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

12:41Cousin Sal:For neither of them coming back. They're both gone. So I would think it's minus. I would say that's like minus 125 range. Yeah, yeah, right in there. I probably contradicted myself here, though. But yeah, right. One's like minus 350, and one's like closer to even. Yeah.

13:02Bill Simmons:So if I'm Tomlin, I want the Atlanta job. Yeah. That job's still open. They're interviewing people. As we've discussed many times in this pod, I thought that team was legitimately talented. they shot themselves in the foot they lost a bunch of dumb games they have a really good nucleus they're in a weird division that I don't think is good and he can switch conferences start over give them that kind of energy you need when you finally have a good coach again and that would be my preference for him

13:35Cousin Sal:Giants would also be fun my hot take for 26 was one of them aside from you eating pizza in three weeks is that Tom when does go to Atlanta but Oh, interesting. What about this? Baltimore?

13:49Bill Simmons:You like the NWA move? This is what Billy Gill was pushing.

13:52Cousin Sal:Oh, yeah, that's right.

13:54Bill Simmons:He was pushing the Hogan joining National Hall, just ripping the mask off.

13:59Cousin Sal:What if he did do the TV for a year, took a year off? He's been at it for a while. We could almost guarantee which teams are going to need coaches next year. Cincinnati's going to need a coach. I don't want to work for a cheap team.

14:12Bill Simmons:I don't want to work for the Jets, 0-2. I'm just trying, you know, it's always going to be six or seven teams right in there.

14:18Cousin Sal:What was it, eight this year?

14:19Bill Simmons:I would argue the Giants job and the Falcons job are legitimately good jobs. And I think the Ravens with Lamar, if you can get his head straight a little bit, I think that's also a really good job. Yeah. To convince him to actually be in the field.

14:33Cousin Sal:That was my idea. The Ravens would be good, too. But the Falcons was like, hey, that was my thing. Can he do the Ravens, though? You can go eight and nine and be fine.

14:41Bill Simmons:Can he do it? That's like a huge. I don't know.

14:43Cousin Sal:That's like you going to work for Fallon. Yeah, we'd have to redo the trader bracket, I think, if that happened.

14:49Bill Simmons:Yeah, that would be. That's a lot. Yeah, I can't imagine anyone doing that. I just can't imagine he just flips sides in the AFC North and then comes back to Pittsburgh twice a year. You go to the NFC, you have a little distance.

15:05Cousin Sal:And if the Ravens take him on and he loses, that's an extra embarrassment, right? So I don't even know if it's worth it for them. if I were him

15:13Bill Simmons:and in general like how long is a football coach supposed to stay with an NFL franchise yeah right even Andy Reid burned out in Philly and then went to KC and rejuvenated but by the time he ran his course in Philly he was done Belichick ran his course with New England like it's gonna be somewhere between 10 and 20 years for the really really good coaches he goes to the Giants that's the best coach they've had since Tom Coughlin's nose would turn like bright maroon right Right. That's right. I miss those days. I miss seeing him in the freezing cold. That was good. So Steelers had 175 total yards today.

15:50Bill Simmons:But this is a weird game. We're going to remember it as 36. I genuinely thought the Steelers were going to win up until that 50-yard pass. And as soon as they went up 10-6, I felt like the game was over, unless Steelers could pull their garbage, whatever.

16:05Cousin Sal:Right. I mean, we were at one point saying, just take a knee and punt because it was that bad for Rodgers and that was probably around the third quarter but yeah then he completed that pass and it was like game

16:16Bill Simmons:our buddy Hench texted us that his initial stood for choke job I loved it he took a break from his 1778 take down of the French

16:27Cousin Sal:four hours of American Revolution talk with that one punt good job by you

16:32Bill Simmons:it was pretty solid alright

16:36Cousin Sal:what are you thinking? Forget about the line for a second, but what do you I'm ready to move on. I'm ready to move forward. Are you more confident before this game at the opponent, the next game, or after the game now?

16:49Bill Simmons:I watched the Pats game again. So we came on right afterwards. We're going live on Netflix. Yeah. By the way, are we on YouTube today?

17:01Cousin Sal:No, no. We're still on Netflix.

17:02Bill Simmons:Oh, good. Yeah. All right. Yeah, we're right next to that John Bernthal show with the his and hers. Oh, right. Which is, I got to say, a little bit on out of time with Denzel Washington's corner. I don't know if you saw that movie from 20 years ago. Yeah, yeah. The real ones will know. It's a little on the corner. I still enjoyed it. I support my guy Bernthal. Yeah. I watched the game again, and I don't think we were positive enough about how good Drake was in the second half. His stats were great. He had like a 140 QB rating. He was like 11 for 14. He had the scramble yardage. Really, the only play he missed was the touchdown to the tight end.

17:44Bill Simmons:But I do think it was one of the... I think it was a young QB who kind of sucked in the first half and then in the second half got his sea legs. Now you move to next week with how fast that Houston defense is going to be. But he can actually move around and try to create plays. the problem, I don't think they have Matt Collins again next week. And the receivers just didn't seem like they were open yesterday. I don't think it's going to get any better tomorrow. So it feels like it'll be around the same game unless they can run on him. Do you think they can run on him?

18:15Cousin Sal:I don't know. I don't think it'll be like today where just like everything kind of fell into place because the Steelers just lost whatever edge they had. But I do wonder if like Christian Kirk, Collins being out is really rough, right? but Christian Kirk might be as good as most all of your receivers. I don't know. Is he? I mean, not when Diggs is hot. And he'd definitely play for us.

18:39Bill Simmons:There's no question he would be on the field. It's weird that Houston's another team that the Pats have owned really this whole century. And the Chargers were another one where it's just in my head, I'm like, whereas I was talking to somebody about Denver and Buffalo, Like if the Pats were able to go into round three, would you rather play Buffalo at home or go to Denver? Buffalo at home brings Josh Allen, the best player in the week. We probably didn't even, we probably weren't even superlative enough about yesterday. Right. The Pats are 0-4 in the playoffs in Denver. Do you know that? Is that what it is?

19:16Bill Simmons:Rulon Jones, safety. I think that was 87. The Jake Plummer game in 2005, one of the most ridiculous losses in the history of the franchise. I don't think we got a single call the whole game. Champ Bailey running 100 yards. Ben Watson knocking him out of bounds. Ball clearly goes through the end zone. They call it out at the one. Still mad about that game. The third one, I think Gronk was out in Denver when Peyton Manning had a good team. And then the fourth one, they lose 20 to 18. Brady makes the best throw of his career. They're down eight, driving. 2016, it was the noodle arm Peyton Manning year where they end up winning the Super Bowl, but he's got the noodle arm.

19:56Bill Simmons:And that was a Gronk two-point conversion. Gronk two-point conversion. They didn't get it. Brady, I'm convinced, was concussed for most of that game. Right. And it was just kind of a game from hell. Yeah. And those were the four times I played in Denver. And in general, L.A. used to kick our ass. And in general, we always lose to Denver. Right. Except for the T-ball playoff game. L.A.

20:19Cousin Sal:No, he's not. He's not L.A. He's not.

20:21Bill Simmons:But do you use the baggage, even though these are all different guys, all we're talking about are uniforms, but there's certain teams you're like, ah. Because Denver's like that for me.

20:34Cousin Sal:Yeah, what, as a fan? Yeah, as a fan. Who's your team? The players don't give a crap. No, I'm just saying for you. The coaching staff has changed three times over. I'm not saying it's rational. No, no. Yeah, no, I don't want to see the Packers. So the Packers are your team? Well, the 49ers for sure. I mean, that goes back forever with the catch and everything else. And Dak screwing up a snap with no time left and all that stuff. I can go back and back. So I guess it's the 49ers. And then everybody else. Yeah.

21:01Bill Simmons:And then all the other teams. It's Jerry Jones. It's all the other NFC teams. The thing that makes me feel good is, as I said last week, I do think Drake has greatness in him and wasn't great in that first game. And I actually like that. And Vrabel called him out. Like in a good coach way. It was just like, yeah, he made a lot of mistakes. Blah, blah, blah. He's got to take care of the ball better. I think he's going to really push them this week, push May, to be like, hey, there's more in there. We need it this game. Houston's great. We're going to need you. And if it's him versus Stroud, and the defenses can be relatively equal and we're home, I like the May chances, but he's got to be a little better.

21:44Bill Simmons:So you think there's 2 ,000 Ravens potential with this Houston team at all or no?

21:48Cousin Sal:I think Stroud has to be better than he was, right? So I don't know if that's good or bad for the Patriots. But I think you got to get a lead. And I texted you. I wasn't understanding what you were doing. You were texting me some local Boston, what you talked about last night.

22:04Bill Simmons:I texted you one of the radio hosts doing the classic glass half-empty tweet about the game.

22:10Cousin Sal:Yeah, stupid.

22:11Bill Simmons:Yeah, but that's what they're going to do all week. This Houston defense, the way the Pats looked, Will Campbell on the left side, they're just going to run him over. and by the time the game starts, you're going to think they should be 10-point underdogs.

22:24Cousin Sal:I think the most important thing you did yesterday was reestablish playoff dominance, especially defensively at home. Yeah. And now make everybody a little nervous to come to you here.

22:36Bill Simmons:Well, there's some good video stuff with Vrabel. Apparently, the Monday meeting before the game, he looked at Milt Williams and Barmore, the two big nose tackles. And Milt Williams, when he's in the game, the defense has been good. and he's like, it's January. You know what January means? Big dogs. It's time for them to show up and kind of stared those guys down and everybody was like, whoa. And it was his theme all week, big dogs. So then when they made plays, Milt Williams got the last sack and he's like, the big dogs are here to eat. And he was doing all that. So they've been really pushing it.

23:08Bill Simmons:He knows how to push the buttons and get certain guys going. And I wonder if he uses that with the offensive line this week. Little nobody believes in us.

23:18Cousin Sal:I don't know if it's the best. I'm trying to think if it's the best one. They're all good. They're all very solid, I think.

23:25Bill Simmons:No, the best one's Rams-Seahawks, right? Rams.

23:28Cousin Sal:Well, no, it's Niners-Seahawks.

23:30Bill Simmons:I mean, Niners-Seahawks.

23:31Cousin Sal:Right. No? Yeah. Rams-Bears is probably going to be interesting because that team is ridiculous, that Bears team. And then I guess Bills-Bronco. Man, they're all good. I like them all. No, Rams-Bears is the best one.

23:44Bill Simmons:Is it the best one? Ryan Clark said on ESPN today that Caleb Williams was now a top five quarterback in the league. Which league? This league? The NFL. Heard that today.

23:55Cousin Sal:That's all it takes? That was when it turned out first take.

23:59Bill Simmons:Caleb Williams is really good. We'll see if it can keep going for him. Top five seemed strong.

24:06Cousin Sal:Well, now I'm going through it in my head now, and I really hesitate to put anyone at that five spot now. Maybe he's right. I don't think it's Caleb Williams. I don't think it is.

24:16Bill Simmons:Do you think he's I'm looking at my QB pyramid

24:19Cousin Sal:What does this mean? Who you trust more? Mahomes is still there, Allen's still there Lamar is still there Burrow's the one I'm not even sure about at 4 anymore I'll put your boy there at 4

24:31Bill Simmons:I'm happy to put Caleb over Burrow for now after that weird Burrow season we had There's nobody else May has to be above Caleb, right? That's fine Um Jeez, Ryan Clark may have done it Ryan Clark, I apologize in real time. Maybe you're right.

24:49Cousin Sal:No, honestly, I still... So you don't put Stafford... I know you hate Stafford. You have to be down on Stafford. I would have Stafford ahead of Caleb Williams at this point. Stafford's ahead of Caleb Williams. I put my guy ahead. I mean, Dak's in the playoff. All right, there's a case at least. It's okay. Ryan Clark's back in this. He's not 10th. Good job, Ryan Clark.

25:07Bill Simmons:I mean, the guy was on ESPN for 12 straight hours today. We got to give him props. That's right. Got to come up with stuff. I think he really was. I think he was on for 12 straight hours. Was he really? Yeah. Wow. He was on first take. He was on NFL Live. He was on all their pregame halftime stuff. It was an amazing job by him.

25:24Cousin Sal:Well, they fired everyone. They have like three guys left. That's true. They had to. Yeah.

25:27Bill Simmons:Yeah. They have to. All right. So we got to guess the line. Okay.

25:32Cousin Sal:I have it written down. If you get this. I haven't seen it. I'm up two to one. I'm up two to one in games. If you get this, you tie me and therefore win the season. for the first time since all the way back in 2024.

25:50Bill Simmons:It's been a while. I have the Patriots favored by one and a half in New England over the Texans.

25:57Cousin Sal:Okay, one and a half.

25:59Bill Simmons:What'd you have?

26:00Cousin Sal:Don't cheat.

26:02Bill Simmons:I can't.

26:02Cousin Sal:I had three.

26:04Bill Simmons:Patriots by three, okay. Definitely not going to be three. It's going to be lower than that. It's two and a half.

26:12Cousin Sal:I'd love to see another week Son of a bitch Well I was even thinking of going higher They were three and a half against the Chargers I don't know I thought maybe Houston By the second quarter I was like This is how Houston's going to present themselves Maybe the Patriots are worth more here

26:31Bill Simmons:So CJ Stroud isn't one of the top five quarterbacks In the league According to Fandle No man that seems high Sal I don't know no you don't think so you would

26:47Cousin Sal:so the Chargers were three and a half right all week yeah

26:54Bill Simmons:no that's fine did Hurts so Hurts drops out of the top five Mahomes is still there is Lamar out of the top five Lamar has to still be in there

27:04Cousin Sal:don't take him out because Caleb Williams had a great fourth quarter yesterday, the other day.

