The "Invincible" Rams, NFL Pressure Guys, and L.A.’s Crazy NBA Month With Tom Pelissero and Sam Koppelman

Bill Simmons welcomes Tom Pelissero to The Ringer to go through their Pressure Rankings of the NFL ahead of the new season. Then, Sam Koppelman joins the pod to take a deep dive into the financial side of the Lakers sale, Mat Ishbia’s Suns, and much more. (0:00) Intro (3:07) NFL preview (38:51) NFL Pressure Rankings (01:22:36) NBA team ownership with Sam Koppelman Host: Bill Simmons Guests: Tom Pelissero and Sam Koppelman Producers: Chia Hao Tat and Eduardo Ocampo NBA 2K27 | Ball Over Everything The Dog Stars only in theaters and IMAX August 28. 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.

• 0:00Bill Simmons?

  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 approval. Learn more at paypal.com slash paying for PayPal, Inc., NMLS 910457.

• 0:39Bill Simmons?

  The Bill Simmons Podcast brought to you by the Ringer Podcast Network. I put up a new rewatchables on Monday. We redid Speed. Me, Sean Fantasy, Chris Ryan. An epic, epic episode. I think I laughed so hard at one point that we had to go to break. So that happened. Anyway, what a fun movie. One of the great action movies of all time and we broke all of it down, including a ton of nitpicks. Speed, a movie that I love and I've seen a million times. Also very fun to nitpick. So we talked about everything. Coming up on this podcast, Tom Pelissero, who we announced yesterday, he's joined the Ringer, he's going to be Netflix sideline reporter as well. He's going to come on to talk about a bunch of football stuff, including what's it like to be an info insider? What's going on with the Rams?

• 1:24Bill Simmons?

  Who has the most pressure on them this year? What's going on in Minnesota with J.J. McCarthy, Kyler Murray? We covered all of it. Great to have him aboard and we're going to talk about his new gig with us. And then after that, Sammy Koppelman, who I've known since he was maybe even younger than a teenager. He is going to come on to talk about the Lakers, the Clippers, the Suns, how money has shifted into the NBA and screwed it up in all of these different ways. Yesterday was one of the craziest LA basketball days I think ever. We had the Clippers battling with the NBA through an ESPN article. You had the Buss family announcing that they're going to start suing each other. The current Lakers Dodgers owner might be going to jail.

• 2:09Bill Simmons?

  He's going to explain all of it to us. So this is quite a podcast. Football and finance, it's all next. We're going to take a break and then Pearl Jam. This episode is brought to you by NBA 2K27. We just had one of the craziest off seasons we've had in the NBA, which is perfect for 2K because every 2K season can be one of the craziest off seasons. The whole league shifted in real life. It could shift to an NBA 2K27. The best place to compete with these new look rosters and also try to figure out who's on what roster. You can see how new teams and new dynamic duos match up. You can play Philly, feel what it's like to have all of their new guys with the old guys.

• 2:52Bill Simmons?

  And you can also take a struggling franchise to the NBA finals if you want, because it'll never happen in real life for a couple of the struggling franchises. You know who I'm talking about. Anyway, NBA 2K lets you experience every transaction and storyline right from your home. Pick up your copy of NBA 2K27 right now.

• 3:41Bill Simmons?

  All right. Announced yesterday, new Netflix sideline reporter for all their NFL games. One of the hosts of the Ringer NFL Show, he's going to be on my podcast every Thursday. There's going to be some writing stuff that we'll talk about when we get there. Tom Pelissero, great to have you aboard. What a pleasure.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  It is great to be here. Bit of an unusual past month for me. After 23 years of, you know, being in training camps and covering the league, I had a little bit of extra time on my hands, but you know, you were one of the first people to reach out for, reach out to me once I became available. And I'm just totally thrilled and pumped up to, to be a part of this thing.

• 4:20Bill Simmons?

  The story was even better than that. We saw you the same day when you found out that you were no longer needed at ESPN and you were randomly in LA. Me and Mallory met you that day because we'd heard so many good things about you. But in your head, I really admired how even keeled you were with it. Cause I remember when I was in a semi similar situation, everybody in your life is reaching out, are you okay? What's going on? And your head's just doing 360s, but you were like, yeah, it'll be fine. I'll find something.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  I remember you said to me too, you're like, I can't believe how well you're taking this. And I think that that was partly a product of, you know, I find out when I'm standing in the Sky Club about to, to board a flight to LA. And I'm like, what do I do? And I'm like, oh, I checked a bag. Well, I guess I should just get on the plane and get the bag. And yeah, I lived my own funeral for like four hours. It was probably good to like every call I sent to voicemail, like I'm on a plane. I'm not available. And yeah, by the time I landed, dropped my stuff at the, at the hotel, popped over to to your studio there and got the tour. I mean, it was, it was cool that it all, it all came together. There were a lot of things we had to work through on this entire deal.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  But I mean, the Ringer and Netflix and the synergy between those two, like I could not possibly have asked for a better spot to be here.

• 5:40Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. And we had never, even dating back to Grantland, we never had really been on the information side as much because we were always built like we react to the information. And I always thought if we ever had somebody who was in that world, it would also have to be somebody who could kind of do the stuff that we do and the, and the back and forth. And you're always a hybrid of those two worlds. When did you, when did you move more toward like, holy shit, I'm getting all this information? I'm getting scoops left and right. Like this might be part of my life here.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  I think it took place over time. Like there's, there's no way that's what, you know, young people who like reach out to me in my, my DMs and whatnot are always asking like, how do you build source and stuff like that? I'm like, I don't know. Do it for 23 years and you just kind of amass that, you know? You start out cold calling people and hoping that you get some calls back. And you know, it just kind of evolved. I think when I went back to Minnesota in like 2010 and we were launching a ESPN radio affiliate there and I was covering the Vikings and most of the radio shows six days a week. Like I had a pretty good run of getting stuff there, which put me on the radar of USA Today. And then, you know, to NFL Network. And then obviously the, the brief Disney stop there over the past several months.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  It's, it was funny though, like during the downtime, because like, you know, not to get into the whole thing, but like legally I couldn't do anything. Like I couldn't tweet, couldn't really just, I couldn't do anything that loosely resembled my job. And so like, I'm finding stuff to do, man. Like, you know, people are calling me within the league and I'm talking, but like, I'm not doing it the same way, right? It's like, what am I going to do? Work to get a scoop and then I can't put it out? So, you know, by last week, and at this point, everything was in motion, but there were still some things we had to get through. And like, I went to Spider-Man 3D in the theater with my 12 year old daughter and literally like we're five minutes into the movie and shit's blowing up. And like, I get the text or the tweet alert, like, you know, Kyler Murray's been named starting quarterback of the Vikings. So I'm like, no, nothing I could have done about that, you know?

• 7:37Speaker 01

  Whatever world, I would love to think I would be the one breaking that. But I'm like, what am I going to do? I'm going to sit back, I'm going to eat some more popcorn. I'm going to enjoy this movie and like, I'll be back soon enough. And so we're just now kind of getting into this thing. And you know, the best part, Bill, about the news coming out yesterday, besides the fact that, you know, it's always awesome just seeing, you know, the feedback and all the messages you get and stuff, but it's that I'm finally not getting the so sorry for you, how are you doing, praying for you calls. Now it's like the, oh, so you're good? All right. Fantastic. Now we get back to doing what we're doing. So I'm glad to be back.

• 8:10Bill Simmons?

  What was the, what's the biggest scoop you ever had? Did you ever have one that was like, it was almost steam coming off it? You couldn't believe like, is this true? Like, did you have your version of like Luca's about to get traded to the Lakers?

• 8:24Speaker 01

  There's a bunch of those over time that, you know, stick out just in terms of like trades that come from like, well, you know, a lot of the best scoops, the ones that are most fun, honestly, are the ones like you're not working on and holding for a month because that's unbelievably stressful. It's when someone will be like, you know, like, you know, hey, do you hear about Darren Waller being traded to the Giants? It's like, what? No. Then you make two calls like, oh, this happened. Okay, cool. Right. I'd say that like the number one example of that was John Gruden resigning because that took place during Monday night football. And I had heard, you know, rumblings, I knew that there was, I knew that it was at a much higher fever pitch over the previous like 48 to 72 hours in terms of, you know, how the league was feeling about it, you know, where the Raiders were at, the fact

• 9:08Speaker 01

  that there were multiple, if you remember multiple stages of these email leaks and it was getting worse. But still, I don't think it was on anybody's radar that he was actually going to step down. And so I got, you know, one call saying, hey, you know, I heard Gruden stepping down, just like wait, because there's, you know, he's got to talk to everybody, just, just hang on and let you know. And then I get a text from somebody who was there going, yeah, Gruden just told all of us he, he's quitting. He's, he's resigning. And I was just like, oh my God. So I'm calling the first person back being like, I gotta go, I gotta go. Meanwhile, you know, again, Monday night football is on, the whole world's trained on this game. And I think it was right at halftime or right after halftime. And I hit blast on that tweet and it was just like, it was this explosion because that,

• 9:51Speaker 01

  that was at that time, Bill, like now it wasn't about football. It was about like social issues and you know, everything around the game and in society. And, um, you know, it was a really bizarre situation, but that was one like, there's very few times I'm sitting like finger over the button, kind of shaking. That was one that I'm like, I'm going to have to go. I gotta go. And finally went and then it went into the universe and then, you know, had to get myself suited up and go on TV all night. Cause I mean, that was one of the, the crazier things I think that's happened in recent NFL history.

• 10:21Bill Simmons?

  What is the NFL version of the Luca trade? I guess probably nothing.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  The fact that it stayed so quiet until you get, you know, a tweet out of nowhere that it's it's happening. I mean, that that made it, you know, interesting. I mean, Miles Garrett, I think, probably fits in that category. You'd had rumblings and stuff talked about.

• 10:40Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I'd say I wasn't. I guess there's no version of it because Miles Garrett was like, holy shit, but I wasn't shocked because it was like.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  Russell Wilson, maybe. I mean, Russell Wilson was a pretty surprising trade. Like, there had been little rumblings here and there about stuff. That was one that was murder for me because like I knew at the combine, it was happening. All that the Seahawks and Broncos were doing for weeks was just horse trading on how many picks. And if you remember, I mean, it was multiple first round picks and it was players. And then it was, all right, the players haven't been told. I'm like, I know the players. And so then you're calling the people be like, find out if he's been called yet, you know, that that was a wild one. The cool thing like in terms of how long I've covered the NFL is we've gone, Bill, from like the NFL, there were no trades. There were no trades at all. Like there was no like the trade deadline was a non event. And I'm not talking like, you know, 50 years ago. I'm talking like 10 to 15 years ago.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  Like it'd be, yeah, the trade deadline is coming up in late October, but like nothing's going to happen. You might get one here or there. Now both, you know, there's several waves of it. There's the wave of, you know, February and March, sometimes even in January, if you think about the Alex Smith trade, you get 10, 12, 15 trades that play out from the end of the regular season, all the way through, you know, the start of the league year when they could become official, you get another wave around the draft. Now maybe you start to see a wave more in these post June 1 things because that's why the AJ Brown trade happened when it did. That's a factor. It's not the main factor, but it was a factor in why the Miles Garrett trade got done when it did. And then you've got this whole other wave that over these next 10 days, we'll see because so many things happened this summer that I think a lot of those, those

• 12:17Speaker 01

  big ticket items are off the table. We'll get some trades. There's no doubt about it. Over the next, whatever it is here, 12 days until.

• 12:25Bill Simmons?

  Especially if there's tanking teams because we don't usually have tanking in the NFL, but we might this year. And there's a couple of suspects already.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  We, you know, we already have, I think, a pretty good idea. Like I was looking at the, the win over unders before I came on here. And it's like, I'd say on that one, Vegas is probably at a, you know, probably pretty much right. I mean, you can see the teams now call it tanking because, you know, there's no like NFL equivalent of Mark Madsen jacking up 12 threes. Like there's just, there's no way to do it. You can't like put a defensive lineman at quarterback, but you can organizationally put yourself in a position where it's apparent like you're not playing for right now. The Dolphins are the perfect example of that. And I've had Dolphins fans ask me, you know, just here and there, people I run into about that. I'm just like, just like buckle up, try to enjoy the ride, but like 2028 is what you're

• 13:17Speaker 01

  looking at here. Yes. Like they went out and they got Malik Willis because he's a great young man who's like, he's got some ability and he's got to be developed. And with Bobby Slowak now calling the offense there, there's a lot of similarities to what he was doing in Green Bay when he had some success. But like, you know, and they've got Devon Achan is a good player, but like you trade Jalen Waddle to get a first round pick. You, you don't bring back some of your other guys. You know, you trade Wade McPhee's Patrick. Although Bradley Chubb's another one that you, you move on from. And they didn't like go out and spend a bunch of money in free agency. They're very much a team that is looking at this as like, all right, we're going to build this the Green Bay way. We got Jeff Halfley and John Eric Sullivan. They're two very intelligent guys and they know like there's no quick fix, especially in a division where you got Buffalo and New England where like, are we really catching these

• 14:00Speaker 01

  teams in the near term? No. Like it's going to take a couple of years. Maybe Malik's the guy. If he's not, you're not over leveraged. I think he's, he's guaranteed like $50 million over two years. They're going to be in the running, I would think. Again, and this is taking nothing away from anybody involved, but realistically, they're going to be in the running for the number one pick.

• 14:17Bill Simmons?

  Well, you look at their, you look at their wide receiver room and it's like, oh, I see what you guys are up to.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  Jalen Tolbert's listed as a starter on the depth chart right now.

• 14:24Bill Simmons?

  Malik Washington, all those.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  I like Jalen, but like, I mean, yeah, they've got, they've got some significant issues, which also, by the way, complicates the evaluation of Malik Willis. Like Malik comes, he's like, all right, at least I got Jalen Waddle. It's like a week later, it's like, well, we traded Jalen Waddle. You're going to be throwing to, you know, the other guys who are still around.

• 14:42Bill Simmons?

  Miami, Arizona.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  Arizona is another obvious one.

• 14:45Bill Simmons?

  Lot of pulsating flags with them. Cleveland has a lot of talent, except the quarterback situations and F minus, minus, minus. So I don't know what happens.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  This year is you're trying to figure out, can either of these guys do it? I know this, like, I mean, the coaching staff came away encouraged from the spring. They felt like they got two guys they can at least function with and try to be competitive with and Deshaun Watson and Shador Sanders. But like, if you're asking me like, what's my guess of who's the quarterback for the Browns, week one in 2027? I'd say neither. I'd say it's somebody who's probably in college right now. You know, I don't see them bringing back Baker Mayfield. It could be somebody else who's available via trade. But I think the Browns with two first round picks, they got the Rams pick now for the Miles Garrett trade. And then the Jets, you know, as much as this year, like you don't bring in DeMario Davis and David Anyamada and Mika Fitzpatrick. If you're thinking like, we're going two and 15, you're thinking, we

• 15:38Speaker 01

  need to win some games or there's going to be even more wholesale, wholesale changes than there were a year ago, where when remember they, they close out the season, Aaron Glenn takes a few weeks. There's a lot of conversation. He basically fires his whole staff. He fires his offensive and defensive coordinators. He makes a bunch of other changes here. They know they've got to take a step forward. You go out and get Geno Smith, too. You're just hoping that you can function. Aaron Glenn's going to call the plays on the defense. You know, they're not going to the playoffs this year. I mean, that would shock me. Anything can happen. It's the NFL. Like they got to get the six, seven win show. They're headed in the right direction. If not, with all that ammo, even if they are a six, seven win team, you got two extra first round picks where you can bundle those together. And so that's

• 16:21Speaker 01

  the big picture story. Yeah. We'll talk about all the contenders and the teams that we think are going to be in the Super Bowl. Like to me, one of the fascinating things here is, and yes, this gets said from time to time, but the people I've talked to within the league, the scouts, the evaluators, I respect. They all say, if things trend positively, there's always a couple of these college guys where their last year, they fall off and a guy we're talking about being a first rounder, like doesn't get drafted, they're a day three pick, the Garrett Nussmeiers of the world. But like, if this, this group holds up the way that these guys think, between Arch Manning, Dante Moore is going to be in that category. Julian Sayan has fans. CJ Carr has fans. What if Lenora Sellers revives himself? What about Mensah at Miami? Like there's, there's all these guys and you've got like these clear

• 17:06Speaker 01

  and obvious teams that are all going to be drafted probably somewhere in the top 12 picks and a couple of have extra picks. Those are the teams that I'm looking at that when we're talking about, you know, the tank for Arch stuff or whatever the, that doesn't rhyme, but they'll come up with some rhyme for it, right? Something with that. Those will be the teams.

