transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:02] We're back, we're back, it's The Distraction.

Speaker 2:
[00:04] I'm Drew, that's Roth. How you doing, Roth?

Speaker 1:
[00:06] I'm good, man. How are you?

Speaker 2:
[00:08] Bad.

Speaker 1:
[00:09] Yeah, well, I'm bad too, but I didn't say, I wasn't gonna say it.

Speaker 2:
[00:13] I went to the dentist this morning, and I flunked, I got two cavities, which, you know, if you're like, if you're like, you know, eight, and you get cavities, fine, that makes sense. You ate too many fucking Sour Patch Kids or whatever. When you're 49, you're a little old and you shouldn't be getting cavities, you know, you shouldn't be doing that.

Speaker 1:
[00:31] Are you a big like soda pop guy? How do you get a cavity at 49? Or is it just, you know, what happens?

Speaker 2:
[00:37] I have a sweet tooth. I enjoy a chocolate or six after dinner. There's no doubt about that.

Speaker 1:
[00:42] But I know you're brushing those teeth. The old guy injury that I've been experiencing of late is, I have like two weeks now of shoulder pain that is 100% the result of me sleeping bad. Like I like put my arms someplace it wasn't supposed to be, and I rested my head on it for seven hours. Then I woke up the next day and I've got problems.

Speaker 2:
[01:04] Yeah. That's your 40s. Like you just like you lift a fork wrong and suddenly you're crippled for life. It's lots of fun. So look, I'm super, super excited for our guest because we're going to have the NFL Draft Preview Podcast. But I do want to, before I introduce our guest, I want to note if you are looking for some good NBA playoffs coverage, because the NBA playoffs are happening right now, I have to note that our own Patrick Redford, a defector, has his own weekly basketball podcast called Nothing But Respect. It's not going to preclude us from talking about basketball here on The Distraction. But if you need that weekly fix of hot basketball takes, Patrick has you covered, so make sure that you go ahead and download that. Now, let's talk about the NFL Draft because for the first time ever on The Distraction or even when we had the deadcast, we are joined at last by the godfather of analytics himself, Aaron Schatz of FTN is here. Hi, Aaron.

Speaker 1:
[01:58] Hey.

Speaker 3:
[01:59] Hey. I am good and it is really good to be here, guys. I love the show. I'm glad to be on with you guys and spread my name to the Defector world.

Speaker 1:
[02:08] They already know, dude. This is what makes it so weird that we haven't had you on is that I feel like every now and then this happens where it's like somebody that I've been reading really for as long as I have been reading about stuff on the computer. Like I feel like it should have happened by accident at some point that you came on here and we like asked you some dumb question about sandwiches.

Speaker 3:
[02:29] Well, I am a kind of a media whore, especially when our book comes out every July. So yeah, it is a little bit of a surprise. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[02:36] I mean, you have to, there isn't really a choice. You have to promote yourself. So before we get into the draft itself, we're not going to talk about the draft itself just yet, because I want to talk to you about the business of NLX, which you were in earlier this week. I wrote about pro football focus being sold off to a nebulous collective called Teamworks, who then quickly laid off most of the consumer side of pro football focus. That company is split in two. One's the data side, which is what the NFL teams all pay for. The other is a front-facing consumer side that had talent like Sam Monson and Steve Palazzolo and guys like that. Aaron, how did you feel personally seeing pro football focus get slowly picked apart like this?

Speaker 3:
[03:17] It's very weird for me because I've had this long relationship with them where it started out that we were rivals. Then, let's be honest, they outgrew me. It got to the point where I had to stop seeing them as a rival because I was kind of like RC Cola where ESPN and PFF were Coke and Pepsi. I had my audience, but they weren't really my rival anymore. They were selling to teams and they were much larger. Then I got to be friends with some of them. I get along well with Steve and Sam and Eric Eager. They're really good people working there and they started doing really good analytical work, not just those grades, but actual analytics. I felt like they were doing good stuff. So now, it's weird to see them broken apart. It's a little bit of an opportunity, I'll be honest. Like we want people to come to FTN. We have a lot of data at FTN. This is my little advertisement. We do a lot of charting. We have a lot of data and people should check it out. We see this as a little bit of an opportunity, but it's also very bittersweet because you don't want to see a leader in your industry get slaughtered.

Speaker 2:
[04:27] When you started off, you founded Football Outsiders, and Football Outsiders, and you told me this over email, you said that you were fucked over by venture capitalists, but in a different way than pro football focus is currently being fucked over by venture capitalists. Could you explain how Football Outsiders ended? Whatever you can, tell us about it. I don't know if you have legal obligations that keep you quiet in some regard.

Speaker 3:
[04:52] I'm not sure what my legal obligations are anymore either.

Speaker 1:
[04:55] In that case, as your attorney, I would advise you to disregard any concerns that you have.

Speaker 2:
[05:00] Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[05:00] Go off, King. It's a podcast. It's not actionable.

Speaker 3:
[05:04] The biggest similarity is the lesson that if you sell your company, you don't know if the group that you sold your company to is going to sell them to someone else. Because Neil Hornsby is not involved with PFF anymore. He doesn't work for them anymore, the way I stayed with Football Outsiders after I sold it.

Speaker 2:
[05:26] Neil was the founder of Pro Football Focus, just for people who don't know.

Speaker 3:
[05:29] Yeah. He probably didn't think, well, eventually, Collinsworth is going to sell PFF to this big conglomerate that serves teams, and they're going to get rid of the consumer. He probably didn't think that. So I didn't think when I sold to Edge Sports, which is the Louisville company that bought Football Outsiders in, I think, 2018. I didn't think that eventually that they were going to sell me to another group. So what happened with Football Outsiders is less a case of venture capitalists draining all the money out of the company, and more a case of just money mismanagement. I felt like if we were going to grow, I had to have other people handle the business stuff. I'm just not a great business guy. And that was the-

Speaker 1:
[06:15] It's a defector lesson, too.

Speaker 3:
[06:17] Yeah, that was the gamble. The gamble I took by selling was these guys will be able to grow Football Outsiders in a way that I couldn't. And we weren't able to do it. And so there just wasn't enough money coming in. And then they sold to these Canadian guys. And then those guys were impossible to communicate with and disappeared off the face of the earth. And they did the thing where they didn't pay anyone for two months without telling me, hey, you know, we're struggling with money. Maybe you should tell the freelancers not to write for a couple of months because we can't pay them. Like the problem isn't that you can't pay freelancers. It's that you have freelancers do things for you and you can't pay them. Like it's one thing to say, hey, we're gonna have to downsize here, but it's another to have people continue to write for you and then not pay them, which is what happened. And then they stopped paying me.

Speaker 1:
[07:13] I feel like there's been stories like this in, especially in like the fantasy space. There was a lot of it, fantasy football, baseball type stuff, not like swords and sandals.

Speaker 2:
[07:23] It was all across media. Vice is guilty of that in spades.

