NFL Hipster Takes I Can Get Behind With Ben Solak

0:00Welcome to the Ringer NFL show. I'm your host, Sheil Kapadia. We have an old friend back today, my old podcast partner, Ben Solak, now doing big things at ESPN. Solak is here because I have identified the quintessential hipster takes for the 2025 season, and there was only one person I could run those by to see if he agrees or disagrees with them. So we're going to get to that on this show. Solak, great to see you, my friend. I got to see you in person a few weeks ago. You were in town, you met the family, and we quickly realized you have much more in common with my kids who are 12 and nine than with me.

0:38I have a care package that I got to send your way because I talked books with one daughter. I talked plants with the other daughter. I heard about what they've got, what they don't got, and now we'll send a little season starting fun care package over from the Solak. I'm excited. This is true. We actually have a door here to the basement where everyone measures their height and we now have Ben Solak's height on the door as well. So yeah, I might have to tweet that out or put it on Instagram later. All right, Solak, we're going to take a quick break. We're going to come back and we're going to get to the hipster takes of the 2025 season.

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2:56all right here we are on the ringer nfl show let's do it solac now some i'm curious because i think some of these are going to push back and say they're not hipster too so i'm just gonna you know i got about a handful here we'll see how many we we get through and you can tell me how you feel about them one one so are they takes that you believe or they takes that you think the hipsters currently have? I think there are takes that the hipsters currently have. Now, sometimes, listen, I can relate to all kinds of people. Right, that's what I'm asking. Yeah, yeah. So I can relate. So some of them, I might be like, yeah, I'm in on that.

3:26And others, I might just make fun of. So let's get to them. All right. Hipster take number one. There is still hope for Justin Fields. And the take is this, Solak from the hipsters. He was in a horrible situation in Chicago. The Steelers screwed him by playing Russell Wilson. He's still 6 '3", 227, ran 4-4-6. Great arm. And guess what we saw last year? Sam Darnold, new environment, looks like a good player. Nobody move off your draft evaluations. Do not give up on Justin Fields with the Jets. Where are we with hipster take number one? There is still hope for Justin Fields. I think that take is a tier beyond hipster at this point.

4:09I think that's like sicko take, right? Like that's, you know, that one's off the deep end a little bit. I think that those like who are still Justin Fields interested, which I would say I'm one for sure, is less of like there's still hope for Justin Fields and it's still, it's more so there's still hope for an offense to be built around what Fields is right now in the NFL, right? Like that 2022 season, we have to remember, Fields ran for like 1 ,100 yards. Like it was one of the most prolific running quarterback seasons in history. He didn't even play a full season. There is a sort of offense that is extremely run oriented and the Jets have a very good interior offensive line.

4:43They have two young first-round tackles in Olufushanu and Armand Membu. They have Brees Hall and Braylon Allen in that backfield. There is a very run-oriented offense. Plays 11-11 football. Ask Justin Fields to be a short yardage guy, a goal line guy. That is better than we expect and is challenging for some defense to deal with. And Zags rather zig. There is a Colin Kaepernick-like impact that Fields can have. Is anybody still holding a candle for Fields, the top 15 pick, to emerge and be an above-average starting quarterback? I think that candle is well and truly snuffed out. But that doesn't mean, much like you bring up the Sam Donald comparison, that doesn't mean there aren't ways to still draw a good offense out of what the guy is, the reality of him now in the NFL.

5:24So I think if you tweak it a little bit, it's a hipster take. So was Arthur Smith just asleep at the wheel? I remember because this time last summer, we're all having conversations. I was kind of excited about it. I said, all right, lean into it, run the ball with Justin Fields, play defense. and it just never materialized. So I guess now we know Aaron Glenn's making, he's not hiding it at all. We know what the Jets are going to do that we will at least see that version of Justin Fields this year. Yeah, I think the Arthur Smith, Mike Tomlin Steelers were in the, let's see if we can make a franchise quarterback out of this guy mode.

5:59And so they were like, do your reads, right? Like, you know, progressions and, you know, throw it underneath and what can we, whatever. I think the Jets are much more so the mode that Aaron Glenn and the Lions were in their first year there in Detroit. Tanner Ankshin in their first year in Detroit, which is we're going to put Jared Goff out there and just run the best possible offense for him and just kind of see if that can hold water for a year, hold for two years while we address the rest of this roster. And hey, if it actually looks pretty good, maybe we'll consider like extending here and move it on from there.

