All Episodes
Feb. 2, 2020 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
01:26:14
Special Report: Football!

Richard Spencer and Mark Brahmin discuss American football. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Well, I speak to you, Mark, and America as a self-hating football fan.
I've gone as far in becoming a self-hating football fan by writing an article entitled Stop Watching Football, and I have not taken my own advice.
So there it is.
I'm not sure I can pull myself out of this addiction.
At some level.
But maybe I don't want to.
And, you know, that title was meant to be provocative.
Maybe we should get to kind of a deeper understanding of it and to not just see it as, oh, it's a distraction.
So you're not focused on the real enemy or, you know, you're a white nationalist watching a bunch of Africans, you know, run around in a field, you know, both of which, of course, have a kernel of truth to them.
but I think doesn't get it kind of the deeper nature of the sport and kind of what it means to be a fan as well.
So hopefully we'll be able to talk about that.
So you are a fan as well.
We are fans of the two most hated teams in the NFL.
True.
Yes.
So you can go ahead and describe your horrible fandom.
Well, I'm a fan of the most hated team.
being from New England.
So, And literally, it was only New England that was coming.
And like every other – I think there might have been some exception in there.
You know, one of those square states up in your neck of the woods might have been the exception, right?
Up in the Montana area.
I don't know.
Maybe there wasn't even an exception.
So, yeah, it's the most hated team.
And anytime you travel, people make it clear that they hate the New England Patriots.
So if you happen to travel for business or something like this, and you go into a bar, get something to eat, yeah, you're wise not to mention that...
You're Patriots.
Yeah, I get the same thing.
So I was born in Massachusetts.
I was actually born in Boston.
And my first couple years of my life were in Brookline, Massachusetts.
So I actually could be a New England Patriots fan and not be a fair weather fan.
I have that in my birth certificate, you know, allowed to be a...
Patriots fan.
And I actually did length them in the Drew Bledsoe years.
And I would actually say that I am not one of those people rooting against the Patriots at all costs, like anyone but the Patriots.
I might jokingly tell you that, but I'm actually not.
I do generally length them, and I have a little bit of a claim.
But I grew up in Dallas, Texas, and I actually, you know, grew up in the 80s and 90s.
So I, you know, when I was quite young and probably too young to be following sports, that was in the tail end of the Landry era.
So the Cowboys were the team of the 70s, really.
That's when the America's team name came about and Roger Staubach and so on.
Um, and, uh, during the eighties, they, they, they had some good years.
They were kind of a decent team, but they, they, it was basically a decade of, of decline.
And I, I think, uh, Joe Montana's, um, uh, the, the, the catch, uh, which he threw to Clark in the end zone, back of the end zone, an amazing catch and throw in, I think it was 1981 or maybe 1980 that, that almost like signaled the.
Rise of the Niners as the team of the 80s and then also the slow decline of the Cowboys.
And then Jarrah Jones bought the team.
Jimmy Johnson became the coach.
And the first draft pick was Troy Aikman.
And it was really uphill from there and uphill at a startling pace.
They went from a 1-15 squad in 1989.
To making the playoffs a couple years later.
And then I would say those 92 and 93 teams, I think they probably would go up there with any of the great teams ever.
The 85 Chicago Bears and 72 Dolphins.
They did lose a few games, but such is life.
I'm not sure, you know, in a Superbowl, any team could beat them.
They, they had it all.
And, uh, so at that point I became a pretty extreme, uh, you know, Cowboys fan when I was, um, you know, 10 years old to, you know, up until probably 18 or so.
And, uh, but ever since, uh, Jerry Jones fired Jimmy Johnson, um, in, uh, I guess it was a early 94 or something like that.
And, I heard Skip Bayless tell this story.
I think he's probably getting at it.
There was a dinner meeting after the '93 Super Bowl.
Jerry felt like he was being dissed by the coaching staff.
So it was kind of like an adults-only coaches meeting.
And they were all praising each other and saying, you know, we did a great job here.
Everyone did their job.
And no one was toasting Jerry because he was just an owner.
And Jerry was furious.
And it was kind of one of those just-watch-me moments.
He fired the Super Bowl winning coach, which is insane.
The wishbone office in college football, you know, running the option and stuff like that.
It's actually Troy Aikman's coach for one year in, you know, the 80s.
But anyway, he was kind of like an overseer and they were able to win another Super Bowl, although they were not anywhere close to being as dominant and as exciting.
And they all got into all the, you know, their heads became big and there were drugs and sex and rock and roll and suspensions and whatever.
And then ever since then, the Cowboys have kind of been in this long decline where they'll sometimes be really relevant a couple of years, but they're kind of most known for blowing it in the last 25 years.
And even though they've had some great players, Tony Romo and so on, unfairly, to a large degree, he's still remembered as the guy who blows it.
But they still have a huge fan base and fanatical following.
And I think they're almost hated even more because everyone's talking about the Cowboys.
But then they go 8-8 as they did this past year.
But yeah, I've had a few times where I've been in a bar, even a bar here in Montana, where there were some Philadelphia transplants or something.
But I went in there and I guess it became clear that I was rooting for the Cowboys.
But I also kind of made it clear to the guys, like, you know, it's a football game.
I'm not going to get into a fistfight with you on my team.
And, you know, I'm outnumbered six to one to boot.
But anyway, yeah, I mean, it is what it is.
I think there is something inherently toxic about football fandom.
Maybe we should get into that.
I don't know.
Maybe we should talk about the good parts first and then kind of get into the toxic parts.
But there is something great about it.
It's a war game.
It's a game for heroes.
And one thing that I like about it is that there's a kind of tragic quality to it.
You can say this about baseball.
But it's not just about Joe Montana throwing the catch in the end zone in the NFC Championship game.
It's also about Joe Montana getting knocked out of the game and not playing for two years in another playoff match against the Giants.
And him walking off the field kind of dazed and confused with a hurt back and wondering whether he could ever play this extremely violent.
You know, manly sport ever again.
You know, it's about, you know, it's the cliche, the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.
It's about winning and doing it.
But there's also a moment in football where you just physically can't do this anymore.
And you might walk off the field a loser, but there's a certain heroism.
And, you know, being a longtime fighter.
So I can say this about boxing.
It's another kind of, you know, sport where the sport itself is so violent that, you know, it's a brief moment in time and it just kind of can't last.
So I think there is a, you know, there are two aspects about football that I think are, you know, good.
There's...
You know, there's obviously, it's a massive distraction, and it's stupid, and the players are criminals and thugs.
We get it.
But there's another aspect of it, of the, you know, the tribalism of fandom, but also the heroism of playing this violent game.
And I think some people who want to criticize football because of, say, this CTE, the head injuries, concussions, you know, that's a real thing, and it's certainly a concern.
But those who, in a way, want to criticize football on those grounds are missing the point at some level, in the sense that the whole point, it's not a blood sport, but the whole point is that this actually is really dangerous.
And you have to have balls just to step out on the field.
There are no real wimps in football.
Even the kickers are probably tougher dudes than most.
And the guys who are willing to get in the trenches are super tough.
And there's just something about it that you don't find in baseball or basketball or European football that American football has maintained.
And that is the fact that you're a gladiator out there.
And you're always risking something.
