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

17:23Bill Simmons:Starch keeps you upright.

17:25Tom Pelissero:You need the opposite. You need to lay flat to get Arch.

17:28Bill Simmons:I got to think about that one. We're going to do pressure rankings, but I want to talk about Minnesota first just because you're there and you have a good Vikings feel. That is somehow not one of the two most tortured franchises in the league, even though I think they would argue that they are. I live here.

17:46Tom Pelissero:People here are sufficiently tortured.

17:49Bill Simmons:They think they're number one.

17:50Tom Pelissero:yeah without you know my dad grew up a vikings fan in the upper peninsula so he's like 65 seasons into this thing yeah all my friends everybody else they would all tell you that this is uh

18:02Bill Simmons:it's not it's not been an easy road it's tough because the bills with all the super bowl losses and then this whole josh allen ride who's now i think 30 years old 29 years old somewhere in there the the the lows of their losses almost feel like the worst minnesota has been steadily just getting kicked in the balls decade after decade forever but the lions like nothing has happened for them forever until this decade and they always get left out of the tortured combo then you have the browns where nothing good has happened with them since 1964 i don't know i don't know what the rankings are but minnesota thinks they're first it depends like if your definition

18:43Tom Pelissero:of the tortured fan base is the one that keeps getting close and can't get over the hump the

18:48Bill Simmons:red sox this was red sox pre-2004 forever every year you think it's the year and then you get

18:53Tom Pelissero:kicked in the teeth right then you all sudden you know you rally against the yankees and everybody can't believe that this is what's happening right like you know the vikings and the bills they're very similar trajectories both have lost four super bowls if you look at i think that the in terms of winning percentage since in the super bowl era the vikings are like number six and every team above and below them has one or more Lombardis. It's crazy. And they have none. And they're, cause they're there all the time. You know, the bills in recent years, yeah, they've, they've been there too, but they went through a stretch from what was it like 1999 to 2017 without going to the playoffs.

19:27Tom Pelissero:So they had a long drought. Vikings have never had that long of a drought. They, they never, it's been, you know, under this ownership group, the will spend a ton of money. They always want to be good. They always want to go for it every year. They, they never go all the way to the bottom, you know, but then, you know, you're constantly getting close and then you're in a bit of a high wire act from a, you know, a cap perspective and whatnot, be able to keep it healthy and figure it out. But, you know, they've never had a quarterback. They haven't found their Josh Allen, probably going back to, you know, Dante Culpepper had a pretty good run in like Oh three Oh four before he blew out his knee.

19:58Tom Pelissero:Since then, it's just been a, you know, two years of Favre and you had, you know, Teddy had his moment, you know,

20:04Bill Simmons:Favre was good that first year and then absolutely got destroyed in that Saints game and probably was concussed 17 times over the course of three. I mean, that was one of the bad interceptions, right? Yeah, he threw one of the worst interceptions ever.

20:19Tom Pelissero:Crossed his body and then they begged him to come back in 2010. In 2010, I was on the Vikings beat at that point. And that was one of the biggest disaster seasons I think that's ever existed in NFL history. It's not just, yeah, Favre, the most durable quarterback ever, got knocked out of his last three or four games consecutively. Corey Wooten hits him on a frozen field at TCF Bank Stadium, and he goes down like a chalk outline like the police would get like this. And he's just out. Still does his press conference, which the rules changed after that about what you're allowed to do. But that's the year the Metrodome roof collapsed.

20:53Tom Pelissero:The Vikings ended up playing a home game in Detroit. They played the Eagles on a Tuesday night in Philadelphia because of a snowstorm that never came. Percy Harvin left the field in an ambulance that year. I mean, it was an unbelievable calamity, but that's what the Vikings fans go through is every time you have a really good season, it's somehow followed by the season from hell. That's their own unique torture in this entire thing.

21:18Bill Simmons:Conspiracy Bill had a lot of thoughts on that Tuesday night game. I always felt like that was the NFL kind of knowing that it wasn't going to be that bad on the Monday, but pushing it to Tuesday just because they were interested to see what the ratings and everything else was going to be. I will always believe that.

21:35Tom Pelissero:I drove by that stadium. We switched from on the advice of somebody on the beat who was an idiot, suggested like, we got to get out of the city. The city's going to be shut down. So we moved from like the Vikings Hotel, which was the Ritz-Carlton downtown to like some really sketchy hotel out by the airport. So on the drive there on Sunday afternoon, we're looking, it was supposed to be, you know, the storm of the century. And I'm telling you, there was about this much like kind of muddied, I don't even know if it was snow or if it was just crap on the side. There was nothing. It barely snowed.

22:03Tom Pelissero:The Mayor Nutter, I think was his name, had called everything off. The city's shutting down. There was no snow at all. And the Vikings played. I think that was a Joe Webb game, if I'm not mistaken. I mean, you want to talk about just like the weirdness of that year. Joe Webb starting a Tuesday game in Philly. It didn't even make the top 10 of that season.

22:20Bill Simmons:Give us the mood in Minnesota on the J.J. McCarthy era.

22:25Tom Pelissero:I mean, I've gotten to know J.J. a little bit. that you're around him for five minutes and you get it. You get why this guy's been a winner and why people like him. Like the locker room really liked him. It's not like, you know, he was this guy and he was, you know, a joke from day one walking in. But, you know, he's in that category of people who, especially at the quarterback position, they have so much going on for their first couple of years that it's just impossible to know what they could be. And now you're going into year three. We don't even know if he's going to be the number two quarterback.

22:56Tom Pelissero:If Carson Wentz outplays the rest of the preseason. Right. Well, I mean, you could potentially trade him. But if you're talking about a third string quarterback, like I wouldn't if I'm him, I don't want to get traded. To me, if I'm a young quarterback, I don't want in late August to get traded to a team that might be running a completely different system with players I don't know. Zero reps, zero time on task to build the rhythm and timing and template and even an NFL passing offense. Then, God forbid, the starter gets hurt. Everyone's like, well, let's see, JJ, you get thrown out there like that's the way to end your career.

23:29Tom Pelissero:or at least, you know, to go along a path of some of the, you know, the Baker Mayfields and the Sam Darnolds who needed several different spots because everyone was done with them. And then he got stability or, you know, whatever, the closest thing to stability for Baker as a different OC every year, but you get in the right spot and all of a sudden your career becomes, you know, kind of looking like what it might be in it. And that could be, James.

23:48Bill Simmons:I was thinking it would be the Chargers and Harbaugh potentially being like, we'll take them third round pick. He's our backup. We'll try to rehab him, rehabilitate him. And then maybe we can flip them.

23:58Tom Pelissero:other other than that every uh uh jim harbaugh press conference is basically a love letter to justin how many different ways he's batting his eyelashes out of how much he loves this guy we bring him in though as the backup like sure i could see that but like what's that's what i mean give up for a backup at the deadline like if you get a real pick i don't think that there's an upside to hey let's just dump this guy for a seventh rounder or something like right still i mean there's people that like him in minnesota but you know i remember what i was like at that age, you know, like I couldn't, I didn't have my life together, you know, like JJ, his first year and he suffers that meniscus injury has the surgery.

24:35Tom Pelissero:We all saw him on the sideline, you know, he loses a ton of weight and it's a hard year because he's never, he's never really had that type of adversity. I mean, he played and he won almost every game he was in all the going all the way back to school. So, you know, he has that year off. And then last year, like, you know, you saw signs of it. I was in a Timberwolves game, him and Justin Jefferson are sitting front row. Justin was really encouraging to him. They spent a ton of time together. You saw flashes of it. And then, you know, he comes out, second half of that week one game against the Bears, and you're like, oh, okay, he's making plays with his legs.

25:06Tom Pelissero:He didn't throw the ball a lot in that game. You're like, okay, I see it. Like, they like the athletic quarterback. He can move. And then, oh, he suffered a high ankle sprain in that game. He's now out, or whatever it was, the following week. He's out for six weeks. And all of a sudden, he's not there. By the way, after the week one game, his fiancee also has a kid. so now you're a 22 year old guy whatever he is 23 who's probably not getting a lot of sleep

25:28Bill Simmons:you're really selling me on him this is an incredible job by you this is it's it's uh i'm starting to buy jj stock for this you're laying it all out think about that like all the different

25:38Tom Pelissero:things you're dealing with life-wise then you come back and then he gets a concussion and then he's got a finger thing or whatever it was wrist but i can't remember the exact nature of the injury something on his throwing hands so like the guy's never healthy you know guys like that or Anthony Richardson, Trey Lance. JJ played a lot more football and was much more productive than those guys in college, but he didn't throw the ball a whole lot more. I just know this, Bill. I was at the Detroit game. You know the nine meme? You know the thing where he's making the funny face and everybody posts the JJ stuff all over and over again?

26:10Tom Pelissero:That's from the locker room in Detroit where I was at that game. He was lights out. Again, he didn't have to throw the ball a ton to like red zone timing. He made a couple of tough throws. you know had a touchdown pass like I was like watch it going oh I get it so you have seen flashes if you watch enough of the Vikings there's flashes there but I think at this point everyone's just you know kind of like all right we've seen it we've also had a lot of success through the years whether it's you know Favre or Case Keenum or Randall Cunningham with the veteran who's got ability and he comes in in the right time maybe that's Kyler Murray who's being coached up differently they split the reps all through the you know through the spring they tried to make it as 50-50 as they could.

26:48Tom Pelissero:But, you know, I was also hearing back in the spring, like, you can tell already who's the baller. Like, Kyler's got that. Let's see with a revamped running game and a really good receiver arsenal and an offensive line that Christian Dara saw is finally healthy. Like, let's see what that ends up looking like in 2026.

27:04Bill Simmons:It's the most polarizing NFC team from a prediction standpoint. I've seen people really like them. I've seen other people think they're clearly fourth place. I'm still deciding on it. I can see both cases. but it seems like the, you could potentially see them win 11, 12 games of Kyler's good. You could also see them be kind of a train wreck. And this could be the final year for KOC, like that kind of scenario too. They're betting a lot on Kyler Murray, a guy that Arizona was paying. And they were like, we're good. Please. There's layers. I get it. But Arizona was like, we're good. And now you're betting on this career resurgence.

27:44Bill Simmons:I don't personally see it. I've never been a huge fan. I just think he's like a 500 quarterback who will put up stats. But I think any good defense, he can't throw over the middle. I don't trust his decision-making. I just don't see it. But some people like him.

27:59Tom Pelissero:I think that Kyler probably, you know, if he holds one NFL record, it's most millions of dollars paid by a team who hates you. Like the Cardinals from the day they did that contract and the homework clause. And it's not like that was a secret. Like everybody knew. And everybody knew about Kyler coming out of college. Like he's not a leader, right? He doesn't hang with the guys. Like he's kind of to himself. He plays video games and all this stuff. You know, they did have some success early with Cliff. I mean, they went to the playoffs one year, but then, you know, Kyler got killed. Everybody there said like he did grow up over time.

28:30Tom Pelissero:The last staff, the Jonathan Gannon staff really did like him. It just, you know, he gets hurt again last year. He's had a bunch of injuries. Like it just didn't work out with him coming to Minnesota. now they like it for a couple of reasons one they don't think they need him to be a leader like ko is going into his fifth year like they've kind of got a locker room that can handle a lot and yeah justin jefferson guys like that aaron jones is on the team you know defensively you do have some veterans that you can lean on like kyler can just come in and be you know a functional quarterback he is being coached differently they revamped the running game which that'll be you know from a fantasy football perspective particularly bill will be really interesting because it's going to be Aaron Jones and Jordan Mason kind of splitting it.

29:10Tom Pelissero:And then the rookie DeMond Claiborne, who they really liked. There were a lot of questions about him coming out, but like he is explosive as shit. It's like how that plays out. That could all take some heat off them. They brought in Frank Smith, who was Miami's offensive coordinator. Keith Carter's the old line coach. Them with KO were kind of putting together the run game. They may not have to be stuck in that throw the ball 45 times a game thing. And by the way, even when at times they were stuck with that last year, They might have had the worst quarterback situation in the league last year.

29:39Tom Pelissero:You have J.J. coming out in and out of the lineup three times. You have Carson Wentz, who played pretty well out of the gate and then bangs up his shoulder. And by the time, late in that second half of that Rams game, every time he's throwing it, it's like, do you remember Rookie of the Year? The old picture. He's like, ah! Every throw is like, this is the end. His arm is going to fall off. And then you're rolling Max Brosmer out there, who was, that was supposed to be a redshirt year, you know, like it was a project that you were going to have there. They won a game on Christmas, you know, with, with bros were thrown for like 50 yards, you know, like they're, they're so adaptive, but they went nine and eight.

30:16Tom Pelissero:They missed the playoffs by a half game. That's why like, if they can get functional quarterback play, KO said it from the moment the season ended, like we need more talent in the room. We need better competition in the room. And that's why they bring back Carson Wentz. It wasn't because they were thinking he was giving the number two over JJ. Jay. It's because they're like, we played, we've played three or more quarterbacks, two out of Kevin's four years. If we can just have quarterbacks who play to a certain level, like everything else, they won 13 and 14 games those other two years. I think I'm not going to give you a gambling advice on the over unders here, but like an eight and a half win total.

30:49Like, I don't know.

30:51Tom Pelissero:History would suggest unless all the quarterbacks, like a nuclear bomb drops on that room, the Vikings are going to find a way to scrap and be in the playoff fund.

