Mike Harmon Discusses College Football Week 1, Fuzzy HOF Math, and The Harmon Hammer

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, what's going on here on a late Saturday night,
West Coast time, early morning, East Coast. Yeah, the bar's
still open. Still got an hour and 45 minutes before
last call out there in New York and certainly plenty
of college football fans. Maybe some team officials looking for
a stiff drink after the happenings of earlier tonight, week

(00:21):
one of the college football season. For all of you
that complained you didn't get your beak wetted enough last
week with some of the early games, well, you had
a full slate. And then it was a question of, well,
whether you liked what you saw. Wherever you are, we
still have a game going on here late into the night.

(00:42):
As UCLA and Cal are getting after it. Guys with
many syllables in their names as the opposing quarterbacks. A
guy named Chesney trying to resurrect UCLA football. All of
those things as we get ourselves set for a big
four-hour run here at Fox Sports Radio. My name's Mike Harmon.
You find me in the Twitterverse at Swollen Dome. You
hear me during the week 7 to 11 every weeknight

(01:05):
Pacific time alongside Jason Smith. You know, my best friend. See,
I get to do it the opposite way. here on
a Saturday night into Sunday. I know there have been
a lot of great moments here in this chair, long tenures.
Happy to be here tonight. You know, Bernie and Jonas
and Ben and many others. Chris Plank, I know, was

(01:27):
here last week. Pleased to be here with the... I've
got Mark and Emmy with me. We're going to take
you through some of the college football stories of the day,
some of the big results, the chaos, obviously, in Michigan,
one thing that we'll have to spend some time on,
shall we say, and obviously the other big story. For me,

(01:49):
it's the villain you need. That's the tease ahead to
what we'll talk about coming up in about 15 minutes
from now. because he was every bit the part and
showed out on Saturday night. But first, let's start with
that Michigan game. Yes, 13-12 is your final. Well, how
did we get there? A little bit of controversy. Underwood

(02:10):
takes the snap. Back to pass. Back at his own 40.
He's going to let it go. This one's coming down
in the end zone. It is caught! Touchdown, Wolverines! Touchdown, Wolverines!
As you can tell, a big Michigan call on the
final there. The second take, of course, because it's a

(02:32):
game mired in controversy. We'll get to the Big Tens.
Very lengthy explanation in a moment. But 13-12, your final.
Underwood with the giant heave. The prior play waved off. Well,
they ruled with one second remaining. There was contact with
the football, which means, well, it's dead. It's done. It's over.

(02:53):
He's out of bounds. And so we live to see
another play. That's Underwood with the big heave, 12-22, 171-1
on the game. And if you read the message board,
people were ready to pack his bags, take everything out
of any apartment, dorm room, or any other place he occupied,
including his locker. And send him packing for the Broncos.

(03:17):
They were looking to create chaos that we've seen happen
with Michigan in the past. Desmond Howard in the post
was having fun going. Well, we still were owed one
for the Colorado play. Oh, so many years ago with
Cordell Stewart, some might argue the last couple of years,
the college football world righted itself. Cause the last I

(03:37):
remember there's no vacated titles or anything of that. I know,
There were some sanctions or whatever, but let's be real.
Nothing really transpired. But Michigan survived. Succeed and proceed. The
old John Calipari line comes into play here in a big,
big way. And let's get to that Big Ten statement,

(03:57):
shall we? As we look at the overarching.
College football world. There were two games of great consequence.
A lot of big players, a lot of big performances
across the board. And the nighttime game, I don't know
how much the game itself really gives us anything to
talk about other than, wow, that was good background fodder

(04:21):
as I was doing other things. Maybe playing with the dog.
Maybe you were building a puzzle or you went and
got an adult Lego set. Yeah, we'll talk trading cards later.
That's my adult Lego set. But all of that. Statement
from the Big Ten Conference.

Speaker 2 (04:34):
Ready?

Speaker 1 (04:35):
Following video review, it was determined Western Michigan's No. 18
started his jump from an established out-of-bounds position, left foot,
and made contact with the ball with one second remaining
on the clock. As shown in the provided video of
what was viewed during the replay process, a side-by-side view

(04:56):
of the play and the game clock using a direct
shot of the game clock in the stadium was used
to determine the final ruling. Aren't you glad you don't
have to diagram sentences anymore? Anyway, that's my aside there.
85 minutes prior to the game, all broadcast cameras used
for the replay system, including the camera on the game clock,
are synced using a strobe system to ensure all cameras

(05:19):
are aligned. Per NCAA Football Rule 423A. A ball not
in player control other than a kick that scores a
field goal is out of bounds when it touches the ground,
a player, a game official, or anything else that is
out of bound or that is outside a boundary line.
And thus... The clock is stopped. See, I like when

(05:41):
you get to the, and thus, it's like you could
see whoever wrote this, like finished with a flurry, like
he was a musical director and getting everybody to their
final note or just, hey, I've got something dramatic to say.
I'm on a stage. I'm an orator. I'm a congressperson
sitting there and giving you my stump speech. And at

(06:02):
the end, I throw my hand up with that great
final line. And thus, the clock is stopped. Now, there's
a Bruder film of all of it. And for those
of you that have really powerful computer systems and you
want to do the. enhance, enhance like we joke about
during our weekday show whenever it comes down to old
police procedurals. Yeah, just yell enhance and hit a button

(06:23):
and all of a sudden it just zooms in and
it's perfectly clear as to what you can see. For
many of us, as we watched it live, And I
hit the rewind a couple of times trying to figure
out exactly, all right, where the ball is, whose hands
are hitting, where are we playing electricity to where he's
not actually out of bounds, but he's touching someone. Like,
what are we doing? But ultimately, you get the do-over.

(06:46):
And as they say, you never let it go to
the judges. And this is where I will take Western
Michigan to task to a slight degree. Because remember, they
got the ball back on a huge fumble in the
final minutes of this game. Right? Great play. Great strip.
Underwood's going to the ground. You've got the waiting defender

(07:07):
who just punches it out, right? Straight out of the
Charles Tillman playbook with the peanut punch. Ball's free. Western
Michigan recovers. First and 10 at the Michigan 31. 11-yard run, okay? Timeout, Michigan.
Four-yard run, okay? Timeout, Michigan. Then you have the third

(07:29):
down play. I'm sorry, it's back to second and six, right?
Because we had the 11-yarder. Then you have the four-yard run.
Then you have another four-yard run.

Speaker 3 (07:37):
Cool.

Speaker 1 (07:38):
Timeout Michigan. Stops the clock. It's third and two. Out
of the shotgun, they're going to call play. Well... He
fumbles it. He puts it out of the carpet. Plays dead, right?
No chance to advance the ball in this scenario. So
you end up having to kick the field goal. Great.
You're up 12-7. And then you get the big Hail Mary.

(08:01):
You get the big play out of this Michigan six-play,
75-yard drive. You still have to play defense. You've done
a great job for the first time. 59 and a
half minutes of this. But you gave it a chance.

(08:21):
You gave them a chance. You have an incomplete pass,
incomplete pass, and then you have a deep ball for
28 yards to get you to the 47-yard line. Now,
a bit of a scramble on what looked to be
the final play of regulation. Ultimately, you get one tick
back on the clock. Again, watched it repeatedly, trying to

(08:42):
determine where that fingertip, where that hand is, where the
leaping is, all of that. Because remember, they've got to
do this quickly. And I know there's a video circulating
off the sideline of one of the Big Ten cameramen
pointing it out to the fans and everybody getting excited.
We can't play that audio because there's a bunch of
blankety blanks and all sorts of stuff going on. But

(09:04):
you can just imagine. And he goes, there it is.
It's one second. So they get the one second left.
And they do a perfect pick in the end zone,
give the absolute opportunity for the opportunity of Buchanan to
go up and make that play. Right? And that's how
it ends. Just like that, all of that great work,

(09:26):
59 minutes plus, to where you've held them under. And again,
everybody looking to ride under without a doubt. Doesn't mean
that they're suddenly going to go on a tremendous run, right? Hey,
we escaped. That's it. Certainly a lot of warts, a
lot of problems in this. But you have the opportunity
now where you're 1-0. And no matter how you got there,

(09:50):
by the skin of your teeth, by a replay review,
by the chaos that ensued, they didn't get to knock
the ball down the second time. High point, and it's
a great catch. For those that haven't seen it, go
look at the way Buchanan rises up and high points
this ball. And what the rest of the Michigan squad's doing,

(10:12):
sealing to give him space to where he's not being
contested as he goes to make that catch. It is
a fantastic execution on the deep ball. Also, when you're
looking at it, it's at the front of the end
zone this time, right? First time scrambled, kind of danced.
and then almost throws it fully out of bounds. This time,

(10:33):
front of the end zone. If nothing else, we might
have gotten ourselves a tip drool. It never got that far.
As Buchanan high points it, Michigan escapes. Succeed and proceed.
We were joking, my brother and I, going back and
forth on this one, and for all of you, you'll
get a lot of random 1980s, 90s to today. Just

(10:54):
like some of your soft stations, right? Your music stations
out there. We give you the hits of the 80s,
the 90s, and today. We'll do this with WWF, WWE, AWA, Regionality,
at Swollen Dome. If you remember any of these heroes.
Precious Paul Ellering, the manager of the great... Legion of doom,
the road warriors would always start by yelling something really

(11:18):
loud and over the top. And if he felt they
got screwed in a match, it always started with like
thieves in the night. This is one of those where
you go running into the tunnel. It's like, we got it.
We got over celebrate with the crowd as they assemble
on the field and just recognize, all right, you got one.
And we're talking about winning him in his debut. You're

(11:38):
never going to have another one like that. That's a
guy that's been at the same place for 30 years.
He comes to Michigan, and he gives you that fantastic finish. Again,
for folks of a certain age, and I think there
are a bunch of you out there. You remember those
Monday Night Football? Hey, fantastic finishes, and they'd give you
a last-second thriller. Here it is. Instant classic. Okay, for

(12:00):
35 seconds or so. 877-99 on Fox is your number. 877-996-6369.
Throughout the night, we'll litter the airwaves with your calls,
with your tweets at Swollen Dome. Come on in. It's
a family show. or at least we'll try to keep

(12:21):
it there. I tried to bring everybody around the old radio,
old timey, as it were, as you're out and about,
if you're driving for a living, be safe. Thanks for
being with us. If you're up on the third shift working,
thank you for being with us. If you're just sitting
around sipping a nice cold water, maybe a nice cup
of coffee, maybe you're starting your day, maybe you're ending it.
However you're listening to us, wherever the I heart radio

(12:42):
app are hundreds of affiliates nationwide. And of course that
little voice in your head, We appreciate you being part
of our extended family. We're just getting warmed up. Coming
up next, we celebrate a great anniversary, but me telling
you all about the villain you need and we all
collectively need. That's coming up next. It's Fox Sports Late
Night with me, Mike Harmon, here on Fox Sports Radio.

(13:04):
Welcome back in Fox sports late night. Be my Carmen
with you on a beautiful Saturday into Sunday. First full
slate of college football games. Just a couple of days
till we get to the NFL. We've got some of
that for you. Give you the quick look at what
we've got over the course of the night. You've heard
Brandon Deutsch on with us with Bernie for months now

(13:26):
talking fantasy football. He'll pop in next hour. We'll do
some last minute draft advice for, some sleepers and all
of that fun stuff with you with the fantasy files.
We're going to talk a little bit of South side
since the white socks are relevant and mighty Mark and
I can commiserate over that. There's also a rendering of
a new stadium. For the White Sox, money? Money flowing

(13:47):
on the South Side? That's a beautiful thing. We've got
some trading cards stuff. Surveys that we need to talk about.
Sleep science. Harmon's hammer. Because we had a topic this
week that really, I think everybody's getting it wrong because
they took the easy way and the easy explanation because
they didn't read paragraph two. But we'll get into that

(14:08):
a little bit later on because it really just comes
down to one thing. It's fuzzy math. Got plenty of
that over the course of the show as well. But
I teased it before. Tonight is the anniversary of the
release of one of the greatest animated shows of all time.
Let's go back to September 5th of 1992. Batman, the

(14:33):
animated series, made its debut. We've just done the rewatch.
I know Emmy's starting to get back into that. He's
going to drag his kid and say, this is the
greatest superhero and collection of villains that you could possibly find.
Am I right? Am I right? Oh, that's right. Yeah,
that's it. I just started today, and I had no
idea it was the anniversary. And I am so glad
I started. See, the way the universe works. You know, Batman, 1989,

(14:57):
the seminal film. It's also Michael Keaton's birthday. 75 years
young today, the Batman. All right, Adam West is the Batman. But,
you know, Michael Keaton for the rest of us. But
all of that ties into, I love supervillains, right? We
love villains. We've had a decade, two decades of the

(15:18):
anti-hero where we're not in a dystopian future. Sometimes those
worlds collide. But we talk about villains. And right now
in the college football era... There's nobody that comes close, right?
We've had guys be contenders and they would be in
the rogues gallery. See, I'm going full Batman nerd with you.

(15:39):
They'd be in the rogues gallery sitting around and you
decide where that bus goes and, and all of those things.
But right now there, there is one and he is
elite and he did some hot yoga and And he
did the pregame show before absolutely dismantling and throttling his
opponent this evening. And he's been thrust into, well, he's

(16:03):
thrust himself, really, into the heart of what people call
the sanctity, the battle for the soul of college sports,
of college football. You can lose me with that. Okay,
we got bag men going back 60 years that we
know of. in terms of college sports and people who

(16:23):
are always there with a nice little handshake and a
folded up wad of bills. Like that's nothing new. We've
just now changed the game, the rules, and maybe there's
a few extra zeros attached to all of it. And remember,
these are the zeros we know of now. I'm not
even going to get into that whole Clipper thing. We
can do that a little bit later on. But when

(16:45):
we talk about college football and where we're at, the
battle with Lane Kiffin, and let's just put the name
on it, has been all about will you be able
to bring guys that got cut off an NFL roster,
never played in a game, never played really much of
anything meaningful. They got to run around and maybe they
got to keep the jerseys and pennies and whatever else

(17:06):
they assembled. but can they come back and play, right?
And this is where we get into eligibility rules, what's
going on, who's a pro, who's not. And some would
argue it's semantics. I say it's very much a very
legal financial distinction, not quite semantics of, you know, potato,
potato kind of thing. There's actually legal distinction because they're

(17:29):
not employees of the school or the state for that matter.
But we talk about NIL and how many commercials did
you see? If you're doing a drinking game for the
Save College sports ads with all the different luminaries that
were part of those, you didn't make it past the
first quarter of your early game. You might have gotten

(17:50):
the early EPL game at, I think it was 4.30
Pacific time that kicked off. And then you might have
gotten through maybe halftime at those 9 a.m. Pacific time starts. Otherwise,
you were done because every break was, here's this ad,
here's this ad, the sanctity of the game. And look,
I think at this point with Lane Kiffin, you can

(18:12):
always find a judge. We've watched TV shows and movies
for years online. of if you work hard enough and
you can find the sympathetic ear, you'll get the warrant
you need, you'll get that guy released, all of those things,
and they're always in a nice robe. Sipping a nice
Chianti or a late night drink. Yeah, you're all picturing it.
How many times did you see Benson and Stabler show up? Judge, judge. Ah,

(18:36):
you two again, right? Yeah. I mean, Sam Waterston. Hey,
meeting up with a buddy at the end of the
bar at 2 a.m. Like, all right, I know it's
almost last call, but this really is going to help
me out. We've all seen it. Now I need to
start re-watching all those Law & Order episodes again. But
all that to say, you find a friendly judge, all
of a sudden you get an injunction here, you get

(18:58):
this lifted, you get this, and suddenly 42 people could
potentially play. In this case, we had two guys in
particular that might have come back to play at LSU.
Here's how Lane Kiffin addressed it earlier this morning.

Speaker 4 (19:11):
Yeah, that wasn't easy.

Speaker 5 (19:13):
As much as I feel for the players, and I
believe that you fight for what you believe in, and
I believe these kids have an opportunity to play, just
like all the other kids around the country that are
winning court cases and being put on rosters. But at
the same time, I'm the head coach of LSU, and
I had to make a decision that is for the

(19:33):
big picture of LSU and the LSU football program with
the uncertainties of what potentially could have come by adding
them to the roster. And we couldn't get exact reasons
or exact what that.

Speaker 4 (19:46):
Would mean if we added them.

Speaker 3 (19:48):
So with that.

Speaker 5 (19:50):
made the decision, which is the best interest of the
team and the university. And we're excited to be playing
a great game today here in front.

Speaker 3 (19:56):
Of these fans.

Speaker 1 (19:57):
And let's spot the ball. There you go. 51-10 was
the final, by the way. I buried the lead there
of what LSU did to Clemson and Dabo Sweeney. We
got plenty on him a little bit later. I know
Aaron and Jason were talking about Dabo and his tenure
and where we're looking at. Because the guy who has
been reticent to embrace any of the newness of college football.