And just to watch that, I think there is something kind of, you could say, primitive, but also, I don't know, traditionalist in the sense that this is what sport really is about.
It's not just a kind of measure of pure muscle fiber twitch capacity, like watching a sprint or something, that it's actually a sport about war and danger.
What do you think about that?
Yeah, I mean, I think I largely agree with what you're saying.
I mean, I think that, you know, in the alt-right, there's the meme about sports ball.
I think that sports are good.
Not just the alt-right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think that sports are generally good.
Now, I don't think that they deserve the sort of emphasis that they enjoy now in our culture.
And I also think that the way that sports have developed, they've kind of developed in a sort of malignant way, in a lot of ways.
But in general, I think sports are good.
And I think that that is sort of a good thing for people to also be kind of athletically inclined or interested in sports as youths.
And being, you know, well-rounded.
I mean, it goes to a sort of kind of Apollonian ideal of being, you know, both a scholar and an athlete.
In fact, that idea of the all-American boy is actually in some way a kind of an American Apollo, right?
The all-American boy you imagine is sort of the blonde football player.
Who in a kind of former time was also a good scholar or someone who was interested in school and he had a varsity jacket or at least this is a kind of ideal.
So I think sports are a very good thing.
Not only are they good for fitness, they're a good way of teaching children team skills and being able to work with a team and to socialize kids.
I think sports are wonderful.
You know, and fear.
I think maybe one of the reasons that I get kind of annoyed with a lot of the kids online is that they will try to destroy you with a tweet or whatever.
But it's all done...
Anonymously, there are no real consequences.
It's cyberbullying at some level is not bullying.
It's some new form, which seems to have no redeemable characteristics to it, whereas I think actual bullying is a part of growing up.
And you should get bullied a little bit, and you should bully a little bit, obviously, within moderation.
You know, look, I played football through youth.
And I am not a great athlete, I'll just say that.
I don't have some great story to tell you about how I won the game or anything like that.
But I did play.
And I played as a kid, and I played varsity football at a prep school.
Could I have played at one of these big Dallas prep schools where they have 200 people on the team?
I don't know, maybe not.
But I did play a lot as a high schooler.
Even though I was not great, I was pretty good.
But even in that low level where prep school type thing, it's not even approaching the level of ferocity and violence and speed.
And so on in the college ranks or NFL or something.
Even on that plane, I was afraid.
And if you had to go to practice and you're doing a two-on-two drill where usually there are two offensive linemen or defensive linemen blocking, going at each other, and then there's a running back and a linebacker.
I don't know if they even do this kind of thing anymore because of the...
Concussion question, and we've just gotten softer as a culture.
But you would do a two-on-two drill like that, and there would be some cracking of shoulder pads and helmets.
It was a mono-a-mono battle between both the linemen and the running back and linebacker or defensive back.
And there was fear.
I mean, you're sitting there wondering if the guy's going to run you over, wondering if the guy's going to knock you.
You know, into the stadium, wondering if the guy's going to, you know, just manhandle you and throw you down and you're humiliated in front of the crowd.
And, you know, certainly that kind of thing happened.
But the fact is, you did it.
And you had a sense of primal fear.
And you faced the fear and you did it.
And even if you failed...
Someone would give you a pat on the ass.
And that just kind of manhood ritual, I think, is something that, you know, football still exists, obviously, but I think it's being totally lost among the youth.
And so we've kind of raised a bunch of kids that have never gotten the shit kicked out of them.
They've never been in a situation where it's like, This guy might be better than you.
And you've got to face him down, face your fear, and try your best and maybe fail.
And I don't think they've ever faced...
I mean, I sound like...
People are going to call me a boomer listening to this podcast.
I might sound like an old-timer.
But this is a real thing.
And this is a very important aspect of psychological development.
Yeah, no, I agree.
And there is something distinct about team sports versus individual sports.
Wrestling, running, they're distinct from team sports.
And I think they both actually have their advantages.
I think that wrestling, I think, can probably be a great thing for kids.
Running can be a great thing.
I think it develops a kind of individual discipline.
And it is good to be a kind of strong individual and to be competing as an individual.
But I think team sports also brings something very valuable, where you're required to kind of collaborate and work with other people and not necessarily kind of be the quarterback in every instance.
And football in particular is a kind of more hierarchical sport.
In other words, if you play ice hockey or if you play soccer to a less extent, but basketball or ice hockey, Or, you know, at least in ice hockey in the forward position, I mean, you can be kind of, you can kind of be your own person to a certain extent.
You can be more creative and you can sort of elect to pass more or shoot more or whatever the case may be.
But in football, the sport is much more hierarchical.
And it's also a sport that's, it's a kind of fundamentally fascist sport in the sense that the plans are, you're literally given your sort of role for every play.
By the coach.
And it's kind of the most structured and hierarchical of sports.
And it's also the sport, of all the sports, that probably requires the most humility from the average player on the team.
So in other words, most people playing football are like on the line or not going to even touch the ball during the course of the game.
Most of the people that take the field will never touch the ball.
So they'll never score a touchdown and they'll never be able to, you know, sort of run with the ball or catch the ball.
Sort of these kind of glamour aspects of football.
Most of the people playing are kind of these sort of more servile, anonymous, you know, very important.
You literally cannot at all win without.
You know, putting your ego aside for a little bit and kind of winning in your own little way.
You know, like I played some tight end and fullback, but actually when I started as a, you know, junior and senior year, I was playing on the offensive line.
I played some defense too.
But yeah, like no one called my name on the stadium, but I was actually pretty good.
As I said, I would win my little battles and have my little mini-war with the defensive end or the tackle, the linebacker, but it was one that went unnoticed.
But again, if you're not willing to do that, then the team cannot win, period.
And teams that are better at subordinating people are better teams.
So, yeah, it's absolutely true.
I think there is this.
We were joking about this.
It is a fascist sport.
It's a different sport.
And I don't know if there's anything really comparable to it.
Because I was one time when I was at University of Chicago, I remember I was at this kind of conference and I was a grad student just, you know, hanging out.
And there was this German...
I'm a philosophy professor.
And he was talking about sports.
And I can't remember his name.
I wish I could.
But he mentioned that basketball is all energy trying to find structure.
And so with basketball, the ball is always moving.
People are passing it around, doing stuff.
And there are these moments where it actually works.
And so there's a pick and roll that's beautiful.
It's like you sketched it out.
You know, some behind-the-back pass that, you know, it looks amazing.
So that structure kind of emerges from just the energy.
But football is kind of different where it's all structure looking for that energy, that force where it actually all works together.
And it's that, you know, je ne sais quoi, that thing you can't really describe, which is teamwork.
Yeah, but it is fascist.
I don't know if there's any other sport like football.
I can't think of one in which it's episodic.
They're downs.
Obviously, football is based primitively.
It's based on an old ball game that became rugby and became soccer and so on.
But I actually was looking into this the other day, and there are these kind of ancient ball games, and actually the Middle Ages, and they can go back further into ancient times.
But it's so synthetic.
They're downs.
You have four downs.
There's basically four seconds of furious intensity, and then everyone stops.
Walking to the line and so on.
And, you know, certainly plays exist in basketball and soccer and even baseball to a certain degree.
But in football, it's all plays.
You are doing a literally scripted, you know, invariable to a very large degree.
You know, task.