6:26I think Fields, the runner, this is, you asked me if I agree with the hipsters on some of these. I think Fields, the runner, that was exciting in 2022. Now I have huge concerns about any time they have to drop back to pass on third down and he's probably going to take a sack and they're going to be a bottom five passing offense. But I can talk myself into at least a team that's saying, let's just lean into the one thing we know he does well and see what it looks like. More importantly, long-time listeners will want to know, how's Mama Solak, the Jets fan, feeling about this? Is she in on, hey, maybe Fields can be kind of fun or is she like, don't do this to me?

6:59Well, long-time listeners will remember that Mama Solak is a Jets fan and Papa Solak is a Steelers fan. So Mama Solak cares about one thing and one thing only, which is week one, Jets Steelers, Aaron Rodgers, that game, like every Jets thing that my mom believes, doesn't believe right now, with Sauce Extension, Gary Wilson Extension, it all comes back to, but Rodgers isn't here and dad's got to deal with him and we're going to win that game in week one. We're going to sack him five times, whatever. So she has no interest in future Jets. It's all retribution for past Jets. That's where her head's at this year.

7:31You know, we haven't booked the show that far in advance yet. I'm going to add Mama Solak to the doc we have here. You know, just potential guests. That's going to do numbers. I'll tell you, that show's going to do some good social clips, all right? We'll be cooking. No doubt about it. All right, that was number one. Hipster take number two. This is the year the Baltimore Ravens finally get over the hump. The take, you know what the take is. They've been one of the best teams in the NFL the last six years. They've just gotten unlucky in the playoffs, but things are set up for them this year. Lamar's at the peak of his powers.

8:03The secondary is stacked. this is the year they get to the Super Bowl and they put all your narratives, you mainstream media losers. I'll go that far. Yeah, absolutely. They're putting all those to bed. All right, so you're in on this one. That's 100 % one of the best hipster takes. It's a take that I myself have delivered multiple times because you just don't want to say the Chiefs, right? That's boring. And you don't want to say the Bills because that's what we said the last couple of years. So now it's Raven's turn. And I also believe this. I very much believe that this Ravens win the Super Bowl, this is finally their year take, is emboldened by the fact that Lamar didn't win MVP.

8:39A lot of it, like, oh, they've been slighted. There'll be another level to Lamar, which I don't think that's true. I don't think Lamar's experiencing that at all. But I do think that if he had won MVP, there'd be less like, we gotta give the Ravens their due sort of excitement. And then the other reason that this is such a hipster take is because every single one of us has the splits from last year, first half of the season, second half of the season of the defense, right? A lot of everybody talked about. Oh, man. Eddie Jackson's back there. Marcus Williams back there. These safeties are no good.

9:09They made the change. Kyle Hamilton. We all love a Kyle Hamilton. Big hipster guy, Kyle Hamilton. They're the best defense by APA for play after week 10, right? Everyone has that data. So it's so easy in a previewing 2025 context to go back to 2024, go back to that second half of the year and be like, so what a lot of folks don't realize, what a lot of them don't know and go on into the Ravens defense. That's 100 % a hipster take. It is as true as it has always been, which is that the Ravens are a very good team with an elite quarterback who have a chance of winning the Super Bowl. You got to be able to get through the AFC playoff picture.

9:39And as we know, that's been a big difficulty for the Lamar-led Ravens, both like the first act of his career and now even in the second act of his career. So it is a hipster take. It'll be a hipster take again next year when we're saying it again next year. Yeah, I think you're right. I think a lot of Super Bowl picks will probably come out this week. And I think they will be a popular pick for the reasons you laid out. I was looking, because it is just kind of hard to explain why hasn't it happened yet where they haven't at least gotten there. Oh, that's very easy to explain, because Lamar's not clutch, and he doesn't play the game from the pocket and everything.

10:09Trust me, I know all the talking points. They're great. They're completely flawless. 94 games with Lamar Jackson, one thing I was looking at, they've been minus three in turnovers four times. Three of those times have been playoff losses. So it's happened once in 87 regular season games, three times in seven playoff games. Is there something, and this isn't an analytical thing, or like just in terms of a team ready to play, a team playing loose, is it worth asking why they're not always at their best in these games? Or is it just complete randomness, the playoff losses? It's six of one half dozen of the other, which is when it comes to something as noisy as turnovers and something as small of a sample as the current playoff games for the Ravens, it's noise.

10:53It absolutely 100 % unequivocally is noise. However, it also happened. It's also noteworthy. The Baltimore Ravens had the lived experience of turning the ball over in the postseason way more than they did in the regular season. And if you listen to the way that they're talking about, you know, what they're working on this offseason, you know, a lot of it is, okay, the pre-sap penalties and, you know, we were the most penalized team in football. That's your one of the top most. But another thing they talk about is we tend to be turnover heavy when we get to January football. How can we deal with that?

