the last 12 years. 2014, Steve Ballmer, Clippers, 2 billion. Didn't own their own arena. 2015 Hawks, 850 million. Seemed high at the time. The Atlanta Hawks, really?

• 18:37Bill Simmons?

  The Nets, 2019, 2.35 million. That included the arena and the Liberty. Also kind of seemed high, but the size didn't care. He's got a ton of money. Now we're getting into the bargain area during, like right before, during and after COVID. The Jazz, 1.66 billion with the arena, 80% stake. So basically valued at two. Ryan Smith, just figured it out. Got the hockey team. Now he's got a whole arsenal there. Timberwolves. 1.5 billion paid in tranches, almost like when you, when you bought a lawnmower from somebody and you want to pay them

• 19:21Bill Simmons?

  once a month for the next three months or something. 1.5 billion total for the Timberwolves, including the arena. Glenn Taylor to the bitter end, just making the worst deals possible. Really one of the worst basketball owners of all time. He couldn't even sell his team properly because less than two years later, the Hornets sold for $3 billion. What's the difference between the Hornets and the Timberwolves? Two small markets, like the Suns in '23, 4 billion. Notice how we're going up. We were in the, we were in the ones. Now I'm, now I'm at four with the Suns. That included the arena to Ishbia. Mavericks, 2024, 3.5 billion for the majority. That includes the arena. Cuban kept the stake.

• 20:06Bill Simmons?

  Celtics, 6.1. And then when you figure in all the buyout people that they had, it's closer to the low sevens. Lakers last year, 10 billion value.

• 20:18Bill Simmons?

  The actual amount of money wasn't that. And then 26, 12.

• 20:24Bill Simmons?

  Did I ever think we would have a $12 billion NBA team?

• 20:29Bill Simmons?

  In basically the 2020s or 2030s? No.

• 20:35Bill Simmons?

  Especially, the only one I would have said was the Knicks because of MSG and the Rangers. And you could have told me, you put all of those assets together, could Dolan have gotten eight figures? I think he could have. Well, now he's looking at this going, holy shit. That we're talking this price range now? Bigger question, why are these franchise valuations skyrocketing like they are? Because we just saw Liverpool, which the Fenway Sports Group is unraveling a sale for. They just announced like Bezos is in it.

• 21:08Bill Simmons?

  There's some reasons. I asked around on this, and I think this is a pretty good list of reasons for this. There's more money for huge ass purchases like this than ever before. And that happened for a bunch of reasons. AI, supercharged the stock market. Trump administration relaxed, a bunch of the rich guy rules. So people have more money and, and kind of easier ways to spend it, basically. There's more private equity out there than ever before. People are just getting better and better at the private equity thing. This has been, you know, a 40 year run here of where you had only a couple of players a while ago. And now pretty much everybody's trying to do this and put together pieces of stuff and things that make sense together.

• 21:53Bill Simmons?

  Like you look at what Ari Emanuel and those guys are doing, like the stuff that they invest in. It's a lot about live event experience and things that tie in together with some sort of like fan

• 22:07Bill Simmons?

  event, venue, and how all that stuff intersects with meteorites seems to be the thing that they care about. They just announced this huge thing where they bought a bunch of stuff involving Broadway. But that's like their angle. And a lot of these people that are coming into this space seem to have certain angles. And one of those angles with the, with the money that's out there is like, guess what never goes down ever, professional sports teams? Guess what? Nobody has ever regretted ever buying one of the signature best trophy professional sports teams. So look at this stuff that sold recently. The commanders, who used to be the Washington Redskins, now they're the commanders. But NFL in Washington, you're buying from Daniel Snyder, they went over 6 million.

• 22:51Bill Simmons?

  The Lakers, the Celtics, Liverpool. I think this keeps happening. And at some point, there's probably a bubble for it. And maybe it'll be after Trump's term is over, maybe it'll happen sooner. Maybe there'll be some black swan event we don't know about. But everyone is buying in at the highest, highest, highest possible version of this bubble because they have money to spend. You know, like SpaceX, a lot of people made a shitload of money from that, including Josh Kushner. And they want to park that money. They want to put it somewhere. What better place to park it than a sports team? Especially an iconic sports team where you have fixed costs, you get the ego from it. People are asking in your life, what do you invest in? I have this, I have this.

• 23:34Bill Simmons?

  Oh, and I bought the Lakers. You bought the Lakers? Oh my God. I didn't realize you were the Lakers owner. At some point, this is a bubble and I don't know when it is, but these prices are so high that I'm thinking about like, what's next?

• 23:48Bill Simmons?

  The Chicago Bulls? Is there a number now that Reinsdorf would think? All right, I gotta, what am I doing? I gotta get out of this. I could get 10, 10 billion for the Bulls. I should do this. Chicago Bears, I think is another one. I think the New York Jets. Dolan's conglomerate. And then I wouldn't rule out the Warriors just from the standpoint of, we took the Steph Curry run as far as we could possibly go. We built the arena. We make the most revenue of any team in the league. Maybe it's time to, to sell high. Could this be what happens? Here's, here's where we should all be scared as fans.

• 24:25Bill Simmons?

  People are moving into these leagues with the signature teams that are doing it solely because of the financial piece and not for any other reason. Bob Iger is a Knicks fan who has Clippers season tickets. He isn't, he's not a Laker fan. I don't know what team Kushner roots for, but that's whatever it is, that's not why they bought it. They bought it because it's one of the best things you can buy in sports, the Los Angeles Lakers. We're seeing this over and over again now with the wealthiest of the wealthy buying sports teams as assets and thinking about them like assets. So now you have a commissioner, Adam Silver, who I've been somewhat critical of the last, I was, I don't know, two years or so.

• 25:09Bill Simmons?

  Because I feel like the league is so revenue driven and so franchise price driven that they're kind of not seeing the forest through the trees anymore. And you could see with the WNBA. All the ways they've handled this WNBA asset, which the league owns a piece of.

• 25:28Bill Simmons?

  I just disagree with a lot of it. I didn't, I didn't like that they over expanded. They've added three expansion teams for reasons that remain unclear. They did this media deal where it's on seven different channels and it's a pain in the ass to figure out who's who. They don't have a real commissioner in place that can solve some of the issues that seem to be repeatedly popping up with this league. Like, you know what the league needed? I'm sorry to go on a WNBA tangent, but the league more than anything else needed somebody, an adult to say, stop with all the discourse. All this stuff that has nothing to do with the basketball players we have and the product we're putting on the floor. Let's talk about our stars. Let's talk about our team, our best teams and all of the positives that have happened over the last few years with this league instead of all the dumb shit.

• 26:12Bill Simmons?

  And anybody who's trying to dine on the dumb shit for clicks, for attention, for social video, whatever, don't have good intentions. And those people should not be spearheading and pushing the dialogue about our league. Well, nobody did that. And it's just going to continue to happen. And meanwhile, you have a game like last night where the fever looked awesome. And, you know, afterwards, it's the same old shit.

• 26:37Bill Simmons?

  It's Stephanie White having to defend herself in a press conference. Everybody in the WNBA has to defend themselves. Why? The league's the best it's ever been. The scoring's up.

• 26:47Bill Simmons?

  And I look at the NBA and I wonder like with the second apron and the players union and these, the revenue stuff and all the stuff they have to care about with the new media deal. I still, maybe it's a pipe dream at this point. You still want to think that the people running the best teams actually care about those teams. Like regardless, the Chisholm who bought the Celtics, who I really like. And I will never understand why they traded Jaylen Brown.

• 27:16Bill Simmons?

  But at least I know it wasn't a financial decision, right? The, the money thing wasn't different. There was something else going on there with Jalen and Jason and them feeling like they had, maybe Brown made a trade. Who knows what happened? But he at least has my trust that I do think he cares about the team that he grew up watching and caring about, that he's not going to want to do wrong by that franchise and by the fan base. You start letting these big money people in here that only care about the investment and only care about what they're getting over the players.

• 27:51Bill Simmons?

  What the economics of the league are.

• 27:54Bill Simmons?

  Everything is seen through the prism of finance. And this is just, listen, in the 1950s and 60s, if you go back and read about the history of the league and you had teams that owned NBA teams that owned bowling alleys, right? Or teams that their entire business rose or fell with how they did with like the Boston Celtics, like Walter Brown who owned the Celtics and the Bruins. And in the seventies and eighties, the NBA started, teams would get flipped over and over again. The Celtics had six, seven owners in the seventies and eighties. And at one point,

• 28:27Bill Simmons?

  John Y. Brown, who owned the Celtics and Irv Levin, who owned Buffalo, just flipped teams. They just changed owners. Like it was just crazy backroom shit that would never happen now. And I think the Mavericks, when they were an expansion team in 1980, 81, it was like 12 million. And there's been levels of when the numbers went up. And the numbers were realistic until about three, four years ago. And now they're not, they're not realistic. I don't think the Lakers are worth $12 billion when they don't even own their own stadium. Somebody thought they were worth it because they paid it.

• 28:59Bill Simmons?

  And they're going to figure out how to turn that into an asset and advantage. But that's a crazy price.

• 29:06Bill Simmons?

  And I guess this is just where we're going to be with, with pro sports, with these bigger things. Like you, you just, these teams are going to get bought. And in the old days, you would be worried that you had some drunk owner, you know, or some, or a bad guy or somebody who leveraged himself and then didn't have enough money to run the team. Or somebody, this was the fourth most important thing they did and they didn't care. Or they got left the team and they don't care about it. We had that with the Celtics with Paul Gaston, Don Gaston's son.

• 29:34Bill Simmons?

  But now we're moving into this whole other era where these things are just giant hedge fund plays.

• 29:42Bill Simmons?

  And is it going to be good for the league? Is it going to be good for professional sports? My instinct is no. But I'm a glass half empty optimistic person. I think this is watching somebody flip the Lakers over a year and a half. Like he's flipping a mansion in Bel Air or something is fucking bonkers. This is the crown jewel of the league. The Lakers and the Knicks are the two most important teams in the league. I'm a Celtic fan, even I would admit that Celtics have the tradition, the titles, the fan base, all that stuff. But if you're just talking about the two most important teams in the league from cities, ratings, money they make, it's the Lakers and it's the Knicks. And one of them just got flipped like a house. So what's it going to mean? I guess we will find out.

• 30:24Bill Simmons?

  We're going to take a break, come back, talk about you sport power rankings for parents. Yeah, we're going from the Lakers to use sports right after this. This episode is brought to you by Chat GPT. Imagine you're running a professional sports team. Nice, that'd be a dream of mine. Imagine the player contract report is due today. Not so nice. You've got performance notes from the coaching staff. You got a salary spreadsheet from your analyst, three rounds of back and forth emails with the agent. And all of it is scattered absolutely everywhere. Well, that's where Chat GPT work comes in. It's a new way to use Chat GPT for bigger multi-step projects.

• 31:04Bill Simmons?

  Give Chat GPT work access to your apps and files and can create real work documents. For instance, spreadsheets, slides, structured reports. You can bring all those to your next meeting. And when you don't need answers, you need help just getting the work across the finish line. Guess what? Chat GPT work can move your projects forward while you stay in control. Put Chat GPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started, just go to chat GPT.com by selecting work mode available on plus and pro plans. My friend Cousin Sal is here. We are killing a ton of time until football season. We're, we're in football prep mode.