And when it breaks down, you can kind of improvise and whatever.
But it's not an improvisational sport.
It is a highly structured, scripted sport.
And in that way, it is hierarchical.
You could even say fascist.
And it's this kind of head coach or offensive coordinator who kind of writes the story of the game.
And you see if the players can enact this story.
And he's in a gamesmanship with the other coach that I think is a greater gamesmanship than any other sport.
I mean, again, it's not that these other coaches and other leagues don't do anything, but just the play-calling, scripted aspect of football makes it a kind of coach's sport much more than anything else.
It is a top-down, yeah, dictatorship.
Dictatorship of the proletariat, you could say, with the guys in the trenches fighting.
But it is a top-down sport geared in that way.
And I think that's probably one of the reasons why it doesn't quite work for some people, and they don't like it.
But that is also kind of its recipe for being amazing and addictive and having a narrative quality.
Unlike other sports, where you're kind of waiting for something to happen in soccer.
Again, I grew up playing soccer as a child, but I've never been into it.
But when I watch the World Cup or something, I'm kind of waiting for something to happen.
With football, you're kind of like experiencing a play that's being written by the head coach.
And whether that play can really work or not is the question.
It's just very different, fundamentally different.
It's unique.
And in that sense, quite amazing.
Yeah, no, I mean, everything you said I think is correct.
I mean, so it is the most kind of micromanaged by the coach, right?
So he's choreographing every play.
And there is also a kind of highly sort of militaristic aspect of the game as well, in the sense that you have these men lining up as if in...
Phalanxes, right?
As if a line of spearmen lining up against another line of spearmen and just, you know, basically going against each other, much in the way sort of ancient battles were fought, effectively.
Except, I mean, they obviously don't have weapons, but they're shielding.
So basically they're doing the same thing that a man would do with a shield, is they're protecting.
And again, it goes to this sort of selfless aspect of some of the players on the field who are basically there just to act as kind of human shields for other players on the field.
But yeah, I mean, I think it's a fascinating game.
I actually do like soccer.
It is a completely different game, and I think there's a kind of subtlety to soccer, and I'm not accusing you of missing this subtlety, but that I think that Americans don't necessarily appreciate.
There are many things I dislike about soccer.
One thing I dislike, just briefly, is games being determined by penalty kicks.
I think that's a terrible way to determine a game.
And really, ultimately, the solution is to create faster balls or just get a wider net or have some weird overtime situation where you're removing a player every five minutes.
But just don't cheat it.
With a penalty kick, because that's literally like flipping a coin.
The goalie is guessing each time and jumping to that, covering one half of the goal, and it's like probability.
Yeah, I totally agree.
It would be like ending a baseball game on a home run derby or something.
It's just clearly not fair.
It's a critical flaw in my mind.
But what is good about the game, though, is actually...
Well, actually, it's not even, I mean, I think it's a good game in general, but it could use some adjustments and improvements, which are probably, you know, that's probably heretical to a European soccer fan who wouldn't want to change the game, because then you make all the sort of records of former soccer greats, you know, no longer meaningful.
That's one thing that you disrupt.
But the other thing that I like about soccer, and it has less to do with the game itself and more to do, I think the World Cup is probably the best sporting event.
And the reason the World Cup is the best sporting event is because you see different nations basically playing each other.
And in some cases, you'll be like a team of nearly all white guys, using the example of certainly the Russian teams, but even the German team is a largely white team.
And you'll see them play.
You know, all these black guys are all these sort of, you know, people of mixed race, people in Brazil, for example, right?
And I just think it's just, to me, and it's not even like a sort of kind of racist thing, but it just makes it so much more kind of interesting and dynamic and fun on some level, right?
It's your guys against their guys.
When North Korea plays Nigeria, you know, it's a...
Yeah, it's like HBD in action.
Yeah, what's the most far away racist?
Yeah, the expression Gibson made famous was, you know, do you have a dog in that fight?
I think in that case, I would not have a dog in that fight.
So it may not be a game that I watch.
But what I'm saying is that, like, so...
That's what I like about that sport.
And you also see examples, which are not the most pleasing examples, where France is basically a sort of African team, as it turns out.
But it's still, nevertheless, a kind of interesting aspect of that tournament, is that you kind of see sort of how culturally different these different European and world countries are.
Yeah, I think real quickly on race in soccer, again, look – More than half of my viewers, I looked at the stats, more than half of my viewers are from America, but I apologize to the 40% of European viewers who are getting mad at the fact that we're calling their sport soccer.
But yeah, just bear with me here.
But yeah, I think it was like the 2000 French team which won the World Cup was...
Becoming this almost African squad.
It was like those who were colonized were playing for the home country.
I do remember I was actually in Berlin.
Are those every five years or every four years?
I think they're every five years.
World Cup's every four years.
Every four years, yeah.
I was actually in Berlin in 2004 for the Italy versus Maybe I'm off on a year here, but roughly the middle of the knots.
And I was actually in Berlin for the World Cup.
And it was quite interesting.
I went to a Depeche Mode concert and then went to go kind of look at the crowd at the World Cup.
I didn't have tickets.
But that was almost a kind of race war between Italy and France, with France becoming an African team, effectively.
And Italy being an Italian team, being recognized by the Italian, Italy won.
Yeah, that was a great, that was actually a great game.
And the thing that I loved about that game, because, and I remember that tournament actually somewhat vividly.
I think that was when I first started paying attention to the World Cup.
But the German team was kind of built for speed and power, which I think is a kind of, they've become a much more, you know, I haven't, well, so people who have more knowledge of European football, as they call it.
We'll know that we'll be more closely tracking these trends, but in recent World Cups, at least, Germany has become a much more effective team, and they've won a couple of World Cups.
But at that point, they were kind of a more power-oriented team, as I remember watching the tournament, whereas Italy had this wonderful chemistry, and they were a very kind of subtle team.
They passed very well together.
The one thing, too, that I noticed is that Germany, for example, because those were a couple of the teams that I was tracking in the tournament, would get opportunities, but they would just basically choke on opportunities.
Italy would get less opportunities, but they would have composure when the moment arrived and score, effectively.
That was a great team that year.
It was brilliant that they beat.
France.
That game's also famous for the headbutt of Zidane.
Who was it?
Zidane?
Yeah.
Zidane.
Who was like a North African or something.
He looked effectively white, actually.
Yeah, he looked effectively white.
I think he might have had some, like, Barbara ancestry.
So I'll have to go back on this.
I'm sure you're probably butchering.
I didn't research this, obviously, beforehand.
But yeah, that was a fascinating game.
But the rest of the team was, you know, it was an African team.
Anyway, if we look at the example of American football, if we return to that, many people have pointed this out.
I remember publishing a couple of articles on this.
And AlternativeWrite.com and RadixJournal and so on.
But the white fans, African-American players phenomenon, which you see pretty intensely in basketball.
You see a little bit less intensely in the NFL.
I think the NFL is somewhere between 60% to 75% African-American.
But you will see pretty intensely in SEC, the Southeast Conference.
You know, home of Florida and, you know, a lot of those schools where you'll have schools that are teams that are blacker than NFL teams.
And then you'll almost also see this huge white fan base as well, rooting them on.
And yeah, I mean, the racial...
I think this is a place where kind of the racial dynamic is noticed by either the alt-right or by...