(20:19):
He's been at Clemson for a long time, going back
to 2008. Had all those huge years. Kind of... Culminating with, well,
Deshaun Watson and his greatness. But like all of that
to say, when we're talking about the era now, you
need the common enemy, right? You've all done it. Maybe

(20:40):
with your brothers or your sisters or your cousins or
your running buddies, whoever was like the extended family. You
played the numbers game. And you try to lean and say, hey,
this is how it's got to work. And you try
to find, you know, someone's got to be the common
enemy of all of it. You work and that energy
goes into one space. And right now, Lane Kiffin's the

(21:02):
common enemy of everybody. Now, remember, LSU voted as part
of that unanimous block to say, hey, we don't want
this in the SEC. And so this is pragmatism 101
right here in terms of, nope, we're not going to
do it. And part of it is, if suddenly you
can find another judge, you take it through the courts,
it goes through fast enough, and it's overturned, well, what
happens if they played meaningful parts or any snaps in

(21:25):
these games that are wins? How do you extract those
stats and their contribution reasonably? and say, well, you know,
they still would have won 48-3. So, no, no, no,
that's not the way it works, right? You played, you
were ineligible, here's what happens. You start talking about losing
wins and all of these different metrics. Now, that would

(21:46):
mean the NCAA would actually have to act with some
level of speed, which, as we know historically, hey, not
going to happen. But in this case, you're also looking
at the SEC conference. there's lots of money and revenue
flowing through. You don't want you as much as you
may want to be the bad boys. And this is
where Kiffin and LSU as an institution, there may be

(22:09):
a bit of a divide, right? Where you could say, Hey,
press it. But you're also like, well, we want to
remain in good standing with the conference because, well, we
see where this is headed. The super friends and the
super conferences when we talk about the SEC and Big
Ten at the head of the table. And as my

(22:29):
favorite guy in the world of wrestling right now, Dan
Housen would say, that's an awful lot of human monies.
And we have to be careful about that and be
judicious about that. And for Lane Kiffin, Hell, at halftime,
he did all his speech and he was good. He's like, oh,
you know what? If we clean this up and we
didn't have this turnover, it should be 38 to nothing.

(22:50):
And he turns and he starts to walk away, but
he turns back and goes, imagine if we had the pros. Okay.
Got a little bit of the swagger, as it were,
as he ran off the field, absolutely obliterating Clemson. Because
there was talk this morning, right? The hot yoga, showing

(23:11):
up on the set with McAfee. which, you know, leaving
no pops, culture stone unturned. There's plenty of instances on
Family Guy where you got Stewie trying to be the
consoling person for Brian, for Peter. Hey there, big guy.
You doing okay? And it felt like what McAfee was
kind of doing. doing with Lane Kiffin. Hey, buddy. And

(23:33):
he's like, you know, it means a lot. You're my guy.
All these things. And they go back and forth. And
it's fine. But I started seeing all the, I don't know,
maybe they're distracted. Maybe not there. Yeah. Laid that to
waste pretty fast, didn't they? To the point where your
starters are out at the end of the third quarter.
Absolute domination from pillar to post. 51-10 your final. It

(23:54):
was 31-3 at half. At the end. You got five
minutes of game plus almost six full minutes. They're doing
an interview with the guy doing knuckle push-ups on the sideline,
one of the cheerleaders. That's how badly handled this was
for Dabo Sweeney and Clemson. Yeah, Lane Kiffin's the guy

(24:16):
that college sports needed. We do a lot of posturing,
a lot of gesturing. Look, the NCAA is in the
last throws of whatever power they have. I get in
arguments with my guy Jason Smith during the week on
this all the time. In theory, in theory, that's a
phrase you may hear a lot over the course of tonight,

(24:36):
is in theory this is great, right? A commissioner, someone
that is at the head. You think the head of
the Big Ten? You think the head of the SEC?
Any of these conferences with any clout whatsoever are going
to say, yep, put that guy in charge. And whatever
he says, we're going to do.

Speaker 2 (24:54):
No!

Speaker 1 (24:55):
No, they're self-directed to the best interest of their conferences,
to what's going to make them the most revenue, make
them the winningest, and keep the line moving, right? It's
like a shark tooth. You take a bite, one falls out.
Guess what? Another one pops up into place to bite
your ass right away the next time. So same thing

(25:16):
here with Lane Kiffin. He's saying, well, it's worth exploring.
And it's worth pushing. And if that makes them the villain,
so be it. But we're already in the age where
you're talking about money. And again, they're not employees. And
if you want to do the collective bargaining and go
down that road, many years ago, there was a Northwestern
group of players that started talking about unionization and everybody

(25:37):
thought they were the worst thing in the world. Full circle.
That's kind of where we're at here again of trying
to make sure that, you know, there's rules and policies
and procedures and equity and and, quote, fairness. All right.
That's always a four letter word, literally and figuratively fair.
But when we look at Lane Kiffin, you finally have
people in the rooms and how they're voting. or I

(26:01):
should say why they're voting may still be in question, right?
Go along to get along behind the scenes. You're working
the mechanics and also saying this would be good for
us for reasons X, Y, Z. But for now, we
stay with the block. But you've got the one guy
that's willing to stand up and go, well, why can't
they come back? They didn't technically play in the NFL

(26:24):
you got players making money and I know the distinction
between NIL and being an employee that's still very big
but you can see where they're inching towards trying to
figure that out right now you have a salary cap
you parse it out over your different programs at the
school but in this time and age it's always just

(26:47):
been about the faceless NCAA I don't know what are
they going to do no idea Right. Long investigations. And
the people that actually get affected are eighth graders right
now in most of these cases. Right. They might have
already got a verbal commit somewhere. But you get my point.
It's usually not the people that are actually involved in

(27:09):
what the change was or any rule breaking or violations
for Lane Kiffin. as much as you may not like
his attitude, as much as you look at the excerpts
of that book, which paint a whole other world, he's
not a guy shy on controversy and history has shown

(27:29):
that throughout his coaching career. But when we look at
it and we sit here today in college football, you've
got haves and haves nots. That's always been the case.
That divide is huge and it keeps getting bigger. But
for this idea of bringing back the pro players, they
washed out. And if there's technically eligibility left based on

(27:52):
years and those kinds of things, because we've washed this
away in terms of signing with, with agents and whatever else,
marketing deals and all of those different pieces of the
puzzle that they can go back. Does it leave me uneasy? Absolutely.

Speaker 6 (28:10):
Absolutely.

Speaker 1 (28:11):
You went into a draft, you were undrafted, whatever the
case may be. You went pro, you didn't make it.
All right, it's time to go find your next vocation.
But until you've got a unifying body to come down
with and you can't find that one judge, you're always
going to find the one judge. But you don't have
a policy in place because you've tried to make it

(28:31):
up as you went along. You didn't look down the
road to say, all right, here's what's ahead of us.
We need to start thinking about rules and and propositions
to all right what happens when a player does this
what happens when a player does that we'll we'll talk
about trading cards in a couple minutes in in one
of my worlds and playing around and just going through

(28:52):
a box of college cards wait do you see what
uh comes out of that but it's it's the idea
that you you've already had all these other rules remember
you had to sit out a year once upon a
time when you transferred i'm old enough to remember those
rules to where you had to sit. So it was
a very big decision, not, hey, I'm going to get
a pile of cash, and I'm going to go supplant

(29:13):
the guy they don't love over there, and it's an
easy transition. It's like, no, I literally can't play for
a year. And whatever happens in that year may affect
whether I ever get on the field. Now it's, all right,
I'm done, I'm gone. All right, so... Giant pile of cash,
and away you go. So you look at where we're

(29:33):
at at this point in college sports. For Lane Kiffin,
he's just that guy that's raising his hand and shaking it.
shaking his fist saying hey what about this all right
let's go out to the phone line we're out to
baker's field up late with us here in california andrew
little bit of college football how excited are you that
week one is well it's not in the books we

(29:54):
got two more days of games.

Speaker 7 (29:59):
It's good.

Speaker 6 (29:59):
I haven't, I haven't been able to find very many
games on I heart, but I'm excited. This is the
first time I've talked to you here. Wanted to call
your show with Jason a few times, but anyways.

Speaker 1 (30:13):
Yeah. Well, to yell at me or yell at him or,
or just to mock us.

Speaker 6 (30:18):
I don't remember specifically, but.

Speaker 1 (30:20):
To mock us. Okay, cool. What do you got Andrew?

Speaker 6 (30:24):
So for college sports, just some general comments, see what
you think. But it seems obvious that there needs to
be some balance. And so my thought is if the
NCAA has no power, and then I'll comment on the
professionals thing, but if the NCAA has no power, it

(30:45):
seems like possibly Congress should get involved to empower them.
And the reason is, that young people are involved in
this and they're at stake.

Speaker 1 (30:59):
What do you think? Yeah, I think when we look
at it, you know, whenever we get governmental intervention, I get,
you know, a little nervous, right? Because the potential for
the overreach comes in. But the key to all of
it is trying to figure out how to get these
guys in the same room to where it's all, at
least on the surface, a unified vision of what the

(31:21):
sport becomes. The problem is right now it's so siloed
to the individual conferences because you're beholden to your member schools, right?
How do you get your best deal, right? Why did
the Pac-12 go and go away for a couple of years?
They signed a terrible TD, right? They're back now, right?
Big game today. I mean, we watched Boise State. I

(31:42):
had a vested interest. They lose that game to Oregon,
but there they are. But it's the idea of they
bought that real estate up in the Bay Area, And
then they signed a really terrible TV deal right as
the Big Ten and the other networks started really cashing in.
So any advantage you would have had, and obviously playing
late and all of that for polling purposes is a

(32:04):
whole other thing, but a lot of it is predicated
on what kind of TV deal you can do and
then cut that money back across the schools. That helps
everything flow. It's one of the hearts of the Dodgers
investigation and discussion we've been having hell, since McCourt went
bankrupt all those years ago. Anyway, what else you got
real quick? Cause we got to get to a break. Okay.

Speaker 6 (32:25):
So what I remember from college sports, it was just
weird to play the video game and try and pick
a team that you thought was good. And none of
their last names were on the back of the shirt,
but I'll move on to that.

Speaker 1 (32:37):
No, that's the best. Cause I actually appeared in one
of those games as a fan in the crowd. Oh, wow. Yeah,
I'll tell you about that in the next segment. But
last thing, really quick.

Speaker 6 (32:46):
Okay, so the pros. I played junior college soccer, and
we were good. And I won't tell you the team,
but we played a team, and they destroyed us. And
then later, through prayer and stuff, I think God revealed
to me that there were some people who had played
pro sports on that team. And so I think... if
someone even steps on a practice field in the name

(33:09):
of trying to play pro sports, they should possibly not
be able to come back to college sports because it's
a higher level. That's all I got.

Speaker 1 (33:15):
Thanks. Appreciate you, Andrew, Andrew and Bakersfield. Appreciate you stopping
in all of you out there. Eight, seven, seven 99
on Fox. You're welcome to chime in coming up next
as we continue here from the Fox sports radio studios
here on Fox sports late night. We'll talk a little
bit of trading cards. One of my, my, loves since
I was a child. And I sit with mountains of them.

(33:38):
And it makes me and takes me to a happy place.
We'll talk about that as we continue. Also, be sure
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Speaker 3 (33:59):
Fox Sports Radio has the best sports talk lineup in
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Speaker 1 (34:11):
Hey, it's Covino and Rick from Fox Sports Radio.

Speaker 8 (34:14):
Now, in addition to hearing us live weekdays from 5
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Sports Radio, we're excited to announce a brand new YouTube
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Speaker 1 (34:24):
Yup, that's right.

Speaker 8 (34:25):
You can now watch Covino & Rich live on YouTube
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thumbs up icon, and comment away.

Speaker 1 (34:42):
Hey, welcome back in Fox Sports Late Night with me. Hi,
I'm Mike Harmon. You hear me weeknight, 7 to 11
Pacific Time with Jason Smith. We continue to roll and
vex each other for another football season. Bears, expectations. Jets,
not so much. So we'll have fun with that. Although
both our college teams won today. His Syracuse Orange with

(35:04):
a big win over New Hampshire. And my Northwestern Wildcats,
while it was not easy, they take down the Jackrabbits.
ultimately uh and they they covered the numbers so uh
all that in is good and fine the i i
want your flex podcast is out there dan byer and
i are back for another fantasy football season coming up
next hour brandon deutsch will stop by uh at the

(35:26):
20 block and we'll get ourselves into some fantasy talk
if you've got some drafts this labor day weekend wherever
you are on the highways and byways we thank you
for being part of our family now look i want
to talk trading cards But we have a couple of
callers that came in, and I want to be nice
and not leave you guys hanging out there into the

(35:46):
evening where you fall asleep and then we get snoring,
although that could be good audio too. But first, let's
go out to Chance out in Alabama, talk a little
college football week one. What's going on, Chance?

Speaker 2 (35:57):
Appreciate it, appreciate it, man. Welcome in. I got to
talk about my– Thank you for taking this. I've got
to talk about my ties. Now I'm not going to
get too far ahead of myself. I'm not going to
go crazy. I know it was just East Carolina. But
I will go this far. 342 total yards, no turnovers.
I think it was like 84 on the ground. Keelyon

(36:18):
Russell looks like the real deal. I think we may
have a stud quarterback. I'm about 95% sure he is legit.
And here's a fun fact. Did you know in the
history of Alabama's football program, he is the highest rated
recruit to come to the program. You think Nick Saban
would have got recruited the highest ranked player, but no,

(36:42):
it's Keely on Russell, the highest ranked recruit to ever come.
And I mean, he was making NFL throws. He was
great under pressure. Like I said, I know it's East Carolina,
but He looks like the real deal. He was not timid.
I'm excited, man. I know with the schedule to come,
we're going to really find out what he's made of.

(37:03):
I'm not going to say we're going to win the SEC,
but I think all teams are on notice that we're
not going to be a pushover this year. We came
in ranked 13th. I think we're a little bit better
than that. Roll damn time, man. I'm excited.

Speaker 1 (37:15):
There you go, Chance. Thanks for stopping in. Hope springs eternal.
We're looking at an over-under, 8.5 wins. And certainly a
lot of folks looking over at Kalen DeBoer and saying,
all right, this is the year. We need you to
take that big step up. He mentions their quarterback. He
was one of those guys I kept finding in the
box of cards. So maybe I'm a little bit richer

(37:36):
as I sit here with you tonight at Fox Sports
late night. All right, let's stay on the phones. We've
got Hollering James next. Hollering James, what's going on?

Speaker 7 (37:45):
Hey, brother, how you doing?

Speaker 1 (37:48):
It's Hollering James. Welcome in. What's going on?

Speaker 7 (37:52):
Hey, man, I like to take the Minnesota Twins. They're battling.
They're fighting their hearts out. I don't know if they
won tonight because I don't have exclusive cable. And the
radio stations here are so cheap. pick them up all
the time when they're at their crucial moment.

Speaker 1 (38:15):
Now, well, let me be that guy for you because
you know, that, that guts to the heart of my
life because they were six, four winners over my beloved
Chicago White Sox. So there you go. You were a winner.

Speaker 2 (38:27):
What?

Speaker 1 (38:33):
There you go. Way to go. Hollering James. Uh, Ben
will be back with you tomorrow night and you can
get after it with him. Appreciate you stopping by eight, seven,
seven 99 on Fox. You want to call in? I
got a big screen. That might become a drop before
it's all said and done. Uh, talking trading cards though. Like,
you know, for me, uh, it's been something that helped
put me through school and, And what I spend a

(38:54):
lot of time with now, and you see athletes getting involved.
It's hit a whole new phase where you're going back
to the players and goats of yesteryear. We're big time
money being spent on. jordan guards griffey cards people getting
back to the jeeters all those stars from the 90s
uh that you remember and obviously jeeter deeper into that

(39:16):
but but the point just being money flowing through and
collegiate cards are kind of fun to collect and and
go through as well um you know i had at
some point picked up a lot of things and i'm
going through tonight i'm like hey i got this cool
josh hoover card well he had a big debut including
a the crimson mask there you go another wrestling term

(39:36):
uh in his debut for indiana but he has a
big deal uh well he's in a tcu Right. And
going through the stack that I did of the college stuff,
you've got guys that have transferred multiple times. Like I
was like, I've got this guy in three different schools
at this point. And going back to our earlier conversation
of once upon a time, you know, it's a lot
of risk involved with making that big decision to go

(40:00):
and transfer when you've got to sit out a year.
But it's, it's just, for me, it's, it's a fun
piece that correlates and ties with, to all of the
love and the highlights and those moments that we remember.
You go back to a year, you look at the
back of a baseball card, you think about opening a pack,
and you had gum or a puzzle piece or a sticker.

(40:22):
I still have some of those stickers. You might see
a bunch of random logos showing up in the Fox
Sports Radio studios. Wait, I shouldn't have said that out loud.
877-99 on Fox, at Swollen Dome, where you find me
in the Twitterverse. Coming up next, we'll talk a little
bit of NFL from 30,000 feet, next on Fox. Greetings
and welcome in. Hour two of the program as we

(40:42):
flip the calendar here on the West Coast. Appreciate you
giving us a few minutes of your time as you're
out and about with your work, trying to fall asleep.
Hopefully I don't send you to sleep, but you get
my point. Let's spend some of the early morning hours together,
shall we? We got Mark and Emmy here to keep
me in check to make sure I don't go too

(41:04):
far off the rails. I believe Emmy has a dump
button in front of him that he's playing pressure luck
with right now. No whammy, no whammy. Ah, he said it.

Speaker 7 (41:13):
Stop!