30:59Bill Simmons:the Cleveland fans and the Vegas fans can't believe you said they had the worst quarterback room in the league last year they need oxygen they need water they Cleveland's like what else do we have to do to have the worst quarterback situation but you're right it was so bleak in that second half of the season for the Vikings they were at least on that level I mean we had some some of the worst quarterback situations we've had since I was like growing up last year Now we have Atlanta. This year is the worst one, I think.

31:28Tom Pelissero:I mean, Atlanta's got, you know, everybody's waiting for the competition, but it's like Michael Penix is on his third torn ACL. Yeah, he's even going to be able to play. It's August 18th. I mean, I can't name off the top of my head another quarterback who was in a quote-unquote competition and didn't practice an 11-on-11 in late August. He hasn't even been out there.

31:48Bill Simmons:And Tua just shouldn't be in the NFL anymore. I mean, he's just, I don't understand how, first of all, how he's a starter. And second, why he even wants to play. He looks terrified to get hit. Even you watch the preseason and he's doing like, it's, it's over. So I don't know who the third stringer is, but we're probably going to see him.

32:07Tom Pelissero:This is part of why I think Mike McDaniel, you know, as much as he, you know, became a meme at times, especially, you know, just cause like of who he is, like his personality, the way he dresses and all that stuff. Like anybody have more of a, a tough, a tough role over the last couple of years than a guy who every game plan had to start with the quarterback can't get hit, not sacked quarterback can't get hit. We can't let him get hit. And I know he does, you know, the jujitsu and he's learned all these different things, but like, that's a, that's an uphill climb. But, you know, for, for Atlanta, it was, it was a, you know, a role of art.

32:41Tom Pelissero:We're going with, we're getting them to the minimum. Miami's still playing. to a like whatever it is, $50 million or something this season. We're bringing them in. It's another lefty. We're building out the protections a certain way. We need to evaluate both these guys. But they're another team that realistically, if I'm guessing who's the quarterback in 2027, I'd say neither of those guys. You can say that for teams right now. Okay, we haven't even started the season. The teams that I would say they're starting quarterback in 2027, probably not even on the 2026 roster, I would say Atlanta. I would say Cleveland.

33:15Tom Pelissero:Jets. I would say the Jets and I would say maybe Arizona, although Carson back is really fascinated to me, um, not just because of, you know, what we saw in the hall of fame game, but you know, going back to the pre-draft process, like this dude was the question was not in talking to all the scouts and coaches. And I write this lengthy quarterback thing, which will be now part of the ringer, uh, going in the draft next year, but like getting the real opinions, um, from people within the league, like Carson back, he helped himself in the process because all the reports from the scouts were about what had happened at Georgia and like the social media and I don't love football and hanging out with the Cavender twin and like just you know driving the Lamborghini buying a house in the wrong part of Miami and gets robbed like immediately upon moving there like all this other stuff but if you talk to people at Miami they're like the guy was dialed like whether it was you know real or he was just playing the part like he did take the cue he did

34:07Bill Simmons:learn from it and they succeeded with him

34:09Tom Pelissero:and he took two teams to the college football playoff you know he's a big strong guy he looks the part the old parcells rules where it's like you know a certain number of starts and you got to be a college graduate and you got to be a senior and you have to win you know win a certain percentage of your games complete a certain percentage of your passes like he's the only guy who checked all those boxes like i'll be really interesting to see because if i'm arizona i definitely want to see carson beck at some point you're not going to the playoffs with jacoby brissette you may play with them for a good chunk of the season, but I would guess we see Carson Beck start some games because you're going to want to go in with all the information you can on, okay, before we draft another guy high, did we find one in the third round and we can pay this guy the minimum for the next two years and use a really high first round pick next year on somebody else or turn that into multiple first round picks?

34:56Tom Pelissero:Monte Austin Ford, the GM's done that before. He made the trade with Houston, you know, in the Will Anderson Jr. trade. So that's the best case scenario for all these teams is take your shots day two and day three in the draft. Find a quarterback that you like. Cleveland's doing the same thing right now with Shadour, and they were doing it, I guess still are, with Dylan Gabriel, too, where it's like, you know, take a flyer on him, and realistically, 2027 is the year that we're going to use that pick.

35:21Bill Simmons:25-1 on FanDuel for Rookie of the Year, Carson Beck. Another team that will not have the same quarterback next year is the Pittsburgh Steelers. We want to mention that as well.

35:32Tom Pelissero:Although they've got two guys, though. It's another one, too.

35:34Bill Simmons:right they fit in that same bucket if they hit with our yeah yeah you drafted allure this year and you drafted will howard last year but it won't be rogers next year right no rogers right but like

35:44Tom Pelissero:in terms of even being on the roster they've at least got two guys they think are developmental will howard mike mccarthy was out of the league last year but like will howard is one of the quarterbacks he loved in the draft process so those two young guys and aaron from what i've heard is kind of taking him under his wing which you can read that multiple ways but like he's been very supportive and he's got a good relationship with the young guys. Maybe again, maybe you find it. The Steelers aren't, I mean, the Steelers aren't going to have a top five pick based on record. I would certainly tell you that like, they're going to be a competent team.

36:14Tom Pelissero:They're going to be a way better offense than they've been in years. Like they've had a bottom, I think they've ranked 24th or worse in offense eight years in a row.

36:22Bill Simmons:Right.

36:24Tom Pelissero:That's mediocrity. Like that's how you don't, you know, every year you're nine and eight and you go out in the first round, everybody jokes about it. It's like, It's not because the defense fell off the cliff. It's because your offense has been terrible under several different coordinators. Let's see.

36:36Bill Simmons:I'm not sure it's going to be better this year.

36:39Tom Pelissero:I would say they will be a top 10 offense this year. That would be my prediction. Mike McCarthy, I want to say 13 of his 18 seasons as a head coach, has had a top 10 offense. He immediately had a number one offense in Dallas on a team that I don't think anybody was sitting there going, this is the most talented offense in the league. Dak played his best football under him. Aaron's played his best football under him. Now Aaron's not quite the same. Like the, the legs aren't there anymore. Like all those plays, like the spectacular Aaron Rogers stuff where it's getting outside the pocket and throwing, you know, off balance one foot, you're backpedaling across his body and throw 50 yards down the field.

37:17Tom Pelissero:Like I've seen him try to do that over the past couple of years. He can't do that anymore. But if you can play like, you know, probably the, the closest example, if you want to buy the upside on it is, when Peyton Manning was at the end of his career in Denver and they won a Super Bowl with him throwing passes like it was out of a t-shirt. One of my favorites. Slowly came down. But it was because he was so mentally fast. They won a Super Bowl with Peyton playing like that. I'm not going to sit here and predict that the Steelers win the Super Bowl but they've got a talented defense. They've added on offense, trading for Michael Pittman.

37:50Tom Pelissero:They brought in one of Mike's favorite running backs, Enrico Dowdle. I think that they will be a better offense. Yeah, they're going to be a better offense would be my prediction than whatever they're being projected.

38:00Bill Simmons:Problem is, it doesn't seem like Aaron Rodgers wants to get hurt anymore. And I still feel like that's part of the quarterback job. You shouldn't want to get hit. I want to get rid of the ball as fast as possible. Please don't hit me. We're taking a break. We're going to come back and do the pressure rankings really fast. This episode is brought to you by 20th Century Studios. The Dog Stars. Only in theaters on August 28th. Visionary filmmaker Ridley Scott. returning to IMAX with the dog stars in a world shattered by catastrophe. A lone pilot's isolated existence is transformed when a mysterious radio transmission crackles through the silence.

38:36Bill Simmons:Uh-oh. Setting out in the unknown, Higg embarks on a dangerous journey in search of something more powerful than survival. Hope. Kind of like the hope I have for the Patriots right now. From the legendary director of Gladiator, the Martian, and Black Hawk Down comes the riveting post-apocalyptic thriller, The Dog Stars, starring Jacob Lorty, Josh Brolin, Margaret Qualley, Guy Pearce. I like all those people. Based on Peter Heller's acclaimed novel and adapted for the screen by Mark L. Smith, The Dog Stars delivers breathtaking visuals, an extraordinary ensemble cast, a deeply human story about resilience, connection, and the choices that define us.

39:15Bill Simmons:The Dog Stars, only in theaters and IMAX on August 28th. Get your tickets now. All right, pressure rankings. I only want to do individuals, but we have to mention the Rams at the top, who I think now have the most pressure in the league because they're prohibitive favorites. They're 5-1 to win the Super Bowl on FanDuel. Nobody else is better than 10-1. Their over-under is 11.5. I saw a segment last week on ESPN, your brief employer that was talking about, uh, could this be the greatest defense of all time? We've lost our minds with this Aaron Donald thing. He's 35 years old. He hasn't played in three years.

39:57Bill Simmons:I'm sure he's going to be awesome, but he's only going to play 35 plays a game. When he comes back, they're really top heavy. They have a quarterback that all, but in the summer last year, we were terrified he was going to get hurt. And it was like his back. Is he going to make it? And he made it. Now we're not worried about him anymore. He's 38. I think there's 10 guys ever who have had really awesome seasons at age 38 or later, not to mention the Puka Nakua stuff, which continues to not seem like it's stabilized. I just have a lot of questions and there's a lot of pressure now that people think they're the favorites.

40:32Bill Simmons:So what are you seeing as you watch from afar here?

40:35Tom Pelissero:Well, you have to start with like what the Rams have been since they got to LA. Like they have fully embraced, like, this is Hollywood. We are always going to be a story. We are always going to be the team that people are talking about and they've done that in different ways like everybody wants to go it's always bleep you know bleep those picks but like they're cyclical they they push it every team is cyclical from a spending standpoint right because you have every dollar you spend hits the cap eventually it's a real cap there's ways you can manipulate it but like it does come home eventually here and so the rams went through that phase of like drafting a bunch of guys the todd girlies and jared goffs they pay those guys then that gave way to all right now we're going for it We're going to trade for Jalen Ramsey.

41:13Tom Pelissero:You know, we're going to trade for Brandon Cooks. They get to a Super Bowl. They don't quite get there. Okay, now we're going to reboot it a couple of years later. Now we're trading for Stafford and we're going for it there. Well, then they got to a certain point after they won the Super Bowl in the 21 season where all the cap stuff, all the older players, they had to, all right, we need to start this thing over. So now we're trading away with Jalen Ramsey. They had the most rookies on their team. I think it was in 2023. Yeah. Of any team in the NFL. And you saw the growing pains. It's the one season they've had that just didn't live up to, you know, what Sean McVay has built.

41:48Tom Pelissero:But when you have 30-plus rookies on your team, now you're paying some of those guys. Now you're getting to this point. They've obviously were really good. You're toward the end with Matthew Stafford. Now we're back. We're cycling the other way where it's going on. It's a re-re-reboot. Right. It's a triple boot. They keep going with this, but, like, it's not like they're just on the gas all the time. That's hard to sustain because at some point, like, Like your draft picks are your young, cheap workforce. They allow you to balance out the money you're spending on these really high-priced players.

42:16Tom Pelissero:At some point, you have to have a recalibration with it. But the way that they've done it this offseason, Bill, for all the wild stuff that they have done, and I know that Sean McVay and Les Snead and Kevin Nevoff and all those guys, they love the fact that they're constantly that team that everybody is talking about. But I don't know that they've ever had one that approaches what happened this offseason. He's like, let's just take a second here to enjoy the past six months for the Rams. They make the commitment. Matthew Stafford announced it. It starts at NFL Honors. Matthew Stafford, in his acceptance speech with his daughters on the stage, says, like, I'm going to be back next year.

42:52Tom Pelissero:And I'm in the theater. And, like, the whole Rams section, they all jump up and are, like, going wild, clapping. Because they didn't know. He hadn't actually told them he was coming back. So the reigning NFL NFL MVP gets the trophy and goes like, hey, I'm coming back for another year. It's like they're over the moon, right? So then over the next several months, they're working on a contract with Stafford. They're not quite getting there. They draft his eventual successor, Ty Simpson, in the first round at number 13 overall, no less, which was something that had been in the motion for months, going all the way back to when Alabama's in the Rose Bowl and Les Snead has Ty's parents over to the facility to essentially talk them into your son should come out.

43:37Tom Pelissero:Mom asks why, and he goes, because I'm going to draft him at number 13. So that all comes to roost. I'm just telling you, this is strictly the quarterbacks without getting into everything else. Then they eventually get the Stafford deal done. So now you have on a team that's going for it. Your number one pick is a guy who if all goes well, we don't see for a year, maybe two.

43:55Bill Simmons:And by the way, there are a couple of good guys at 13 that would have helped this year's team specifically.

44:00Tom Pelissero:So you're trying to balance this because in the Rams minds, they're going, we're winning the Superbowl this year. So having the number 32 pick in a draft next year, where all these guys are going to go above us, we're not going to get one. Then we're not going to get one as long as Stafford is here. So let's take one now while we can catch the rest of the league off guard. And I don't know who else, if anyone takes tie in the first round, but in the Rams minds, they're going, we've got a guy who fits perfectly into the system, who is trained in that style of offense, more under center snaps than anybody in the NFL.

44:28Tom Pelissero:Let's just get them now and we'll figure it out. So then they eventually get the deal done with Stafford. It's painted as this, you know, extension and everything. If you look at it on paper, all it does is it buys them more time because of when his contract would avoid it. It's still unclear what's going to happen with Matthew Stafford in 2027. He'll have a decision to make. Rams will have a decision to make. But all that happens is -

44:50Bill Simmons:And by the way, and physically, we don't know what's going to happen to him.