Or by leftists who see this as inherently exploitation and so on.
And they actually have their right to a large degree.
I think especially with college football in which these players are not being paid.
And this is actually now being talked about seriously in a way that I don't think it would have been talked about at all even 10 years ago.
Certainly not 25 years ago.
Putting forth quite seriously, we need to pay these players.
We know that they're getting $1,000 handshakes from boosters and donors to the university, etc.
And they're probably being paid in some fashion.
But the fact that they're generating millions per game, the fact that the coach...
If he's successful at one of these big schools, he could be earning tens of millions of dollars.
I think there was actually a $100 million contract or something like that for Coach and Clemson.
And they're also risking their health inherently just by the violence of the sport.
They're risking getting their knees blown out or whatever.
But with the CTE phenomenon, they're...
Even if they're not injured in the standard way, they are risking serious memory loss and even worse.
And the fact that they are not being paid at all is inherently exploitative and does actually kind of evoke this slavery image, which is kind of hanging in people's minds.
They don't really want to go there.
But basically the...
The white plantation manager with his team of African slaves out fighting on the field while he's getting paid and they're risking their lives.
This critique is real.
You hear that mostly on the left, but it contains more than a kernel of truth, I'd say.
Yeah, no, it's...
I mean, that's sort of like in...
All right.
1.0.
That was sort of the that was the kind of rebuttal.
That was the kind of rebuttal to Southerners who would get irritated at Yankees for being such liberals was that the South was essentially addicted to football.
Sort of the blackest teams in the country, as it were.
And other people are being exploited.
I'll let you go on this, but just to mention, there's another element in which there were these scandals.
There was actually one scandal, and I wrote about this in an article, a big article I wrote about a year and a half ago now.
There was a scandal in North Carolina where all of these athletes, they're getting a scholarship.
They're taking these joke classes where they would probably not even attend class.
And if they did, they were just hanging out and they got their little study buddy to write a paper for them or they cheated or whatever.
And there was just this tacit assumption that, you know, you're not here to learn, son.
You're here to play football.
And that was a huge scandal just because it made a mockery of the idea of a student athlete.
But things could actually get much worse.
Barry Switzer was involved in this, some other coaches.
But Baylor had a major scandal of effectively prostituting out some female student athletes.
Interestingly, and just some college co-eds were basically just thrown at these recruits very often.
An 18-year-old in high school and he arrives on campus.
Are you going to go to UT or are you going to go to Baylor?
Well, Baylor wants to get up there, so we're just going to throw a bunch of cheerleaders at you.
And there is this...
You're bringing these people onto campus.
You're making a mockery of the idea of a student athlete or scholarship.
And girls are getting raped.
Girls are being pressured into having sex with football players to get these top recruits.
I mean, yeah, there is just something so inherently toxic about the whole thing.
It makes you kind of want to walk away from it.
Whereas with the NFL, you know...
They're getting paid millions.
We know what's going on.
They're not making a mockery of anything.
It's a professional league for gladiators.
We know this.
Yeah.
It's like a Tom Wolfe novel, what you're describing.
I am Charlotte Simmons.
Yeah, definitely.
Which I never read, but I've enjoyed other books.
I would recommend The Painted Word.
It's a very insightful book, actually, about the modern art industry.
So, yeah, I mean, I think that college football, that's something that I never really got into.
I didn't go to a school that had a very good college team.
I went to a school in the Northeast, and typically the teams are just not as good in the Northeast.
So in other words, New England, ironically enough, even though we have this fantastic professional team, it's relatively speaking a kind of desert in terms of football talent, as it were.
I mean, I think that most of these kids come from, whether they're quarterbacks or other positions, they come from Texas or they come from California.
Or Alabama or Mississippi or some of these places.
Doug Flutie is kind of our most famous college football player.
Right.
Yeah, yeah.
We've actually produced some good quarterbacks.
Ryan, who's Atlanta, right?
Oh, Matt Ryan.
Yeah, Matt Ryan.
He's good.
He was also Boston College, so good quarterback.
But, yeah, so it's not really kind of football country, as it were.
But ironically enough, we have this very good football team, professional football team.
But, you know, Tom Brady, of course, is from California, I believe.
And, I mean, you know, just to kind of segue back to the Patriots, you know, one of the sort of, because we talked at the beginning of this podcast about how, you know, People generally are hostile to the Patriots in the country because they've been such a successful team.
It's sort of understandable in a way.
People are hostile to the New York Yankees.
Why would you cheat as well?
Well, my tendency is actually to defend them in the sense that I think that probably everyone is doing everything they can to get an advantage, I would argue.
Practices of another squad.
Playing with deflated footballs.
I mean, you guys are the worst.
All completely invalid points, I'll say.
But in any case, because I don't want to look ridiculous defending my sports balls in too kind of earnest or passionate.
What I'll say, though, is that it is a kind of irony in the sense that I mean, very visibly and obviously, the Patriots have been a very successful team for the last, I don't know, over 15 years.
And in a kind of unique way, it's been a franchise.
It's a kind of unrivaled franchise.
One thing that's interesting about it is that a lot of the skilled players have actually been white guys.
The famous skilled players, and by skilled players, we mean the wide receivers.
They've actually had a couple of good...
pretty good white running backs as well, which is kind of even rarer phenomenon.
I remember was a, you know, kind of an unknown guy who was, you know, playing really well in the Super Bowl and so on.
And yeah, the white running back is an absolute rarity.
Yeah.
And Belichick is actually kind of unique in the regard that he's, I mean, there were obviously other white skilled players in the league.
But I think he's, you know, in the last like 15 years, he certainly has been kind of at ahead of that trend And a lot of it has to do with the fact, you know, Paul Kersey actually said on a podcast that he's very good at like kind of getting a deal, as it were.
I mean, he didn't say this exactly, but in the sense that there's all these kind of undervalued white players in the league because there is a sort of like subliminal.
Right.
Particularly at skilled positions.
Not at offensive line, but definitely at wide receiver or running back or defensive back or things like that.
Yeah, sure.
To finish up my earlier point, it is kind of an irony that the Patriots are so hated, but they're also kind of the...
I think that you actually wrote an article that contains a similar sentiment about the...
Leitner, the famous Duke basketball player.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
The unbearable whiteness.
The unbearable whiteness, yeah.
White doubles.
I wrote that 10 years ago.
Oh, my God.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I feel quite old.
Yeah, I wrote that in the early days of Alternative Right in 2010.
But yeah, Duke is an interesting one in basketball because although there were certainly black players and the team has become...
Blacker as time's gone on.
Their key players were these cocky...
White guys, you know, Bobby Hurley, Christian Laettner being just paradigmatic.
You know, he was, you know, he was actually from a working class background, but he kind of had a snobby air to him.
He was cocky.
And that game in the 90s, early 90s against UNLV, where you had, it was kind of the Catholics versus the convicts, you know, kind of rivalry.
You had this, that was a...
Notre Dame versus Miami rivalry in the 90s.
But this was that version of it.
You had this team that was just seemingly so athletically superior that it was like an NBA squad playing a middle school team.
People were just like, this can't happen.
And Duke did it.
They won.
And they won by playing...
Solid basketball.
I mean, Krzyzewski is known for complicated offensive schemes and then playing tough man-on-man defense, and they won.