27:10Bill Simmons:Herbert's out. This is, even the nerds are threatening to turn on Herbert now.

27:14Cousin Sal:I know. I will say Caleb is in the top five

27:18Bill Simmons:and maybe top three of my team is playing you or I bet against you. You're down seven, but I'm completely terrified because you're capable of any throw.

27:29Cousin Sal:Yeah.

27:29Bill Simmons:Right? Like there's no way to ever feel, if he was in on Pittsburgh today, down 14-6, he wouldn't have given up on the game like he would have with Rodgers. That's true. This guy could do, who knows?

27:41Cousin Sal:Definitely top five more exciting. I'd put him maybe ahead of Lamar in that department. Like more exciting. He could pass Lamar next year anyway.

27:49Bill Simmons:I love the fucking crazy arms. Like Elway was like this. We've only had a couple dudes. Dudes that can throw when their feet aren't set or when they're up in the air. Right, right, right. The scrambling's great too. But then there's other times. You can watch them for a half hour and the ball's just bouncing around all over the place.

28:08Cousin Sal:He needs like two hours to settle in. It's just weird. I was thinking of him as a closer. Like, could he Mariano Rivera this thing? Will they just use him in the fourth quarter? Or does he actually need... They pick Tyson Bajan for... Yeah. Does he need the first two hours to get it out of his system so that the fourth quarter is good?

28:22Bill Simmons:Well, the Rams defense definitely, I wouldn't say, is going to shut him down. They'll give him a pass rush, but he can throw on him. Right.

28:32Cousin Sal:So what did they do here real quick? Let's talk about this. so you talk about the TV schedule yeah yeah yeah so the Bears Rams we're coming on after Bears Rams Sunday right little earlier than normal yeah the Bears played Saturday and the Rams played Saturday so why do you have to move that to Sunday whereas you're who's getting screwed here I would say like the Texans are I don't understand this year.

29:05Bill Simmons:So Buffalo Denver is the first game. San Francisco Seattle is the second game on Saturday. Houston. And that kind of has to be because that's West Coast, I guess. Although Denver's, I guess, West Coast as well. Houston, New England. And then Rams Bears, 3.30 Pacific. So we'll be coming on at like 7 o 'clock. That's great for us.

29:28Cousin Sal:Yeah, yeah. No, good for us.

29:30Bill Simmons:7 o 'clock PT, right before the Landman season and finale. Oh, wow. Yeah. Well, maybe we'll just keep it rolling. Really tough, tough, tough, tough Landman season.

29:40Cousin Sal:Well, you ruined it for everyone, with Jon Hamm's plight. That was it.

29:45Bill Simmons:I'm starting to wonder if Taylor Sheridan can write seven shows at the same time. There's been cracks in the armor for this one.

29:53Cousin Sal:We know seven's the number, the big number. Yeah, I think seven simultaneous

29:56Bill Simmons:shows is too hard.

29:58Cousin Sal:The Seahawks had 13 days off and the Niners have, like, six or five.

30:04Bill Simmons:Listen, the Niners are just happy to be alive. I know. Next to that electromagnetic practice center fiasco thing they have going. They're probably just excited to go to Seattle. I wonder if that's true. They're like, can we go today? Yeah. Can we leave on Wednesday to get out of here?

30:21Cousin Sal:You talked about how we wrote together on Jimmy Kimmel Live that first year. Remember that big cancerous box over our head that was just buzzing all day long? Yes. Remember that thing?

30:30Bill Simmons:Yeah. Probably full of asbestos, all that stuff. Yeah.

30:33Cousin Sal:We turned out all right, right? No.

30:35Bill Simmons:I think so. Can you... I was thinking the Shakey's game on Saturday, which we always joke about. The first game around one we call the Shakey's game. There should be a name for that first game on Sunday that the 12 o 'clock PT start. For this round coming up? Yeah. Yeah. Clearly that's where they want to stick the worst game every time. Because the Saturday one's a little later. It starts 1.30 Pacific. It's going into primetime East Coast. So you want to put a good one there. Second one is an official primetimer. And then that 12 o 'clock PT Sunday game. I think that's a good rating spot though, isn't it?

31:18Cousin Sal:Oh yeah, 3 o 'clock Eastern?

31:20Bill Simmons:That's what you're talking about, right? Sunday nights, Saturday and Sunday night are the two best games.

31:24Cousin Sal:The nights for sure. So yeah, the nights for sure. But now it's network. So that Seahawks game's a Fox game. Oh, your game's an ESPN ABC game. Interesting.

31:38Bill Simmons:So we get Buck and Aikman? Yeah.

31:42Cousin Sal:Yeah.

31:43Bill Simmons:Oh, that's amazing.

31:45Cousin Sal:Yeah, you get Buck and Aikman. That's what I'm seeing on ESPN.

31:48Bill Simmons:So we get Romo doing Buffalo Denver.

31:51Cousin Sal:Right. We have Brady doing the Niners Seahawks.

31:56Bill Simmons:Seahawks. Oh, this is good. This is good.

32:01Cousin Sal:And then Peacock is going to be Torrico and Collinsworth. Rams, Bears. I love it. Football's so good.

32:08Bill Simmons:Mike, Matthew Stafford. He's not even looking at him, Mike.

32:12Cousin Sal:Mike, Caleb, will you hear what Bill said about him throwing all contorted in the air? He's right.

32:18Bill Simmons:In the air. He's 12 feet up in the air, Mike, just whipping a 50-yarder.

32:23Cousin Sal:He's top five in my book. All right.

32:25Bill Simmons:So the lines we have now for next week, since we did them yesterday, Buffalo, are they favored yet?

32:37Cousin Sal:I'll go back to it. Yes, they are.

32:38Bill Simmons:Buffalo is now favored. Yep. Minus one and a half. Seahawks minus seven and a half. Patriots minus two and a half. Rams minus three and a half. it feels like there's a seven pointer using the Broncos up to plus eight and a half the Seahawks to minus half and the Patriots to plus four and a half that I'm already eyeing

33:12Cousin Sal:were you the only home team

33:13Bill Simmons:to win this week yeah right and so we expect the Bears were home team the Bears are all teams

33:24Cousin Sal:sorry yeah yeah right I'll count that yeah two out of six and so now this is getting even up here alright so long Aaron Rodgers that's it I mean you know one more thing I'm just looking at this now and I should probably start up a GoFundMe right this second for how much I'm gonna lose on the Indiana Hoosiers Seattle Seahawks Moneyline Parlay that's it

33:50Bill Simmons:it's coming What is that going to be? So Seahawks minus 390. And then we have Indiana minus 350. So you'll use that as the anchor and you'll put that with a third team all over the place?

34:05Cousin Sal:No, minus 163 is fine. So 48 ,900. Oh, you wouldn't even use that as your anchor? Yeah, because 48 ,900 to win 30 ,000. That's good, right? Sounds great. Is that what you need to recoup? And then I'll be halfway back. Yeah. Do you think Babydoll watched us on Netflix last night? Oh, interesting. Did not comment on it. So I have to say no. Once in a while he'll comment. And even then, you don't even know if he watched it. But today he didn't even comment.

34:35Bill Simmons:There's a theory going around that Babydoll, or your agent, Jimmy's agent, my sometimes agent, my agent in hybridation. There's a theory that he's retired. Really? Yeah. That's the word on the street. It's not an official retirement, but it's an unofficial retirement.

34:53Cousin Sal:That's not good for me because I just wrote him a quarterly check at the end of December. We'll see. Maybe it's not true. We'll see. See if it goes through. We'll find out.

35:04Bill Simmons:You're going to be back on Sunday night with me. So we'll be earlier on Sunday night. It looks like around seven o 'clock range. That's right. And we'll have an answer for that. We'll have an answer for four games. We'll have an answer for whether in ring or 107, we could go for the 0-13. Let's do it. I just want to be 0 in something, whether it's 13 and 0, 0 in 13, whatever happens. I'm happy to do it. People something to fade. That way they know, right? That's the thing. People are like, oh, look, your record sucks. It's like, cool, bet against me. That's all. I'm laying the blueprint. Just if you think it's so funny, win some money.

35:36Bill Simmons:Go ahead, knock yourself out. There you go. That's your Johnny Cochran moment. Great to see you. We're coming back, taking a break. Come back with Chuck Klosterman right after this.

35:45Cousin Sal:Brillen sind wie die Songs deiner Lieblingsplaylist. Man kriegt nie genug davon. Zeit für einen neuen Style? Dann ab zu Apollo. Kauft zwei Brillen oder Sonnenbrennen in Sehstärke und erhalte das günstigere oder gleichwertige Glaspaket geschenkt. Gilt nur auf ausgewählte Glaspakete. Alle Details zur 2-für-1-Aktion. Klick auf den Banner.

36:09Bill Simmons:All right, so we're going backward in time. Chuck Closter-Minist here. BS Podcast, Hall of Famer. We're taping this late morning Pacific time. He has a book coming out called Football. And ironically, this is probably the best football time right now, where you have the semifinals of college. You have the NFL playoffs. We just had five games. There's about to be a sixth playoff game tonight. It's like football, football, football. Ratings are the best it's ever been. You and I have both been football fans our whole life. And then you decided, I'm going to write an entire book about my complicated relationship with football.

36:42Chuck Klosterman:Yes, that's exactly what has happened, Bill. that's exactly what it is you know i nailed it i've been thinking about this stuff for 40 years now in my life i think i've been thinking about it very consciously for about 20 years and uh i just i finally did it i mean i there's been a bunch of books where i've kind of talked about sports here and there but this is the first time i was like okay this is what it's about this

37:05Bill Simmons:is the book yeah so was it was it the kaepernick situation was it cte was it what what was the tipping point where you were like, cause I remember for me, I had, and I was writing for Grantland at the time and it was, uh, early 2010s really worried about the NFL and what it said about me that I loved it so much with the way that they were treating the players, the schedule, um, the concussion stuff that they were kind of doing the plausible deniability of. Um, and it was just like, man, this, this sucks. I don't feel good about this. And then for some reason in the mid 2010s, I kind of just rolled over and accepted it.

37:44Bill Simmons:I was like, you know what? I love it.

37:46Chuck Klosterman:Well, it wasn't like that for me. It wasn't an incident in that way. You know, I mean, the Kaepernick thing is mentioned in the book. I mean, the CTE stuff is in the book, certainly. But I think it had more to do with the fact that I just I'd always wanted to do a sports book. And and you and I have talked about this a lot over the years. I think that maybe as a game, we both prefer basketball, like the purity of basketball, the idea of basketball. I think if someone said like, what is the greatest game? I would say basketball as a team sport, but football is so much more important. It weirdly matters to me so much more than the other sports.

38:27Chuck Klosterman:The actual application of the game itself, like what I'm actually seeing and experiencing. And about, I think about 20 years ago, I just kind of made this decision that like, I'd like to write a book about football that was all encompassing. That it was, it was about sort of, you know, it was about players and it was about teams, but it was really sort of about the idea and the meaning of this. And as football evolved into this thing, that is not just the most popular sport in the United States, but more popular than all the sports in the United States, really. I mean, like I mentioned early in the book, how in 2023 of the top 100 broadcasts on television in the United States, 93 of them were football games, pro football games.

39:12Chuck Klosterman:And then like three or four more were college games. There's nothing else like that. I mean, I'm a person who's kind of interested in the monoculture. I always have been. And the only elements of the monoculture left in the United States are football and Taylor Swift, I guess. Like, that's really it. And Landman.

39:29Bill Simmons:Landman, I think would be the third one.

39:31Chuck Klosterman:Landman? I don't know. So, I mean, this is something I've been kind of thinking about, like I said, for four decades, really seriously for two decades. When I brought the idea up to my publisher, they were not enthusiastic. I don't know what they thought the book was going to be. But it's not the book I think they imagined in practice. I think it's, they seem pretty happy about it now. And I'm happy about it. Like I, I, which I, I don't often say about these things that I write. I mean, if we went back and listened to the podcast that I've done with you, whenever I had books coming out, I generally feel like they're terrible.

40:05Chuck Klosterman:That's just sort of nature. I am. I mean, like that, like that closer a book comes to publication, the worse I feel about it.

40:11Bill Simmons:Yeah.

40:12Chuck Klosterman:I have, you know, this isn't perfect, but it's close, closer to what I imagined in my mind than most of the books I've done. That what I wanted to do and what it ended up being is

40:24Bill Simmons:similar. Yeah. Well, it seemed like you were spilling all of your football thoughts. Yes. You're just trying to get them all down with some sort of structure through like basically like nine different topics and trying to hit as many things as possible. And there was some, how much do you want to spoil? Well, I don't, I don't care really.

40:41Chuck Klosterman:I mean, a little bit, I guess, but not in a bit, you know, it is very interesting how the world is now. Like, you know, when that book Abundance came out last year? Okay. Yeah. Now that seems like a book I would read, right? I never did read it. Although I feel completely informed about it because I heard it on podcasts like nine different times. Like sometimes I think that the way things work now is you write a nonfiction book and you know, maybe 150 ,000 people read it, but most people experience it through this, through these kind of like these ancillary moments of people discussing the book.

41:16Chuck Klosterman:So I understand that there are people listening to this podcast who I think would be prime people to buy this, and they probably won't. They'll be like, I just don't buy books anymore. It's really hard to sell books to men particularly. So if you want to talk about specifics of the book, that's fine. I don't mind.