Speaker 1:
[07:27] But there's these sorts of owners though, like this specific thing that Aaron's talking about where it's like instead of making a difficult decision about your business one way or another, you just fucking go dark and are like, we're not gonna like pay anybody and we'll see how they respond to that. And that is just like, you're not, that's not on the menu. Like there's ways that you do this or ways that you don't do it, but you can't just decide to stop fucking paying people. Except I guess you can if you're the richer party in there, you just sort of, like how did this, how did it wind down, Aaron? Like, so when they stopped paying you, I'm assuming you were like, all right, we're finished here? Or like, what do you do?

Speaker 3:
[08:08] Yeah, basically, I was like, we're finished here. And I had a thing in my contract that said that if I left for good reason, that I could continue to use all of my methods. You know, I wrote them a letter saying, I'm leaving for good reason. And the good reason is you haven't paid me for two months.

Speaker 1:
[08:22] Yeah, it's solid as those things go.

Speaker 2:
[08:24] Did you have to buy it or did you have to lawyer up?

Speaker 3:
[08:27] I mean, I have a lawyer, but they never sued me or anything. I haven't talked to those guys in years. They're impossible to contact. And the fact that it is across international boundaries makes it even more difficult. There is a go-between that I have with them. And I am trying to negotiate. I would like to get the URL and the archives back just to put the site up as an archive. Like it would just say, you know, this is a site that existed for 20 years, and it would have links to what everyone's doing now. You know, it would have a link to FTN and a link to Mike Tenier's substack and a link to what Bill Barnwell is doing and whoever else wrote for me for all those years. And then it would have 20 years of archives, and we would just leave it up like that. That's the way I would like to do it. But I can't do it unless these guys communicate with me because the archives are all saved on a server somewhere, and they own the URL, but the URL is dead.

Speaker 2:
[09:21] That's a dead link. So those archives are not public. Even if I wanted to pay as a consumer to look at them.

Speaker 3:
[09:28] Yeah, way back machine. Yeah, way back machine.

Speaker 2:
[09:30] What a load of shit.

Speaker 1:
[09:31] Yeah, and there's so much of this happening too. And it's the kind of thing where we ran a story I thought was a real good story by A. Beam about the way that this has worked out in hip hop media from like the nineties and the early aughts, that it's just, it's not even that the stuff, like, you know, he talked to a bunch of writers that had written stuff for like big magazines that existed, things that you'd like see on the shelf at Barnes and Noble when there was a magazine shelf at Barnes and Noble, we're all old enough to remember that. And some of those writers were like, well, you know, whatever, like, I don't stand by everything that's in that. Like, I made some jokes that I'm not proud of, right? But the idea of an archive, again, of a website that existed for 20 years, and that is like a part of how that, like an entire generation of football fans understood what was happening in football at that time. Like, yeah, you can say it's silly, and I'm sure that if it all came back and you had to read every blog that had your byline on it, you would be cringing a few times. I would for sure do the same. But watching that just blink out of existence, it goes beyond sort of a professional pride or like caring about the discourse sort of thing. Like, there's a historical record of how we got to where we are now, that that is essential to and not being there feels more than insulting. Like, I mean, I feel like that is like a desecration of something.

Speaker 3:
[11:02] I am very proud of my coaching tree. For people who don't know, there are a lot of football writers who came through football outsiders over the years, and who I edited, and who I helped mold. And that site has the early work of Bill Barnwell, and the early work of Bill Connolly, and the early work of Doug Farrar, and Michael David Smith, and Ryan Wilson, and all of these people. And I would definitely pay a little bit of money for them, for the rights, to just put it up as an archive of all these people's work from 20 years, because I'm very proud of it. And yeah, it is interesting to go back and see what we said about, I mean, Lord knows Buffalo Bills fans will never let me forget what we said about Josh Allen. So we might as well go back and see the good stuff too, right?

Speaker 1:
[11:46] Bring the archive back, but all Josh Allen content is paid for. If you want to see you being like, yeah, sure, he's fast. I think you should be returning kicks, though. You got to pay $5 for that.

Speaker 2:
[11:57] Do you have access to that data? Like, do you keep it on like a hard drive? Have you kept it on a hard drive in your home so you can use it for FTN?

Speaker 3:
[12:05] I have some rough drafts of articles. I have all the numbers. I mean, I have all the data. I have all the play by play. You know, my play by play data goes back to 1977 now. I have all of that stuff. Jeez. Like, it's the articles. It's the writing that is missing.

Speaker 2:
[12:22] Do you worry about the future of football data research in general with all these companies getting sort of eaten up by conglomerates that may not have the best interest of the product at heart?

Speaker 3:
[12:36] I mean, I feel pretty good about FTN. And I feel like there's room, there's always going to be enough fans that are interested in advanced data for at least one site that does advanced data. And if conglomerates eat up sites, then new sites will pop up. There's always room for at least one, maybe a couple of sites that do this kind of data, like the charting stuff that we do, cornerback coverage and all of that stuff, to be publicly available, not just the next gen stats that the league keeps, but it's kind of hit it and they sell some of it, but they hide some of it. I think there's room for a site like that to always exist, and I hope that I'm always working for it.

Speaker 1:
[13:17] I also think it's like for the way, I follow baseball more closely than football, but I think that that is another space where there has been a lot of analytics. There's a lot of private analytics that teams subscribe to, and then there's your public-facing sites like FanGraphs and Baseball Perspectus, that have, I think this is like, beyond how interesting I find the content on those sites, which is very, I think also it's helpful to the broader ecosystem of analytics in that, in baseball anyway, that those sites have people doing the math. A lot of times they're like, you know, maybe they're in college or they're in grad school or they're hobbyists. Those people routinely do get front office jobs. They sort of like, that is a healthy thing.

Speaker 2:
[14:02] They're even working for the Panthers now.

Speaker 1:
[14:03] Right. And this is like, that to me is normal. This is how you create a pipeline. Talking about coaching trees and stuff, the site that I started with people years ago, the Classical, it's like one of the great points of pride in my life, that people that wrote for that went on to write for other publications. You need that in order to find new talent to write for magazines and websites. There need to be smaller ones that are maybe paying less, or maybe they're not paying all where people can show out, demonstrate what they can do, and then people are able to find them. If you remove those rungs from the ladder, and all you have left is the corporate level pay site stuff, and then people posting on Twitter, then you've cut the bottom out of how people are going to understand this stuff and how they're going to get jobs in it.

Speaker 3:
[14:53] Thank God for the NFL fast start package, publicly available data, the guys who put that package together, and the league for not blocking it. Because that means that there's always freely available data of some sort for new people to play with.

Speaker 2:
[15:10] I think it's a net good, and proof is in the pudding. You are still here, you have your own site, and there are other indie analytics sites or journalists that I rely on and that I really like. However, I want to talk to you about one other element in here, which is gambling, because many of the sites or the journalists that I consult on these matters, including yours, they're closely aligned with gambling interests, at the very least, for the sake of just maintaining a livelihood. I know people who have to take money from FanDuel and stuff like that to keep their newsletters going. How comfortable are you with FTN's relationship with gambling, because you have gambling content on the site?