Speaker 1 (41:14):
Yeah, welcome in. At Swollen Dome is where you find
me in the Twitterverse. 877-99 on Fox. 877-996-6369 is the
phone number. Again, at Swollen Dome on Twitter, Instagram, all
the good places. If you want to show me pictures
of your trading card collection, that's all the pictures I'm authorizing.

(41:35):
I know it's late night and you guys want to
get wild. That's all I want. You got trading cards, right?
You got a Jordan collection.

Speaker 3 (41:41):
Cool.

Speaker 1 (41:41):
Show me some cool stuff there. You got some piece
of memorabilia that you love about your favorite team. Maybe
because we're finishing the college football Saturday that you cherish.
I dig it. Ticket stubs, stories, meeting guys. Like, that's it.
It's building the community. And that's part of the trading
card thing for me and everybody. and certainly why I

(42:02):
love doing this job and talking sports, right? It's a
community builder. Yeah, we might argue and disagree about different facts,
you know, or I should say with different positions on
a different, and we argue about facts too, because lies,
damn lies, and statistics is truly what it comes down to,

(42:24):
the old Disraeli quote. But when we talk about sports, right,
we can all come back to the common ground. We're
there to watch a game. That's why I love going
to live theater and concerts. They might not have played
my favorite song or your favorite song, but we're there
for the band. We're there for that communal experience. It's
like going to services on the weekend or during the
week or however you gather for different things. We talked

(42:46):
about Lane Kiffin and his hot yoga. That's where you
find your peace. So be it. Same thing here. We're
talking sports. We're talking pop culture. We're just having a
good time. So come along, grab a drink of your choice,
and sit and hang with us as we get ready.
The NFL, later on this week, will finally get underway.
Labor Day weekend. On the highways and byways of life.

(43:08):
Couple more days. Couple more big games of college football
to go. But come Wednesday, we'll kick things off for real.
And we'll have some on sleep patterns and all of
that fun stuff coming up the end of next hour.
Because there's some studies and data that... Well, it might
help you in terms of making your prognostication. In 20 minutes,
we'll talk some fantasy. Brandon Deutsch is going to come

(43:30):
in and hang out. We'll go through some of that
early round math, what you should be doing as you're
stacking your team, and maybe a couple of late round
flyers because I know there's a lot of fantasy drafts
going on this weekend. We have our big in-house guillotine league,
which we'll draft actually on Labor Day. I think I
might be on air. So in the middle of arguing
with Jason Smith, I might just start talking cursing uh

(43:53):
off mic and you'll wonder what it is like it
means i just got a guy swiped out from under
me once again but as we get ready for this
nfl season i mean it's myriad storylines right we can
come up with a handful for pretty much every team
on the books from the top of the heap and
the rams and the presumptive favorites right five and plus

(44:15):
550 are their odds to win it all right now
to where you go down to the Arizona Cardinals and
the New York football jets sitting at 750 to one.
You got the Miami Dolphins down there in those odds.
I think the Jets are a little bit better, but
you get my point. We're talking, that's the big gap.
The heroes to the dregs. The Arizona Cardinals are 100-1

(44:38):
to win the NFC West. The Dolphins were 40-1 to
win the AFC East the last I looked. So what
we're talking about... Once again, haves, have-nots, rebuild, repurposing. The Dolphins,
I've argued, and I continue to do so, that they
should have taken every dime that they owe in terms
of dead cap space to Tua Tunga-Vailoa. Bottomed out. Bottomed

(45:02):
out this year. That's it. We're done. 2027, it's a
whole new world as opposed to, all right, we still
have some money that we owe to a guy who's
probably not going to play a lot of meaningful football.
in 2026 if you saw anything that was going on
with the atlanta falcons uh this preseason to the point
where you got burner accounts his wife chiming in and
all of those subplots that go through he and michael

(45:25):
pennix jr i bring up the falcons in the same
breath as the dolphins because i've joked a bunch on
our weekday show that before it's all said and done
and you'll nod your head because you'll you you may
remember this name james wilder 1984 tampa bay buccaneers 492
touches from scrimmage. Receptions and carries. Think about that.

Speaker 6 (45:50):
492.

Speaker 1 (45:50):
16-game season. A. Chan and B. John Robinson might actually
challenge for that if things break right. I think both
those guys are 100-catch guys when we get down to it,
just like Christian McCaffrey was for the 49ers a year ago.
But we'll get into some of the fantasy implications of
all of this because you can always find value even
if it's a low-goal. or in the case of the

(46:12):
Cleveland Browns, no logo, on the side of the helmet.
There's value to be had from each of these rosters.
But we just look at all of the different storylines,
and I've used this a little bit. If you've heard it,
forgive me. If you haven't, well, it's new to you.
It's like the old sitcoms on NBC. If you missed
them in the fall and they started rerun season, they

(46:32):
sold you that it was brand new because you didn't
see them in the fall. You were watching something else,
you know, like football. But 10... 21-14. Now maybe that's
a locker combination. Maybe you got something on a strong
box or a locker or something. Maybe you got a
little storage unit as part of your apartment complex. You

(46:53):
can go try it. Maybe it'll open up the lock.
I don't know. But we got 10 new head coaches
in the National Football League this year. We have 21
new offensive coordinators. this year now you got some guys
returning back to say eric b enemy even though it's
still andy reed but it's eric b enemy back in

(47:14):
kansas city so can we turn back the clock if
patrick mahomes can stay healthy we'll talk a little of
that in the fantasy segment but you get where i'm
going with this a lot of turnover 14 new defensive
coordinators which i think led us to in the preseason
we got a little longer views of a lot of
these teams where normally it would have been a queen's
wave i did my three plays i'm done Now you

(47:37):
got to see them a little more, deeper into the
first quarter, maybe working with a completely reshuffled offensive line.
But you see the joint practices in some of the
videos that came out of there. You see some of
those reports that it's a very different NFL. And it's
been changing, not to the extent of what we talk

(47:57):
about with the grandiose sweeping defense, world of college sports
and college football specifically for the purpose of this conversation.
But for the NFL, you got a lot of new
blood coming in, right? Some of our favorites are now
in the broadcast booth or are going to be in studio.
Tell me, do you ever want to just bang your
head against the wall when you see that camel walk

(48:20):
through the newsroom? And you go, oh, God, there it is.
It's back. It's back. Mike, Mike, Mike, Mike, Mike, Mike, Mike. No, no.
Because that means, you know what happens with a name, Mike?
I get a lot of people that walk up to me. Hey,
I'm being funny. It's like, no, you're going to get
a flying forearm smash. Or I'm going to Rick Steiner you.
You remember that? Scott Steiner's kid and... Saints camp at

(48:41):
a joint practice when he German suplexed the guy. No,
that's what you get from me. So I like the bit,
you know, for the fact that Tirico plays along fine
hump day. And then they go to Tom when he said,
don't even, but then Mike Tomlin broke all, all of the,
facade we've had of him being a hard ass all
these years and we know he he he's a fun

(49:02):
guy in his own spot and he has fun with
you know the reporters i've got my own stories from
when he was first uh taking over the job for
a couple years i'd go out to training camp and
there were a number of times where little mikey Harmon
found himself in spots on the practice fields where maybe
I was one of two guys standing there and maybe

(49:23):
he had to dress down a player and maybe he
said that doesn't show up tomorrow. Maybe there's some of those,
but for him to then do that whole TikTok dance
thing that they had with the NBC crew, I'm like,
what are we doing? Mike Tomlin, what are we doing?
But then he talks about how relaxed he is because
he finally has had a life for the first time

(49:44):
in years. And we remember what a drain this is,
what a grind it is, and what a glorious moment
we're in right now because we're getting ready to embark
on another 272 glorious regular season games. Sure, it starts
in odd spaces. Do you ever think we're going to
have a game in Austria? No. Travel plans, we'll talk

(50:06):
about that later, but you've got that and you keep
the global reach, the global expansion, wrapping the world in
a great big hug with the NFL. But it's just
that idea that hope springs eternal, right? We took a
couple calls at the end of last hour and it
was some of that as well. Mark, what do you got?

Speaker 9 (50:26):
So I wanted to ask you a question just to
circle back on what you were talking about. When it
comes to Miami, are they... Unofficial, official, trying to tank.
And who is the goal for those teams attempting to
tank their season?

Speaker 4 (50:43):
To get who?

Speaker 1 (50:44):
Who are they trying to get? Well, and that's the thing, right?
We're going to see that shake out. You've got a
lot of quarterbacks that have put up big numbers here
in the first quarter. couple of days here that we've
watched you got my ava here in in los angeles
with usc he's been fantastic to this point uh we'll
have more on the attendance of how many people actually
saw him ply his wares the last couple of weeks

(51:07):
you know the presumption is that arch manning's gonna light
things up and they had a big win today and
you move on and you know we can't take a
ton from week one but We presume, I think, that
you're looking at a bunch of quarterbacks, right? We love
our wideouts. I think in their best-case scenario, Malik Willis
is good and good enough that they say, okay, we'll
take you for year two and three to where if they–

(51:30):
Let's assume they have the number one pick. Let's just
go there, okay? That they're worse than Arizona, Cleveland, and
the Jets. That maybe they're looking for more help, right?
You got A-Chan, you just re-upped him this year. But
outside of that, you're devoid of a lot of talent
and a lot of building blocks. So can you turn
that number one pick? Because assuming folks still want to
go get it, right? Because remember, this year was supposed

(51:52):
to be a great class of quarterbacks. A lot of
those guys didn't make rosters, right? Right. They went and
they got hurt or they had a subpar year in
their final college experience. And all of a sudden they're
sixth round picks. So if things break right, then, yeah,
maybe they look at Malik Willis and say, well, forget it.
We're going to go get that quarterback, that guy and

(52:14):
move forward. Or if nothing else, it's a great lottery
ticket to have to trade down and find a couple
other building blocks. At least from where I sit. And
that's the beauty. Hope springs eternal for most teams. Which
is why I did the odds thing to kind of
show the divide. Because no matter how big a fan
of your squad you are, sometimes you just recognize what

(52:38):
you're sitting in. Right? You and I are White Sox fans, Mark.

Speaker 3 (52:41):
Right.

Speaker 1 (52:41):
The last three years... I love my squad. A lot
of times, you know, it's like, as soon as you
start posting out the audio and video of, you know what,
we had the best record of baseball after five and
a half innings, you know it's gone to hell. Breaking
records for losses, 300 loss seasons, all of those. So

(53:02):
this year, I'm in found money territory. Young core players.
Murakami comes from Japan and he's embracing Chicago.

Speaker 4 (53:11):
They're not embarrassing anymore.

Speaker 1 (53:12):
That's the best part. But right. And now we're talking
about new state. Like all of these things are just
absolutely insane, but you could see how fast it turns, right?
Indiana is the defending college football champion. Hope Springs eternal. Likewise,
when it comes to the draft, if you can identify
that guy and that's the thing for me, like if
you're looking at those quarterbacks and you decide that's the

(53:33):
guy you live and die on that Hill, I will defend,
and I didn't like a lot of the moves they made,
and even the draft pick didn't make sense. But I
mentioned Deshaun Watson when we were talking about Dabo and
everything before. Go back to that draft in 2017. It's
very convenient to say the Bears should have taken Patrick Mahomes.
That was never the argument. That was never the discussion.

(53:56):
It was Trubisky was a riser and people were talking
about him, or it was Deshaun Watson. Because Deshaun Watson
had played well in college. Now, is he the same guy,
same allegations, same history, same injuries, whatever? If he's not
in Houston, operations shut down, all those issues, bunch of injuries,
playing in Cleveland? Don't know. But if we're honest with ourselves,

(54:19):
that was the pick that you would have said on
draft night. He played really well in college. Why didn't
they take him? Mahomes was, he plays in this weird system.
It's kind of funky. Great arm, great IQ, all of
these things, but does that translate? And then he gets
to learn at the feet of Andy Reid, BNME, and

(54:39):
Alex Smith, and lo and behold, we get the career
that it becomes. But I'm always of the opinion, like,
if they decide there's a guy to live or die
on that hill, go find him at number one. So
we'll see how that plays. All right, 877-99 on Fox
is the number. At Swollen Dome is where you find
me in the Twitterverse. Coming up next, we're going to

(55:01):
take our trip to Fantasyland. We're going to dance around
the upper rounds. How do you build a roster? A
couple of sleepers maybe later in your draft. Get the
pencils and paper ready. Grab another cup of coffee or
maybe a stiff drink. We got you next here on Fox. Hey,
welcome back in. Fox Sports Late Night. My name's Mike Harmon.
Thanks for hanging out with us. We got Emmy and

(55:23):
Mark making us sound so pretty here into your early
morning hours. Appreciate you. The iHeartRadio app. Take us with
you wherever you're going. Hundreds of affiliates nationwide. As always,
that little voice in your head. We're going to switch
gears a little bit here. Talk NFL from a different angle.
Talking fantasy football. Brandon Deutsch, one of our editors, producers.

(55:46):
And Content Man, when it comes down to the fantasy
football world, he's been part of the Bernie Frato Show
for a few months doing his takes. So we're going
to take the fantasy files and we're going to do
it live here each week here on the show. Brandon S.
Deutsch on TikTok and Instagram. BSD takes on X. If

(56:06):
you have fantasy questions, by all means, please shoot them
our way. But, Brandon, we're in the final throws of
draft season. The fun and excitement, the data's out. Obviously,
the first two guys jumping off the board in some combination,
Bijan Robinson and Jameer Gibbs, and then we start fighting thereafter.
But from a general draft perspective, how are you roster

(56:28):
building in 2026?

Speaker 4 (56:30):
Well, in my leagues that I'm in personally, I mean,
it feels like the running backs, if you play with
a lot of seasoned veterans, the running backs go off
the board pretty quickly. I know Jonathan Taylor had one
league because a guy was picking third at that turn
in round two. He knew there wasn't going to be
a good running back available. So he took Taylor over
Jamar Chase. And this was in a PPR league. Not

(56:50):
even half PPR. But yeah, I mean, roster, but you
always want a great running back before round three, at
least one. But I don't think like you're you have
to take a running back in the first round as
much as. it used to be a thing, you know
what I mean? Cause there's so many good wide receivers now.
And besides Christian McCaffrey, I mean, those wide receivers were
super close to outperforming most of the top running backs

(57:11):
last year.

Speaker 1 (57:12):
Well, and that's been the, the trend. I went back
and looked at some of the data in terms of
that drop-off, right? When you talk QB one through 12,
and then what's left, where's the drop-off RB one to 12,
and then start looking at RB two, RB three for
those running back one, running back two. running back three
usually in a flex position in most leagues the way

(57:32):
they're assembled now and then do the same with the
wide receivers just the points differential between 1 and 12
is huge and then once you get beyond that there's
not a lot of variance so it's can you survive
missing out on one of those 12 guys yeah zero
running back strategy had a couple of years But we've

(57:55):
seen the pendulum of the NFL swing back to where
you only have a handful of true number ones.

Speaker 4 (58:02):
Yeah, well, I mean, I think you know this. I mean,
you've played fantasy football and have talked about it and
made content, whether it be articles, talking about it for
years and years and years. But fantasy football is like
the stock market, right? I mean, just because a guy
is there and you need a position super bad doesn't
mean you have to– overvalue that player you got to

(58:23):
take value where there's value similar to the stock market
you're not going to pay extra for uh nvidia if
it's 240 when you can get it for 180 something
else for 187 that's just as good with the earnings
potential right so it's the same thing with like if
davante smith is there in round three you have a
wide receiver and a running back. You really want to
take a running back, but the next RB is somebody like,

(58:45):
I don't know, Javante Williams. You're going to take the
Vontae Smith because you're going to want to have two
elite wide receivers.

Speaker 1 (58:51):
Yeah, as we look at the draft board as it sits,
I pulled up a run of a grid that Yahoo
had put up. So Gibbs and Robinson account for about 95%
of number one overall picks. Where it starts to get
interesting is as early as number two, right? It's still
Robinson and gibbs and now we start seeing well jamar

(59:12):
chase's name starts flying up if you go to the
number three draft slot currently 56 percent of leagues draft
chase ahead of taylor ahead of mcafree and nakua yeah I.

Speaker 4 (59:27):
Mean, look, I wouldn't take Jamar Chase just because I
feel like you can lose your league in the first round.
Like really easily. You can't win your league. I mean,
you win your league in the middle rounds and in
the later rounds, like Christian McCaffrey is a little too
risky for my liking. Jamar Chase is elite. He has
the upside to be this guy that can win you
a league because he did it a few years ago.

(59:48):
The fact of the matter is, you know, whether it's
history or whether it's just something that all of a
sudden happened. No wide receiver ones repeated in even non-consecutive
years since Antonio Brown in 2017. I'm not saying Jamar
can't do it. He was the wide receiver one a
few seasons ago. It's contingent upon Burrow's health. So I
prefer if I'm at that three slot, I'm not saying Jamar,

(01:00:08):
You guys have to do it, but I prefer the
safety route. And I take Amon Ross St. Brown almost
all the time because he's been the wide receiver three,
three seasons in a row. And what that tells me is, look,
even if that might be considered a reach for some people,
I know the guy's going to get 115 receptions. I
know he's going to be a top five receiver. I mean,

(01:00:29):
he's been the wide receiver three, three seasons in a row.
I'll get the running back next. If Gibbs and, and
B Jean are off the board. Cause CMC, I mean,
418 touches last year.

