You could hear it on the horizon, getting louder as the hour and object drew closer. It was the sound of Drew, on his way back from vacation, making the NFL Draft chime at peak volume as he prepared to return to the podcast in time for the beginning of the draft. Drew loves it enough for the both of us and also a decent number of you all as well, so there was no way that we weren't going to Talk Football upon his return from Puerto Rico. After a brief discussion of his vacation misadventures, highlighted by him groaning through watching Gabriel Iglesias complain about wokeism and pronouns, and immediately after a stirring a capella version of that very same NFL Draft chime from Drew, we did just that.
We were joined on this journey by Mike Tanier, proprietor of the indispensable Too Deep Zone newsletter, and one of the foremost football-knowers in the game. We talked about the chaos of Alpha Football Dudes trying to make decisions by committee based on entirely too much information, what smart teams have figured out that other bureaucracy-bound teams haven't, and what makes bad teams bad at making these sorts of decisions. We celebrated the Baltimore Ravens' unique capacity for coherence and addressed the risk of too much coherence represented by the Pittsburgh Steelers, remembered the tragicomic era where the league was trying to Do Patriots Things by hiring dyspeptic NESCAC guys in fucked-up sweatshirts, and discussed the challenge of extracting reasonable decisions from unreasonable, vain, sleep-deprived people. It wasn't all draft talk: Mike explained how smart teams use all the new cap space they get each league year to build winning teams in a lasting way.
And then we got down to the specifics, not just about the NFL Draft but this particular one. How shitty, Drew asked, is this year's quarterback class relative to the historically poor 2022 one? The answer set the stage for a conversation that started with some flawed but compelling quarterback prospects and ranged out into the inherent strangeness and unknowability of evaluating such unfinished talent. That meant some frank talk from Mike on Shedeur Sanders, a prospect who makes people stupid in a variety of ways. We talked about what actually can be scouted effectively where college quarterbacks are concerned, and the challenges that NFL teams face in developing players at the pro level, and the lamentable fact that scouting draft guys now also requires watching Cam Ward play Overwatch on Twitch. After a brief digression on the NFL version of the Endless Rebuild Mode so popular in MLB, we turned to something that Mike has written wonderfully about, which is how the New Orleans Saints managed to put together the most lavishly borked cap situation in the NFL.
While that was it for the NFL stuff, the back third of the podcast was decently expansive this week. We talked about Mike's experiences at his local Tesla Takedown protests, and the life-affirming experience of getting plugged into local networks of like-minded people to bother powerful turds that you hate. We all agreed on the importance of being offline—I am much better at giving this advice than taking it, but I am quite good at giving it by now—and where political change will actually come from, how non-linear it will likely be, and the enduring hazards of West Wing brain.
We extracted two hideous and wriggling queries from the Funbag, the first of which concerned which league commissioner does the least work over the course of a calendar year. The second question, about when legacy rock bands should retire, devolved as these things do—Mike discussed how much slower once-fast songs get over time, I lamented the high percentage of my live music experiences that involve watching a band play a beloved album in its entirety on the 25th anniversary of that album's release, and Drew talked about his brother catching a Queensryche show at Disneyland. In the end, we all came down squarely on the pro side of the state fair musical circuit. When you consider how many worse jobs there are—being the Saints GM, the person screening Roger Goodell's calls, or in any NFL team's draft war room, for starters—getting fired by Lou Gramm for playing "Hot Blooded" too quickly honestly sounded pretty good.
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