In what has been something of a bait-and-switch experience for us both, Rohan Nadkarni's last two visits to the podcast have come during weeks when I was out. Strategically, this is sound, just given that Rohan is effectively a third host whenever he's on. But for both him and me, it was kind of a raw deal. Has he had any new sandwiches since last we spoke? Formulated any new opinions about Josh McRoberts? I suppose I could listen to those podcast appearances and learn the answers myself but uh, hold on, sorry. Sorry I have to start a new paragraph right now, it's an emergency. Sorry!
Anyway, it was great to finally be reunited with two of my favorite podcast buddies for what turned out to be both a typically goofy and decently sports-heavy episode. It turns out Rohan has a new job, and at the risk of spoiling the episode, he has had some sandwiches lately.
We started out by getting caught up on those various sandwiches, both ones that Rohan has enjoyed, ones that he is strategizing about, and ones that he has heard tell of without actually having tried yet. It's not important how we got from there to Drew telling a story about lying down on the ground to take a nap at a youth soccer game and getting a ball bonked off of him and then getting razzed by a teen, but he did and we did. And then, after a brief conversation about Drew's willingness to kick off his shoes and go to sleep more or less wherever and whenever, we brought the nonsense portion of the podcast to a close and got to the sports stuff.
We began in the NFL, where Rohan seemed surprised at how un-fucked the Miami Dolphins' broader situation appears despite the team seeming oddly unprepared for the inevitable loss of Tua Tagovailoa to another concussion. After a brief moment to appreciate whatever it is the Tennessee Titans are doing and celebrate Tom Ley's "Will Levis, You Have To Stop Cooking" headline we considered new frontiers in NFL roster construction, the bold gambit of teams strategically punting on the quarterback position and, invariably, the current level of Tua-related angst and the cynical but deft way in which the NFL continues to finesse its concussion issues. It's hard to call this an appreciation of the way the league has calculated the ratios of performative concern and rule-making relative to actual action, but you don't need to admire something to be impressed by it.
After the break, we turned to baseball, and I finally broke my legendary silence on how I'm feeling about the Mets. Regular readers already know this amounts to "maintaining some perspective while believing in the stupidest possible miracles," however much more difficult that has become since we recorded on Tuesday. Drew believes in the Mets and Rohan does not, and after a brief bit on the strange dynamic of Drew being into the Mets and me telling him why he's wrong to get excited, Rohan explained his side of things. Which is to say that he kind of went off on how the Mets are not the damn Little Giants from the movie Little Giants, and how the Dodgers are getting the short end of things against a team that's even richer and more obnoxious than they are. After what seemed to me like a reasonable enough point of order—or, anyway, pointing out that a lot of the Mets' historic payroll is going to guys who aren't currently on the team—Rohan kind of kept going. The phrase "what happened to this country" is invoked; Grimace is defended in the most qualified possible way. Pretty much the usual.
In the literal and figurative sense, we were heading into the Funbag, and after a brief break in which Rohan was allowed to exercise his Remembering A Guy privileges, we finally got there. The question was about which big-ticket actor is the most shameless in their pursuit of shitty paycheck work, and while the answers you'd expect were invoked more or less as you'd expect, there was an impressive amount of collateral damage—to Peter Berg's samey filmography as a director, to Mark Wahlberg's off the court issues and oafish empire-building gambits, and to top-tier Hallmark guy Chad Michael Murray's notably grimmer sideline as a late-stage Bruce Willis costar. It fits that an episode that begins with sandwich chat would end up making this much of a mess.
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