Speaker 1 (01:00:37):
Well, and that's the thing. Historically running backs. When you
get that level of touch count now, 101 of them
were receptions. Yes. As we predicted appropriately. I think it
was one-on-one last year. Cause I said it earlier this hour, right?
That CMC, I think for B. John Robinson and Jameer Gibbs,
and certainly for Devon Achan, they're three guys that might
go close to that century mark. Maybe Gibbs a little

(01:01:00):
less because you've got more people around and more targets.
But when you look at the Atlanta offense, you look
at the Miami offense, that's what you got. Like, I
love Drake London. Neither of those quarterbacks is trying to
force him the ball 14 times.

Speaker 8 (01:01:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:01:15):
I mean, that's, that's why I think Bijan Robinson's the
number one pick over Jameer Gibbs, simply not because he's
more efficient or going to be more efficient just because
they have London. Sometimes they throw to pits, but that
quarterback situation's murky. And I know Bijan Robinson's going to
probably have the most, catches of any running back if
it's not Devon H and it's him whereas Gibbs he'll

(01:01:36):
scored more touchdowns probably but you have Amin Rai of
Jameson Williams by the way Jameson Williams was top 12
wide receiver last year in fantasy football it's not like
Gibbs has a monopoly on this offense like like Bijan
does on the Falcons and I think Devon H is
getting slept on because the team's going to be behind
the entire game and someone's like oh well they're going
to be bad Well, in PBR leagues, that's six to

(01:01:58):
eight catches sometimes a game for Devon H. And he's
not only their RB one, he's their wide receiver one.
So I think he's being undervalued too, because did that
stop you, Mike? When, when Christian McCaffrey was on the
Panthers from drafting him, that he was on a pad.

Speaker 1 (01:02:12):
I don't care what logo is on the side of
the helmet values value. I'm also the guy that used
to get in fights with NFL players back in the day,
doing events up in the Bay area when I'd be like,
all right, positive quotes on brett farve's like i thought
you said you were a chicago guy i'm like sure
they're not shutting everybody out yeah and brett farve is

(01:02:33):
going to put up his points he's gonna throw you
some picks but generally speaking at that point in time
and it would be like well you're not really a
fan i'm like no it's categorically incorrect i want him
to lose every game 38 35 Yeah. And throw five
touchdowns for my fantasy team. I'm still rooting against them,
but I'm a realist.

Speaker 2 (01:02:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:02:52):
I'm a realist as to what the outcome is. Likewise,
when you go to the decal or in the case
of the Browns, no decal on the helmet, I'm going
to be able to find value even with the worst
teams in the league. Now. Is your upside in terms
of goal line and red zone opportunity going to be...
That ceiling's going to be a lot lower? We're watching

(01:03:13):
a little late-night Danny DeVito. I mean, he might be
bumping his head sometimes against some of these things. Sorry, Danny.
I'm not that... I'm vertically challenged myself. But all of
that to say... You're trying to find where that floor
is and certainly give yourself as big a ceiling as
you can. And when you've got an offense which is

(01:03:34):
going to struggle, the dump off to the running back
remains one of the easy linchpins to it all. All right,
what do you do with Saquon Barkley?

Speaker 4 (01:03:42):
Oh, I love Saquon Barkley this year. I think it
was ADP like 12 or 13 or is it fall
into like 15? I have him as my RB eight.
I mean, last year it didn't take a genius to
figure out that he wouldn't be that productive because he
led the league in touches the year before. I mean,
the last time a running back led the league in
touches and then had a top five finish was Ezekiel Elliott.

(01:04:04):
But besides him, there hasn't been anybody that's done it
in 12 years. So I knew he wouldn't do that.
I mean, I'm shocked he stayed healthy last year. He
was RB 14. He just wasn't that productive. Now they
didn't go that deep in the playoffs. There wasn't as
much of a toll on his body like the previous
year because it wasn't just the season. I mean, they
won the Super Bowl. He was playing all these playoff games.
I think that's going to bode well for him. I

(01:04:25):
wouldn't say similar to McCaffrey this past year, but I
do expect at least a top 10 finish. I would
not be shocked if it's a top five finish. I
love him with my second round pick. I wouldn't be
shocked if people took him at the end of the
first round.

Speaker 1 (01:04:37):
Outperformed. Currently 14 on the ADP, according to FantasyPros.com, where
I contribute. each and every week during the season with
the iHeartRadio app stream us live wherever you happen to
be catch us and all of our Fox Sports Radio
shows live 24-7 it's the new and improved iHeartRadio app
search Fox Sports Radio on the app stream us live
all day every day be sure to select Fox Sports

(01:04:57):
Radio as one of your presets in the iHeart app
so it'll always pop up at the top of your
screen now I've been bullish go quarterback wide receiver for
a second on the experiment to come from Kyler Murray
Justin Jefferson Yes, no, yes, no. We got a nice
little bounce back and forth in terms of his production
the last four years. Up, down, middle, undecided.

Speaker 4 (01:05:21):
It's tough because those drop issues were prevalent down the
stretch last season. Didn't matter who we had at quarterback.
I mean, he was, they were trying to get him
the ball. Now, Kyler's obviously a substantial upgrade over J.J.
McCarthy and Max Brosmer. And I know Brosmer was just
released recently. But J.J. McCarthy, there was that first game

(01:05:45):
against the Bears where he got a touchdown.

Speaker 1 (01:05:47):
That was a good last couple of minutes.

Speaker 4 (01:05:49):
Yes. And then J.J. McCarthy, I mean, you thought, oh,
the future's his. And then, I mean, look where we
are now at this point. But I'm in on Justin Jefferson.
I mean, I have him as the wide receiver six,
I believe, or wide receiver five. I think I have
him slightly above CeeDee Lamb. Just because I think Kyler, look,
he's only supported, I believe, one top 10 finish. That
was DeAndre Hopkins early on in his Arizona days. But

(01:06:11):
Justin Jefferson's out. He's arguably the most talented receiver in
the league. So I think the upside is tantalizing. I
don't think he's going to be a top three wide
receiver in fantasy again, like he was with Darnold a
few seasons ago. But top six?

Speaker 1 (01:06:23):
Yeah, he should be. All right, last guys before we
get to the sleeper fun. Ashton Genting, ankle injury to
get things started, but you look at the Las Vegas
Raiders just outside of an RB1 last year, even though
fantasy owners thought it was the worst thing in the world.
it's not my fault you overdrafted him but he's 13th

(01:06:45):
despite getting hit in the backfield every other carry how
much better or worse can it be in 2026 well i.

Speaker 4 (01:06:50):
Think he's going to be more efficient right linderbaum's going
to help a lot that offensive line improved drastically still
have dj glaze on an offensive line which is not
great um i hope he performs better this year but
I think we're overlooking what Kubiak did in Seattle, which
was deploy the two running back system. And the issue
with that isn't that Gentee's not going to outperform what

(01:07:11):
he did last year. He certainly finishes the top 10
running back.

Speaker 7 (01:07:14):
But.

Speaker 4 (01:07:15):
I think his ADP is falling because of the injury.
Even if he was fully healthy, I wouldn't take him
until pick 20 because Mike Washington would get a ton
of touches. If we're just looking at, yeah, Super Bowl MVP,
you didn't give him many touches during the regular season
as much as people thought. I mean, he was always overdrafted.
Kenneth Walker, his Charbonnet was vulturing touchdowns. Mike Washington could

(01:07:36):
do the same thing.

Speaker 1 (01:07:37):
It's so good that the term vulturing stayed around. I
need a tissue. I need a tissue. I'm verklempt. It's
younger generation keeping our terms alive. Paul Charchi and I
were using that from the great Phil Regan from all
those years ago in baseball, the vulture. And that was
also Dick Tidros' nickname back in the day. But either way,

(01:07:59):
crossing sports. But yeah, Mike Washington, that's where we get
into the sleeper and guys rising based on their Reports
coming out of camp and certainly their early performances. Washington's
a guy we've seen the ADP. You've got the issue
in Green Bay. A couple of running backs that maybe
people are sleeping on.

Speaker 4 (01:08:15):
I think one, just because the RB1 just can't stay healthy.
I don't think he's played a 15-plus game season in
a while, and that's J.K.

Speaker 1 (01:08:24):
Dobbins.

Speaker 4 (01:08:25):
So the guy I'm thinking of is Jonah Coleman.

Speaker 1 (01:08:28):
Okay, skipping right past R.J. Harvey.

Speaker 4 (01:08:30):
I mean, I like R.J. Harvey in PPR leagues, in
half PPR leagues. I mean, he's not going to be
that valuable. I think Coleman's ADP, it's around like 130.
I mean, he's getting, this is going to be one
of the best teams in the league. One of the best,
probably rushing teams in the league, just because that offensive
line is so good. And that tells me, even if
Coleman has like a Blake Corum to Kyron Williams type

(01:08:51):
of role this year, like Blake Corum did last year,
Blake Corum had some 15, 20 plus fantasy point games.
I think Jonah Coleman could absolutely get eight touchdowns, but Corum.

Speaker 1 (01:09:01):
Is still another guy that people haven't gravitated to. I mean,
Kyron Williams is obviously fantastic and did a lot of
the dirty work in the red zone himself. But if
the goal is defending the title at SoFi, i.e. the
title they won all those years ago, Kyron Williams needs
to be on the field, so how much How much
in those third and fourth quarters is suddenly, if this

(01:09:23):
plays to script, right? And this is where we've got
to take fantasy and reality and do that nice match.
Because if it plays to script, Matthew Stafford's not winging
the ball around in the third and fourth quarter. And
Kyron Williams is probably not touching the ball a ton.

Speaker 4 (01:09:36):
Yeah, I would say Blake Corum is going to have
a big... I mean, I did a video on my
TikTok last week. Who's this year's Trevante Williams? And what
I meant by that is ADP of 100 plus. That
ends up being a top 12 running back. I picked
Blake Corum. Because the metric that fits in is top
six offense. And that was the only guy going in

(01:09:57):
the hundreds, early hundreds. And, you know, in some leagues
he's going in the 80s, 90s. I still think that's
good value. That fit that metric. And remember, he had
a few 15-plus fantasy point games. He's a better pure
runner than Kyron Williams. And even if Kyron does continuously
have a role, he doesn't have to get injured for
Blake Corum to be fantasy relevant. They both were last year.

(01:10:19):
But I do think down the stretch, Mike, to your point,
when games get close, they're going to lean on the
better running back, pure running back. And that's Blake Corum.
So I do believe Blake Corum going around. I mean,
I picked him in one league at the end of
round seven. I'm that high on him. I get my
guys where I get my guys. I know he's going
to outperform round nine. I know he's going to outperform

(01:10:39):
round eight. I know he's going to outperform round seven.
So I was cool taking him there.

Speaker 1 (01:10:43):
Who's the guy that you go into a draft saying,
I got to get this guy on my roster?

Speaker 4 (01:10:47):
Running back, wide receiver, or just anybody? Just Parker Washington.

Speaker 1 (01:10:50):
Okay.

Speaker 4 (01:10:50):
I mean, he averaged 22 fantasy points per game over
the last five games of the season. Then he was
Trevor's number one target in the playoffs. I'm out on BTJ. Look,
that's not saying that BTJ can't have a better year
than last year. It's pretty difficult to have a worse
year than what he did based on his expectations his
regular year. But remember, Mac Jones was thrown in the

(01:11:12):
football when he had that wide receiver four finish. It
was not Trevor Lawrence when he popped off toward the
end of the season. Trevor Lawrence looked Jacoby Myers' way
and Parker Washington's way more than BTJ. I think Parker
Washington's still getting underdrafted in round six.

Speaker 1 (01:11:27):
Well, there's, I think, a liking problem that a lot
of folks still have with Trevor Lawrence.

Speaker 8 (01:11:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:11:32):
I think they want to see him do it again, right?
Because you've seen the fits and starts, and a lot
of his value came with his legs from a fantasy perspective.

Speaker 4 (01:11:42):
Absolutely.

Speaker 1 (01:11:43):
So I think that's where folks are a little reticent
to jump on board. One of my favorite stories of
the offseason was the Liam Cohen just complaining and feeling
disrespected that they weren't disrespected enough.

Speaker 7 (01:11:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:11:56):
Because he didn't appear alongside Caleb Williams and Ben Johnson
and all those articles about teams that were supposed to
slide back after big 2020 to five seasons.

Speaker 4 (01:12:05):
Yeah, interesting rhetoric there, but he's a great coach.

Speaker 1 (01:12:08):
We'll see.

Speaker 4 (01:12:08):
They have tape on him now, so I don't know
if that offense can be as good as last year.

Speaker 1 (01:12:12):
We'll see. And yeah, Thomas Jr. is just one of
the more interesting guys. I think if I'm looking at
where he's being drafted, there's a guy with potential top
five if things break right again.

Speaker 4 (01:12:24):
Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1 (01:12:25):
Because of what we saw and early drops, I think
they lost confidence, and you had a couple other guys
pick up. But the size, the talent, the ability... to separate,
I think is still there to be unearthed, whether it's
there or maybe somewhere else. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:12:41):
And the guy that's also going in that range, Marvin
Harrison Jr., he hasn't had a top five wide receiver
finish like Brian Thomas Jr. So that's why people have
more confidence in BTJ possibly having a comeback rather than
Marvin Harrison Jr. having a breakout because Michael Wilson's still there.
They just paid him Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:12:59):
What does that say about surprise right there? I was,
I mean, he's their best receiver, but they were fighting
it till the last minute. Yeah. Arizona. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:13:07):
They don't want to be bad. Why would they pay?
I mean, they paid Jacoby percent 15 million. Probably didn't
have to.

Speaker 1 (01:13:11):
Well, they're going to trade him as soon as the
season goes South and someone, and a couple of guys
get hurt.

Speaker 4 (01:13:16):
As soon as he throws 500 yards against the Niners
again in week three.

Speaker 1 (01:13:19):
Look at you, the 49er fan showing through. Brandon S.
Deuce on Instagram and TikTok. BSD takes on X. We'll
be doing this as the season goes on. Any last
words on the final drafts for people in terms of
sending them into terror?

Speaker 4 (01:13:36):
Go get your guys. Doesn't matter which round. Get the
guys you really value. That's my take on it.

Speaker 1 (01:13:42):
There you go. Brandon joins us each and every week
as we sit here at Swollen Dome. You find me
at the I Watch Your Flex podcast. Check out Brandon's stuff.
We'll get the Twitter and Instagram and TikTok mentions again
before the show is done. Good stuff. As we continue,
we take a trip to the South Side. We're going
to talk about blueprints and plans and hopes and dreams.
Isn't it wonderful? Week one of the college football season,

(01:14:05):
and even I'm bright-eyed and excitable. Fox Sports Late Night
with me, Mike Harmon, continues. Thanks, Brandon. We'll do it again.

Speaker 2 (01:14:12):
Hey, hey, hey!

Speaker 1 (01:14:14):
Thanks to Brandon for stopping by, talking a little bit
of fantasy football. That'll be up on all the socials,
video of us looking so pretty here on an early
Sunday morning. Happy 80th to Freddie Mercury. Added some to
your playlist. Get that spring in your step. Stand defiantly.
Arm raised in the air like that famous Montreux statue.

(01:14:38):
Maybe I have one of those gold lame jackets. You
don't know. Maybe you're picturing it right now. Maybe I'm
going to go to a karaoke bar when this is done.
You never know. At Swollen Dome, where you find me
on Twitter and Instagram. We've got Emmy and Mark making
sure I don't take us too far off the rails.
Remember the iHeartRadio app. Take it wherever you go. All

(01:14:59):
those affiliates nationwide. Thanks to the program directors. Thanks to
all of you. that want some Fox Sports radio in
your life. We appreciate you. It's not lost on us.
The I Want Your Flex podcast that Dan Beyer and
I do each and every week. We break down. So far,
we've done a couple of preview episodes going through some
of the rankings as I see them. And then we're

(01:15:19):
going to do our draft. We always do one last
preseason draft with all the movers and shakers. So that'll
be up wherever you get podcasts. Please download it. Give
it five stars. Tell me what you love, tell me
what you don't. But always, it's free to send it
along to friends and family. So please do that as
well as we continue our search for global domination. Now,
one of the things we're going to do is we'll

(01:15:41):
get to know each other a little bit. And from
my end, I am originally from the south side of Chicago.
I live and die everything Chicago sports, except the Cubs.
Because anybody that tells you they're a fan of both
is either... trying to sell you something, they're running for
a political office, or they have no spine. Okay, maybe

(01:16:04):
the last one I was a little cruel on. But
the point being that you got to pick a side.
You just do. You just can't be a, hey, I
like everything, Chicago. No, no, no. Baseball, it's one side
or the other. That's the way it is. And you
have your colors, and you run through. I've been to
many Cubs, White Sox battles. And literally outside the streets,
plenty of battles. There's a guy with a Sandberg jersey. Oh,

(01:16:27):
that's not going to end well. He's talking smack. No, no, no,
not to those guys. Don't do it, man. Don't do it.
And then you're trying to play human shield to keep
what's inevitable there. But saw earlier, and Mark is a
White Sox fan, and he's got a Bulls hat on,
if I'm remembering correctly, because I don't have my glasses
on at the moment, and I'm old and blind. But...

