It shouldn't be a strange thing to talk football—like, really get after it, talk about it like you really care about it—on a sports podcast, and I suppose on the merits it isn't. Drew, for his part and to his credit, is never self-conscious about it; he really cares about the Vikings like that, and he really follows the fine points of the sport like that, so this is a very natural way for him to talk and be. I am less that way, both because I care about my team of choice so much less and because football is a sport I've always kept at something like arm's length. So it was strange, both during the recording of this week's NFL-heavy episode and in listening back to the finished product, to hear someone who sounds so much like me so obviously enjoying Talking Football like this. Can you be highly interested in something that you're pretty sure you don't entirely like? Given how much I have written about American politics, maybe I shouldn't be surprised that the answer is yes. But I think, here, the proof is very much in the podding.
Our guest this week was Rivers McCown, formerly of Football Outsiders and The Athletic and currently the purveyor of a very good newsletter all his own. After a brief discussion of his family's Oops! All Pizzas menu on Thanksgiving and the pleasures and pitfalls of making pizza at home, we got down to the football stuff and mostly stayed there for the next 40-odd minutes. After a brief bit on the state of the football discourse, which has improved in shockingly positive ways even as the broader football media has diminished in predictably negative ones, we went ahead and engaged in some football discourse ourselves.
This began with the team that Rivers covered for The Athletic, and which was both one of the better stories of last year and one of the queasier disappointments of this one. Our attempt to figure out what's the matter with the Houston Texans led us to examine the wild and bumpy ride of offensive coordinator Bobby Slowik, the specific challenges facing C.J. Stroud, the broader challenge of evaluating young quarterbacks, and the broader questions of what makes a NFL team good. We also spoke about why and how the Kansas City Chiefs have become such a tough sit, considered the Chicago Bears as a locus of vibe contagion, and treated ourselves to some Jameis Winston chat—in which we offered a highly qualified appreciation of the NFL's jankiest showman and the Cleveland Browns deciding to Try Some Stuff after the wreckage of the Deshaun Watson experience.
After the break, we talked about the thrilling if not entirely unpredictable renaissance seasons of Saquon Barkley and Derrick Henry and the ongoing strategic push and pull in the NFL where RB's are concerned. We considered Kirk Cousins at or near the end and enjoyed a bit of hope for the futures of Anthony Richardson and Bryce Young. That talk about the Bryce-aissance—if you have a less unpleasant-looking way of describing him putting together a competent month of quarterbacking after looking terrified for the first season and a half of his career, I'd love to hear it—became a conversation about how difficult it is even for elite talents to figure out how to play quarterback in the NFL. Although, again, if you'd watched either Richardson or Young try to figure it out over the last season and change, you already knew that.
The Funbag yielded questions about which famous person has had the most easeful and pleasant-seeming public career—this included a consideration of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which happily and quickly gave way to a brief but thrilling portion of the podcast done entirely in Arnold Schwarzenegger voices—and probably the most sustained bit of Adam Sandler chat in Distraction history. A question from a listener about taking the tags off all your stuff revealed the three of us, maybe not surprisingly, as pretty ardent rule-followers. Again, maybe that's not a surprise. A Football Man craves order. The surprising part, for me, was finding out the extent to which I actually was (am?) just such a man.
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