And yeah, it was absolutely like that.
During the Super Bowl a couple years ago, it was the Super Bowl where, I guess it was 2016, early 2017, in which the Patriots had a miraculous comeback.
I think they were down 28-3 at one point or something like that.
And they were playing the Atlanta Falcons.
I remember it well.
Yeah, I'm sure you do.
Well, I remember it well, too, because I became a kind of...
I wasn't even planning this, but it just all worked out where my Twitter was going insane.
And basically, a dozen or so celebrities and sports writers were retweeting me, just saying, like, this is the worst person in America.
But I basically said that.
I was like...
Okay, I'm rooting for New England in this game.
And, you know, first off, I actually was born in Boston, so I can do that.
But secondly, like, you know, they have three white wide receivers.
And Tom Brady is this, you know, Aryan avatar, you know, and just kind of being using, you know.
Provocative language.
It was an epic tweet.
It actually got picked up in the Boston newspapers to the extent that they were...
People were freaking out.
When it was 28-3 at halftime or early third quarter or something, I was getting all these tweets like, what do you think about this, Spencer?
What do you think about this?
It was kind of, I guess, a sign of where we were, where we just couldn't lose for about a year or so.
And the Patriots came back, and then I was engaged in lots of frivolity the rest of the night.
But again, I was getting at something.
I talked to this sports writer in 2017.
He was actually a nice guy.
I'm forgetting his name in the moment.
But he wrote an article about this.
And I basically made this argument, which I think Paul Kersey might have pioneered, which is that you have a hard salary cap sport.
So you cannot overpay players.
In the 90s with the Cowboys, Jerry would just throw money at people because they were so successful he wanted to win.
You cannot do that.
And so you have to find undervalued talent.
It's like picking a stock.
You know, where you don't want to buy the stock that everyone wants to buy.
You're overpaying for it.
You want to buy the one that no one wants to buy.
And so Belichick was able to create a system where he had Tom Brady.
So he had the centerpiece of a very good quarterback who became a great quarterback.
And then you just put in all these pieces around him.
There have been some stars, but it's been remarkable how few stars there are.
I don't think Tom Brady...
Maybe in 2005, he might have had a dream team of all of these amazing players, but that was the only time.
He's won with players that were kind of like a little too old, not underappreciated, maybe not used in the right way because they were a bit niche in their skill set.
You know, Belichick just puts it all together.
And Belichick is a master at special teams, which other teams can sometimes overlook.
He puts the pieces together, and it's obviously successful despite their rampant cheating, as I mentioned.
But, you know, and again, there was this kind of notion...
There's this notion that part of that was picking up these players.
I mean, Wes Welker, I believe, was 5 '8 or something.
And Julian Edelman is 5 '10.
They are a bit undersized when it comes to wide receivers.
They are more of the kind of guy of like, oh, he's a slot receiver, which is...
He's white to a large degree.
But he made it work as those guys are number one because they're really quick.
They've got great hands.
They run great routes.
They do the kind of white stuff.
And Belichick and Brady proved that that can be much more important than having a diva wide receiver who wants to go deep all the time and make an amazing catch.
But the fact is, again, it's a team game.
It's a slog.
It's about...
Doing the little things over and over and over again, as opposed to doing that one amazing thing once.
And it worked.
And yeah, there was a Super Bowl squad that started three white wide receivers.
There's great white wide receivers in the NFL right now, but it's just something you don't see.
And Belichick did it.
And so there was this kind of...
I think the sports writer told me that...
In aggregate, the New England Patriots were not whiter than other teams, which might very well be true.
But what I was pointing out was that, you know, uniqueness of finding these guys who are breaking the mold of, you know, you're six feet tall, maybe taller, you're African American, you're super fast, you've got, you know, you're a flamboyant guy.
Like, that's the mold of the star wide receiver.
And the Patriots won without it.
Yeah, no, and the other thing, too, I would say is that while everything you said is true in the sense that Belichick found all the sort of right pieces, and more than, you know, focusing on these diva wide receivers or finding these great individuals, he kind of built this sort of machine, that kind of well-oiled machine where every part was kind of serving its role.
That's all true.
I think it tends to...
We undervalue those athletes, those white athletes as wide receivers, who are, you know, some of them will be Hall of Famers or should be Hall of Famers.
Guys like Wes Welker, even this guy Edelman is a fantastic receiver and physically remarkable receiver.
He's a very quick guy and very skilled.
And a lot of it, you know, part of it's his physical attributes.
Part of it, you know, these sort of white traits you describe of like the discipline, the reliability or whatever the case may be.
But it becomes because of these sort of, you know, I think that there is obviously a kind of psychological bias toward the black athlete.
And one of the reasons that these other coaches in the league will not play, you know, white guys at receiver at these skilled positions like Belichick will is because they are.
Not as confident in their ability to see talent, as it were, I would argue.
Because their fear is that if they play the white cornerback and the guy gets blown by in some critical play, then they're going to be fired.
Their reputation as a coach is going to suffer because they play the white guy when the default position is play the black guy.
So I think that there is some kind of fear or a kind of lack of confidence in their own ability to assess talent among some of these other coaches in the league, whereas with Belichick, I think that that doesn't, you know, I think he does play the best players, and they may have these white traits, as you say, and he may kind of fit them perfectly into a system, but they're also individually very skilled.
One example of this is this guy, Rob Gronkowski.
Gronk, as he's kind of...
He's a physical freak.
I mean, the guy is massive.
I mean, he looks like a cartoon character of a football player.
And he's just this ridiculously buff, massive guy who actually can run pretty fast.
And he's actually very athletic.
And so that's an example.
He didn't have the foot speed, but...
But he obviously was a big, hulking guy, but he would make these amazing catches that you would expect from a guy who's like 5 '9", but he's 6 '4", 250, or whatever he was.
And yeah, he is the typical guy who gets drafted in the later rounds.
I think he might have been a first-round draft pick, maybe not, but he...
The talent doesn't jump out at you by just measuring it.
I don't know what he ran the 40 in or whatever, but as a football player, he's a complete unstoppable badass.
Yeah, and there's all these sort of like strange, and I don't know if it's becoming a more kind of common thing, but there are these sort of strange outliers.
Arguably, they're outliers, but it's really hard to tell because I do think that there is a kind of subconscious bias happening in the league.
I mean, I think certainly you could say that blacks have an advantage in sort of straightforward speed and in leaping ability as well.
But those two things, while valuable for wide receiver, Don't make a great wide receiver by themselves.
Being a great receiver requires more than just being able to jump high or run fast.
The league is full of black guys that can basically do exactly that.
But very few of them are as good as Wes Welker.
He's a very rarefied elite in the league.
So that's the other thing I would say, is that there are other attributes that make a great receiver, a great skilled player.
And then we are also starting to see all these kind of strange outliers recently.
There's this guy, what's his name?
Christian, the running back.
Oh, Christian McCaffrey, yeah.
Yeah.
Now, he's arguably the best sort of skilled...
He's arguably the best football player in the NFL right now.
He was on a team that sucked this year, the Carolina Panthers.
But in terms of a player that can catch the ball, run the ball, run the ball inside the tackles, run the ball outside.
I don't know if he's doing this anymore, but he was a great punt returner and kickoff returner in college.
Yeah, he's arguably the best football player in the NFL.
