A few hours after absorbing my last blistering own from Ray Ratto on last week's episode, I grabbed my bag and headed for the desert. While Ray is absolutely capable of saying something to me that would make me execute the Paris, Texas Protocol, this particular trip was planned in advance. From last Wednesday until this past Monday, I was on vacation in and around Palm Springs. While sports things were happening, my wife and I were looking at some cool desert artwork, drinking date milkshakes, and generally trying to avoid any sense of the outside world. We mostly succeeded.
But because I look at sports scores and work Slack even when I am in Energy Saver Mode, I had some sense of what we might be talking about this week. I saw on my phone that Joshua Dobbs, one of football's truly state-of-the-art backup quarterbacks, had led a wild comeback shortly after joining the Vikings; I also saw Drew losing his shit about this in Slack while working his Sunday shift in the blog chair. So I knew, or thought I knew.
I didn't watch a minute of NFL football last week, which honestly felt amazing, and you never really know, when talking to a fired-up Drew about the Vikings, just how intense things are going to get. The Vikings Chat at the top of the episode is decently intense even by that standard—I am not giving anything away by reporting that Drew at one point says, "My son had to explain to his friend why I was making the noises I was making"—but we pulled back from that to a more global assessment fairly quickly. One of my special professional skills is that I'm able to talk about backup quarterbacks, sometimes with a vigor that surprises me and sometimes when those guys aren't even NFL backups yet, regardless of whatever else is going on. And given that backup quarterbacks are the hottest trend in the NFL at the moment, that meant I was fully prepared to get after it this week despite coming into the episode "fresh" off a red-eye flight.
Was I at my best? Given that podcast listeners can't see my Michael Gambon-ass eye bagginess, I could try telling you that I was. But because listeners will still be able to hear my slightly loopier-than-usual performance, I won't try that. I will say that I enjoyed the chance to talk about one of my favorite subsets of Sports Guys, and glory in the collapse of purebred prick Josh McDaniels, Arthur Smith's hilariously unearned grandiosity, the decline of the Bill Belichick mystique, and The Connor Stalions Affair. To get to do all that and also do my dumb little voices and make some fake trombone sounds (I will not give this bit away) and bask in the reflected positivity of Drew's renewed faith in his football team was, in its way, a vacation in its own right. In another more specific sense, it was just a nice way to be welcomed back.
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