• 17:22Bill Simmons?

  Starch for Arch. Starch. No, I don't know.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  Starch keeps you upright. You need the opposite. You need to lay flat to get Arch.

• 17:29Bill Simmons?

  I got to think about that one. We're going to do pressure rankings, but I want to talk about Minnesota first, just because you're there.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:36Bill Simmons?

  And you have a good Vikings feel and that is somehow not one of the two most tortured franchises in the league, even though I think they would argue that they are.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  I live here. I would say the people here are sufficiently.

• 17:50Bill Simmons?

  They think they're number one. Yeah.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  Without, you know, my dad grew up a Vikings fan in the Upper Peninsula. So he's like 65 seasons into this thing. Yeah. All my friends, everybody else, they would all tell you that this is, it's not, it's not been an easy road.

• 18:05Bill Simmons?

  It's tough because the Bills with all the Super Bowl losses and then this whole Josh Allen ride, who's now, I think 30 years old, 29 years old, somewhere in there. The, the lows of their losses almost feel like the worst. Minnesota has been steadily just getting kicked in the balls decade after decade forever. But the Lions, like nothing has happened for them forever until this decade. And they always get left out of the tortured convo. Then you have the Browns where nothing good has happened with them since 1964. I don't know. I don't know what the rankings are, but Minnesota thinks they're first.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  It depends. Like if your definition of the tortured fan base is the one that keeps getting close and can't get over the hump.

• 18:49Bill Simmons?

  The Red Sox. This was Red Sox pre 2004.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  Forever.

• 18:52Bill Simmons?

  Every year you think it's the year and then you get kicked in the teeth.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  Right. Then all of a sudden, you know, you rally against the Yankees and everybody can't believe that this is what's happening. Like, you know, the Vikings and the Bills, they're very similar trajectories. Both have lost four Super Bowls. If you look at, I think that the, in terms of winning percentage since in the Super Bowl era, the Vikings are like number six and every team above and below them has one or more Lombardis. And they have none. And they're, because they're there all the time. You know, the Bills in recent years, yeah, they've, they've been there too, but they went through a stretch from what was it like 1999 to 2017 without going to the playoffs. So they had a long drought. Vikings have never had that long of a drought. They, they never, especially, you know, under this ownership group that will spend a ton of money. They always want to be good. They always want

• 19:37Speaker 01

  to go for it every year. They, they never go all the way to the bottom, you know, but then, you know, you're constantly getting close and then you're in a bit of a high wire act from a, you know, a cap perspective and whatnot to be able to keep it healthy and, and figure it out. But, you know, they've never had a quarterback. They haven't found their Josh Allen, probably going back to, you know, Dante Culpepper had a pretty good run in like 03, 04, before he blew out his knee. Since then, it's just been a, you know, two years of Favre and you had, you know, Teddy had his moment. You know.

• 20:06Bill Simmons?

  Favre was good that first year and then

• 20:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:08Bill Simmons?

  absolutely got destroyed in that Saints game and probably was concussed 17 times over the course of three. I mean, that was one of the bad games, right? Yeah. He threw one of the worst interceptions ever.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  Crossed his body and then they beg him to come back in 2010 and 2010. I was, I was on the Vikings beat at that point and that was one of the biggest disaster seasons I think that's ever existed in NFL history. It's not just, yeah, Favre, the most durable quarterback ever got knocked out of like his last three or four games consecutively. Corey Wooten hits him on a frozen field at TCF Bank Stadium and he goes down like a chalk outline like the police would get like this. And he's just pout. Still does his press conference, which the rules changed after that about what you're allowed to do. But that's the year the Metrodome roof collapsed. The Vikings ended up play a home game in Detroit. They played the Eagles on a Tuesday night in Philadelphia because of a snowstorm that never came. Percy

• 21:03Speaker 01

  Harvin left the field in an ambulance that year. I mean, it was, it was an unbelievable calamity, but that's, that's what the Vikings fans go through is every time you have a really good season, it's somehow followed by the season from hell. That's their own unique torture in this entire thing.

• 21:19Bill Simmons?

  Conspiracy Bill had a lot of thoughts on that Tuesday night game. I always felt like that was the NFL. Kind of knowing that this it wasn't going to be that bad on the Monday, but pushing it to Tuesday just because they were interested to see what the ratings and everything else was going to be. I will always believe that.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  I drove by that stadium. We switched from on the advice of somebody on the beat, who was an idiot, suggested like, we got to get out of the city. The city is going to be shut down. So we moved from like the Vikings hotel, which was the Ritz Carlton downtown to like some really sketchy hotel out by the airport. So on the drive there on Sunday afternoon, we're looking, it was supposed to be, you know, the storm of the century. And I'm telling you, there was about this much like kind of muddy. I don't even know if it was snow or it was just crap on the side. There was nothing, it barely snowed. The mayor nutter, I think was his name and called everything off. The city is shutting down. There was no snow at all. And the Vikings played, I think that was a Joe Webb game, if I'm not mistaken. I mean, you want to talk about just like the weirdness of that year.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  Joe Webb starting a Tuesday game in Philly was, I didn't even make the top 10 of that season.

• 22:21Bill Simmons?

  Give us the mood in Minnesota on the J.J. McCarthy era.

• 22:27Speaker 01

  I mean, I, you know, I've gotten to know J.J. A little bit. You're around him for five minutes and you get it. You get why this guy's been a winner and why people like him, like the locker room really liked him. It's not like, you know, he was this guy and he was, you know, a joke from, from day one walking in. But, you know, he, he's in that category of people who, especially at the quarterback position. They have so much going on for their first couple of years that it's just impossible to know what they could be. And now you're going into year three, we don't even know if he's going to be the number two quarterback. If Carson Wentz.

• 22:58Bill Simmons?

  Is he going to be on the team?

• 23:00Speaker 01

  Right. If, you know, well, I mean, you could potentially trade him. But if you're talking about a, you know, a third string quarterback, like I wouldn't, if I'm him, I don't want to get traded. To me, if I'm a young quarterback, I don't want in late August to get traded to a team that might be running a completely different system with players I don't know, zero reps, zero time on task to build the rhythm and timing and template you need in an NFL passing offense. Then God forbid the starter gets hurt and everyone's like, well, see J.J. Do you get thrown out there? Like, that's the way to end your career, or at least, you know, to go along a path of a, you know, some of the, you know, the Baker Mayfields and the Sam Darnolds who needed several different spots because everyone was done with them. And then he got stability or, you know, whatever, the closest thing to stability for Baker as a different O C every year.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  But you get in the right spot and all of a sudden your career becomes, you know, kind of looking like what it might be in it. And that could be J.J.

• 23:49Bill Simmons?

  I was thinking it would be the Chargers and Harbaugh potentially being like, we'll take them. Third round pick, he's our backup. We'll try to rehab him, rehabilitate him, and then maybe we can flip them.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  Other, other than that, every Jim Harbaugh press conference is basically a love letter to Justin Herbert. I don't know how many different ways.

• 24:06Bill Simmons?

  He's batting his eyelashes out of.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  How much he loves this guy. We bring him in though as the backup, like sure, I could see that, but like, what's the team going to give up for a backup at the deadline? Like, if you get a real pick, I don't think that there's an upside to, hey, let's just dump this guy for a seventh rounder or something like. There's still, I mean, there's people that like him in Minnesota, but, you know, I remember when I was like at that age, you know, like I couldn't, I didn't have my life together, you know, like J.J. His first year and he, you know, suffers that meniscus injury. He has the surgery. We all saw him on the sideline, you know, he loses a ton of weight and it's a hard year because he's never, he's never really had that type of adversity. I mean, he played and he won almost every game he was in, all the, going all the way back to, you know, prep school. So, you know, he has that year off and then last year, like, you know, you saw signs of it.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  I was at a Timberwolves game, him and Justin Jefferson are sitting front row. Justin was really encouraging to him. They spent a ton of time together. You saw flashes of it. And then, you know, he comes out, second half of that week one game against the Bears and you're like, oh, okay. He's making plays with his legs. He didn't throw the ball a lot in that game. You're like, okay, I see it like they, they like the athletic quarterback. He can move. And then, oh, he suffered a high ankle sprain in that game. He's now out or whatever was the following week, he's out for six weeks and all of a sudden he's not there. By the way, after the week one game, his fiance also has a kid. So now you're a 22 year old guy, whatever he is, 23, who's probably not getting a lot of sleep.

• 25:29Bill Simmons?

  You're really selling me on him. This is an incredible job by you.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  This is, it's, it's a, I mean.

• 25:34Bill Simmons?

  I'm starting to buy J.J. Stock for this, you're laying it all out.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  Think about that, like all the different things that you're dealing with life wise. Then you come back and then he gets concussion and then he's got a finger thing or whatever it was, wrist. I can't remember the exact nature of the injury, something on his throwing hand. So, but the guy's never healthy, you know, guys like that or Anthony Richardson, Trey Lance. J.J. Played a lot more football and was much more productive than those guys in college. But he didn't throw the ball a whole lot more. I just know this, Bill, I, I was at the Detroit game, you know, the nine meme, you know, the thing where he's making the funny face and everybody posts the J.J. Stuff all over and over again. Like, that's from the locker room in Detroit where I was at that game. He was lights out. Again, he didn't have to throw the ball a ton to like red zone timing. He made a couple of tough throws, you know, had a touchdown pass. Like, I was like, watching going, oh, I get it.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  So you have seen flashes. If you watch enough of the Vikings, there's flashes there. But I think at this point, everyone's just, you know, kind of like, all right, we've seen it. We've also had a lot of success through the years, whether it's, you know, Favre or Case Keenum or Randall Cunningham with the veteran who's got ability and he comes in in the right time. Maybe that's Kyler Murray who's being coached up differently. They split the reps all through the, you know, through the spring. They tried to make it as 50 50 as they could. But, you know, I was also hearing back in the spring, like you can tell already who's the baller. Like Kyler's got that. Let's see with a revamped running game and a really good receiver arsenal and an offensive line that Christian Derrisaw is finally healthy. Like, let's see what that ends up looking like in 2026.

• 27:05Bill Simmons?

  It's the most polarizing NFC team from a prediction standpoint. I've seen people really like them. I've seen other people think they're clearly fourth place. I'm still deciding on it. I could see both cases, but it seems like the, you could potentially see them win 11, 12 games if Kyler's good. You could also see them be kind of a train wreck and this could be the final year for K O C. Like that kind of scenario too. They're betting a lot on Kyler Murray, a guy that Arizona was paying. And they were like, we're good. We're, please, please take them. I get it, but Arizona is like, we're good. And now you're betting on this career resurgence. I don't personally see it. I've never been a huge fan.

• 27:48Bill Simmons?

  I just think he's like a 500 quarterback who will put up stats, but I think any good defense, he can't throw over the middle. I don't trust his decision making. I just don't see it, but some people like him.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  I think that Kyler probably, you know, if he holds one NFL record, it's most millions of dollars paid by a team who hates you. Like Cardinals from the day they did that contract and the homework clause. And it's not like that was a secret, like everybody knew and everybody knew about Kyler coming out of college. Like, he's not a leader, right? He doesn't hang with the guys, like he's kind of to himself. He plays video games and all this stuff. You know, they did have some success early with Cliff. I mean, they went to the playoffs one year, but then, you know, Kyler had the injury. Everybody there said like he, he did grow up over time. The last staff, the Jonathan Gannon staff really did like him. It just, you know, he gets hurt again last year. He's had a bunch of injuries. Like it, it just didn't work out with him coming to Minnesota now. They like it for a couple of reasons. One, they don't think they need him to be a leader.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  Like K O is going into his fifth year, like they've kind of got a locker room that can handle a lot. And you got Justin Jefferson, guys like that, Aaron Jones is on the team. You know, defensively, you do have some veterans that you can lean on. Like Kyler can just come in and be, you know, a functional quarterback. He is being coached differently. They revamped the running game, which that'll be, you know, from a fantasy football perspective, particularly Bill, will be really interesting because it's going to be Aaron Jones and Jordan Mason kind of splitting it. And then the rookie, Demond Claiborne, who they really like. There were a lot of questions about him coming out, but like he is explosive as shit. It's like how that plays out, that could all take some heat off him. They, they brought in Frank Smith, who was Miami's offensive coordinator. Keith Carter's the O line coach, them with K O were kind of putting together the run game.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  They may not have to be stuck in that throw the ball 45 times a game thing. And by the way, even when at times they were stuck with that last year, they still, they might've had the worst quarterback situation in the league. Last year, you have J.J. Coming out in and out of the lineup three times. You have Carson Wentz, who played pretty well out of the gate and then bangs up his shoulder. And then by the time, late in that second half of that Rams game, it's, you know, every time he's throwing it, it's like, do you remember rookie of the year? The old picture who like.

• 29:57Bill Simmons?

  Broken shoulder.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  It's like, ah, every throw was like, this is the end. His arm is going to fall off. Then you're rolling Max Brosmer out there who was, that was supposed to be a richer year, you know? Like he was a, a project that you were going to have there. They won a game on Christmas, you know, with, with Brosmer throwing for like 50 yards. So, you know, like they're, they're so, that's what they went nine and eight. Like he's one, nine, they missed the playoffs by a half game. That's why like, if they can get functional quarterback play, K O said it from the moment the season ended, like we need more talent in the room. We need better competition in the room. And that's why they bring back Carson Wentz. It wasn't because they were thinking he was going to be the number two over J.J. It's because they're like, we played, we've played three or more quarterbacks, two out of Kevin's four years.

• 30:37Speaker 01

  If we can just have quarterbacks who play to a certain level, like everything else, they won 13 and 14 games those other two years. I, I think, I'm not going to, you know, give you a gambling advice on the over unders here, but like an eight and a half win total? Like, I don't know, history would suggest unless all the quarterbacks, like a nuclear bomb drops on that room, the Vikings are going to find a way to scrap and be in the playoff hunt.

• 31:00Bill Simmons?

  The Cleveland fans and the Vegas fans can't believe you said they had the worst quarterback room in the league last year. They need oxygen. They need water. Cleveland's like, what else did we have to do to have the worst quarterback situation? But you're right. It was so bleak in that second half of the season for the Vikings. They were at least on that level. I mean, we had some, some of the worst quarterback situations we've had since I was like, growing up last year. Now, now we have Atlanta this year is the worst one, I think.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  I mean, Atlanta's got, you know, everybody was waiting for the competition, but it's like, Michael Penix is on his third torn ACL.

• 31:34Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, is he even gonna be able to play?

• 31:36Speaker 01

  It's August 18th. I mean, I can't name off the top of my head, another quarterback who was in a quote unquote, competition and didn't practice in 11 on 11 in late August. He hasn't even been out there.

• 31:49Bill Simmons?

  And Tua just shouldn't be in the NFL anymore. I mean, he's just, I, I, I don't understand how, first of all, how he's a starter and second, why he even wants to play. He looks terrified to get hit. Even you watched the preseason and he's doing like, it's, it's over. So I don't know who the third stringer is, but we're probably gonna see him.

• 32:08Speaker 01

  This is part of why I think Mike McDaniel, you know, as much as he, you know, became a meme at times, especially, you know, just cause like of who he is, like his personality, the way he dresses and all that stuff. Like, would anybody have more of a, a tough, a tough role over the last couple of years than a guy who every game plan had to start with? The quarterback can't get hit. Not sacked. The quarterback can't get hit. We can't let him get hit. And I know he does, you know, the jujitsu and he's learned all these different things, but like, that's a, that's an uphill climb. But, you know, for, for Atlanta, it was, it was a, you know, a role of all right, we're going with, we're getting for the minimum. Miami's still paying Tua, like whatever it is, $50 million or something this season. You know, we're bringing him in. It's another lefty. We're building out the protections

• 32:53Speaker 01

  a certain way. Um, we need to evaluate both these guys, but they're another team that realistically, if I'm guessing who's the quarterback in 2027, I'd say neither of those guys. You can say that for teams, teams right now. Okay. We haven't even started the season. The teams that I would say their starting quarterback in 2027, probably not even on the 2026 roster. I would say Atlanta. I would say Cleveland.

• 33:15Bill Simmons?

