If I may take you Inside The Game for a moment: Before he worked up the usual rundown of questions and topics and suchlike, Drew messaged me to see if I wanted to talk about "any of the other shit" on the pod this week, in addition to football. We knew that we were going to have two football-minded guests in Christopher Harris of Harris Football (and a self-confessed Defector Twitch viewer) and returning champ Andy Behrens of The Deep Shot, but they are also alive and awake for all of The Other Shit, and surely could have talked about it before we jumped into overreacting to three weeks of NFL football. I said that I didn't, and Drew admitted that he didn't, and the result is an episode of the podcast that is pretty well free of The Other Shit. I assure that its absence is not because I haven't been thinking about it. It's partially because I feel like there's plenty of that in the monitors as it stands, and also because an hour off from doing that sounded pretty great to me.
And the resulting episode, I think, is at the very least pretty good. Harris and Behrens know their stuff, and we had as much fun talking about macro-scale issues like the creep of gambling intelligence into both NFL and fantasy sports analysis, and the uneasy role of those kinds of analytics in fantasy football, as we did talking about the actual football. But much of the episode is given over to the actual football: how Monday Night Football exemplified the analytics vs. vibes question, tonally; the possibility of a Fallen scenario on the Giants sideline and the tragicomic end of Russell Wilson's Giants arc; and assessments of Caleb Williams and Drake Maye from within their respective awful contexts.
After the break, we considered how a 7-10 season might impact the Taylor Swift/Travis Kelce fairytale, and what the Chiefs can do to avoid that scenario, and turned our attention at last to the Daniel Dimes Renaissance and the Indianapolis Colts, who are definitely fun and might also be good. Seven wonderful years of "Is Daniel Jones good?" discourse, and I'm still not tired of it. There were Scottish accents at the beginning of this, and some moderately troubling Dabo Swinney voice work at the end, but while what's in the middle is pretty straightforward, I also noticed when we were recording that everyone was laughing a lot. That's generally a good sign.
And we hadn't even gotten to the Funbag yet, where a whopper of a follow-up question to the classic "discovering a fully wrapped Italian hero in a gas station bathroom" scenario. We have already established an answer to "Would you eat it," for better or worse; this question, which focused on whether I would cop to eating it if caught, opened some even more disturbing doors. There's a lot of imagery, some recriminations, a detailed scenario in which I change my identity and disappear forever, and the words "standing at a urinal, eating a sandwich." There was another (good) Funbag question about which basic sports tasks would be terrifying and impossible at a high level, but the return of Bathroom Sandwich discourse was as much the headline here as the absence of any actual real-world nightmare stuff. Also still very disturbing, obviously, but an escape all the same.
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