41:34Bill Simmons:I was psyched that I had to read the book because you were coming on, and plus I wanted to read it, and it forced me to read. And as we discussed, I usually read stuff on my iPad now because we're older. Um, but I think part of the issues with books these days is that it's so much easier to just kind of consume other things that don't take as much brain power as a book, which I think is you and I've talked about this offline a bunch. So I think as the most alarming thing, when I think about people under 30, because it's not just that it's not just like, Oh, people got to read more. It's like, when you read, you learn about the past.

42:10Bill Simmons:And the only way to know how to prepare for what's coming in the future is to learn from the mistakes of the past. And if you're not reading and you're just watching like, you know, the craziest clips of all time on Twitter or Instagram or wherever, you're not going to learn backwards. And that's the part that scares me the most. That's how you and I both, I think we both had a lot of time by ourselves when we were kids and I read everything. And I just don't feel like I would have done that if I was a kid now.

42:37Chuck Klosterman:But, you know, it's an interesting thing. Like, okay, so there's this belief that like nobody reads anymore. Now, I don't think that's actually true. In a weird way, I think people might be reading more than they ever had in their life because they're constantly staring at their phone, but they're not reading our books. Okay. And the problem with this, if there is one, I mean, I guess, you know, things change and you just got to accept that the world changes, is that anything like that's like in through the internet or sort of through the media in the present tense is really kind of like a prisoner of the present.

43:14Chuck Klosterman:It doesn't really exist with the idea that the past happened. It doesn't really care that much about the future outside of tomorrow.

43:23Bill Simmons:Well, wait, let me interrupt that for a second, because we saw this happen this weekend and we see this happen all the times in sports now when there's a really good weekend. People are like, that's the best weekend we've ever had. And it's like, was it? Do you want to go through the last 50 years and actually try to figure this out? But it's just like present, big hyperbole one way or the other. And that's how things get consumed for the most part now.

43:45Chuck Klosterman:Yeah. And maybe that's understandable and natural. But, you know, I can't change in some ways the person I am. Like I'm, I like writing books. I like books. because I'm at the age of the kind of person who does, I guess. And that's the only way I really would have felt comfortable doing something like this. What's in this book, it wouldn't make sense as a substack that I do over time. It's this thing.

44:15Bill Simmons:Or like a narrative podcast where you do each chapter, you interview people. Well, all right, I'm going to spoil a couple of things. The basic premise of the book is you think football is not going to exist in the way that it does now in 50 years?

44:31Chuck Klosterman:Well, the basic premise, the most basic premise is this, which is that football is probably the most popular thing we have in the country right now. And there's a sense that this is just how it's always going to be. But nothing is like that. In 50 years or 100 years, the world's going to be different, populated by different people. And football, it probably won't completely disappear. but it's going to radically recede and will not be the center of the world as it is now. And when that happens, people in that time are going to explain or try to explain what it was, you know, in the same way that people now sometimes try to describe, you know, the meaning of Roman gladiators or the meaning of jazz.

45:17Chuck Klosterman:So these things, you know, that from the past that are still around, but they're kind of gone. And it never works. It's always wrong. Because people are always basically projecting the present onto the past. They're taking the, this is how we think about things now. So therefore, this was the failure of this thing in the past. Because it's also always sort of framed as a failure. The thing ended, so something must have went wrong. And I know that's going to happen with football. I can see it already. I can see people just preparing for this almost unknowingly that when football starts to change and starts to become less important and moves away, they're going to say, well, this was, this was why that happened.

45:56Chuck Klosterman:And this was, this is what football meant. And I'm trying to describe what football means now and why it sort of became the thing that it is. I mean, if somebody said to me, what's the best way to describe the last half of the 20th century, like 1950 to 2000, you need some vessel to sort of use as a way you describe that. I would use football, which is why a lot of this book in some ways will seem like it's a little bit, I wouldn't say mired in the past, but involves the past. I mean, most of the things discussed in this book, many of the players, not all of them, but a lot of them are players who are retired now or things that have happened already.

46:35Chuck Klosterman:And I feel as though the future is not designed for football to dominate the way the past was.

46:45Bill Simmons:You know, obviously I agree with you. What's interesting about that is you could say from 1888 through about 1975, baseball was the sport that explained everything the best. Right. And then, so with football, I would almost, you could almost, there's an overlap for a while, but one of the points you made in this book is that at some point football grabbed the America pastime title from baseball. And some of that was unforced errors that baseball had. Other things were that football just became way more popular. Fantasy football came in. They figured out how to just put more games on. Like you mentioned in the book, how you watch two and a half games a week.

47:26Bill Simmons:I was probably, there was the early game and then they were usually a double header on one of the networks unless the Pats were playing. so it was sometimes three afternoon games but maybe usually two plus the Monday night I was in the same boat as you could maybe stay up through Cosell and then we experienced it through football highlights from the pregame show on CBS there wasn't ESPN back then football cards magazines books Sports Illustrated like we're just kind of grabbing any piece of it and I think what's changed so much since now that we're in our 50s is football's just everywhere all the time.

48:05Bill Simmons:Think how many channels it's on now.

48:07Chuck Klosterman:Absolutely.

48:08Bill Simmons:You have a game on Amazon, NBC, Fox, and CBS. We have five playoff games in four spots and you can see every piece of it. You can see the highlights right away. I can watch after a Patriots game. I can see Mike Vrabel greeting every player as they run back in the tunnel. And then I can watch the locker room speeches everyone give. And I can do this within an hour of the game. And if you had explained any of this to us in 1978, we would have been, our brains would have broken. Oh, absolutely.

48:34Chuck Klosterman:And we would have wanted it. We would have wanted what was described, even though I don't know if necessarily the way it's working out is better for the consumer. But just to go back to something you had said earlier, you know, it is an interesting thing. Like, football was more popular than baseball in the 70s. It already had passed it. But we didn't think of it that way. We still looked at baseball as sort of, you know, the American pastime, and football was this other thing.

48:57Bill Simmons:Do you feel like football had stars in the same way that baseball did, I think that was the one difference where it felt like Pete Rose, Reggie Jackson, and a couple of those guys were just bigger than any football player except maybe Staubach.

49:09Chuck Klosterman:Well, but here's the deal. That seems like a positive, but it is a problem for any sport focused in that way around people. See, football has a real advantage of many things, but one of the real advantage it has is that, you know, the players are almost faces. You know, we're always watching this clash of colors on the field. The uniforms are, it's a warlike kind of simulation where the person, the 20 most popular players in the NBA now are more famous than the 20 most popular non-quarterbacks in the NFL, for sure. They're more recognizable. And that seems like a benefit, right? If you're the NBA, you're like, this is great.

49:53Chuck Klosterman:We have all these personalities. But the thing is, personalities disappear and people's feelings toward them change. Matters is the thing itself. The reason football is so dominant is not because of the individuals. It's because of the collective. It's because the sport is what people like. You know, you had mentioned like this thing with baseball. It is interesting. So, you know, football starts, you know, late 19th century or whatever. And then it intersects with the rise of television in the 1950s. And that is what makes it happen.

50:28Bill Simmons:The famous Colts-Giants game, that really kicks it off and then we're just off.

50:33Chuck Klosterman:I mean, that's sort of the marker we use. But it really goes beyond that. Because certainly when you're inventing a sport in the 19th century, when you're inventing college football, television doesn't exist. When television as a medium was being created, there was an idea that, oh, we can show sports on this, but it was like, we can show the Kentucky Derby on this. You know, we can show baseball games on this. Football was not the, no one looked at television and thought like, this will be the perfect machine to broadcast football. Well, wasn't that boxing though? Boxing too. I feel like boxing was the most important TV story.

51:08Chuck Klosterman:Yes, absolutely. I mean, all three of those sports, when football or when television was created, I think would have been like, this is what this box will let us do. But one of the big arguments I make early in the book, and the reason it's the first essay is because in many ways, it's the most important, is an incredible coincidence happened, is that football is better experienced through television. and television for a whole variety of kind of semiotic reasons, the best thing it can do is show you a football game. The way it's designed, the way the passive experience of watching television works, it's just ideal for football.

51:51Chuck Klosterman:And this is why football became the thing that it did. It's this kind of enforced marriage to television that ended up being the best possible thing for both sides of the equation. That's why, like when I say like football was more popular than baseball in the seventies, but we were still kind of operating from this idea that what mattered is what we said mattered. So if we say baseball is the national pastime, it was, but at some point that changed where the consumer had more control than the person dictating what the meaning is. And football now is so pervasive that it kind of informs the lives of people who don't care at all.

52:29Chuck Klosterman:Like there's just, it's a cliche thing to say, but really like as somebody's into the monoculture, it's just football and Taylor Swift. That's it. Like all that rest of it is gone, you know? And that's why I would say football is really a way to understand the last half of the 20th century. I'm not sure it'll be the best way to understand the 21st century.

52:50Bill Simmons:Well, there's some genius things that they added to it. When you think about the football we watched in the 70s versus where they are now. Part of the problem with football was if you came into a game, you didn't know what the score... This seems so basic. I know. You wouldn't know what the score was for 20 minutes. And then they might flash the graphic. You're like, oh, the Browns are winning. Be one of those. They gradually realized, oh, we should put the score on the bottom. When you're watching, especially on the old square TVs with the reception's not awesome, you never knew what was the first down.

53:21Bill Simmons:You couldn't see the ball sometimes. You couldn't see replays of what happened. Did the guy catch it? So they add instant replay. They add all these things that kind of make you a participant in the game, even though you're not playing. I have opinions on all the strategy on both sides. I think I'm smarter than half the coaches, even though I'm clearly not. I'm debating whether this was a penalty, whether he caught this. Why did they call it this way that time when they called it the last time? Baseball lost a lot of that with the stat revolution. All of a sudden, there weren't as many arguments because you couldn't be like, Otani shouldn't bat first.

53:59Bill Simmons:That's ridiculous. So fast guys should bat first. I was talking with my friend Kevin Hatch the other day about when the 78 and 79 Red Sox, we had Rick Burlson and Jerry Remy at the top of the lineup because they were the fast guys. And their on-base was like 290. I was like, well, of course they should be at the top of the lineup. But now if you redid that Red Sox lineup, Fred Linden would clearly bat first.

54:19Chuck Klosterman:Yeah, it's very weird. It's like for somebody my age, it was very weird to see like a Tawny batting first. I was like, what? Right. It's weird.

54:26Bill Simmons:Baseball kind of solved all this stuff, but football, I feel like we've never really totally solved. We still have games like that weird Pat's Chargers game where it's just like the Chargers can't figure out how to block these guys. You know, it's like the basic things that were still happening in the 1930s. And that's, I think, why it still works.

54:42Chuck Klosterman:The things you're saying are all true, But I guess I feel like it's something even much bigger than that. I mean, OK. Oh, no question. I'm just saying that I think that stuff helps. But what I'm saying is, OK, so one thing that's often mentioned, particularly by people who don't like football, is a kind of a very famous Wall Street Journal article from 2011, where these guys studied these pro football games and they were like, do you know, in a three hour telecast of an NFL game, there's 11 minutes of action. Right. You're sitting there for three hours and there's 11 minutes of action. Now, if somebody was inventing football right now for the first time, there was no way that would get through the pitch meeting.

55:22Chuck Klosterman:If they said this is a three-hour sport and there's actually about 11 minutes of action, people would say like, that's insane. No one's going to sit through that. Nobody wants that. That's a huge flaw. But it's not a flaw. As it turns out, 11 minutes is the perfect amount. Because these things you're talking about, they happen in between plays.

55:41Bill Simmons:Yeah.

55:41Chuck Klosterman:Like there's like football is, has this, like this, this accidental upside, which is super intense hyperaction in this small window of time, maybe seven seconds. And then there's this time when you can think about what you saw, what you will see next. What was the meaning of that? Maybe the analyst will describe what we actually saw in a way that we couldn't comprehend. Or maybe I'll hate the analyst and think he's an idiot. Sure. Either way I win. Or you can think about something else. You can talk to somebody about something that's not involved with the actual football game, or you can talk about the football game.

56:17Chuck Klosterman:This experience, which seems like it should be a mistake, it should be a mistake that something that lasts that long has that little amount of action. This is one of these things that like, it's one of the many counterintuitive things about football and that the TV experience is great, despite the fact that it would never get through a focus group. The fact that somebody said the main view you will have in a football game most of the time will not show you all the players. You will not be able to see the free safeties. You know, when the quarterback drops back and throws the ball, you will have a moment where you will have no idea if the guy is open or covered.

56:51Chuck Klosterman:Like these things that seem like they should be problems actually create this sort of internal psychological tension that makes this experience so enriching. I really believe that football, the reason that it is the best thing television kind of has ever sort of been built with, you know, is because even a bad football game is weirdly watchable. And that isn't true about other things like like the very apex, you know, the greatest Final Four game or or like, you know, an extremely tight World Series in the ninth inning. Those are as good as any football game at the apex. it's all shared but at the bottom a bad football game is still better than a bad almost anything

57:32Bill Simmons:you know and then you throw in gambling and fantasy football and other things you might have and that's even better yeah two things on that one the 11 minutes it's 11 minutes but there's so much to discuss between every play it doesn't feel like 11 minutes but you notice that like when i have the sunday set up and i had the six games going at once it's always amazing how how many games are either in commercial or nothing. Like you can actually watch six games at once because there's so little action in all the games that you can, for the most part, get a feel for every game, right? Sometimes two games will have something happening at the exact same time.

58:06Bill Simmons:But for the most part, you really can watch six games at once. I mean, but you're in,

58:10Chuck Klosterman:it's an insanely specific situation, Bill. You are in top of like both. Yeah, but I'm just saying like, you are in top of like most people who love football.