Speaker 3:
[15:50] It is part of life, and I've said for a few years that it's become the black hole that sucks in all content in the sports world. Like everything had become associated with gambling. I think we've learned over the last year or so, that the audience for gambling may not be as big as we thought it was, and that maybe the audience for stuff that isn't gambling is bigger than we thought it was, and maybe we're going to need to have these sponsorships. One thing that happens with Draft Kings and FanDuel is it's like they're always looking for new subscribers. They're always looking for new users. They're going to run out of people to be new. There's only so many people who could be new before everybody's tried it already, and you have to have another strategy to get people to use your stuff.

Speaker 2:
[16:36] Gambling addicts die. They go broke or they die by suicide. So once you've maxed out the gambling addict population, they start to go away. You start to cultivate new ones unless you're advertising in the fucking NICU or some shit like that, which they could probably do if they could.

Speaker 1:
[16:55] I'm curious about, Aaron, to what you said about the gambling content. Obviously, people are gambling. A great deal of money is being spent on all of this. They don't read blogs that are basically aimed at here are some good daily fantasy things or whatever. You've just found that they don't... So they're just gambling purely off vibes? Is that the sense that you're getting, that they're...

Speaker 3:
[17:18] Some people will read our advice. Absolutely. That's why we do it, right? Like people subscribe to us for... And some people subscribe to us for gambling advice, and some people for DFS. But a lot of people for just straight fantasy. All of Jeff Radcliffe's stuff is pretty much straight, year-long fantasy stuff. And he's very popular and he's a huge part of what drives our subscription. And I think that it may not be as driven by gamblers as we thought it was.

Speaker 2:
[17:47] Does that bear out in your P&L sheet?

Speaker 3:
[17:50] Like I said, I'm not a very good business person. So I'm not like seeing the P&L all the time.

Speaker 2:
[17:54] But yeah, but like you have someone telling you, hey, this is doing well.

Speaker 3:
[17:58] Given what we talk about, I think you're going to see things move away a little bit from gambling and more towards things like fantasy and just fans of advanced data who want advanced data.

Speaker 1:
[18:10] It's really heartening in some ways that there are still people that want that. I think this is the existential question that everybody in the business of selling words about sports for subscription prices sort of has is like, does anybody care about this as what it is? Like do they like it the way that I like it?

Speaker 3:
[18:31] One of the problems with the venture capitalists getting involved in anything, but like with analytics is that sometimes you have to accept that you can just make a good living. It doesn't have to be constant growth.

Speaker 2:
[18:43] Yeah. I agree with you on that. The other thing is, I think in terms of gambling content, I think that the average gambling addict, that just gets in the way of their ability to place a bet. Like they don't want to waste any time losing money. They want to get right to the action. So the idea of reading like three paragraphs on who you should bet on or something like that, that's time that in their gambling addicted brain, they're wired to not want that. They're wired to want to push the bet button as many times as they possibly can.

Speaker 1:
[19:14] There's also that tiering of who is participating in all of this. Because I think that there's a lot of people that, there's good and bad sports gamblers, I guess. It's not a habit that I am looking to pick up, but there's people that can use all of these tools and have a really fine grained understanding of what is going on. For instance, in college basketball, stuff where there's so much data that it would be very, very difficult for any normal person to like, for lay reasons to understand it. That there's people that would get really deep in that and then try to make money off of it. Then there's people that I think are the ones that you're describing, Drew, where it's basically like every Sunday morning, they bet $600 on bullshit just because they don't know how not to do it at this point.

Speaker 2:
[20:02] I think the addiction rewires you, so it's just a reflex and you just bet for the sake of betting. I have one more question before we go to the break. This is the other thing I was thinking of. So I just want to be clear, Aaron, you see a distinct difference between gambling and fantasy. Would that be fair to say?

Speaker 3:
[20:18] Yeah, I do. I do see a distinctive, I mean, DFS sort of straddles the line between the two, but there's a difference between gambling and me and my friends do a league for 250 bucks and you have to track it for six months.

Speaker 1:
[20:33] Yeah, I think that's, I mean, again, as somebody who does a league with their friends and has to track it for six months, of course, I agree with you, but also I do think that there's like, if we're basically tracking all of this on a continuum of, this is kind of my job or like this is something that I do because I, I think that it is going to make me money all the way down to like, I appreciate this the way that I appreciate art or music or books or whatever, I get the same satisfaction out of it. I do put fantasy in a different place because I think it's just another way to leverage this like sort of nerdy collector brain instinct to know as much and retain as much as you can. Maybe that's me sort of blowing smoke up my own ass about why I do the things that I do, but that is how it scans to me always.

Speaker 2:
[21:20] There's an evolution though. I think you can go from playing league fantasy, you get bored with that, you go to DFS because it's just faster, just, you know, and the rosters change every week. And then you go from there because those DFS providers also have their own sports books, you just go to straight up sports gambling. Like I think that, and I am not, I'm not one to believe in gateway drugs. Like that's the average, you know, that's usually bullshit. Anyone who says something's a gateway drug or a slippery slope is usually just blowing shit in your ears or it's blowing-

Speaker 1:
[21:50] Blowing shit in your ears is the expression you usually hear. Yeah, I mean-

Speaker 2:
[21:53] Yeah, yeah. You know what, they are. They're blowing a big old pile of shit in your ear. But in this case, I think there is-

Speaker 1:
[21:59] Gross.

Speaker 2:
[22:00] I think there is a bit of merit to it, but you know, obviously I don't have the metrics.

Speaker 3:
[22:04] There is a thing where fantasy, a lot of the time, is like poker night with your friends, whereas gambling is like sitting at a slot machine just pulling on a lever.

Speaker 2:
[22:15] Yeah, it's very solitary.

Speaker 3:
[22:16] And there's something social about fantasy when you're in a league with your friends, your buddies from college, or people from work or something. I mean, we have a league that has been going for 23 years, and last summer, half of us went to a Worcester Red Sox game together just to be social. And that's just a very different experience.

Speaker 2:
[22:35] Imagine voluntarily going to Worcester. That's impressive.

Speaker 3:
[22:38] That's where I live, man. I live in Worcester.

Speaker 1:
[22:43] Get disparaged at Worcester not knowing if the guy's from Worcester or not. My car died there some summers ago. And I remember it was, I mean, it started dying in Connecticut. It was basically like it had a cracked head gasket, and my parents had been driving it around with one for a while. And they were like, wow, this engine gets really hot now. Anyway, have fun driving to Maine in this car. We'll tell you more about the problem later. And we got it overheated on the Merritt Parkway. And then it was just overheating over and over and over again. It was Worcester was finally where we got it junked. But I remember we got to a, it was summertime. We got to a big hotel in downtown Worcester, totally empty. And the people behind the desk were very nice. We were kind of like, you know, like welcome. We were like, right, thanks. And what brings you to Worcester? And my wife was just like, car trouble.