44:52Tom Pelissero:And physically - He might be right on the cusp. He's played through so much, and he's been beat up throughout the course of his career. Do we see Ty Simpson? Do we see Stetson Bennett at some point? We don't know how the season is going to play out. Wide receiver, meanwhile, because all that stuff's happening. Wide receiver, they work on, at one point, a trade of Devontae Adams to the point that they tell Devontae Adams, we're probably going to trade you, or we might trade you, because they're working on a trade for A.J. Brown. they eventually back away from the A.J. Brown trade there's medical stuff he's had a long running knee thing that everybody knows about going back to Tennessee which is why they traded away years ago what the hell you're just dropping that on me they're trying to trade for A.J.

45:35Tom Pelissero:Brown so they tell Devontae Adams we may move on from you then the A.J. thing goes away now Devontae okay you're back by the way Puka is in rehab dealing with some serious personal stuff that he's got to work through. He hasn't been extended yet. So that also is an undercurrent of all this. Defensively, you completely overhaul your secondary. You bring in the two corners from the Chiefs. You trade your other one for Trent McDuffie and give him a record contract. You sign Jalen Watson to play on the other side. And then, oh yeah, you trade for Miles Garrett. You trade your first, second, and third round picks, plus Jared Verse, who's like 24 years old, eyes.

46:18Tom Pelissero:Like I thought the value was really good for the Browns. I get why the Rams did it. I thought the Browns extracted really good value out of that situation. So you basically change everything about how you're playing up front. And we haven't even talked about the Aaron Donald saga, which is a guy who hasn't played in several years. I know everybody keeps saying, I keep seeing like headlines and people saying like, he's not coming back unless he's Aaron Donald. He's not going to be Aaron Donald, Aaron Donald. He might be something approaching Aaron Donald, but it's going to be on a limited snap type of a basis.

46:51Tom Pelissero:I mean, if you go back through modern NFL history, and I had my former employee's research team look this up at one point, the only player in the post-World War II era who's in the Hall of Fame, who sat out multiple seasons and came back and played was Deion. And Deion came back as like a part-time player in Baltimore for a couple of years because Ray Lewis got him to come back. He still made plays. He's Deion Sanders, but he's going to be on a limited snap type of a basis. He wasn't playing a ton.

47:19Bill Simmons:Wouldn't the comparison be how the Pats used Diggs last year, where Diggs was impactful, but he was only playing 40 % of the snaps, 45 % of the snaps?

47:28Tom Pelissero:I mean, there's probably some of that.

47:29Bill Simmons:And with Donald, it would be the same thing. They're going to use him strategically, but he's not going to be out there all the time.

47:35Tom Pelissero:That part of it's definitely true. I think that what you will see, if Aaron Donald decides he wants to play, which I don't think that's coming in the next few days. Listen, this is August 18th.

47:45Bill Simmons:We kind of need to know soon.

47:47Tom Pelissero:They got joint practice with the Saints, I think, on Thursday. Aaron Donald had shown up for a joint practice with the Saints, so it would be sometime thereafter if he's going to come back. But the idea of the vision would be third downs, two-minute late in games, pass rush situations where we're going to roll out Aaron Donald, whatever he is now, plus Miles Garrett, plus Byron Young, plus Kobe Turner. Basically, they're like, figure out who you're going to double. Just go ahead and try us here. That would be the idea of it with Aaron Donald. but it would add even more of that. Like it's honestly, it would be like the equivalent of LeBron at this point where.

48:22Tom Pelissero:LeBron coming to Philly

48:24Bill Simmons:if he played 22 minutes a game.

48:25Tom Pelissero:It's exactly that same thought, which what are you getting out of LeBron? Well, he can facilitate. He can make the other people around him better, even if he himself is not what he was. But also it's like LeBron chose Philly. Oh shit. Like we're going to be in the mix to win this thing right now. Like it makes everybody every day come in. You would hope. And I know that's kind of how the Rams are thinking about this. Like everybody's going to be like, man, if he decided to come back from retirement because he thinks this team has a shot to win it, that means every day I got to show up with the same intensity and vision that he's got.

48:54Bill Simmons:And you have, you can, if you think you're going to make the playoffs, which I think they're going to make the playoffs and barring like a bunch of crazy shit happening, you can kind of steer it toward, hey, what if we get, if we can get the one seed, we only have to play three playoff games. We steer Donald toward, can you give us like two awesome weeks in a row by week, then Superbowl? can you play like 70 % of the plays just for those three weeks? I, if we're rating, which things make me the most dubious Puka is number one. I want to talk about him in a second. Stafford just holding up at age 38, how much Donald will be able to actually play all the pressure and hype, which the moment anything goes wrong, it's, Oh my God, the Rams are one and two.

49:38Bill Simmons:And it just becomes,

49:39Tom Pelissero:and by the way, the whole country watching week one, the first game in Australia, I'll be on the sideline. Right. The whole country is going to watch it. Everybody overreacts to week one. They're playing a tough 49ers team. And they're in the fucking room across the world. I had a call with the Melbourne folks yesterday, like the local, the visitor bureau or whatever they are people, the presentation for us. And they were, I asked them like, is there a team that people root for there? And they said, well, no, like the people in Melbourne don't really have a team, but the 49ers are reviving earlier.

50:08Tom Pelissero:They're going to be in the community. So we think the crowd will be for the 49ers. Like the Rams are going to be in at least a slightly, you know, environment where they're, they're challenged. And yeah, it's, it's gonna be a weird game. You know, these guys, McVay and Kyle know each other so well, like there's no surprises where he Morris is the former Rams coordinators now in San Francisco. Like there's tons of familiarity, but that, that game, like weird stuff always happens in week one. If they come back from that on a long flight back and they're Owen one, and they were the team that everybody said is going to win the Superbowl.

50:36Tom Pelissero:And now it's 10 days of hearing like that, they, you know, they might not be the team that we thought like that that does have some weight on people even if it's just one of 17 games puka who was the best receiver in the league last year in my opinion even though

50:51Bill Simmons:i think jsn he had all the accolades but puka just game to game was just ridiculous the blocking he was catches in traffic was just dominant i don't know what to expect from him and it was like no no he's getting his life back together and then the story comes out that he ran through a glass or Michael Rubin's house and July 4th. And it's like, are we sure he's doing great? What about all the legal troubles? And is there something really going on with this guy? So what have you heard on that?

51:19Tom Pelissero:Well, I would start by saying, you know, from all accounts, from everyone I've talked to, since he got back in the building, which he was back, you know, OTAs in the spring, like he's been good around the facility, which is like, he's in a good spot. And you also can surmise based on the timing of everything. Like he probably didn't have his life together last season when he was the most dominant receiver or one of the most dominant receivers in the NFL. So you would like to think if whatever he's dealing with, he can be in a better spot with that now, maybe the guy can be even better here. His contract was never going to get done early in the offseason.

51:53Tom Pelissero:I think this one was always going to take a little bit, but certainly he's going to have a spotlight on him for a variety of different reasons. He's still somehow appearing on podcasts and seeing crazy stuff. Like, yeah, I walked through a plate glass window and cut up my face. Like, I don't know. I guess I've never gone to a white party. Maybe everyone wearing whites. If that was one of my friends or one of your friends,

52:17Bill Simmons:it would be a red flag. I mean, what happened? You walked through a plate glass window?

52:21Tom Pelissero:Like, how drunk were you? What happened? I mean, that is some speed. You know, it's not Charles Barkley throwing you through a plate glass window. Like, if you just walked and broke it, I know you're a strong dude, but that's... Yeah, that's a lot. Like, listen, I mean, yeah, it'll be something worth monitoring. There's no doubt about it. But like in terms of on the field and football, like everything sounds like it's gone well so far. It's just it's one of the many things we'll have to be keeping tabs on here through the season.

52:45Bill Simmons:Well, in the last 30 years, only one team has been a giant favorite heading into the season and actually won the Super Bowl. And that was the 2018 Patriots who beat the Rams. So there you go. Pressure rankings really quick. individuals. These are my rankings. I don't think they're the correct rankings. I did not send them to you. The number one person with the most pressure on him this year, in my opinion, is going to be CJ Stroud. Because I think the Texans are really, really, really good and could absolutely make the Super Bowl and maybe should have made the Super Bowl last year, except he let them down in New England and was awful.

53:31Bill Simmons:Run games better. offensive line is supposedly a little better receiver room is better um the defense is the same and probably better but they brought everybody back it's all lined up for him just give us a c plus and we're going to win 13 games can you be a c are you giving him a nickname c plus stroud c plus stroud that sounds great i'll start it right now just just a c plus we'll go 12 and five um i think he has the most pressure on him it's it's it's just crazy to think about the

54:03Tom Pelissero:arc for cj stroud you know as the number two picked and the entire world decided you know about three games into that rookie year that he was you know clearly should have been the number one pick he's played well enough he's gone to the playoffs every year he wins a playoff game every year but then has had bumps like last year last year was a roller coaster man like out of the gate they were bad i mean they were 0-3 the offense was really struggling they were changing schemes because they fired Bobby Slowick. They had Nick Caley coming in. It's a different style of offense that he was running.

54:33Tom Pelissero:But then in the middle of the season, they did get better. Defensively, Matt Burke taking over the play calling was huge for the defense. And then offensively, you saw them kind of figure some things out, even though, yeah, the running back situation with Mixon out and you got a late career Nick Chubb. Those things weren't ideal.

54:51Bill Simmons:They had the worst running backs in the league.

54:52Tom Pelissero:Yeah, so trading for David Montgomery makes a lot of sense. Like Montgomery still got, you know, with lack of wear and tear over the last couple of years, like he's still got some juice left in his legs. I think that that was a smart move and pairing him with a young back, like makes a ton of sense. Take Dell is CJ Stroud's favorite receiver. And he didn't play last year. He's back now because he had a horrific injury in 2024. You know, he's been back out there. I know he hasn't practiced the last few days, but it seems like he'll be ready to roll. So like that's another another addition here.

55:20Tom Pelissero:There have been contract talks between CJ Stroud, his agent and the Texans. And so there's at least a chance, but it's really hard to get a quarterback contract done right now because every agent is looking at this and going next year, the quarterback class of 2023 will all be extension eligible. So that is, you know, Drake May and Jaden Daniels and Caleb Williams and Bo Nix. Baker Mayfield potentially is a free agent. That could be another one. Lamar Jackson is going to be due for a new contract that the Ravens have been working on for like two years now. so there's a number where that deal could get done but if not i know this cj charles totally comfortable going out and playing it out so is there pressure yeah and the way that things ended last year with like the weird chuck knoblox style yips where like he couldn't take a snap like he couldn't handle the football that was just weird and out of character um you'd like to think that it's not going to look like that but no doubt if he doesn't have a contract any quarterback fourth year your rookie deal there's there's a level of pressure especially on a really good team

56:17Bill Simmons:So you have the contract, you have the history from last season where he probably single-handedly cost them a playoff run. There's another thing, and it doesn't happen that often in the NFL, but when you have a team that's kind of ready to potentially make a Super Bowl and you have a unit that's the other side of the ball, that's fucking awesome. And it's like the defense, if we can just get good enough offense, this defense can carry us and you're letting them down. that's where football becomes like unlike any other sport where it's like the two units working together but if this unit's letting down this unit and it just compounds itself and you could feel it in that playoff game and it to me it's like a fork in the road for him like he could be he could salvage whatever get to get a big contract out of this make win a couple playoff games or i can see him not being the quarterback next year like it's like a clear fork in the road i don't

57:11Tom Pelissero:know how it's going to play out yeah and then listen anytime you're making those commitments we've seen teams we talked about some of the teams that have made these big commitments to quarterbacks and you very quickly like it's not even second guessing it's like first guessing it's like right you re-sign kyler when you just don't like him at all as a person to like you gave him 46 million a year to with the concussion history i mean i remember when that deal got done and like i i understand like you know if you're chris greer and that staff like you drafted him Mike McDaniel, like part of his pitch to get the job was like, I can win with Tua.

57:43Tom Pelissero:Every other coach said, you got to get rid of Tua. Mike McDaniel walked in and said, I can win with him. When you do that and you tie yourself to somebody, you're like, all right, well, we're going to pay him. And we want to send a message by paying him. But I had other GMs, as soon as that contract going down, being like, why in the world didn't they just let that play out and then franchise tag him? What are you doing? Why would you pay him now with the history? And obviously it played out that way. So I think that the combination of the fact that, you know, listen, Bill, in like 2013 or 14, certainly in 13, I think still in 14, the highest paid quarterback in the NFL was Aaron Rodgers at 22 million a year.

58:20Tom Pelissero:22 million. He was the highest paid quarterback for like two years.

58:23Bill Simmons:Are you counting off the table Brady money from TV? I'm not counting that house. I'm just saying the money that we know.

58:30Tom Pelissero:Money.

58:30Bill Simmons:No, OK.

58:32Tom Pelissero:That market is now triple. essentially right by the time that we get a lamar deal or whatever caleb and jaden and drake and bo we'll see who else is in there like it's gonna be a you know the the 60 million dollar quarterback forget that it's gonna be the 70 million quarterback and depending how you look at 70 way that like the way that like josh allen's deal got redone that was basically a two-year 200 million dollar extension like the numbers are astronomical the agents have no reason to say like well we'll just take a 45 million dollar a year deal daniel jones coming off a torn achilles signed a two-year,$100 million contract.