58:16Bill Simmons:I get it, but I'm just saying that's one of those things where it's like the 11 minutes, you really feel it. Like you could watch six basketball games at once. It'd be impossible.

58:25Chuck Klosterman:It's true. You watch the red zone on Sunday and then you watch the Sunday night game. Red zone's another one.

58:30Bill Simmons:Red zone is just constant boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. But here's the other thing. So you compared it to basketball. Basketball has, you know, the 11 minutes problem in reverse where basketball is constant. But then when we get to the last four minutes, what happens? It becomes too slow. There's too much time. There's timeouts. there's instant replay reviews and there's not enough action. And we're constantly going, come on, just start. And that's why when we watch like the world FIFA championships or the Olympics or something, and there's like a real pace to the games, we're like, this is much better.

59:03Bill Simmons:Why can't basketball be like this? So they, in a weird way, they have the opposite problem.

59:07Chuck Klosterman:One of the things I kind of talk about in this book is how, you know, there are kind of three types of sports. There's the one sport that is like basketball, soccer, hockey, to some extent, auto racing and boxing. They're kind of hypnotic. They're constant movement. Because it's action that's perpetual. It never stops. So you can almost sort of be hypnotized by it. And when the action is great, of course, you're thrilled. But even the second quarter of an NBA playoff game can get dull sometimes. You can kind of check out. There are other sports that are almost totally intellectual and cognitive baseball golf you know these sports where most of what you're watching is thinking about what could or could not happen you know golf golf's a great one and you're and it's it's actually sort of everything you see uh when you're watching golf it's kind of like um set up prologue for what you kind of hope will happen at the end okay and then the third one is football which is unlike the other two in the sense that it is like the second version where there's lots of stoppage of play and there's lots of consideration of what could happen, what happened earlier, all of these things.

1:00:18Chuck Klosterman:But in the moments of action, it is so hyperkinetic that it feels as though you're watching something very intense and that's moving fast. It doesn't feel slow in the way some of the other cognitive sports do. And football is unique in this. Football takes the best qualities from these two kinds of sports and makes it into one sport. And again, this was completely accidental. No one planned this. Like nobody thought to themselves that, you know, the way football operates will be ideal for this television medium. And it clearly is. I mean, and even if someone wants to argue with me, if someone wants to say like, oh, there's many things that are actually better on TV or whatever.

1:00:59Chuck Klosterman:It's like the evidence sure suggests the opposite. The evidence suggests that people would rather watch football than anything. Like, you know, it's like in 2024, the numbers were a little bit changed because it was an election year. But people still watch the Super Bowl more than they watch the election results. I mean, there's no comparison to this in other countries, right? You know, soccer is the sport of Europe. In many countries, it's almost like their combination of football, basketball, and baseball, and hockey all together. And yet we would never see in, you know, in Norway that 93 of the 100 most watched events were a sport.

1:01:40Chuck Klosterman:I mean, people in Japan love baseball. It would never be a situation where 93 of the 100 most watched Japanese broadcasts are baseball. Like this is like America is different in a lot of ways. This is one of them, you know.

1:01:54Bill Simmons:Well, it's funny that football has evolved perfectly as the decades has evolved, whereas other sports have not. Like I think about tennis and no fault of tennis, but the players just became more durable during matches, right? You have these matches that are like five and a half hours, five hours, four hours and 48 minutes. And it's kind of like the players outgrew the sport in some ways where I actually think they could probably think about changing the rules. I'm not sure anyone wants to be there for five-hour matches.

1:02:26Chuck Klosterman:That was always McEnroe's thing. It's like make him go back to wood rackets.

1:02:30Bill Simmons:Or make it like four games a set or something. So I used to love tennis more than I do now. Now I watch Wimbledon and I'll watch U.S. Open. And that's really it. But for the most part, I don't want to spend five hours watching a tennis match.

1:02:43Chuck Klosterman:Although this is another thing that sort of complicates this conversation. I mean, could tennis find a way to become more popular in the way that baseball found a way to make some real changes and becoming baseball is a better experience now on TV. The last World Series is evidence, you know?

1:02:59Bill Simmons:Yeah.

1:03:00Chuck Klosterman:But yet something like, you know, tennis or track or any of these things like. They don't really need to be this thing that 80 million people care about, but they can be their own thing and then kind of evolve in their own way. But now football can't do that anymore. Football can only get bigger. The NFL can only expand. And that's what makes it fragile. That's why, like, you know, at the end of this book, I talk about this idea of how, you know, football can kind of collapse. Right now, that seems insane. Right now, it seems more likely that football would swallow up every other sport. And that's all we would have.

1:03:36Chuck Klosterman:But nothing works that way. People change. The world changes. And it was the only part of your book that I disagreed with vehemently. Really? So you agreed with the part about Tom Brady and Jim Thorpe.

1:03:49Bill Simmons:No, it was just when you talked about how commercial money, not to spoil it, but commercial money was going to go away and they wouldn't be able to replace it. I actually think they're always going to be able to find a way to replace the money. And you're already seeing it now. You never could have predicted the streamer stuff. They'll keep making the schedules longer. They'll keep selling these one-off games. And I just think as long as the ratings and the interest are where they are, the money's going to come from however people consume it. And what the real thing we've learned is that people, you mentioned this earlier, it's more fun to stay home and watch all the games than it is to go to a game.

1:04:26Bill Simmons:It's the only sport where you can definitively say like, why would I go to the game? I'd rather watch it because it's more fun to watch at home.

1:04:32Chuck Klosterman:There are many reasons to go to a pro football game or a college football game, but one of them can never be, I want to see the game better. That can never be it. the two things I wanted to say before we move on to this, though, it's like the thing you say about how as long as there's interest in the sport, they'll find different ways to pay for it. That's possible. Like, you know, it's I think certainly in the way we are now, let's say advertising disappeared tomorrow. I think that the NFL could sell these games all the cart.

1:05:00Bill Simmons:You know, why would advertising disappear, though? Like it's never going to disappear. People are always going to have to tell other people about their product.

1:05:07Chuck Klosterman:But here's why I would say this. The reason I think that at some point advertising, the idea of commercial advertising particularly, is going to disappear. Because we don't have any proof that advertising works now. The only thing we know about advertising is that it can introduce people to a product that they've never before experienced. So if someone has never had a Budweiser and they see a commercial for Budweiser, it introduces that into their life. But if they see a thousand Budweiser ads, it's not necessarily going to make them want to drink it more. OK, so advertising is already a gamble.

1:05:40Chuck Klosterman:It's just the best thing that we have. If you're a company or a corporation, it's a little tautological, too, because it's like, well, we advertise a lot and our company is successful. So we put more money into advertising and it stays successful. I think that there is going to be a realization in the future that advertising is a lagging indicator of everything and that the amount it costs, not just to create ads, but to pay for them, to pay whoever, Fox or Prime, whoever is showing them, isn't worth it. And that's going to be a sudden sort of sea change, right? There's going to be this sudden realization that what these platforms and these networks are paying for this sport, it's not going to work.

1:06:23Chuck Klosterman:Suddenly, there's going to be a collective bargaining agreement, and the amount of money is not going to go up for covering the NFL. It's going to go down and there's going to be a work stoppage. And the bigger thing here, Bill, and this is the key, the key point is that I think the human relationship to football is already starting to change. And 40 years from now, which is two generations, the average person, their only relationship to football will be it's an entertaining distraction that's on television and if there's a work stoppage they're not going to care if there was a work stoppage now people lose their fucking mind they'd be like what am i going to gamble on what am i going to do on weekends how do i live but i mean i got you know you know when the strikes happened in the 80s you know that was and football wasn't as big as it is now then but it was big and people were like we want these games back we need these games back i can imagine a time in 50 years when this happens and the kind of person who consumes football does not have a hard time living without it.

1:07:26Chuck Klosterman:And that's what the thing that we cannot possibly, it's hard to visualize that now. Like it's very difficult to visualize a world where people aren't like us, but of course there will be in the same way that we're different people than the ones who lived 50 years ago and probably could not believe that horse racing would ever disappear.

1:07:44Bill Simmons:I want to keep going on this, but ironically, we have to take a break to hear from our sponsors. So you mentioned horse racing as a sport that was absolutely massive and then declined in public interest year after year after year, basically starting, I would say, in the 90s, right? Somewhere around there.

1:08:03Chuck Klosterman:I would say it probably started decreasing in popularity probably in the 40s or 50s. In the 70s, when there was just kind of a... 70s was a renaissance when we were kids. There was an incredible run of horses, right? But even those horses, like, you know, people unironically argue like Seabiscuit was as popular as Babe Ruth. That wasn't the case for Seattle Slew. Seattle Slew wasn't as popular as Reggie Jackson or whatever, you know. Like it had already started to change to the point now where to be a horse racing fan signifies something very specific. Either you are an addictive gambler or you own horses.

1:08:39Chuck Klosterman:You know, that's basically it.

1:08:40Bill Simmons:Or you're an addictive gambler who owns horses.

1:08:43Chuck Klosterman:Sure. Sure. That's the third category. But the horse racing thing, it really was like, if you go back, what do you like?

1:08:53Bill Simmons:If we rank the sports in 1928. It's horse racing, boxing and baseball in some order. And I think football is probably fourth.

1:09:04Chuck Klosterman:I mean, fourth, it's very, you know, it's an odd thing that people love to bring up this thing of the three biggest sports 100 years ago. They never go to the fourth one.

1:09:13Bill Simmons:Was football the fourth most popular sport? I think football was fourth. And then I think it started a nudge horse racing out probably in the 40s.

1:09:21Chuck Klosterman:Yeah, probably. Probably. I mean, yeah.

1:09:23Bill Simmons:Because it's only a spectator sport in the 20s. And boxing, you could do on the, that boxing was a big radio sport. So it was horse racing. So probably, and then by the 50s, I think it switches. The boxing, who was the guy that died in the ring? by from booboo mancini here no no and then in the 60s i'm blanking emil emil griffith killed benny the kid parade whatever that happened on live tv and that seemed like that was some sort of weird tipping point for boxing is like people started to go whoa what's going on here are you sure that's what made it happen

1:10:00Chuck Klosterman:because i thought that was like a modern view of that i don't know if i i know i think that's

1:10:04Bill Simmons:when it happened i think that was like a big public reckoning with what are we watching it was like the first time that it happened with boxing i think that was the fight popularity did spike and ali spiked it up again in the 70s yeah and then when we saw ali in the 80s that i

1:10:17Chuck Klosterman:mean the boxing decline i mean obviously max kellerman or whatever would be a better person to talk about this but it's like that the decline of boxing is very complex it has it has a lot of different aspects as to why corruption the way the fights were you know the way the way fighting has changed like like there's a really great i don't know if you ever listened to this podcast Hardcore History. This guy, Dan Carlin, has an amazing episode about how boxing is the one sport that all experts basically agree is the only one where the guys would lose to the guys of the past. And that even many of the things that many of the things boxers did in the past can't even be done now.

1:10:55Chuck Klosterman:There's no one to train them. And because the weights don't change, you know, guys stay in the same weight class. A boxer from the past would beat a boxer from the present in all likelihood now. so boxing is kind of it's kind of its own thing okay the decline in baseball is something we've talked about and i think it's like it's it's it's yeah we've talked nuanced but like you can there are some sort of kind of wide brushes that can be made horse racing is the easiest to understand i mean to me at least i mean that that's that was just like there was a time when we had a relationship to horses and there's a time when we didn't so we were watching something now that's alien we're watching these things that we like like i like i i i would guess that there are people listening to this podcast who have many, many people who have never touched a horse, have never actually had their hand on a horse.

1:11:39Chuck Klosterman:I would guess maybe the majority of the people listening to this podcast.

1:11:43Bill Simmons:But your case in the book was that horse racing was so much more popular in the first part of the 20th century because people actually spent a lot of time around horses.

1:11:53Chuck Klosterman:They still cared about horses. I mean, even if they used them for transportation. Well, you know, yeah. I mean, if in the year 1900, even an urban area like Chicago was called the city of horses. There were horses everywhere. If you had a blue collar job, horses did the work. Maybe you didn't have a horse, but your dad probably did. Your grandfather almost certainly did. Like you would have been, you know, the country was more rural. So the idea of just running into a horse was common. The idea of encountering horses was not some kind of surprising thing. It would probably be surprising if you leave this podcast and saw a horse.

1:12:27Chuck Klosterman:That might be enough for you to tell everyone you know you will not believe what I saw was a horse on the street. So I think that is a huge part of it. And that's why I kind of made this comparison to what I think is going to happen with football in that it is increasingly becoming something that people only watch, that they would never let their kid play. They didn't play themselves. Their father didn't play. They, you know, that it's this thing that is an only, you know, it's a mediated experience only. And when a mediated experience only disappears, it can be replaced with other media. You know, that seems like an obvious thing to say, but it's true.

1:13:10Chuck Klosterman:Like, I don't think the way people feel about football is going to continue. I think that in many ways, people our age are kind of at the tail end of this. There's still some people younger than us who, you know. But for the idea that it's like a normal thing, like a normal thing to, you know, like, I don't think you played high school football, but you probably went to high school football games. And you just, it was like it was in your world, sort of, you know?

1:13:37Bill Simmons:Yeah, because I think, I don't know if I agree with you on this one, because I think it's more realistic that football will evolve and there will be different forms of football at the same time. And you're already seeing this with the flag football stuff. That's a different thing, though. these seven. No, I know, but it's, it's, I think some stuff's going to shift that way. So your basic premise is right. But I don't think football like necessarily like goes on the major decline or I think it'll just kind of shift where some people will just be like, oh, high school football is just now flag football, or it's like no hitting.