• 31:48Bill Simmons?

  You've been on the Ringer Wise Guys, we're calling it now, which is our old gambling show, which is on Twitch and YouTube and Spotify. Breaking down divisions. But you just came back from Cooperstown.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  Yes. And by the way, let's do it. Let's just do the football. Cooperstown is fine, but let's just do the, we're, we're ready. You're ready, I'm ready. How many times, you know?

• 32:07Bill Simmons?

  So we're, we're recording the football on August 27th of Thursday.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:11Bill Simmons?

  And we're doing a two parter. And I couldn't be more excited because we are now 15 days away from that. But this was the perfect time. It's my daughter's last college soccer season coming up. You just went to Cooperstown, your, your son's team finished six out of like 102 teams. You just lived this whole week long, like you, you think you're in a sports movie. And one of the questions that I get the most, because people know from the podcast, from other stuff, that I've been, you know, a soccer dad for a long time. When you meet these people who have younger kids and they're like, what would we, like, give me some advice. What do you think my, my kid should play? What sport would you recommend? And I always find, so I'm finally like, fuck it. We're just going to do this.

• 32:53Bill Simmons?

  But before we do that, so you've done, you're, one of your sons played football. You had a son that did wrestling. And then your youngest son is in a whole bunch of stuff, but probably likes baseball the most. So what's your favorite out of all of those?

• 33:05Speaker 01

  I could speak to football, wrestling, baseball, basketball and rugby, actually. Now, um, as the five that I've competed in or my kids have. I have to pick a favorite right off the bat?

• 33:19Bill Simmons?

  No, you don't. Save it, save it. We'll save it for the list.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  All right.

• 33:22Bill Simmons?

  All right. We are going to, people are going to hate this. We're going to go from, from 20 to one. Worst sport for your kid to play from a parent experience. We are not talking about the kids. This is just, this is all selfish. This is just for the parents only, parent only rankings from 20 to one. And we're just going to try to give you some, some wisdom. I have some, some guidelines here. I have seven questions. The first one is, how does the sport actually upend your life? Which is an underrated part of being a use sports parent. Does it regularly affect the time you wake up? Do you have to spend a lot of time driving to far tournaments?

• 34:06Bill Simmons?

  Are your weekends just destroyed? Is there food diet stuff that has to try? Like you wrestled in, in high school, like, you know, there's, there's a two month stretch where you're not allowed to basically eat anything. How upset will your kid be at you if you miss one of the events and how upset will you be? And then if your weekends are going to be ruined for years, are you at least having fun or somewhat fun? So from a parent's standpoint, I think that's number one. Baseball, you've been in a lot of, it's a lot of driving.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, first of all, we should clarify a little because like, what are the, what time period, right? Because little league baseball, when they're six is delightful. I mean, what's better than staring at them in the cute uniforms? So he, Ethan hit the ball and he immediately ran to third base. How cute. But if Ethan does that when he's 12, you're looking to fight his father, right? So, you know, I, I, I guess we'll put it at, well, what, what range are we putting it at? Post six years old.

• 35:04Bill Simmons?

  This is the whole run. Yeah, we're, we're assuming that your kid is going to at least be competent enough to play from, let's say age six, all the way through around high school age, if it goes well.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 35:15Bill Simmons?

  Okay.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 35:17Bill Simmons?

  Second, second question. You just were in the middle of this. What's the parent culture around the sport? What type of other parents are you consistently hanging out with? How much do you actually have to hang out with them? Are there outs? Can you wander off? Can you like in baseball, you could be like, I'm going to go watch some of this from left field, but you're really trying to get away from aggro dad. How crazy are the parents on a scale of one to 10? Just day to day regularly at practices? How competitive are they with the other kids and parents on the team for scholarship stuff, whatever? And just, can you move in and out of this?

• 35:59Bill Simmons?

  So wrestling, you go and you're in the stands. You never know, you, you're watching everybody else and then your kid's up and everybody's kind of pulling for everybody else in wrestling. Right?

• 36:09Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yep. I would say wrestling, you're stuck in a smelly gymnasium for a tournament, I would say. Like a meet on a Tuesday or Thursday is a little more manageable. You know, when your kid is wrestling, you can invite relatives out for a tournament. Way-ins could be at 7:30 in the morning.

• 36:26Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  The tournament starts at nine and he or she could wrestle at 10 and then two, depending on the, the weight class. So that part of it is miserable, I would say.

• 36:38Bill Simmons?

  And not to spoil my rankings, because these are my rankings. You don't even know what we're doing, but the unpredictability of event times.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 36:47Bill Simmons?

  Is so much more important and crucial to this than people seem to realize where it's like, I, my son has a track and field meet today. Well, when is, when is it going to be? I have no idea. It could be 9:30, it could be two, there could be a race here. We might have seven hours to kill. Now I'm eating a hot dog from the concession stand or chips or stuff out of a vending machine. Oh, do we have time to drive 10 minutes to go to like Jack in the Box? The, the, the more uncertainty you have around the schedule, the less fun it is. So you have that. The next question is how expensive is the sport to become good at? So that includes special travel teams, club teams, um, special expensive equipment.

• 37:32Bill Simmons?

  You know, like, I think like lacrosse, hockey, some of these ones where you, oh, or even baseball gloves. Like, oh, my kid grew, I have to get more stuff. Oh, it's another year. Oh, the lacrosse stick is too short for him now. I got to get that again. Oh, I gotta get another, you know, helmet for whatever. I got to get new gloves, the whole thing of that.

• 37:52Speaker 01

  It's hard to explain the reaction you have when you buy an expensive bat for your kid for Christmas. And then he's using the best hitter on the team's bat by the MLK tournament.

• 38:02Bill Simmons?

  Right. And you're like, I just, this is our big Christmas gift to you. And four months later, you, yeah, it's too small. And then private training and private coaches, because there's some of these where, you know, called privates. But like in baseball, if you want your kid to potentially play in college, you're going to start doing privates. If your kid's a figure skater, like that's a whole other, now you have to hire a coach. Like that's going nuts versus like some of these other sports. You know, basketball, you could have, you could definitely have privates. You could also just be a really good athlete who could just lace on some sneakers and go out there and play for a club team.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think this is for, for me, because my kid's a tweener, right? He's not terrible, but he's not going to play pro or anything close. And all of his friends are in that category. So what do you do with the private lessons? You don't want him to embarrass himself. But I feel like this is in the, the e-bike cell phone category. Like they never need it until a couple of their friends take it. And then you're screwed. So you really have to rally the parents to resist as much as you can.

• 39:03Bill Simmons?

  I would say for soccer, it is important. Yeah, that's, that's, when we go through, I'll, I'll talk about the different ones. But for some of them, like, just like technique, sports with technique. If you're a baseball pitcher, at some point you're going to have some sort of private coach that helps you with your throwing motion, all that stuff. All right. So that's expensive is another category. So that's three. So we have, does the sport upend your life? What's the parent culture? How expensive it is? The fourth one is physical mental health risk for your kid.

• 39:34Bill Simmons?

  I would argue this is the most important. We're talking about concussion potential. We're talking about dieting and all the crazy shit you have to do to compete in certain sports. Injury potential. Is your body going to be the same when you're 30 years old because you played this sport? Also, are you solo? Is all the pressure on you or are you part of a team? I would argue it's better to be part of a team and have that dynamic and learn how to compete with other people. And the solo thing can, can get weird, but also like it's easier to succeed in. Does the sport get you in better shape? There's certain sports where like, if you play soccer, you're just in good shape. Right?

• 40:17Bill Simmons?

  You could play baseball and potentially not be in great shape, but physical mental health. So you're a wrestler. You, you have all the dieting stuff, all the crazy, you're running up and down the stairs. It's 110 degrees. You have the pressure of these matches of letting the team down. I would say that's like a nine out of 10 pressure toll on your body sport, right?

• 40:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's like you're sending your kid to the, off to the, to the service, like to, to the armed forces, you know? And without doing that, you know, without getting in a fight with your wife about doing.

• 40:53Bill Simmons?

  Right. But you would do it again.

• 40:56Speaker 01

  It's the best and the worst. I'd, I'd put it at the top and the very bottom because it's like the mental torture it takes. The physical torture it takes. But later in life, if you have to lose weight, whatever, you got that. You, you are rooting for your team, but it isn't individual sport. I would say from a parent's perspective, if you like to blame people, you're not going to be able to do it. Like, I know we all love to blame people. We're all in the Twitter universe, right? We like to blame or whatever, politics, it's always, it's gotta be someone else's fault. Once in a while, a referee will call a takedown out of bounds. It didn't happen, but for the most part, it's your kid effing up or your kid doing great. So the highs are as high as they could be and the lows are as low as they could be.

• 41:37Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, anything when it's just you. Cross countries like this, track and fields like this, like ultimately it's just you. Yeah. You, you're in charge of your destiny. There's no other people to blame. You can't say, oh, the coach's kid was playing the wrong position or he, my, my kid should have been there. And he, instead they played him at the, like, you have no excuses. You're just looking at, in the mirror. And then, you know, there's some, you're talking about the more physical sports. There's a real toll that happens. Like my son in the high school played as a freshman and sophomore, played football and lacrosse. And he's still, he didn't want to play. I mean, his body is still banged up. Like he has hip stuff already.

• 42:17Bill Simmons?

  He had like two minor concussions and, and then looking back, you're like, man, should we have let him play football at all? And you have the, the parent guilt. Parent guilt is almost its own category in this.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. I would say for that, just real quick, like, you know, football as far as like a spectator sport. And this is all subjective. You could like soccer better, but Friday night under the lights, nothing better. That's why they make TV, TV shows about it, movies about it. But same time, you talk about like skipping a game, like the, one of the parents kinda has to be there just in case that all god awful thing that we read about happens, you know, the head injury or whatever. We've seen ambulances taking kids off the field. It's not as much a, a concern with, you know, golf or, you know, the field hockey, but it is for football for sure.

• 43:11Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. And, and having been in the stands a couple of times when that happens, it's the single worst feeling. Like somebody got hurt, somebody's down, they stop the game. Like it's, and he was like, oh, Friday night football, it's so much fun. And then it's like, holy shit, what are we doing? That kid's 15, he's getting carted up. Three more categories. Is there actual realistic college scholarship potential? Could this weirdly all pay off? All the time you're spending doing whatever, privates, anything, could you, could this be a shortcut to not having to pay for college? Which can be like half a million dollars in five, six years. And then which sports are the sneaky best bets to get a scholarship? I factored that in the ranking too.

• 43:55Speaker 01

  Oh, I thought you were saying which can you bet on, which is also.

• 43:57Bill Simmons?

  No, we could also, which sports can you bet on? But like water polo is a sport you and I would have been like, yeah, Ben's getting into water polo. Or yeah, Harrison's a big water polo guy down here. You're like, what?

• 44:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:09Bill Simmons?

  Water polo. And then you watch like, my son's school had all of these kids just going from the water polo team to all of these, you know, pretty prestigious colleges, cause it's not a sport that everybody has. So if you're lucky enough to live in an area that has something like that, you know, there's a water polo college athlete?