  Jets.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  I, I would say the Jets and I would say maybe Arizona, although Carson Beck is really fascinating to me. Um, not just because of, you know, what we saw in the Hall of Fame game, but you know, going back to the pre-draft process, like this dude was, the question was not, in talking to all the scouts and coaches, and I read this lengthy quarterback thing, which will be now part of the ringer, uh, going into the draft next year, but like getting the real opinions, um, from people within the league, like Carson Beck, he helped himself in the process because all the reports from the scouts were about what had happened to Georgia and like the social media and I don't love football and hanging out with the Cavender twin and like, just, you know, driving the Lamborghini, buying a house in the wrong part of Miami and gets robbed like immediately upon moving there. Like all this other stuff.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  But if you talk to people at Miami, they're like, the guy was dialed, like whether it was, you know, real or he was just playing the part, like he did take the cue. He did learn from it.

• 34:09Bill Simmons?

  And they succeeded with them.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  And he took two teams to the college football playoff. You know, he's a big, strong guy. He looks the part. The old Parcells rules where it's like, you know, a certain number of starts and you gotta be a college graduate and you gotta be a senior and you have to win, you know, win a certain percentage of your games, complete a certain percentage of your passes. Like he's the only guy who checked all those boxes. Like, I'll be really interesting to see because if I'm Arizona, I definitely want to see Carson Beck at some point. You're not going to the playoffs with Jacoby Brissette. You may play with him for a good chunk of the season, but like, I would guess we see Carson Beck start some games because you're going to want to go in with all the information you can on, okay, before we draft another guy high, did we find one in the third round and we can pay this guy the minimum for the next two years and use a really high first round pick next year

• 34:53Speaker 01

  on somebody else or turn that into multiple first round picks? Mania Austin, fourth, the GM's done that before. You need to trade with Houston, um, you know, in the Will Anderson Jr. trade. So that's the best case scenario for all these teams is take your shots, day two and day three in the draft. Find a quarterback that you like. Cleveland's doing the same thing right now with Shador and they were doing it, I guess still are with Dylan Gabriel too, where it's like, you know, take a flyer on him and, you know, realistically 2027 is the year that we're gonna, we're gonna use that pick.

• 35:22Bill Simmons?

  25 to one on FanDuel for Rookie of the Year. Carson Beck. Uh, another team that will not have the same quarterback next year is the Pittsburgh Steelers. We want to mention that as well.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  Right. That's a, although they've got, they've got two guys though. It's another one too, right? They fit in that same bucket.

• 35:36Bill Simmons?

  If they hit with our, yeah.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. You, you drafted Aller this year and you drafted Will Howard last year.

• 35:41Bill Simmons?

  But it won't be Rogers next year.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  Right. No Rogers. Right. But like in terms of it even being on the roster, they've at least got two guys they think are developmental. Uh, Will Howard, Mike McCarthy was out of the league last year, but like Will Howard is one of the quarterbacks he loved in the draft process. So those two young guys and Aaron, from what I've heard is kind of taking him under his wing, which you can read that multiple ways, but like, he's been very supportive and he's got a good relationship with the young guys. Maybe, again, maybe you find it. The Steelers aren't, I mean, the Steelers aren't going to have a top five pick based on record. I would certainly tell you that. Like they're going to be a, a competent team. They're going to be a way better offense than they've been in years. Like they've had a bottom, I think they've ranked 24th or worse in offense, eight years in a row. Like that's mediocrity. Like that's how you don't, you know, every year you're nine and eight and

• 36:29Speaker 01

  you go on the first round and everybody jokes about it. It's like, it's not because the defense fell off the cliff. It's because your offense has been terrible under several different coordinators. Yeah. Let's see.

• 36:37Bill Simmons?

  Not sure it's, not sure it's gonna be better this year. I, I think the.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  I would say they will be a top 10 offense this year. That would be my prediction. Mike McCarthy, I want to say 13 of his 18 seasons as a head coach has had a top 10 offense. He was immediately had a number one offense in Dallas on a team that I don't think anybody was sitting there going, this is the most talented offense in the league. Dak played his best football under him. Aaron's played his best football under him. Now Aaron's not quite the same. Like the, the legs aren't there anymore. Like all those plays, like the spectacular Aaron Rodgers stuff where it's getting outside the pocket and throwing, you know, off balance, one foot, you know, backpedaling across his body and throw 50 yards down the field. Like I've seen him try to do that over the past couple of years. He can't do that anymore. But if you can play like, you know, probably the, the closest

• 37:25Speaker 01

  example, if you want to buy the upside on it is, you know, when Peyton Manning was at the end of his career in Denver and they won a Super Bowl with him throwing passes like it was out of a t-shirt.

• 37:35Bill Simmons?

  Noodle, noodle on Peyton. One of my favorites.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  And like slowly came down, but it was because he was so mentally fast. They won a Super Bowl with Peyton playing like that. I'm not going to sit here and predict that the Steelers, you know, win the Super Bowl, but like they've, they've got a talented defense. They've added on offense, trading for Michael Pittman. Um, they brought in, you know, one of Mike's favorite running backs, Rico Dowdell. Like I, I think that they would be.

• 37:55Bill Simmons?

  Seems like he won the job.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. They, they're going to be a better offense would be my prediction than whatever they're being projected.

• 38:01Bill Simmons?

  Problem is, it doesn't seem like Aaron Rodgers wants to get hurt anymore. And I still feel like that's part of the quarterback job.

• 38:06Speaker 01

  You shouldn't want to get hit.

• 38:08Bill Simmons?

  I want to get rid of the ball as fast as possible. Please don't hit me. We're taking a break. We're going to come back and do the pressure rankings really fast. This episode is brought to you by 20th Century Studios, The Dog Stars, only in theaters on August 28th. Visionary filmmaker Ridley Scott, returning to IMAX with The Dog Stars in a world shattered by catastrophe. A lone pilot's isolated existence is transformed when a mysterious radio transmission crackles through the silence. Uh-oh. Setting out in the unknown, Higg embarks on a dangerous journey in, in search of something more powerful than survival. Hope. Kind of like the hope I have for the Patriots right now. From the legendary director

• 38:51Bill Simmons?

  of Gladiator, The Martian, Black Hawk Down comes the riveting post-apocalyptic thriller, The Dog Stars, starring Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin, Margot Qualley, Guy Pearce. I like all those people. Based on Peter Heller's acclaimed novel and adapted for the screen by Markell Smith, The Dog Stars delivers breathtaking visuals, an extraordinary ensemble cast, a deeply human story about resilience, connection, and the choices that define us. The Dog Stars, only in theaters in IMAX on August 28th. Get your tickets now. All right. Pressure rankings. I only want to do individuals, but we have to mention the Rams at the top, who I think now have the most pressure in the league because they're prohibitive favorites.

• 39:37Bill Simmons?

  They're five to one to win the Super Bowl on FanDuel. Nobody else is better than 10 to one. Their over under is 11 and a half. I saw a segment last week on ESPN, your brief employer, that was talking about, could this be the greatest defense of all time? We've lost our minds with this Aaron Donald thing. He's 35 years old. He hasn't played in three years. I'm sure he's going to be awesome, but he's only going to play 35 plays a game when he comes back. They're really top heavy. They have a quarterback that all but in the summer last year, we were terrified he was going to get hurt. And it was like, is back? Is he going to make it? And he made it. Now we're not worried about him anymore. He's 38. There are, I think there's 10 guys ever who have had really awesome seasons at age 38 or later.

• 40:21Bill Simmons?

  Not to mention the Puka Nakua stuff, which continues to not seem like it's stabilized. I just have a lot of questions and there's a lot of pressure now that people think they're the favorites. So what are you seeing as you watch from afar here?

• 40:36Speaker 01

  Well, you have to start with like what the Rams have been since they got to LA. Like they have fully embraced, like this is Hollywood. We are always going to be a story. We are always going to be the team that people are talking about and they've done that in different ways. Like everybody wants to just go, it's always bleep, you know, bleep those picks, but like they're cyclical. They, they push it. Every team is cyclical from a spending standpoint, right? Because you have, every dollar you spend hits the cap eventually. It's a real cap. There's ways you can manipulate it, but like it does come home eventually here. And so the Rams went through that phase of like drafting a bunch of guys, the Todd Gurleys and Jared Goffs. They pay those guys. Then that gave way to, all right, now we're going for it. We're going to trade for Jalen Ramsey. Um, you know, we're going to trade for Brandon Cooks. They get to a Super Bowl. They don't quite get there. Okay.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  Now we're going to reboot it a couple of years later. Now we're trading for Stafford and we're going for it there. Well, then they got to a certain point after they won the Super Bowl in the 21 season, where all the cap stuff, all the older players, they had to, all right, we need to start this thing over. So now we're trading away Jalen Ramsey. They had the most rookies on their team. I think it was in 2023.

• 41:40Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  Of any team in the NFL and you saw the growing pains. It's the one season they've had that just didn't live up to, you know, what Sean McVay has built.

• 41:49Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  But we have 30 plus rookies on your team. Now you're paying some of those guys. Now you're getting to this point. They've obviously were really good. You're toward the end with Matthew Stafford. Now we're back. We're cycling the other way.

• 41:59Bill Simmons?

  It's a re re reboot.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  Right. And they just, they keep going. They keep going with this, but like, it's not like they're just on the gas all the time. That's hard to sustain because at some point, like your, your draft picks are your young, cheap workforce. They allow you to balance out the money you're spending on these really high priced players. At some point you have to have a recalibration with it. But the way that they've done it this off season, Bill, for all the wild stuff that they have done. And I know that, you know, Sean McVay and Les Snead and Kevin Nevoff and all those guys, like they love the fact that they're constantly that team that everybody is talking about. But I don't know that they've ever had one that approaches what happened this offseason. Like, let's just take a second here to enjoy the past six months, okay, for the Rams.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  They make the commitment. Matthew Stafford announces, it starts at NFL honors. Matthew Stafford in his acceptance speech with his, his daughters on the stage says like, I'm going to be back next year. And I'm in the theater and like the whole Ram section, they all jump up and like going wild, clapping because they didn't know. He hadn't actually told them he was coming back. So the reigning NFL, NFL MVP gets the trophy. And goes like, hey, I'm coming back for another year. It's like they're, they're over the moon. Right? So then, over the next several months, they're working on a contract with Stafford. They're not quite getting there. They draft his eventual successor, Ty Simpson, in the first round and number 13 overall, no less,

• 43:26Speaker 01

  which was something that had been in the motion for months, going all the way back to when Alabama's in the, in the Rose Bowl and Les Snead has Ty's parents over to the facility to essentially talk them into your son should come out. Mom asks why? And he goes, because I'm going to draft him at number 13. So that all comes to roost. I'm just telling you, this is strictly the quarterbacks without getting to everything else. Then they eventually get the Stafford deal done. So now you have on a team that's going for it. Your number one pick is a guy who if all goes well, we don't see for a year, maybe two.

• 43:56Bill Simmons?

  And by the way, there were a couple of good guys at 13 that would have helped this year's team specifically.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  So you're trying to balance this because in the Rams minds, they're going, we're winning the Super Bowl this year. So having the number 32 pick in a draft next year where all these guys are going to go above us. We're not going to get one then. We're not going to get one as long as Stafford is here. So let's take one now. While we can catch the rest of the league off guard. And I don't know who else, if anyone takes Ty in the first round. But in the Rams minds, they're going, we've got a guy who fits perfectly into the system, who is trained in that style of offense, more under center snaps than anybody in the NFL. Let's just get them now and we'll figure it out.

• 44:31Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  So then they eventually get the deal done with Stafford. It's painted as this, you know, extension and everything. If you look at it on paper, all it does is it buys them more time because of when his contract would avoid it. It's still unclear what's going to happen with, with Matthew Stafford in 2027. He'll have a decision to make. Rams will have a decision to make. But all that happens.

• 44:50Bill Simmons?

  And physically, we don't know what's going to happen to him.

• 44:53Speaker 01

  And physically.

• 44:54Bill Simmons?

  He might be right on the cusp.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  He's played through so much and he's been beat up throughout the course of his career. Like, do we see Ty Simpson? Do we see Stetson Bennett at some point? Like, we don't know how the season is going to play out. Wide receiver meanwhile, because all that stuff's happening, wide receiver. They work on at one point, a trade of Devante Adams, to the point that they tell Devante Adams, we're, we're probably going to trade you or we might trade you because they're working on a trade for AJ Brown. They eventually back away from the AJ Brown trade. There's medical stuff. He's had a long running knee thing that everybody knows about going back to Tennessee, which is why they traded him away years ago.

• 45:32Bill Simmons?

  What the hell? You're just dropping that on me?

• 45:34Speaker 01

  They're trying to trade for AJ Brown. They're trying to trade for AJ Brown. So they tell Devante Adams, we may move on from you. Then the AJ thing goes away. Now Devante, okay, you're back. By the way, Puka is in rehab, dealing with some serious personal stuff that he's got to work through. He hasn't been extended yet. So that also is an undercurrent of all this. Defensively, you completely overhaul your secondary. You bring in the two corners from the Chiefs. You trade your other one for Trent McDuffie and give him a record contract. You sign Jalen Watson to play on the other side. And then, oh yeah, you trade for Myles Garrett. You trade your first, second and third round picks.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  Plus Jared verse, who's like 24 years old, one of the core guys. Like I, I thought the value was really good for the Browns. I get why the Rams did it. I thought the Browns extracted really good value out of that situation. So you basically change everything about how you're playing up front. And we haven't even talked about the Aaron Donald saga, which is a guy who hasn't played in several years. I know everybody keeps saying, I keep seeing like headlines and people saying like, he's not coming back unless he's Aaron Donald.

• 46:42Bill Simmons?

  He's not going to be Aaron Donald.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  Aaron Donald. He might be something approaching Aaron Donald, but it's going to be on a limited snap type of a basis. I mean, if you go back through a modern NFL history, and I had my former employees, research team looked this up at one point. The only player in the soup, basically the only player in the post World War II era, who's in the Hall of Fame, who sat out multiple seasons and came back and played was Deion. And Deion came back as like a part-time player in Baltimore for a couple of years because Ray Lewis got him to come back. He still, you know, still made plays. He's Deion Sanders, but like he wasn't playing a ton.

• 47:20Bill Simmons?

  Well, wouldn't, wouldn't the comparison be how the Pats used Diggs last year? Where Diggs was impactful, but he was only playing 40% of the snaps, 45% of the snaps.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  I mean, there's probably some of that.

• 47:30Bill Simmons?

  The same, same thing. Like they're going to use him strategically, but he's not going to be out there all the time.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  That, that part of it's definitely true. Like I think that what you will see if Aaron Donald decides he wants to play, which I don't think that's coming in the next few days. Um, you know, listen, this is.

• 47:45Bill Simmons?

  August 18th. We kind of need to know soon.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  They got joint practice with the Saints, I think on Thursday, Aaron Donald had shown up for a joint practice with the Saints. So it would be sometime thereafter, if he's going to come back. But the idea, the vision would be third downs, two minute late in games, pass rush situations, where we're going to roll out Aaron Donald, whatever he is now, plus Myles Garrett, plus Byron Young, plus Kobe Turner. Basically they're like, figure out who you're going to double. Like just go ahead and, you know, try us here. That would be the, the idea of it. With Aaron Donald, but it would add even more of that. Like it's, it's honestly, it would be like the equivalent of LeBron at this point where.

• 48:23Bill Simmons?

  LeBron coming to Philly if he played 22 minutes a game.

• 48:26Speaker 01

  It's, it's exactly that same thought, which what are you getting out of LeBron? Well, he can facilitate. He can make the other people around him better, even if he himself is not what he was. But also it's like LeBron chose Philly. Oh shit, like we're, we're going to be in the mix to win this thing right now. Like it makes everybody every day come in, you would hope. And I know that's kind of how the Rams are thinking about this. Like everybody's going to be like, man, if he decided to come back from retirement, because he thinks this team has a shot to win it, that means every day I got to show up with the same, the same intensity and vision that he's got.

• 48:55Bill Simmons?

  And you have, you can, if you think you're going to make the playoffs, which I think they're going to make the playoffs. And barring like a bunch of crazy shit happening, you can kind of steer it toward, hey, what if we get, if we can get to one seed, we only have to play three playoff games. We steer Donald toward, can you give us like, two awesome weeks in a row, bye week, then Super Bowl. Can you play like 70% of the plays just for those three weeks? I, if we're rating which things make me the most dubious, Puka's number one. I want to talk about him in a second. Stafford just holding up at age 38. How much Donald will be able to actually play.

• 49:34Bill Simmons?

  All the pressure and hype, which the moment anything goes wrong, it's, oh my God, the Rams are one and two. And it just becomes.

• 49:40Speaker 01

  And by the way, the whole country watching week one, the first game in Australia, I'll be on the sideline.

• 49:45Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  The whole country is going to watch it. Everybody overreacts to week one. They're playing a tough 49ers team.