(01:16:49):
You know, White Sox lose on Saturday to the Twins.
We talked about that with Holler and James. We got
one of the great screams of recent memory. But minority
owner Justin Ishbia, some new money coming in, potentially part
of the succession line here with Jerry Reinsdorf in these
coming years. They have the South Loop Rail Yards project

(01:17:10):
that got announced, including a rendering of a new stadium.
Complete with what looks kind of like a replication of
some of these other places where suddenly you got a
mini mall, a bunch of restaurants or whatever. But it
looks pretty. And it's nice when you're in the middle
of selling hope for those kind of things while the
team is winning. So first off, Mark, as we commiserate

(01:17:31):
over the love of the south side of Chicago and
these beloved White Sox of this year. I mean, 74-68,
42-28 at home. Yeah, they take one on the chin
to the Twins today. But when we started back at
opening day, you and I were talking. It was like, hey, man,
if we can get anywhere near 500, it would be

(01:17:53):
a massive win. Would that get us anywhere near the playoffs?
Didn't expect it. Also didn't think that Detroit was going
to sell off half of their starting rotation before it
was all said and done. But here we sit.

Speaker 2 (01:18:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:18:05):
Early September, first place, White Sox. It's a good thing.

Speaker 9 (01:18:08):
I was on the days that I work with Ben Maller.
He always teases me about White Sox stuff. And I
just tell him, I just don't want them to be embarrassing.
So I'm glad that the season is going well and
that the team is doing well. And right now the
batch is still working. And I guess the pitching is
still working. So it's like we said, optimism for good

(01:18:31):
things for the White Sox.

Speaker 1 (01:18:33):
Just a very odd space to be in after a
record setting loss season just a couple of years ago.
They've got three guys that have gone to the 30
homer mark at this point in the season. That last
happened on the sidelines. side of chicago in 2008 that's
what we're talking about in terms of history in terms

(01:18:54):
of the bats coming out and swinging here uh on
the south side vargas has more home runs now than
he has in the last four years combined talk amongst
yourselves uh montgomery antinucci my drop all these pieces and
yes there are still plenty of pitchers out there that
i lament that they're no longer on the south side
of chicago every time i see chris sale pitch i

(01:19:17):
i still wince a little bit it does hurt carlos
rodan it is you know many journeys whenever i see
him pitch for the yankees i'm like i like him
He used to go back and forth with he and
his wife in the Twitterverse a little bit once upon
a time when he was ours. But either way, it's
meaningful baseball in September and potential postseason action, which is

(01:19:38):
very exciting. especially with the Bears season getting ready to
crank up as well. Expectations high in Chicago. The Cubs
are going to make the playoffs as well. They've got
the MVP, 95% likelihood. Remember when I was talking trading
guards last hour? Well, go find those Topps Chrome PCAs.
They're going to be worth $ 20 apiece of trade-in value,

(01:20:00):
and you can level up at your local shop. Yeah,
it's not official yet, but boy, the lead he has taken.
It's insurmountable, it would seem, especially with the continuing struggles
health-wise of Shohei Otani, not only to get onto the mound,
but just getting back in the lineup as he was
scratched for the third straight day. There's a little baseball update,

(01:20:21):
a little bit of the south side of Chicago with
Mighty Mark and myself. As we continue here, Survey says,
what does it say about your NFL favorite team? whiners
i saw the word whiners in the headline and i
cackled like i was max katie and cape fear we'll
make it all make sense swollen dome it's fox sports

(01:20:42):
late night with me mike garvin on fox sports radio
greetings welcome in second half is on the air appreciate
you being out here fox sports late night with me
mike garvin disco ball spinning marching band refusing to yield
you got to run through them Stanford Cal early here
on a Sunday morning. We appreciate you being part of

(01:21:03):
the extended family wherever, however you're listening. The iHeartRadio app,
the easiest way to take us wherever you go, download
the app. You get everything we do here at Fox
Sports Radio, all sorts of music, all sorts of Other podcasts,
including the iWatch and Flex podcast that I do with
Dan Beyer. The episodes that Jason Smith and I do
Monday through Friday here on the network. We appreciate you

(01:21:27):
downloading it and spreading the information to your friends and
family as we continue to build, as we get ready
for a huge football season. Great week one of college football.
A couple of big stories that stand out. We had
the Michigan miracle. The tainted... And it's a win. In

(01:21:47):
the end, you know, when folks look at it, 13-12,
a Hail Mary finishes it on a second try. Yes,
Hail Mary that finishes with one second remaining statement out
by the conference officials. And then... The second try is converted.
A big play by Buchanan, the receiver, to make the

(01:22:08):
catch from Underwood. And, you know, we watched the postgame
presser and Western Michigan going, I don't know where the
recourse is. Like, you know what you're going to get?
You're going to get a nice note to just say, hey,
thanks for trying. That's really all it comes down to
at this point. You had the opportunity to close it,
a botched snap and a fumble that ends up Forcing

(01:22:29):
a settlement into a field goal. Not enough to create
the distance. Final 35 seconds. Michigan steals the W. The
other was the collective world that doesn't embrace villainy. that
doesn't embrace the Lane Kiffin mode of thinking towards this
should pros or would-be pros come back, because were they

(01:22:51):
really pros at all? I mean, I don't know. It's
an existential question, chicken and egg kind of thing. But
the collective world was waiting for the thud by the
LSU Tigers. Yes, there was a weather delay, torrential downpour.
You saw it all. By the end, we were getting
features on Peter the dog, which I know there's a

(01:23:12):
certain fraction of you that every mention of that, you
either take a drink or you curse audibly. That was
in the final few minutes as well as one of
the cheerleaders doing knuckle push-ups to the 51 points that
they rolled up on Clemson in what was a laugher.
Now a lot of questions after last year's 7-6 season

(01:23:33):
for Dabo Sweeney and the Clemson Tigers. Will there be
an issue of whether, well, you start looking around going, well,
he's been there since 2008, many highs, three or more losses.
several straight years. And last year you go back into
the schedule and you had a couple of big clunkers

(01:23:56):
early in the season. So is that enough to where
you start thinking about the winds of change to it all?
But those were the two games that stood out most.
We had a thriller late night, California, when you talk
UCLA and the Bob Chesney era underway and, So we
had that versus Cal that went late into the night.

(01:24:19):
That was still on when we were here, and it
was 24-all. UCLA pulls away, ends up winning 45-24. That
was up at Cal. Here in Los Angeles, you had
All sorts of revelry in terms of, well, the Dodgers played.
You had Guns N' Roses playing with Ice Cube. Like

(01:24:39):
all sorts of stuff going on and a busy Saturday here. USC,
I should say, having their big win on Friday night.
But for the rest of the college slate, we saw
a bunch of blowouts and teams handling their business. We
did have... The escape by the Oregon Ducks, the No.
2 team in the nation. They take down Boise State.

(01:25:01):
Some chunk yardage, some big plays after a discombobulated, inefficient
first half. They eventually got things rolling, and it was
enough to get a W. Story that caught my eye, though,
going back to the National Football League. This comes from
the analysis of the Action Network, actionnetwork.com. And this survey

(01:25:23):
of NFL teams, which I think is kind of fun,
you have the New York football Giants and their fan
were categorized as the quote-unquote most foul-mouthed in football, whereas
the Jets and their fans were the champion complainers, according

(01:25:46):
to this. The Big Blues fan base, as they affectionately
called the Giants... they had more swear words in comments
on their subreddit, nearly 15%, more than any other team
in the National Football League. And you get to the

(01:26:06):
complaining about the Jets, that they came in as they
even went back to Saturday Night Live and Debbie Downers
saying that You're talking about 26%. That was actually attributed
to the Colts. And then you have the negativity of
the Jets fans just behind them at 25.76%. So they

(01:26:29):
can't even win the most negative fan base nod. That
somehow goes to Indianapolis. But... What's interesting is we get
ready for this new year, and we're talking about it
a lot at the start of the show, right? The pageantry,
the pomp and circumstance, the traditions of college football. With

(01:26:49):
the NFL, it's a little different. Sure, we don't have
student sections and all of that, but we got our
rabid fan bases. Whatever the team is your favorite. You
have that group that you know, all right, this is
going to be a focal point, right? For Chicago, we
know the quarterback position. Caleb Williams, even with all of

(01:27:11):
the heroic moments last year, there's still a percentage of
fans and pundits in the city of Chicago that are
looking around going, yeah, but... And that doesn't mean that
they're going to win the same number of games, have
the same level of success. Will it be more... Uniform,
will it be a more consistent four quarters in year
two with Ben Johnson? I would like to think so.

(01:27:33):
But what happens on the other side of that is
that you're looking at a defense, at least from this
man's point of view, that can be, what's the word?
Joe Namath said it best for us, struggling with great...
consistency right last year a lot of opportunism a lot
of turnovers created can you bank on those again generally

(01:27:55):
it swings the other way one score games generally swing
back towards the midpoint so we look at all of
that to wonder you know in terms of hope springs
eternal for your respective teams. But I'm curious, you know,
all of you out there, as you think about your
favorite team, we know the over-unders and we can do
all that breakdown analysis and odds, but there's just that

(01:28:19):
gut feeling coming into a season, right? There's things we
know that unless there's the version of a sports miracle,
a Festivus miracle to steal from our friends at Seinfeld,
that the Jets, the Browns, The Arizona Cardinals and the
Miami Dolphins are going to be bad. The Jets have

(01:28:40):
heard arguments, and I can hear them to a point,
about if it breaks right, you look at a good defense,
you've got a couple of good skill position players on offense,
above average offensive line, it's all just about the signal caller.
Whether Geno Smith can find some semblance of what he
was for a spell in Seattle. Again, he was displaced

(01:29:01):
by another former Jet in Sam Darnold, who went on
to win a Super Bowl. And then you have the
all-my-life's-a-circle kind of thing, going back to Geno when he
was there as a second-round pick in 2013. Can it
break right behind him, or is Cade Klubnick the future,
and the future is now? That's what we're looking at
as we look at the Jets. But just taking it

(01:29:23):
from a— and I talk about them with— moderate level of
authority given the amount of time I spend next to
Jason Smith here on the network each night and how
about a fresca if you want to tag him and
make him part of this conversation as well but for
your fan base you know trying to figure out those
expectations do you have your quarterback the continuity I did
the 10 21 14 locker combination talking about what it

(01:29:48):
is here in this season for the NFL of 10
new head coaches many first timers 21 new offensive coordinators.
A lot of first-time play callers. 14 new defensive coordinators. Again,
a couple of these are guys that have bounced before,
but we're talking new teams. New turnover, all 22. Now,

(01:30:09):
is it the same level of turnover chaos that we
have in college football? Well, not necessarily in most of
your key positions, but certainly some building in, and we've
watched teams over the last few years. September is... what
the Patriots used to do when we're a standalone all
those years, right? The parsing out touches, looking at what

(01:30:32):
you can add to the playbook. What's this squad capable of?
And maybe you can only came out of it two
and two, but after a month, you knew your team.
I think for the NFL as a whole, as we've
drifted towards the parody slash mediocrity, sorry, has to be
said a portion of the program that, uh, The goal
is for everybody to be 8-8 and fighting in December.

(01:30:53):
I get that. We like winners as a collective. We
root for winners. I come from a generation where you
can find a lot of folks in your friend group
that are Dallas Cowboy, New York Yankee, and either Chicago Bulls,
maybe a couple of Pistons guys here and there, but

(01:31:15):
Lakers or Celtics fans. That's it. That's what you got.
And it's like, how'd you do that? Well, I just
grabbed on to everybody. I was like Drake. I grabbed
on to anybody that was winning in this certain period
of my life. And I decided that that was going
to be my team. And you certainly had that. But otherwise,
you know, you're kind of going in the ebb and
flow and with your squad. year-to-year reassessing thing. With all

(01:31:39):
of this turnover, it's made for interesting bedfellows and chases. Now,
I just have a show mantra that we've used, Jason
Smith and I, for many a year. Individual games, like
we have our specific teams, and in Sports Talk Radio,
you got into this because you loved a team. You
loved your hometown. You loved your city. You loved the

(01:32:01):
college you spent your hours at and your money at.
That has not changed. Now, some might, you know, in
the spirit of detente, throw things up saying, well, I'm
not a fan of anybody. Maybe on air, that's going
to be the case. Off air, you have your hometown
teams that you still cheer for. And I don't believe

(01:32:21):
anybody that tells me they don't. whether it's a player
or a coach or the team itself, there's still that
level of interest. That's what keeps you coming back for more.
As fans, the hope springs eternal that you're going to
find that winning combination of coach, coordinator, and quarterback, however
that may be. Even if it's for a year, you
like to see that you too can turn it around.

(01:32:44):
But the mantra of the show is very simply this.
I may not have a dog in the fight. But
every game, I want it to be close, late, and
then however it breaks from there. Now, we make picks
like everybody else when you're going against the spread and whatever,
that you're looking at outcomes in that way a little
bit differently. I don't have to nod to it like

(01:33:05):
Brett Musburger did all those years ago. No, we can
talk about it. And when Jason Smith and I are
breaking down Monday night football, Thursday night football, alternating Tuesday
afternoon football, all of those things. We'll go deep dive
into those kind of things as well. But this survey
just gives you a little glimpse, at least into New
York fandom. We'll fan it out to the rest of

(01:33:27):
you out there, how you're feeling about your squad. If
you want to get in 877-99 on Fox, if you
have hope or if you've already in despair and there's
a guy playing on Saturdays, that you're already eyeballing and,
and maybe sitting in your back room with your editing software,
Photoshopping him into your favorite uniform. If you don't have it, uh,

(01:33:49):
the ability to use Photoshop, maybe you're going to the, uh,
you know, Batman version of Batman Forever where you're Jim
Carrey and you're cutting out letters and pictures and creating
little things with crayons that you've decided you're coloring that
guy into your uniform. I don't know. Many different ways
to get after it. But your fandom here, as we

(01:34:11):
start September... Look, there's a lot of sports still swirling.
We're still in the throes of all of these legal
things with the Clippers, the Lakers being sold. We've got
some time before we get back into the NBA. WNBA
is on another break as they've got the FIBA tournament
going on. College football is underway. College soccer started yesterday. Selfishly,

(01:34:33):
I'm going to get a highlight played of one of
my favorite athletes in all of sports a little bit
later on. But it's the idea that you're coming into
this year, and we're not real about it, most of us.
There's that, if this breaks well, right? You pull up
the schedule when it's released, right? Sometimes you do it
on air, and certainly in your local market, a lot

(01:34:55):
of folks are going to say, all right, over the
next hour, we're going to go through all of these
17 games of our NFL team. We're going to pick them. Yeah,
we don't quite do that with all 272, at least
not on air, but we're going through it and saying, well,
there is a path to X, and it's always above.
Nobody says, hey, my team's going to be 2-15. even

(01:35:20):
the most realistic and pragmatic of people is still going
to find that third win on the schedule or that
fourth one. Or maybe if you're greedy, a fifth, right?
I know there's dolphin fans out there. Hell, you might
hear Arnie Spanier tomorrow, still predicting them to go to
the Superbowl. I don't know, but it's the idea that
hope springs eternal. And for all of us right now,

(01:35:41):
we've got a couple more days to bask in that
glory before reality comes and kicks us in the ass.
That's what I'm talking about. At Swollen Dome is where
you find me on Twitter, on Instagram. Survey says, tell
me what you think about your team at either of
those platforms or call us in 877-99 on Fox. Of course.

Speaker 2 (01:36:02):
877-996-6369.

Speaker 1 (01:36:03):
But coming up next, we're going to talk about taking
copious notes. Maybe you did that when Brandon was in
last hour talking about fantasy. I'm going to give you
two scenarios. One, it can really help you and maybe
save your ass. The other, it gets your team in
a lot of hot water. Hi, Clipper fan. We're going
to talk about that as we continue. It's Fox Sports
Late Night with me. I'm Mike Harmon, and this is

(01:36:24):
Fox Sports Radio. Hey, welcome back in Fox Sports Late Night.
I'm Mike Harmon. Thanks for hanging out with me into
the wee hours of this beautiful Sunday morning. Whatever you're doing,
passing the time, maybe you're at work, maybe you're winding
down from work, coming back from a bar or restaurant,
Broadway show, I don't know, whatever it is, I appreciate

(01:36:45):
you hanging out with us. Mark and Emmy making us
sound so pretty and keeping me on point as we
roll through. So I do appreciate all your feedback as well.
A couple of nice notes from folks in the Instagram
and Twitter verse at swollen dome, where you find me there.
You certainly can always drop a line. You hear me

(01:37:05):
seven to 11 Pacific each weeknight with Jason Smith. We
have a good time there. And while we're getting ranked
ready and cranked up, I should say for what's coming
up here in the football season, week one of college, Uh,
almost there. We got a couple more games. We still
got to see Notre Dame, uh, get, uh, into their

(01:37:26):
mix as well. But we had a couple of stories
on note-taking that I thought were quite interesting that started, uh,
making their way, uh, around for Sean McVay as he
started his tenure with the Los Angeles Rams. Some notes
of how he would, uh, suddenly, uh, ask someone, uh,

(01:37:47):
about a play call about a sequence of about a formation,
you know, basically pop quiz and folks were going on
recall or figuring they were going to get the cliff's
notes at the end. Uh, and they were made to
look not necessarily foolish, but are you following what we're
doing here? Uh, one of them famously, uh, with Wade Phillips, uh,

(01:38:07):
one of my and a guy, I think, who always
got a bad rap when it came down to his
head coaching tenure there in Dallas. But he couldn't answer
one of the first questions, so everybody realized that at
any point they could be asked. So they had cheat sheets. Quote,

(01:38:28):
I became a better note taker in Sean McVay's first
team meetings. He started blindsiding people with these culture tests.
First two team meetings. He gives the whole culture. It's unbelievable.
You can make a whole documentary on what he did
the first couple of team meetings back in LA. That
was Zach Taylor talking about what it was like being
on the staff with McVay in the formative years. So

(01:38:52):
just that And we all do it, right? There's different
schools of thought. I don't want to leave a paper trail.
I don't want to put anything in writing that may
come back and find me. I get that. I understand
that because we got a case of that coming back
in a minute, but also in Los Angeles. But the
idea being that there are going to be pieces of

(01:39:14):
the puzzle and you have to decide and you do
this in your coursework, right? If you were in school
or maybe your kids are in classes now, your grandkids, whatever, nieces, nephews, whatever.
And you ask them about their, their homework and you know, what,
what they're doing, how they're taking notes, right? Is it
all on the iPad? Is it a computer? Is it,
or do you still, you know, do the, the claw

(01:39:34):
that you get by the end of a long, long day.
And all of you have a certain age, you know,
you did it right. We're at the end of holding
a pencil or a pen and, for as many hours
as you did in class, and then certainly in the
postscript as you were doing problem sets and whatever else,
that you were doing a lot of writing to where
you had the iron claw. And no, I'm not talking

(01:39:55):
about the Von Eriks and the movie with Zac Efron,
although I really enjoyed that. But it's just the idea that,
you know, you got this gnarled claw of a hand
from all of that handwriting over time. But there's also
the the idea that in, in a lot of these circumstances,
it's the stuff you decided you weren't going to write down. Yeah,

(01:40:16):
that's unnecessary. That's extraneous. Guess what? Wasn't that always the
point that showed up on a quiz or a test?
It's like, yeah, I remember him mentioning that.

