I know how it goes by now. Sometime very close to the start of the NFL season, Drew and I welcome our buddy Kalyn Kahler, who is now at ESPN but is forever a part of the Defector team, onto the podcast to talk about which NFL teams will be good and which will be bad in the year to come. You can hear the 2022 version of this here, and the 2023 version of it here; this year's model is embedded below. These episodes are always a little longer than usual, and always somewhat rushed once things start bogging down around the AFC South. You may know its rhythms by now, too. Drew wants us to simply say whether a team is good or bad, and Kalyn and I, in very different but mostly equal ways, are just not people who really talk like that.
I can't speak for Drew, whose job in this episode moreso than usual amounts to herding us through things, but it is generally one of my favorite episodes each year, authentically kind of service-y and bracing in its challenge. But there is something about it that didn't really occur to me until we were recording this year's installment, and which I didn't confirm until just recently, which is that no one else plays this game. This is not only not a tried-and-true podcasting format, it is one that only Drew has even tried. He just made it up, and then every year he chases me and Kalyn through it like a couple of disobedient corgis struggling with a dog show obstacle course. This makes me feel better about somehow never doing it quite as briskly as Drew wants it done. You just made it up, man. I can't do a bad job at something that isn't even real.
Before Drew got to herding we talked to Kalyn about her new podcast Spiraled, which brings her back to the sad story of Packers legend Kabeer Gbaja-Biamila and the weird masculinist Black Israelite cult attracting former NFL linemen. It's a wild story, one that enfolds a collection of aimless post-retirement NFL linemen, an ultra-macho coach-coded vision of Christianity, the deranging effects of YouTube and the seemingly equally deranging effect of replacing football with family life for people who have long prioritized one over the other. We also talked about Kalyn convening her friends for a draconian listening party to the first episode. She made them take a damn quiz afterward.
And then it was Good/Bad time. We began, as usual, by pushing back against the rules of the game; on the very first team, Kalyn refuted the idea of "good" where the Cowboys are concerned. The Giants are a less complicated case, but we spent some time getting sidetracked by the mysteries of their strange and stuffy organizational vibes. The pace quickened as we considered the possibility of a newly stacked NFC North and the familiar abjectness of the NFC South, and then slowed again as we discussed new Panthers head coach Dave Canales's cringe-inducingly public Masculinity Journey and uh heroic triumph over porn addiction. We also addressed the hilarious trolling particulars of wide receivers staging contract holdouts, a conversation that was pegged to Brandon Aiyuk moping around the 49ers facility before he got his contract, but which ranged characteristically far afield.
When we turned to the AFC, a conversation about the New York Jets and the broader question of how crazy a QB can be and still function at a high level was derailed by a fascinating Kalyn insight on last year's Jets duffing it by not choosing to purchase insurance on Aaron Rodgers, and a disquisition on how insurance works in the NFL. I actually learned something from that, although the rest of it—this includes Russell Wilson's ill-fated Eat The Ball endorsement, Bill Simmons's fascination with Mike Vrabel, and Sean Payton raving about Bo Nix as a Football Guy—was more your familiar AFC stuff. It was nice to conclude with some frank talk about whatever it is that the Raiders are, and are doing, but mostly it was nice to conclude. It beats working, but it can be tiring to sprint through a whole league like this, let alone in a format that your co-host just came up with one night while sitting in his Dad Chair. And yet, after another year of being encouraged to scoot through various tubes and baited with various treats (the chance to talk about the Raiders), I have to say that I still enjoy it. It's good exercise, at least.
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