• 44:27Speaker 01

  Who's that?

• 44:28Bill Simmons?

  You'll never guess this. I don't think you know the answer to this. Joe House.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  Really?

• 44:33Bill Simmons?

  Joe House was a big high school water polo and basketball, but then in college did water polo for a couple of years. Until I think we shamed him and made fun of him to get him to stop. Yeah.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  Oh, that's funny. How did he stop? He could have gone pro.

• 44:48Bill Simmons?

  Probably didn't want to just be treading water in a pool in the Patriot League. All right, two more categories. Parent entertainment value. So this is a positive category. How much fun is it to attend the games? Are the schedules consistent? Are you outdoors or indoors? How easy, this is a big one for you. How easy for you to sneak away and do a work call or some sort of other call during the event? Do you have flexibility or you have to be locked in scared the entire time? Are there breaks?

• 45:21Speaker 01

  And I have a bet on the undercard and UFC in Saudi Arabia at 2:00 PM. And I have to, I have to get away and, and watch that match. And, uh, you know, we'll see what little Nathan does afterwards.

• 45:33Bill Simmons?

  Right. Well, and then can you watch, can you watch stuff during the events?

• 45:39Speaker 01

  Other sports.

• 45:39Bill Simmons?

  I mean, and we would do Sunday pods where Zoe had a soccer tournament and I would have Sunday ticket on my phone while she's playing games, trying to keep track of everything and taking notes. And soccer is a little easier, but there's some other sports that would not be as easy.

• 45:55Speaker 01

  And you're guilty either way. You feel guilty, right? Cause you're missing your kid a little bit or you're missing the Sunday slate. And I have to, how am I going to go on Sunday night and make it like I watched everything? But.

• 46:05Bill Simmons?

  The only other piece for parent entertainment value is, is the actual sport relatively easy to understand? Is it fun for the parent? Do you feel like you could have some sort of opinion slash respectable thoughts about what you're watching? Or are you just like, what, go in there going, I don't know what the fuck's going on. Where this goes wrong is baseball where everybody thinks they're the biggest expert in the world. So this is a pros and cons. The easier the sport is to understand, the more people are weighing in with some of the worst takes of all time. You're in the middle of this with baseball. It was the single worst thing about being a baseball parent.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's people aggressively like screaming balk, balk every pit, you know? It's like, no, it's not a balk. He stepped off, cut it out. There's that part of it. And then there's your wife or husband who doesn't know the game after, you know, the nine years of this is just like, so wait, they have to tag him at first? But don't they have to tag him on a ground ball? Right? No, no, no. But I will say this, like, there was something comforting when my son Archie, my oldest decided to play rugby sophomore year. And aside from like worried that he'll get kneed in the face with the ball, you know? Cause they wear those goofy kind of protective helmets, but not, nothing really on the face. There was something nice about not knowing the rules and just like kinda watching along.

• 47:30Speaker 01

  And, you know, I didn't get loud about anything because I didn't know the rules. So, you know, when they're throwing it in and one kid's standing on the other shoulders and there's a throw in like, it was fine to me. So I don't know. It's, it could go either way.

• 47:41Bill Simmons?

  I had this with lacrosse. I, lacrosse is a sport I'd never followed in any capacity, never watched, never cared about. And then my son got pulled onto the lacrosse team and all of a sudden was playing when he was a ninth grader. And I didn't know what was going on. And I, I became like, it was almost like I was a foreigner sitting on the sidelines being like, so you, so that guy can't go past midfield? And these people can run off and they're back on and wait, why didn't that goal count? I was just confused for two months. I couldn't understand anything and the goals were fast, these fouls, then it would be like, there would be like this delayed power play. Where if you had the ball and there, and then the guy's running off, but you still have it.

• 48:24Bill Simmons?

  And it's like, well, is he off for 30 seconds or two minutes? And I don't know, it was a lot.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  As long as it eventually makes sense.

• 48:32Bill Simmons?

  It eventually made sense.

• 48:33Speaker 01

  It's not like VAR for all of this whole summer we went through.

• 48:36Bill Simmons?

  Right. All right, last question, bonus question. This is a really important one. When you talk to grownups, your age or a little younger, but adults about the sport that they devoted their youth to?

• 48:51Bill Simmons?

  What do they say in retrospect? Are they happy they did it? Did, would they run it back? Would they do it over again? This is the number one gymnastics is the number one for this. I'm still waiting to meet the first person who did gymnastics all the way through high school or college and was like, that was great. I would definitely a hundred percent do that again. The person does not exist. Even people like who won Olympic gold medals like, yeah, I don't know. What if I run that one back? And football is another one where I think if you talk to people who played football in high school and in college afterwards, like, yeah, football was great. Would I do it again? No. So it's an interesting one. Whereas other ones like soccer, unless you, you know, had some terrible injury or something

• 49:35Bill Simmons?

  for the most part, or volleyball, nobody's like, oh yeah, I wouldn't, I would never play volleyball again, you know?

• 49:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, first of all, when you ask them the question, you're hoping they haven't sustained enough injuries where they're, they're not able to verbalize anything.

• 49:50Bill Simmons?

  They're taking the answer.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  But I do have a personal story with this. We'll bring up Tony Romo here. It's not exactly play out what you said, but I wanted my kid, I wanted Archie to play football, starting in seventh grade, like tackle football. And like, we knew the Romos and we went out with them. Sorry to name drop, whatever.

• 50:09Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  And I asked, I was like, I'll, I'll get Tony to convince Melissa and his wife will agree and that'll be nice. It's like, it's like Tony, Archie could play tackle in seventh grade, right? Right? And he's like, eh, he could wait till 10th. And I was like, what? You're just ruining it for me. You just took three years of my life.

• 50:28Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 50:28Speaker 01

  Even though you might've added three to his, but that's not the answer I wanted to hear. So yeah, you will get, you will get negative honest feedback for whatever reason from these athletes.

• 50:39Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I wish, I wish we had held Ben out until 10th grade because he was ninth grade. He was starting playing, you know, against 18 year olds. I look back at that, I'm like, this is fucking crazy, but he was doing well and it seemed like a good idea. And now I really regret that. So the questions are, do they acknowledge now is bad for their bodies? Were they more or less likely to have a positive or negative experience with a coach, depending on the sport? You can have some sports where if you have the wrong coach, you never want to play that sport again. You can have other sports where it's like, oh man, that guy changed the course of my life or that lady. If I hadn't met that person, I probably wouldn't be doing this for a living. Another good question is which sport do you actually wish you would play?

• 51:22Bill Simmons?

  And then, and then the big one. Can you keep playing the sport after high school or college? Which I think gets lost in this whole thing where it's like, if you play football, you're done playing football, either in high school or college, you never play it again. Right? There's other sports, like if you get into golf when you're six, now you're playing golf for 80 years. I get, I get invited to Baby Doll's country club. I get to, get to play 18 with them somewhere. I, it never ends. Tennis is another one. Like if I'm good at tennis and I have the mechanics of a serve and I can play serve and volley, I'm playing until I'm 75, you know?

• 52:04Speaker 01

  And that's it. It's just those two, right? Pickleball, I guess if you want to count it now, I don't know how, how much momentum that'll happen.

• 52:10Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Pickleball did not make our list for top 20.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  Good, good.

• 52:14Bill Simmons?

  But beach volleyball is another one. You could probably play until your twenties or thirties. My daughter's talking about this now because she's, she's really competitive and she's like, I'm not playing, this is my last soccer year. I'm done. What am I going to do after? And, and I think she's going to start playing tennis and like really try to get good at it because she's like, I can play tennis, I can play doubles, you play singles. Like my wife plays five days a week and you know, she's close to our age. So, um, so those are the big ones. So the seven are, I'm going to call it life grenade. How much does this blow up your life when your kid plays the sport? Parent culture around it. Finances, how expensive it is. Physical, mental health risks. College scholarship potential.

• 52:57Bill Simmons?

  Parent entertainment value for us personally, do we have a good time watching it? And then post playing career regrets for the people we know. Those are the seven calculuses. The other thing.

• 53:09Speaker 01

  I would add, maybe, maybe this isn't a separate question because it's all encompassing, but what percentage of the games you're rooting against your kid's team for whatever reason?

• 53:21Bill Simmons?

  Oh, to have the weekend end early?

• 53:23Speaker 01

  Cause you have to get back, because you have to do something else, because they're going to get killed by the next team anyway.

• 53:28Bill Simmons?

  Well, isn't baseball number one for that? Where it's like, oh man, two more and it's a mercy rule and we can get out of here.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  It is. It's number one. It's definitely number one.

• 53:38Bill Simmons?

  One thing I didn't have on here, just so people know, is flag football, which I think 10 years from now, I think flag football will basically be football for everyone under 16. And flag football is great. I had so much fun when my, when my son played for his school, the Willows, they won the eighth grade title, which was like one of my great sports moments as a parent. But super fun and not, you don't have to worry about like a major injury for the most part. You might have like, once the kids get better, you might have the collision over the middle where somebody's going for an interception and maybe they hit heads. You see some kids wearing caps, but for the most part, really safe. And I think that's going to keep taking off.

• 54:19Speaker 01

  And I think you would put football number one for entertainment value and everything else and camaraderie and parents and be able to get away and all those things you talked about, if not for the injury risk. And that flag football could be just as exciting on a Friday night. If you have a competitive game, my kid's been in it for like six years now. So.

• 54:37Bill Simmons?

  It's great.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  And no injury.

• 54:39Bill Simmons?

  All right, we're going to take a break and we're going to come back and we're going to unleash the top 20.

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• 56:10Bill Simmons?

  All right. Top 20 best youth sports for parents from 20 to one, 20 being the worst. Very important, these are not Sal's rankings, these are my rankings.

• 56:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:21Bill Simmons?

  Sal is my conciliary slash sounding board. I'm happy to move stuff around. Coming in last at number 20, figure skating. I think it's the perfect storm. I think it checks every negative box. Incredibly expensive. Horrific ice rink times, right? You're getting, oh, I gotta get up. Julie's got figure skating, but 4:15 tomorrow morning, it's the only time we get the ice rink. Lonely. You're relying on coaches that could be terrible or great. And the upside is, I don't know, they don't have, really have figure skating scholarships, right? So the upside is my kid might be able to go pro and make money and the odds of that,

• 57:04Bill Simmons?

  you're competing against literally everybody else on the planet. And you have to buy skates every year and you can't really do it then when you're older, except for if you're doing like a Christmas stroll skate. This is my number, number one worst, and I don't think it's arguable. What do you think?

• 57:21Speaker 01

  Pretty good. Good. I would say the only good thing is you don't have, um, you know, you're not freezing outside. The, the rain, the weather doesn't affect it because it's indoors. That's the only good thing. You're right about the morning.

• 57:32Bill Simmons?

  But the rinks are cold though.

• 57:34Speaker 01

  The rinks are kind of cold. Yeah. And there could always be some lunatic who hit your knee with a lead pipe and who the hell knows? It goes on and on for unsolved for decades. So, um, yeah, I would put that to, by the way, this is going to be, get ready for this because you're going to get more backlash from your list, no matter what. I haven't even heard it.

