We at The Distraction HQ do not need much of an excuse to invite ESPN NFL ace and Defector comrade emeritus Kalyn Kahler onto the program. We think she's great at her job and great at talking about it, and the frequency with which she's joined us to speak excitedly about the NFC North and generally "deal with our shit" speaks for itself. But she did make it easy for us this week, with a big, anecdote-rich ESPN story, written with ESPN Raiders reporter Ryan McFadden, on the unusually complicated, surprisingly novel, extremely predictable carnage in the Las Vegas Raiders front office, and sideline, and owner's suite, and I guess also in the offensive line meeting room. Just having to do with the Raiders in general. I suppose one could just write "It is a story about the Raiders" here, in retrospect.
But what a story it is! Even by the standard of this kind of thing—and deeply reported stories about dysfunctional teams published shortly after those teams end their seasons and fire their coaches are a genre unto themselves—this one has it all, and also some stuff that I didn't know such stories could have. While we did discuss some other NFL stuff in the back half of the show, we could have done an entire episode on what this story reveals about Tom Brady's weird part-time job as a co-owner and not-quite-team-president with the Raiders, and how that job has and hasn't evolved, how it fits within the broader Mark Davis Experience and why the league's goofiest and least wealthy owner wanted it in the first place, and the bizarre results it has delivered. Kalyn talked about what Brady (reportedly) likes in a quarterback, what he didn't like about Sam Darnold, and how any of those preferences align with reality, as well as the secret history of the ill-fated and extremely expensive pairing of deposed offensive coordinator Chip Kelly and deposed head coach Pete Carroll and the pure anarchy/abandonment of what resulted from it. What, besides image management, is Tom Brady actually doing in Vegas? Were the secret meetings between the Raiders offensive line, Ashton Jeanty, and Geno Smith, held without Pete Carroll's son and offensive line coach Brennan in the room, a peak in the history of NFL nepo-failure? There is a universe in which we are still talking about this.
But it is podcasting best practices to maintain a 60/40 split between talking about one weird three-win team and discussing the entire playoff field. When we returned from the break, we did that. Kalyn leveraged her status as a broken Bears fan and the perspective it's afforded her to help us try to figure out how good the team actually is. We discussed the Buffalo Bills, too, who will try to undo years of postseason heartbreak by steering an oddly flubby team through a decently open window of opportunity. We did our best to parse the Jaguarsaissance—Kalyn loves Jags kicker Cam Little, Trevor Lawrence loves Jakobi Meyers, everyone kind of wants to believe—and considered whether Mike Tomlin could still get fired, and why. And then, after Kalyn told the story of a sad cupcake moment after Cody Parkey's double-doink field goal miss in the 2018 playoffs, we wrapped up the pod with like seven minutes of me talking about my turtles. This was because of a Funbag question, to be fair; I was not, and am not even now, able to find a way to relate my weird pet to Cody Parkey. If we'd let the podcast go a little longer, maybe I could have.
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