• 49:50Bill Simmons?

  And they're fucking across the world.

• 49:53Speaker 01

  I had a call with the Melbourne folks yesterday, like the local, the visitor bureau or whatever they are, people. They did a presentation for us and they were, I asked them like, is there a team that people root for there? And they said, well, no, like, uh, the people in Melbourne don't really have a team. But the 49ers are reviving earlier. They're going to be in the community. So we think the crowd will be for the 49ers. It's like the Rams are going to be in at least a slightly, you know, environment where they're, they're challenged. And yeah, it's, it's going to be a weird game. You know, these guys, McVay and Kyle know each other so well. Like there's no surprises. Raheem Morris is the former Rams coordinator, is now in San Francisco. Like there's tons of familiarity. But that, that game, like weird stuff always happens in week one. If they come back from that on a long flight back and they're 0-1 and they were the team that everybody sensed is going to win the Super Bowl.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  And now it's 10 days of hearing like that they, you know, they might not be the team that we thought like that. That does have some weight on people, even if it's just one of 17 games.

• 50:49Bill Simmons?

  Who was the best receiver in the league last year, in my opinion, even though I think JSN, he had all the accolades, but Puka just game to game was just ridiculous, the blocking, he was catches in traffic was just dominant. I don't know what to expect from him and it was like, no, no, he's getting his life back together. And then the story comes out that he ran through a glass door at Michael Rubin's house and July 4th. And it's like, are we sure he's doing great? What about all the legal troubles? And is there something really going on with this guy? So what have you heard on that?

• 51:20Speaker 01

  Well, I would start by saying, you know, from all accounts, from everyone I've talked to, since he got back in the building, which he was back, you know, OTAs in the spring, like he's been, he's been good around the facility, which is like, he's in a good spot. And you also can surmise based on the timing of everything, like he probably didn't have his life together last season when he was the most dominant receiver or one of the most dominant receivers in the NFL. So you would like to think if whatever he's dealing with, he can be in a better spot with that now. Maybe the guy can be even better here. His contract was never going to get done early in the off season. I think this one was always going to take a little bit, but certainly he's going to have a, you know, a spotlight on him for a variety of different reasons.

• 52:00Speaker 01

  He's still somehow appearing on podcasts and seeing crazy stuff like, yeah, I walked through a plate glass window and cut up my face like, I don't know. I guess I've never gone to a white party, maybe everyone wearing white.

• 52:15Bill Simmons?

  If that was one of my friends or one of your friends, it would be a red flag.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  I mean,

• 52:20Bill Simmons?

  What happened? You walked through a plate glass window? Like, how drunk were you? What happened?

• 52:24Speaker 01

  I mean, that is some speed, you know, it's not, not Charles Barkley throwing you through a plate glass window. Like if you just walked and broke it, I know you're a strong dude, but that's, uh, yeah, that's a lot. Like, listen, I mean, yeah, there's, it'll be something worth monitoring. There's no doubt about it, but like in terms of on the field and football, like everything sounds like it's gone well so far. It's just, it's one of the many things we'll have to be keeping tabs on here through the season.

• 52:46Bill Simmons?

  Well, in the last 30 years, only one team has been a giant favorite heading into the season and actually won the Super Bowl, and that was the 2018 Patriots who beat the Rams. So there you go.

• 53:02Bill Simmons?

  Pressure rankings really quick.

• 53:05Bill Simmons?

  Individuals, these are my rankings. I don't think they're the correct rankings. I did not send them to you.

• 53:12Bill Simmons?

  The number one person with the most pressure on him this year, in my opinion, is going to be CJ Stroud. Because I think the Texans are really, really, really good and could absolutely make the Super Bowl and maybe should have made the Super Bowl last year, except he let them down in New England and was awful. Run game's better. Offensive line is supposedly a little better. Receiver room is better.

• 53:39Bill Simmons?

  The defense is the same and probably better, but they brought everybody back. It's all lined up for him. Just give us a C plus and we're going to win 13 games. Can you be a C?

• 53:50Speaker 01

  Are you giving him a nickname? C plus Stroud?

• 53:53Bill Simmons?

  C plus Stroud. That sounds great. I'll start it right now. Just, just a C plus, we'll go 12 and 5. I think he has the most pressure on him.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  It's, it's, it's just crazy to think about the arc for CJ Stroud, you know, as the number two pick in the entire world decided, you know, about three games into that rookie year that he was, you know, clearly should have been the number one pick. He's played well enough. He's gone to the playoffs every year, wins a playoff game every year, but then has had bumps. Like last year, last year was a roller coaster, man. Like out of the gate, they were bad. I mean, they were 0-3. The offense was really struggling. They were changing schemes because they'd fired Bobby Slowik, they had Nick Calley coming in. It's a, it's a different style of offense that he was running. But then over the, in the middle of the season, like they did get better defensively. Matt Burke taking over the play calling was huge for the defense. And then offensively, like you saw them kind of figure some things out, even though, yeah,

• 54:45Speaker 01

  the running back situation with mixing out and you had a late, late career Nick Chubb. But those things weren't ideal.

• 54:51Bill Simmons?

  They had the worst running backs in the league.

• 54:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. So trading for David Montgomery makes a lot of sense. Like Montgomery's still got, you know, with lack of wear and tear over the last couple of years, like he's still got some juice left in his legs. I think that that was a, a smart move and pairing him with a young back like makes a ton of sense. Tank Dell is CJ Stroud's favorite receiver. And he didn't play last year. He's back now because he had a horrific injury in 2024. You know, he's been back out there. I know he hasn't practiced the last few days, but it seems like he'll be ready to roll. So like, that's another, another addition here. There have been contract talks between CJ Stroud, his agent and the Texans. So there's at least a chance, but it's really hard to get a quarterback contract done right now because every agent is looking at this and going next year, the quarterback class of 2023

• 55:37Speaker 01

  will all be extension eligible. So that is, um, you know, Drake May and Jaden Daniels and Caleb Williams and Bo Nix. Baker Mayfield potentially is a free agent. That could be another one. Lamar Jackson is going to be due for a new contract that the Ravens have been working on for like two years now. So there's a number where that deal could get done, but if not, I know this CJ Stroud's totally comfortable going out and playing it out. So is there pressure? Yeah. And the way that things ended last year with like the weird Chuck Knoblock style yips where like he couldn't take a snap, like he couldn't handle the football. That was just weird and out of character. You'd like to think that it's not going to look like that, but no doubt if he doesn't have a contract, any quarterback, fourth year or your rookie deal, there's, there's a level of pressure, especially on a really good team.

• 56:18Bill Simmons?

  So you have the contract, you have the history from last season where he probably single handedly cost them a playoff run. There's another thing, and it doesn't happen that often in the NFL, but when you have a team that's kind of ready to potentially make a Super Bowl and you have a unit that's the other side of the ball, that's fucking awesome. And it's like the defense, if we can just get good enough offense, this defense can carry us and you're letting them down. That's where football becomes like unlike any other sport where it's like the two units working together. But if this unit's letting down this unit and it just compounds itself and you could feel it in that playoff game. And it, to me, it's like a fork in the road for him.

• 57:00Bill Simmons?

  Like he could be, he could salvage whatever, get, get a big contract out of this, make, win a couple of playoff games, or I can see him not being the quarterback next year. Like it's like a clear fork in the road. I don't know how it's going to play out.

• 57:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then listen, anytime you're making those commitments, we've seen teams, we talked about some of the teams that have made these big commitments to quarterbacks and you very quickly, like it's not even second guessing, it's like first guessing. It's like, you re-signed Kyler when you just don't like him at all as a person? You gave him 46 million a year? Tua with the concussion history? I mean, I remember when that deal got done and like I, I understand like, you know, if you're Chris Greer and that staff, like you drafted him, Mike McDaniel, like a big part of his pitch to get the job was like, I can win with Tua. Every other coach said, you gotta get rid of Tua. Mike McDaniel walked in and said, I can win with him. When you do that and you tie yourself to somebody, you're like, all right, well, we're going to pay him and we want to send a message by paying him. But I had other GMs, as soon as that contract going down being like, why in the world didn't

• 57:57Speaker 01

  they just let that play out and then franchise tag him? Like, what are you doing? Like what, why would you pay him now with the history? And obviously it played out that way. So I think that the combination of the fact that, you know, listen, Bill, in like 2013 or 14, certainly in 13, I think still in 14, the highest paid quarterback in the NFL was Aaron Rodgers at 22 million a year. 22 million. He was the highest paid quarterback for like two years then.

• 58:24Bill Simmons?

  Are you counting off the table Brady money to from TB 12?

• 58:27Speaker 01

  I'm not counting that house. I'm just saying the money that we know of.

• 58:30Bill Simmons?

  Money enough, okay.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  That market is now triple essentially. By the time that we get a Lamar deal or whatever, Caleb and Jaden and Drake and Bo, we'll see who else is in there. Like it's going to be a, you know, the, the $60 million quarterback, forget that. It's going to be the 70 million quarterback. And depending how you look at the way that like, the way that like Josh Allen's deal got redone, that was basically a two-year, $200 million extension. Like the, the numbers are astronomical. The agents have no reason to say like, well, we'll just take a $45 million a year deal. Daniel Jones coming off a torn Achilles, signed a two-year, $100 million contract. That's just where we are. So if you're committing that much cash and cap dollars to a player, I don't blame the people who are like, let's get all the information we can first. It's why, it's why Bryce Young won't have an extension right now.

• 59:15Speaker 01

  You know, they, they had some very preliminary talks from my understanding, but it was kind of everybody was under the understanding like, you're not going to pay what the market is. We're not going to take it. So let's just play it out. You guys get more information, so do we? And let's see where the market is next year. It just, it just creates, you know, ripple effects in this. And maybe we see some of these quarterbacks who in the past didn't get out there and now they do. And maybe quarterbacks toward the tail end of their rookie contracts begin getting traded. There, there's a lot of different macro things that could happen because you've got guys like, I mean, CJ Stroud on paper, three years, three playoff appearances, three playoff wins. Like you'd take that for a young quarterback, but it's like, all right, peel back the layers

• 59:58Speaker 01

  of why haven't they taken those additional steps, what it looked like at the end of last season? He's going to take it into his own hands, barring a contract getting done before this season. And he's going to be a really interesting, um, you know, guy available if in fact they aren't able to get something done.

• 1:00:12Bill Simmons?

  He has built in excuses for last year with the line, the no running game at all, the wide receiver injuries, like you could go down the line, but he also wasn't very good. Number two on my pressure rankings is Josh Allen. We have the whole season to talk about him. We don't need to do that here, but I don't need to lay that one out.

• 1:00:31Bill Simmons?

  Three, four, five, I have Herbert, Lamar and Burrow, tentatively in that order. So if, if, if I offered you Justin Herbert, Jackson and Burrow, who do you think, who would you put with the most pressure of those three guys? Cause I think it's Herbert because he's getting the MVP buzz. He's 10 to one. He's got the fourth best odds. We're hearing all this, oh, Mike McDaniel, oh, Harbaugh's blowing smoke left and right about him. He's got the offensive line back. Um, they're a little sleepery, but we've never seen him play well in a playoff game ever.

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  I would say at least pressure on Lamar because I think that we all need to of the three, I'll go backwards here. Least pressure on Lamar because I think we all have to be aware of the challenge that he is taking on here. Declan Doyle was the new OC. He's 30 years old. He's basically the same age as Lamar. He trained under Sean Payton and Ben Johnson, two of the most detail oriented, brilliant offensive minds that we've seen in the NFL. And from what they did in Chicago, which there's going to be a lot of corollaries to what they're doing in Baltimore with Lamar. Like if you go back to Caleb in the first two months of last season, like it was bumpy. Cause you're trying to take this dude who can be Superman every play and just go, no, we need Clark Kent like 90% of the time.

• 1:01:52Speaker 01

  Just execute and be in rhythm and let your feet, you know, do the work, connect your feet and your eyes. Have the ball come out on time. We'll worry about getting your receivers to hit the landmark. So the ball comes out on time. They're where they're supposed to be. You gotta do your part. I, I wouldn't be surprised at all if we have some bumps early on, uh, for Lamar. I think if I'm not mistaken, I think Baltimore plays Tennessee in week one. You know, Robert Sala will have some things cooked up to try to, you know, make things complicated for him. Um, but Lamar, I think that the fact that you've got a first time head coach, first time offensive coordinator. Yes, it's Lamar, two time NFL MVP. There's always pressure on that team and Lamar himself. But I think there, there needs to be from our perspective, more of a grace period with Lamar, just because there's so much new.

• 1:02:36Bill Simmons?

  Can I give you the first five for Lamar?

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, please.

• 1:02:39Bill Simmons?

  It's at Indy.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  Indy, sorry. Where Lu, Lu Anarumo is another one who historically, you know, going back, there, there've been, you know, some ups and downs when Lou was in Cincinnati, but he's played him a lot of times.

• 1:02:50Bill Simmons?

  Home for Saints, at Cowboys in Brazil, home Titans. There's your Sala.

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  There, there it was.

• 1:02:58Bill Simmons?

  At Falcons, at Browns is the first six. No, Falcons is Sunday night football. So the Falcons Browns will be the easier stretch of that because I think both those teams will not be good.

• 1:03:08Speaker 01

  Storyline out of the gate to me is going to be, the Ravens are probably going to win a majority of those games.

• 1:03:13Bill Simmons?

  See, that's what they, they look like. They're going to be five and one.

• 1:03:16Speaker 01

  Good enough. Yeah. That, that'll be the storyline.

• 1:03:18Bill Simmons?

  They're five and one. Why don't we feel good about them?

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  And the offense isn't doing like what we've seen in the past. It's not going to. Um, listen, Declan, the problem the Ravens are going to have is if their offense is good and if they go this direction, which is the plan, like Declan Doyle is going to be a head coach next year. Like he, he's going to be in that, in that type of category just because of the way that he's trained from a very young age.

• 1:03:38Bill Simmons?

  Strong name. I like his name. Declan Doyle. Sounds like, yeah, he could be like a detective. Yeah, it's good one. All right. So you have Lamar five, you have Burrow four?

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  I would say Burrow probably next because, you know, Joe's just had injuries. That's the biggest thing. Like, yeah, he's got pressure on himself to not get hurt and the Bengals have pressure on them to not get him hurt. So in the first preseason game where Orlando Brown Jr., who I love, he's a great dude. And, um, you know, but like he probably, you know, he's got one on tape that he's going to be like, ah, I should have had that one. And Burrow gets smoked and every Bengals fan goes, oh my God, it's more of the same. But like, they are trying to put, you know, the pieces around them. The investment in the defense, like that's the biggest thing with Joe. Yes, you can say, all right, we just want the defense to be better. And you go out and you trade the number 10 pick for Dexter Lawrence. You sign Brian Cook for a bunch of money. You give money to Boye Mafe, the Seattle pass rusher.

• 1:04:29Speaker 01

  Um, but you're doing those things also because if we're not having to throw the ball 50 times, if we're not perpetually in a shootout, guess what happens? Like Joe doesn't have to be dropping back. We can actually have a balanced offense. We can, you know, we can protect him more because we don't have to get five guys on the ropes or trying to come back. That's the idea is the big picture. It's not just, hey, we gotta block better. It's like, we gotta play a better game. There's pressure on Joe only because he hasn't been able to stay on the field. Those things aren't always necessarily his fault. You know, the one last year holds the ball for a long time in the pocket. He suffers a severe turf toe injury like that. You gotta be able to get the football out. Um, so yeah, I think that there's some level of him, but it's also, it's everybody else. Joe's a big backer, Zach Taylor. They've gone to the Superbowl together. Zach's in year eight.

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  Like there's pressure on the entire operation here, which is why they did unbangles things and were aggressive going out and trading a high draft pick, um, for a veteran player. And then with Justin Herbert, I, I think that there's less pressure. And I've said this before on Justin Herbert than there is on Jim Harbaugh. But another situation where the entire thing.

• 1:05:31Bill Simmons?

  Harbaugh over, Harbaugh over Herbert for pressure?

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And I would say because Justin Herbert is still a young, he's still a young quarterback. He also has new offensive coordinator, of course, with Mike McDaniel, and everybody's got high hopes about what that is going to look like here. But think about this, Jim Harbaugh coming off a national championship at Michigan. And of course there were a lot of other things that happened before, during and after that, that we won't get into here. But a highly regarded coach would want it every stop. He wanted UC San Diego. Um, he wanted Stanford. He won with the 49ers. He won at Michigan over the course of time, although it took him a while to get there. In San Francisco, his first two years were NFC championship, Superbowl. His third year was another NFC championship. It was instantaneous success. When the Chargers brought him from Michigan, the Falcons also interviewed him in that cycle.