Speaker 2:
[23:32] Wow. She was honest.

Speaker 1:
[23:35] They were like, all right, here's your key card. Sorry. I could see that you're having a really bad time. And that was that.

Speaker 2:
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Speaker 2:
[27:01] And we're back with Aaron Schatz of FTN Fantasy. Let's talk about the NFL itself. Aaron, you are a proud Worcesteronian fan, a Patriots fan. How do you feel about AJ Brown coming to your team, which has been, it's not official, but it's done. Adam Schefter did the whole tipped pick thing, saying it was the Patriots have their eyes on him, something like that. So are you happy about it?

Speaker 3:
[27:26] I don't know what's going back. It's hard to know how happy I am until I know what's going back to the Eagles in the trade, but he's very good. The ESPN receiver tracking metrics that are based on the NextGen stats, he was number one for three years, and then last year he was sixth. So he's a very talented receiver, and he's probably got a couple of years left before he starts to decline. So this is a really good player. So in that way, I'm happy, but I don't know what they're sending back.

Speaker 2:
[27:58] Also, would they have to extend him post-trade?

Speaker 3:
[28:01] I'm assuming that there would be a new contract involved. There usually is, and that always makes these trades less valuable, because the fact is you're giving up the draft capital and the money, whereas if you sign a guy in free agency, you're only giving up the money. That's why the Dexter Lawrence thing is a little bit questionable, just because they handed him a big contract extension, and they lost the number 10 pick, even though we know it's not a good draft, number 10 pick isn't worth as much, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 2:
[28:29] But it was only a one-year extension on top of the deal he already had.

Speaker 3:
[28:33] Yeah, I thought it was going to be longer.

Speaker 2:
[28:35] It was under 30 million AUV. So I don't know, I'll put it to you this way, I was surprised at the value of the extension. I thought that he was asking for the moon, and that's why the Giants had to get room. Turns out he just hated working for the New York Giants. So that was fun.

Speaker 1:
[28:52] And that seems to be the somewhat like a extenuating circumstance with the AJ Brown thing too. I was surprised, again, you know, lousy draft, whatever. I was surprised the Giants got as much back as they did for Lawrence, not because I don't think he's great. I mean, he's like probably declining, but you know, so are we all. It's just also like, I think of players that ask for trades, like high profile NFL guys, like are basically distressed assets as a result of like everybody knowing that they're on the market. Like obviously AJ Brown is like one of the very best receivers, you know, in football. But like I don't, I can't imagine that the Patriots are going to have to trade a first round pick for him because it's like, he can't go back. He's not like that situation had soured so much that it just seemed like he was, he's going to go somewhere, right? Like does that not push the price down just because of the fact that?

Speaker 3:
[29:46] I think it does. It's likely that it might be a second. And the fact that it's a pick in next year rather than this year, I mean, it's supposed to be a better draft, but they always discount picks in the future. So you're probably right in that it's probably not a first, but I doubt it's any lower than a second.

Speaker 1:
[30:03] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[30:03] Pat's question for you, are you angry at Mike Vrabel for cheating on his old lady? Are you just disappointed in Coach Vrabel?

Speaker 3:
[30:10] As someone who was in a marriage that imploded, it's hard for me to judge anybody, but I wish he had not been so darn public about it. That is frustrating because this is an organization that constantly has preached no distractions and it's a gigantic distraction.

Speaker 2:
[30:27] No, that's the thing he's sorriest about was, I'm just so sorry I caused the distraction. Nothing, none of you stepped out.

Speaker 1:
[30:34] I think that there is a level of football brain where the thing he really is sorriest about is having created a distraction. We should be focusing on winning. And then there's another thing, you have to go home and be like, so Sedona, I bet you have some questions. But there's a sense of variable priorities are like, football is very, very high up, and then everything under it is in the little type that tells you that you Brelvy might cause your torso to fall off.

Speaker 3:
[31:01] I mean, as a fan, what I care about is the distraction. I mean, I don't know what the situation is in his marriage. I don't know what his wife is like, etc. But as a fan, what matters to me is the team, right? I mean, I don't want to see anybody's marriage break up, but there's a lot of stuff going on there that we have no idea about.

Speaker 2:
[31:19] That's true. Let's go over to other teams. Before I ask you about The Draft, I want to ask you about Free Agency in general. Which team so far has handled the offseason the shrewdest in your opinion, and according to your research, and which team has just left you utterly baffled, and why is it the Steelers?

Speaker 3:
[31:37] So I wrote some notes about this. I actually like the Steelers, but I don't think they're the shrewdest. I think they've made some good moves. Jamel Dean was fantastic by My Metrics last year.

Speaker 2:
[31:49] He was the best corner in football last year by Your Metrics.

Speaker 3:
[31:51] By My Metrics. That's correct. Now, I mean, cornerback coverage is very inconsistent from year to year, but still really good signing. Pittman, I like the Pittman trade. I don't like the Pittman extension, but it's not shrewd. The fact that the Panthers and Raiders spent a lot of money is not shrewd, because they had a lot of money to spend, so they bought a lot of good players. All right, that's good. Like they overpaid for Jalen Phillips, you know. I think the shrewdest might be the 40 Niners because of the Oda-Gwazua trade that got them a really good asset for not that much. And because they finally got an extension done with Trent Williams, and everybody likes the Mike Evans signing.

Speaker 2:
[32:32] By the way, in retrospect, and I will always believe this, that when Washington traded Trent Williams to the Niners, that was for like a third and something else. That is one of the most lopsided shitty trades. That's like the-

Speaker 3:
[32:45] You're talking about distressed assets. He was so angry at their medical staff, they had no choice.

Speaker 2:
[32:50] Well, like this. Well, because they almost fucking killed him.

Speaker 3:
[32:53] They can't.

Speaker 1:
[32:54] Did he have like, I don't remember the exact sort of, I mean, obviously I know that who owned the football team at that point. So there's nothing you could tell me that would surprise me. But did they like misdiagnose a staff infection or some shit? Like what did they do?

Speaker 2:
[33:07] It was a growth in his fucking head that they misdiagnosed. Oh my gosh. It was vintage Dan Snyder shit.

Speaker 3:
[33:16] It also sounds like they just didn't have a good bedside manner. Like they just didn't deal with him well and they just weren't honest with him about things and he got pretty pissed off.

Speaker 1:
[33:24] Also vintage Dan Snyder.

Speaker 2:
[33:25] Not the best people managers in the world over in Ashburn. Okay, so let's go over-

Speaker 1:
[33:30] Dan's a friend, okay? Friend of the pod. I'm sorry.