11:16We, you're not going to ask Lamar to play a different style of game, but you 100 % are going to think about, okay, how do we insulate him? from this tendency, from this, you know, believed correlation, even if it's not a real thing. Like, I think a big part of that is what Derrick Henry means to that team and their ability to run the football, right? When coaches are afraid of turnovers, they just want to put the ball in the belly of the back, right? Three things can happen when you throw a pass and two of them are bad sort of a thing. So it's not significant of anything. There's no, you know, misplaced gene in Lamar Jackson's quarterback DNA that means when the calendar turns to the new year, he just becomes turnover pro.

11:51Like, that's not a real thing. However, it's now occurred. So it's going to be something that they're cognizant of dealing with and something that opposing defenses are cognizant of as well and seeing if they can continue to take advantage of that from the young player. And to be clear, not all those turnovers are Lamar Jackson. Is there a team thing? You know, if you're John Harbaugh, are you like, why is my team so good the entire year? And then we play our worst game in these playoff losses. And obviously the competition you're facing has something to do with that. It's probably randomness.

12:17My answer is almost everything in football. It's just random. Because Lamar has been very fumble prone in the playoffs. And that was true earlier. I remember because his first playoff game, he had like three fumbles. He didn't lose them all, but still. He dropped the ball a lot and he was not careful with the ball in the pocket. That to me is the sort of thing where it's like this young player thinks he needs to superhero this entire team. I think if you watch the Lamar playoff runs from the past two seasons, where he still had three turnovers, I want to say in that Kansas City loss, the third turnover is the pick trying to score the touchdown to tie the game.

12:47How much is that turnover like an impactful player or whatever? I think if you watch those games, you see a guy who's smarter in the pocket, even regular season smarter in the pocket than he was, it's just sometimes balls don't bounce the way you want them to bounce. You just gotta swallow that and try to get up off the mat for next season. Yeah, they've had so many of those, the Zay Flowers fumble, the Mark Andrews drop, I remember 2019. The Mark Andrews fumble, remember? Also the second half, Mark Andrews fumble on a big completion. Yeah. I mean, I wrote a 2019, I covered the Ravens-Titans game and I wrote like a column like, you know, this isn't a don't blame this all on Lamar.

13:19And now here we are. I mean, it's six years later and it's like they still, I would have thought they would have gotten over the hump by this point. Listen, that Titans-Ravens game though, 2019, talking about football hipsters. That Dean Pease defensive game plan against the Greg Roman, Lamar Jackson, Sensation Ravens. That is like on vinyl, in the record shelf. Himster lore that game. Oh, it was good. Crack a PBR and just watch the all 22 with Dean Pease. You know, that's how you spend your Friday nights. All right, let's take a break. We come back with a big one. I got a few more hipster takes for Solak.

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15:15Hit the street, grab a can, and get after it. All right, we're back on the Ringer NFL show. All right, so hipster take number three. If you don't have Justin Herbert as a top five QB, you don't know ball. And the argument is this. The classic. The QB rankings start at six. Herbert is absolutely a top five guy. the arm, the athleticism, the decision-making. He's just been cursed with bad situations. Put him on one of these other teams and he'd be in the MVP conversation. Stop ranking your quarterbacks by quarterback wins. Justin Herbert is absolutely a stud. That's the hipster take, Solak. Where are we with that one?

15:57I'm now going to ask you a great question I've long missed asking you, which is if you see something - You can never ask me. No, I'm asking you. No, I'm going to ask you a question I've missed asking you, which is if you've seen something on the internet or not. Have you seen that? There's an AI edited photo. It's like Justin Herbert. He's like in a superhero cape, blue and yellow chargers, a big uniform behind him. And then the emblem on the chest of the superhero suit says, if, for Justin Herbert, right? And it's so good. I'll send it to you later because that's so much of the Justin Herbert conversation.

16:28Everybody who defends Herbert like me, and certainly like you as well, says, well, if X, then Y. if he had a good pass direction for the first couple years of his career, if the receiver room was ever the sort of caliber it's been for some other guys, so on and so forth. I think it is defensible to have Herbert outside of your top five. I certainly think that it is viewed still as a hipster take to have Herbert up in there. It shouldn't be. It should be mainstream, which is the classic hipster line, but it should be. He's ridiculously, preposterously good at football. But at this point, whereas a couple years ago, I was Herbert over Burrow.

17:00I think it's tough to be there now. I think Burrow's pretty clearly above Herbert in terms of how Burrow's improved, especially the sack avoidant stuff. And so that leaves one spot left in the top five. I'd put Herbert there. If someone wants to talk me into Stafford's last season, and we don't know how healthy he'll be, but what Stafford was last year, somebody wants to be that pot committed on one year of Jaden Daniels, if somebody wants to be there on anything even if CJ Stroud is still defensible up there, that doesn't hassle me too much. Because Herbert hasn't improved over the last couple of years.