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  Um, they ultimately hired Raheem Morris. He wanted to go to LA. That's where, you know, from September, like I was hearing that he was telling people in the building, like, I'm going to be the Chargers head coach next year. Like he had eyes on that job all along. Justin Herbert was a big part of it. But if you told me Jim Harbaugh is one of the highest paid coaches in the NFL was going to have, he's already had two, to have three seasons without a playoff win, you'd say that that is a failure for him coming in. So the pressure is on everybody there to be able to take that next step. With Herbert, he's had to overcome a lot. You want to talk about, I mean, CJ Stroud did have a lot of issues on the offensive line.

• 1:06:56Bill Simmons?

  Nothing like Herbert. Yeah.

• 1:06:58Speaker 01

  Joe Alt and Rashawn Slater didn't get out of camp last year. I mean, it was a constant revolving door and they made changes at the OC position. They made changes at the offensive line coach. So now you got Butch Berry there who's a very veteran guy, um, along Mike McDaniel. You know, let, let's see what the whole thing, you know, ends up looking like here. Herbert's had a lot of injuries. He plays through as much as anybody. I mean, that high ankle sprain, I think, I can't remember if that was last year or two years ago, but like, he had that thing taped, like, you know, it was like 1980s football. Like he had the full spack. Like his foot was three times the size. Like, he plays through stuff, but he's got to be able to, you know, and organizationally, they've got to be able to win. So I'd say Herbert, just because we've seen Lamar. Yeah. He hasn't gotten to a Superbowl. Joe hasn't won a Superbowl. Herbert doesn't want a playoff game.

• 1:07:43Speaker 01

  He was there and had a massive lead on the Jaguars once. That's the closest that they came. Um, but you know, everybody there involved. Again, I still put more pressure on Jim Harbaugh, um, than Justin Herbert. But everybody there has pressure on them in LA just because these are two guys making big time money in a big time city where you're competing for attention with the team that owns the stadium. And this is the year where now you've got to be able to take a step forward. You start wondering, all right, how many coaches go into year four without a playoff win? And you're not talking about really needing to make major changes. It would just would, it would raise a lot of questions as much space as they have in those guys, about exactly what the path forward is.

• 1:08:22Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Herbert, you could do the Stroud thing where there are excuses for what happened last year because of the injuries to the tackles. But there's, doesn't seem a lot of excuses this year. All right. So I have the Rams, CJ Stroud, Josh Allen, Harbaugh, Herbert together, Joe Burrow, Lamar as the next two. I'm just going to give you, because we got to go soon, I'm going to give you seven names and tell me if any of them have more pressure on them than Joe Burrow or Lamar Jackson.

• 1:08:52Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:08:52Bill Simmons?

  Jalen Hertz, Mike Frabel, Dak Prescott, Myles Garrett, Kyler Murray, Jaden Daniels and Jordan Love.

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  All right, let's go one by one.

• 1:09:06Bill Simmons?

  Well, just which one jumped out?

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  I'll give you, I mean, Jalen Hurts is the one that jumps out immediately. New offense that on paper isn't really geared to his skillset. Sean Mannion's coming in as another young offensive coordinator who's never called plays at any level. And he's going to be running, you know, he, he played under LaFleur in, in Green Bay. He played under Sean McVay or didn't play a whole lot. He was the backup quarterback under those guys. Like that's never been Jalen Hurts game. It's a precision style drop back under center offense. Jalen Hurts has a lot of pressure. Just because if they're committed to this style of play and it doesn't click immediately, you're going to be talking about, okay, where potentially would Jalen Hurts be the quarterback in 2027? We're not there yet. They want to see it.

• 1:09:52Speaker 01

  But when you don't have the evidence that he can succeed and play at a really high level in that system, I think inevitably there's a ton of pressure that goes into that, especially because he's getting to a point in his contract too, where if everything was going swimmingly in Philadelphia, we'd be talking about Jalen Hurts being up for a new contract as well.

• 1:10:07Bill Simmons?

  It's an interesting topic with Eagles fans, and I know unfortunately for me, I know a bunch of them. They still rub the Patriots Super Bowl in my face.

• 1:10:16Bill Simmons?

  Respect Hurts because he won them the Super Bowl, right? Big sturdy guy there, like clearly like they feel indebted to him because he, they did have success with them. But none of them are sure if he's that good. And you can hear when you talk to, they were always like, they just seem wishy washy about it.

• 1:10:35Speaker 01

  Pretty damn good in the Super Bowl.

• 1:10:36Bill Simmons?

  He was.

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  Run.

• 1:10:37Bill Simmons?

  He had a great run.

• 1:10:38Speaker 01

  They had a nonstopable play in the tush push, but he also, he threw the ball. If you go back to that Super Bowl, the deep shot to Devante Smith, that was basically the dagger. You know, he was executing at a high level. It's just, you know, listen, Jalen's another guy who is just, he's more to himself. He's, you know, he's an extremely hard worker. He's unbelievably driven, but he's not, you know, the guy who's going to be the, you know, the centerpiece of the locker room. That's just not his personality and everybody knew, you know, coming out of Alabama and Oklahoma, that wasn't really him. That's not necessarily a character flaw. I mean, they won a Super Bowl with them. I think we sometimes overlook this and he became available. He, if he became available, there would be, you know, a huge price for him. But, but the, the pressure comes from the Eagles again, on paper have made a move to like, hey, we're going to run this other style of offense.

• 1:11:23Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  That isn't naturally a fit for you. It would be like if, if the Patriots, when Tom Brady were there, hired Sean Mannion. I guess, I mean, it would have been like in his twenties, but like you hire some guy who's going to run the LaFleur offense. And Tom would have been like, we're doing what now? We've been running one offense and we've had a ton of success. We won a Super Bowl like.

• 1:11:40Bill Simmons?

  Why are we changing this?

• 1:11:40Speaker 01

  Do something that's completely different from what I do. That to me creates pressure. I mean, some of the other ones, Dak, you know, Dak's been a highly productive quarterback. He's at that point where, you know, the Cowboys have to be thinking about the future, but he's still in his prime. They've got a ton of firepower. I don't think that there's necessarily pressure that goes beyond just.

• 1:11:59Bill Simmons?

  Really? See, I totally disagree. I feel like there's, I feel like there's a lot of stuff. Watch out for Dallas in the NFC. They can make the Super Bowl. This is the best team he's had.

• 1:12:10Speaker 01

  Don't we do that a lot? Don't we always overvalue Dallas?

• 1:12:12Bill Simmons?

  Year 11. Like, yeah, I don't think he's made a conference championship game yet. And by the way, they're America's team. Everybody talks about them the most, even.

• 1:12:21Speaker 01

  They haven't made an NFC championship game in three decades. He's got the most valuable franchise, everything from business.

• 1:12:26Bill Simmons?

  When is it going to happen? I mean, you could argue the Parsons trade worked out for them, especially because they turned some of the picks into Williams. And like, I think you look at that holistically, it actually like was smart how they played it.

• 1:12:39Speaker 01

  That, but the weird thing about what Dallas did last year was like, they're the first team that I can remember that basically decided to start building their defense in August and continued through November. Like you say what you will about Matt Eberflus, but like he found out a week before, two before the season, we're trading your best player, Micah Parsons. It's like up until that point, it was not totally clear that this was actually going to happen. So you trade Micah and now it's like, well, we have no pass rushers. Then like, well, we got Kenny Clark. It's like, okay, that's great because we need to know it. We need a, you know, a defensive tackle, but like Kenny's more of a nose. He's not a three tech. Well, we don't have a three tech and then get to November, they're like, hey, we got to three tech. Quinn Williams is like, okay, cool. We could have used him the past two months.

• 1:13:24Speaker 01

  They traded for the linebacker, Logan Wilson. He's like, hey, middle linebacker, like the most important positions in that scheme are.

• 1:13:30Bill Simmons?

  They're doing it on the fly during this season.

• 1:13:32Speaker 01

  A middle linebacker. And you're just making it up in the middle of it. But the, the best thing they did, you know, if they were going to fire Flus, like going to getting Christian Parker, just getting a young, hungry dude. Like another one who if they're good, we're going to talk about Christian Parker's a head coaching candidate this year. I'm really fascinated to see, he comes from the Vic Fangio school. He's unbelievably bright young guy. He's going to have a plan. They're finally, they're steady in terms of their personnel. And obviously, you know, they drafted defense of Malachi Lawrence in the first round, which that's going to be an interesting one. Because that's a, a project. You know, they had two first round picks, use both of them on defense. Like that's, that's what you want to see. But how quickly does it all come together? That, that to me, I, I think they're going to be good on offense. I don't think there's a whole lot of doubt about that.

• 1:14:14Bill Simmons?

  A lot of people like them.

• 1:14:15Speaker 01

  Injuries. But yeah, I think defensively is where it boils down to.

• 1:14:19Bill Simmons?

  I got Dak in there. All right. Jordan Love, pressure because he, I anointed him a couple of weeks ago with Mina, the, the new nerd king at quarterback. The nerds are, they've moved their attention away from Justin Herbert. Now are they're over on Jordan Love touting the virtues of Jordan Love and how much better he is than people realize. And so he's got the pressure of the nerds. He's got to carry the weight for them.

• 1:14:41Speaker 01

  Top 10, top seven, like every statistical.

• 1:14:44Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. EPA, name anything. He's really good at it.

• 1:14:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, you think, I don't know, like if the Packers ever gone like three straight weeks over these, in the Jordan Love era, where like they have the same group of receivers, like every, it's Christian Watson's.

• 1:14:57Bill Simmons?

  By the way, it won't be, it won't be this season either.

• 1:15:00Speaker 01

  All right. Well, I mean, Tucker Kraft, the fact that he's come back, that, that's the number one thing that happened to them last year. Look at them playing before the Tucker Kraft injury and after, everybody was losing their minds. Cause I think the week after that, like they, they lost to Carolina. They had a close game against Carolina and they played, didn't play great the following week. It was like, what's going on? It's like, they lost a guy like Tucker Kraft is young Travis Kelsey.

• 1:15:18Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:15:19Speaker 01

  He can be that good. It seems like he's on track to play early in the season. I don't know how much, but Jordan Love is, I'll tell you this, like the coaches there love him. Matt LaFleur loves him, you know, the leader, the guy, the player. They just got to get some, you know, some better consistency. Josh Jacobs was banged up most of last year too. That was a, a really big deal for him. So yeah, it'll be interesting to see. I, I don't think that there's as much pressure other than again, you're the quarterback of the Green Bay Packers. You might be in the toughest division in the entire league.

• 1:15:46Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I think.

• 1:15:49Bill Simmons?

  Almost 99% done with my research. It's clear that that's the best division, I think. I think NFC North, top to bottom is probably the best one.

• 1:15:56Speaker 01

  Who you even, who you'd even argue. I mean, the NFC West minus Arizona, but there's no minus in the NFC North.

• 1:16:04Bill Simmons?

  Before we go, give me, every year there's a team that comes out of nowhere and makes the playoffs and everybody's shocked. And we're getting better at the Vegas odds with this. Like the Patriots were a huge shock last year, but actually not to people who were studying the schedule and the coaching change. All the, is there anybody in that bottom 10 that you feel like could make a leap that we're not seeing? I'm talking like, I'm talking like the Cleveland's, like those kinds of teams, the Giants, Arizona. Is there a shitty team that's not going to be shitty?

• 1:16:36Speaker 01

  Well, the thing is, how many shitty teams are there? Like going into the year, we talked about the four. I, I think that after that, like there's not a lot of teams you think are just going to be bad.

• 1:16:44Bill Simmons?

  I mean, you could say everyone in the NFC South might be shitty. You can say Arizona.

• 1:16:49Speaker 01

  Sit up for five straight years.

• 1:16:50Bill Simmons?

  You can say the Giants and Washington are both going to be shitty. Jets, Miami, Cleveland.

• 1:16:55Speaker 01

  Did you mention John Harbaugh on your pressure list?

• 1:16:58Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, it's year one. I think you got a grace period for year one.

• 1:17:01Speaker 01

  John Harbaugh went to the AFC Championship game in his first year in, in Baltimore. Like he's come in with more fanfare, one of the highest paid coaches. Like there's instant expectations. Now, I mean, people are going to feel different ways about Jackson Dart and Cam Scataboo.

• 1:17:15Bill Simmons?

  Our guy Schrager picked them to win 11 and 12 games. Did you see that? I gotta, I gotta, I don't know. I don't know if he was drinking when he did that. It's like a Pukunakua moment for Schrager.

• 1:17:25Speaker 01

  Schrager takes off the jacket and has a Scataboo jersey underneath and makes a Super Bowl pick. I'm not going to put too much, uh.

• 1:17:30Bill Simmons?

  All right, that's fair.

• 1:17:31Speaker 01

  Stocking into it. I have my, some of the, the board that I, I may have a whiteboard with a bunch of different stuff, but one of them is I have the ranking of the hot seat going into the year. Which is like ranked on who's most likely to get fired one through 32. So like looking at the teams up at the top of like, who's going to.

• 1:17:47Bill Simmons?

  Is Bowles at the top?

• 1:17:50Speaker 01

  I would say this, like Tampa, I mean, the fact that we were talking about it for a week after the season last year and there wasn't a clear answer and he cleaned out most of his, two thirds of his coaching staff, like, yeah, there's pressure on top of this, there's pressure on a lot of different coaches going into, you know, this year. Again, they just, they haven't had stability at offensive coordinator. You know, that's, that's just happened over and over. I mean, I think the one team, and I might be, listen, I might be dead wrong on this, but like, I could see Washington being good. I think Washington, what is their over under for wins? It's like six and a half or something, I think.

• 1:18:22Bill Simmons?

  It's around seven.

• 1:18:23Speaker 01

  I think everybody's looking at that team. And listen, Jaden Daniels, I know he was in your pressure rankings. He probably wouldn't have been there up until the whole lawsuit.

• 1:18:32Bill Simmons?

  It's about seven. People think seven, seven wins is, it's between six and a half and seven up.

• 1:18:37Speaker 01

  And listen, they could be bad again, but like, Washington fell into frankly, a familiar trap coming off of the 2024 season where like, I mean, Jaden Daniels was, was lights out that season. They go to the, all the way to the end of your championship game. Everybody's, you know, gassing them up. And what did they do? They doubled down on, well, let's bring in a bunch of veterans and trying to put it over the top. So that's where you sign Von Miller toward the end of his career. You, you bring back, you know, the Zach Ertzes of the world, um, you know, I'm forgetting some others, but they had a bunch of like, they had one of the, the oldest rosters that like 15 guys were aged 30 and older. And like, I remember going through there in camp last year for a practice and just being like, it feels slow. Debo was another one that they brought in. Like, this team just doesn't have

• 1:19:21Speaker 01

  a lot of juice. And at the time I chalked it up to Terry McLaurin was holding in and, you know, some other guys weren't out there, but like, you just got that sense. And I've seen it many times in the past where like, that doesn't work. So what they did this year, and they go and they draft a couple of, you know, wide receivers who they think they're going to be able to help them, um, in the near term here. Uh, they bring in Diggs. Like, Diggs is an older player, but nobody in the league practices harder than Diggs. He showed last year in what 51% of the snaps or whatever. He still has a thousand yard receiver. And he's a guy who you can play a lot in slot. You know, he can kind of offset some of the things that people try to do to you.

• 1:19:55Bill Simmons?

  Healthy McLaurin. McLaurin came in, he was battling injuries because he held out or held in whatever.

• 1:20:01Speaker 01

  Another, you know, older player. Like they do still have some of those older players on the team and they lost Larry Tunsil. I mean, that's the biggest deal. People aren't, everyone's like trade for a left tackle. It's like, from who? What left tackle is magically available in August? Like that, that's my biggest concern with them. But like, Jaden was, was, he didn't have the guys last year. Like all the injuries around him and the holdout with McLaurin, like they never had, Austin Eckler, another later stage player who got hurt. They'd never had their actual guys out there. Now you give them Diggs to go along with McLaurin, to go along with all these young receivers. Like, if you look at their depth chart, like their entire three deep at all three receiver spots is names you know. They got like, Diami Brown back there and like, a bunch of players, you're like, I could see all these guys competing. They've gotten younger, they've gotten faster,

• 1:20:45Speaker 01

  they invested into the defense, they moved on from a lot of those older players. Um, and they moved on, you know, in terms of their offensive coordinator. Again, this is another theme of the season. Like David Blau, another one, 30 years old. I feel like it was yesterday we were watching him fill in starting for the Lions on Thanksgiving with a, uh, the, the, the wristband where the flap was broken. So the entire game, his play sheet was flapping like this. That was like four years ago. And now he's an offensive coordinator. Like we'll, we'll see exactly what that ends up looking like. Like Detroit wanted him to come back there and be the offensive coordinator. Like they were really interested, um, in David Blau. If, if they can find some rhythm, because I don't know that Jaden Daniels was real fired up about the idea of playing a different style of offense. If Jaden's healthy,

• 1:21:27Speaker 01

  the pieces around him are healthy. Um, I, I think that they've got a real opportunity here in a division that I, I just don't know that there's a single dominant team going into the season. The Eagles are always there. The Cowboys, everyone's expecting, um, a lot from the Giants. We'll see. I could see them making noise if Jaden is Jaden again in a year where if he plays like he did as a rookie, there's your 60 to 70 million dollar quarterback right there.