• 57:52Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 57:52Speaker 01

  Than any other podcast you've ever done.

• 57:54Bill Simmons?

  I'm fine. I'm going to take it. This is, this is just my rankings only. And if it's, it's an opinion. Opinions are like assholes. Everybody has one.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  Everyone's going to have a hundred. That's a problem. Yeah.

• 58:05Bill Simmons?

  Figure skating. Also, uh, when it, when it kind of goes up in levels, now I gotta buy outfits.

• 58:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 58:13Bill Simmons?

  Have to buy the fancy little figure skating dresses. I've got to pay coaches. Like if you're doing this, you better know from age four, your kid is an absolute prodigy. I don't, I don't see it.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  And the weight thing is a problem too, right? Like keeping the weight down.

• 58:28Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, there's a whole bunch of, yeah, there's a whole bunch of eating stuff that could happen too. All right. I guess the benefit is if you're, if you're pairs, very tight relationship with your pairs partner. So you're not, you're not alone.

• 58:43Speaker 01

  That's true. You find a, find a partner.

• 58:45Bill Simmons?

  Also, when you think about scariest moment as a parent, like let's say your kid's getting good at figure skating and is in sub tournament, but then does the, oh, here comes the triple axel and then falls. Is there, what would be more devastating other than like if your kid's a kicker in football in college? And your kid misses the kick and there's 75,000 people there and your kid just blew everybody the game. Penalty kicks, maybe.

• 59:11Bill Simmons?

  Baseball that you're just, your kid's never playing. Football is probably the biggest amount of people.

• 59:17Speaker 01

  I think so. Then there's pick six or something, something like that. But yeah, it does individualize it as much as anything else.

• 59:23Bill Simmons?

  Figure skating, last, second to last gymnastics, easily could have been number 20.

• 59:30Bill Simmons?

  An actual body ruiner. There's, there's a really good book that, uh, somebody wrote like 30 years ago. I think it's called Little Girls in Pretty Boxes about like, especially gymnastics, like, like has real, real effects on it stunts growth, like knee back stuff. One of my wife's best friends did gymnastics and is like an advocate now for, please don't ever, don't have your kids do this. Yeah, it's just, there's, you have back stuff, you have spine stuff, you have leg stuff, you can have foot stuff. You're constantly like, oh, I'm a little sore, but we have a meet tomorrow. I gotta play like, I'm, I'm out on gymnastics. A lot of people like it.

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  It's, well, everyone loves it in the summer for the summer Olympics. Isn't it the most watched? I mean, it's like.

• 1:00:17Bill Simmons?

  Most watched. It's the best of the best.

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  It's the one thing, the whole family will get together and watch, I feel like. Yeah.

• 1:00:23Bill Simmons?

  But those are like the best 50 ever. Like what about all the other ones who, who, uh, went through college? See, this is where people are going to get mad.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  Well, they should do a PSA. The Simone Biles of the world. But like, hey, this isn't for everybody. In fact, it's just for the like seven of us and that's it. Don't even try.

• 1:00:41Bill Simmons?

  I, I think dance is more interesting for gyms because we had some, some little girls, like we had Zoe did gymnastics for, I don't know, like the first year and they were like, you gotta get her coming five days a week. She could be amazing. And we were like, Zoe's gonna be like five nine. What is she gonna be a gymnast? But I think there's, there's, I would push toward dance would be my parent advice. Not saying I'm right or wrong, but if you want your little girl to be limber and do stuff like, like go the dance route. Cause you're going to get great balance from it and everything else.

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  I asked a friend, my, my buddy Tony, I wasn't sure if you were going to include dance, not our mutual friend Tony, but I did. He did say, insert dance in there. And he's like, from a parent's perspective, it's awful because you're seeing them do the same five minute routine.

• 1:01:30Bill Simmons?

  Over and over and over again. Yeah. It was that dance did not make the cut.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:01:34Bill Simmons?

  Number 18, um, swimming.

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:39Bill Simmons?

  So, bunch of stuff going on here.

• 1:01:44Bill Simmons?

  The all day meets we talked about with wrestling, especially if your kid's doing multiple things. You might, the first one might be at 7:30 and then the next one's at two, and then the last one's at five. I had, our buddy Gus had a kid who was a swimmer and that it was the meets where it really, it's an all there. With the added bonus, you can barely tell which kid is yours. If you're in like the bigger things, it's like, is that, is he in lane five or lane four? And then, then you're going and, um, there's a lot of chlorine exposure.

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:13Bill Simmons?

  And, uh, the benefits are you get in sick shape.

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:02:18Bill Simmons?

  And there's scholarship potential, but, um, I don't know. I'm just, right. What are your swimming thoughts?

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  Body image issues for sure. Right? I mean, from sixth grade on, you're in a, you're in a.

• 1:02:30Bill Simmons?

  You're in a speedo.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  At school. Yeah, that's it. Or, or yeah, boy or girl. So it's, it is tough. Yeah, that chlorine killed me. My kid trained for junior guards out here to be a lifeguard and it wasn't swim meets, but it was a lot of intensive, uh, and the coaches can be crazy too. That's an underrated, uh, like, like, you know, uh, Iron Chef type coaches in the background screaming their.

• 1:02:53Bill Simmons?

  We just saw Zach Lowe, whose dad was a famous high school coach in Greenwich for swimming and he's going to be furious that swimming came in 18. Look, there's no, there's no losers. These are just the rankings. I include diving and swimming. This is all, anything with a pool. Also pool time's hard. You know, sometimes that's another one where you might have to get up early to go swimming. So anyways, swimming's 18. Wrestling 17. For a lot of the stuff we mentioned, and I say this knowing that you loved wrestling, but when you think, when your kid wins a match and pins somebody about as exciting as it's going to get for a parent.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  Nothing better.

• 1:03:29Bill Simmons?

  And then I would say every other piece of it's terrible.

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  A lot of it's terrible. Yeah. The, the discipline's great for later in life. Like I said, the, the body thing, like if you're 112 pounds, trying to get down to 106, now you're talking about like, you know, 8% of your body weight and it's stunting growth and those one 12 pounders are, are, it'd be tough for them to get to 135, 140 in their later years. Uh, the times, like I said, all over the place, scattered, don't know when to invite people to watch your kid for a tournament. Yeah. I mean, I'm in my car for four hours watching EPL on my phone because the time between the weigh-ins, 7:00 AM and his first match is 11:00 and I don't even know if that's, that's going to be, you know, that's another thing.

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  If you're, if your school or whatever, there's a whole other story. We didn't have buses. So we had to each drive our kid for the weigh-ins an hour and a half away.

• 1:04:22Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. You got the weigh-ins too.

• 1:04:25Speaker 01

  It's rough. Yeah.

• 1:04:26Bill Simmons?

  One other benefit other than when your kid wins, I mean, when you, and then when your kid loses, it's devastating, but you can use this later in life.

• 1:04:36Bill Simmons?

  Like you're like a sneaky, I would trust you in a dark alley as my sidekick if we had to fight people. Like you do have moves and I don't know, you learn some stuff. You're, you're cagey.

• 1:04:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's no jujitsu, uh, team in high school, right? So this is, yeah, if you want to be able to handle yourself in a fight, like a lot of these fights end up on the ground. So, but no, I don't, I don't use it for offense. Bill, you know that I'm defensive.

• 1:05:02Bill Simmons?

  You're like Mr. Biagi.

• 1:05:03Speaker 01

  I'm Biagi all the way.

• 1:05:04Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. You don't, you're not supposed to punch somebody unless you're challenged. All right. So number 17, I'm sorry, number 16 and 15, I put together cycling and cross country. Cross country is interesting. Know a couple of cross country parents.

• 1:05:23Bill Simmons?

  The kids by themselves just doing stuff. They're on a team and it's fun, but it's really just them. But the real problem is there's, when you actually have like a meet, there's nowhere to go. You basically have to pick a spot. It's like, oh, my son runs 10K. It's like, oh, he's going to run. All right. I'm going to pick this. We'll, we'll go meet him at the halfway there in the trail. And then you wait and you wait and then he runs by and like, go, go, Sal. All right. Go, come on buddy. And he's not listening because they're like locked in the cross country.

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:56Bill Simmons?

  So fun, but also not fun at all. At least you get to be outdoors. The benefit is you get to do this after you, you know, your whole life. If you run, you run your whole life. So you're learning.

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:06Bill Simmons?

  Learning good stuff.

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  I, I asked for some input here, my, from my friend Megan, who is a long distance Olympic hopeful actually for 2028. So she said, the, the meets are typically further away at some random park or in the middle of the woods, or sometimes on a golf course. But again, it's a 20 minute race. So you could realistically be back home by noon. And then she said, this is what really got me. She said, you would love being a cross country dad though, because the night before, you get to have pasta parties. So you could eat all the carbs, which is right up your alley. She's right. Yes, it is up my alley.

• 1:06:35Bill Simmons?

  Oh, that sounds amazing.

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:37Bill Simmons?

  So, so is cross country too? Should I put it higher? I guess we'll see.

• 1:06:40Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know. We'll see. Yeah. We'll see where we put everything else.

• 1:06:44Bill Simmons?

  Next one's rowing, number 14.

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  This is so douchey. This is so east coast prep douchey. You didn't need to put this in, but go ahead.

• 1:06:53Bill Simmons?

  Listen, it's, it's first of all, college scholarships available. You get to be in awesome shape. You don't necessarily have to be super coordinated or a great athlete. You just kind of have to be strong and have discipline, right? So if you're like one of those, like you have a strong body, but you're, you know, if you're playing basketball, you're a mess. But rowing may be, you know, um, the, the downside, you have to get up crazy early. I think this might be the earliest other than figure skating.

• 1:07:23Speaker 01

  Is it really?

• 1:07:23Bill Simmons?

  The kids who rode and caught, we had a rowing team in, at Holy Cross.

• 1:07:28Bill Simmons?

  We, none of us understood it. It's like, why are you doing this to yourself? This is the worst thing ever. I can't go out on Saturday night because I have a meet on Sunday and the, but, and the meet's at seven in the morning. It really ruins your life. It is kind of a fun parent sport though. If, if your kid gets good, you get to go to these, you know, you can see it in like Oxford Blues or some of these movies that they made with the crew. You get to go to your spot, kind of hang out, like Head of the Charles is a big thing in Boston. But, uh, the morning schedule just sounds like a fucking nightmare.

• 1:08:00Speaker 01

  Well, I think you put it too high. You're going to hear from the Winklevoss twins here. Good luck.

• 1:08:05Bill Simmons?

  For both of them. Number 13, track and field, which is the, I think the hardest one to figure out on the whole list. Cause you had the scholarship potential.

• 1:08:15Bill Simmons?

  You have all the meets where there's 75 things going on. You don't even know, it's a bigger stadium. You don't even know where to go and what you're looking at. And it really depends on the event. Like, I think if your kid's a pole vaulter, pretty cool. Right? You can, you can kind of get near the pole vault pit. The running stuff's a little harder, but, um, but it's the same thing we talked about earlier with the meets and just not knowing when the times were for things.