17:28right? He's been pretty, uh, there's been a lot of stasis in what he's done in terms of being the check down play a guy and being a little bit too, you know, risk averse. And then he obviously had this like super low interception season and they're pushing the ball a little bit more down the field off the play action stuff. I'm like, okay, maybe this can work for the Greg Roman of it all, but it's not like he took like this massive leap, this massive jump. I think that like, there's been, you know, there was a little bit of improvement there from three into four, but not so much that it's like, Oh, Herbert's proven the doubters wrong.

17:53No, the people who doubted Herbert two years ago, their position remains pretty defensible and pretty understandable. So I don't think it's probably a hipster to have Herbert top five, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that like the average hipster is like, if you don't have him top five, like that's a ridiculously bad take. No, I think that that tier is pretty tight. And I understand why other people have people ranked above Herbert. All right. So the takes against what you just said with Herbert, other than, you know, he hasn't won a playoff game, regular season record. Cause I do think there's other stuff too.

18:22You know, I think when you look at quarterbacks around the NFL and do analysis, a lot of it is what are you going to make excuses for? And what are you not going to make excuses for with one guy versus another guy? They've had a top 10 offense once in five seasons with Justin Herbert. We mentioned the playoff thing last three years. He's 16th by the, in the nerd stats, EPA per pass play 19th in success rate. And I loved Herbert, like his rookie year. I saw him play like three games and I'm like, this guy's going to win an MVP. And then I saw him the next year and I'm like, I'm going to actually pick him to win MVP his third season.

18:56And me as someone who really liked him early in his career can say, I feel a little underwhelmed by the way this thing has gone to your point that he hasn't reached a certain level. And again, I'm not saying the factors around him have been perfect. I'm not saying he's bad. I think if you did a draft, if you had like an expansion team in the NFL, Justin Herbert would go very high. But I think it's also fair to say it's okay to feel a little underwhelmed and feel like he should have accomplished more at this point, given what we saw early in his career. And then that is kind of where I land with Herbert and how I actually feel.

19:29Yeah. I also, for as talented as Herbert is and for how fondly I view him, I'm disappointed in the lack of accolades that have come with that, lack of success that has come with that. In my understanding of football, I want the quarterbacks who I think are best to have the best numbers and to produce the best passing offenses and to win the most games because I think that that reflects the reality of how they play. We all know, and we all can see this on a game level very clearly, when context affects how a quarterback's performance is interpreted, is consumed by the average viewer, right? Justin Herbert was X completions for Y attempts for Z yards, right?

20:08Anthony Richardson was one last year, right? I only completed 44 % of his passes. Yeah, watch the passes and you can understand why I only completed 44%. Like you look at it and you're like, okay, this makes sense on a game level. When we expand, it's like, right, the last three seasons of Herbert. When we lose the specificity, there's always like, okay, but by now, surely law of big numbers, he should have, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That's still Quentin Johnson, man. That's still Zion Johnson. It's still Joel Lombardi. It's still Greg Roman. Like even at the 30 ,000 foot scale, like it said so constantly with Herbert.

20:38That's why there's the meme of him with the giant if on his chest, but it bears repeating because it still has a total degree of truth, complete total veracity. He's fighting an uphill battle and these other guys aren't. He is in terms of how the passing game is designed, in terms of what's asked from, in terms of his pass protection. It's been true for the last four seasons. And to me, while I am disappointed in the lack of postseason success, Occam's razor, it's because this guy's quite good, but the rest of the team is not as good. Jim Harbaugh got asked this last month, right? It was like, what does Herbert need to do to improve?

21:09He's like, the number one Herbert thing, the number one thing Herbert needs to do to improve is get a better office line and better weapons. His HUD coach said it, right? Like it's, they have not done a good job, the Los Angeles Chargers, building around this guy over the course of his career. Is that, to me, it's as simple as that. That was everything I wanted in the hipster defense of Justin Herbert. I know, and while there are people yelling right now, he yanked me in. I avoided it the first pass, the second pass he got me. That's exactly, I was thinking this recently, last thing on Herbert.

21:33If you swapped him with Jaden Daniels last year, are the commanders as good? I say no. No, but you want to talk about an offense being built for a guy, right? And I should say it that way. You want to talk about like a quarterback and a system and a coordinator and weapons all working in unison with one another, right? That was Washington last year. I mean, everything that Jaden was for that offense, everything that offense was for Jaden, like they were, you know, like very well connected, very well integrated as opposed to like the Greg Roman offense of like, let's put Tucker Fisk and Scott Matlock on the field and then wonder why we can't get anybody open in the passing game.