And, you know, there are other people who go to that.
But yeah, I think there are the occasional person who can fight the mold.
He was blessed, I guess, with genes.
I mean, his father was an NFL wide receiver who I remember watching when I was a kid.
And his mother was like a...
I don't know, like on the Olympic alternate team of track and field.
It was some crazy, you know, marriage of athletes that you produce.
The Kwisak Sadarak or something.
But nevertheless, you know, he's absolutely amazing.
But there's also no question that he faced some kind of...
Bigotry, for lack of a better word, in being a running back.
He can be a tight end.
You could maybe play strong safety or linebacker or something.
But this idea that you would be doing the glory position and doing it in a kind of quote-unquote black way is actually...
Um, uh, maybe taboo is too strong a word, but it goes against the group think of basically every coach you're going to ever be coached under, um, for your entire career and every scout.
And, uh, so there, there is a kind of like, uh, disruption, you know, equality to McCaffrey.
We should pursue those eugenic policies, certainly.
But the other thing I would say is that he...
So guys like that, and there's Luka Doncic.
He's a basketball player now who is a remarkable basketball player.
If he continues sort of at his current trajectory, like, he'll be the best basketball player that ever lived.
I mean, like, he'll be better than...
In the sense of he's this good at this young.
I think he's, like, in his early 20s.
Well, he's 20 years old.
He's 20 years old.
Yeah, and he's already had, like...
Don't quote me because I don't follow it that closely, but he's already had well over a dozen triple-doubles in the league.
Apparently, that's more than the rest of the league combined.
He's better than LeBron James.
was when LeBron James was 20. That is something that's irrefutable.
I have heard some pushback from some sports guys who say that he doesn't play defense and that you've got to learn that if you want to be an all-around player.
Well, okay.
But the fact is he's a tall point guard.
He's like a 6 '8 point guard, which is in itself kind of interesting and highly unusual.
And he's unstoppable as a three-point shooter.
And just dribbler and kind of creative person.
Again, I don't really like basketball.
I don't follow it at all, really.
But I've just seen these highlights of him playing.
And he's actually a basketball player that I would want to watch because he's just creative.
Cool bounce passes between defenders, behind the back, you know, slowing up and hitting a fadeaway three-pointer.
He's got a kind of like Pete Maravich, like showman quality to him, which is, again, is very interesting.
And we're also seeing that this kind of thing works in the NBA.
This is maybe even the future of the NBA is playing like this, playing like players played in the 60s.
And you don't need to be...
A kind of genetic freak that can jump over the hoop and, you know, swat everything down and so on.
Actually, it is still a sport.
And it's not just a test of, you know, your 40 time or your leaping ability.
It's actually a game that involves strategy and creativity and showmanship and so on.
And yeah, the guy is, you know, he might be an MVP candidate at age 20. As a white guy from Eastern Europe, there is hope.
Yeah.
No, he is a remarkable player.
And the thing that you notice about dominant players is that it's almost like they are sort of more conscious than everyone else on the floor, whether it's a guy like Wayne Gretzky.
In other words, you're seeing all these things.
Everyone else is kind of trapped in this sort of smaller mindset where they're just trying to do their role or their basic function, whereas this dominant player is kind of seeing all these things that everyone else is kind of missing, and he's literally on another level, but it has to be related to some kind of cerebral ability that he has where he's in a way kind of more conscious on a spatial level, and he's able to see all these opportunities that everyone else is kind of missing.
Or ignoring or just focused on these more basic things that he's not.
He's already past those sort of basic things as a war.
Yes.
I'm a pretty smart guy and I was never like that.
In my history of playing all sports.
So it's not just intelligence, it's something else.
But it probably is connected to intelligence.
I don't think you can be a totally dumb person and act like that.
It is seeing something that others are missing.
Yes, and it's finding that sort of perfect alchemy of the kind of physical ability and that awareness or intelligence or whatever we're calling it.
Now, one thing I would point out, we were talking about groupthink or bigotry, you could say, against the white athlete, at least at certain skill positions.
There's not bigotry against white tight ends.
The best ones are white.
I think this guy who's actually playing in the Super Bowl, Kittle, is really good.
And he's a white guy.
Travis Kelsey is on the other side of the ball.
These are probably the two best tight ends in America, and they're playing in the Super Bowl.
And maybe that's not a coincidence, actually.
It's a very important position.
But two white guys.
So in certain ways, they're not being discriminated against.
But in other ways, I think there is.
clearly group think bias going on.
But then flip it around and the quarterback.
So do we consider Jimmy Garoppolo white?
Yeah, no, no, he's, He is white.
He's kind of a swarthy guy.
Very handsome guy.
Probably have to be a bit handsome to be a quarterback.
Are there any ugly quarterbacks?
You've got to be cocky and a leader.
It seems like something that maybe Ed Dutton has done a study on, but I think that there is a correlation between the symmetry of the face and athletic ability, apparently.
Oh, there's a correlation between that and in general health and intelligence, and just a healthy nervous system in general is facial symmetry.
Yeah, so physical attractiveness correlates, I don't know how strongly, but does correlate with athletic ability.
Yes, and it correlates with health as well.
Sure.
So yeah, Jimmy Garoppolo, he looks kind of like a Hollywood, almost like a Hollywood star from the 50s or something.
And Tom Brady, also very handsome.
And this probably does play into it at some level.
I would say Russell Wilson and Patrick Mahomes are kind of less handsome.
They're not ugly, exactly, but that is interesting.
Whereas there's a bias against white athletes at certain positions, I would actually admit that there probably is a bias towards white quarterbacks.
I think there's probably a well-founded bias in the sense that the quarterback is a different position.
It is about processing speeds.
Africans have slower processing speeds.
At things like reaction times and so on than Europeans.
So that is clearly a very important thing in playing quarterback.
You've got to just read a defense and you've got less than a second to make a call and you can't just sit there holding the ball waiting for somebody to get open.
That's like the first sign of a bad quarterback.
You've got to make the read and gun it out of there.
So I think there's probably a well-grounded aspect to that.
I think also, in terms of the white quarterback, just because you need less foot speed, I mean, quickness, having a quick release is important, but just being able to outrun the defense, that's not important, at least in the way that football is played now.
So it kind of levels the playing field.
And at the end of the day, there are more white guys than there are black guys.
So there's just going to be more white quarterbacks.
I think these are important factors.
But I actually wouldn't.
I'm open-minded enough to say that there might very well be a bias towards white quarterbacks.
It's kind of unspoken, but it's there among head coaches and scouts.
That may have been more...
Yeah, it might be changing.
But before I say it, because I kind of know where you're going, because I do think things might be changing.
But if you look back at the Super Bowls, they have been white winning quarterbacks on the Super Bowl squad, with an interesting exception of Doug Williams or the Redskins.
And then also Russell Wilson, who's a very good quarterback.
Kind of more of a running quarterback, but he's...
Now more of a passer.
But he is half-white for what it's worth.
So basically, white quarterbacks have won the Super Bowl.
Now, there's an interesting case even with Patrick Mahomes, who is a clearly superstar quarterback, makes some amazing throws for the Kansas City Chiefs.
But he's half-white as well.
I think his father might have been a black baseball player, which is unusual in itself, and he had a white mother.