• 1:21:54Bill Simmons?

  They went five and 12 last year. They lost Tunsil already. They play the AFC South and the NFC West. So that's basically two easy games and potentially five or six really hard ones. Um, they start out at Eagles, at Dallas, home Seahawks. And if they can somehow get through that one and two or two and one, I mean, it would be, they'll be heavy underdogs in each game.

• 1:22:19Speaker 01

  Steal that first one. That would help.

• 1:22:20Bill Simmons?

  One of those. But if they start out 0-3, then, uh, not great. All right, Tom. Um, you're going to be on the Ringer NFL Show. I don't know when it starts, but it started pretty soon and you're going to be on there. You're going to be on here on Thursdays. Uh, we're going to do a little info segment because I'm going to change around my Thursday show a little bit, but we're going to have a fun thing for that. And then, uh, some writing stuff is coming too. But you're back. You're part of the universe. Uh, great to have you. I'm glad we were able to, uh, shoot all this stuff. Say hi to everybody in Minnesota. Apologize to them that I didn't have them in the top two tortured rankings. I got to rethink that. They're probably, you know what? There is, I'm not going to rank anyone. There's like a four and nobody can be ranked against each other. I apologize.

• 1:23:01Speaker 01

  Everybody thinks they're aggrieved. Eagles fans think they're aggrieved.

• 1:23:03Bill Simmons?

  Everybody's aggrieved. Everybody has a grudge. All right. Uh, good to see you. Thank you, my friend.

• 1:23:08Speaker 01

  Thanks, Bill.

• 1:23:10Speaker 02

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• 1:24:34Bill Simmons?

  Well, this is a first for BS Podcast history. Uh, Sammy Koppelman is here. His father is Brian Koppelman. This is the first ever father-son podcast thing on my pod. And I, and honestly, people are going to compare it to LeBron and Bronny James. We can't, we, it's, it's two separate worlds. I'm not going to do that.

• 1:24:52Speaker 05

  We need to be going for Rick Brunson, Jalen Brunson.

• 1:24:56Bill Simmons?

  That sounds great. Yeah.

• 1:24:57Speaker 05

  If I fail, we're looking at Bronny and LeBron. If this is a success, I'm the Jalen, he's the Rick.

• 1:25:05Bill Simmons?

  All right. So you're into, uh, the whole financial world. You're the publisher of Hunter Brook and you've been following all of these, uh, all of these billionaire shenanigans. And we have a ton of them right now. Monday, a quiet sports day allegedly in mid-August, and then Lakers and Clippers both blew up in all these different ways. And I tweeted that I thought the Lakers situation was a thousand times more interesting than the Clippers situation because it has all of these other ramifications outside of basketball. I was probably doing a little hyperbole with the thousand times, but, um, I need you to explain this Mark Walter situation to my audience because it's starting to seem like he's an actual crook. It's starting to seem like he might actually go to jail. He's already,

• 1:25:50Bill Simmons?

  uh, shed himself of the Lakers. He's selling his Chelsea stake reportedly right now, which was like 12 and a half percent. And my guess is the Dodgers are going to be next. So what is this? Is this like, are we moving toward like a Bernie Madoff, Ivan Bostky type of situation? What is this?

• 1:26:07Speaker 05

  I wouldn't quite say we're at Madoff. And I do have to say, I've worked with Pablo your buddy on a couple of those stories having to do with the Clippers. And what's most interesting about that story and this story is it's kind of the same story. It's about billionaires who believe that certain rules don't apply to them and hate to have to operate within a system where they're suddenly constricted. And so when you look at Walter, what basically happened here is, as you know, in 2012, he buys the Dodgers. And at the time, people are kind of confused. They're like, how's this guy who runs Guggenheim, which is a successful operation, but he's not known as some giant titan of industry?

• 1:26:52Speaker 05

  How is he buying the Dodgers for this amount of money?

• 1:26:55Bill Simmons?

  And what was it like 2.25 billion, something like that? And then the other bidders were upset. They didn't understand. They had questions about where he got the money and all that stuff.

• 1:27:04Speaker 05

  Yeah. I, I was looking at this last night. It seems like Mark Cuban was involved. It seems like the next bid was almost a billion dollars shy of Walter's bid. So people were confused. They were like, where's he getting this money? And at the time, people started looking into the question, was he using insurance money? Money people had been putting away for their insurance because he owns a couple of insurance companies. And so the question was, was he using that money to buy the team, which echoes the current scandal and what he's being investigated for by the DOJ, which just to explain it in basic terms, the way this works is if you have a life insurance policy, you're putting money away so that one day, when you die, your loved ones have something or you get paid an annuity when you're old.

• 1:27:47Bill Simmons?

  So, uh, so our dads get an insurance policy. Basically, when they die, we get money and they took care of us a little bit.

• 1:27:55Speaker 05

  Exactly. Like if my dad hadn't started lifting like a crazy person and he died from the O K City, he would suffer it.

• 1:28:02Bill Simmons?

  If your dad wasn't continuing to sell shows, if he had to actually file stuff away. Anyway.

• 1:28:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. Um, and so people do that and they take out these. Life insurance policies. And in the meantime, being an insurer is pretty good because you get to invest that money in what you want to invest it in. And the way it works is usually they're going to go invest that money in safe bonds or in a diversified index of stocks so that your money is safe overall. And they're collecting a vig, and that's no secret. That's why it's a business. But just like when you're sports betting and the betting platforms collecting a vig, that's sort of just like the way it works. What Walter figured out and what a bunch of people have started doing is, well, what if you just start investing that in like better assets, assets that are riskier, but you might be able to juice the returns. And one

• 1:28:49Speaker 05

  big asset class Walter's obsessed with is sports. And it's not just the Dodgers and then the Lakers. He has invested in Formula One. We found in one of our investigations that he was invested in American rodeo, a bullfighting team. He clearly thinks that sports is this incredible asset class. And it's actually, in theory, okay, to use insurance money to invest in assets like sports teams if you disclose to people what you're doing. The problem here with Mark Walter is that you're supposed to specifically disclose something called a related party transaction, which sounds boring. But basically, what this means

• 1:29:34Speaker 05

  is you can't pay yourself. Like, if he took his insurance money and he used it to buy himself a restaurant he wanted to run that was going to go out of business otherwise, that wouldn't be allowed. And so you have to disclose, all right, yes, I invested in the sports team, which I also own, but I think it's a good investment for X, Y, and Z reasons. And what Walter did, according to all of these reports, the reason that FBI agents boarded his private jet and stole his phone and stole his computer, which doesn't happen every day for billionaires like this, that's a serious, serious thing, is he wasn't disclosing that he was investing in related parties. And one of the insurers he owns had said 3% of its investments were going to related parties. They then corrected their

• 1:30:18Speaker 05

  filings to say it was 40. And so that raises the question, what's he been doing with these billions and billions of dollars Americans have been putting away for their insurance policies? And it seems like he's been using that money to buy sports teams left and right.

• 1:30:32Bill Simmons?

  So people like our parents and grandparents are buying it, buying insurance and assuming that it's going to be invested in the safest possible stuff, right?

• 1:30:42Speaker 05

  Correct.

• 1:30:43Bill Simmons?

  And he, and he's not the only one who did this because it's like a trillion dollar industry now. But he was like, well, what if I take that money, I'm going to steer it toward some higher risk stuff, and they trust me because I'm successful. But then the, the problem is he was investing it in his own shit. And, and reporting it as, oh, it's only, what did he say? It was like 3 billion?

• 1:31:05Speaker 05

  Independent.

• 1:31:06Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, it was, oh, it's only 3 billion of that. But it turned out, I've heard reports, 16, 20, you're saying 40. Like, this is the question of, the big question is, did he just fail to disclose this? Or is this fraud?

• 1:31:20Speaker 05

  And the other big question is, where is all of the money? We know some of it went to these sports teams. But the kind of person who wouldn't disclose that, it raises questions about his firm, Guggenheim. And just to give you some color on Mark Walter, because it's kind of fun, like, you know, it's called Guggenheim. So you probably think it's like the Guggenheim family, like the Guggenheim Museum.

• 1:31:42Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:42Speaker 05

  For Men in Black. Okay, so here's like how Mark Walter made this fund called Guggenheim. There was a guy named Meyer Guggenheim. He died in 1905. His son was a guy named Solomon Guggenheim. Then that person had a daughter named Barbara Guggenheim. Their son was a guy named Peter Lawson Johnston, Sr., whose son was Peter Lawson Johnston, the second. Walter had that guy as a co-founder of his company so he could legally use the name Guggenheim.

• 1:32:12Bill Simmons?

  Wow.

• 1:32:13Speaker 05

  And then they got rid of that guy. But it has this air of legitimacy. It has this patina of institutionalism. And that's what Walter's been doing his whole life, is he's a genius at accruing assets, figuring out how to invest in them, levering them, and then getting what he wants from the world. And you kind of have to give him credit. It's pretty amazing. I mean, this guy owns some of the premier assets in the entire world. And the other key point of all this, the other way he does it, is that insurance money's super valuable because historically, it was invested in safe stuff, which means from a regulation standpoint, unlike some other stuff that was regulated after 2008, you're

• 1:32:57Speaker 05

  allowed to lever it. So like, you put away, your dad puts away some money in a life insurance policy. And that's a dollar. And Walter can go invest like $50, $20, $15 for every dollar that was put away.

• 1:33:12Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:12Speaker 05

  And so it ends up being this leverage in the system that compounds. And so you have billions in insurance money. You can buy tens of billions of dollars worth of assets. And that's how this kind of random guy who everyone was surprised bought the Dodgers in 2012, ends up owning a piece of Chelsea and the Dodgers and the Lakers and all these other premier, signature assets of America.

• 1:33:32Bill Simmons?

  Well, I went back, I looked back at my notes from last summer because I almost did a thing after, after he bought the Lakers. Because I couldn't figure out where he got all the money. Because it was a lot of money.

• 1:33:43Speaker 05

  What tipped you off to it being weird? I mean, I followed that you've kind of

• 1:33:46Bill Simmons?

  I, I went back and looked at all my notes and I sketched out this whole thing. And I chickened out and I didn't do it because he went to, what's it called, Mubadala, the, he got like a huge investment from them.

• 1:33:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, Abu Dhabi.

• 1:33:58Bill Simmons?

  And I, people started, there were some whispers about like, basically, the Saudi money has bought the Lakers here. And they're trying to pretend that that's not what happened. But it actually is what happened. And then you go back and you read, he got all this money, but then he also invested in them. And it just seemed like this circle of money going around. And it's like, you give me the money and then I'll give it back. And we've invested because the NBA has this rule, you can only invest, you can only take 20% from private equity and that's it. That's the cap. So if you buy, if I buy a team for 10 million, 10 billion, I can only get 2 billion in private equity. So it seemed like he had found some end around. And I went, I did it and I was going to do a whole

• 1:34:41Bill Simmons?

  thing about it. And I just, I was too nervous about it. It's not my expertise. And ironically, I was, I was texting with Pablo about it.

• 1:34:49Speaker 05

  You and Cousins Al could have been like Woodward and Bernstein at the end of that.

• 1:34:53Bill Simmons?

  No, but you know who I texted? Our friend Pablo. And I, because Pablo's like, you gotta come on the pod. And I was like, I want to do Mark Walter. And we texted about it. And we had never done it. But it never added up to me. I never understood how the money circled back to the people he was getting the investment from. And I, the league just is so desperate to make as much money as possible on every franchise, they're kind of like, we don't want to know. Which has been part of the problem with the Clippers situation, too. But the league's always like, don't tell us, like, we don't, nothing to see here. This was crazy.

• 1:35:27Speaker 05

  They'd much rather stay in the dark. Pablo and I are working on a story having to do with Mark Walter. Not going to get into the specifics, but I'll just say, high level, it's pretty interesting that after he bought the Dodgers in 2012, a couple of years later, Magic Johnson ended up being the owner of a life insurance company that he bought from Guggenheim, Walter's firm.

• 1:35:47Bill Simmons?

  Huh.

• 1:35:48Speaker 05

  I have no evidence that anything went wrong there, yet. But it's the exact same structure we're talking about here.

• 1:35:55Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:55Speaker 05

  And, you know, insurance companies are mostly owned by these like, great institutions. And in this case, they're owned by Mark Walter. And then there's one random insurance company owned by Magic Johnson, of all people. It's strange. I think the big problem here, you mentioned the private equity sort of max.

• 1:36:11Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:12Speaker 05

  Is that teams have just become too expensive. Like, it used to be that the rich guy in your town could buy your sports team. And they, that worked because they were a fan of the team. And they'd go to every game and they'd want their kids to run the team. But now these teams are worth like $10 billion. And so there's not that many people who actually can come up with that kind of money. And, you know, Pablo and I, and Hunter Brook, we investigated Mat Ishbia as our first big story.

• 1:36:37Bill Simmons?

  I want to talk about him in a second. Yeah.

• 1:36:39Speaker 05

  And, and that's another example of, all right, someone had to pay billions and billions of dollars. And the NBA had to put that team up for sale in a pretty distressed situation. And it ends up being Ishbia, who on paper has billions of dollars, and on paper seems like exactly the person you'd want owning a sports team. He was a walk-on at Michigan State.

• 1:36:59Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:00Speaker 05

  Really cares about basketball. He literally has Isaiah Thomas on the board of his company. Like, this is a true basketball guy. But the problem is, the people buying these teams now, they can't really afford the teams on their own. And so that ends up leaving the NBA in pretty tricky situations.

• 1:37:18Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. When it, when like, one third of the league was basically for sale at the end of the 2000s, before they had the lockout, the guy who bought Memphis, Michael Para, bought it with, he had this, this company that was doing well. But then as he was buying it, the company was not doing well.

• 1:37:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, Robert Para.

• 1:37:35Bill Simmons?

  Robert Para, I'm sorry. I confused it with Michael Sarah. Robert Para.

• 1:37:39Speaker 05

  Very different guys, by the way.

• 1:37:42Bill Simmons?

  Totally.

• 1:37:43Speaker 05

  Totally different guys. I don't think, I don't think Robert Para would have been very good in Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist.

• 1:37:48Bill Simmons?

  No, or This is the End. But people were worried at the time, oh, my God, he's not going to be able to cover the thing. But at that time, it was 220 million, whatever he paid for the Grizzlies. Now we're talking about, Ishbia paid over $4 billion for the Suns. And if it doesn't work out for them, now you have, like, if he, if, and he just disclosed all, they, they, what did he report, like 450 million in losses for the second quarter of his company?

• 1:38:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:38:15Bill Simmons?

  That just happened.

• 1:38:16Speaker 05

  You have to give Ishbia credit as a sports team owner. This guy, in my view, basically bankrupted his company, which was the biggest mortgage lender in the country, in order to pay for this.

• 1:38:26Bill Simmons?

  In order to buy the Suns. Right.

• 1:38:27Speaker 05

  Which, and to, and to continue running the Suns. This guy was paying Bradley Beal $50 million a year.

• 1:38:34Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:38:35Speaker 05

  When he was owning a mortgage company as rates were going up and they stopped making money. And what happened with Ishbia is truly, um, he was taking $600 million a year out of the company in this dividend. The company couldn't afford. And then to buy the team, he took out what's called a margin loan against his shares in the team, uh, against his shares in UWM. And so what that meant was he basically gave the bank billions of dollars worth of his UWM stake. And so when the shares fell in value, the bank's able to tighten the screws and say, all right, you gotta sell shares, you gotta put up more money. And he was willing to take essentially every dollar he could out of that company in order to keep running the Suns. And that's kind of what happens. Like he, he came in to run the Suns.