• 1:08:43Speaker 01

  My buddy, you know, in the parlay kid, coaches now, uh, girls track after decades of coaching real sports like football, baseball and wrestling, but he's like, it's easy to coach. But I will say, he's like, from a parent's perspective, there's a lot of warming up. You'll see these kids warm up in whatever event it is, they will be like 80% of warmups before they get to the actual race. And then you can't like even delineate which is, which is which. So that's a negative, I would say.

• 1:09:09Bill Simmons?

  Right. If you have like a nine AM race, you're there an hour and a half early because you gotta do a whole warmup thing. Track and field's fun because there's a lot of different aspects and places to push your kid. And it is a good college scholarship sport potentially. So there's some benefit there. We're getting, now we're in the top 12.

• 1:09:27Bill Simmons?

  I have hockey 12.

• 1:09:31Bill Simmons?

  So basically all the same physical fears that you would have with football. You know, hockey has so much concussions and people getting hurt and I honestly, it's just bodies colliding. The ice rank times are truly horrific unless you're living in like a cold place. If you're in a cold place, maybe better. If you're in Canada, obviously, if you're in Minnesota, if you're in, I don't know, Wisconsin. It's that there's a reason all of the best players are all coming from the same few states.

• 1:10:04Bill Simmons?

  Parent culture is insane.

• 1:10:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:08Bill Simmons?

  I don't know if this is a craziest parent sport, but it's gotta be top three, right? This is the one, like, this is the most likely if you're on the Twitter for you or Instagram to see like parents fighting. Probably like just people just punching each other for no reason at a hockey thing.

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  Going through the glass. Yeah, there's some crazy, crazy clips on there about parents fighting.

• 1:10:32Bill Simmons?

  You, it's the rinks are, Ben did hockey for two years and he was too late because this is another problem with hockey. You have to start skating by the time you're like four to actually be good at it. He started probably, but he, he would have been good at hockey. And it was fun to go there, but the rinks are freezing. Like they're just like, and they're not big rinks either. So you're, you're wearing like winter coats and, you know.

• 1:10:57Speaker 01

  Is it deck, what, out here? The rinks are freezing?

• 1:10:59Bill Simmons?

  Rinks are freezing. Yeah. Hockey rinks are freezing.

• 1:11:04Bill Simmons?

  It is really fun.

• 1:11:04Speaker 01

  They're colder than it's like a Kings game or Ducks?

• 1:11:07Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Cause it's, it's, they're smaller rinks. They're not like, you know. The games themselves are super fun.

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:16Bill Simmons?

  So that's why I, I have it ahead of football. I mean, I'm sorry, I have it below football. I have football ahead of football because, um, I, what you mentioned about Friday night football. I think is the differentiator, but for the most part, I think these things are pretty even.

• 1:11:32Speaker 01

  Equipment's pricey, right? Depending on what you want to do with this kind of thing.

• 1:11:38Bill Simmons?

  This is among the most expensive. Yeah. Sticks, um, privates.

• 1:11:45Bill Simmons?

  It's a, it's a commitment. This is, if your kid plays hockey, probably not on, probably not doing two other sports.

• 1:11:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:11:52Bill Simmons?

  Right? This is year round. You're doing this all the time. If you get good at it, you're, you're away every weekend. There is some major.

• 1:12:00Speaker 01

  You can't not skate for four months. Yeah. You have to kind of keep it going.

• 1:12:03Bill Simmons?

  Whereas football is like three months, it's more contained. You do have like the long preseason in football. So that would be the other one. But I have football 11 and I have hockey 12.

• 1:12:12Speaker 01

  Oh. 11?

• 1:12:15Bill Simmons?

  I have football 11. Yeah.

• 1:12:17Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:12:19Bill Simmons?

  So many pluses and minuses, Sal.

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  This is sad for me.

• 1:12:27Bill Simmons?

  I love football, but I think football with flag football could move up the ranks as we do the move into more of a hybrid model. But I would say parent culture.

• 1:12:38Bill Simmons?

  Pretty bad.

• 1:12:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:40Bill Simmons?

  Is there a position for every kind of kid with a body type? A hundred percent. If you're like the big giant kid, you can be our left guard or, you know, if you're slow, but you're a good athlete, hey, you could be the center or you could be the, the defensive end.

• 1:12:58Bill Simmons?

  But the physical toll of football is, is, it's a hard one.

• 1:13:02Speaker 01

  I'm just looking at all these sports you're going to put ahead of football. It makes me sad. I'll, I'll, how about this for a positive? For the most part, a no cut sport.

• 1:13:12Bill Simmons?

  Everybody makes it.

• 1:13:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Doesn't mean they play, but they're involved, right? The practices and everything else.

• 1:13:20Bill Simmons?

  When do you think tackle football should actually start for kids? Cause the, I've heard every sort of analysis of this, because you could argue it should be like fourth, fifth grade because you learn how to tackle. You lose, you learn like, uh, you know, basically the technique.

• 1:13:38Bill Simmons?

  And your body learns how to, it gets conditioned to the collisions. Whereas if you do it a little, when you're older, it doesn't. But then you have 10 year olds just ramming into each other.

• 1:13:49Speaker 01

  I think you could bump it up to ninth, 10th grade. This great Tony Romo is going to be hired by the Ringer soon, uh, said to me, I think it could be. I think ninth or 10th grade is fine. I don't know, because I do think like, you know, they, they talk about CTE and all this stuff. Most of it happens in these practices. It really does. I remember getting my bell rung a bunch of times between 10th and 12th grade. And then if you're in college, but you know, whatever, it's, it's only in the pros actually where you're not going helmet to helmet in practice at least. So you definitely want to keep a, um, what do they call them in wrestling? Bumps?

• 1:14:24Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

  You want to keep that bump toll down under a thousand.

• 1:14:28Bill Simmons?

  You could tell me 10th grade is, is the cutoff. If we had a sports czar, the sports czar would probably say you can't play football till you're 16.

• 1:14:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:14:35Bill Simmons?

  Tackle football. All right. Number 10. Skiing slash snowboarding.

• 1:14:43Bill Simmons?

  Now, super expensive. I'm not sure about the team dynamic. Um, and you basically have to live near a mountain or close to something. Something, something where you can do it or you can't do it. So I'm just assuming that's for all of those people. But it does seem pretty great. I have, uh, one of my cousins has a daughter who's a big snowboarder and they have to, they're in New Winkle and they have to, you know, drive two, three hours sometimes to go to these things, but they, they do love it. Injury potential, yeah, you could wipe out every once in a while. But the big thing with skiing and snowboarding, this is something you can literally do your entire life. Right?

• 1:15:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:15:22Bill Simmons?

  And there's like tournaments and, you know, there's, could, could they, but they keep adding Olympic sports. Like who knows? There's some college stuff with their team dynamics, a little weird, but I think for the most part, this is pretty solid.

• 1:15:37Speaker 01

  Harrison's friends with a kid who is, excels at skiing, snowboarding, surfing and okay at other sports. But that's it. And so now he's got Instagram clips of himself, like taking, you know, riding the pipeline and everything and just snow. And I was, and to answer your question like earlier, like which one do you wish you would have done? God, it would be great to just be a world-class skier.

• 1:15:58Bill Simmons?

  Right. Just have been doing it since you were five.

• 1:16:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. I mean, if boxing's not on the list, that's, that's probably my pick.

• 1:16:06Bill Simmons?

  Weekends and vacations constantly. Yeah. So skiing, snowboarding, I guess surfing would be in this too. These are all like the individual where you need some sort of either a wave or a mountain. You need to put all those together. Okay.

• 1:16:19Speaker 01

  Volcano, something. Yeah.

• 1:16:21Bill Simmons?

  Number nine, I was surprised they ranked this high. Water polo.

• 1:16:26Bill Simmons?

  College scholarship potential galore.

• 1:16:31Bill Simmons?

  Kind of your kids, everybody who's doing it is in awesome shape. Kind of underrated as a sport to watch in person. It's weird that it has no traction on all TV, although with ESPN, the way they've been adding weird sports to ESPN one and two, maybe water polo will have a moment. The biggest, I think, parent demerit is there's a lot going on that you just don't know when you're watching. Like there's stuff going underwater. There's people punching each other.

• 1:16:58Bill Simmons?

  It's, sometimes it's hard to see if somebody scored. And there's no juice at all, you know, with water polo. Water polo almost needs like better PR.

• 1:17:08Speaker 01

  Well, and it's weird because it's, it's a loud, it's a lively gym, right?

• 1:17:12Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:13Speaker 01

  They go, the parents are going nuts after everything, even if it's just a passing the ball around the perimeter. But yeah, you're right. It needs a better PR team because it's fun. The Olympics is one of my favorites to watch.

• 1:17:23Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Ben's school, sometimes like picking them up, they would have a game and the parents are going fucking crazy and it's packed. You know, they, his school had a good water polo team, but.

• 1:17:32Speaker 01

  I can't believe this house thing. This is amazing.

• 1:17:35Bill Simmons?

  Joe House water polo. By the way, anybody who can produce video footage of Joe House playing water polo at any point in his life, um, there's a bounty for you. Okay. Number eight.

• 1:17:47Speaker 01

  Did he eat while he played? Maybe that was a problem.

• 1:17:49Bill Simmons?

  I think that's why he had to quit because he kept taking pizza up to the pool.

• 1:17:54Speaker 01

  It doesn't taste as good, chlorinated. Yeah.

• 1:17:57Bill Simmons?

  All right. Number eight.

• 1:18:00Bill Simmons?

  Baseball slash softball.

• 1:18:02Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 1:18:06Bill Simmons?

  Destroys your weekends. This is a weekend destroyer.

• 1:18:11Bill Simmons?

  I would say a pretty unarguably bad parent culture.

• 1:18:17Bill Simmons?

  Because it's really one of the only sports where every parent has an opinion on everything that's going on at all times.

• 1:18:23Speaker 01

  No doubt.

• 1:18:24Bill Simmons?

  Also inappropriate comments with, with the kids. How does he not bunt there? You know, it's like that kid's eight, like shut the fuck up.

• 1:18:34Bill Simmons?

  The mercy rule stuff and the blowouts, like going to a tournament and just being like, we're gonna lose every game by 15 runs is awful. And I think the highest level of parents talking to their asses, if you're good, there's a whole bunch of privates, gets expensive. It can carry over to adult softball. Right? If you're good at, let's say you played at a high level softball, baseball in high school, maybe even college, you now become a ringer in office softball for like 20 years. You could also play in adult leagues when you're older. So you can kind of keep going.

• 1:19:11Bill Simmons?

  But I think this is around the right level. Number eight, would you agree with this?

• 1:19:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there's just so many pros and cons. It's what, what type of, uh, where you want to land on it. But I will say the parenting is so important because you're gonna have to eat with these people. And I'm lucky enough to be part of a group that we, we all like each other. So it's good because you're gonna have a 12 o'clock game. And then a four o'clock game. And then so from two to three, you're gonna have to eat and watch games with these people at the local sports bar. So that's important. But parents in general, baseball parents, it's funny, you talk to coaches, they're like, yeah, I only got into coaching so I could be away from the parents. There's a reason they're behind the cage.