Speaker 2:
[33:33] All right, so let me ask you about the shit teams in Free Agency. I mentioned the Steelers because I'd find their quarterback situation utterly appalling. Because if they have a handshake deal with Aaron Rodgers to come back, well, cookie for them. But Rodgers was like no great shakes. He was okay, but he got to win on the fucking Super Bowl anytime soon. So what team this off season has left you like, huh, why are they doing that?

Speaker 3:
[33:57] Two teams I'll mention. The Chargers have a ton of cap space and didn't sign like anybody. Like they had a bunch of cap space, Colestrange, like whatever. I mean, really like they barely signed anything. The other is the Dolphins, because if you're going to punt on the whole year, why do you give a lot of money to Malik Willis? And why are you not trading Devon HN? If you're punting on the whole year, why don't you trade HN and get something for him?

Speaker 2:
[34:30] Is it possible that HN ends up being on another team by the end of this weekend? That's possible, sure. Prior to the draft, I never bought... The Vikings have said, Johnathan Grinard is going to be on our team next year, but I'm sure he's still on the block if someone offers them a first or something like that. So, I don't know. The Willis thing, I feel like Willis' contract was not that expensive. It's like, okay, we're punting on this season, but if we happen to get a good quarterback out of it...

Speaker 3:
[35:00] Yeah, but how are they going to judge whether he's any good or not when he's throwing to Taj Washington?

Speaker 2:
[35:06] That is Taj Washington disrespect, sir.

Speaker 1:
[35:09] I do think that's the thing that is harder. When an NBA team tanks, the best practices in tanking are to basically make it impossible through the players that are on your roster for you to succeed. Even if all of those guys hit their hundred and fifth percentile outcome, the process sixers, those guys just were not NBA quality starting players. The Dolphins, I imagine that they're going to succeed in being bad, but I do think that that's an interesting question. It's basically like, so you've got a quarterback that you're paying something like market rate, and you've got, or whatever, under, this is the deal you get before you get the big deal if he ever gets it. Then yeah, you've got this player who's like did on HN like I know almost entirely as a fantasy contributor, if I'm being honest, I don't watch a lot of Dolphins tape, but like that is a really good player. Like if they rock and roll, he's good. If they really wanted to tank out, it's like don't have guys there that could accidentally win you six games. And then you wind up with like whatever the 13th pick or something.

Speaker 2:
[36:14] It is a touch Jetsy. Did you like the Jets moves this off season, Aaron, which they got older by like 10 years per player?

Speaker 3:
[36:22] Do you like going seven and 10?

Speaker 2:
[36:25] I love it.

Speaker 1:
[36:26] That would be a huge bounce back for them though. That would be like the best record they've had since.

Speaker 3:
[36:30] It would, but is that really, is that what they need? I mean, they built a bit of a defense with a bunch of old guys, which means that they'll have a better defense this year with a bunch of old guys who by the time they build an offense, those guys are all going to be gone. So I don't know what the point was.

Speaker 2:
[36:45] According to pretty much everyone inside the league, this is a truly awful draft class. I'm not going to say that it's historically awful. We're talking about maybe a dozen guys who have a first-ground grade on them internally in front offices. How do you expect teams to deal with this problem on Thursday night?

Speaker 3:
[37:00] I think the Bengals did it already. If bad teams are going to make players available, good teams are going to trade draft picks for them, because they're going to be like, well, this pick isn't going to help us this year, certainly, let's go get a player.

Speaker 1:
[37:14] Yeah, I mean, that makes some sense. The idea is that basically like two years of Dexter Lawrence is more valuable than X number of years that you would get under contract for whoever you'd pick 10th, like, yeah.

Speaker 3:
[37:26] And the opposite of that is if I'm the Vikings and I think I'm a contender, and we can talk about whether they are or not, but I would rather have greener than a pick this year.

Speaker 2:
[37:35] Yeah, that's a whole other thing. And I don't want to get down the Vikings morass with people. Well, let me ask you just about one player in particular, because we all know Fernando Mendoza is going to go first. He'll be the first quarterback taken. I am of the mind that I don't think any other quarterback will go in the first round, but one keeps getting talked up, and that's Alabama's Ty Simpson. Is Ty Simpson a bad quarterback or the worst quarterback, Aaron?

Speaker 3:
[38:02] I think just bad.

Speaker 1:
[38:04] Wow, he's high on Ty Simpson.

Speaker 3:
[38:05] I mean, you're talking about that guy. Going back to the early days of my analysis, we figured out in the early days that you could predict a quarterback in part based on just games started and completion rate. Now, we have a more complicated system, but the fact is the record of guys with one year of college starting is bad, and Ty Simpson was bad for half that year.

Speaker 2:
[38:31] Yes.

Speaker 3:
[38:31] He had half a good year. Half a good year, that's it, man. That is not promising.

Speaker 2:
[38:38] It was the first half of that season. It was against the Southeastern Louisiana Techs of the World or whatever.

Speaker 3:
[38:44] Wisconsin and whatever, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[38:46] Can you say more about the ability to predict with some success, a quarterback's success basically on whether a team continues to put them under center? How does that work? It makes sense to me intuitively.

Speaker 3:
[39:01] It was like if you play when you're younger, you're better because you got in over older players. Then often if guys stayed later, they got more experience and so that's not the case at other positions. At wide receiver, it's better if you come out earlier. But it just so happened that at quarterback, it was better if you came out later. Now, we have a more complicated methodology now that considers things like quarterbacks mobility and who his teammates are. Are you Johnny Manziel throwing to Mike Evans all the time, that kind of thing. But when we started, it was Dave Lewin was the guy who came up with it, who's now the, he runs the Maine Celtics in the G League. Oh, wow. He's in the basketball world.

Speaker 1:
[39:44] Partied hard with the Maine Celtics. I had been to games.

Speaker 3:
[39:46] He's the one who came up with this, that yeah. And it turns out Bill Parcells had said something similar in the past that we didn't realize, that basically you just wanted to look at game started and completion percentage.

Speaker 2:
[39:57] No shit. Do you believe in positional value in a draft, this shallow in talent? Because like Jeremiah Love is sort of the superstar of the main character of this particular draft. You go as high as number four or even number three, but he plays a low value position in running back. Would you rather draft someone like him high or past Love, like a highly ranked first round graded, internally linebacker or safety over a higher value position, like an offensive tackle or a wide receiver who has a second round grade in your room?

Speaker 3:
[40:32] I think I'd still believe in positional value. But I will say for running back, it's a little different than the other positions. For running back, the issue is not how important the position is, as much as they're all really good, and so there isn't that much of a difference between a great one and a good one, and you're so dependent on your teammates, you're so dependent on your offensive line, you're so dependent on your scheme, that a guy like Love isn't going to really have a big impact unless he goes to a team that has the line that can block for him, witness Ashton Jantey. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[41:07] Who did not?

Speaker 3:
[41:08] Whereas a safety and a linebacker, we can ask, are those positions as important? But if Sonny Stiles goes to a team, he's going to make an impact. It's just linebacker doesn't make as big an impact as edge rusher, but he doesn't necessarily need the guys in front of him to be great for him to make a lot of plays in the same way a running back does.