1:14:12Bill Simmons:And that's just where we are 50 years from now.

1:14:15Chuck Klosterman:I mean, I think this is why it's kind of a complicated, but interesting thing. It's sort of like there are some components of football that have to be there for football to be what it is. You know, nobody watches or very few people, I would say, watch football as a blood sport. Very few people watch football hoping to see guys just get rocked and get carried off in stretchers. That's not how it is.

1:14:39Bill Simmons:There might be. Yeah, but as recently as 30 years ago, I think that was a component.

1:14:42Chuck Klosterman:Well, it may be. There was some of it there. But but even then, there was always this idea that like what they liked about football was the game itself, but for it to be meaningful, there has to be the risk of real injury. That if you take that, that if there's that, what is interesting about football is not necessarily, or just entirely what you're seeing on the field, the guys running a post, the quarterbacks rolling, right? They're pulling these guys like that's interesting, right? But they're doing it in this incredibly dangerous scenario. And as you remove that danger, the meaning of the thing that you like changes.

1:15:19Like, say a guy's going to climb Mount Everest, right?

1:15:26Chuck Klosterman:He doesn't want to die, but it's meaningful because he could, right? Football has that. Football needs to have an element of violence and of danger, not because the violence is what we like, but the violence changes the meaning of everything else. So if, as football moves away from this, like moves, you know, they say like, we could play flag football, right? You know, it would be just as exhilarating to see, you know, Pook and a Koo or whatever, run a pattern without the idea that he doesn't get his head knocked off when the ball comes in or whatever, but it's not the same. And that's what I think is going to change.

1:15:59Chuck Klosterman:I think the idea is going to, that we're going to just completely bifurcate this, where there's going to be people who watch football and people who play football and they have no relationship at all, no interaction whatsoever. Football players are all going to come from the same places, the only places in America that say that we're going to stay with this. We're going to, this is part of our identity and our culture. And that makes it perilous. It makes it precarious, I guess. The idea that there is this thing that people are supposed to care about, even though it has no meaning to them in a personal, individual way.

1:16:30Bill Simmons:see what i'm saying kind of yeah i do i just think you you got to throw in the call as long as college football and college scholarships exist well i think there's going to be a huge part of the country that still cares about being good and okay you know whatever the before high school football high school football can i get it can i get somebody to pay for my college by

1:16:50Chuck Klosterman:playing football okay we're in we're in a very fascinating time to have this specific point okay We sure are. Okay. So like, let's say, I don't know when our first podcast was 20 years ago. If we would have said, you know what's going to happen in about 20 years? Indiana is going to be the clear favorite to win the national football championship. And Nebraska is going to be 16-0 in basketball. And they could win the Big Ten. Yeah. What? Big Ten? Well, none of it makes sense, right? None of it seems possible. now in the short term these things nil stuff portal stuff is going to slightly boost the popularity of these college sports because now people in indiana are able to watch football in a way for the first time in this way anytime you professionalize something it does have a short term benefit a short term game but yeah for time i do think this is probably going to be a disaster for college sports.

1:17:49Bill Simmons:I wouldn't even use the word probably. I think it's, I think we're headed that way already.

1:17:54Chuck Klosterman:I thought you just kind of said that there'll always be places though. Like in Tennessee, they'll always care about Tennessee volunteer football. And maybe that is true.

1:18:01Bill Simmons:But I'm talking, I'm talking about as a high-end sport that competes against the NFL and all these other places. It's so poorly governed right now. We're getting to the point where people are in the playoffs and they just leave their teams. Well, yeah. Or they decide they're transferring. You have like guys in the secondary of a team that's in the final four, just transferring and be like, okay guys, good luck. Like you're done as a sport. If that keeps happening.

1:18:24Chuck Klosterman:It's not even poorly governed. It's ungoverned. It's ungoverned. It's a wild West. So, you know, and, and now in the present moment, we can't really blame these guys, right? Like you can't look to a kid and you know, like I saw today or whatever, I think like the Arizona state quarterback is like, he's transferring to LSU. I think I saw this morning. I'm sure he's going to get a ton of money for doing that. And he's going to be a higher profile person. So you can't look at that kid and be like, why? You can't blame him, right? You have to do what's best for, every person has to do what's best for them.

1:18:56Chuck Klosterman:You can't expect them to think about the long-term health of the sport. You can't put this on coaches. You can't put this on anyone. You can't expect them to think about things in the future. But these things are going to be detrimental in the future. People are going to have a less relationship with college. We've already seen what happened with college basketball when guys only played one year. OK, it was like we didn't have a relationship to the best guys. You know, it's like you'd see a player and he'd be gone or whatever. Football is now I mean, all sports are doing this, I guess. Basketball as well have like done such an amplified version of this.

1:19:32Chuck Klosterman:We've guys from the G League now going back to college football players playing on seemingly somehow six.

1:19:40Bill Simmons:What about the guy in Kansas, Darren Peterson, who's got a huge NIL money and then got hurt. Then there was rumors that he was just going to be done and keep the money. Then he came back and whatever happens, he's only going to be there for six months anyway. I just feel like all the stuff that's happening in college, like this decade, is confirming how stupid college sports were for a long time and everybody was in complete denial with it. right? It was like these athletes are getting exploited. Everybody's making so much money for them. These guys should be more empowered. Well, now we empowered them and now it's like wild, wild West and there's no middle ground and there's nobody to figure out the middle ground.

1:20:22Bill Simmons:That's the thing that, you know, maybe there's other parts of America that work like this, but this is unsolvable because nobody's going to solve it. Nobody's going to be empowered to be able to be like, okay, here are my ideas. Everybody's got to listen to me. Can you imagine? Like even in the Cowboys doc when Jerry Jones was like, fuck it, I'm just going to do my own deal with Nike. And everyone's like, whoa, you can't do that because he kind of broke out of the 32 team code that was there. College has no code.

1:20:48Chuck Klosterman:Well, no, it had like the NCAA, as it turns out, was just a bunch of letters. They really have no ability to do anything.

1:20:57Bill Simmons:Other than just prevent people from playing was like seemingly their only ability to do anything. I also think that the way these things are perceived.

1:21:06Chuck Klosterman:Okay. So you remember some years back, it was like, I believe it was the Northwestern football team. And they were like the first team who was going to unionize or whatever, you know, this is before guys were getting NIL money and all this stuff. Yeah. And there was this move, or I think this perception that's like, well, that's good. These kids are doing this. This is unfair. They're being exploited. We kind of looked at college football players the way typically a labor, you know, somebody who covers labor would look at like coal mines and coal miners or whatever, you know, like suddenly the idea of having a free college education and being able to have this life was a complete ripoff to these guys that somehow if you played for, you went to Notre Dame or whatever, and you played football and were the hero of the town and got a degree and all these things for free.

1:21:55Chuck Klosterman:That was now seen as like, you got, you got jammed. You did not get what you were worth because technically you weren't. Technically you were someone like Tim Tebow or Johnny Manziel was certainly making more money for these universities than they were getting back. So it's like I say, it's understandable that like that any college athlete would be like, well, okay, how, how can I get, I got to take care of myself. You can't expect that person to think about college sports in general, but who's supposed to think about college sports in general? Who is it? I actually got this idea.

1:22:27Bill Simmons:I've been getting a bunch of good mailbag questions about how to save college sports. And the best idea that I've heard that I think is really tough to refute is this seems like the perfect system for relegation where you have maybe it's 24 teams in there, like for college football. It's like the top 24, 16 get to advance, maybe eight are in the playoffs. the other 16 get to stay at the top level. The bottom eight that didn't make it now drop down to the second level. The top eight move up. However you want to do the numbers where you're in, basically we have a top, top level that everyone would want to be at.

1:23:09Bill Simmons:Other teams have a chance to move into that level. And there's like a clear disparity between the levels and that top level makes the most money. They figure out how to make it so that it's split better between the players and the coaches and the universities. and maybe that works. Whatever's happening now with the conferences.

1:23:26Chuck Klosterman:But what's the goal of that? What, like, this, this, this, you said to save college sports. Like, what is the goal? That to keep them popular? I don't know if the huge risk that in the short term, college sports are going to become less popular. That just seems to me like hyper-professionalizing it.

1:23:41Bill Simmons:Yeah, but that's my point. I think we should. What is the point of having these conferences? We have conferences. The whole point of college sports conferences was that they were regional. and it was like the Pac-10, these kids are in college. We don't want to have them traveling all over the place. So they're going to play the schools that are closely approximate to where they live. And now you have UCLA flying to play Penn State and all this crazy shit. Like, what's the point of that? I mean, so if we're going to hyper-professionalize it, let's actually do it.

1:24:11Chuck Klosterman:But okay, I guess, but I don't want that to happen, right? Okay, so like all these things. Hasn't the ship sailed though? Well, it has, but I'm not going to be here and be like it's sailed. so therefore the ship is fucking great the ship has sailed that's awful like it's bad that this happened right now yeah i guess what you're kind of arguing it's not a bad argument you just got to keep going forward right and i would say well keep going forward don't even make the guys playing for these schools go to school there just let these colleges like you know pay people to represent the university what you know i guess that would be just as interesting like a minor leagues almost Exactly.

1:24:45Chuck Klosterman:But like, I, I don't, I don't want that to happen. Like, you know, it was, I liked it when they were, I want them to be different. You know, I like, I don't want the, I don't want Saturday and Sunday to feel the same to me. And they increasingly do because all these other things are going to happen to the game itself because of this. Like what's great about college football, many things, but one of them is that the diversity in the way teams played was a huge spectrum. You might see a team playing, you know, like the Flexbone and they're playing an Air Raid team and it's like this collision. One thing you saw with the SEC over the last 10 or 15 years is those teams fundamentally kind of play the same because they had all these great players in the same way in the NFL.

1:25:33Chuck Klosterman:That once, you know, you can't do it like a, a lot of the things that I think that you might see is kind of like gimmicky in college or like a quarterback. Can't work in the NFL, right? There's too many good guys. Like you can't, you can't, like a Mike Leach system or whatever would not have worked maybe in the NFL because people would just take these things away and stuff like that. But a college, they still, that still existed, right? It was a neat thing to see. It was neat to think about how maybe football on the West Coast and football in the Southeast and football in the Midwest is sort of fundamentally different.

1:26:04Chuck Klosterman:And that the kind of players you see are kind of fundamentally different. That even though recruiting is national, most teams kind of recruited regionally. I mean, that's going to be completely over now. Like you say this relegation thing. So let's say we did that. We have 24 teams and the bottom eight teams get relegated.

1:26:24Chuck Klosterman:A kid is still going to basically be, at this point, be sort of persuaded to go to one school over another, not because of whether or not they might get relegated, whether or not they're at the top. It's like, what check is bigger? I mean well like that's that's what this guy in Indiana that's just he's brilliant for a lot of reasons but the reason I guess to good coach is because he's the best at evaluating talent

1:26:47Bill Simmons:and finding bargains that's what Belichick thought he was going to be good at and maybe he still will be but then he thought that was the advantage which you're basically the 33rd NFL team was

1:26:58Chuck Klosterman:how he phrased it but even that it's kind of so let's say he was let's say he had let's say Billichick was the best evaluator of talent or whatever. Um, it's still like, do we have the money in our coffers to pay for these guys? Like, you know, that's what it really kind of comes down to.

1:27:12Bill Simmons:Um, but here's the problem with the money part, the, the NIL we've already seen the boosters who it seemed like a good idea the first couple of years are not going to keep committing money to it. Cause you have the Ohio state situation where they, would they get like$35 million worth of NIL and then they lost anyway. And it was like, Hey, can you write us another check this year? and say, no, I'm good, actually. Thanks.

1:27:33Chuck Klosterman:It's a weird way. It's like some people are listening to this conversation and they're like, you want these kids to be the equivalent of like indentured servants. You don't want them to, it's like, it's a weird argument to make. No. They're always supposed to argue. Everyone kind of feels like they're supposed to argue on behalf of the player. What is best for the player? And, you know, I understand that. I understand that. I understand that thinking. but it's really the institution that matters. It's the, it's every player in orchestra. It's every program in orchestra. What is best for all of those things?

1:28:09Chuck Klosterman:And that's just an impossible thing to deal with. So I do think what's going to happen, say with college sports, I do think there is going to be this temporary spike in interest. I'm sure to someone living in Bloomington, Indiana, this is incredible. Like this is like, they may be like football their whole life, but not like this. This is, it's going to expand these things into places that weren't traditionally, you know, hotbeds for these things. So at first it will seem like, oh, like, I think everyone's interested in, in like this national football championship, but over time, it's going to change the thing that we liked originally.

1:28:44Chuck Klosterman:That's why we were talking earlier in this conversation about like, why I think football's benefit advantage is that personalities do not drive it. Teams drive it. Like the idea of football is what drives it. Yeah. Whereas on the NBA, it's not that way. Now person that, you know, celebrity drives the NBA now.

1:29:03Bill Simmons:I think you're missing one thing with college though. Which is, um, first of all, we've turned into haves and have nots more than ever with college football, right? It's more glaring than it's ever been. And you might have a James Madison type of outlier every once in a while. And then what happens? They make the playoffs and the guy immediately gets hired by UCLA and we won't see them again. I wonder when you think about the cost of having a football team from a scholarship standpoint and how you have to match those scholarships on the other side. I just feel like more and more universities, the liability, concussions, how much it costs to do a program, the way people transfer around, how much depends on a coach and how much of a good recruiter he can be, how many laws he can kind of bend his way around.

