We do not do emergency podcasts at The Distraction, although we do joke around about it a lot. The phrase itself feels like a joke, summoning as it does images of two people roughly my age sliding down a fireman's pole into a brightly lit room with a Shure SM7 microphone in it and then saying "Wow" a bunch of times while watching a movie trailer. We will never do this. But given the fact that news of the Micah Parsons trade broke shortly after we finished recording last week's NFC-centric NFL Good/Bad episode with Kalyn Kahler, we were throwing the phrase "emergency podcast" around—in jest, in jest—a lot more than usual. But rules are rules, and this week's episode would focus on the AFC. Right? We wouldn't immediately start haranguing literally Mina Kimes, from ESPN and The Mina Kimes Show Featuring Lenny, about it right at the start of the show, at least. Surely.
And it didn't happen right away. Drew did talk about accidentally setting his grill on fire and having to put it out with a fire extinguisher. But a story this deeply stupid, and the broader spectacle of the manifestly duffed and highly public negotiation between Jerry Jones and his former star pass rusher cannot and should not pass entirely without mention. It didn't, and Drew fought hard against getting real upset about the Packers again—this is foreshadowing—and we all had a good laugh parsing the Cowboys Cope and getting mad at Jerry Jones getting offended that Parsons tried to negotiate through an agent, as if it were a common "business deal."
But the whole of the AFC was there to be discussed, and so we fairly quickly turned to that. We talked more about the interesting teams than the less interesting ones, which is not the same thing as talking only about the good ones. The Baltimore Ravens are both extremely good and interesting in their otherwise inexplicable thwartedness; the Cincinnati Bengals are not good but interesting enough that Mina debuted the term "goo-bad" to describe them; the Pittsburgh Steelers might actually be kind of bad, but Aaron Rodgers' Mystery Wife and his knack for finding the most annoying way to be annoying about anything won them some time, too. And while we scanned through a lot of other teams in the AFC North and South, some good questions were raised regarding whether the average NFL fan could name four Titans, whether my plan for Trevor Lawrence's local shrimphouse chain was doomed from the start, and why we have never been able to guess the Colts correctly in all our years of doing this. (There is seriously data on the last bit.)
The same trend continued after the break. We discussed Patriots assistant and former Giants head coach Ben McAdoo's ever-evolving aesthetic, his NASCAR Dad era, and the brief period where he looked like Mark Ruffalo's character in Collateral; the Jets becoming normal before they become good, and the most enjoyable time to be a fan of a team; and the bummer of the Kansas City Chiefs as they shamble through their circa-now Walking Dead seasons phase. A conversation about the Chargers and Justin Herbert gave us occasion to revisit Mina's tweet on the Chargers as a haunted house, consider Herbert's place in the NFL's quarterback hierarchy, and ... oh no. We were so close to being through a delightful and informative hour of football talk when Drew slipped in some gratuitous disrespect directed at Jordan Love. Mina issued a decently forceful corrective, Drew explained how and why he gets so upset about the Packers quarterback, and would you look at that, we are out of time. All this before we got to the Las Vegas Raiders. Anyway, surely things will get more reasonable once the games start.
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