• 1:39:19Speaker 05

  He said he was going to sell super cheap concessions. He said he was going to make it affordable to watch the games on TV. He was trying to be, I think, like a consummate, really good owner. Um, probably trusted Isaiah Thomas too much, which led to all kinds of problems in my own childhood as a Knicks fan. I could have pulled him out to do that. The Eddie Curry trade is reason enough not to put Isaiah Thomas on the board of your public company. But ultimately what happened is, um, two weeks ago, he had to get rescue financing for his company. They had no more money left. They had to dilute all their shareholders and the stock went from whatever it was down to a dollar or something.

• 1:39:53Bill Simmons?

  Well, you, you understand this stuff better than I do, but from what, how I read it and understood it, he had made a big bet with a big chunk of his company that interest rates were going to go down by a certain time. Right? And that, and that, so he leveraged it in a way like it'll be fine when the interest rates go down. Only they never did. And, and it was funny to like, reading about it, it was very similar to the Kevin Durant trade, where he's like, um, Kevin Durant, we gotta get him. We're putting all this stuff in and this is going to be, and it was like this massive swing. It's like, I'm a big swing taker. And it didn't work out and it didn't seem like this swing worked out either.

• 1:40:31Speaker 05

  No, and it's funny, you can actually look at how his company was doing and sort of when he was making these big bets in his company and when he was making big bets on the team. And you'll notice that the Suns went from a tax paying team to a not tax paying team.

• 1:40:43Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:40:43Speaker 05

  After then traded Durant away. That was the same period of time when he really needed money at the company.

• 1:40:48Bill Simmons?

  And they bought out Bradley Beal and stretched it out so it could get him under the luxury tax threshold. And now they're not a big spender like they were.

• 1:40:56Speaker 05

  Exactly. My big question reporting on Ishbia over the last bunch of months was which is he going to pick? His company or the team? Because there were all kinds of ways he could have shored up the company's balance sheet. He could have just stopped paying the $600 million a year dividend and they would have probably been fine. But he wanted to sign some players and he wanted to fund this team.

• 1:41:15Bill Simmons?

  And he's competitive and all these guys are competitive and they're competing against all the other rich guys.

• 1:41:20Speaker 05

  Totally. I guess I'm curious, do you think the NBA seeing this now where there's some owners who it seems like couldn't really afford teams with their own money? Like Walter and like Ishbia. And then the owners who are really rich, like Ballmer, become almost impossible to punish or to contain.

• 1:41:36Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:41:37Speaker 05

  Because the NBA is not going to punish Ballmer, the richest owner in American sports. So do you think at this point, they actually end up just saying, all right, whatever? Private equity money's fine, Middle Eastern money is fine. We don't really care who is paying.

• 1:41:51Bill Simmons?

  I think they're so desperate and focused on driving the value of these franchises. Like Vegas, one of the reasons, I got a lot of intel about, um, why Iger and Kushner bought the Lakers. The Vegas thing unquestionably is over nine billion now, like for the, for the fees, right? And Iger and Kushner were trying to get it. They didn't have the highest bid. They didn't really feel like a Vegas team that we probably need to build a new arena. And who the hell knows if Vegas is worth that much? And at some point Kushner got the idea he'd been reading about the Walter stuff. And I had thought Adam Silver kind of nudged him there, but I don't think that's what happened. I think, I think he went to Walter directly and was like, yo. So anyway, the point is these things are going so high.

• 1:42:35Bill Simmons?

  I think that's what the league wants. And when you have somebody like Ishbia who buys the Suns and basically buys the team himself, he still has outs with the team. Like he could still sell 35% of the Suns to somebody and be like, and if in four years, if I sell, you get, you get, uh, first dibs on buying the whole team, which is what Mark Walter with the Bus Family. There's this guy, I think Lucas Walton bought a piece of the Bulls. And now if the Bulls sell over the next few years, he's the first one that can buy in. So Ishbia still has ways to make money. And I think the way, that's the way these rich guys look at these teams where it's like, once I have the asset, I can skin it any different way I want, but I, I, I just got to go all in and get it and then I'll figure it out.

• 1:43:18Bill Simmons?

  But the problem is, as you said, these things are too expensive now.

• 1:43:22Speaker 05

  Totally. And it's actually funny, like one thing Ishbia did along these lines is he wanted to buy out his other co-owners. He actually didn't want to have a bunch of minority owners. And so he bought out a couple of his co-owners with shares in his company.

• 1:43:34Bill Simmons?

  Wow.

• 1:43:35Speaker 05

  Right before it takes, and so they ended up owning it. And then there were other co-owners of the team who then end up suing Ishbia because he was trying to basically aggressively force them out. And I agree that given that the assets just keep going up in value, it's actually a lot of room to navigate for the people who own them. And so, yeah, I mean, we saw Dan Gilbert, it seems like is going to sell a piece of the Cavs. It seems like Ishbia could sell a piece of the Suns. And then you do get a couple billion of liquidity.

• 1:44:06Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:44:06Speaker 05

  But it's also interesting to think, what happens if the direction of these team values ever flips? I mean, I have no reason to think that they will, as you said, uh, in one of your recent episodes, it's never been a mistake to buy a sports team. They're all valued higher than they've ever been, but there's been moments when the teams have gone down in value and people have had to sell. And that's going to end really badly for the people who had to take on leverage, who had to use insurance money, who had to buy these teams when they couldn't really afford them. And I think what's really interesting about Kushner buying this team is he's doing it through this entity, Thrive Eternal.

• 1:44:41Bill Simmons?

  Right. His, his other fund.

• 1:44:44Speaker 05

  The idea is, okay, he's this big investor in AI, OpenAI and SpaceX. And he's like, on the one hand, everything's going to be computer, you know, it's all going to be AI. But then in that world, what are people going to do? What's going to matter? And like sports is one of the only things that people think is going to persist through an AI future. And so you can imagine that all these AI guys with the crazy wealth being created from the SpaceX IPO, but then also it's going to be OpenAI and Anthropic. There's going to be a bunch of new money that's looking to buy the kinds of assets that never go away. And so my guess is that this particular bubble, if it's a bubble or this particular asset class does keep going up, at which point, you know, maybe every team ends up being owned by Abu Dhabi.

• 1:45:29Bill Simmons?

  Well, the fear is you go back and you look at the early 2000s, the last time this happened, when we had the internet boom. What happened? We had a crash after the boom and then it kind of readjusted and went. We haven't had the crash with any of this stuff yet. So that's one thing. And then you look at, when we talk about the amount of money, these guys can be like, like Josh Kushner is rich. He's still not writing a $12 billion check for the Lakers. And what happened yesterday with the Bus Family, basically reenacting season four succession and all of the siblings that Jeannie had basically shanked over the years and kept control and kept her governorcy for five years. And they finally got their revenge on her. But they got, they wanted to get dragged in the deal, which is what happened with the Celtics too.

• 1:46:14Bill Simmons?

  It's like, oh, that's the price. I'd like to sell mine as well. The Celtics paid over seven, or the Chisholm and those guys paid over seven billion because these guys got dragged in. The Laker people got dragged, the Buses wanted to get dragged in. So Kushner's got to write, basically he's got to find 12 billion somehow, even if he's putting in two and a half, three, whatever. Iger's putting in 500. They still have to scramble now to find eight billion more in people to invest. So where do you go? Probably the Middle East, right?

• 1:46:42Speaker 05

  You know, it's funny though, this comes at the same moment when these live tour golfers are not being paid.

• 1:46:47Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, they're pulling back, right?

• 1:46:49Speaker 05

  But the Saudis are canceling live. It's a weird moment for all of this with the Iran war and huge tourism decline in the Middle East and the Middle East tightening its coffers. It's a funny moment to have to come up with.

• 1:47:03Bill Simmons?

  And not wanting a sports wash anymore. Like, like a couple of years ago, they were throwing money at all the American sports and the premier league, wherever, because they were trying to change the narrative.

• 1:47:15Speaker 05

  Sports watching is a luxury. Like that's something you do when you've got a ton of money and.

• 1:47:19Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:19Speaker 05

  You want to have the World Cup in Qatar and you want to have live golf and you want to pay Phil Mickelson enough money, uh, that he's going to leave the PGA tour. But suddenly if money gets tight in the Middle East, you're not exactly dying to buy assets that, you know, you could buy again in future years when you have more liquidity. But there is a lot of money sloshing around the system. And I think what Mark Walter shows is that there's pockets of money people don't even realize are entering these sports leagues. Because surely this is not the only example of insurance money being used to fund sports teams. A lot of owners across a lot of leagues are tied to all these industries, private credit and private equity and insurance.

• 1:48:01Speaker 05

  And they're very, very sophisticated at figuring out how to take out loans against their assets. So even if in some of these cases, it's not insurance money directly being invested, it's some person taking out money against their insurance company. And so ultimately there's a lot of risk in the system. And I think what Mark Walter will show is the first couple of cracks. And once those first couple of cracks are revealed, I think there's going to be a bunch of others across all these leagues.

• 1:48:31Bill Simmons?

  Well, and you can see with the NBA, like the Blazers, they went for four, right? And that was the highest bid. But then a couple of years before that, the Timberwolves were one and a half. Utah was like 1.6, you know? So we've, we've seen just the smaller market teams are all probably worth five. The Celtics, they ended up paying over seven when you, when you include the people that got dragged in. They're probably worth allegedly nine now. They probably all feel like they made money because this Lakers sets this new figure. And yeah.

• 1:49:02Speaker 05

  Were you a little insulted by the delta between the Lakers price and the Celtics price?

• 1:49:08Bill Simmons?

  It hurt.

• 1:49:10Bill Simmons?

  It was a wake up call for us. No, but I think the Lakers and the Knicks are the two premier teams you'd want to buy in the NBA. I think even the Celtic fans would admit that.

• 1:49:21Speaker 05

  The most like mind bending, nauseating part of all of this is that suddenly Jim Dolan looks like a genius, exactly who you'd want to have on your sports team.

• 1:49:31Bill Simmons?

  Unbelievable.

• 1:49:32Speaker 05

  I spent my entire life resenting Jim Dolan, thinking through ways I could convince people to go buy the Knicks from him. Wanted to stake out Gracie Mansion and get Mike Bloomberg to do it when I was a kid. I wanted to just knock on the door and be like, please save New York. Everyone will love you if you buy the team. And suddenly like everyone's going to the sphere. It stocks through the roof. The Knicks won the championship. He really let guys, you know, run the team independently. And he's not one of these owners who's using borrowed money. It's a family asset, which historically it's always been a bit of an eye roll. Like, yeah, I mean, this guy inherited the Knicks. What a joke. But actually, there's some continuity that makes that stronger, a stronger foundation than these teams that

• 1:50:17Speaker 05

  are being bought with new money or fake money or borrowed money or insurance money or whatever.

• 1:50:21Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:50:22Speaker 05

  As a Knicks fan, I feel pretty good today. This might be the top for the Knicks. I might be jinxing the whole thing. But I feel pretty with Jim Dolan as the owner of the Knicks.

• 1:50:31Bill Simmons?

  I've known you since you were a little kid. And you were just tortured Knicks fan who was just in basketball hell. And now you're married. You have a Knicks championship, you know, that you can hang your hat on. And your dad's one of the premier powerlifters in America over age 60. So you have a lot going on right now.

• 1:50:48Speaker 05

  Totally. It's a big, it's a big moment.

• 1:50:50Bill Simmons?

  This is it. This is the peak. Dolan is a great point. He's probably in the best situation. Like his whole empire, added all together is worth at least $15 billion. He would never sell because he loves it. He loves the juice.

• 1:51:04Speaker 05

  But maybe this is what we do. Maybe you agree to juice the Spotify algorithm so that his band gets some listens. And if his band gets some listens, maybe he'll feel fulfilled enough that he'll sell the team to someone else.

• 1:51:15Bill Simmons?

  I'm gonna, I'll talk to them about that.

• 1:51:17Speaker 05

  Dolan's a, Dolan's a big, Dolan's a big winner from this whole thing. And the Knicks are huge winners from this whole thing.

• 1:51:24Bill Simmons?

  Bus family, bus family losers. The bus family are good. They're going to be suing each other for the next five years.

• 1:51:29Speaker 05

  I was gonna say, I'm not sure that they actually sell. I think that was a pretty weird coup attempt yesterday. But we all know which bus actually runs the show. I don't think the siblings can get out.

• 1:51:40Bill Simmons?

  I know, but explain this to me. It's a controlling trust and she quote unquote runs it, but they can all vote on what to do. And if, if they basically have a two thirds majority, they have to do what the majority is, right? And I guess her vote, the way I understand it is if it was a tie, she would have the deciding vote. But it's not an deciding vote. It sounds like it was five to one. And they all want to sell because a couple of the kids want to use the money to buy an NBA Europe team. So the problem for Walter is if this gets tied up in court, and it keeps going, it could delay the sale. And it sounds like he needs money like ASAP.

• 1:52:18Speaker 05

  He needs the cash stat.

• 1:52:19Bill Simmons?

  Like right now.

• 1:52:20Speaker 05

  What's your, what's your guess? What happens to Ballmer? What happens to Walter? What happens to Ishbia?

• 1:52:25Bill Simmons?

  Well, I was gonna ask you. I think Ishbia will be fine because he'll sell a chunk of the team if he has to. Will the words Mark Walter today pled guilty, dot, dot, dot? Will that sentence be said in the next two years? Will the words Mark Walter pled guilty?

• 1:52:43Speaker 05

  I think it's really possible. I also think the Trump administration has not put away very many billionaires. And so I'm sure they work something out. But I don't think there's a single safe asset in the entire Mark Walter cinematic universe. Like, I think it's potentially all for sale. And I do think that the Dodgers being sold, a piece of the Suns being sold, I think all of this is on the table.

• 1:53:09Bill Simmons?

  Well, but that's why this is such a bigger story than just the Lakers. Like, if he has to sell the Dodgers, who spent so much money over the last seven years that they're going to single handedly create the baseball lockout next year, they also won two titles. And I think one of the many differences between the Clippers situation and the Mark Walter situation, he's had all this extra money to buy the last two World Series titles. The Dodgers are back to back champions, partly because of all the fucking money this guy spent. The Clippers have had no success at all. They won basically two playoff series in seven years with Kawhi Leonard. They did all this stuff, whatever they did or didn't do, who knows? But none of it paid off. And they built the Oklahoma City Thunder. Like, it was a disaster in every way. It was the opposite for the Dodgers.

• 1:53:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, totally. Say what you will about Walter. He never traded a pick that became SGA.

• 1:53:59Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:53:59Speaker 05

  He was a great owner of, of the Dodgers and he's been

• 1:54:02Bill Simmons?

  He was.

• 1:54:03Speaker 05

  A decent owner of the Lakers. He pulled off one of the great trades of all time under his ownership.

• 1:54:11Bill Simmons?

  I don't think he, does he get credit for that?

• 1:54:13Speaker 05

  It was, it was in the

• 1:54:14Bill Simmons?

  It was right, yeah, it was right in there.

• 1:54:16Speaker 05

  It predated him.

• 1:54:16Bill Simmons?

  Could sort of get credit.

• 1:54:18Speaker 05

  He was a good owner. And look, it's pretty easy to be a good owner if you're spending other people's money.

• 1:54:23Bill Simmons?

  Right.

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• 1:55:18Bill Simmons?

  Okay, so Clippers, this is a harder one because this is now being investigated for a year. Pablo started everything. It's going and going and going. And it doesn't seem like there's a smoking gun. And what we learned yesterday, ESPN had this report, they basically said, we didn't find any real hardcore, the NBA hasn't found any hardcore evidence, or the investigator. And now they have to figure out this weird, how are we going to penalize you? And the Clippers like, we didn't do anything. And it feels like the Clippers and the NBA are going to go to war. Al Davis versus the NFL style feels like the outcome here.

• 1:55:53Speaker 05

  I think maybe. But if I were Ballmer, I don't think I'd actually want to be in arbitration. I don't think there's going to be a friendlier judge for this particular matter than Adam Silver. And that story yesterday, I think was a huge mistake. Clearly, the sources who leaked that were the Clippers. I mean, there was a statement the Clippers released when the story came out on like a beautiful template background where they had a PR ready to go.

• 1:56:18Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:18Speaker 05

  And the NBA, I don't know if you've ever reached out to the NBA for comment, they're like usually, you know, pretty tough to get to comment. And they almost never say anything publicly. And after the story came out, the NBA released this statement saying the story had numerous inaccuracies. I think what that was, was a leak from Ballmer's camp. Like when Samuel Alito leaked the Dobbs decision revealing Roe v. Wade, where he was like, I want it on the record right now. You guys don't have any findings that could put me away. And to me, it's actually not a close call. It's pretty obvious that Kawhi had sponsorship deals with companies like Daktronics, the Jumbotron maker. And he never did anything for them. You can't see it. When we worked on that story, we called Daktronics. We're

• 1:57:00Speaker 05

  like, can you show me one clip of Kawhi even just saying like, I love Daktronics, hell of a jumbo board, that halo board for the Clippers arena?