• 1:19:49Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:19:50Speaker 01

  Animals. And I think it's gotten worse. And this is probably true for every sport, but I feel like with baseball, every 10, coach of a 10 U team could start the season saying, hey, you know what? No kid from wherever you're from has ever made it to, to become a pro. So that's why we're just gonna go out there and have fun. We're not gonna worry about being serious. But nowadays you can't say that because there's NIL money and everybody thinks like this is where coaching and teaching is different. Like it used to be in the same sphere, but no one thinks their kid is gonna grow up to be an astrophysicist.

• 1:20:25Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:26Speaker 01

  Everyone thinks their kid can make a hundred grand playing a sport somehow if they, if they play their cards right. And, uh, and that's why it's gotten worse.

• 1:20:34Bill Simmons?

  It's a great point. You know what else it is? It's the worst sport for this.

• 1:20:40Bill Simmons?

  Oh, Bobby's up. And all of a sudden you got mom or dad be, you know, right behind, right behind, uh, the, the, the big cage in front of home plate or behind home plate.

• 1:20:51Speaker 01

  The fence, the one little thing. Yeah, right in there.

• 1:20:54Bill Simmons?

  Or, or the kid's pitching and now the kid's pitching and there's his mom like with the, with the phone like this and, uh, it has, it has the most phone damage potential. The softball, I think would have been higher on the list before

• 1:21:12Bill Simmons?

  they had to put all this protective, like having these crazy helmets and stuff and even like the third baseman and the mass and not as much fun as it was 20 years ago.

• 1:21:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:23Bill Simmons?

  Our buddy Gus coached some, some college softball when he was at Rollins.

• 1:21:27Speaker 01

  Did he really?

• 1:21:28Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:28Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:21:28Bill Simmons?

  Back in the old day before they had all this stuff on. But yeah, I think eight's baseball softball. Fun part is everyone can play. You can hide even the worst kids for a couple innings and put them in a couple of positions. Everybody can be part of the team. There's some fun.

• 1:21:43Speaker 01

  I don't know what you're gonna end on here. This is interesting to me that there's seven

• 1:21:47Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:48Speaker 01

  better than baseball, football and all these. Okay.

• 1:21:51Bill Simmons?

  Number seven, tennis.

• 1:21:53Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:21:54Bill Simmons?

  There's wins everywhere, especially, uh, you get to do it your whole life. You get to do it with your kid. You can just go and be like, hey, let's go hit some balls and go do it. You can play it anywhere. I think as long as it's not winter and some of the east coast or the Midwest, you can, it's a 12 month. In California, it's a 12 month a year sport. You don't necessarily have to belong to a tennis club. You can play in public parks. The rackets are expensive. You gotta keep changing those. Incredibly fun to watch as a parent. Scholarship potential and pro potential and NIL potential. And the downsides would be the privates, which you're gonna have to do if the kid's gonna be good. And then a little lonely.

• 1:22:37Bill Simmons?

  It was, it was why with, with our daughter, like I, I kept wondering whether we should get her involved in tennis when she was like eight, nine, because she would have been good at it. But just, you just kind of by yourself a lot, right? And you're not really part of the team and it's a lot of like pressure on yourself at all times. And some kids can handle it, some can't. But for the most part, you get to be outdoors. Play it anywhere. You can play it until you're 75.

• 1:23:04Speaker 01

  Right. And the pressure, uh, the, the parents thing is what we talked about. You can't blame anyone else if they're losing, right?

• 1:23:10Bill Simmons?

  No, unless it's doubles, in the doubles match, maybe you could blame the partner.

• 1:23:14Speaker 01

  Always blame the partner.

• 1:23:15Bill Simmons?

  And by the way, doubles is another great one. You play mixed doubles, you play same sex doubles, like you, you have all the, all these zuts with that. So I think tennis is a, is a really good one. Right? That's one of the, that's the first one that I would really strongly recommend.

• 1:23:31Speaker 01

  Do you think, are you gonna lump tennis with pickleball like you did?

• 1:23:35Bill Simmons?

  No.

• 1:23:35Speaker 01

  Like you do football with flag football? No, just in that.

• 1:23:38Bill Simmons?

  We don't acknowledge pickleball or padel.

• 1:23:40Speaker 01

  Tennis isn't going away, but pickleball is very, very big.

• 1:23:44Bill Simmons?

  So you think there's gonna be like high school pickleball someday?

• 1:23:46Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 1:23:47Bill Simmons?

  I might move. And that, that might be it for me. I don't know.

• 1:23:52Bill Simmons?

  Move somewhere else. Move to Italy.

• 1:23:54Speaker 01

  Italy will have it too.

• 1:23:55Bill Simmons?

  No, then I'll move from there.

• 1:24:00Bill Simmons?

  Number six, field hockey.

• 1:24:04Speaker 01

  I don't know shit about this. All right. Yeah.

• 1:24:06Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. This is why it's number six. Under the radar. It's really females only, uh, incredible scholarship potential and super fun to watch. And okay, some, some states are bigger than others, but man, if you're good at field hockey, the, the world is your oyster with some of this stuff. You get to run around. It's very similar to Saki, uh, soccer.

• 1:24:30Speaker 01

  Saki.

• 1:24:30Bill Simmons?

  Saki and soccer. Get these big sticks. Um, you have to be a little aggro. When I was at the Olympics, I actually went to a couple of field hockey games and it was like incredibly fun, um, really high level and

• 1:24:45Bill Simmons?

  always kind of slips under the radar. Some schools don't have it.

• 1:24:49Speaker 01

  And soccer, lacrosse and soccer mixed, or you can't lift your stick, right? Basically. And I guess polo?

• 1:24:55Bill Simmons?

  You, you bent over a little bit and you gotta like, um,

• 1:24:59Speaker 01

  Go ahead, stand up, demonstrate.

• 1:25:00Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. So field hockey is six. Now we're in the top five. Basketball, five.

• 1:25:08Bill Simmons?

  Basketball, you can play your whole life. Basketball, if it's a tournament, you, it passes the parent test of I can sneak out. Oh, his next game's not until an hour from now. You're there all day, but it's actually fun to watch basketball. There's different types of players. Your kid can be, you know, a three point shooter, be an athlete, shot blocker, like pick whatever. Good team culture. The AAU, if your kid's really good, that gets a little weird. The club teams start really early. The club teams start at like third, fourth grade and that gets a little expensive. But for the most part, the only expenses are a basketball and sneakers.

• 1:25:49Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:25:50Bill Simmons?

  And that's it.

• 1:25:50Speaker 01

  Very exciting. You, you know, when your kid's playing for the most part, right? The game, the, one thing we didn't mention, some of these baseball games can go four hours, right? If, if they're in a tournament and they have to go extra innings and stuff. Basketball I know can go overtime, but for the most part, it's, it's gonna be short and it's gonna be by the, uh, standards of the clock. So.

• 1:26:08Bill Simmons?

  I have that for the, our, for our final three. It's a huge piece to know the actual schedule and have a sense for beginning, middle and end of an event versus baseball where you could tell me like, ah, Harrison had a four hour game. We went into the 12th inning.

• 1:26:27Bill Simmons?

  We had to call the game because it was dark and then they lost.

• 1:26:30Speaker 01

  Right. What's interesting though about basketball is if you look at videos of parents fighting, by a mile, basketball has more, right? Like basketball brawl.

• 1:26:41Bill Simmons?

  Is there just more basketball and that's why we have more videos?

• 1:26:44Speaker 01

  Maybe there's that. Oh, there's baseball has a lot of parents like, uh, misbehaving, but maybe it's not parents. Maybe it's just like rival schools in the crowd that I'm seeing, but.

• 1:26:53Bill Simmons?

  Basketball from a parent standpoint, you get to play with your kids basically from age seven on, you can play horse with them. You can play 21, you get a shooting contest with them. Then when you get older, you can actually like really play them. You can, they can go down to the park, play with their friends, play five on five, play pickup. There's some injury stuff with basketball, mostly knees and lower half of the body.

• 1:27:19Bill Simmons?

  The club teams, you can, so if you're good at basketball in high school, you can be on a club team, but then you also get to play for your high school. And I would say that's one of the most high, high profile high school sports to play. Right?

• 1:27:34Bill Simmons?

  So that's a win. So I think it's, to me it's top five.

• 1:27:37Speaker 01

  There's five starting spots though. That's, that's the problem. Right? So that, that's it. You can.

• 1:27:42Bill Simmons?

  And you need to be relatively tall, right? That's another piece.

• 1:27:46Speaker 01

  What's, what's the acceptable age? Your kid could beat you one on one, one on one in basketball.

• 1:27:51Bill Simmons?

  Oh, man.

• 1:27:54Speaker 01

  Game to 11, win by two.

• 1:27:57Bill Simmons?

  14, 15 probably is when it gets.

• 1:27:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's good. Yeah.

• 1:28:00Bill Simmons?

  Still feel like you can bully.

• 1:28:02Speaker 01

  All right, so 11 and a half wasn't good for me. All right. I got you.

• 1:28:07Bill Simmons?

  Coming in at number four. Golf.

• 1:28:14Bill Simmons?

  One downside and one downside only. Insanely expensive. I mean, probably the most expensive of all these sports. There's literally no other downside. If you play golf and you teach your kid how to play golf, you are now doing this with them all the time and this becomes your thing. Your kid will eventually be good at it. By the way, a lot of college scholarship potential.

• 1:28:36Bill Simmons?

  Who knows what other kind of potential, but then they're doing it for the rest of their lives. And it's something that's helpful. You know, it's why I always think about that I should start playing. I always get invited to play, but I'm always, I'm one of those, I either have to play a lot or I don't want to play at all. And there's so many fun, social aspects that come from golf. There's work stuff and it's the only downside is the expense. You get to be outdoors to play all these different courses. You get to go, when you're older, you get to go on college trips with your buddies or whatever. It's like, it's wins everywhere except for the expenses.

• 1:29:10Speaker 01

  Yep. And it's bucket list type destinations, right? I want to play Pebble Beach. I want to play this when I'm older and all that stuff. I'll say this, we came back from Cooperstown and I think my kid, we had a good time and I'll get into that story, but when you see the teams that made the finals, I think he, it was an eye opener and he's like, oh, I got a couple of years left in me in baseball and that's it.

• 1:29:32Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:29:32Speaker 01

  He played 18 holes the last three days, three of the last four days of golf. He's like now switching to golf a little bit because he and his buddies like love it.

• 1:29:42Bill Simmons?

  That's great. It's also the perfect age to start playing. You gotta be like 11, 12, 13.

• 1:29:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:47Bill Simmons?

  Then you, then you can kind of figure out a semblance of a swing and golf balls are expensive. Not crazy expensive, but that's a price. Clubs, if you have a kid, you start playing them when they're six, you have to buy clubs basically every year and a half, two years. So there's, it's insanely expensive compared to some of these other ones, but no other downside, no injury stuff at all, except for maybe a back, right? Back, maybe hips. It's about it.

• 1:30:14Speaker 01

  Right. Lightning strikes happen every other time.

• 1:30:18Bill Simmons?

  I mean, our agent, James Babydoll Dixon, who's now 64.