1:29:48Bill Simmons:I think we're going to see more and more colleges at the mid-level just be like, fuck it. you know, and then we're going to turn into like the higher end colleges playing football and then like div three. And that's just kind of where we're going to go.

1:30:02Chuck Klosterman:Football pays for every other sport though. That's the thing. I mean, like, even if you look at the Mac or whatever, it's like, you know, if, if, if you're at Marshall or whatever, it's like the fact that you had those matching games on Tuesday, that's what's paying for the Marshall women's team in basketball for the track team. So it's going to be hard for college to say, we're going to dump football.

1:30:22Bill Simmons:But are people going to care about those games as much when we become more about the haves and the have-nots and there's only 20 teams that you really need to watch every college football season and everybody else is kind of over there?

1:30:33Chuck Klosterman:I think what you're describing, I actually think kind of the opposite is going to happen.

1:30:38Bill Simmons:You think it's going to be better for those teams?

1:30:39Chuck Klosterman:Well, because that's what you're describing is how college football was for most of my life. Great. Alabama and Texas, and they had down years. But for the most part, when I was a kid, The teams that were great in college football were still that late, right? You know, now who are the haves and have, Indiana was a have not forever. Now they have it as long as they got this coach and as long as they can pay for it. Nebraska was a have not in basketball. Now they're undefeated. They were a have in football, but now they're not. Now they lose their quarterback. You know, it's like, um, I think that what's going to happen is it's going to be more like, I mean, One of the reasons the NFL is so successful as the mass creation is because every six or seven or eight years, your team should be good.

1:31:26Chuck Klosterman:The whole thing is designed for that through the draft, the parity, through all the salary cap, all those things like your if you follow a football team for 40 years, there should be at least three or four times when you're in contention for a Super Bowl. Unless you're the Jets. Unless you're the Jets. I get, you know, because they've just done everything wrong. And yet it still is not unfathomable to imagine the Jets being good in three years. It could happen. That could happen.

1:31:54Bill Simmons:It's probably unfathomable to Sean Fentasy. A couple of things you add in this book that I just want to go quick because we're not going to go for seven hours here. You talked about the concept of goats in football and came to the, I'll spoil this chapter because I liked it. But also I don't want to spoil too much of the book. You're basically like the goat should be somebody that created the ground that obviously we're going to keep getting better and better at sports as the years pass. And Brady is the goat because it was a recency bias and, or people think he's the goat because recency bias.

1:32:28Bill Simmons:He played, he had the most success at the most important position we've ever seen, but the odds are there's going to be another Brady. Jim Thorpe comes in, did things nobody could have ever imagined, kind of created the template for where we were going to go. And that should be the true definition of a goat.

1:32:45Chuck Klosterman:I mean, that's an interesting chapter in the book because the amount of football players named in that essay... You had eight goats. I think might be more than in any other chapter in the entire book. The number of things about football I discuss. And yet, ideologically, it's kind of like just about the idea of how greatness is measured. And I think that the modern person thinks about greatness for the most part incorrectly in the sense that whoever is the greatest player in the present, in theory, is the greatest player of all time because of the way training changes and nutrition changes. It's like cars.

1:33:27Bill Simmons:The 2026 best Porsche is probably better than the 1976 best Porsche. So when you're talking about the greatness of anything, and there are exceptions, and I'm sure you're going to pick some up as soon as I say this, but when I'm thinking, if someone asks me, like, what is the greatest whatever in anything, any subject, what I'm trying to do is

1:33:48Chuck Klosterman:think of what is the earliest incarnation of greatness that's still present in the modern version. So it's like the earliest version of something that was great, indisputably great, that still exists in every version that comes after. And my argument with Jim Thorpe kind of - So it's like a prototype goat. Well, a little bit. I mean, because otherwise the argument over greatness -

1:34:14Bill Simmons:Oh, it's goat ground zero. It's kind of meaningless. I like goat ground zero is kind of where you're going, right?

1:34:20Chuck Klosterman:I guess. That way I would be, yes, I could have called that, I guess. um i i just i think that that is the way greatness needs to be considered it has to be like it we always want to think of the future but greatness comes from the past it's sort of like the building blocks of these things i use the beatles as the example in this book not you know unsurprisingly sort of like what makes the beatles so great is that not only what they did but sort of what they did is still completely present in all the pop music that came after now granted sports are different sports have a greater objective element than a subjective element and people talk about this i to me it really came down to jim thorpe or jim brown because it could i think the argument could be made that the sport jim thorpe was playing had no relationship to the sport we have now whereas jim brown you know we're playing we have the platoon system we're wearing face masks a little closer but when jim port played was an 11 on 11 sport touchdowns for six points the first down was 10 yards there was passing there was strategy all these things uh like were there like like like the the rudimentary elements of football were there and he was the first great player and that makes him the great player for us so by this argument bill russell is the go to basketball well you know that's a really interesting one because Because I do think that in the same way that football has these different kind of hinge points, it does seem to me like there was a real hinge point in basketball with the NBA -ABA merger and the addition of the three-point goal in this period in the late 70s.

1:36:03Chuck Klosterman:I think that basketball dramatically changed the idea that it added a way to score that had never before existed, an extra point for a three-point goal. So I think from that way, you could really look at basketball having these two chunks. In the first chunk, I think it probably would be Wilt Chamberlain. And I think in the second chunk, it would be Michael Jordan.

1:36:24Bill Simmons:Wilt Chamberlain, if you like losing at the end of the season?

1:36:27Chuck Klosterman:Sure. I mean, the thing is that you factor in, I think you actually overemphasize the... Wins and losses? The outcome. Titles? As opposed to the process. Yes. Yes, I do.

1:36:40Bill Simmons:But you, the same Jim Thorpe argument you make in the book for pages is the exact same argument you can make for Bill Russell. Like he introduced the entire concept of defense, fast break, something running through a center and everybody running off them. Everything they did in the late 50s and early 60s became basketball. And he won the title every year.

1:37:03Chuck Klosterman:You could absolutely make a very strong argument that if you had to pick one of those guys to be on your team, Russell would be the guy to pick. The fact that every time they squared up against each other, it seemed like Russell got the better of him, despite the fact the rosters weren't really the same. No, I debunked that. The rosters were just as good. I totally understand that. What I'm talking about is sort of like the archetype of the basketball player. You know, the ability to do the rudimentary elements of basketball. Score the ball, rebound the ball. pass the ball, play defense, move up and down the court.

1:37:36Chuck Klosterman:Okay. I believe, and I wrote this in your book, I believe that Wilt Chamberlain with a different mindset could have been Bill Russell. I do not believe Bill Russell with a different mindset could have been Wilt Chamberlain. I don't think that. Now, I, you know, in the same way that, that, that I disagreed with it when it was in my book. I mean, so you think that if, if Bill Russell had been a more sort of selfish self-oriented. I just think he did.

1:38:06Bill Simmons:He scored 100 points in a game. I just think he figured out the best. How do I win a basketball game? How do I use my teammates? How do I use opponent's deficiencies against them? Within the context of... How do I win?

1:38:20Chuck Klosterman:Yes. And basketball is a team sport, so you could make the argument that his ability to figure out what was the best way to do this within the confines of this five-on-five game or whatever, we can't discount that, right? You can't discount.

1:38:33Bill Simmons:So if we were doing ground zero goats, Thorpe's for football, I think Russell's basketball and Babe Ruth's obviously baseball.

1:38:40Chuck Klosterman:I would say those two, but Chamberlain instead of Russell, yes.

1:38:45Bill Simmons:All right, I'm discounting Chamberlain. And then hockey? Hockey is one I... Hockey gets tougher.

1:38:51Chuck Klosterman:I think Gretzky is the greatest hockey player of all time, even though by my logic here, it should be Bobby Orr or somebody. But like I said, there's always going to be exceptions. There's no... It would be very... there's no theory that on greatness that's so airtight that there are no flaws unless the only argument that is would be someone who makes the argument that the greatest person in every medium is whoever is the greatest right now because humanity always advances so somebody could make that argument and then you can't really disagree with that you can't well you but i i don't you

1:39:23Bill Simmons:talked about moss and you talked about uh how you thought the best player that i ever saw i might

1:39:29Chuck Klosterman:To me, Randy Moss was the greatest football player I saw with my eyes.

1:39:33Bill Simmons:So the four best football players I ever saw were Randy Moss, Jerry Rice, Lawrence Taylor, and Tom Brady and not in that order.

1:39:42Chuck Klosterman:Okay.

1:39:44Bill Simmons:And I actually think Jerry Rice, if you could just give me a receiver for their career. Absolutely. And I'd have the best chance to win. It has to be Jerry Rice. Moss, you made the point. Moss had these physical gifts. That year he was on the Pats, those first two months. it was like i i've never had an experience like that as a fan and there was something he passed the stadium test too if you went to actually see him in a game it was unforgettable to just watch him run and it just seemed he was the only football player i've ever seen where it actually seemed kind of unfair that he was to the defense that he was out there right yeah i mean you this

1:40:22Chuck Klosterman:this book is it's like in some ways it's like a book of criticism about a sport you know the same way that you yeah um so uh the rules i i i admittedly are my rules right so like look at jerry rice and randy moss for a career no question moss is greater for a season or no i mean for a career rice is better for a career rice is clearly better for a season rice is better i think potentially for an important game rice is better but for a play nobody's better than moss well you

1:40:56Bill Simmons:You wrote about my favorite Patriots play of all time, which was an incompletion. I think it was third down.

1:41:02Chuck Klosterman:The best incompletion I ever saw in my life.

1:41:04Bill Simmons:Giants Super Bowl. I was at the game. Everyone in the arena knew it was coming. They double teamed him. He ran as fast as he could for 60 yards. Brady threw it, I think, 75 yards or some crazy thing. And it just missed him. It missed him by an inch. And it was absolutely conceivable that he was going to catch it.

1:41:19Chuck Klosterman:And it was just, it was, it's placing the last 18 seconds. It was, it was so, it was just, I can see it in my mind right now. But one of the things I talk about in this, just briefly, it's not a big part of the book, but you know, so my son, when he would play football at recess in like third grade or fourth grade, the kids would talk about mossing people. Okay. Yeah. In fact, took a post-it note and wrote mossed on it and put it on his forehead. So when he scored a touchdown, he could lift up his bangs and say like he mossed his opponent. None of these kids knew who Randy Moss was. none of them they didn't even know that the moss term had a randy in front of it or whatever and to me that's like this is somebody who's transcended the game right this is somebody who like it's not randy moss was not the first receiver who was ever fast and a great jumper with great hands who did these things but he became the definition of this thing this thing that kids want to do right when they play receiver they want to moss people they want to use like pure athleticism to simply out catch if that's a term their opponent you know that's meaningful to me.

1:42:25Chuck Klosterman:When you see someone do that in a game, when you're watching just any football game and you see a guy do that, it's like he mossed him. That's like a Randy Moss type thing. And I would argue that whenever you see anyone running the football, you're kind of seeing Jim Thorpe. That the essence of that, the essence of being faster and stronger and more agile and more nimble than your opponent and to, you know, in this sort of like real kind of DNA of the sport. I think it probably does go back to that.

1:42:56Bill Simmons:Yeah.

1:43:00Bill Simmons:I'm really possessive about the race thing. Cause I think sometimes with this legacy stuff, and this is one of the reasons I wrote my basketball book a million years ago was like, some people live on, other people's don't. And some of it has to do with what happened after their careers. Did they stay on TV? Did they stay in the limelight? with social media now, are their clips easily caught into, Randy Moss was a problem, and you just watch these amazing highlights. Rice was the best receiver I ever saw. Moss was the scariest receiver I ever saw. But if I had one game, like, how do you not take Rice?

1:43:34Bill Simmons:He was always open. Didn't matter who the quarterback was.

1:43:37Chuck Klosterman:And he's playing at a time when... I mean, you know, with Rice, you know, he plays with these two great quarterbacks. But then, even at the end, I mean, like... Then he goes to the Raiders, so he's 40.

1:43:47Bill Simmons:But he's also playing during a time when you could still get hit pretty hard over the middle and get your head taken off.

1:43:54Chuck Klosterman:Absolutely. I mean, I think that you could still make... Because you can use different arguments for this. I mean, that's one of the things. There are different ways to think about these things. I'm presenting my way of thinking about this.

1:44:08Bill Simmons:Yeah. Well, the one thing, the biggest thing I learned was that I might have known this and forgot was that Roger Staubach was your only true sports hero.

1:44:17Chuck Klosterman:well yeah i i see i think it's i just think it's weird to have a hero as an adult like like i as a as a as a man i shouldn't see another man heroically even if they're doing heroic things it's like that's just nowadays right you need heroes when you're eight and the hero your hero when you're eight is your hero for life so roger stavack is my hero for life um you know and And the sort of thing that I talk about is I feel extremely lucky that that's how it worked out because it could have been anyone. And in many ways, Roger Staubach, to me, represents the best possible hero. You could have picked OJ Simpson.

1:44:58Chuck Klosterman:That would have been terrible. Absolutely, yes. You know, we got to.

1:45:02Bill Simmons:It's like, OJ, pull the car over. Just quickly to go through stuff because we got to run soon. you have chapters that we didn't talk about about simulations, football coaches, the white black thing, CFL three downs versus NFL four downs, which I thought was fun. The football coaches almost felt like that could have been its own book. And I think if anything has not changed about football over the years, like I think like golf's never changed. You can watch a 1979 Masters masters on YouTube. By the way, they have all the old masters on YouTube and you can watch them. It's exactly the same. Everything, the rhythm about it, the course, it's like you're in a time machine.