Speaker 2:
[41:31] I think you partially answered this when we were talking about quarterbacks, but how much should age factor into a team selection process? Because I remember, it was only a few years ago when I remember that it was very important from an analytical standpoint to draft guys who were relatively young, because you didn't want a guy who essentially reached his prime in college because there was no upside past that.

Speaker 3:
[41:53] Yeah, and that's still true. I mean, we want quarterbacks who started three or four years, but you want them to have started as freshmen. You don't want guys who started years three through six. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[42:04] Of course, in Beck. Yes, okay.

Speaker 3:
[42:06] Yes. That's right.

Speaker 1:
[42:07] The challenge with analytics in general is people need to keep them in this broader context. The idea of being like, Chris Wanky, that's a lot of experience. Then you're drafting a 27-year-old guy who's played minor league baseball for a long time or whatever.

Speaker 2:
[42:22] There are old guys in this draft.

Speaker 3:
[42:24] Sadiq, I think, is a great prospect in part because he's 21.

Speaker 2:
[42:28] This is Kenyon Sadiq of Oregon, the tight end.

Speaker 3:
[42:30] Yeah, the tight end is that there's so much growth potential there that you can be like, well, he didn't have as much production in college as you'd like, but the workouts are off the charts and he is so young. He's the youngest tight end, I think, in the draft. So the age absolutely matters. It's just like it matters in other sports because there is the growth potential. And the NIL world is going to make this all very confusing. I mean, we live in a different world where guys have reason to stay in college longer and they transfer and they play at two or three schools over the course of their careers. Like they're going to go on Sunday Night Football now and be like, you know, I'm from Michigan. And you're like, you played one year at Michigan and you played three years at Eastern Washington and you played one at Hofstra. Like, I don't know, like guys are going to move around so much.

Speaker 2:
[43:22] It's when they do the jokey thing in the intros and they're like, I'm from Ridgefield High School or like I'm from Narnia.

Speaker 3:
[43:27] Like at least you went to Ridgefield High School for four years.

Speaker 1:
[43:31] Right. Just say the place where you spent the most time. You can't be like, I'm from all over. You're not allowed to say Sam Elliott shit on Sunday Night Football.

Speaker 2:
[43:40] Are you able to capably project how players with recent or long injury histories in college, like Jordan Tyson in this draft or Caleb Banks in this draft. Are you able to project, and obviously you can't know for certain, but are you able to project how they are able to stand up to the rigors of playing in the league after being drafted?

Speaker 3:
[43:58] I am not, but there are people doing work on that. Certainly that is something that the analysts for teams are doing a lot of work on. And then like Sports Info Solutions does a lot of work on injury stuff. So there are people out there trying to determine just how much injuries mean for these prospects, but it's not something that I study particularly.

Speaker 2:
[44:18] Why don't you do that? Why are you so lazy?

Speaker 3:
[44:21] Because I'm not really a draft guy. I've got my projection systems for certain positions, but I don't get into the weeds on draft prospects. I don't think of myself as a scout. Like when the draft comes and I know how they fit into the teams that drafted them, then I really start paying attention to them.

Speaker 2:
[44:37] You do have production systems. You said you had it for quarterbacks, running backs, wide receivers and edges. Is that correct? How do they work?

Speaker 3:
[44:43] Yes, those are the four. I should give props. First of all, Nathan Forster and Vince Fairhigh worked on the systems for edge rushers, running backs and wide receivers. And two guys, Alex Ulbrecht and Jeremy Rosen, do the quarterback system based on some other work that we've done in the past, combined with some work that they did academically. They look at different things, some of them, the quarterback one is just based on performance in college and who your teammates are. Some of them include workout, like the edge one or the running back one should include some workout numbers from combine or pro day, which itself is becoming complicated because guys are doing fewer workouts now. Like we had to just drop the three cone. I can't remember which of them we dropped it from, but guys just don't do the three cone anymore. So we just had to drop, we just can't consider it.

Speaker 2:
[45:34] Right, if you fuck it up, it costs you money, right? Same with the 40, like a lot of guys don't run the 40 anymore.

Speaker 3:
[45:39] Yeah, it's easier. More guys are running the 40 at least at their pro day, but they're not even doing the three cone at their pro day. But I forgot to mention tight ends. I do a tight end system also. It only predicts yardage though. It doesn't predict like blocking ability. But like it says, for example, what everybody knows, which is it's a one man running back class. Like love is so far ahead of everybody else. There's a good number of edge rushers. You know, the wide receivers are, it has certain wide receivers. Like Carnell Tate is not as high as you would think he is, but there's a reason for that. It's because the teammate adjustment is based on teammates who are in the same draft and Jeremiah Smith isn't in this draft. If you account for Jeremiah Smith, then Tate's projection is really good.

Speaker 2:
[46:21] Let me ask you, why do you account for workout numbers for those positions? What makes them valuable when, you know, when guys don't necessarily do certain combine things and when pro days are essentially set up to showcase, you know, these players, you know, they're trying to get the best measurements out of them at their own pro day.

Speaker 3:
[46:40] Yeah, because they still have signal. You adjust pro days a little bit because, you know, pro day numbers are going to be a little bit better than combine numbers. Like a big, the edge is what we call explosion index, which looks at broad jump, vertical jump, and 40 time because it does show you a guy's get off. Like it does actually, you know, guys who weren't, didn't do a lot in college and then have great combine numbers often do produce in the NFL like Ziggy Ansa.

Speaker 2:
[47:08] Which edge had the best explosion metric for this year's try?

Speaker 3:
[47:12] I think it's Reese.

Speaker 2:
[47:14] Oh, Avril Reese of Ohio State. Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[47:16] But Bailey has the best projection because of course, Reese didn't have the same production in college because he wasn't always an edge rusher in college.

Speaker 1:
[47:25] Right.

Speaker 2:
[47:25] He dropped in the college coverage more often than he rushed the passer, correct?

Speaker 3:
[47:29] When you look at the projections, you know that like you don't just look at a number, you know what Reese's story is, so you know why he's different than Bailey.

Speaker 1:
[47:39] Or if you're a bad GM, you don't do that and you look at the numbers and you sort high to low and that is, yeah.

Speaker 3:
[47:46] It is interesting because we all talk about edges now, as if there's no difference between the standing three-four edge and the hand on the ground four-three edge. But it is interesting that the Jets are switching to a three-four base, which means that they do expect that they'll be playing a lot of three down linemen with the edges standing, and that would seem to fit Reese much better than Bailey.

Speaker 2:
[48:10] Does that render the term edge? Should that term not be used anymore? Should we go back to DE and outside linebacker instead?