• 1:30:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:26Bill Simmons?

  Smokes two packs a day and can still play seven days a week.

• 1:30:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, but he always has his elbows hanging off his arm or something, right? Whatever he has, bursitis or something, but.

• 1:30:37Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, true. He does. He'll have like a rotator cuff. I guess that would be another issue. Good one for phone calls. If you're following your kid, like if your kid's in a tournament, you just get to walk the course with them. You're outside, you can pop away for a phone call, go behind a tree, places to go for the bathroom, all over the place. Golf's huge win and not for everybody because it's really expensive. Coming in third, so this is an interesting one.

• 1:31:02Bill Simmons?

  I have lacrosse at three.

• 1:31:05Bill Simmons?

  I think if it was men's lacrosse only, I would have it in the 10 to 12 range with football and hockey because of, of all the physical toll and the concussions. This is like the most underrated concussion sport of all the sports.

• 1:31:19Bill Simmons?

  Girls lacrosse might be number one if we were just doing a boys versus girls thing.

• 1:31:25Bill Simmons?

  No contact really at all. Same as soccer, less people playing it. There's an easier path for college scholarships. Now it's on ESPN where they have women's lacrosse on ESPN. And it's weird because with girls, you're just not allowed to touch each other all the way through high school. You're not allowed to collide anything. And I remember we took Zoe once because I thought Zoe would be good at lacrosse and she would have been, but you go and it's just no, people are just running around. It's like, oh, now this person has a ball and nobody can do anything. And they're just kind of trying to whack at the stick. So it's, it's a little odd. There's also like some places just don't have it. Like California has a really weak lacrosse scene.

• 1:32:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely.

• 1:32:08Bill Simmons?

  Whereas like if you're in the East Coast where you grew up, like it's fucking everywhere. If you're in DC, Philly, Jersey, New York.

• 1:32:18Bill Simmons?

  But I think girls lacrosse is, I would highly recommend that. Really the only expense is the stick.

• 1:32:23Speaker 01

  That's a flag football version of football, girls lacrosse.

• 1:32:26Bill Simmons?

  I would say flag football for boys and some girls play football too, but girls lacrosse would be the other one.

• 1:32:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:32:33Bill Simmons?

  I don't know anybody whose daughter played lacrosse is like, that sucked.

• 1:32:38Speaker 01

  Right. Don't do it. Yeah. Okay.

• 1:32:41Bill Simmons?

  And then the final two.

• 1:32:44Bill Simmons?

  I'll do in alphabetical order, soccer and volleyball I have together.

• 1:32:49Bill Simmons?

  And incredibly fun to watch. Everyone can understand. Time controlled games.

• 1:32:59Bill Simmons?

  Lots of scholarships available because the teams are long, so you have that possibility. You have the NIL possibility.

• 1:33:07Bill Simmons?

  Soccer's outdoors, volleyball's indoors. Volleyball, less injury potential. You'll get some shoulder stuff. Maybe somebody will have like, I don't know, plantar fasciitis. Soccer is like, if you're, if you're a high-end women's soccer player, it's 40 to 50% chance you're hurting your knee or some other stuff. I think I would give volleyball the slight edge. It's super fun to watch. I remember when I covered high school sports for the Boston Herald in the mid 90s, volleyball was my favorite one of all the sports. Could follow it, you know, it's, it resets, you know, every set. You always know what's going on. You can't be like a know-it-all with volleyball and be like, oh, I can't believe

• 1:33:47Bill Simmons?

  the setter. Like, nobody, nobody knows what's going on. You're just there cheering and, and you can play it after as an adult or you can play beach volleyball. So I think volleyball's one and soccer's two.

• 1:33:59Speaker 01

  Beach volleyball, by the way, for a parent, might be the best experience actually to just hang out by the beach and watch your kid. I know it's like a niche thing, but, a niche thing, but it's out, out, yeah, out here, out west, volleyball's a prestigious, if you have a position on the high school team, that's a prestigious way to go. Yeah, obviously. All the Olympians are from out here. So, yeah, it's good. And so you wouldn't put soccer interesting.

• 1:34:25Bill Simmons?

  No, I think volleyball because of, if you include the beach volleyball.

• 1:34:30Speaker 01

  Underrated concussion thing for soccer, right?

• 1:34:32Bill Simmons?

  So that's, it's not underrated. I think at this point, people know, like, you know, especially when you're talking about collisions with goalies and strikers or two people going for a head and they bang heads, like it's, you know, it's been my biggest fear ever since like probably age 11. Once people start going airborne, you're just scared about it. The other underrated one is you can just get kicked by the ball. Like somebody could be clearing out the ball and kick it and you don't realize and it just hits the back of your head. Like I've seen a few of those. It's definitely concussions. That's, that's another thing volleyball versus soccer. I think volleyball, I guess you can get a concussion if you just got, took a spike in the head.

• 1:35:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:13Bill Simmons?

  But other than that, no. And then volleyball, all different types of body types too, because you can have the setters are smaller, the other ones are, you know, the, the people at the net are taller.

• 1:35:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, everybody's tall. There's small people in volleyball? Yeah?

• 1:35:30Bill Simmons?

  Small, yeah, the setters are smaller, right?

• 1:35:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. I don't know. I don't know.

• 1:35:34Bill Simmons?

  But they could take the setters out.

• 1:35:36Speaker 01

  The soccer, the hell was I gonna say? Yeah, it's interesting with the soccer with the, because I think if you go, we're mostly talking here at 13 to 18 or whatever, but if you go, it's the first sport they all play, right?

• 1:35:52Bill Simmons?

  Soccer.

• 1:35:53Speaker 01

  From four to 10, four to 10, it's number one, no matter what. It's gotta be. And I hate to say that as a, as a baseball junk, but it just is because your kid gets to play, your kid's involved, running around, kid's not making sandcastles in left field, you know? So I think there's a, there's something to that as a positive.

• 1:36:12Bill Simmons?

  You just, you're in great shape from soccer. The tournaments, even though it's a long whatever and you go to these, and I've been to a bunch of them, you're at these locations where there's 30 fields, you gotta figure out where the field is, but for the most part, pretty easy to navigate. You're gonna have two games a day. They're usually not staggered where it's like one game's at nine and the other one's at six.

• 1:36:35Bill Simmons?

  They're usually within like four or five hours of each other. So you have time to kind of relax, veg out. Also fun to just watch other soccer games that are happening, which I think volleyball is the same thing. If it's in one of those places with a lot of games, you can kind of jump around and watch. But I think the concussion piece is, outweighs the fact that you're outdoors with soccer. But I think these are the best too.

• 1:36:58Speaker 01

  You might be right. The one, the, where you, you have to drive past 50 soccer fields to get to your tournament, two hours away. You have to drive past 50 baseball diamonds. Like, oh, we could have played this team in Norwalk 20 minutes away. But, by the way, that should be your number one concern for someone who doesn't wear a seatbelt, should be how close the venue is.

• 1:37:18Bill Simmons?

  No, I'm wearing a seatbelt now. Everybody's shaming.

• 1:37:20Speaker 01

  This is something I forgot about. I remember it like 20 years ago and I just completely forgot. I thought you came to your senses. You, you have to wear it.

• 1:37:29Bill Simmons?

  One of the reasons I wanted to talk about it with Wilds is because I know I'd be publicly shamed for not being a seatbelt guy and I needed to, I needed to really have the shame and had to do it. I had so, I heard from so many people, well, most of the time I'm just driving around LA going 25 miles an hour.

• 1:37:47Speaker 01

  I get it. And I know you're confident in how good a driver you are, but everyone else has become, everyone else has become a terrible driver. Everyone else is looking at their phone. Doesn't that scare you that they're, okay, I'm not wearing a seatbelt and everyone's staring at their phone while they're trying to pass me?

• 1:38:01Bill Simmons?

  That's true. Yeah, I'm gonna start wearing. I needed, I had my whole process. I needed to say that to Wilds. I know people get mad. All right.

• 1:38:08Speaker 01

  It took 55 years. All right.

• 1:38:11Bill Simmons?

  I'm gonna count, countdown backwards, 20 to one. 20 figure skating. Sorry to all the skaters out there. 19 gymnastics, swimming, wrestling, cycling, cross country together, rowing, track and field, hockey, football, skiing, snowboarding, surfing, all at number 10. Water polo, baseball, softball, tennis, field hockey, basketball is fifth. Golf, fourth, lacrosse, third, soccer, second, volleyball, first. What's going to be the most controversial?

• 1:38:44Bill Simmons?

  Again, this is for parents.

• 1:38:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think like you're going to hear from like figure skating, all the ones you put 20, 19, 18, they're going to get mad at you. I personally would have moved football up a little bit just because I feel like the, the juice behind the Friday night stuff is just, it takes it to a different level. And this is going to sound ridiculous coming from me because I accuse everyone to be in an NBA hole, but I think basketball is, is one or two.

• 1:39:12Bill Simmons?

  Really?

• 1:39:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do. I do.

• 1:39:16Bill Simmons?

  If you could start over right now with Harrison and only have him play one sport from age five,

• 1:39:24Bill Simmons?

  which sport would you pick?

• 1:39:25Speaker 01

  I think it would be golf. If a, if solo sport, it would be golf at this point because he's already upset with himself that he's behind his friend who's excellent, hits the green off of every tee on a par three.

• 1:39:38Bill Simmons?

  I would have done lacrosse for Zoe.

• 1:39:40Speaker 01

  You would have done lacrosse?

• 1:39:41Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:42Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. But soccer was great.

• 1:39:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:46Bill Simmons?

  But lacrosse, lacrosse, I think lacrosse was

• 1:39:53Bill Simmons?

  for girls, like you're removing some of the injury arrests that makes soccer a little, a little iffy. Anyway, I hope that helped. Listen, again,

• 1:40:01Speaker 01

  That was good.

• 1:40:02Bill Simmons?

  This is just, just my opinion only. It doesn't mean I'm right. You could disagree. I, I don't, these aren't authoritative rankings.

• 1:40:09Speaker 01

  People could disagree with these.

• 1:40:10Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, people can absolutely disagree with these.

• 1:40:14Speaker 02

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• 1:41:07Bill Simmons?

  All right. Before we go, do a parent corner for us.

• 1:41:09Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, let me tell you a little bit about Cooperstown. We just got back. I thought it was the greatest. I mean, I really, I can't say enough about it. It was like the culmination of like eight years of Little League.

• 1:41:18Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:19Speaker 01

  And then you get to Cooperstown. It's beautifully manicured fields. The amount of like Americana thrown at you is like perfect. They have the opening ceremonies where the teams march out. And then they had like a kid who, an actual Little Leaguer was participating and they hadn't seen his father who was deployed overseas. And then the father shows up. So very emotional. They had that knocked out. So, and the kids bunk together and you don't see them except for 20 minutes before and after every game. So, and then you have a few hours to hit the museum, which is fantastic. And you could hate it because of who's in and who's not, but of it, there's plenty of Pete Rose, there's plenty of Barry Bonds stuff, giant exhibits, just no plaque. So I'm sure, I promise it's enjoyable.