59:02Tom Pelissero:That's just where we are. So if you're committing that much cash and cap dollars to a player, I don't blame the people who are like, let's get all the information we can first. It's why Bryce Young won't have an extension right now. They had some very preliminary talks from my understanding, but everybody was under the understanding like, you're not going to pay what the market is. We're not going to take it. So let's just play it out. You guys get more information. So do we. and let's see where the market is next year. It just creates ripple effects in this. And maybe we see some of these quarterbacks who in the past didn't get out there, and now they do.

59:38Tom Pelissero:And maybe quarterbacks toward the tail end of their rookie contracts begin getting traded. There's a lot of different macro things that could happen because you've got guys like, I mean, CJ Strong on paper, three years, three playoff appearances, three playoff wins. You take that for a young quarterback, but it's like, all right, peel back the layers of why haven't they taken those additional steps, what it looked like at the end of last season. He's going to take it into his own hands, barring a contract getting done before this season. He's going to be a really interesting guy available if, in fact, they aren't able to get something done.

1:00:11Bill Simmons:He has built-in excuses for last year with the line, the no running game at all, the wide receiver injuries. You could go down the line, but he also wasn't very good. Number two on my pressure rankings is Josh Allen. We have the whole season to talk about him. We don't need to do that here. but I don't need to lay that one out. Three, four, five. I have Herbert, Lamar, and Burrow tentatively in that order. So if I offered you Justin Herbert, Jackson, and Burrow, who do you think, who would you put with the most pressure of those three guys? Because I think it's Herbert because he's getting the MVP buzz.

1:00:52Bill Simmons:He's 10 to one. He's got the fourth best odds. We're hearing all this, Oh, Mike McTano. Harbaugh's blowing smoke left and right about him. He's got the offensive line back. They're a little sleepery, but we've never seen him play well in a playoff game ever.

1:01:08Tom Pelissero:I would say least pressure on Lamar because I think that we all need to, of the three, I'll go backwards here. Least pressure on Lamar because I think we all have to be aware of the challenge that he is taking on here. Declan Doyle, who's the new OC, he's 30 years old. He's basically the same age as Lamar. He trained under Sean Payton and Ben Johnson, two of the most detail-oriented, brilliant offensive minds that we've seen in the NFL. And from what they did in Chicago, which there's going to be a lot of corollaries to what they're doing in Baltimore with Lamar, like, if you go back to Caleb in the first two months of last season, like, it was bumpy.

1:01:44Tom Pelissero:because you're trying to take this dude who can be Superman every play and just go, no, we need Clark Kent like 90 % of the time. Just execute and be in rhythm and let your feet, you know, do the work, connect your feet and your eyes. Had the ball come out on time. We'll worry about getting receivers to hit the landmark. So the ball comes out on time. They're where they're supposed to be. You got to do your part. I wouldn't be surprised at all if we have some bumps early on for Lamar. I think if I'm not mistaken, I think Baltimore plays Tennessee in week one, you know, Robert Sala will have some things cooked up to try to, you know, make things complicated for him.

1:02:18Tom Pelissero:But Lamar, I think that the fact that you've got a first time head coach, first time offensive coordinator, yes, it's Lamar, two time NFL MVP. There's always pressure on that team and Lamar himself. But I think there needs to be, from our perspective, more of a grace period with Lamar, just because there's so much new.

1:02:35Bill Simmons:Can I give you the first five for Lamar? Yeah, please. It's at Indy.

1:02:40Tom Pelissero:Indy, sorry. where Lou on a rumo is another one who historically you're going back. There've, there've been, you know, some ups and downs when Lou was in Cincinnati, but he's played them a lot of times home for saints.

1:02:51Bill Simmons:At Cowboys in Brazil. Home Titans. There's your Sala. There it was. At Falcons at Browns. It's the first six. And the Falcons is Sunday Night Football. So the Falcons-Browns will be the easier stretch of that because I think both those teams will not be good.

1:03:07Tom Pelissero:The storyline out of the gate to me is going to be the Ravens are probably going to win a majority of those games. So that's what they look like.

1:03:14Bill Simmons:Why isn't the offense good enough yet?

1:03:16Tom Pelissero:That'll be the storyline. They're 5-1. Why don't we feel good about that? And the offense isn't doing like what we've seen in the past. It's not going to. Listen, Declan, the problem the Ravens are going to have is if their offense is good and if they go this direction, which is the plan, like Declan Doyle is going to be a head coach next year. Like he's going to be in that type of category just because of the way that he's trained from a very young age. Strong name.

1:03:38Bill Simmons:I like his name. Declan Doyle. Sounds like he could be like a detective. Yeah, it's a good one. So you have Lamar five. You have Burrow four.

1:03:46Tom Pelissero:I would say Burrow probably next. because, you know, Joe's just had injuries. That's the biggest thing. Like, yeah, he's got pressure on himself to not get hurt. And the Bengals have pressure on them to not get him hurt. So in the first preseason game where Orlando Brown Jr., who I love, he's a great dude, you know, but like, you know, he's got one on tape that he's going to be like, ah, I should have had that one. And Burrow gets smoked and every Bengals fan goes, oh, my God, it's more of the same. But like, they are trying to put, you know, the pieces around him. The investment in the defense, like, that's the biggest thing with Joe.

1:04:17Tom Pelissero:yes you can say all right we just want the defense to be better and you go out and you trade the number 10 pick for dexter lawrence you sign brian cook for a bunch of money you give money to boy a mafe the seattle pass rusher um but you're doing those things also because if we're not having to throw the ball 50 times if we're not perpetually in a shootout guess what happens like joe doesn't have to be dropping back we can actually have a balanced offense yeah we can you know we can protect him more because we don't have to get five guys on the ropes you're trying to come back That's the idea is the big picture.

1:04:46Tom Pelissero:It's not just, hey, we got to block better. It's like, we got to play a better game. There's pressure on Joe only because he hasn't been able to stay on the field. Those things aren't always necessarily his fault. You know, the one last year holds the ball for a long time in the pocket. He suffers a severe turf toe injury. Like that, you got to be able to get the football out. So, yeah, I think that there's some level of him, but it's also it's everybody else. Joe's a big backer, Zach Taylor. They've gone to the Super Bowl together. Zach's in year eight. Like there's pressure on the entire operation here, which is why they did un-Bengals things and were aggressive going out and trading a high draft pick for a veteran player.

1:05:22Tom Pelissero:And then with Justin Herbert, I think that there's less pressure. And I've said this before on Justin Herbert than there is on Jim Harbaugh, but another situation where the entire thing. Harbaugh over Herbert for pressure? Absolutely. And I would say, because Justin Herbert is still a young, he's still a young quarterback. He also has a new offensive coordinator course with Mike McDaniel and Everybody's got high hopes about what that is going to look like here. But think about this. Jim Harbaugh coming off a national championship at Michigan. And, of course, there were a lot of other things that happened before, during, and after that that we won't get into here.

1:05:55Tom Pelissero:But a highly regarded coach would want at every stop. He won at UC San Diego. He won at Stanford. He won with the 49ers. He won at Michigan over the course of time, although it took him a while to get there. In San Francisco, his first two years were NFC Championship, Super Bowl. His third year was another FC championship. It was instantaneous success. When the Chargers brought him from Michigan, the Falcons also interviewed him in that cycle. They ultimately hired Raheem Morris. He wanted to go to LA. That's where, you know, from September, like I was hearing that he was telling people in the building, like I'm going to be the Chargers head coach next year.

1:06:28Tom Pelissero:Like he had eyes on that job all along. Justin Herbert was a big part of it. But if you told me Jim Harbaugh is one of the highest paid coaches in the NFL was going to have, he's already had two, to have three seasons without a playoff win, you'd say that that is a failure for him coming in. So the pressure is on everybody there to be able to take that next step. With Herbert, he's had to overcome a lot. You want to talk about, I mean, C.J. Stroud did have a lot of issues on the offensive line. Nothing like Herbert, yeah. Joe Ault and Rashawn Slayer didn't get out of camp last year. I mean, it was a constant revolving door, and they made changes at the O.C.

1:07:04Tom Pelissero:position. They made changes at the offensive line coach. So now you got Butch Berry there, who's a very veteran guy along Mike McDaniel. Let's see what the whole thing ends up looking like here. Herbert's had a lot of injuries. He plays through as much as anybody. I mean, that high ankle sprain, I can't remember if that was last year or two years ago, but he had that thing taped. It was like 1980s football. He had the full stack. His foot was three times the size. He plays through stuff, but he's got to be able to, and organizationally, they've got to be able to win. So I'd say Herbert, just because we've seen Lamar.

1:07:37Tom Pelissero:Yeah, he hasn't gotten to a Super Bowl. Joe hasn't won a Super Bowl. Herbert doesn't want a playoff game. He was there and had a massive lead on the Jaguars once. That's the closest that they came. But, you know, everybody there involved. Again, I still put more pressure on Jim Harbaugh than Justin Herbert, but everybody there has pressure on him in L.A. just because these are two guys making big time money in a big time city where you're competing for attention with the team that owns the stadium. and this is the year where now you've got to be able to take a step forward. You start wondering, all right, how many coaches go into year four without a playoff win and you're not talking about really needing to make major changes.

1:08:16Tom Pelissero:It would raise a lot of questions as much space as they have in those guys about exactly what the path forward is.

1:08:21Bill Simmons:Yeah, Herbert, you could do the Stroud thing where there are excuses for what happened last year because of the injuries to the tackles, but there doesn't seem a lot of excuses this year. All right, so I have the Rams, CJ Stroud, Josh Allen, Harbaugh Herbert together. Joe Burrow, Lamar as the next two. I'm just going to give you, because we got to go soon. I'm going to give you seven names and tell me if any of them have more pressure on them than Joe Burrow or Lamar Jackson. Okay. Jalen Hurts, Mike Vrabel, Dak Prescott, Miles Garrett, Kyler Murray, Jaden Daniels and Jordan Love.

1:09:03Tom Pelissero:All right, let's go one by one. Which one jumps out? I'll give you a shot. I mean, Jalen Hurts is the one that jumps out immediately. New offense that on paper isn't really geared to his skill set. Sean Mannion's coming in as another young offensive coordinator. He's never called plays at any level and is going to be running. You know, he played under LeFleur in Green Bay. He played under Sean McVay or didn't play a whole lot. He was the backup quarterback under those guys. Like that's never been Jalen Hurts game. It's a precision style drop back under center offense. Jalen Hurts has a lot of pressure just because if they're committed to this style of play and it doesn't click immediately, you're going to be talking about, okay, where potentially would Jalen Hurts be the quarterback in 2027?

1:09:49Tom Pelissero:We're not there yet. They want to see it. But when you don't have the evidence that he can succeed and play at a really high level in that system. I think inevitably there's a ton of pressure that goes into that, especially because he's getting to a point in this contract too where if everything was going swimmingly in Philadelphia, we'd be talking about Jalen Hurts being up for a new contract as well.

1:10:06Bill Simmons:Well, it's an interesting topic with the Eagles fans. And I know, unfortunately for me, I know a bunch of them because they still rubbed the Patriots Super Bowl in my face. Respect Hurts because he won them the Super Bowl, right? Big, sturdy guy. They're like, clearly like they feel indebted to him because they did have success. of them, but none of them are sure if he's that good. And you can hear when you talk to you, they were always like, they just seem wishy-washy about it. He was pretty damn good in the Super

1:10:35Tom Pelissero:Bowl. He was. He had a great run. They had an unstoppable play in the tush push, but he also, he threw the ball. If you go back to that Super Bowl, the deep shot, the Devante Smith, that was basically the dagger, you know, he was executing at a high level. It's just, you know, listen, Jalen's another guy who is just, he's more to himself. He's, you know, he's an extremely hard worker. He's unbelievably driven, but he's not, you know, the guy who's going to be the, you know, the centerpiece of the locker. And that's just not his personality. And everybody knew, you know, coming out of Alabama and Oklahoma, that wasn't really him.

1:11:04Tom Pelissero:Um, but that's not necessarily a character flaw. I mean, they won a Superbowl with them. I think we sometimes overlook this and he became available. He began, if he became available, there would be a, you know, a huge price for him, but the pressure comes from the Eagles again on paper have made a move to like, hey, we're going to run this other style of offense that isn't naturally a fit for you. It would be like if the Patriots, when Tom Brady were there, hired Sean Mannion, I guess, I mean, it would have been like in his 20s, but like you hire some guy who's going to run the LeFleur offense and Tom would have been like, we're doing what now?

1:11:35Tom Pelissero:We've been running one offense and we've had a ton of success. We won a Super Bowl. Like, we're going to do something that's completely different from what I do. That to me creates pressure. I mean, some of the other ones, Dak, you know, Dak's been a highly productive quarterback. He's at that point where, you know, The Cowboys have to be thinking about the future, but he's still in his prime. They've got a ton of firepower. I don't think that there's necessarily pressure that goes beyond just... Really? See, I totally disagree.

1:12:01Bill Simmons:I feel like there's a lot of stuff. Watch out for Dallas and the NFC. They can make the Super Bowl. This is the best team he's had.

1:12:09Tom Pelissero:Don't we do that a lot? Don't we always overvalue Dallas? He's in year 11.

1:12:13Bill Simmons:I don't think he's made a conference championship game yet. No. By the way, they're America's team. Everybody talks about them the most. Even they're talking about the more than a rant.

1:12:21Tom Pelissero:Adam Manning has a game in three decades. Yeah. He's got the most valuable franchise. Everything from business projects. When is it going to happen? I mean, you could argue the Parsons trade worked out for them,

1:12:31Bill Simmons:especially because they turned some of the picks into Williams. And, like, I think you look at that holistically, it actually, like, was smart how they played it.