Speaker 3:
[48:19] No, because there's still way more similarity. I do a lot with history. I mean, people know that I've done all this research into the old play-by-play, and I've done all these old defensive numbers and stuff, and you go back and guys like Bruce Smith were playing a three-four end and would have 13 sacks, which three-four ends just don't have now. Because kind of how the three-four work was different back then than how it's worked for the last few years.

Speaker 2:
[48:45] Because the three-four end now is essentially a tackle, right?

Speaker 3:
[48:48] Right. Yeah. So now the outside linebackers of the three-four and the defensive ends of the four-three, there is still a little bit of a difference, but they are much more alike than they used to be. So it actually makes much more sense to call guys edges. They are much more interchangeable than they used to be. But there is still a little bit of a difference. If you do have a three-four base, which of course you only play 25 percent of the time, because you're mostly playing nickel, but still you are expecting those guys to drop in the coverage a little bit more, Reese does fit a little bit.

Speaker 1:
[49:21] This is the Bruce Smith bit, just it's an opportunity to remember some guys. I'm not going to pass that up. But then also the historic stuff, as you've gone back over that, there have been experiences where looking at data from, like I'm assuming that you were like a kid when Bruce Smith was at his very best, like similar to us. Has there been like a new perspective on guys that you sort of faintly remembered from the 80s and 90s that's changed the way you think about them? Like who are the guys that you would off the top of your head think of as having like either learned a new appreciation from or just sort of recontextualize that way?

Speaker 3:
[49:54] The first thing I'll say, I was not a huge football fan as a kid. I was mostly a baseball fan as a kid. I really got into football after college, because when I was living in Florida as a disc jockey, the way I reconnected with other people from New England was I went to the sports bars to watch Patriots games.

Speaker 1:
[50:12] Many such cases, I'm sure.

Speaker 3:
[50:13] That's when I really became a football. That's when I really got into football. But the guy I think who stands out the most is, I don't think people realize how good Roger Staubach was.

Speaker 1:
[50:25] Really? I sure don't. I think of him as just like some guy who smoked cigarettes and played 70s style football.

Speaker 2:
[50:31] Also, he was before my time, so.

Speaker 1:
[50:34] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[50:34] Number one quarterback in the league in 78 and 79 by Advanced Stats, when he was like 37 years old, like crazy good. Number two in 1977 behind Burt Jones, like so good. Roger Staubach was so good. It's not just that he was with the Cowboys, like he really was that good.

Speaker 2:
[50:55] Was he like the best quarterback of all time?

Speaker 3:
[50:57] No, but I did first. Jarrett Bailey, I think, did a thing where he asked people in the media for their top 30 quarterbacks of the Super Bowl era. I think I had Staubach higher than anyone else. I had him 10th.

Speaker 1:
[51:08] I think this is like a hazard of, I mean, it's for somebody who doesn't have a very rigorous practice of fandom. There's always guys that I have like either overrated in my own mind because I watched them in one good game or because they do shit that I think is cool. I'm really heartened to learn that there's people that have this like very like serious practice of figuring this stuff out. And you still have guys where you're kind of like, no, you're dead wrong on Roger Stalbach.

Speaker 3:
[51:33] I'll give you another one by the way. Same team, Michael Irvin.

Speaker 2:
[51:38] Oh yeah, the playmaker, of course.

Speaker 3:
[51:39] Michael Irvin dominates in my advanced stats. I mean, it's not quite dominates because Jerry Rice is also there at the same time. But he was a first down machine. If you measure and you look at first downs rather than just raw yardage, Irvin is incredible.

Speaker 2:
[51:57] The sake of Cowboys haters listening to this, did you account for his push offs in your measurements?

Speaker 3:
[52:04] No, no, I call that the Plaxico. No, we don't necessarily account for that.

Speaker 1:
[52:09] The Plax factor?

Speaker 2:
[52:11] It ain't cheating if you can get away with it. All right, let me quickly humor me on the Vikings. I will tell you, you asked whether or not the Vikings are contenders or not. First of all, if you haven't won a playoff game since 2019, you're not really a contender. The Vikings are in a very weird spot because virtually every important starter on their team becomes a free agent after this coming season. Whatever they do at 18 and whatever they've done in free agency, they didn't do much. It's all on the hope that they have a 2026 that indicates where they should go in 2027. Everyone's mocking Oregon Safety Dillon Thienem into my team at 18. Should I be happy to get that fucker?

Speaker 3:
[52:53] I mean, I'm not really a judge or a great scout of safeties, so I can't tell you if people are right about him. I mean, I think based on what people think of this draft in general and what they think of the top three safeties, that that seems like a good pick. As far as positional value goes, I do feel like safeties are a little bit more important than off-ball linebackers who are themselves a little bit more important than running backs. So I think, given the fact that it's a weak draft overall, if you take a safety in 18, we're not saying, oh, god, how stupid are you? It seems like a fine pick.

Speaker 2:
[53:31] What is the least valuable position, offense or defense, or offense, including offense and defense?

Speaker 3:
[53:38] Not including special teams?

Speaker 2:
[53:40] Yeah, not including special teams, because you can get a punter or a kicker kind of way.

Speaker 3:
[53:43] Running back.

Speaker 2:
[53:44] Okay, all right.

Speaker 3:
[53:45] And I know that's hard for people because we all grew up with fantasy football, and in fantasy football, the running back is king. But so much of what a running back does is really the offensive line. You know, I feel like I have to apologize because one of the things that analytics has really done in football is lower running back salaries. But I sure hope we've increased offensive lineman salaries just as much because those guys are super important to the running game.

Speaker 1:
[54:09] You're redistributing from one to many. Honestly, I think that's praxis.

Speaker 2:
[54:14] All right, let's move on to the thumb bag. These are real questions from defector readers and distraction listeners. I'm going to give you a baseball question, Aaron. This is from Paul. Since teams no longer bunt or steal or do the hit and run strategy much, discussions by the broadcasters on games has been reduced to pitch selection. It's all they talk about because there isn't any other strategy to discuss. And pitch selection as a way to discuss strategy is very boring and mostly meaningless to fans like me who don't know the nuances of pitching strategy. I'm right, right? Is Paul right, Aaron?

Speaker 3:
[54:48] Well, the other thing is also pitching strategy, but there's a lot of discussion of when should this guy come out? Do we pull him after this batter or do we pull him after the next batter?

Speaker 1:
[54:57] Are you a Mets fan? You're not a Mets fan, are you?

Speaker 3:
[55:00] No, I'm a Red Sox.

Speaker 1:
[55:02] All right, fine, yeah.

Speaker 3:
[55:03] I think he's right. Look, one of the things that I'm very happy about with my life is that football analytics makes for a better game. Unfortunately, baseball analytics has made for a more boring game, but football analytics has made for a more exciting game. Punching sucks, going for it is awesome. It's a better game. Analytics makes for a better game in football, and in baseball, it makes for a little bit of less exciting game with all the walks and strikeouts. It's a bummer because analytics is smart.

Speaker 2:
[55:37] More homers out of it though, don't you?