Speaker 2 (01:40:25):
Damn it.

Speaker 1 (01:40:26):
Why didn't I write that down? I wrote everything else down.
I wrote out my grocery list on the right thin.
But all of that to say, when you get into
these kind of scenarios and you're trying to assess the
new guy in town, new head coach, new teacher, new boss,
whatever else, how many of you sat in on the

(01:40:47):
first meeting with the boss thinking, oh, it's always been
kind of lax and whatever, and then someone comes in
and they're immediately to the PowerPoint or to a, all right,
here's how we do things here. OK, sit up a
little straighter and maybe you should have brought that piece
of paper or maybe you open the notes app and
you you slide past whatever scoreboard you were looking at
and the box score or you stop drafting that fantasy

(01:41:10):
team and put it on auto pick for a pick
or two. I see you there. But it's always that
reminder that, you know, what may seem extraneous might be
part of what they're trying to build. and trying to
instill in a new regime. So I think that's what
Zach Taylor was kind of getting to there. It's like, hey,
we need everybody on the same page buttoned up to

(01:41:31):
make this operation as efficient as it possibly can be.
And certainly for the Rams, lo these many years later,
I'll be first to raise my hand. When that hiring
first went down, there were a lot of rumors, conjecture,
speculation here in LA, and some of the details and
reporting just didn't make a lot of sense. and then the,

(01:41:53):
the hiring happens and it's the, I'm curious, right? Always
curious when we, and we've certainly seen this shift. I've
talked about a lot, the 10, 21, 14 metrics for
the national football league coaches, coordinators, offensive, defensive, they're 21
and 14 respectively, that you're looking into a new regime,

(01:42:15):
but you're looking at a lot of those numbers in
terms of the hiring age and are a lot lower
than they used to be historically, right? With analytics, with
different learning processes, being around the game, et cetera, you're
seeing skewed younger. And for years, that wasn't the case.
Even going back to when McVay was hired, it was

(01:42:35):
still kind of an outlier. And then it worked, which
meant it was friends of McVay, disciples, the, the coaching tree,
all of those kinds of things start to come into play.
And you see that more readily available across the college
and pro landscapes. Well, the note taking on the other
side of where, well, maybe you just need to have

(01:42:57):
a big industrial size shredder handy is the Lawrence Frank
side of things with this latest Clipper debacle that went down.
And we had the ruling earlier this week, hammered for
a bunch of first round picks and, Ballmer's got to
be away from the team. Loris Frank basically turned states,
I guess, is how it's been described by many, is

(01:43:18):
that he had a bunch of notes about all of
these dealings and what the process had to be, etc.
So in the. finding out as Pablo Torre did as
as everybody had to have their moments of discussion of
their role and what they knew and didn't know and
when and all of that that Lawrence Frank had copious

(01:43:40):
notes at his disposal which is you know basically the
all right let me lead you to water of how
this all came to be so it goes back the
other way right you want to know but you're also
At some point, you want to know what you're beholden to.
And if you don't write it down, it becomes the,
remember you told me you borrowed 50 from me. That

(01:44:00):
was like six months ago. I don't really remember. Or, hey,
you told me you were going to pick me up here.
I did? All right, you're mad at me. You can
think of a million different circumstances. Think about it. conversations
with your parents, significant others, promises you may or may
not have made to your kids along the way. There's
a million of those things that come into press as

(01:44:23):
you go through it. And certainly... The dichotomy here of
the two Los Angeles institutions, when we talk about what
the Rams have been these last couple of years and
they're getting ready for that big trip, then we'll talk
into circadian rhythms and all of those a little bit

(01:44:43):
later in the program. with sleep science come to bear,
there's a big article going out about how you get
into your rhythms versus, you know, acclimating to a new place.
And many of you have traveled. Some of you have
not traveled great lengths. I can tell you the multiple
time zone thing, for those that haven't done it, can

(01:45:05):
kick you in the ass and have you dragging for
days thereafter. For some folks, they just... Acclimate quickly and
just get after it, right? The old don't get off
a long plane ride and go to sleep. All of
those things may come to fruition. If you missed any
of today's show, catch the podcast. Search Fox Sports Radio
wherever you get your podcasts right after the show. The

(01:45:28):
podcast gets posted. Be sure to follow, rate it, give
it five stars, review it, tell me I'm great, tell
me I need a better cadence and I need a
bigger vocabulary, whatever the case may be. Search Fox Sports Radio,
wherever you get your podcasts, finds today's full show posted
right after we get off the air. Now, earlier today,

(01:45:51):
we started getting the actual... attendance numbers for the much
maligned USC Trojans. We're doing the hat trick of California
stories here in the early morning hours, West Coast. And
doing the old eyeball test, the announcements and the announced numbers. Well,
we might have a revision that came through. 51,000 for

(01:46:14):
the season opener against San Jose State. You saw a
lot of those camera angles with very large swaths of
empty seats, or patrons disguised as empty seats, as you
might say. That was the smallest crowd ever announced for
a Lincoln-Riley home date. And then they played again on
Friday evening against Fresno State. Holiday weekend. General Los Angeles

(01:46:38):
traffic on a Friday. Warm, but still not to the
sweltering of a week ago. But again, holiday traffic. Getting through,
getting off work, going to the Coliseum as opposed to
skipping town. 53,014, the announced total for that one on
Friday night. However, to quote someone in our business, however,

(01:47:07):
according to the tabulation kept by the Los Angeles Fire Department,
this is where it gets fun. Fun with number. Fuzzy math,
as it were. Right? We talk about accounting when it
comes to what the Clippers were doing. Accounting in so
many ways in sports. Accounting is a lot of what
we're talking about with college football. How much money is
really being transacted and into the hands of players. No, no, no.

(01:47:32):
According to the Los Angeles Fire Department, this comes through
courtesy of the California Post. 35,585 people scanned through the
gates for that San Jose State game. That's 15,559 fewer people.
We're talking 15,500 out of an announced 51,000 people that
didn't actually show up. Now, I like these stories because

(01:48:11):
they're kind of fun, right? It got people mad. I
liked it here in Los Angeles where I've resided for
a lot of my adult life, pursuing the, living the dream.
Eventually I'm going to start showing up at auditions as,
you know, fat guy number two. or fat short guy
number two, balding fat short guy number two, whatever they

(01:48:32):
need in the description. Loudmouth. Don't forget the loudmouth. But
all of those things that here in California, I love
the fact that people got loud and defensive. Nobody dismissed it.
What are you going to do? There's a lot of reasons, excuses,
however you want to look at it, as to what
those attendants are. I mentioned it for the holiday weekend.

(01:48:56):
It's a lot. A 6 o'clock Friday night game in
most larger cities is going to be a pain in
the ass. And you're going to have a slow arriving
or no arriving crowd, particularly if you think you're going
to throttle the opposition. It becomes a time and resource
management thing, as well as your general temperament. I'm going

(01:49:16):
to be mad sitting in my car in traffic to
go to a game where I don't think I'm going
to see a lot of meaningful football. You're not doing that.
You're not committing seven hours of your life to that.
The cost in terms of dollars, and yes, we can
get into parking costs in Los Angeles. You all go
to games wherever you may be. It's not unusual to

(01:49:39):
see 80-plus as the get-in for a lot of lots,
unless you're willing to park in someone's driveway two miles
from the venue. Maybe you'll do that. You'll do the walk,
and you'll trust that your car is still fine later on.
But you're talking about... that huge a disparity. Now, against

(01:49:59):
Fresno State, 45,833. It's an increase of 10,000 from the opener.

Speaker 4 (01:50:03):
Cool.

Speaker 1 (01:50:03):
Only 7,100 fewer than the announced figure. So that was good.
Temperatures in the 70s. So people.
Fewer of them were dressed as empty seats than the
announced crowd that time. The temperature, all of those things,
maybe you knocked off work early. So it worked. But again,

(01:50:26):
going back to the San Jose State game weekend, all
the fall sports are back in session. So a lot
of people that might have gone to your game were
at their kids' games. I think that's one of those
pieces that people forget. You have family obligations that may
preclude you from that. Now, you're going to find an
excuse to get out of some of those once you

(01:50:48):
get into conference season and the Big Ten comes a-calling.
Don't get me wrong. Suddenly, Johnny or Susie's latest escapade
to a bounce house birthday party. And, Emmy, you nod
your head because you're going to be going to a
lot of these damn things. Every Saturday, where are we meeting?
What are we going to do? We're going to go
watch a game?

Speaker 7 (01:51:05):
No.

Speaker 1 (01:51:06):
Johnny's got his two hours at the bounce house. Damn it,
we were just there yesterday. You know, if we pooled
our money instead of funding these damn bounce houses, we
could have all bought a boat and then fought about
who got to name it. Instead, you're funneling that over
and you're all standing in a corner making sure your
kid doesn't kill himself on the zip line or in

(01:51:28):
the ball pit while watching the game on your phone
because you can't go. Because if you go, you're going
to get mad. Someone's going to get mad. There's going
to be a revenge exacted. Do I speak like a
guy that's done this with experience? Yeah. I was the
guy pushing the kids on the zip line because I
didn't want to answer questions about sports. Maybe that would
have been fun conversations. But I'd just done my show.

(01:51:49):
Listen to the podcast. But it's the idea of week
after week, we handed money hand over fist to these people.
We missed out on the games that we wanted to
go to. And I know a lot of you out
there right now are thinking about it going, you know,
I got to go to one of those in about
seven hours, maybe eight hours right after church. Right after
I walked the dog this morning, I got to go
to that bounce house. I got to go to this.

(01:52:12):
And I'm not going, look, that's how you make your living.
I'm not going against the people that own and operate
the said bounce houses. God bless you. We're all trying
to hustle and make our dollars. But I'm talking for
the families out there. I'm talking for the moms, the dads,
the grandmas, the grandpas, that that was their responsibility to
go to a lot of those things. consolidation into once

(01:52:34):
a month would have been good. You would have been
freed up to go do other things, not to mention T-ball, softball, soccer.
Anything that your kid may be in. Pee-wee football. All
of those things come into play. And that happens across
the country. That is not specific to California. But I
think as I watched the games today, and there were exceptions. Obviously,

(01:52:54):
you had a massive crowd for that LSU-Clemson kickoff or
whatever else. A lot of the stadiums, they pan the crowd.
A lot of empty seats there, too. I don't think
it'll get the same vitriol because of maybe a liking
problem that people have with California. They like to show up,
go to Disneyland and leave. But it's the the idea

(01:53:16):
that this became a very big deal. Certainly USC acknowledging
it in a in a press release was dopey. At
the highest level... Like who authorized that? It's like you're
typing and... Hitting send privileges... Are taking away... Mike Garman here...
Late night... On Fox... With you here... Fox Sports Radio...

(01:53:39):
Fox Late Night... With me... Mike Garman... At Swollen Dome...
Is where you find me... In the Twitterverse... On Instagram...
As you go through... I talked about the sleep schedule...
Two different ways to approach an opening week. And what
do we make of it? We'll talk about that as
we continue here. It's Fox Sports Late Night with me,
Mike Harmon.

Speaker 3 (01:53:58):
You're listening to Fox Sports Radio.

Speaker 1 (01:54:01):
Hey, it's Covino and Rich from Fox Sports Radio.

Speaker 8 (01:54:04):
Now, in addition to hearing us live weekdays from 5
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Sports Radio, we're excited to announce a brand new YouTube
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Speaker 1 (01:54:14):
Yup, that's right.

Speaker 8 (01:54:14):
You can now watch Covino & Rich live on YouTube
every day. All you gotta do, search Covino & Rich
FSR on YouTube. Again, go to YouTube, search Covino &
Rich FSR. Check us out on YouTube, subscribe, hit that
thumbs up icon, and comment away.

Speaker 1 (01:54:32):
Coming up in about 10 minutes from now here, Fox
Sports Late Night with me, Mike Harmon. We get into
some fuzzy math, fuzzy math. Harmon's hammer comes down. I
might actually slam the desk, but if I break my hand,
I don't know that they then pay me for it.
So I don't know. We'll figure it out. But we'll
do that coming up about 10 minutes from now. Again,

(01:54:53):
podcast goes up after we get off the air. Appreciate
you downloading that, giving it maybe a listen or at
least pushing it along. The pieces that you particularly like
to your friends, family, as we try to grow here
on the network. As a whole, the I Watch Reflex
podcast is up already as well. Wherever you get your podcasts,
Fantasy Football 2026. We did a bit with Brandon Deutsch

(01:55:16):
a little bit earlier on in the show. That'll go
up as well as part of the podcast for us.
I know Brandon's parsing out the video. That'll go up
as well. So we got a lot going on. And
we're pleased as can be that you're spending some time
with us here on a Sunday morning. Maybe your sleep
rhythms are off. Maybe that's what's getting you. That gets

(01:55:37):
us to our next story, talking about this next week's game.
All the way in Australia, we have the 49ers that decided,
and maybe they were trying to escape the substation. Maybe
they were trying to get past the boogeyman and everything
that has affected their health and get out there, and
maybe they have to do more of the... yeoman's work
of shaking hands and kissing babies when it comes to

(01:55:59):
promotional opportunities but they made the trip already this week
it's 8 000 miles and 16 hours so they're in
australia so they're going to they're in the time zone
17 hours ahead of california whereas the rams are still
here sleeping in their own beds practicing at the facility
and everything is well uh they're expected to arrive in

(01:56:22):
melbourne about 24 hours before kickoff OK, so that's kind
of interesting. There's a Stanford research professor specializing in sleep
medicine talking about risks, benefits, all of those kind of things,
talking about trying to keep yourself on the right clock
in optimum. operation. Quote, main thing you want to do

(01:56:42):
is avoid light during the nighttime in California. So wherever
it's night in California, you want to avoid light when
you're in Australia to stay on California time. It starts
getting into deep theoretical stuff. So have the hotel blackout shades,
all of these things, meetings in darkened ballrooms if necessary,

(01:57:04):
private chefs that are cooking for them and everything else.
And just keep everything as much of a routine as
you can. But saying also, you've got those other effects
that long flights, right? I don't know, compression socks, anybody?
Or maybe just getting comfortable. And while they may have
the best amenities in terms of, hey, being able to
lay flat and take a nice snooze. Maybe you've been

(01:57:27):
on flights that have those amenities in first class. Or
maybe you've just seen the commercials telling you that you
need to take a flight like that.

Speaker 3 (01:57:35):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:57:35):
We had that game in Ireland. uh, last week. I
don't know about you, but as soon as I stopped watching, uh,
the walls had ears and suddenly I was inundated with
ads of here's the best way to travel comfortably to
Ireland or to England or all of these other countries.
Like I just need to throw all my, uh, devices
in the ocean because they hear everything. But all of

(01:57:57):
that to say is trying to figure out coming off
of a plane, the most, uh, viable way to get
everybody into their proper stretches. Did they sleep well? You know,
do they have a kink in their neck? Like there's
a million little things that go wrong and we've all
taken flights. We've all had little hiccups along the way. Yes.