1:12:38Tom Pelissero:But the weird thing about what Dallas did last year was, like, they're the first team that I can remember that basically decided to start building their defense in August and continued through November. Like, you say what you will about Matt Eberflus. Like, he found out a week before, two before the season, we're trading your best player, Micah Parsons. Like, up until that point, it was not totally clear that this was actually going to happen. So you trade Micah, and now it's like, well, we have no pass rushers. Then, like, well, we got Kenny Clark. It's like, okay, that's great because we need a defensive tackle.

1:13:13Tom Pelissero:But, like, Kenny's more of a nose. He's not a three tech. We don't have a three tech. And then get to November. They're like, hey, we got to three tech. Quinny Williams is like, okay, cool. We could have used him the past two months. They traded for the linebacker, Logan Wilson. He's like, hey, middle linebacker, like the most important positions in that scheme are three tech defensive tackle and middle linebacker. You're just making it up in the middle of it. But the best thing they did, you know, if they were going to fire a flu, it's like going to getting Christian Parker, just getting a young, hungry dude, like another one who, if they're good, We're going to talk about Christian Parker as a head coaching candidate this year.

1:13:45Tom Pelissero:I'm really fascinated to see. He comes from the Vic Fangio School. He's an unbelievably bright young guy. He's going to have a plan. They're finally steady in terms of their personnel. And obviously, you know, they drafted defense, Malachi Lawrence, in the first round, which that's going to be an interesting one because that's a project. You know, they had two first-round picks, used both of them on defense. Like, that's what you want to see. But how quickly does it all come together? That, to me, I think they're going to be good on offense. I don't think there's a whole lot of doubt about that hard on injuries.

1:14:15Tom Pelissero:But yeah, I think defensively is where it boils down to.

1:14:18Bill Simmons:I got Dak in there. All right. Jordan Love, pressure because he, I anointed him a couple weeks ago with Mina, the new nerd king at quarterback. The nerds are, they've moved their attention away from Justin Herbert. Now they're over on Jordan Love, touting the virtues of Jordan Love and how much better he is than people realize. And so he's got the pressure of the nerds. He's got to carry the weight for them.

1:14:40Tom Pelissero:top 10 top seven like every statistical yeah epa name anything he's really good at it yeah i mean you think i don't know like if the packers ever gone like three straight weeks over these in the jordan love era where like they have the same group of receivers like every week it's christian watson's by the way it won't be this season either all right well i mean tucker craft the fact that he's come back that that's the number one thing that happened to them last year look at them playing before the tucker craft injury and after everybody was losing their minds i think the week after that, like they, they lost to Carolina.

1:15:10Tom Pelissero:They had a close game against Carolina and they played, didn't play great the following week. It was like, what's going on? It's like, they lost a guy who like Tucker craft is young Travis Kelsey, right? He can be that good. It seems like he's on track to play early in the season. I don't know how much, but Jordan love is, I'll tell you this, like the coaches there love them. Matt LaFleur loves them. You know, the leader, the guy, the player, um, they just got to get some, you know, some better consistency. Josh Jacobs was banged up most of last year too. That was a really big deal for him. It'll be interesting to see.

1:15:39Tom Pelissero:I don't think that there's as much pressure other than again, you're the quarterback of the Green Bay Packers and you might be in the toughest division in the entire league.

1:15:46Bill Simmons:I think 99 % done with my research. It's clear that that's the best division. I think NFC North top to bottom is probably the best one.

1:15:56Tom Pelissero:Who you'd even argue. The NFC West minus Arizona, but there's no minus.

1:16:03Bill Simmons:Before we go, give me every year there's a team that comes out of nowhere and makes the playoffs and everybody's shocked and we're getting better at the vegas odds with this like the patriots were a huge shock last year but actually not to people who were studying the schedule and the coaching change all the is there anybody in that bottom 10 that you feel like could make a leap that we're not seeing i'm talking like i'm talking like the clevelands like those kind of teams the giants arizona is Is there a shitty team that's not going to be shitty?

1:16:35Tom Pelissero:Well, the thing is, how many shitty teams are there? Like going into the year, we talked about the four. I think that after that, like there's not a lot of teams you think are just going to be bad.

1:16:44Bill Simmons:I mean, you can say everyone in the NFC South might be shitty. You can say Arizona. You can say that for five straight years. You can say the Giants and Washington are both going to be shitty. Jets, Miami, Cleveland.

1:16:54Tom Pelissero:Did you mention John Harbaugh on your pressure list?

1:16:57Bill Simmons:That's year one. I think you got a grace period for year one.

1:17:00Tom Pelissero:John Arbaugh went to the AFC Championship game in his first year in Baltimore. He's come in with more fanfare, one of the highest paid coaches. There's instant expectations. Now, I mean, people are going to feel different ways about Jackson Dart and Cam Scadaboo.

1:17:14Bill Simmons:Our guy Schrager picked them to win 11 to 12 games. Did you see that? I got to, I don't know. I don't know if he was drinking when he did that. It's like a Puka Nakua moment for Schrager.

1:17:24Tom Pelissero:Until Schrager takes off the jacket and has a Scadaboo jersey underneath and makes a Super Bowl pick. I'm not going to put too much stuff in it. I have my, some of the board that I have a whiteboard with a bunch of different stuff. But one of them is I have the ranking of the hot seat going into the year, which is like ranked on who's most likely to get fired one through 32. So I'm like looking at the teams up at the top of like, who's going to, his balls at the top. I would say this, like Tampa, I mean, the fact that we were talking about it for a week after the season last year, and there wasn't a clear answer and he cleaned out most of his two-thirds of his coaching staff like yeah there's pressure on top of this pressure on a lot of different coaches um going into you know this year again they just they haven't had stability at offensive coordinator you know that's that's just happened over and over i mean i think the one team and i might be listen i might be dead wrong on this but like i could see washington being good i think washington what was their over under for wins it's like oh my god for something

1:18:20Bill Simmons:Yeah, it's around seven.

1:18:22Tom Pelissero:I think everybody's looking at that team. And listen, Jaden Daniels, I know he was in your pressure rankings. He probably wouldn't have been there up until the whole lawsuit. It's about seven. People think seven.

1:18:33Bill Simmons:Seven wins. Seven wins. It's between six and a half and seven and a half.

1:18:36Tom Pelissero:And listen, they could be bad again. But Washington fell into, frankly, a familiar trap coming off of the 2024 season. We're like, I mean, Jaden Daniels was lights out that season. They go all the way to the NFC Championship game. Everybody's gassing them up. but what did they do they doubled down on well let's bring in a bunch of veterans and trying to put it over the top so that's where you sign von miller toward the end of his career you bring back you know the zach urts is of the world um you know i'm forgetting some others but they had a bunch of like they had one of the the oldest rosters they had like 15 guys who were age 30 and older and like i remember going through there in camp last year for a practice and just being like they feel slow.

1:19:17Tom Pelissero:Debo was another one that they brought in. Like this team just doesn't have a lot of juice. And at the time I chalked it up to Terry McLaurin was holding in and some other guys weren't out there, but like, you just got that sense. And I've seen it many times in the past where like that doesn't work. So what they did this year and they go out and they draft a couple of, you know, wide receivers who they think they're going to be able to help them in the near term here. They bring in digs like digs is an older player, but nobody in the league practices harder than digs he showed last year in what 51 of the snaps or whatever he still has a thousand yard receiver and he's a guy who you can play a lot in slot you know he can kind of offset

1:19:52Bill Simmons:some of the things that people try to do to you healthy mclaurin mclaurin came in he's battling injuries because he held out or held in whatever he's another you know older player like they do

1:20:01Tom Pelissero:still have some of those older players on the team and they lost larry tonsil i mean that's the biggest deal people aren't you everyone's like trade for left tackle it's like from who what left tackle is available in august like that that's my biggest concern with them but like jayden was was he didn't have the guys last year like all the injuries around him and the holdout with mccloren like they never had austin eckler another later stage player who got hurt they never had their actual guys out there now you give them digs to go along with mccloren to go along with all these young receivers like if you look at their depth chart like their entire three deep at all three receiver spots is names you know they got like d 'ami brown back there and like a bunch of players you're like i can see all these guys competing they've gotten younger they've gotten faster they invested into the defense they moved on from a lot of those older players um and they moved on you know in terms of their offensive coordinator again this is another theme of the season like david blau another one 30 years old i feel like it was yesterday we were watching him fill in starting for the lions on thanksgiving with a uh the the wristband where the flap was broken so the entire game his uh play sheet was flapping like this was like four years ago and now he's an offensive coordinator like we'll see exactly what that ends up looking like like Detroit wanted him to come back there and be the offensive coordinator like they were really interested um in David Blau if they can find some rhythm because I don't know that Jaden Daniels was real fired up about the idea of playing a different style of offense if Jaden's healthy the pieces around him are healthy um I think that they've got a real opportunity here in a division that I just don't know that there's a single dominant team going into the season.

1:21:37Tom Pelissero:The Eagles are always there. The Cowboys, everyone's expecting a lot from. The Giants, we'll see. I could see them making noise if Jaden is Jaden again in a year where if he plays like he did as a rookie, there's your$60 million to$70 million quarterback right there.

1:21:53Bill Simmons:They went 5-12 last year. They lost tons already. They play the AFC South and the NFC West. so that's basically two easy games and potentially five or six really hard ones um they start out at eagles at dallas home seahawks and if they can somehow get through that one and two or two and one i mean it would be they'll be heavy underdogs yeah that would help one of those but if they start out oh and three then uh not great all right tom um you're gonna be on the ringer nfl show I don't know when it starts, but it started pretty soon. And you're going to be on there. You're going to be on here on Thursdays.

1:22:32Bill Simmons:We're going to do a little info segment because I'm going to change around my Thursday show a little bit, but we're going to have a fun thing for that. And then some writing stuff is coming too. But you're back. You're part of the universe. Great to have you. I'm glad we were able to shoot all this stuff. Say hi to everybody in Minnesota. Apologize to them that I didn't have them in the top two tortured rankings. I got to rethink that. You know what? I'm not going to rank anyone. There's like a four and nobody can be ranked against each other. I apologize.

1:23:00Tom Pelissero:Everybody thinks they're aggrieved. Eagles fans think they're aggrieved. Everybody has a grudge.

1:23:04Bill Simmons:All right. Good to see you. Thank you, my friend.

1:23:07Tom Pelissero:Thanks, Bill.

1:23:08Bill Simmons:This episode is brought to you by ChatGBT. Imagine you're running a professional sports team. Nice. Imagine the player contract report is due today. Not so nice. You've got performance notes from the coaching staff. You've got a salary spreadsheet from your analyst. Three rounds of back and forth emails with the agent. and all of it is scattered absolutely everywhere. Well, that's where ChatGBT work comes in. It's a new way to use ChatGBT for bigger multi-step projects. Give ChatGBT work access to your apps and files and can create real work documents. For instance, spreadsheets, slides, structured reports.

1:23:45Bill Simmons:You can bring all those to your next meeting and when you don't need answers, you need help just getting the work across the finish line. ChatGBT work can move your projects forward while you stay in control. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started. Just go to ChatGPT.com by selecting work mode available on Plus and Pro plans.

1:24:24Bill Simmons:the season's biggest storylines. Catch additional coverage with NFL Today, NFL Today Plus, CBS Sports HQ, Fantasy Football Today, and more. So sign up and sign into Paramount Plus today. And we'll see you Sunday for another thrilling season of the NFL and CBS streaming live on Paramount Plus.

1:24:41Tom Pelissero:You want to impress them on a first date, but also play it cool. So what do you do? I'm Rufy Thorpe, and I wrote and read a real love story about a hinged couple that navigated exactly that. Listen to the free audiobook now.

1:24:56Bill Simmons:Well, this is a first for BS Podcast History. Sammy Koppelman is here. His father is Brian Koppelman. This is the first ever father-son podcast thing on my pod. And honestly, people are going to compare it to LeBron and Bronny James. We can't. It's two separate worlds. I'm not going to do that. We need to be going for Rick Brunson, Jalen Brunson. That sounds great. If I fail, we're looking at Bronny and LeBron. If this is a success, I'm the Jalen. He's the Rick. All right. So you're into the whole financial world. You're the publisher of Hunterbrook. And you've been following all of these billionaire shenanigans.

1:25:36Bill Simmons:And we have a ton of them right now. Monday, a quiet sports day, allegedly, in mid-August. And then Lakers and Clippers both blew up in all these different ways. And I tweeted that I thought the Lakers situation was a thousand times more interesting than the Clippers situation because it has all of these other ramifications outside of basketball. I was probably doing a little hyperbole with a thousand times, but I need you to explain this Mark Walter situation to my audience because it's starting to seem like he's an actual crook. It's starting to seem like he might actually go to jail. He's already shed himself of the Lakers.

1:26:14Bill Simmons:He's selling his Chelsea stake reportedly right now, which was like 12 and a half percent. And my guess is the Dodgers are going to be next. So what is this? Is this like, are we moving toward like a Bernie Madoff, Ivan Boski type of situation? What is this? I wouldn't quite say we're at Madoff. And I do have to say, I've worked with Pablo, your buddy, on a couple of those stories having to do with the Clippers. And what's most interesting about that story and this story is it's kind of the same story. It's about billionaires who believe that certain rules don't apply to them and hate to have to operate within a system where they're suddenly constricted.