• 1:57:08Bill Simmons?

  I didn't know that. I didn't even know what Daktronics was. And I go to Clipper games. I didn't even know that was the name of the company.

• 1:57:14Speaker 05

  And you certainly hadn't heard Kawhi advertising it. Because by the way, there's not a lot of consumers who are like looking to buy Jumbotrons and are going to be persuaded by Kawhi. Like on its face, it's ridiculous that nothing happened here. But I think, and this goes to the overall point of all of this, the NBA doesn't have much latitude to punish Steve Ballmer.

• 1:57:32Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:32Speaker 05

  Because these owners don't work for Adam Silver. Adam Silver works for these owners. And there's fewer and fewer owners who can actually pay for these teams these days. And the assets are getting more and more expensive. And I think having a blue chip guy like Steve Ballmer, who built one of the great American businesses, is the kind of thing the NBA is not going to get rid of. So my guess on the Clippers is that Ballmer walks away with some kind of punishment and they just make Uncle Dennis the fall guy. I think they're going to say Kawhi maybe never even got this money. That's what I think they're going to try to argue. That Dennis was negotiating side deals. And yes, that might have been cap circumvention. But how much of that money was getting back to

• 1:58:14Speaker 05

  Kawhi? I think that's where the NBA could land, where they can slap the Clippers on the wrist. They can punish Kawhi, but they can blame some guy who like, you know, in every mob movie ever.

• 1:58:26Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:58:27Speaker 05

  Ball on the sword.

• 1:58:28Bill Simmons?

  So here's what hasn't happened with the Clippers. If you look at the, even the recent Mark Walter stuff, everything started because there was a whistleblower at Guggenheim who was like, hey, this, and the Wall Street Journal wrote about this yesterday, but basically Mubadala, there was a whistleblower with the funds with that. And once that happened in Guggenheim, even they, they had a spokesman in that Wall Street Journal piece saying, yes, the firm received a whistleblower report in spring 2025. With the Clippers, there's been no whistleblower on the Clipper side, at least not yet. There's been, all the people Pablo has found who were, you know, had surface ties, but it wasn't like somebody with direct

• 1:59:13Bill Simmons?

  knowledge of all this Kawhi stuff blew the whistle to the NBA or any of it. And I think that's, the Clippers are adamant they didn't do anything. And it's, they've really dug in. They, they are adamant, nothing happened. And

• 1:59:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean.

• 1:59:27Bill Simmons?

  I don't know what to believe anywhere.

• 1:59:29Speaker 05

  In this, in this case, you have the whistleblowers from those companies who have basically come forward and been like, yeah, I worked at aspiration and I had to deal with the billings here. And I was like, why are we paying Kawhi Leonard? And everyone told me it was cap circumvention. So you do have people on the other side. But I've been impressed, Ballmer's closed ranks. He's gotten those Clippers people right in line.

• 1:59:51Bill Simmons?

  Yes.

• 1:59:52Speaker 05

  Impressive. But I do think he might have flown a little too close to the sun by leaking that story, if that's what happened. Because Adam Silver definitely didn't sound happy that that leaked. If you look at the NBA's statement.

• 2:00:03Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 2:00:04Speaker 05

  And I think that, you know, it's a live ball. And ultimately, this isn't some court of law with some specific standards that need to be followed. The guy who decides the sentence is Adam Silver. And if I were Ballmer, I'd be pretty careful about upsetting him.

• 2:00:18Bill Simmons?

  Well, I have three, the three actual things that still make me go huh with the Kawhi thing. This is now, we're now a year into this. He never actually did the work for aspiration, but got paid. I've never, I've just never heard an adequate explanation for that. I don't understand.

• 2:00:35Speaker 05

  That's true of the Daktronics one, too.

• 2:00:37Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Why are you paying somebody to not do anything like that? Even like one Instagram tweet, nothing. That's weird. Uncle Dennis by multiple accounts, just asking everybody for under the table shit in the summer of 2019. And multiple teams going on the record saying, oh yeah, that guy was fucking asking for ownership stakes. That was weird. And then the third one was the Clippers trading Kawhi to Toronto.

• 2:01:04Bill Simmons?

  If you're like, can put it this way, conspiracy bill definitely like put a hat on and studied that one. Cause it was like, all right, Toronto is the one team with a real, real, real reason to be aggrieved. Right. They just won the title. They could have potentially brought, he didn't want to play for the Lakers as it comes out. They could have brought this guy back. They were really good in 2020. They probably would have represented the East and played the Lakers in the finals. And all that got pulled away and they have the biggest reason to be pissed. And instead they trade him there and now it's like, all right, I guess we have Kawhi now. It's fine. Those are the three things that caught my eye.

• 2:01:41Speaker 05

  I've definitely never seen a sponsorship deal in history. And in this case, there's at least two where you pay someone to be your sponsor and they don't have to do anything in return. I would love one of those deals, by the way, if anyone wants to make.

• 2:01:53Bill Simmons?

  I asked for it every year from Spotify. Yeah. Just, just can people give our podcast money and I don't have to do anything for it?

• 2:02:01Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, it's deeply, deeply suspicious, but I think the good news is the Walter case is actually going to have real evidence. They've got the phones. They've got the computers. To me, it's completely unclear whether the Ballmer situation has had any sort of like subpoena power equivalent in the investigation. Like to the extent they might not have found a smoking gun inside the Clippers. My guess is that when Wachtel, the law firm investigating this, asked for information from the Clippers, the Clipper was, we're like, no. And the information we've gotten as part of our reporting, and we included this in one of the recent stories with Pablo. His emails with Daktronics and the Clippers where Daktronics is like, hey, guys, uh, we spoke to Uncle Dennis.

• 2:02:45Speaker 05

  And I love that they referred him as Uncle Dennis, like everybody, even.

• 2:02:48Bill Simmons?

  It's like cousin Sal.

• 2:02:49Speaker 05

  With the fake seeming partnership, the first name is Uncle Dennis. Like, hey, can we get Kawhi to like sign an autograph? Can we get him to do something? And those emails have all come out to us and all the sourcing's come out to us from essentially other parties. The Clippers have been tight, man. It's been impressive to see.

• 2:03:08Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Cause the difference when this happened with Joe Smith in the early 2000s, when Minnesota got nailed for doing the wink, wink deal with them. Is they actually had a contract for the wink, wink deal for like two years from now. Joe will get this and here it is. And I forget if the whistleblower was on the agency side or the Timber Wolf side. I think it was on the agency side, the agent, the situation blew up and the guy had the thing. And, and it was just clear evidence that they circumvented this, that they did the most illegal thing you can do is promise somebody a contract two years from now. And Stern flipped out and was like, fuck this, we're not doing this. And basically ruined the KG era in Minnesota. I mean, KG's there for another seven years and it got decimated.

• 2:03:51Bill Simmons?

  With the Clippers, you could argue Kawhi already ruined the Clippers in the 2020s. And I wonder if that factors in at all with the punishment where it's like, well, these guys are already screwed.

• 2:04:01Speaker 05

  They're punished enough.

• 2:04:02Bill Simmons?

  They got nothing. They, they built a potential dynasty in OKC. Like now I'm going to do, take five more lottery picks away from them. I don't know how it plays out, but I really do feel like it's going to end up with everybody suing each other. I think this is going to be the outcome.

• 2:04:17Speaker 05

  Agreed that this is not going to be some simple outcome. Yeah. The, the Clippers learned the stringer bell lesson from the T Wolves is you're taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy. Is the famous wire, wire quote. And I think that Ballmer took fewer notes than some of his predecessors on what he was working out with Kawhi. And so I think Ballmer lives to fight another day. Walter, I feel less good about.

• 2:04:41Bill Simmons?

  When you're, when you're like studying and reporting on all these super rich people.

• 2:04:46Bill Simmons?

  Like one of the things with Ballmer and the Clippers that I was always suspicious of, it never added up was this was, was so blatant if he did this, right? If the Clippers did this, it was so blatantly stupid and transparent and easily to get caught. Like what's, how is that worth it? Like the Clippers were in an OK situation in 2019. How is it worth risking your professional reputation? Being Joe Smith 2.0, like, why? Like Ballmer supposedly relatively, you know, one of the smarter billionaires, like, why would he risk this?

• 2:05:18Speaker 05

  And look, Pablo's done much more of the reporting on this story. So.

• 2:05:21Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:21Speaker 05

  I'll share my personal perspective on this.

• 2:05:24Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:24Speaker 05

  My view is, but Ballmer keeps saying this, I got conned and scammed by this company aspiration. And I think that is absolutely true because if.

• 2:05:35Bill Simmons?

  I do too.

• 2:05:35Speaker 05

  Were a real successful company, none of this would have ever been revealed. It was actually a pretty sophisticated plan. The plan was they're going to sponsor our jerseys and we're going to pay, they're going to pay Kawhi and we're going to pay them. And it's all going to work out. And they planned to go public as a company. They planned to SPAC with Oaktree, actually, which is the same firm that just bailed out Ishbia. And they were going to go public. And if that had happened, if they'd have managed to go public, if the company hadn't been a fraud, Ballmer would have been hands clean. He'd have been totally fine because they would have gone public and no one would have ever had to find out. And it would have seemed like a reasonable investment for Ballmer to have made.

• 2:06:15Speaker 05

  The problem is after aspiration starts going down, that's when Ballmer starts looking desperate. That's where the cover up is worse than the proverbial crime. Where in this case, they start going down and Ballmer realizes, cause he's smart. If these guys go down and there's a bankruptcy, it's going to become clear that they were paying Kawhi with money they didn't have. And it would look really strange.

• 2:06:38Bill Simmons?

  That's your theory. You're not, you don't know that for sure, but that's your theory.

• 2:06:40Speaker 05

  What we know, what we know is after that period of time, when it became clear the business was failing. Ballmer invested again, and then Dennis Wong invested again.

• 2:06:51Bill Simmons?

  His minority owner.

• 2:06:52Speaker 05

  Seemed like a failing entity.

• 2:06:53Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:54Speaker 05

  The exact amounts of money that would cover the payments to Kawhi. And that to me seemed like, and this is my opinion. Okay. Once you realize that this company is going down, you realize that the big scheme is not going to actually work out. And so you get desperate and you start getting stupid. That's what ends up happening when the walls start closing in Henry Hill style every time. But on this one, I think that Ballmer was at least trying to do something sophisticated. And when you look at the Daktronics example, which is this other payment, you look at their SEC filings, there's no obvious payment. Here's our, you know, payment to Kawhi for marketing that we could see. It was done in a very sophisticated, buttoned up way.

• 2:07:37Speaker 05

  And the problem is that he bet on the wrong guys to be partners in a scheme with, when aspiration went under and blew up.

• 2:07:45Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. I guess the counter would be aspiration was just spending money like crazy.

• 2:07:50Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 2:07:51Bill Simmons?

  With no rhyme or reason to what they were doing. Ballmer belatedly found out, oh shit, these guys might go down. They have, they paid Kawhi 28 million. Oh my God, people are going to think I did this. We gotta help the company. I guess that would be the defense. I don't know what the fuck happened, but I, I do know this.

• 2:08:11Bill Simmons?

  And I'm not a Clipper fan. I've had, I've talked about, I've had the Clipper tickets. I go to, I go to eight to 10 games a year. I always hope that they do well so I can go to playoff games. I don't really care. I'm a Celtic fan.

• 2:08:23Bill Simmons?

  This franchise, of all the teams this could have happened to, where you like, nothing good ever happens to the Clippers, ever. Even when they have good things, it falls apart. Like the 2014 was their best chance to win the title and the Donald Sterling thing happened. Like over and over again, this is how it goes. They have Kawhi and Paul George together. Kawhi gets hurt in 2021 when they have the best chance to win the title. Like this is just how it goes for them and they're like.

• 2:08:49Speaker 05

  Even with this, even with this Iger thing, like Iger was a Clippers fan. He could have totally bought the Clippers.

• 2:08:54Bill Simmons?

  It's a great point.

• 2:08:55Speaker 05

  Was friends with Chris Paul and by all accounts, Iger's the exact kind of guy you'd want owning your team. And instead they end up with Ballmer who definitely, you know, was willing to spend profligately on this team. He's not like a cheap owner.

• 2:09:10Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 2:09:10Speaker 05

  But he's created this total mess for them. And I think in my view, it'll be clear when you look at Josh Kushner, who's like a killer, like.

• 2:09:20Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:20Speaker 05

  By all accounts, like he's, you know, obviously related to Jared and who knows what's going on in that whole orbit. But he's like a serious guy who's going to run the team seriously with Iger, who's a serious guy who's going to run the team seriously. You're going to have that right next door to this complete clusterfuck.

• 2:09:38Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 2:09:39Speaker 05

  And I think the, the salt in the wound is going to hurt even more.

• 2:09:43Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Kushner's really well respected for being a smart ass dude. And he's.

• 2:09:48Speaker 05

  It's pretty amazing that he's laid low amid the Jared stuff, amid everything else. And has built this reputation as just like this great investor. I mean, who knows? I haven't done an investigation into Kushner, anything happened. But I do think if you were looking for a sports team owner, there's way worse people than Jared Kushner. I'm sorry, Josh Kushner. Jared would be top.

• 2:10:13Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Jared would be top.

• 2:10:14Speaker 05

  Josh Kushner and Iger, that's a serious, serious ownership group. And, you know, I think the Lakers are going to be in decent hands.

• 2:10:25Bill Simmons?

  Well, here's the thing.

• 2:10:26Speaker 05

  Works out for the Lakers.

• 2:10:27Bill Simmons?

  Josh isn't going to run the day to day at all. Iger's doing all of it. And Iger 75 could probably put six, seven really good years in here. And this is all he's going to do. And this guy just ran a giant company. It's a completely different job. Like I was joking with Matt Bellany. Now, you know, somebody sitting courtside is mad that the chicken fingers aren't warm enough. Iger's like the maitre d of this Lakers restaurant, right? He's taking all the calls from everybody. He's at his thing. He's talking to seven people.

• 2:10:56Speaker 05

  Iger's going to be good at dealing with like the drama of Luca. Like he dealt with actors and actresses.

• 2:11:02Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:03Speaker 05

  Bob Iger's dealt with entertainment people. Luca's going to be easy. Hold up Luca on GLP's within two weeks.

• 2:11:10Bill Simmons?

  Well, as long as it's not freedom of speech on a late night TV show.

• 2:11:15Speaker 05

  That is a huge problem for sure.

• 2:11:18Bill Simmons?

  Sammy, this was great. I know it delighted your dad to no end. We didn't even tell him we were doing this.

• 2:11:23Speaker 05

  This is so fun. Do you think this was in the Bronny LeBron category?

• 2:11:26Bill Simmons?

  You were so, so far ahead of Bronny's best game on the Lakers. This is like. This was almost like.

• 2:11:32Speaker 05

  I'm working on my Brunson. I'm like Brunson, you know, it's like Brunson first year at Villanova, a little, little nervous, but there's, there's some sparks, you think? You think, you think, you think this could be something?

• 2:11:40Bill Simmons?

  You hit like five or six threes. I thought I was impressed with your two way play. When's your next podcast with, uh, episode with, uh, Pablo coming?

• 2:11:49Speaker 05

  We'll see. We'll see. We've got to answer these Walter questions, but you know, hopefully in the next month. And yeah, I'll shamelessly plug subscribe to Hunter Brook. We do incredible financial journalism. No one does that anymore. You can follow us on all social media and we will continue to report on all of these sports team owners, which I think is one of the great subplots of sports right now.

• 2:12:09Bill Simmons?

  Becoming more and more interesting.

• 2:12:10Speaker 05

  Crazy characters who are trying to find money wherever they can under every couch cushion, and they're doing their best. But you know, there end up being some problems. So thank you so much for having me. This has been awesome.

• 2:12:21Bill Simmons?

  Great to see you, Sammy. I'll see you in Boston.

• 2:12:23Speaker 05

  Sounds good. See you soon.

• 2:12:26Bill Simmons?

  All right, that's it for the podcast. Thanks to Tom and Sammy. Thanks to Gahal and Eduardo as well. I think I'm coming back on Thursday with another podcast this week. So stay tuned for that. Don't forget about rewatchables. The re-speed. It's up. Go check it out. I'll see you later in the week.

• 2:13:01Bill Simmons?

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