1:45:50Boxing for the most part is basically the same.

1:45:54Bill Simmons:You're just two guys in a ring trying to beat each other and we have rounds and a referee. And I think tennis, when you think about sports like that, those sports have evolved and changed. Hockey's changed. Basketball's change. Horse racing's probably the same. But when I think about football, football's changed in every possible way, except the coaches still have this outsized something. I'm watching what happens now with Vrabel and the Patriots, and it's like, we had a terrible coach last year, and the team was a disaster. He came in, culture, bought into the guys, built certain guys up, stuck with guys that maybe shouldn't have stuck with, and just kind of flipped it around.

1:46:33Bill Simmons:And I watched this happen with Belichick, and now I've seen that. So I've seen it happen twice with the Patriots coach and it's still the most important guy other than the quarterback. And that has never changed.

1:46:43Chuck Klosterman:Well, okay. That's never changed because coaching does have more impact in football than almost any other sport because it's a completely hierarchical thing. I mean, the fact that like every single play is being, not 98 % of plays are being dictated by somebody in a booth transmitted down to the sideline, you know, so, so it's, you really can control it. But to me, the more fascinating thing is this, I would say in practice, football coaches have actually changed quite a bit. There's a lot of coaches in the NFL now. I can't really say that I remember a guy like that when I was young, especially among kind of the younger offensive minds, the Rams, the Vikings and these things.

1:47:20Chuck Klosterman:However, the caricature of the football coach never changes. The idea, you're a big sports movie guy. The way a football coach is presented in a sports movie does not waver. It doesn't matter if he's presented positively or negatively. They still have the same central qualities. Only a used car salesman. That's the only job that has more of a shared idea of what the personality of the person is like compared to the football coach. You know, I mentioned how like, you know, there was, you know, there's the movie All the Right Moves and there was the TV show Coach. And it's the same guy in both, you know.

1:47:59Chuck Klosterman:And one, he's a good guy. The one, he's a bad guy. but the way he acts is kind of the same. It's like, it doesn't really change. Like we can see that the things a football coach does in different ways. I mean, that's why I said, but like, you know, like what Kamala Harris thought was going to happen if she takes a guy who was a, you know, picks a veep, who was a former high school football coach. I think she believed, well, people are just going to accept that these things about football coaches apply to him too. It turns out that was not the thing to do. But, you know, it is like if like if somebody said like, oh, hey, you know, you're say your daughter came home and she's like, I got a new boyfriend.

1:48:38Chuck Klosterman:And and you're like, what's he like? And and she's like, well, he's kind of like a football coach. You would instantly have an idea of what he must be like.

1:48:47Bill Simmons:You would instantly have an idea of what I'd be like. Charismatic. Don't trust him. Probably full of shit. Well, I don't trust his intentions.

1:48:55Chuck Klosterman:Well, like, or maybe be like, you know, it's, it's, it's not the outcome. It's the process or whatever. You know, like these things, like these kind of, these things that they sort of believe about how to live, you know, it's like, like, right. Some sort of code they abide by. Yes. And, and like, you know, the weather never affects them, you know, or, and it's like, it's like all these certain things that like things they believe that like, you can't be a football coach if you don't believe it. almost. Yeah.

1:49:27Bill Simmons:Well, and there's so many bad coaches in all sports, but it feels like they can do the most damage in football. They can single-handedly, because football fundamentally, it's not that fun to play. You're getting the shit kicked out of you and you really have to buy into the team and the concept of giving yourself up for the greater good, right? And if you have a coach that you either hate or doesn't get you to buy into that, you end up like the Eagles this weekend where you have AJ Brown's like, I'm fucking out. I'm not even talking to

1:49:56Chuck Klosterman:the press. I'm done. I do feel we've talked about this many times in the past. I do feel that you are unfair to coaches. Oh, there's no question. So you agree. But why would you keep doing it if you agree?

1:50:10Bill Simmons:Well, because I get passionate about this stuff. Listen, there are some really good coaches. And then I think there's a bunch of coaches that are either mediocre or worse. that do most of the damage during these playoffs, like we saw in that Green Bay Chicago game, that it's like impossible to lose that game if you're the Packers.

1:50:28Chuck Klosterman:Okay.

1:50:28Bill Simmons:And they were poorly coached.

1:50:30Chuck Klosterman:And that's why they lost. Can I give one, I just want to say my point of why I feel at times like you and Sal and some of the other guys are unfair to coaches, right? Yeah. I feel like you look at what they do on Sunday as 90 % of the job. when in fact, that's 20 % of the job.

1:50:54Bill Simmons:No, here's where it's unfair. I think it would be really hard to stand on the sideline with all that stuff going on and be able to concentrate on all the stuff you need to concentrate on to win a game. Whereas when I'm on the couch and I can be like, why would you throw on second down when your job's to kill the clock? He's worrying about, are there 11 guys in the field? And I think there's so much stuff going on. Sometimes you can just miss shit. Sure.

1:51:17Chuck Klosterman:But on the couch, you don't miss anything. But it's more than just that the job on Sunday for three hours is more complicated than it seems. Those three hours are the culmination of everything else. And I think that a lot of times people will be like, why is this guy still getting hired? Why are they still hiring this guy? It's because, yeah, they do have some bad o 'clock management or there's these mistakes that they make going for fourth down or not going for that.

1:51:44Bill Simmons:Yeah, they have a flaw.

1:51:44Chuck Klosterman:But there's all of these things that make them a good football coach that are completely divorced from the game we see.

1:51:52Bill Simmons:There's also a media narrative thing that I think we're watching right now with John Harbaugh, right? John Harbaugh was going to get fired before Lamar took over from Flacco, like halfway through that season. It was like he was done in Baltimore that year. Lamar came in, saved his job, and then he rode the Lamar train for, I don't know, six, seven more years. And then he finally gets fired because he can't really click with Lamar in the right ways, obviously. And now he's the number one coaching for age. And it's like, this guy almost got fired in 2017. And I have no idea how good of a coach he is.

1:52:27Bill Simmons:And we just got to watch him. Some people think he's one of the best five coaches in the league. Other people are like, eh, we'll see you in the second team. We just saw Pete Carroll go to Vegas and was a disaster. So I don't know. It might be a situation where there's only like four or five good coaches and that's it. Shanahan clearly has proven that no matter what's happening with this team or his roster, he can still compete.

1:52:50Chuck Klosterman:Well, I mean, it would seem to suggest that the job he has done this year is maybe the best job anyone has done in the last.

1:52:55Bill Simmons:Yeah, this is like, he is now like unassailably, you could have picked him apart for the comebacks and for his record earlier in his career, but now he's there.

1:53:05Chuck Klosterman:So what do you think about this new story about how the reason the Niners are all getting injured is because they're next to this electromagnetic plant? And then Kittle blows out his Achilles. That seems perfect for you. Okay.

1:53:16Bill Simmons:Oh my God. No, you were one of the first people I thought of when I read that because I was like, I can imagine Chuck reading this entire thing and then Googling for another two hours about what's... I mean, the crazy thing is the story comes out and then Kittle tears his Achilles two days later. Like yet another one. So I don't know. I think there's something to it. How much? If I was a player in the Niners, I'd be like, we're not playing until you move the practice facility. Really?

1:53:42Chuck Klosterman:Yeah. So you think there's a lot to it. You don't think there's... As a player, you would say, I'm speaking for the team. We need to change our practice facility. I would, wouldn't you? I mean, I don't know. It is possible. Why are they by far the most injured team? Okay, they are the most injured team. Are they by far the most injured team?

1:54:03Bill Simmons:I think they, he said they had by far the most tendon ligament damages. Anyone in the league said this, this guy who did the long piece about it.

1:54:11Chuck Klosterman:I mean, but that's like, let's, let's see the list. Let's see like, what's the difference between them one and two and what's the difference between one and 14, you know?

1:54:19Bill Simmons:All right. So sign me up for way more research on a fascinating topic.

1:54:22Chuck Klosterman:Because what it, what would it, would it mean that this is her, like, because there's obviously many different ways to get, so what is, what is the idea that, that, I mean, I'm not even disagreeing with it. I've brought it up, but it's the idea that there's an electrical charge that is weakening.

1:54:43Bill Simmons:10. What is it? It's like weakening muscles and tenants. I mean, the bigger thing is why people work in there,

1:54:48Chuck Klosterman:the people who were, I mean, that would be like, you know, are they, are they constantly like, do they, do they go to, you know, to urgent care more than the other? I think these are other things you have to look into. I would guess. I don't know what it's just, it's a crazy story, but it's strange,

1:55:01Bill Simmons:you know? I would say it's the most, most what the fuck story we've had in sports in a while. With the way it was laid out, I was like, this is unbelievable. How did they not know all this was happening? But this is the kind of shit that used to happen in like 1960s, right?

1:55:18Chuck Klosterman:How did they not know? How would they know? How long would it take you before you put that together? That wouldn't certainly be the first thing. If I had an injury plagued team, like if I was coaching, if I was coaching the Seahawks or whatever, and we had a ton of injuries, certainly my first thought wouldn't be like, Is there anything built around the stadium that could be affecting the physiology of my place? Who would fucking think of that? It's interesting that it's a story. I don't know. What is your stance on microplastics in general?

1:55:47Bill Simmons:A real thing I'm concerned about with the turfs. I would think about that when my daughter was playing soccer when she was little. And we would see these turfs with the pellets. And I'm like, I know those are bad for people.

1:55:58Chuck Klosterman:Yeah, but what about every other extension we have with plastic? To me. Oh, you're talking about like in bottles and shit. Either microplastics is just something we're talking about because we need to talk about shit, or it's too late. It is over. I mean, what percentage of our... Well, so on a scale... Is we're acting plastic?

1:56:15Bill Simmons:I mean, it's like, yeah. Right. On a scale of one to ten, like cigarettes where they knew something was wrong for a long, long time. And kept kind of, no, no, it's fine. And then after, by what, the 70s? By the time we were like teenagers, we were like, we know cigarettes are really bad.

1:56:32Chuck Klosterman:But like, they're still running ads for them in the 60s. But there was also like a certain, like no one, like people knew if you smoked your whole life, you coughed a lot. The first time you smoke a cigarette, you coughed. There had to have been, I wasn't alive during that period, but there had to have been some understanding that like smoking is not healthy. It is smoke. You know, my mom died of lung cancer at age 51. The military gave people cigarettes because it'll calm your anxiety or whatever. I had a teacher, a chemistry teacher. Her mom told her when she was in high school, start smoking, you'll keep you thin or whatever.

1:57:06Chuck Klosterman:So yes, we thought it totally different.

1:57:10Bill Simmons:So I wonder with microplastics 50 years from now, we're like, holy shit. Remember when these idiots had water and water bottles and were just inhaling plastics? It might seem like that.

1:57:21Chuck Klosterman:It's hard to...

1:57:23Bill Simmons:Wait, I have one more thing before we go. this is a short one, but you wrote about Vince Ferragamo in this book. A little bit. And it got me all excited to just kind of rekindle my fascination with Vince, who had a nice little run there, took the Rams to the Super Bowl.

1:57:42Chuck Klosterman:I didn't know you were a big Vince Ferragamo fan.

1:57:45Bill Simmons:It was a fascinating rise and fall, goes to the CFL, bombs, comes back, but it made me look at his pro football reference. and it was one of the most entertaining like 40 seconds I spent in 2026 so far. His last couple years, he threw eight touchdowns and 28 interceptions in his last three years. And it's like, you can go in these 1980s deep dives and you'll see some of the worst stats. You know, like...

1:58:11Chuck Klosterman:He also came back from Canada and had a 400-yard passing game. Yeah, I know. He was good the year he came back and then it was like... I think prior to leaving one year, he led the NFL in passing touchdowns and he was terrible with the Alouettes. It is just, it is an interesting,

1:58:26Bill Simmons:can I, what are some of the - Because now a bad years is like Gino Smith throwing 15 picks. It's like, oh my God, Gino was so bad. It's like, can I show you Steve Grogan's pro football reference in the 1980s?

1:58:38Chuck Klosterman:I mean, nothing is crazier than just looking at like the trajectory of completion percentage. Right. There was, when we were kids, you want your quarterback to complete half his passes. You could not have a job like that now. What were some other great 40-second moments you've had this year so far?

1:58:56Bill Simmons:That was way up there. Okay, what else? What else? 40 seconds, that's a very specific tight window. No, I was just trying to think of under a minute. Just really, that was probably number one. Yeah, Steve Grogan, when I was a kid in 1981, which was an eight-game season, seven touchdowns, 16 interceptions, and 54 % of his passes. And it was like normal. Because back then, when you're a quarterback, they're diving at your knees. you could hit every wide receiver over the middle. It was like, if you had a quarterback that was 22 touchdowns, 12 picks, 58 % completion, that guy was like probably an all pro, right?

1:59:35Chuck Klosterman:Well, yeah, you know, it's just, okay. The one thing I want to say about this, because I know like, okay, so a lot of this book in some ways, I can hear a person listening to this podcast or hopefully reading the book and being like, okay, so this guy, he's convinced that like Everything was better in the past than it is now. No, no, you didn't. I don't think you did that at all. But it's an interesting deal. A few years ago, it must have been the anniversary of Super Bowl III for some anniversary. So they were showing the Joe Namath Colts Jets Super Bowl. They were replaying it. I can't remember if it was on ESPN or ESPN Classic or whatever it was.