1:26:56And so when you look at Walter, what basically happened here is, as you know, in 2012, he buys the Dodgers. And at the time, people are kind of confused. They're like, how's this guy who runs Guggenheim, which is a successful operation, but he's not known as some giant titan of industry. How is he buying the Dodgers for this amount of money?

1:27:18Bill Simmons:And what was it like 2.25 billion, something like that. And then the other bidders were upset. They didn't understand. They had questions about where he got the money and all that stuff. Yeah, I was looking at this last night. It seems like Mark Cuban was involved. it seems like the next bid was almost a billion dollars shy of Walter's bid. So people were confused. They were like, where is he getting this money? And at the time, people started looking into the question, was he using insurance money, money people had been putting away for their insurance because he owns a couple of insurance companies.

1:27:48And so the question was, was he using that money to buy the team, which echoes the current scandal and what he's being investigated for by the DOJ, which just to explain it in basic terms, The way this works is if you have a life insurance policy, you're putting money away so that one day when you die, your loved ones have something or you get paid an annuity when you're old.

1:28:10Bill Simmons:So our dads get an insurance policy. Basically, when they die, we get money and they took care of us a little bit. Exactly. Like if my dad hadn't started lifting like a crazy person and he died from the open city, he would suffer. If your dad wasn't continuing to sell shows, if he had to actually file stuff away. Yeah, exactly. And so people do that and they take out these life insurance policies. And in the meantime, being an insurer is pretty good because you get to invest that money in what you want to invest it in. And the way it works is usually they're going to go invest that money in safe bonds or in a diversified index of stocks so that your money is safe overall.

1:28:49And they're collecting a VIG and that's no secret. That's why it's a business. but just like when you're sports betting and the betting platforms collecting a big, that's sort of just like the way it works. What Walter figured out and what a bunch of people have started doing is, well, what if you just start investing that in like better assets, assets that are riskier, but you might be able to juice the returns. And one big asset class Walter's obsessed with is sports. And it's not just the Dodgers and then the Lakers. He has invested in Formula One. We found in one of our investigations that he was invested in American Rodeo, a bullfighting team.

1:29:29He clearly thinks that sports is this incredible asset class. And it's actually, in theory, okay to use insurance money to invest in assets like sports teams if you disclose to people what you're doing. The problem here with Mark Walter is that you're supposed to specifically disclose something called a related party transaction, which sounds boring, but basically what this means is you can't pay yourself. Like if he took his insurance money and he used it to buy himself a restaurant he wanted to run that was going to go out of business otherwise, that wouldn't be allowed. And so you have to disclose, all right, yes, I invested in a sports team, which I also own, But I think it's a good investment for X, Y, and Z reasons.

1:30:16And what Walter did, according to all of these reports, the reason that FBI agents boarded his private jet and stole his phone and stole his computer, which doesn't happen every day for billionaires like this, that's a serious, serious thing, is he wasn't disclosing that he was investing in related parties. And one of the insurers he owns had said 3 % of its investments were going to related parties. They then corrected their filings to say it was 40. And so that raises the question, what's he been doing with these billions and billions of dollars Americans have been putting away for their insurance policies?

1:30:50And it seems like he's been using that money to buy sports teams left and right.

1:30:55Bill Simmons:So people like our parents and grandparents are buying insurance and assuming that it's going to be invested in the safest possible stuff, right? Correct. And he's not the only one who did this because it's like a trillion dollar industry now. But he was like, well, what if I take that money? I'm going to steer it toward some higher risk stuff. And they trust me because I'm successful. But then the problem is he was investing it in his own shit and reporting it as, oh, it's only, what did he say? It was like 3 billion. Yeah. It was, oh, it's only 3 billion of that. But it turned out, I've heard reports 16, 20, you're saying 40.

1:31:35Bill Simmons:like this is the question of the big question is, did he just fail to disclose this or is this fraud? And the other big question is, where is all of the money? We know some of it went to these sports teams, but the kind of person who wouldn't disclose that it raises questions about his firm Guggenheim. I just give you some color on Mark Walter because it's kind of fun. Like, you know, it's called Guggenheim. So you probably think it's like the Guggenheim family, like the Guggenheim Museum. Yeah. For men in black. Okay. So here's like how Mark Walter made this fund called Guggenheim. There was a guy named Meyer Guggenheim.

1:32:13He died in 1905. His son was a guy named Solomon Guggenheim. Then that person had a daughter named Barbara Guggenheim. Their son was a guy named Peter Lawson Johnston Sr., whose son was Peter Lawson Johnston II. Walter had that guy as a co-founder of his company so he could legally use the name Guggenheim.

1:32:35Bill Simmons:Wow. And then they got rid of that guy. But it has this air of legitimacy. It has this patina of institutionalism. And that's what Walter's been doing his whole life, is he's a genius at accruing assets, figuring out how to invest in them, levering them, and then getting what he wants from the world. And you kind of have to give him credit. It's pretty amazing. I mean, this guy owns some of the premier assets in the entire world. And the other key point of all this, the other way he does it, is that insurance money is super valuable because historically, it was invested in safe stuff, which means from a regulation standpoint, unlike some other stuff that was regulated after 2008, you're allowed to lever it.

1:33:21So like you put away, your dad puts away some money in a life insurance policy, and that's a dollar. and Walter can go invest like$50,$20,$15 for every dollar that was put away. Yeah. And so there ends up being this leverage in the system that compounds. And so you have billions in insurance money. You can buy tens of billions of dollars worth of assets. And that's how this kind of random guy who everyone was surprised bought the Dodgers in 2012 ends up owning a piece of Chelsea and the Dodgers and the Lakers and all these other premier signature assets of America.

1:33:54Bill Simmons:Well, I went back. I look back at my notes from last summer because I almost did a thing after after he bought the Lakers because I couldn't figure out where he got all the money because it was a lot of money. What tips you off to it being weird? I mean, I followed that you've. I went back and looked at all my notes and I sketched out this whole thing and I chickened out and I didn't do it because he went to what's it called? Mubidala. He got like a huge investment from them. Yeah. Abu Dhabi. And I, people started, there was some whispers about like, basically the Saudi money has bought the Lakers here and they're trying to pretend that that's not what happened, but it actually is what happened.

1:34:34Bill Simmons:And then you go back and you read, he got all this money, but then he also invested in them. And it just seemed like this circle of money going around. It's like, you give me the money and then I'll give it back. And we've invested because the NBA has this rule. you can only invest, you can only take 20 % from private equity and that's it. That's the cap. So if you buy, if I buy a team for 10 million, 10 billion, I can only get 2 billion in private equity. So it seemed like he had found some end around and I went and I did it and I was going to do a whole thing about it. And I just, I was too nervous about it.

1:35:07Bill Simmons:It's not my expertise. And ironically, I was, I was texting with Pablo about it. You and Cousins Al could have been like Woodward and Bernstein of the NBA. No, but you know who I texted? Our friend Pablo. Because Pablo's like, you got to come on the pod. And I was like, I want to do Mark Walter. And we texted about it and we had never done it. But it never added up to me. I never understood how the money circled back to the people he was getting the investment from. And the league just is so desperate to make as much money as possible on every franchise. They kind of like, we don't want to know, which has been part of the problem with the Clippers situation too.

1:35:43Bill Simmons:But the league's always like, don't tell us, like we don't, nothing to see here. This was crazy. They'd much rather stay in the dark. Pablo and I are working on a story having to do with Mark Walter. I'm not going to get into the specifics, but I'll just say high level. It's pretty interesting that after he bought the Dodgers in 2012, a couple of years later, Magic Johnson ended up being the owner of a life insurance company that he bought from Guggenheim, Walter's firm. Huh. I have no evidence that anything went wrong there yet, but it's the exact same structure we're talking about here. And, you know, insurance companies are mostly owned by these like great institutions.

1:36:22And in this case, they're owned by Mark Walter. And then there's one random insurance company owned by Magic Johnson, of all people. It's strange. I think the big problem here, you mentioned the private equity sort of max, is that teams have just become too expensive. Like it used to be that the rich guy in your town could buy your sports team. And that worked because they were a fan of the team and they'd go to every game and they'd want their kids to run the team. But now these teams are worth like$10 billion. And so there's not that many people who actually can come up with that kind of money.

1:36:54And Pablo and I and Hunterbrook, we investigated Matt Ishbia as our first big story.

1:37:00Bill Simmons:I want to talk about him in a second. Yeah. And that's another example of, all right, someone had to pay billions and billions of dollars. And the NBA had to put that team up for sale in a pretty distressed situation. And it ends up being Ishbia, who on paper has billions of dollars. And on paper, seems like exactly the person you'd want owning a sports team. He was a walk-on at Michigan State. He really cares about basketball. He literally has Isaiah Thomas on the board of his company. Like, this is a true basketball guy. But the problem is the people buying these teams now, They can't really afford the teams on their own.

1:37:35And so that ends up leaving the NBA in pretty tricky situations.

1:37:41Bill Simmons:Yeah. When like one third of the league was basically for sale at the end of the 2000s before they had the lockout, the guy who bought Memphis, Michael Pera, bought it with like, he had this company that was doing well. But then as he was buying it, the company was not doing well. Robert Pera. Robert Pera. I'm sorry. I confused it with Michael Cera. Robert Pera. very different guys by the way totally different guys i don't think i don't think Robert Pera would have been very good in Nick and Nora's infinite playlist no or this is the end um but people were worried at the time oh my god he's not gonna be able to cover the thing but at that time it was 220 million whatever he paid for the grizzlies now we're talking about it should be paid over four billion dollars for the suns and if it doesn't work out for them now you have Like if he, if, and he just disclosed all they, they, what did he report?

1:38:33Bill Simmons:Like 450 million in losses for the second quarter of his company. Yeah. You have to just happen. You have to give Ishbi a credit as a sports team owner. This guy, in my view, basically bankrupted his company, which was the biggest mortgage lender in the country in order to pay in order to buy the sons. Right. And to continue running the sons. I mean, this guy was paying Bradley Beal$50 million a year. Right. When he was owning a mortgage company, as rates were going up, then they stopped making money. And what happened with Ishbia is truly, he was taking$600 million a year out of the company in this dividend the company couldn't afford.

1:39:10And then to buy the team, he took out what's called a margin loan against his shares in the team, against his shares in UWM. And so what that meant was he basically gave the bank billions of dollars worth of his UWM stake. And so when the shares fell in value, the bank's able to tighten the screws and say, all right, you got to sell shares. You got to put up more money. And he was willing to take essentially every dollar he could out of that company in order to keep running the Suns. And that's kind of what happens. Like he came in to run the Suns. He said he was going to sell super cheap concessions.

1:39:44He said he was going to make it more affordable to watch the games on TV. be he was trying to be i think like a consummate really good owner um probably trusted isaiah thomas too much which led to all kinds of problems in my own childhood as a knicks fan i could have told him not to do that the eddie curry trade is reason enough not to put isaiah thomas on the board of your public company but ultimately what happened is um two weeks ago he had to get rescue financing for his company they had no more money left they had to dilute all their shareholders and the stock went from whatever it was down to a dollar or something.

1:40:16Bill Simmons:Well, you, you understand this stuff better than I do, but from what, how I read it and understood it, he had made a big bet with a big chunk of his company that interest rates were going to go down by a certain time. Right. And that, and that, so he leveraged it in a way like, it'll be fine when the interest rates go down. Only they never did. And it was funny to like reading about it. It was very similar to the Kevin Durant trade where he's like, I'm Kevin Durant. We got to get him. We're putting all this stuff in and this is going to be. And it was like this massive swing. He's like, I'm a big swing taker and it didn't work out.

1:40:50Bill Simmons:And it didn't seem like this swing worked out either. No. And it's funny. You can actually look at how his company was doing and sort of when he was making these big bets in his company and when he was making big bets on the team. And you'll notice that the sons went from a tax paying team to a not tax paying team after then traded Durant away. That was the same period of time when he really needed money at the company. And they bought out Bradley Beal and stretched it out so it could get him under the luxury tax threshold. And now they're not a big spender like they were. Exactly. My big question reporting on Ishbia over the last bunch of months was, which is he going to pick, his company or the team?

1:41:24Because there were all kinds of ways he could have shored up the company's balance sheet. He could have just stopped paying the$600 million a year dividend, and it would have probably been fine. But he wanted to sign some players and he wanted to fund this team.

1:41:37Bill Simmons:and he's competitive and all these guys are competitive and they're competing against all the other rich guys totally i guess i'm curious do you think the nba seeing this now where there's some owners who it seems like couldn't really afford teams with their own money like walter and like ishbia and then the owners who are really rich like bomber become almost impossible to punish or to contain right because the nba is not going to punish bomber the richest owner in american in sports. So do you think at this point, they actually end up just saying, all right, whatever, private equity money is fine.

1:42:09Middle Eastern money is fine. We don't really care who.

1:42:13Bill Simmons:I think that, I think they're so desperate and focused on driving the value of these franchises, like Vegas. One of the reasons I got a lot of Intel about, um, why Iger and Kushner bought the Lakers, the Vegas thing unquestionably is over 9 billion now, like for the, for the fees. right and agar and kushner were trying to get it they didn't have the highest bid they didn't really feel like a vegas team that where you probably need to build a new arena and who the hell knows in vegas is worth that much and at some point kushner got the idea he'd been reading about the walter stuff and i thought adam silver kind of nudged him there but i don't think that's what happened i think i think he went to walter directly and was like yo so anyway the point is these things are going so high.