So again, you could say there's this bias, but then it's kind of easy to be biased when the most winning team, the most successful quarterbacks have been white guys.
Sure.
I think that that's changed and there's been a kind of conscious effort.
I mean, for maybe the last 20 to 15 years, the NFL and coaches ostensibly as well have been sort of attached to this idea of the running quarterback, right?
So in other words, in one sort of early, not that early example, but one early example of it is Michael Vick, right?
He was sort of a...
The archetype of the running quarterback.
The idea is that you basically have a hybrid player who's skilled both at distributing the ball through passing but also can run the ball, whether he's in trouble or through planned plays or whatever the case may be.
There are two problems with that model.
In fact, I would argue probably the most successful quarterback of that model was Steve Young, who's a white quarterback.
He was a very good running quarterback, as it were.
Now, the problem with the model is that whether you're white or black or whatever your processing speed is...
You're still going to get hit.
Yeah, well, that's the second thing I was going to...
Yeah, injuries is the other part.
Injuries is a big problem for that sort of model of play, as it were.
So it doesn't really seem that well thought out in my mind.
Like, you're going to have this running quarterback?
Okay.
And then what's going to happen when he gets injured, right?
Because he is the most important player on your team.
And he doesn't go out as well.
He's the general.
A quarterback plays every play.
Yeah.
A running back, you can rotate these guys in and out.
They can get winded.
They can get banged up and take breathers.
You can't do that with a quarterback.
He's your field general, effectively, right?
He's the most precious player that you have on the team.
But the other aspect of it is that in a way, it's almost like you almost don't want to have the option to be able to run because you already have so many options and so many problems to deal with as a quarterback that it just creates another layer of complexity to the position where you're also thinking about running.
Like, in other words, and especially if you're someone who's a kind of fleet-footed runner, like a guy like Michael Vick, is that there's always the temptation to say, hey, fuck it, I'm going to run.
You know, like, I don't see the pass, I'm going to run.
And so it's almost like, I think it's a very difficult thing to pull off.
A running quarterback is a very difficult thing to pull off.
And I think very few people have actually pulled it off in the history of the game and been exceptionally successful quarterbacks.
And one of them is Steve.
But Steve Young was a brilliant passer, is the other thing.
He wasn't just some guy.
The person who will probably win the MVP this year is named Lamar Jackson, and he plays for the Baltimore Ravens.
And he, again, I don't...
I don't want to get all racist or whatever, but, you know, he doesn't...
Usually the quarterback is the guy who gets...
He's not just the field general.
He's also the guy who gets interviewed and he's kind of the fan's connection to the team.
He's more of a, you know, more intelligent, almost seemingly...
Normal guy in that sense.
Whereas if a defensive lineman has an IQ of 80 and long hair and tattoos and is just a total wild man or whatever, all the better.
You're not expecting him to be your representative out in the field.
But the quarterback is just a different position.
It's the golden boy.
It's the gory position, etc.
Lamar Jackson is much more...
I've seen him get interviewed or...
Or things like that.
He kind of strikes me as having the mental capacity of the guy who plays linebacker.
And I don't really mean that as a criticism, to be honest, because you're out there to play football.
I don't care if you've read.
Shakespeare.
But he's just a different type, and he runs the ball very well.
He's very fast.
He can turn the corner on most players.
He is very dynamic in that way.
He does throw the ball, and he's had some success with it.
But sometimes I see some of these highlights of him throwing the ball, and I'm kind of...
I'm incredulous that he's completing passes.
It's a...
Not a great ball.
It's kind of weak.
He has this funny throwing motion.
It's not the type of quarterback that works in the way that offenses have been heading for the past 20 years, which is short passing game, fairly complicated playbook, quick reads, so on.
That's the direction the game is headed, and he seems to be headed in a very different direction, which is a run-first quarterback.
He seems to have success throwing because he can run.
But as a passer, I'm in a way kind of amazed that he's doing what he's doing.
He's had success.
He's obviously a great athlete.
Nothing against him.
But I can't imagine that working for 10 years or maybe even for two or three years.
You know, and the other thing that people have remarked, I haven't followed the league very closely this year, I'll admit.
I've followed it less closely increasingly as the years have gone on.
It's just less interesting to me in general.
But what I would say is that one thing that people have been remarking on is that sort of the quality of the league in general is sort of in decline, is the feeling.
And in fact, to such an extent that...
People were optimistic in New England that the Patriots had a shot to win yet another Super Bowl with a 42-year-old quarterback.
In other words, the league didn't strike people as that impressive this year in general.
Now, obviously, the two teams that are in the Super Bowl now are better than the Patriots were.
They include very good players and are good teams, but the general trend in the league is that it's just...
It's a less skilled or it's becoming a less skilled league than it was in the past.
Maybe its height was when Peyton and Brady were in the league and these super quarterbacks, as it were.
I think that if they are kind of artificially pursuing this agenda of getting this sort of fantasy hybrid quarterback, which again, I think is just a kind of strategically bad idea to have your quarterback even run the ball or have that as a main option.
Because of injury, first and foremost.
I think that what may actually happen is kind of remarkable because you always think about sports as the athletes always getting better and the game getting better.
But there are these sort of subtle changes that happen in sports leagues that can actually decrease the quality of play, whether or not the sort of physical athleticism of players is actually increasing.
There are things that can happen, for example, in the professional basketball league.
One of the reasons that Luka is so successful is because he's a good shooter.
Shooting, I think, for a long time had started to decline in the NBA because people became very attracted to this idea of a player who could dunk the ball or slash the basket.
Now, that changed.
That changed.
Who is the jump shooter?
See, I just don't follow basketball.
Look, I don't follow basketball as well, but I actually think you're almost, you're about like 10 or 15 years behind because basketball has become, I think through this money ball, like algorithmic look at the game, Seth Curry, it's become a three-point shooting league.
Which I think is really problematic, actually.
As exciting as a long shot could be, it's not as good of basketball.
So basically, I'm just throwing out numbers here to make a point, but if you shoot three-pointers at 30% and you shoot...
You know, five to ten footers at 60%, you should basically never shoot a five to ten footer.
You should just keep shooting threes.
You get an extra point, it makes up for the lower percentage of shots.
And so algorithmically, just don't shoot threes.
And that's where the game has gone.
So the game used to be more about defense and kind of like even bruising defense.
Despite the fact that they're fouls and so on.
But if you drove to the lane, you would have to go up against the big men.
Well, there aren't really any dominant big men anymore.
That's gone.
It's more about just spreading the court out and firing off a three, getting as many attempts as possible in a high-scoring game where you kind of win algorithmically.
But I think I think basketball has declined in the sense that I would rather watch ball movement and slashing and so on.
Then I would watch just, you know, one pass and you throw up a three pointer.
I that gets pretty boring and it's just not as intense.
And, you know, football.
I think the money ball concept has had less effect on football.
I mean, it's certainly more of a passing game.
But, you know, I don't know.
I don't want to watch a different sport.
You know, I want to...
I want to see people run the ball and gain four yards in a cloud of dust and be like, all right, it's good first down.
Now, you know, let's set up the third down, all that kind of stuff.
That's interesting to me.
If they came up with some weird hybrid sport where they're throwing Hail Mary passes every down, it's just kind of like, I don't want to watch this.
And I think basketball has become like that to a large degree.