2:00:11Chuck Klosterman:So I watched that. And it is kind of mind-blowing. Late in the game, it's like Baltimore's down 16 to 7. There's like three minutes left. They're huddling every play. They're not, they don't use the shotgun. It's like, you're watching this. You're like, how could this, how could this be the way it was? Like, like, like, do they, like the only difference is the offensive lineman, like jogged a little faster to the line of scrimmage. And I was like, yeah, score twice. How could you do this? So it is sort of incredible how, as much as people like me and people like you, like, you know, sort of like long for these, the past in a way, and how much we loved it.

2:00:49Chuck Klosterman:And then when you actually experience, you were like, rewatch it, like, what is this? Like, everything has improved. It just feels terrible.

2:00:59Bill Simmons:I was talking to Sal about that this weekend because we're both following this guy on Twitter. I think his name's Kevin Gallagher. He posts all these old, kind of pretty clear videos of...

2:01:08Chuck Klosterman:No, I follow him too.

2:01:10Bill Simmons:Yeah, it's like, it's the 50th anniversary of this game. Yeah. It's the 45th anniversary of this game. So during the playoffs, he's been posting all these playoff moments and some of them, I won't say I've forgotten. I just haven't thought about it in a while.

2:01:22Chuck Klosterman:There was a lot of Vince Ferragamo stuff on there. There was some Vince in there. The one that always beat him in like 78 and then the Rams upset him in 79.

2:01:30Bill Simmons:He had the Hollywood Henderson interception touchdown on there. So they showed the Mike Renfro play, which as a kid was this incredibly important moment in my life that just kind of came and went. And I'm not, I was a Patriot fan, not a Houston fan, But I didn't like the Steelers and the Raiders because they were in the AFC. Those were the teams we had to beat. So they became like the villains for me, those two teams. I just rooted for anyone and tried to beat them. And Renfro catches this, it seemed like a touchdown. And they huddled and they ruled no touchdown. Now, the Steelers fans would say that wasn't like they would have won the game if he caught it.

2:02:05Bill Simmons:But it was still a really important play that Houston ended up losing and it felt incredibly unfair. And it was kind of the moment when instant replay, the ball kind of got going. But I remember where I watched that game. I remember how I felt. I remember being really upset, even though it wasn't my team. And now we just, now that stuff's fixed. Now it's a catch, right? Now they look at it for two minutes and it's overturned and Houston has a better chance to win the game. So I don't, of course, things are better now. You know, like if you're a Houston fan, the Patriots lost on the Sugar Bear Hamilton, Ruff and the Passer, which wouldn't be able to be reviewed.

2:02:43Bill Simmons:The Renfro thing would have been reviewed. But the thing that you just said,

2:02:45Chuck Klosterman:like you said, of course, it's better now. That's an example to me of why things are worse now. Why? You just talked about something that happened to you when you were probably what, nine or 10 years? That was nine, yeah. It lives in your mind, right? Yeah. It also, it means all this, you know, it was just this critical missed call that sort of solidified the Steelers dynasty, stopped Houston from going to the Super Bowl with all those good old Campbell teams. They never went to whatever. Bum Phillips never went to the Super Bowl. Okay, now that would have been overturned. You know, they would have got the right call or whatever.

2:03:17Chuck Klosterman:But like, to me, the other thing is better. I mean, I say this on every podcast. So you'd rather have the pain. I hate instant replay in every way. I think it is absolutely insane that the evidence it takes to overturn a catch or a drop on second eight in the first quarter of the game is greater than the evidence needed to give the guy an electric chair. You're going to kill a guy. You don't need indisputable visual evidence to prove that guy before we execute him, right? But in football, I think it does not add, because they still get things wrong, right? There's still elements of instant replay that don't work it slows the game down and it also to me forces me to remember like there is some kind of something silly about this it's like guys are playing the game humans are playing the game but humans can't officiate it we need robots we need technology to do it because even though people are playing it's so important whether or not renfro catches that pass that we need to like i just i it's you so you're a human error guy the own human error is part of it in the same way it would be like um i mean it just it just happens sometimes the only time that i am not against instantly play is i i don't mind it when it's was a basketball released before or after the light comes on at the end of a half or end of just look at it quick yeah you You know, because that's like, it's the last play.

2:04:50Chuck Klosterman:This is it. Like the idea of it, you know, but the idea like instant replay and officiating reasons obviously damaged basketball the last two minutes of a basketball game deeply, particularly the idea of plays that throughout the entire game would be officiated one way. But because we have video evidence, they go the other way. If I hold a basketball in my hands and you punch it, technically, yes, it does touch my pinky finger last. that's obviously out on you, you know? But when I watch it, like a football game, it's like, you know, they talk about, remember the Rams and the Saints a few years ago, like with this interference call late in the game.

2:05:29Chuck Klosterman:It's like, you know, that's just part of it. It happens. It's like, I - Basketball happens too.

2:05:35Bill Simmons:Well, they'll miss a goaltend or they'll miss something that can't be reviewed. And it's like, hey, we all kind of move on. We move past it. The Renfro thing was a little different.

2:05:42Chuck Klosterman:Like sometimes like you'll hear people be like, well, when the playoffs start for any sport, why does the division winner get a bot like it should be it should just be you know a straight recording of the record so in the nba it shouldn't matter if you won your division or whatever it should matter just you know it's like but that's what it is we designed it this way this is the sport yeah okay it's like we're not trying to answer like we're not trying to solve a problem we're trying to create something that is sort of interesting and alive and meaningful and and can be used in different ways and helps us understand ourselves and the world.

2:06:19Chuck Klosterman:We don't need to find the best possible truth in all of these cases because it's already a fictional world. It's a simulated thing. Nothing really important is happening, but we love it anyways. So why do we got to fix this thing that we love to make it more, I don't know, objectively true?

2:06:38Bill Simmons:This is kind of what your book's about. It's like the constant quest of solving things, perfection, innovation. How do we get better? Better. One other thing I found out in that Kevin Gallagher thing, how much I enjoyed the really horrible weather games. I don't feel like we have those anymore.

2:06:55Chuck Klosterman:You know, I regret.

2:06:58Bill Simmons:Houston just going to Pittsburgh and it's just freezing rain. They lose 34 to five. It's like zero degrees.

2:07:05Chuck Klosterman:That weather could have been a chapter. No, that was the one chapter that I regret. Like I felt the book was the right length. But I would have liked to write something about that because this is another thing that sort of sets football apart from other sports. It's not indoors. We never delay the game or stop the game. I guess we do for lightning. But, you know, it's like the weather is part of it. And it changes the way we think about what makes a football player good, what makes a quarterback good. If a quarterback can't play in the cold, even though he may never face the cold for years, Some seasons, a guy never has to play, you know, in the elements.

2:07:44Chuck Klosterman:But like, it's so... You talk about watching six games at once. I guarantee you the game you watch the most during a blizzard is the snow game. It's just immediately, you know?

2:07:56Bill Simmons:Well, you can see it from... It passes the bar test where if there's a TV on and there's snow, everyone will kind of gravitate toward the TV. Almost like there's like a hockey fight or something. Like, oh. Plus like in HD, it looks even better now.

2:08:09Chuck Klosterman:it looks amazing like some friday night and all of a sudden i'll get a text and it'll be someone that says like you know turn on wyoming and caro state and i know it's a blizzard i know what it's going to be i know it's going to be that you know um and it's like uh is it oh one thing well maybe that could be your next book well i can't i mean i always thought that would be a really great documentary like right i remember we talked about very difficult for you to do that because it's hard to get the rights to these football games it's like only the nfl network could do it it seems like and it's like i don't it's a it's kind of a strange thing i also feel like one thing that i feel that that in a lot of sports they've made a mistake now and they they can't go back and fix it which is that like you know they'll delay a football game for lightning if there's a lightning strike within a 15 mile radius of yeah i think that they they looked at this wrong they didn't realize that 15 miles in every direction is this huge expanse of space but they can't go back because if they said like actually would be better if it was a 10 mile radius or whatever and someone gets killed by lightning they'd be like you actually changed this law but like that was one thing that they did to kind of like you know improve safety i don't because very often it like These delays, they clear everybody out of the stands.

2:09:30Chuck Klosterman:It's kind of a disaster.

2:09:32Bill Simmons:It's pretty bad. The book is called Football. When does it come out?

2:09:36Chuck Klosterman:It comes out. I guess today's the 12th, the 19th. Are you doing a little... A week from tomorrow. Okay, so next week. Or a week from... Is this running up Monday? A week. It comes out next week. If someone orders it on Amazon or whatever, it'll probably come before that. because the books are already done, you know.

2:09:57Bill Simmons:And are you doing any little tour stuff or no?

2:10:00Chuck Klosterman:Yes, I am. I'm doing New York, Philadelphia, and then interestingly, Harrisburg. And then I'm flying home. And then I'm doing Kansas City, Louisville, and Chicago. And then I'm doing Portland and Seattle. So it's an interesting collection of towns. I like that. Those are fun towns. Yeah, my, oh, I'm looking forward to it. But my life makes it real hard to go to these places. Even like we talk about like being able to like watch six games at once. Like that's one thing about your life that I am envious of. It's like you, because it's totally your job and just the work you live in, you can watch everything all the time.

2:10:42Chuck Klosterman:My whole life, all fall and all winter is just a process of me trying to see these games I want to see, which I then never remember. like you know it's like it or with very few exceptions i mean this is you know there was a bunch of years ago i sometimes think of this like there you know there's this concert movie about lcd sound system yeah and i'm in you're in it yes okay so so we filmed that we filmed that documentary and it's before their last show which is on saturday at madison square garden and they're like oh you want you come to the show you know you can get these great seats or whatever but that Saturday was the day of the final four I already had plans to watch the final four in basketball so I was like no I'm not gonna go I've seen I've seen I've seen LC that I've seen him a few times anyways like and you know I don't know if I can remember who played that day like I think it was the year Wisconsin was really good like maybe Wisconsin had one loss but I'm not sure um like so i i did go i did this i did this movie did not go to the big final show where i probably would have got to sit in the front row or something because i had to see these basketball games and i don't remember them now i don't it's like it's just all gone it's it's so weird how that is isn't it how like like i care about these sporting events and i know you do too like so much and like well it's the anticipation of the game we have pretty good memories for these yeah like like i would say the likelihood of you bringing up something or me bringing up a sporting event from the past, but likelihood's pretty high.

2:12:13Chuck Klosterman:The other person's going to be like, oh yeah, you know? And yet for the most part, like I'm just constantly, like, cause I just, there's something about me that just wants to see every game. You know, so like this last weekend, like, you know, I watched college football Thursday and Friday. I could see those. And I was able to see the games on Saturday. But then on Sunday, it was like my daughter's birthday and all these things. So like, so I was like, you know, I was planning that party. And then I took my son to play Magic the Gathering somewhere. So I'm doing all these different things. And I'm like, kind of following the game on the radio and my phone and stuff like that.

2:12:42Chuck Klosterman:I can't imagine what it's like to be you in some ways. Where it's just like, I just go out and I watch everything all the time. You know, and that's, you know.

2:12:51Bill Simmons:Yeah, the weirdest one for me was when my daughter was like really into the club soccer stuff, having Sundays where I was at games as football was going on and trying to do this with my phone and try it. But yeah, it's, my whole thing is I just constructed my life. So if I'm going to keep doing this, I want to do it at the highest possible level I can do it. And I just have to do it this way. But the one thing that's happened, and maybe it's a little age wear and tear, I found myself drifting more to four games this year versus six. I found it was harder for me to concentrate on all six in the same way.

2:13:31Bill Simmons:So you don't turn two TVs on? No, I was just going with the pure multi-view. I started to go upstairs into our little theater place and just watching the four box on the multi-view and then having my iPad going, knowing if I had to switch things. And I found that I could concentrate on everything better.

2:13:49Chuck Klosterman:Well, I just, I feel like you could absolutely justify watching every sporting event that happens. I mean, that's, you're the sports guy. Well, I could. How do I justify it? I don't know if I could justify it to my wife. Storage Tech is playing Vandy this weekend. Like, I got to see it. Like, what's my argument for that?

2:14:03Bill Simmons:I don't really have one. So I'm just, so it's... Yeah, but you said in your book, you were talking about there's two six and two teams on a Thursday. It's like, I got to watch this. It sounds like a great night.

2:14:13Chuck Klosterman:I'm drawn to it. It's like, it's just this dark thing. It's like, how can I get out of every other aspect of my life to see this? And it's crazy because I know I'm not going to remember it. Like, I know I'm just going to go foof.

2:14:26Bill Simmons:You know, it's just going to be early. We have to go. Okay. The book is called Football. It comes out next week. I like the title. I really enjoyed the book. Obviously, I enjoy everything you do, but I really had a good time reading it.

2:14:38Chuck Klosterman:Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate you promoting it. No, it was great. I know you don't do a lot of this. You do not do a lot of this. Well, but you're a special case, though.

2:14:44Bill Simmons:You're a 20-year Hall of Famer for us. I know.

2:14:46Chuck Klosterman:Well, yes, but still, you wouldn't need to do it, and I appreciate that you did.

2:14:50Bill Simmons:No. Come on. All right. Good to see you, Chuck.

2:14:52Chuck Klosterman:Good.

2:14:53Bill Simmons:All right. That's it for the podcast. Thanks to Cousin Sal. Thanks to Klosterman. Thanks to Gahal and Eduardo and Jack Wilson and Chris and Kevin as well. we will be back on this podcast on Wednesday stay tuned we're doing four this week so we have another on Wednesday another on Thursday don't forget about the rewatchables if you like movie podcasts that is coming on Tuesday with What Lies Beneath I will see you on this feed on Wednesday

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