1:42:57Bill Simmons:I think that's what the league wants. And when you have somebody like Ishbia who buys the sons and basically buys the team himself, he still has outs with the team. Like he could still sell 35 % of the sons to somebody and be like, and if in four years, if I sell you get, you get a first dibs on buying the whole team, which is what Mark Walter with bus family. There's this guy, I think Lucas Walton bought a piece of the bulls. and now if the bulls sell over the next few years, he's the first one that can buy in. So Ishbia still has ways to make money. And I think that's the way these rich guys look at these teams where it's like, once I have the asset, I can skin it any different way I want, but I just got to go all in and get it and then I'll figure it out.

1:43:40Bill Simmons:But the problem is, as you said, these things are too expensive now. Totally. And it's actually funny. One thing Ishbia did along these lines is he wanted to buy out his other co-owners. He actually didn't want to have a bunch of minority owners. And so he bought out a couple of his co-owners with shares in his company. Wow. Right before it taxed. And so they ended up owning it. And then there were other co-owners of the team who then ended up suing Ishbia because he was trying to basically aggressively force them out. And I agree that given that the assets just keep going up in value, it's actually a lot of room to navigate for the people who own them.

1:44:17And so, yeah, I mean, we saw Dan Gilbert, it seems like, is going to sell a piece of the calves. It seems like Ishbia could sell a piece of the Suns. And then you do get a couple billion of liquidity. But it's also interesting to think what happens if the direction of these team values ever flips. I mean, I have no reason to think that they will, as you said in one of your recent episodes. It's never been a mistake to buy a sports team. They're all valued higher than they've ever been. But there's been moments when the teams have gone down in value and people have had to sell. And that's going to end really badly for the people who had to take on leverage, who had to use insurance money, who had to buy these teams when they couldn't really afford them.

1:44:56And I think what's really interesting about Kushner buying this team is he's doing it through this entity Thrive Eternal. Right. His other funds. The idea is, okay, he's this big investor in AI, OpenAI and SpaceX. And he's like, on the one hand, everything's going to be computer. You know, it's all going to be AI. But then in that world, what are people going to do? What's going to matter? And sports is one of the only things that people think is going to persist through an AI future. And so you can imagine that all these AI guys with the crazy wealth being created from the SpaceX IPO, but then also it's going to be OpenAI and Anthropic.

1:45:35There's going to be a bunch of new money that's looking to buy the kinds of assets that never go away. And so my guess is that this particular bubble, if it's a bubble, or this particular asset class does keep going up. At which point, you know, maybe every team ends up being owned by Abu Dhabi.

1:45:51Bill Simmons:Well, the fear is you go back and you look at the early 2000s, the last time this happened, when we had the internet boom, what happened? We had a crash after the boom and then it kind of readjusted and went. We haven't had the crash with any of this stuff yet. So that's one thing. And then you look at when we talk about the amount of money, these guys can be like, like Josh Kirshner's rich. He's still not writing a$12 billion check for the Lakers. And what happened yesterday with the bus family, basically reenacting season four of succession and all of the siblings that Jeannie had basically shanked over the years and kept control and kept her governor seat for five years.

1:46:30Bill Simmons:And they finally got their revenge on her, but they got, they wanted to get dragged in the deal, which is what happened with the Celtics too. It's like, Oh, that's the price. I'd like to sell mine as well. The Celtics paid over seven or the Chism and those guys paid over 7 billion because these guys got dragged in the Laker people got dragged. the buses want to get dragged in. So now Kushner's got to write, basically, he's got to find 12 billion somehow, even if he's putting in two and a half, three, whatever, Agur's putting in 500. They still have to scramble now to find 8 billion more in people to invest.

1:47:02Bill Simmons:So where do you go? Probably the Middle East, right? You know, it's funny though, this comes at the same moment when these live tour golfers are not being paid. Yeah, they're pulling back. But the Saudis are canceling live. It's a weird moment for all of this with the Iran war and huge tourism decline in the Middle East and the Middle East tightening its coffers. It's a funny moment to have to come up with. And not wanting a sports wash anymore. Like a couple of years ago, they were throwing money at all the American sports and the Premier League wherever because they were trying to change the narrative.

1:47:37Sports washing is a luxury. That's something you do when you've got a ton of money and you want to have the World Cup in Qatar and you want to have live golf and you want to pay Phil Mickelson enough money that he's going to leave the PGA Tour. But suddenly, if money gets tight in the Middle East, you're not exactly dying to buy assets that you could buy again in future years when you have more liquidity. But there is a lot of money sloshing around the system. And I think what Walter shows is that there's pockets of money people don't even realize are entering these sports leagues. Because surely this is not the only example of insurance money being used to fund sports teams.

1:48:16A lot of owners across a lot of leagues are tied to all these industries, private credit and private equity and insurance. And they're very, very sophisticated at figuring out how to take out loans against their assets. So even if in some of these cases, it's not insurance money directly being invested, it's some person taking out money against their insurance company. And so ultimately, there's a lot of risk in the system. And I think what Mark Walter will show is the first couple cracks. And once those first couple cracks are revealed, I think there's going to be a bunch others across all these leagues.

1:48:53Bill Simmons:Well, and you can see with the NBA, like the Blazers, they went for four, right? And that was the highest bid. But then a couple years before that, the Timberwolves were one and a half. Utah was like 1.6. You know, so we've we've seen just the smaller market teams are all probably worth five. The Celtics, they ended up paying over seven when you when you include the people that got dragged in. They're probably worth allegedly nine now. They probably all feel like they made money because this Lakers sets this new figure. And yet, were you a little insulted by the delta between the Lakers price and the Celtics price?

1:49:29It hurt.

1:49:33Bill Simmons:It was a wake up call for us. No, but I think the Lakers and the Knicks are the two premier teams you'd want to buy in the NBA. I think even the Celtic fans would admit that. The most mind-bending, nauseating part of all of this is that suddenly Jim Dolan looks like a genius, exactly who you'd want to have on your sports team. Unbelievable. I spent my entire life resenting Jim Dolan, thinking through ways I could convince people to go buy the Knicks from him. wanted to stake out Gracie Manchin and get Mike Bloomberg to do it. When I was a kid, I wanted to just knock on the door and be like, please save New York.

1:50:10Everyone will love you if you buy the team. And suddenly, like everyone's going to the sphere, it stalks through the roof. The Knicks won the championship. He really let guys, you know, run the team independently. And he's not one of these owners who's using borrowed money. It's a family asset, which historically, it's always been a bit of an eye roll. Like, yeah, I mean, this guy inherited the Knicks. What a joke. But actually, there's some continuity that makes that stronger, a stronger foundation than these teams that are being bought with new money or fake money or borrowed money or insurance money or whatever else.

1:50:44As a Knicks fan, I feel pretty good today. This might be the top for the Knicks. I might be jinxing the whole thing. But I feel pretty good with Jim Dolan as the owner of the Knicks.

1:50:53Bill Simmons:I've known you since you were a little kid. And you were just tortured Knicks fan who was just in basketball hell. And now you're married. You have a Knicks championship, you know, that you can hang your hat on. And your dad's one of the premier power lifters in America over age 60. So you have a lot going on right now. Totally. It's a big, it's a big moment. This is it. This is the peak. Dolan is a great point. He's probably in the best situation. Like his whole empire added all together is worth at least$15 billion. He would never sell because he loves it. He loves the juice. Maybe this is what we do.

1:51:27Maybe you agree to juice the Spotify algorithm so that his band gets some listens. And if his band gets some listens, maybe he'll feel fulfilled enough that he'll sell the team to someone else. I'll talk to them about that. Dolan's a big winner from this whole thing. And the Knicks are huge winners from this whole thing. Buzz family.

1:51:47Bill Simmons:Buzz family losers. The Buzz family are going to be suing each other for the next five years. I was going to say, I'm not sure that they actually sell. I think that was a pretty weird coup attempt yesterday, but we all know which bus actually runs the show. I don't think the siblings can get out. I know, but explain this to me. It's a controlling trust and she quote unquote runs it, but they can all vote on what to do. And if they basically have a two thirds majority, they have to do what the majority is. Right. And I guess her vote, the way I understand it is if it was a tie, she would have the deciding vote, but it's not a deciding vote.

1:52:22Bill Simmons:It sounds like it was five to one and they all want to sell because a couple of the kids want to use the money to buy an NBA Europe team. So the problem for Walter is if this gets tied up in court and it keeps going, it could delay the sale. And it sounds like he needs money like ASAP. He needs the cash stat. Like right now. What's your guess? What happens to Balmer? What happens to Walter? What happens to Ishbia? Well, I was going to ask you. I think Ishbia will be fine because he'll sell a chunk of the team if he has to. will the words Mark Walter today pled guilty dot, dot, dot. Will that sentence be said in the next two years?

1:53:02Bill Simmons:Will the words Mark Walter pled guilty? I think it's really possible. I also think the Trump administration has not put away very many billionaires. And so I'm sure they work something out. But I don't think there's a single safe asset in the entire Mark Walter cinematic universe. like I think it's potentially all for sale and I do think that the Dodgers being sold a piece of the Suns being sold I think all of this is on the table well but that's why this is such a bigger story than just the Lakers like if he has to sell the Dodgers who spent so much money over the last seven years that they're going to single-handedly create the baseball lockout next year they also won two titles and I think one of the many differences between the Quipper situation and the Mark Walter situation, he's had all this extra money to buy the last two World Series titles.

1:53:55Bill Simmons:The Dodgers are back-to-back champions, partly because of all the fucking money this guy spent. The Clippers have had no success at all. They won basically two playoff series in seven years with Kawhi Leonard. They did all this stuff, whatever they did or didn't do, who knows, but none of it paid off. And they built the Oklahoma City Thunder. It was a disaster in every way. It was the opposite for the Dodgers. Yeah, totally. Say what you will about Walter. He never traded a pick that became SGA. Right. He was a great owner of the Dodgers. And he's been a decent owner of the Lakers. He pulled off one of the great trades of all time under his ownership.

1:54:33I don't think he does. He get credit for that. It was in the bridge. It was right. Yeah, it was right in there. It predated him. He was a good owner. And look, it's pretty easy to be a good owner if you're spending other people's money.

1:54:45Bill Simmons:Right. Saying how you feel out loud is terrifying. But that's what Hinge's new free audiobook, No Ordinary Love, is all about.

1:54:57Tom Pelissero:It's a collection of real love stories about five couples that met on Hinge. The stories are written and read by Tembi Dinton Hurst, Nicola Dinan, Curtis Garner, Raven Smith, and Rufy Thorpe. I, Hunter Harris, wrote and read the foreword. The audiobook's out now. Give it a listen.

1:55:17Bill Simmons:The perfect lunch combo. That first bite of your favorite sub, followed by ice cold Pepsi. Add a couple of friends, and now that's next level. Suddenly, the laughs get louder, the stories keep flowing, and the food tastes better. Because Pepsi brings out more flavor, more fun, and more of the moment. Food deserves Pepsi. Grab a Pepsi Zero Sugar today. Okay, so Clippers. This is a harder one because this is now being investigated for a year. Pablo started everything. It's going and going and going. And it doesn't seem like there's a smoking gun. And what we learned yesterday, ESPN had this report.

1:55:57Bill Simmons:They basically said, we didn't find any real hardcore evidence. The NBA hasn't found any hardcore evidence or the investigator. And now they have to figure out this weird, how are we going to penalize you? And the Clippers are like, we didn't do anything. And it feels like the Clippers and the NBA are going to go to war. Al Davis versus the NFL style. Feels like the outcome here. I think maybe, but if I were Balmer, I don't think I'd actually want to be in arbitration. I don't think there's going to be a friendlier judge for this particular matter than Adam Silver. And that story yesterday, I think was a huge mistake.

1:56:30Clearly the sources who leaked that were the Clippers. I mean, there was a statement the Clippers released when the story came out on like a beautiful template background where they had a PR ready to go. And the NBA, I don't know if you've ever reached out to the NBA for comment. And they're like usually, you know, pretty tough to get to comment. And they almost never say anything publicly. And after the story came out, the NBA released a statement saying the story had numerous inaccuracies. I think what that was was a leak from Bombers Camp. Like when Samuel Alito leaked the Dobbs decision repealing Roe v.

1:57:02Wade, where he was like, I want it on the record right now. You guys don't have any findings that could put me away. And to me, it's actually not a close call. it's pretty obvious that kawaii had sponsorship deals with companies like dactronics the jumbotron maker and he never did anything for them you can't see it when we worked on that story we called dactronics we're like can you show me one clip of kawaii even just saying like i love dactronics hell of a jumbo board that halo board for the clippers i didn't know that i didn't know

1:57:32Bill Simmons:what dactronics was and i go to clipper games i didn't even know that was the name of the company and you certainly hadn't heard kawaii advertising it because by the way there's not a lot of consumers were like looking to buy jumbotrons and are going to be persuaded by Kawhi. Like on its face, it's ridiculous that nothing happened here. But I think, and this goes to the overall point of all of this, the NBA doesn't have much latitude to punish Steve Ballmer because these owners don't work for Adam Silver. Adam Silver works for these owners and there's fewer and fewer owners who can actually pay for these teams these days.

1:58:04And the assets are getting more and more expensive. And I think having a blue chip guy like Steve Ballmer who built one of the great American businesses is the kind of thing the NBA is not going to get rid of. So my guess on the Clippers is that Ballmer walks away with some kind of punishment and they just make Uncle Dennis the fall guy. I think they're going to say Kawhi maybe never even got this money. That's what I think they're going to try to argue. That Dennis was negotiating side deals. And yes, that might have been cap circumvention, but how much of that money was getting back to Kawhi?