(01:58:18):
They don't have to worry about someone losing their bag
when they get there. But you know, when you're trying
to optimize things for a week, one football game, you,
Let's also be mindful. For the 49ers, they're approaching the crossroads, right?
We talk about that, going down to the crossroads, and
you're making that deal with the devil. Maybe we're talking

(01:58:40):
about the old Ralph Macchio movie as well, but it's
the idea that You got an aging roster, most of
your star players in their 30s, mid-30s. You got Brock Purdy,
but you got a lot of guys with many a
weary mile. This game means a lot towards their season
for the division and for where they're headed. For the Rams, yeah,

(01:59:02):
Donald's back. You bring in Miles Garrett. You brought in
some pieces of the secondary. You're the presumptive Super Bowl favorite,
but you're also looking at a scenario where you're playing
the long game. You want to win the division, obviously.
You want to win a division game. You want to
show well in that opener in Australia and all of
these things. You want the adoring fans in Australia that

(01:59:24):
show up. But it's the idea that you're playing for
a return to SoFi. to defend that Super Bowl title
that you won by beating the Bengals all those years ago. Like,
that's it. You're looking for act two. And it's a long,
arduous journey. So week one doesn't necessarily get the same juice.
I don't know. They may come out like a house

(01:59:45):
of fire. I talked about it earlier with LSU and
Clemson and the expectations of that game. I expected LSU
to win. I also expected Dabo Swinney and Clemson to
show up. I mean, I didn't get much of an
effort there at all in terms of what they did.
There were some of the first half numbers. They literally

(02:00:05):
had one first down in the first half. But all
I heard over the course of the day is like, eh,
Lane seems to be taking this too casually. He's too
wrapped up in whether the pros can play or not.
And they went out and kicked his ass. So for
all I know, Sean McVay is super genius, super villain, right?
to tie all the themes of the show together, that
he's got this down. And while it's maybe out of

(02:00:28):
the ordinary for what we've seen NFL teams do, a
lot of what he's done in building the Rams to
where they are and what the organization has done has
been very much the same. And maybe it works in
just the same fashion towards a grand debut later this week.
Plenty of preview coming up here. Fox Sports Radio, myself
and Jason Smith, all of our lineup as you roll

(02:00:50):
into Fox Football Sunday coming up here in just a
little bit. But coming up next, the math game that
everybody's getting wrong. That's right, it does come back to math.
Don't forget to carry the one. Fox Sports Late Night
with me, Mike Harmon continues. One more hour to go.
greetings welcome back in happy early sunday morning thanks for

(02:01:10):
hanging out with us here fox sports late night fox
sports radio my name is mike harman you hear me
weeknights alongside jason smith seven o'clock to eleven pacific time
four hours of merriment there i'm with you as your
humble host and guide through the early morning hours here
on a sunday tonight i appreciate you giving us a

(02:01:31):
few minutes of your time and being part of our
extended family. You can jump in, 877-99 on Fox. If
you want to comment on anything we've talked about, talk
about the Week 1 college football slate, what you liked,
what you didn't. Are you calling for Dabo Swinney to
be fired after a no-show effort in a big game?
Not like there was anything at stake against the devil himself,

(02:01:53):
according to some. Elaine, Kevin, see what I did there?
Tie it all back. Got to listen to the whole show.
Grab the podcast after we're done next hour and keep
that close to you as you're on the treadmills or
the walking trails or whatever you're doing here on a
beautiful Labor Day holiday weekend. Thanks to Mark and Emmy
for being alongside me and keeping me safe. Honest here

(02:02:16):
as we broadcast live from the Fox Sports Radio studios. Now,
I had a milestone earlier today. This was pretty cool.
You know, proud dad moment. It is actually sports related.
Not that I won't still jam in some more movie
references and whatever before we're done. But my daughter just
started playing and I'm 3,000 plus miles away playing out
in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Beautiful Vassar College where she is now

(02:02:41):
playing some defense and getting her teeth done. You know,
getting her first steps, I guess, into what I hope
to be a fantastic collegiate experience. But in their second game,
they're up 2-0. And, well, dad got to do this
from 3,000 miles away. Sheehan. Plays it and a goal! Yeah,

(02:03:12):
it's pretty cool.

Speaker 3 (02:03:13):
There you go.

Speaker 1 (02:03:14):
You you've got the. the Scranton, uh, announcer on the call. Uh,
pretty cool. Uh, she, she dove in, uh, last second
takes the header off of the corner kick for her
first career goal. So that was kind of cool. And
disseminating that to friends and family proud moment, you know,

(02:03:36):
a lot of hours, uh, during COVID here in California, kicking, uh,
into a net that was chained up, uh, and kicking
it into the parking lot of a, uh, I don't
even know what they make widgets for the sake of
this argument. But guys that we'd see and they'd be,
they'd shag balls for us. Like, Hey, she's hitting them

(02:03:57):
great today. It's like, thanks guys. Sorry. We're a pain
in the ass, but you know, all those hours and
just getting to watch her live that out and get
ready for this collegiate experience a little bit more on me,
you know, proud soccer dad. And while Maddie got played
on national radio, that's the power of the chair and
the fact that Emmy didn't tell me I was nuts.

(02:04:17):
So that was good. So we got that underway. Southside Chicagoan.
Been out here in Los Angeles for many a year.
I've adopted none of their teams. And people have tried.
They did not come with enough swag to turn me
into one of them. I believe I've worn a Dodgers

(02:04:37):
shirt I think twice, maybe three times in my existence
because I went to events that you were going to
be meeting people. I have no issue with them. Love
the AM570 LA Sports, what the Dodgers have built. Curious
times to come here in the post-Walter era. But we
look at just... You know, embracing a city as a whole.

(02:05:00):
I love the passion that this place has, which is
why we did some of those California stories before in
terms of the attendance and everything else. You know, you've
got folks that are diehard for these squads. Still a
lot of Raider fans out here, don't get me wrong.
But Rams and Chargers starting to build on some things here.
And I'm starting to see as many... get these tickets

(02:05:24):
for Charger games featuring Charger players as I do billboards
for accident and injury attorneys, which is good, which is good.
We're making waves. Come and see our product as opposed
to calling me because you just had a fender bender.
All of that to say that it's very exciting times.
Glad to be with you guys here tonight as we

(02:05:46):
get ready for what is going promises to be a
fantastic college football season. And I know we're all jacked
about the pros and something that, you know, we're workshopping
and it starts right here. We're laying down the hammer.
right harman's hammer uh and eventually i will get one
of those giant novelty gavels that'll be slamming against the

(02:06:06):
desk here uh as if i'm judge wapner or harry
anderson from night court yeah or some of those angry
guys from those law and order episodes but all of
that comes into play thanks mark that was quick quick
quick hands uh in the early morning hours here But
I want to lay the hammer down on folks as

(02:06:27):
this Hall of Fame voting revision started to be announced
for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. And I take
issue with one piece in particular. It's fuzzy math. It's
fuzzy math. We're going to go back to school and
some of your grades for a moment, if you will.

Speaker 2 (02:06:47):
Right.

Speaker 1 (02:06:47):
You will have those classes where you had a prof
is like, hey, do homework. I don't care. Do the
problem sets. Whatever. Turn them in. Don't don't care. You're
not really getting any credit for it. They really weren't
going to help you by looking through it. And, you know,
you all had at least one of those professors. I
can think of at least three of them. one of
whom probably announced about two weeks into, like, well, you

(02:07:09):
all think I'm so terrible, I'm done at the end
of this semester. That meant we were screwed. Nothing was
going to go right if you were a bit off
the beaten path. But all of that to say, in
those classes where maybe you had a midterm or a final,
tanking one of those killed you, right? No matter how
much you went and groveled for an extra point here
or there, you're just like, all right, get me my, what,

(02:07:34):
get degrees or whatever term you wanted to use. Get
it so mom, dad, grandma, grandpa, aunt, uncle, loans, however
you were paying for school, suddenly someone wasn't raising their
hand going, what the hell am I doing here?

Speaker 7 (02:07:49):
Right?

Speaker 1 (02:07:50):
That you needed that course to keep towards a major
or whatever. We all had at least one or two courses.
But then you had the other where class participation, attendance,
some quizzes. your homework assignments, all of them in that
different way. And then you had your midterm. Maybe you
had two midterms, right? Two tests and a final. And

(02:08:11):
it all was weighted differently. And you had a puncher's
chance because you had a lot of ways that you
could score some points to get you at least to
that C's gets degree. Now, it doesn't mean you were
going to do really well on the final and the
final product there. But along the way, it wasn't the,
all right, I think I'm learning. I think I'm doing okay.
And now I'm going to have two big chances to

(02:08:32):
prove it. Well, that's where the math in the Pro
Football Hall of Fame thing gets fuzzy and really torpedoes
one of the biggest arguments that was made when it
was announced that the voting electorate was going to be
reduced from 50, including a representative from each NFL city,

(02:08:52):
down to 27. Right? Alternates. You got someone from the
Pro Football Writers Association. But, ostensibly, you're cutting it in half.
You're going down to 25. Which means, based on the
math of last year to next, last year you needed
11 people to vote you know to not get in.

Speaker 2 (02:09:15):
Okay?

Speaker 1 (02:09:16):
11. Under the new rules, you only need six. And
I use that specifically because the argument was, well, they
did it because Bill Belichick didn't get in. This is
why they had to make this rule change. Now, according
to reports, and you can decide whether you believe them
or not, we're in a day and age, be skeptical

(02:09:37):
of everything, right? I think Lou Reed said it best
in one of the songs from New York, believe half
of what you see and none of what you hear.
And then it goes on from there to some profane
line that I can't use. But it was just that
idea of, all right, be skeptical, be questioning. And that's
what we do here, right? I think on sports radio,
sports TV, a lot of times we're pretty good at that.

(02:10:00):
Sometimes you get a snow job and you believe the data,
and this is where we get into that other story
from this week, right? Insider, reporter, all of those things,
whether it's Pablo Torre finding out, Diana Rossini, all of
this swirled in together. But in this particular case, with
the Bill Belichick story, Part of the news, the report
was that they'd been thinking about this for years. Jason Cole,

(02:10:23):
who's a longtime friend of our show, I treasure the
conversations with him. He's been a pro football Hall of
Fame voter for many years. He's got a bunch of
books on the shelves in places where you go and
buy books. look at John Elway's life was fantastic, right?
One of the most recent things. The other was your,

(02:10:44):
I forget what the first part of it was, but
it was essentially telling you all the things that you
think your kid might be destined for. But just remember,
not everybody's going to be number one in everything. Your
kid's not that good, but it's the idea that you
made all these changes for Belichick. You made changes to
how you're going to go through this process. And what
Jason Cole was telling us with Jim Porter is, who's

(02:11:08):
the guy at the head of the snake here is
a guy who's a light for a hall, a hall
of fame, love, right? That is his thing. And in
terms of the sanctity of the institution and protecting it
to make sure the best players are getting in that,
you know, the hall should be limited and not, hey

(02:11:30):
the door's open the water's nice and cool come on
in right and everybody comes to the pool and hangs
out no it's you be the selection process where it's
harder well that's actually what this does by virtue of
what i gave you with the school example so for
anybody saying this made it easier for bill belichick because

(02:11:50):
of this change of the rule it's basic math I
only need to convince a handful of people to vote
my same way. Whereas before I needed two handfuls and me,
that's it. It's all hand goes back to that claw thing.
Now it's close. See no fingers showing on my claw hand.
Whereas here it goes full Dave Chappelle show. I go one, two, three,

(02:12:12):
four thief. That's what I needed. I need another five guys.
Now I need six. I, before I needed 11. It's
harder for Bill Belichick. Cole went on to tell us,
he goes, you know, just do the math for him,
for Eli Manning. They changed the rules. Like everybody's in
the same pool. So you don't have contributors slash veteran.

(02:12:33):
And you know, the old timers, they're all pooled together.
So you start thinking about the guys that are coming
up for induction. He cited specifically, you got Richard Sherman,
you got Rob Gronkowski, you got Ben Roethlisberger, and, and
Adrian Peterson all coming up. How many of those guys
are getting in? Three or four, maybe all four of them.

(02:12:57):
How much room does that leave for the old-timers? How
much room does that leave for the contributors? Robert Kraft,
Bill Belichick. I'm not saying Belichick's not getting in. He
and Cole went on to say that he thought he
should have been in, and I know we can get
into Spygate, how much you love or dislike the whole
Deflategate thing, and again, whether it's fuzzy math. But all

(02:13:17):
of that to say... that it made it harder, not
easier for these guys to get in. Like any of
the guys on the Veterans Committee from the last couple
of years that it was parsed out, got in, they
probably would never see the light of day, right? They
had their run on the ballot. So Drew Pearson, we
joke about one of his policies is he needs to

(02:13:40):
take Cowboys out one by one. And Drew Pearson getting
in was one of the examples. Well, by the way
the new rules would set up, Drew Pearson's not getting in.
Veteran guys that have been on the ballot for years
that are still circling out there, they're not in anymore.
It's going to be that much harder to pass. And

(02:14:01):
I feel bad for some of those guys that I
grew up watching, guys that were having their heyday at
the end of my collegiate experience and when I'm first
making a couple of bucks to where you can really
maybe travel, do a game, take some other things in, whatever.
Guys like Torrey Holt and some of those guys might
get lost in a pure numbers game going forward. But

(02:14:22):
to this point, they haven't gotten in and they haven't
convinced the 11 or more voters to vote them in before.
But again, the Belichick thing just left me scratching, scratching
my head and pulling out what's left of my hair.
Is that it's just bad math. It does not make
it easier for Belichick to walk into the Hall of Fame.

(02:14:44):
Doesn't mean he's not getting in. Unless they specifically went
and said, all right, we know most of the people
that voted against Belichick, and we presume these three people.
If suddenly all those people are gone, then okay, let's
talk about it. If they're half of the people that
are excised... then, yeah, I guess you could start having
that conversation. But we don't know that yet. The new

(02:15:07):
electing body has not yet been announced. But all of
it to just say that it was done in a
response to Belichick because they felt bad he didn't get
in is just bad math. It's bad logic. And it's
fitting your agenda because you don't like Bill Belichick. Maybe
you hold Spygate and Deflategate. Maybe you're just pissed because

(02:15:29):
your team never got over because the Patriots got you.
Whatever the case may be, it's a math problem, and
you didn't solve it. So you remember pass-fail from earlier
in the course here? You failed. Fox Sports Late Night
with me, Mike Harmon, here at Fox Sports Radio. And
there's the hammer.

Speaker 3 (02:15:50):
I'm laying it down.

Speaker 1 (02:15:51):
Lay it down again. Okay. We're broadcasting. There it is.
There it is. Judge, jury, executioner. This guy. Maybe I'll
get a robe. I'll walk around in a resplendent robe.
Magnificent colors, too. Unlike the stayed black that you have
in most courtrooms. No, we do it with pizzazz here

(02:16:14):
at Fox Sports Radio. Hey, coming up next, we're going
to also go back in the Wayback Machine. Because we're
going to talk a lot about Heisman hopefuls. And we
did that week zero into week one. I'm going to
tell you about the guy. And his name is the
one you really should get familiar with with a couple
of guys that are being bandied about as would-be candidates
for this year's trophy. We'll do that next. Fox Sports

(02:16:36):
Late Night with me, Mike Harmon. This is Fox Sports Radio.
Welcome back in. It's Fox Sports Late Night. Mike Harmon
with you, having a blast here. Starting your Sunday out early.
If you're out getting the deliveries... Making deliveries and getting
the day going, thank you. If you're a trucker out

(02:16:58):
on the roads, be safe. Thank you. Everybody up and moving,
whatever you're doing, thanks for being part of our extended family.
We appreciate you and your support of Fox Sports Radio
and the programming we do. Hopefully make you laugh, make
you think a little bit, maybe tick you off so
your energy is... negativity can come to me i bring
it on it'll make me 10 feet tall or something

(02:17:19):
like that now one of the stories that's been fun
and starting to percolate in college football and it's always
we need a quick reality check and you know what
i'll be that guy to do that for you uh
in this regard in that what we've watched over the
first couple of weeks are a lot of celebrations Of
wide receivers and it starts to become the, this guy

(02:17:43):
could be in the Heisman race. This guy can crack through.
This guy can be like we saw. with Travis Hunter.
This guy can be some of these great receivers of
years past and get themselves to the award where you're
nodding and smiling and going quarterback award. Almost entirely in

(02:18:03):
our existence, quarterback award. So what I'd like to do
is reintroduce you to a man who, of yesteryear a
name that you should become more familiar with if you're
a fan of jeremiah smith or malachi tony or cam
coleman maybe a mario craver maybe you like him so
i'm looking at the old school oakland raiders and here

(02:18:29):
we give a nod he oh you can hear it
listen it smells football Let's let it breathe. Let's celebrate football.

(02:19:11):
We're going to cut it there. We'll cut that there
with John Facenda giving us the big voiceover, right? That's
about half. You go to the autumn wind, and we
can play that. There's a big instrumental, and then you
can add all sorts of Raider highlights. Remember, there were
Raider highlights. Oh, and they were glorious, and they were glorious.
We'll see it again come Thanksgiving time. I don't know

(02:19:32):
about you guys, but I'm ready for the Amazon Prime
movie when I get to watch Nick Cage running around.
No question about it. But I'm talking about Fred Bolitnikoff,
the man who the receiving award is named after. So
all those names that I gave you, whether you're talking

(02:19:52):
about Smith, Tony Coleman, Craver, Ryan Williams, those are your
odds right now as it sits here early on this
Sunday morning. Plus 250 to plus 300 for Jeremiah Smith
of Ohio State. Malachi Toney, big outing, 7-1. A couple
places where he's drifted a little shy of 5-1. Cam

(02:20:14):
Coleman of Texas, that's the big guy coming in for
Arch Manning, 10-1. Craver and Williams are both at 25-1.
So right now, ostensibly, we've got a three-man race. But
why do I bring up Fred Blitnikoff? Because it's his
award they're trying to win. It's not the Heisman. Heisman's
going to be one of these quarterbacks unless something breaks

(02:20:36):
completely off the grid. Or you have multiple quarterbacks that
split time at these schools. Like you do at old Texas,
Chris Sims, Major Applewhite. There, I did it for you.
There you go. I hit you in the way back
machine right there. Before he was pontificating, he was a
lefty throwing at the University of Texas. That's Chris Sims.