• 1:42:00Speaker 01

  But for my parent corner story, so Harrison's team goes up there and he only wants to hit a homerun. That's, that's his whole summer goal because the fences at Cooperstown are 200 and he's used to like 225, 230. So they're like having homerun derbies, he and his friends on the local fields and everything. And so we get to playing and we're, we have five pool games and we're blowing teams out. In three days, we have five pool games and we mercy rule for the five teams. But as we're beating these teams, he's not hitting homeruns and his buddies are all hitting homeruns. Now he's like one of four kids who haven't hit a homerun. And you know, he's coming back after, we greet the kids after they come out after like a 15 to two win.

• 1:42:42Speaker 01

  He's like choking back tears because the other boys are posing with their homeruns and the fathers chase the homerun balls and so that everybody could pose. And I was like, hey, get it together. Like he's getting singles, he's pitching well, he's making plays in the field. Like, come on, what are you, what are you doing? So

• 1:42:55Bill Simmons?

  Hey, you're a winning player. Your war is good.

• 1:42:58Speaker 01

  Exactly. But the, the only negatives are hitting the homerun becomes a priority. And also these collectible pins. So they trade these pins with the other teams. Everybody has a pin represented for their teams and they trade with everybody else's teams in the, the barracks. And the Jalen Brunson pin, he's one of the few, he has no negotiating skills. So, uh, no New York aggression in the kids. So he ironically can't get a hold of this Jalen Brunson pin. So no Jalen Brunson pin, hasn't hit a homerun. So fast forward, we win all five pool games. We're ranked sixth out of 102 teams. I'm like, oh man, we could really make a run here. We win the round of 32 game by 10 runs. Round of 16, we're up 5-1 in the last inning.

• 1:43:42Speaker 01

  We made four errors over three days. We make five errors in the last inning and they tie it up. And Harrison's one of the worst one. He boosts like a hard hit ball to third just to start the rally. And everyone's devastated. Like I want to go fricking hide behind the Pee Wee Reese exhibit and never come out. So I don't, so it's the bottom of the inning. There's two out and a kid gets a single and they pinch run Harrison. He's one of the faster kids on the team. I'm like, okay, this could be, he could inadvertently score the winning run. This could be nice, whatever. We'll put a smile on his face maybe after this whole thing. First pitch comes in, he takes off and I see he doesn't have like a great jump. So, and I'm just watching him like, oh shit, this could be close. He gets the second, he beats the throw by six feet.

• 1:44:26Speaker 01

  He doesn't overslide the base. The ump calls him out and I am losing my shit. This is the Dez call, the Dez catch all over again. And I'm like, what the, what, what are you kidding? I'm like, what are you looking at up? What are you doing? And I'm like, I'm mad at my coach because he's not arguing and Harrison's got his arms in the air and everyone's like, oh my God, what happened? And I'm like screaming things. I don't even know what I was like in a different dimension. I didn't even know what I was screaming.

• 1:44:53Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that was it. And then like after like a good 20 Mississippi worth of screaming, one of the fathers elbows me is like, uh, I think they're calling batter's interference. And I look at the batter because I hadn't watched, I was just watching.

• 1:45:07Bill Simmons?

  Oh no.

• 1:45:08Speaker 01

  Little Dean is, is in the catcher's lap. So somehow he like over swung and ended up in the, and that's why the throw didn't get there. I'm like,

• 1:45:16Bill Simmons?

  Oh no. And meanwhile, you've, meanwhile, you've said 17 horrible things to them.

• 1:45:21Speaker 01

  Showed, showed my hand like, like I should be, they should just put me in a white jacket and zip me up. Like that's ridiculous. Like, so that was it.

• 1:45:28Bill Simmons?

  You're the baseball parents we were talking about earlier. It's you.

• 1:45:31Speaker 01

  It's me the whole time. And then we lose by like eight runs and extra innings and that was that.

• 1:45:36Bill Simmons?

  Some, some poor second base ump from Utica who's making $10 a game, just getting berated by Cousin Sal.

• 1:45:42Speaker 01

  Nothing. He's like a, an army vet who's doing it for free. Oh God. So that's it.

• 1:45:48Bill Simmons?

  So he didn't get the steal. You guys lost and Harrison didn't get his homerun or the Jalen Brunson pin?

• 1:45:53Speaker 01

  No homerun, no Jalen Brunson pin. And that's it. So otherwise fantastic experience.

• 1:45:59Bill Simmons?

  Wow. Did he come close to a homerun?

• 1:46:02Speaker 01

  Uh, no, not really. I mean, it's so funny because you end up playing different kind of baseball. It's not like, hey, move the runner over and do this. Like everyone's just jacking it for the fence. But he got like five singles and whatever, but it wasn't good enough.

• 1:46:14Bill Simmons?

  Sounds like Major League Baseball.

• 1:46:16Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:46:18Bill Simmons?

  All right. Well, I'm sorry he didn't get a homerun. Thanks for, uh, thanks for doing the U sport rankings with me.

• 1:46:22Speaker 01

  This is fun. This is good. I can't, I want to hear, I gotta hear the feedback. I really, I can't wait.

• 1:46:28Bill Simmons?

  I'm, I'm ready for it. Look, man, sometimes you gotta go out on a limb with content and not everybody's gonna like it.

• 1:46:35Bill Simmons?

  We're going to be back together August 27th, Thursday. We're going to be doing, are we going to do NFC first or AFC first?

• 1:46:41Speaker 01

  Whatever you want, man. We usually do, we do awards too. And then do we do a thing where we do?

• 1:46:46Bill Simmons?

  We're going to save the awards futures to the, because we're doing it a week early this year. So we can save stuff for the Sunday before. We usually do the conference that had the Super Bowl champs. So I guess we do.

• 1:46:58Speaker 01

  Which one was that? I wasn't paying attention.

• 1:47:00Bill Simmons?

  Sadly, it was the NFC. But I've appreciated you doing the divisions with Raheem and DeBundo and, and House and not really tipping your hand this year, which is something I'm doing as well.

• 1:47:12Speaker 01

  I'm just setting the table for them. They're doing a great job. Listen to that. We did the AFC East preview. We did the AFC North on Monday and we'll be doing the South on Friday. So.

• 1:47:20Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Last year I felt like, I did all these pods in August, laying out all my opinions for the year. And then when we did our AFC, NFC, everyone kind of knew who listens to the pod, like, oh yeah, he's talked about Denver four times. He loves Denver. So I'm really trying to keep everything under wraps this year because I have some hard opinions on a couple of things. Um, but I mean,

• 1:47:45Speaker 01

  I do too. Honestly, Sal, down the lines. I mean, not, because people are such that, I mean, even our, our Ringer Wise guys like really want to talk week one lines. Like guys, I can't do it. I cannot do it.

• 1:47:56Bill Simmons?

  We're four weeks away now. Should we mail each other lines and then have like a point and a half leeway with the line or something?

• 1:48:05Speaker 01

  Maybe we should.

• 1:48:06Bill Simmons?

  The only one, I told you, I already saw the Seattle, New England line unfortunately. So I know what that is.

• 1:48:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. Patriots getting 10, right?

• 1:48:12Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Well, 10, 10 and a half. Weird that it's the exact same line as the Super Bowl, which I was not expecting. Cause usually there's a bump for the home team. But yeah, we might have to, maybe this weekend we have to mail each other. I, the Hall of Fame game, seven plus million people watched.

• 1:48:28Speaker 01

  I know. And it was the most bet on game more than like any baseball WNBA, if you can believe that. I lost. I had a teaser and I lost.

• 1:48:37Bill Simmons?

  You had a teaser and you lost?

• 1:48:39Speaker 01

  There's 32 points. I bet the under on the teaser. Of course you have to bet the under, what are they going to show? And there was like 32 points in the second quarter.

• 1:48:46Bill Simmons?

  I've been watching, um, Enough WNBA to have actual opinions on when we get to the playoffs.

• 1:48:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. Really?

• 1:48:55Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I've been watching. I've actually been getting into it. The league's the best.

• 1:49:01Bill Simmons?

  Entertainment wise, it's ever been. I'm not talking about.

• 1:49:03Speaker 01

  Is that league gonna make it to the playoffs?

• 1:49:06Bill Simmons?

  It might. They might have a walkout before the playoffs, but like the Fever beat the shit out of New York last night. And I texted Ruko and he actually said it on the air because Ruko was doing the thing. I was like, this is like watching Nash's Suns. Like Indiana is like, they're just balls to the wall. Like every time they get a rebound, even off makes, they're just going and they have these two great guards and they're like really good. I don't, I think you can make a real case. They can win the title. It's them, Minnesota or Vegas, I think are the three. I don't think anybody else, but houses, mystics are getting a little frisky.

• 1:49:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. I have money on the Lynx. I seem to bet them every night when they're favored by 12 on the money line parlay.

• 1:49:47Bill Simmons?

  The move with them, yeah, if you like the Lynx at home, just do the over with the Lynx, but they're playing really well though. I, I think it's going to be a fun playoffs that will of course be screwed up schedule wise as they try to go against football for some reason. And then I'll end up watching all this and then missing the key game of the finals because I'm watching fucking Cincinnati against Dallas.

• 1:50:07Speaker 01

  And yet basketball is your number five. Unbelievable.

• 1:50:11Bill Simmons?

  By the way, speaking of, speaking of Dallas.

• 1:50:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:14Bill Simmons?

  Some, some Cowboys buzz like, I think there's gonna be some smart people who are gonna pick them to win NFC.

• 1:50:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, some dumb people too, probably, but uh, yeah, Knockstar, they're training with the Rams and then at the end they're doing wind sprints and they're like, come on, let's do them with us. And the Rams like, nah, we're good. We're better than you. We don't need to do this. I kind of like, I like the vibe a little bit.

• 1:50:37Bill Simmons?

  They have some blue chippers. Team's pretty good.

• 1:50:42Bill Simmons?

  That'd be amazing. I mean, where's the Super Bowl? It's in LA this year, right?

• 1:50:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's here.

• 1:50:46Bill Simmons?

  Wonder if the Lakers will sell again by then.

• 1:50:48Speaker 01

  We're doing a podcast from there. We're gonna have to do the last one from there.

• 1:50:50Bill Simmons?

  You know, we talked about, I think we might actually do our Super Bowl podcast from, from SoFi.

• 1:50:57Speaker 01

  Does that make sense?

• 1:50:58Bill Simmons?

  I think they offered it to us.

• 1:51:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:00Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, we gotta do that.

• 1:51:01Speaker 01

  Good times.

• 1:51:02Bill Simmons?

  That'll be it. All right, Sal. Great to see you. Thanks for doing this with me. I'll let you know what the feedback is or if I get threatened by any gymnastics parents or anything. Uh, pleasure as always. Good job by you.

• 1:51:12Speaker 01

  Can't wait. Good job by you, buddy.

• 1:51:15Bill Simmons?

  All right. That's it for the podcast. Thanks to Cousin Sal. Thanks to Gahan Eduardo as well. Um, don't forget rewatchables, Italian jobs up about last night coming Thursday night and then uh, the re-speed on Monday. So uh, this podcast will come back on Sunday. Stay tuned for that and uh, enjoy the rest of the week.

• 1:51:57Bill Simmons?

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