Speaker 3:
[55:38] You get homers out of it, but yeah, you get a lot of strikeouts and a lot of walks. I'm not against the use of analytics, but there are places in baseball where they feel like they have to tweak the game a little bit to take away the advantages of analytics because they're just not exciting. Whereas in football, we're like stop doing boring shit and do cool stuff.

Speaker 1:
[55:57] Yeah, I think that is pretty right on honestly. We talked about this a little bit with Michael Schur last week, but the ways that MLB had to tweak its product to basically make people try to steal bases again, they did the right thing. It worked, it's good that they did it. I also feel like it's one of those deals where I understand why it fell out of favor. This is the part with like, and this is something that I feel like we talked to Schur about in the past, but that people when in the early days of Sabermetric or like, you know, analytic discourse in baseball, that there was a sense where, I mean, like the Fire Joe Morgan site was like sitcom writers complaining about broadcasters who were just like only wanted months. Like it was this sense of like you were pushing back against this stodgy kind of like self-satisfied style of, you know, doing things the way that they had always been done. And so you felt like you were not just like, you know, arguing with these like old guys that had more money than you, but also you were basically like, I want this to be cooler. I want more. I want to understand it better. I want a more varied experience. And I think you could tell yourself 20 years ago that that's what analytics was going to offer you. And I think that the challenge with it, like looking back at it now, as somebody who was very, I mean, for someone who's like more or less enumerate, like I was very into that stuff, because it was new shit that I didn't know about. And I wanted to know everything that I could, like the same way that I did when I was reading the backs of baseball cards when I was a kid. I just loved that information. And yet like the interests that I have as a fan in seeing like different creative approaches to baseball, my interests and those of a baseball team trying to win games at some point, part ways. And that like the optimized thing, like basically what you're talking about Aaron in terms of like recognizing that like giving away an out on a base path with a stolen base attempt that doesn't work, that's stupid. You only get three outs per inning. You can't waste them like that. Ditto for like, you know, like walks and strikeouts and sacrifices or any of this shit that like you strip out stuff that is inefficient in the game and you are left with like a cleaner, probably, you know, optimized, I guess, in a value neutral way experience. But you have taken out a lot of the color of the thing.

Speaker 2:
[58:23] Let me ask you, I want to know if you agreed with Paul's question that the color guys aren't as interesting because they can only talk about pitch, pitch selection and pitch count.

Speaker 1:
[58:34] I think there's something to that. But I also, I think that that varies from one color commentator to the next. You know, like the problem with John Smoltz isn't that he's out there being like, you should throw a slider here and then they throw a slider or they don't. Like the problem is his fucking attitude. You know, like it's just that he's, he's a turd and he's bad vibes. And as somebody who watches a good broadcasting team, describing the actions of a very bad and often very wrong baseball like club, there's more and less interesting ways to sort of illuminate what's going on there. I think the challenge is that older generations of baseball players who would wind up, you know, on the color commentary thing, guys that played in the 80s and 90s were playing a game that was so different in terms of like what was in it and what the average game was like that it would be very difficult for them to describe this one, even having had 15 years of playing professionally and, you know, a whole life in the game afterwards, they're just, it's like why when NFL commentators, I feel like we've talked about this, have this arc too, where it's like the three years after they retire, when they start doing color commentary, they're right fucking on it because they know exactly what they're talking about. They know the personnel and they know the...

Speaker 3:
[59:51] I don't know here, Rog.

Speaker 1:
[59:52] Yeah, but this is, Rog was a perfect example of that though. Do you remember the first year that he was doing it where everybody was like, holy shit, does he have the playbook? How does he know all this? And then the further he gets from the game, the more he's like, I don't know, just making noises. And I don't mind the noises, but it's different. When you have the facts, you bang on the facts, and when you don't have the facts, you bang on the table. And in this case, it's like when you know what a team is thinking, you say it, and when you don't, you make noises in Jim Nantz's distraction until the next play happens.

Speaker 2:
[60:25] By the way, Aaron's side FTN Fantasy, they cover more than football. You want to do some plugging away here, Aaron, for FTN?

Speaker 3:
[60:32] Oh yeah, absolutely. We have, first of all, our fantasy projections are award-winning. So if you play fantasy, you've got to check out all of Jeff Radcliffe's stuff. We do other sports. We do baseball. We do basketball. We do charting for basketball. So you can check out our stats hub for basketball, and we have all kinds of interesting, like an NBA expected points model, similar to what you see in football, but for the NBA. Like I don't do any of that stuff, but the guys who do it, it's pretty awesome. Then we even do stuff like tennis and golf. Alex Blickel knows golf so well. If you gamble on golf, he's a smart guy to read.

Speaker 2:
[61:10] He doesn't.

Speaker 3:
[61:11] So we do a lot of really cool stuff at FTN and other sports, even though I only do the NFL.

Speaker 1:
[61:18] Do you still care about baseball like that or are you just out on it at this point?

Speaker 3:
[61:21] I don't care about baseball as much as I used to, but I still play in a couple of very hardcore fantasy leagues, very deep, with reserve rounds and stuff. I also play in something called the multi-league, where we draft baseball, basketball, and football all together.

Speaker 1:
[61:40] Oh my God.

Speaker 3:
[61:41] And whoever does the best across all three sports wins.

Speaker 1:
[61:44] That is perverse. Shout out to you. That is like really deep behavior.

Speaker 2:
[61:50] Well, it was an absolute pleasure having you on the podcast for the first time. And this will not be the last time. Just absolute joy to have you on, Aaron. Thank you so much for coming on.

Speaker 1:
[61:58] Thanks.

Speaker 3:
[61:59] Thank you for having me. And again, I'll remind, we're not pre-sailing yet, but we are going to pre-sale the Almanac this year for the first time. So do keep checking FTN and all of my socials. I'm aaronschatz.com on Blue Sky. I'm A. Schatz, NFL, on Threads and on the site The Shall Not Be Named. And make sure you get this year's book. It'll have Jackson Smith the Jigba on the cover.

Speaker 2:
[62:23] Oh, no shit.

Speaker 1:
[62:24] That's a photogenic guy.

Speaker 2:
[62:25] And there's no curse to it either. You're not mad. You can't curse them. It's fine.

Speaker 3:
[62:29] I don't think so.

Speaker 1:
[62:30] They'll have Peyton Hillis on the cover.

Speaker 2:
[62:32] Brandon Grugle is our producer, Mischa Stanton is our editor, our theme song is by Kirk Hamilton. Ads and production services are by multitude, you can subscribe to defector.com. Just go to Defector. Hit the subscribe button. You can also email us at distraction at defector.com or even call us at 909-726-3720 and leave a message. That's 909-Panera-0. I have to go clean out that voicemail and do some of those. Thank you again, Aaron, for coming on. And we'll see you next week. Goodbye, everybody.

Speaker 1:
[62:57] Bye.

Speaker 3:
[62:58] Bye.