Yeah, so my point, though, was the trends, basically.
So it's not just about the sort of athleticism of the players.
It's trends.
And with a guy like Stephen Curry, like in other words, one player can be very influential in these trends.
And Stephen Curry is one example in the sense that it became more of a jump shooting and three point shooting league as his model became successful.
I'm more closely familiar with football, which I've followed in a more close manner, but not in a kind of obsessive manner, in the sense that with the Patriots team, There was a period where effectively the tight end became very important in the league,
and teams were trying to copy the Patriots' model and have a tight end and have basically a system where they had a player like Gronk or a sort of kind of inferior version of Gronk and were running these schemes that sort of focused on the tight end, as it were.
But a lot of that, the reason that trend developed was because of the success of the Patriots.
So in other words, that did not...
That trend was sort of synthetic in the way that that's not the only way to win a football game.
It's just that the most successful football team was winning in that way.
And so the same can be said for Stephen Curry, right?
Yeah.
Or Lamar Jackson, where it's kind of like you can do this for a little bit in the sense of you have a quarterback who's...
Basically, at his peak physical condition, he can run a 4-3 or a 4-2 or whatever.
He can run 40. He can just turn the corner on pretty much every defensive lineman and linebacker.
And you can kind of win like that.
I mean, you're not breaking the rules to do that, but it can't really last.
And you can't just look at that model and try to reproduce it.
Have a successful team, you know, in terms of other squads.
I've seen a couple, there have been a couple of, like, iterations throughout my life of, like, the new hybrid black quarterback.
And it's kind of always peaked and petered out pretty quickly.
And these players didn't really change the league.
You know, who is the guy who, he retired a couple years ago, Philadelphia Eagles.
I'm forgetting his name right now.
He didn't really change the league.
There's actually a controversy with Rush Limbaugh about the black quarterback.
Michael Vick didn't really change the league.
I don't think Lamar Jackson will change the league either.
Yeah, yeah.
So I guess in that sense, the trend that we saw in basketball was actually more organic in the sense that people were basically copying a successful model.
Now, the reason the model was successful is because you just happened to have a guy that was an extremely good three-point shooter.
But it's not because it was the only model that could have succeeded.
So people just started imitating a successful model.
So it's very human in that way, right?
And so the same thing happened with this sort of tight end trend where people were looking for like a great tight end scheme or a great tight end like Gronkowski.
But that just happened to be the way that Belichick, those were kind of the tools that Belichick happened to be using.
Now, Now, in this trend towards the running quarterback, I think that this is actually kind of a more artificial thing, where you actually haven't really seen the model yet, but they're sort of dreaming up this model of sort of this throwing-running hybrid that now represents a kind of new ideal for the quarterback, but we actually haven't really seen it succeed yet, so that's kind of different in that way, right?
We have definitely not seen it succeed in terms of Super Bowl victories.
And the Ravens, I think, lost their first playoff game, even though they were very good in the regular season.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, in that way, sports are kind of interesting.
And there is a real kind of human dimension in the sense that there is this kind of copycat phenomenon that forms trends.
Like, there are actual trends in sports.
So it's not just a matter of, like, okay, the guys are bigger and stronger and faster now.
There are other kind of factors involved where a certain type of player is going to be successful during a certain error, as it were.
And there does seem to be, I don't know if this is just a trick of memory where you remember the good times and not the bad, but it does seem like NFL play has declined.
And there are a lot more just mediocre, bad games going on, and I don't quite know why.
Yeah, and it might have been one of the reasons the Patriots have been so successful.
Yeah.
Because the rest of the league has not— They're one of the few teams in the last 15 years that's been consistently a good team.
Very few teams have that consistency in the league.
They'll be one-hit wonders, as it were, including players.
They'll be a successful quarterback like Cam Newton.
He's one of these guys that they hope will be one of these running-thrung hybrids.
He was very successful early.
And then he kind of petered out.
You know what I mean?
Well, he suffered injuries, predictably.
Though I don't know how he suffered that particular injury, but I guess it probably was related to running the ball, whether in practice or in a game.
I don't know.
So, in other words, you understand what I'm saying.
A lot of these football teams tend to be one-hit wonders.
And the Patriots have been successful.
And so it's kind of an anomaly, actually, that they're not in the Super Bowl this year.
Thank God.
So, who do you think?
Well, we'll just put a bow on it with this.
Who do you think is going to win the Super Bowl?
I kind of don't care, but I think I'm going to root for San Francisco because they have a sort of, they have a whitish quarterback.
It's a white guy.
And I don't mind being, you know, I mean, I think that...
I think that's natural to root for someone that's kind of...
I think San Francisco's going to win as well.
I mean, Kansas City, they throw the ball really well.
You know, Patrick Mahomes is obviously amazing.
But one thing that I noted with San Francisco, because I watched their game against the Packers, I guess, two weeks ago.
And I had not...
You know, again, I'll kind of watch the Cowboys on a Sunday afternoon.
That's the...
I'll keep up with it to a degree, but that's kind of the level of my casual fandom.
What I saw from the Niners, and I've seen some of their highlights as well, is that they're doing kind of old-school stuff.
Jimmy Garoppolo threw the ball eight times against the Green Bay Backers.
That's unheard of.
That's unheard of over the past...
40 or 50 years of football.
And they have this zone-running attack, and they use a fullback, which is a white position that's been lost to time, lost to trends, basically.
It's a highly sophisticated...
You know, done by Kyle Shanahan, but it has a lot of old-school elements where they're able to run, you know, as a team, run the ball and play strong defense and just out-scheme the other side.
And, yeah, I think I would put money.
I might, you know, I don't know.
I might bet $25 on it just for the...
I'm not a big sports gambler at all.
I'm not a big sports gambler as well.
I would put my money on San Francisco.
I just think they have a better team, a better scheme.
They're doing the old school football stuff, which have never gone out of style.
Despite all the rules changes, despite the new athletes and training, etc., it's still the same game.
If the best defense is to keep the other side off the field, run the ball.
Sure.
You don't have to be this high-flying passing attack.
There's no rule that you have to do that.
If they can't stop you and you run 3.5 yards every down, you cannot lose.
Sure.
I think that it's being characterized as a contest of Kansas City's offense against San Francisco's defense.
I think that I actually don't really have a prediction as to who's going to win.
I'm pulling for San Francisco.
Garoppolo is also a former Patriots player.
He could have been your quarterback now if Brady didn't have such a huge ego.
Don't remind me of it.
We were happy to give him a couple more Super Bowls, which is really a consequence.
literally another two quarter, another two Superbowls.
Right.
Yeah.
So we do have bragging rights for the goat as it were.
Now it means now we have, we're in a little bit of a recovery mode, but honestly, uh, Belichick, come on.
I mean, he's the most important element of that team in my mind.
There was briefly, there was a, um, there was this period, Matt Castle.
Do you remember that guy?
Yeah.
He won 11 games when Brady was out.
Yeah.
And he was the backup.
And that was kind of in their Super Bowl drought, as it were, which was like five or six years as opposed to the normal 35 years.
Yeah.
So, yeah, I think it comes down to Belichick.
It's a head coaching league.
That's what it's about.
NBA might be about players.
NFL is about the head coach.
Belichick is really good at cheating.
That's right.
Export Selection