(02:20:58):
But you look at the career of Fred Belitnikoff and
everything this Hall of Famer did. You talk about big-time catches.
big receptions uh throughout his his run average 15.2 yards
per catch 76 touchdowns a lot of big time moments

(02:21:19):
when it came to the playoffs and big runs for
those raider teams of yesteryear yes i know 2026 believe
me once upon a time the raiders were really good
it wasn't just rich gannon with tim brown and jerry
rice no they had teams that really it wasn't the
year that derrick carr was really good where they had
that really weird thing where the football gods loved them

(02:21:43):
until they didn't and it was broke We played that
audio more than Hey, It's Tiger, I think, at this
point on the network's history. But you remember that year.
Derek Carr was fantastic. The Raiders had the healthiest team
I think any of us could have remembered. And then
on one fateful play, it was done. The MVP dreams,

(02:22:05):
the postseason dreams, all of that towards another success. glorious
appearance in a super bowl all that was gone then
you go back to belitnikov's raiders you go back to
a time and a place many years hence and we
talk about great squads averaged uh you know you had
53 receptions a year uh at that time you know

(02:22:26):
what's crazy is you look at that now it's like
yeah that's my third wide receiver no no that's the
way the nfl worked once upon a time Three yards
in a cloud of dust. And occasionally a guy would
break free, break containment, and bring you greatness. And we
saw that with some of the great runs that Bolitnikov had.
I was watching some highlight videos earlier, watching him get separation.

(02:22:50):
Guys running into stanchions. Again, weird formations of some of
these stadiums. Like five to ten yards behind the end zone.
They're running into a post. They're running into the... into
the bunting on the edge there. They're running into the,
really going up the walkway in some of the cases.

(02:23:10):
So you just see some of that craziness of it all.
But I want to remind folks that ultimately, We love
when there's other positions in the conversation, when running backs
are suddenly back at the front of the table. And
maybe we see that a little bit. I would love

(02:23:32):
to see that. There's no question about it. I grew
up in the age when you had guys that were parenthetical,
like you would have someone DDS, someone Esquire, whatever. It
was Ron Dane, the ball carrier. That's how it was
described at any Wisconsin game. I watched him run over
my beloved Northwestern Wildcats behind the behemoth on an offensive line.

(02:23:55):
Ron Dane, the ball carrier. That's what he was. And
maybe we see that again, right? It's in the NFL.
I don't see it happening back to the college slate.
Because we just see so much of this wide open offense.
Kurt Warner was commenting on it earlier. Boy, at a
high division D1 school with all this talent, the amount
of separation and opportunity to drop it in the bucket

(02:24:18):
that you have because of the... this differential between your
a-list players uh and maybe some of these other squads
uh just salivating at that what would be that opportunities
uh but we look at it from just reality the
pinball numbers that get put up year after year that

(02:24:39):
it's going to take an awful giant leap for one
of these wide receivers to really cut through and give
you an opportunity there Now, from a Hall of Fame
wide receiver to a guy who's really just getting started,
it was revealed in a podcast earlier this week, Kemp
Skadavu was pondering retirement. Now, I know we can say the,

(02:25:01):
do you believe him? Well, I mean, he said he
strongly considered it after the injury this past year that
took him out. He appeared on Kay Adams' Up and
Adams show, said he thought about retiring about a month
into his recovery, which happened late October. So we're talking
holiday time. And for a lot of folks, look, we'll

(02:25:23):
be here for you here at Fox Sports Radio. you
use the phone 877-99 on Fox find us in our
socials even if you just want to scream at us
we're here for you right holidays get get people into
weird head spaces right you got the the gloom that
goes over and look I'm a kid of Chicago and
Mark's behind the glass he's nodding his head family friends

(02:25:45):
you're out you know Midwest East Coast whatever even here
in California once it starts getting dark at five o'clock
the mind starts playing tricks on you it just does
right seasonality is a very real thing But Skadabo said
to Kay Adams, quote, like the first month, I was like, damn,
do I really want to do this? Seven games, though.
I got to go back and play. He's 24 years old.

(02:26:07):
Said coming out of college, going into the NFL, I
think I gave myself one rule, and it was if
I ever got a major injury, I was done playing.
And that happened seven games into my career. Wait for it.
So that kind of sucked.

Speaker 3 (02:26:21):
There you go.

Speaker 1 (02:26:22):
He's every man. He's every one of us. Even if
you laughed at him when he couldn't land that backflip
and put everybody's hearts in their throats. But just finding
out who I was, finding happiness, finding the person I
wanted to be on and off the field, I built
over time. So 10 months being able to be back
and focusing on football.

Speaker 8 (02:26:42):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (02:26:43):
Now, his running style is something that made him great.
And this is where we get into a difficult conversation
about the Giants, both for their quarterback and for their
running back, right? It's that thing that makes you great
that if suddenly you then have to change, that leap
to the, you know, jump to the left, step to
the right, shout out Tim Curry, you know, doing a

(02:27:06):
time warp as we go here late into a Sunday morning.
It's like that gets you off your game. and it's
how quickly you can get back on course, right? Talk
about school in the last segment when it came to
the fuzzy math of voting on things, or maybe a
class that you were taking, right? You had a bad
quiz early. How quickly can you get back into the

(02:27:27):
right frame of mind that the next one doesn't spook you,
that you're not out thinking it, that maybe you have
to develop a little different approach to how you're studying
the material, how you're engaging problem sets, white papers, whatever
it is you're using in that particular course. Same thing
here for athletes. If you've already always been able to
run through a brick wall, guess what? Suddenly everybody is

(02:27:50):
as fast, as big, as strong or stronger than you
are It's a world that you need to recognize. And
running into guys is not necessarily the best spot. You know,
trying to avoid that extra contact instead of laying a
guy out because it'll be a cool highlight. It takes
some getting used to. Mike Trout, we watch his career

(02:28:11):
here with the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, although I
think there was a governmental edict that they're now just
the Anaheim Angels. I don't know if that's in effect
yet with the sale pending. But all of that to say,
Mike Trout was one of the greatest players we'd ever
seen until his body started to give out. Diving into walls,
diving for balls, diving on the base paths, all of

(02:28:33):
those things. Not saying you don't do it, but there's
a cost. And it's your longevity. It's your health. It's
your ability to be there every day. For Cam Scadabo,
running as he does, not going to give you a
long shelf life. It might give you some great moments.
And you can go out saying, I did it my way.
That's what Jackson Dart has to learn as well. And
so Harbaugh and all of his assistants and everybody else,

(02:28:56):
you've got to live to see another play. Right? By
way of the... studying if you've always dominated things take
it from that approach right athletically you've always dominated and
this is where we can drag a little and and
i say that affectionately kyler murray into the room right
all of the stuff that was reported in arizona if
you've always been the first pick the heisman winner your

(02:29:20):
second sport you're still a first round pick all of
these things And you can debate which was his first
sport or not. But the point being that it always
came easy. But all of a sudden, reading an NFL
defense and recognizing you don't have that same separation, that
speed that was different from your receiver to the linebackers
isn't as stark, or the cornerbacks, isn't as stark as

(02:29:43):
it was when you were playing in college football. And
the guy's trying to chase you down. You know, they
get paid a lot of money, too, very specifically to
do that. That they're a step faster. So all of
a sudden, everything's got to be sped up. And you
have to relearn things. Sometimes you would adapt quickly. Sometimes
you don't adapt very quickly at all. Sometimes you don't

(02:30:05):
adapt at all. And for Cam Scadaboo, I think the
injury may force them to reconsider some things. Certainly he,
in terms of how he approaches his craft... But remember,
that's also what made him great. So you understand when
guys continue down that path, even if that first injury
is there. And it was scared him enough to where

(02:30:27):
he pondered retirement. Now, you talk about guys that maybe
have banked a couple of bucks already when you talk
about the collegiate experience, whatever. Maybe that's the case and
gives you a little bit more freedom to consider that.
And maybe that's something we see in the coming years
where that's the real case. Either way, fantasy owners still
drafting Skadaboo, expecting goal line brilliance. And then for the Giants, look,

(02:30:53):
I'm on the more pessimistic side that we can get
both of them and Malik Nabors through a full season
of health. I hope to be wrong, right? Look, the
one thing in this chair is we need storylines, we
need greatness, and we need, whether you like it or not,
for the New York teams, Chicago teams, Los Angeles teams

(02:31:15):
to be relevant. So either good or terrible. The last
thing I need is a bunch of 8-8 teams in
those particular marketplaces. That doesn't sell quite as easily. That
doesn't sell quite so well. By the way, in the
NFC East, just for giggles, we'll do this more next week.
We'll have a couple of games in the book, but

(02:31:37):
we'll get back to it. You're also looking at a
division where the Cowboys and Eagles battle atop, and there's
a lot of mistrust going on with the Eagles. Another coordinator, yes, A.J.
Brown's gone, but Devontae Smith turns into the number one.
Are you going to get Lemon fully on board? Is

(02:31:59):
that going to work? He's been hampered with some injuries
in camp. Saquon Barkley, another year. Maybe fewer touches last
year is the Magic Elixir, but you talk about the
offensive line. Again, another coordinator for Jalen Hurts. And then
you have the Cowboys where they've retooled their defense. Is
it enough? Dak Prescott's running around wearing a t-shirt saying

(02:32:20):
it's the greatest offense there is, which is great. I
like that bravado. Show me. Show me. Cowboys, one of
those maybe long shots, especially of Jerry Jones. I don't
know if you guys saw this. Mark, did you guys
see this? Michael Irvin showing Jerry Jones how to walk
with the pimp cane. Yeah, that was one of the

(02:32:41):
great videos of recent memory. Jerry Jones, who we have
probably a full soundboard. There used to be a place,
and I haven't looked it up lately. It might still
be there. E-bombs world where you'd have soundboards of celebrities
and whatever. I think we have enough to have one
of those for Jerry Jones and our soundboard here at
Fox Sports Radio because he has given us some gems.

(02:33:04):
through the years, but now doing the, the Pim Kane
walk with Michael Irvin. I might just get on board
with that just because of, well, embracing the chaos. That's
what we do here. Fox sports late night, Mike Harmon.
As we continue, we're going to finish up shop with
one of my favorite things. We bring it back. It's
called find your wins. We're all about positivity, right? Hope springs,

(02:33:25):
eternal week, one of college football, getting ready for a long,
arduous NFL season. and there was a graphic that I
saw earlier this week that made me smile. It's a
little close to home with one of the particular entrants
to it, but a reminder that all is alive and
well in the college football world. What's it mean? We'll
tell you next as we continue and close up shop

(02:33:47):
here at Fox Sports Radio.

Speaker 3 (02:33:49):
Settle down.

Speaker 1 (02:33:51):
Hey, welcome back in. We're finishing things up on a beautiful...
fox sports late night i'm mike harman thanks for taking
a ride with us however long you've been with us
uh i know it's that time of day and he's
already looking at traffic and uh well we've got accidents
on the road be safe people be safe be smart
because i'm looking at the clock and i know uh

(02:34:11):
last call here was last call there Wherever you are,
however you're listening, thank you. The iHeartRadio app, keep it tuned.
Andy Furman and Bucky Brooks coming up here in just
a couple of minutes following us as we get you
into a Fox Football Sunday as we break down week one.
So much going on in our sporting universe. As we

(02:34:31):
get ready for week one of the national football league season.
I know there's still some fantasy drafts to be done
by all means at swollen domes. Shoot me a line.
Brandon was in with us earlier. He's doing content as well.
One of our editors and producers here at Fox sports
radio at Brandon as Deutsch. That's at Instagram and Tik

(02:34:52):
TOK and BSD takes that's his account over at X.
You can harass him with sit starts and all that
fun stuff too. He'll be part of the, uh, the
program as we roll it forward here on Fox Sports
Late Night. But one of the things I've long had,
and I've got the website, I've got to be better
at posting with regularity. It's called Find Your Wins. And

(02:35:14):
one of the things, just that mantra each and every day,
I know it's, you know, some things, right? Jobs, health, relationships, whatever.
thing is at the forefront of your mind that takes
away from some of the happiness of what you're trying
to get through, maybe your job. It's the idea that
you find something over the course of the day, and

(02:35:35):
you may be cheesy and you may be flipping me
off right now, but bear with me, that something brings
you happiness. Whether it's talking about sports, whether it's going
for a walk with your dog, watching people, you know, skateboard.
I don't know. Simple things. But the idea is by
the end of the day, we're all going 1-0. And
that was a mantra that Pat Fitzgerald, when he was

(02:35:57):
the coach of Northwestern, was always 1-0 today. So that's
kind of been a thing we've adopted, my brothers and I.
There's a lot of things we all go through, but
the idea is at the end of the day, we
went 1-0. I got to play my daughter's first career
soccer goal at Vassar earlier. That's pretty cool. 1-0 before

(02:36:18):
I even cracked the microphone. But I think we've had
a pretty fun time putting together four hours of audio.
Pat Fitzgerald won his debut at Michigan State. All the
metrics would say it should have been a block, 10-point win.
So depending on where you bet, and this is where
I get nerdy, the line was either somewhere between 9.5
and 10.5. They won by 10. So you look at that.

(02:36:40):
But he got his first win. Go back. They separated
from Northwestern after all those years, some allegations. They ended
up having to write an apology. He got his W.
but one of the things that stood out to me
for this collegiate season, we've got a couple of guys
in the building that have their sons getting ready to

(02:37:04):
embark on college football seasons. Look at Notre Dame. You've
got Elijah Burris, Plaxico Burris of our up-on game. Our
guy LaVar Arrington, you hear him on Up On Game,
and you hear him during the week, two pros at
a cup of joe with Jonas Knox and Brady Quinn.
His son, man-man, LaVar Arrington II, he's getting ready to
get after it for Penn State. Matt Leinart's son, Cole,

(02:37:29):
he played at my daughter's high school in Redondo Beach.
He's off to SMU. You've got Kennedy Urlacher. We watched
him terrorize the quarterback on Friday night at Fresno State,
chasing him around. He was all over the field. That's
all the fam of Brian Urlacher. Back to Notre Dame,
Jerome Bettis' kid. Matt Hasselbeck's son is playing. Rodney Harrison's son,

(02:37:53):
Antonio Cromartie. Olin Krutz should be in the Hall of Fame.
His son's at Illinois, linebacker. Go on down the line. Pennington, McGahee, Gramatica, Finley, Young, Davis.
Just tons of ex-NFL players. And guys that we've had
in these hallways, people that I've been able to share
a laugh with, a handshake, an interview through the years,

(02:38:15):
and now seeing their kids up into the ranks, it's
pretty damn cool. And, you know, the passage of time,
the father time element to it all. But I'm just
looking at this list. And when you see the surname,
you have a smile, right? You know, mine invokes Mark
Harmon turned 75 earlier this week, right? NCIS, but UCLA.

(02:38:40):
And if you go back and look at the pictures,
that flowing mane, the locks were great, as well as
kind of a cheeseball mustache. But it got the job
done when he was running in between the white lines.
But it's just that thing. Find your wins, right? Because,
you know, time passes very fast in all of this.
And I know for LeVar, and I don't know Plax

(02:39:01):
as well, but LeVar and I used to do the
Sunday morning shows and the Pride with his daughters, with
his son, like all of that. and their growth in
these respective sports so taking a minute to do that
and for all of you out there i got to
share mine uh you could share it with me at
swollen dome at fox sports radio uh and all the

(02:39:21):
socials there but it's it's just that find your win
in the moment right whether they're just starting ayso or
their first t-ball or whatever the case may be embrace
it because it goes pretty fast to where you're doing
long drives and then suddenly uh it it all ends
and it turns out a dime and for me fortunately

(02:39:41):
through the power of these interwebs uh there's plenty of
sites where they can reach into my pocket for another
subscription to get me to watch it again which we
were able to do but we had a grand a
grand run over the course we laid down the hammer
on this new hall of fame voting keep your head
on a swivel whether note-taking is right for you, circadian rhythms,

(02:40:04):
and the villain we need in college sports. We talked
about Lane Kiffin. We talked about the big Hail Mary
win by Michigan. We covered it all, and it'll all
go up in the podcast coming up in just a
few minutes as Emmy and Mark get that thing put
together on this beautiful first edition of Fox Sports Live.
late night. I'm Mike Herman at swollen dome is where

(02:40:26):
you can find me as you roll it up. We
still have some more college football. Remember CJ car, uh,
and the, one of the favorites to win it all
Notre Dame fight and Iris. They still have some work
to do before this Labor Day weekend. And so whatever
you're doing this holiday weekend, we appreciate you giving us
a few minutes here on Fox sports radio, be safe
traveling on the highways and byways, enjoy family, friends, and

(02:40:48):
a lot of good football, Andy and Bucky coming up next.
This is Fox sports radio.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Mike Harmon Discusses College Football Week 1, Fuzzy HOF Math, and The Harmon Hammer