1:58:37I think that's where the NBA could land, where they can slap the Clippers on the wrist. They can punish Kawhi, but they can blame some guy who like, you know, in every mob movie ever, fall on the sword.

1:58:51Bill Simmons:So here's what hasn't happened with the Clippers. If you look at the, even the recent Mark Walther stuff, everything started because there was a whistleblower at Guggenheim who was like, Hey, this uh and the wall street journal wrote about this yesterday but basically moved dollar um there was a whistleblower with the funds with that and once that happened in guggenheim even they they had a spokesman in that wall street journal piece saying yes the firm received a whistleblower report in spring 2025 with the clippers there's been no whistleblower on the clipper side at least not yet there's been all the people pablo has found who were you know had surface ties but it wasn't like somebody direct with direct knowledge of all this kawaii stuff blew the whistle to the nba or any of it and i think that's the clippers are adamant they didn't do anything and it's gonna they've really dug in they they are adamant nothing happened and yeah i mean i don't know what to believe anywhere.

1:59:51In this case, you have the whistleblowers from those companies who have basically come forward and been like, yeah, I worked at Aspiration and I had to deal with the billings here. And I was like, why are we paying Kawhi Leonard? And everyone told me it was cap circumvention. So you do have people on the other side, but I've been impressed. Bombers close ranks. He's gotten those Clippers people right in line. It's impressive. But I do think he might have flown a little too close to the sun by leaking that story, if that's what happened. Because Adam Silver definitely didn't sound happy that that leaked, if you look at the NBA statement.

2:00:26And I think that it's a live ball. And ultimately, this isn't some court of law with some specific standards that need to be followed. The guy who decides the sentence is Adam Silver. And if I were Balmer, I'd be pretty careful about upsetting him.

2:00:41Bill Simmons:Well, I have the three actual things that still make me go, huh? With the Kawhi thing. This is now, we are now a year into this. He never actually did the work for Aspiration, but got paid. I've never, I've just never heard an adequate explanation for that. I don't understand why. That's true of the Dactronics one too. Yeah, why are you paying somebody to not do anything? Like not even like one Instagram tweet, nothing. That's weird. Uncle Dennis, by multiple accounts, just asking everybody for under the table shit in the summer of 2019. and multiple teams going on the record saying, oh yeah, that guy was fucking asking for ownership stakes.

2:01:19Bill Simmons:That was weird. And then the third one was the Clippers trading Kawhi to Toronto. And I, if you're like, can put this way, conspiracy bill definitely like put a hat on and studied that one. Cause it was like, all right, Toronto is the one team with a real, real, real reason to be aggrieved. Right. They just won the title. They could have potentially brought, he didn't want to play for the Lakers as it comes out. They could have brought this guy back. They were really good in 2020. They probably would have represented the East and played the Lakers in the finals and all that got pulled away. And they have the biggest reason to be pissed.

2:01:56Bill Simmons:And instead they trade them there. And now it's like, all right, I guess we have Kawhi now. It's fine. Those are the three things that caught my eye. I've definitely never seen a sponsorship deal in history. And in this case, there's at least two where you pay someone to be your sponsor and they don't have to do anything in return. I would love one of those deals, by the way. If anyone wants to make... I ask for it every year from Spotify. Yeah. Just can people give our podcast money and I don't have to do anything for it? Yeah, I mean, it's deeply, deeply suspicious. But I think the good news is the Walter case is actually going to have real evidence.

2:02:34They've got the phones, they've got the computers. To me, it's completely unclear whether the Balmer situation has had any sort of like subpoena power equivalent in the investigation. Like to the extent they might not have found a smoking gun inside the Clippers. My guess is that when Wachtell, the law firm investigating this, asked for information from the Clippers. The Clippers were like, no. And the information we've gotten as part of our reporting, and we included this in one of the recent stories with Pablo, is emails with Daktronics and the Clippers, where Daktronics is like, hey, guys, we spoke to Uncle Dennis.

2:03:08And I love that they referred him as Uncle Dennis. Like everybody, even the company with the fake-seeming partnership refers to him as Uncle Dennis. Like, hey, can we get Kawhi to sign an autograph? Can we get him to do something? and those emails have all come out to us and all the sourcings come out to us from essentially other parties. The Clippers have been tight, man. It's been impressive to see.

2:03:31Bill Simmons:Yeah, because the difference when this happened with Joe Smith in the early 2000s, when Minnesota got nailed for doing the wink-wink deal with them, is they actually had a contract for the wink-wink deal for like two years from now. Joe will get this and here it is. And I forget if the whistleblower was on the agency side or the Timberwolf side. I think it was on the agency side. The agent, the situation blew up and the guy had the thing and it was just clear evidence that they circumvented this, that they did the most illegal thing you can do was promise somebody a contract two years from now.

2:04:04Bill Simmons:And Stern flipped out and was like, fuck this, we're not doing this. And basically ruined the KG era in Minnesota. I mean, KG's there for another seven years and it got decimated. With the Clippers, you could argue Kawhi already ruined the Clippers in the 2020s. And I wonder if that factors in at all with the punishment where it's like, well, these guys are already screwed. Yeah, they're punished enough. They got nothing. They built a potential dynasty in OKC. Now I'm going to take five more lottery picks away from them. I don't know how it plays out, but I really do feel like it's going to end up with everybody suing each other.

2:04:38Bill Simmons:I think this is going to be the outcome. Agreed that this is not going to be some simple outcome. Yeah, the Clippers learned the Stringer Bell lesson from the T-Wolves. Is you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy? is the famous wire quote. And I think that Balmer took fewer notes than some of his predecessors on what he was working out with Kawhi. And so I think Balmer lives to fight another day. Walter, I feel less good about. When you're like studying and reporting on all these super rich people, like one of the things with Balmer and the Clippers that I was always suspicious of and never added up was this was so blatant if he did this, right?

2:05:16Bill Simmons:If the Clippers did this, it was so blatantly stupid and transparent and easily to get caught. Like what's, how is that worth it? Like the Clippers were in an okay situation in 2019. How is it worth risking your professional reputation? Being Joe Smith 2.0, like why? Like Balmer is supposedly a relatively, you know, one of the smarter billionaires. Like why would he risk this? And look, Pablo's done much more of the reporting on this story. So I'll share my personal perspective on this. Yeah. My view is what Bomber keeps saying is I got conned and scammed by this company Aspiration. And I think that is absolutely true because if Aspiration were a real successful company, none of this would have ever been revealed.

2:06:03It was actually a pretty sophisticated plan. The plan was they're going to sponsor our jerseys and we're going to pay, they're going to pay Kawhi and we're going to pay them and it's all going to work out. And they plan to go public as a company. They planned to SPAC with Oaktree, actually, which is the same firm that just bailed out Ishbia. And they were going to go public. And if that had happened, if they'd have managed to go public, if the company hadn't been a fraud, Bomber would have been hands clean. He would have been totally fine because they would have gone public and no one would have ever had to find out.

2:06:34And it would have seemed like a reasonable investment for Bomber to have made. The problem is after aspiration starts going down, that's when Bomber starts looking desperate. but that's where the cover-up is worse than the proverbial crime. Where in this case, they start going down and Balmer realizes, because he's smart, if these guys go down and there's a bankruptcy, it's going to become clear that they were paying Kawhi with money they didn't have. And it would look really strange.

2:07:00Bill Simmons:That's your theory. You don't know that for sure, but that's your theory. What we know is after that period of time, when it became clear the business was failing, Balmer invested again, and then Dennis Wong invested again. his minority owner seemed like a failing entity yeah the exact amounts of money that would cover the payments to kawaii and that to me seemed like and this is my opinion okay once you realize that this company is going down you realize that the big scheme is not going to actually work out and so you get desperate and you start getting stupid that's what ends up happening when the walls start closing in Henry Hill style every time.

2:07:39But on this one, I think that Balmer was at least trying to do something sophisticated. And when you look at the Daktronics example, which is this other payment, you look at their SEC filings, there's no obvious payment. Here's our payment to Kawhi for marketing that we could see. It was done in a very sophisticated, buttoned up way. And the problem is that he bet on the wrong guys to be partners in a scheme with when Aspiration went under and blew up.

2:08:08Bill Simmons:Yeah, I guess the counter would be Aspiration was just spending money like crazy. Sure. With no rhyme or reason to what they were doing. Balmer belatedly found out, oh shit, these guys might go down. They paid Kawhi 28 million. Oh my God, people are going to think I did this. We got to help the company. I guess that would be the defense. I don't know what the fuck happened, but I do know this. and I'm not a Clipper fan. I've had that. I've talked about it. I've had the Clipper tickets. I go to eight to 10 games a year. I always hope that they do well so I can go to playoff games. I don't really care.

2:08:44Bill Simmons:I'm a Celtic fan. This franchise, of all the teams this could have happened to, where you, like, nothing good ever happens to the Clippers, ever. Even when they have good things, it falls apart. Like, the 2014 was their best chance to win the title and the Donald Sterling thing happened. Like over and over again, this is how it goes. They have Kawhi and Paul George together. Kawhi gets hurt in 2021 when they have the best chance to win the title. Like this is just how it goes for them. And they're like, even with this, even with this Iger thing, like I was a Clippers fan. He could have totally bought the Clippers.

2:09:17Bill Simmons:It's a great point. Was friends with Chris Paul. And by all accounts, Iger is the exact kind of guy you'd want owning your team. And instead they end up with bomber who definitely, you know, was willing to spend profligately on this team. He's not like a cheap owner, but he's created this total mess for them. And I think in my view, it'll be clear when you look at Josh Kushner, who's like a killer, like by all accounts, like he's, you know, obviously related to Jared and who knows what's going on in that whole orbit, but he's like a serious guy who's going to run the team seriously with Iger. Who's a serious guy.

2:09:55Who's going to run the team seriously. You're going to have that right next door to this complete clusterfuck in the covers. And I think the salt in the wound is going to hurt even more.

2:10:06Bill Simmons:Yeah, Kushner's really well-respected for being a smart-ass dude. It's pretty amazing that he's laid low amid the Jared stuff, amid everything else, and has built this reputation as just like this great investor. I mean, who knows? I haven't done an investigation into Kushner, anything happened. but I do think if you were looking for a sports team owner, there's way worse people than Jared Kushner. I'm sorry. Josh Kushner. Jared would be tough. Yeah. Jared would be tough. Josh Kushner and Iger. That's a serious, serious ownership group. And, you know, I think the Lakers, um, are going to be in decent hands.

2:10:48here's the thing. Watch out for the Lakers.

2:10:50Bill Simmons:Josh isn't going to run the day to day at all. Iger is doing all of it. And Iger 75 could probably put, six, seven really good years in here. And this is all he's going to do. And this guy just ran a giant company. It's a completely different job. Like I was joking with Matt Bellany. Now, you know, somebody sitting courtside is mad that the chicken fingers aren't warm enough. Iger's like the maitre d' of this Lakers restaurant, right? He's taking all the calls from everybody. He's at Disney. He's talking to seven people. Iger's going to be good at dealing with like the drama of Luca. Like he dealt with actors and actresses.

2:11:25Like Bob Iger has dealt with entertainment people. Luca is going to be easy. Hold up Luca on GLPs within two weeks.

2:11:33Bill Simmons:Well, as long as it's not freedom of speech on a late night TV show. Um, that is a huge problem for sure. Sammy, this was great. I know it delighted your dad to no end. We didn't even tell him we were doing this. This is so fun. Do you think this was in the Bronny LeBron category? You were so, so far ahead of Bronny's best game on the Lakers. This is like, this was almost like, I'm like Brunson. You know, it's like Brunson first year at Villanova, a little, little nervous, but there's, there's some sparks. You think, you think, you think this could be something? You hit like five or six threes.

2:12:05Bill Simmons:I thought I was impressed with your two-way play. When's your next podcast with episode with Pablo coming? We'll see. We'll see. We've got to answer these Walter questions, but you know, hopefully in the next month. And yeah, I'll shamelessly plug subscribe to Hunterbrook. We do incredible financial journalism. No one does that anymore. you can follow us on all social media and we will continue to report on all of these sports team owners which I think is one of the great subplots of sports right now crazy characters who are trying to find money wherever they can under every couch cushion and they're doing their best but there end up being some problems so thank you so much for having me this has been awesome great to see you Sammy I'll see you in Boston sounds good see you soon alright that's it for the podcast thanks to Tom and Sammy thanks to Gahal and Eduardo as well.

2:12:53Bill Simmons:I think I'm coming back on Thursday with another podcast this week, so stay tuned for that. Don't forget about Rewatchables. The Re Speed. It's up. Go check it out. I'll see you later in the week. I don't want to see them on the wayside I don't have feelings with them on the wayside on the first side Must be 21 plus in president select states for Kansas in affiliation with Kansas Star Casino or 18 plus in president DC, Kentucky, or Wyoming. Game problem, call 1-800-GAMBLE or 1-800-MY-RESET. Call 888-79-7777 or visit ccpg.org slash chat in Connecticut or mdgamblinghelp.org in Maryland. Hope is here.

2:13:45Bill Simmons:Visit gamblinghelpline ma.org or call 800-327-5050 for 24-7 support in Massachusetts. or call 877-8-HOPE-NY or text HOPE-NY in New York for Louisiana. Call 877-770-7867. You matched on Hinge. You're vibing. Then her energy completely changes. What do you do? I'm Raven Smith, and I wrote and read a real love story about this exact sitch. Listen to the free audiobook now.