On this episode of 3 & Out, John Middlekauff reacts to the Seattle Seahawks being sold for a record $9.6 billion, discussing what the historic sale means for the franchise, NFL ownership, and the ever-growing value of professional sports teams.
John also dives into the excitement surrounding the FIFA World Cup, explaining why the tournament continues to capture the attention of sports fans around the globe and what makes it one of the biggest events in all of sports.
Plus, an expected move in Detroit as Terrion Arnold is cut by the Lions. John breaks down why this was the only move for Detriot and is there a path back to the NFL for Arnold after all these legal issues?.
Could Aaron Donald really be making a return to the NFL? John discusses the latest rumors surrounding the future Hall of Famer and whether a comeback is realistic—or simply offseason speculation.
To wrap things up, John reacts to Conor McGregor's latest fight, which came to an abrupt end in just seconds, and what the result means for one of combat sports' biggest stars.
From NFL news and ownership shakeups to global sports and combat sports headlines, it's all covered on this episode of 3 & Out.
Follow John on Twitter, and Instagram for the latest.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
The volume. What is going on? My people? How are
we doing? John Middlecoff three and now podcast? Let's see
if I can still do this. A lot of you
(00:22):
guys have been dming me, hitting me up, as my
mom would say. The on the X Channel, John has
calling severed ties with you. Did you quit? Where have
you gone? So, guys, it's late June, early July, just
taking a little breather, a little family time. Enjoying vacation
would be strong when you have a baby. But I've
been Lake Tahoe, Newport Beach, just kind of hanging out
(00:45):
and uh, hopefully I can still do a podcast because
you know you haven't talked this long in a while. Well,
I've been talking a lot, but just not into a microphone.
We had a lot going on. Seahawks just sold tear
an armed, the stories wild the World Cup is thriving.
Connor Gregor that was It's one of the wildest things
you'll ever see. Aaron Donald by all accounts are gonna
(01:06):
come back. So the game plan will be podcast today,
podcast the next couple days. Not sure if I'm gonna
do one This Thursday. I'm gonna be down in La
for I'm doing the Herd on Thursday and Friday. But
definitely got a bunch of podcasts this week and we'll
just keep home. Definitely some mail bags I haven't we
haven't done one of those in a while. So at
John Middlecoff at John Midlecoff is the Instagram fire in
(01:26):
those dms, you guys know the drill. If you listen
on Collins Feed, make sure you subscribed to three now
you'll never miss a show as well as you can
catch us on Netflix. That's where we will be from
a video standpoint for this podcast. So I appreciate everyone
that's watched, and let's just let's just dive into some sports.
But I do want to start with the Seattle Seahawks,
who sold for nine point six billion dollars. One thing's
(01:50):
pretty key in this modern day world of pro sports
valuations and franchises, you need a lot of money to
get involved the day. And Paul Allen, which listen, one
hundred ninety four million dollars in nineteen ninety seven was
a lot of money. I remember I heard someone say
this the other day, like in the Really When reality
(02:12):
television show and some of the game shows that happened
when I was in junior high in high school, if
you want a million dollars, it felt like the equivalent
of giving someone twenty million dollars now, so one hundred
ninety four million dollars a ton of money. He co
founded Microsoft, and obviously he's passed away now, but his
sister just sold the thing for nine point six billion dollars,
(02:35):
which is a crazy amount of money. I mean, Seattle's
not exactly Chicago or New York City or the Dallas Cowboys.
So the evaluations in this league, the safety your team
can suck. You can win zero games every single year
and still make money because of the league's television agreements.
(02:56):
It's what makes football so unique relative to basketball and baseball.
The NBA salary caps gone down, why because of the
local television networks, which were a huge part of basketball
because they have eighty two games, are falling apart. Cable
networks aren't going to exist. Obviously in baseball, the local
(03:17):
inventory is massive. The NFL is all national games. We
don't have local broadcasters. They're only on the radio. So
the national television revenue entice his guys like this, who
from what Wikipedia said, he's worth like fourteen billion dollars
to want to get involved in the league. Now he
was already a minority owner in the forty nine ers.
(03:40):
Super successful guy started some microsystems back in the early eighties,
came over here from India in the seventies, went to Stanford.
I mean, an incredible success story. Just was watching a
Stanford business talk that he gave. I mean, this guy
came from nothing and wanted no part of being employee.
This guy, once he went to college, wanted to start
(04:02):
his own thing. Wasn't afraid to fail. So I admire
that mentality. Props to that guy who is crushed in life.
It's obviously since Sun microsystem became an incredible part of
a venture capitalist firm that invested in some of the
most successful companies over the last several decades in the
Internet era, so that this guy is a cash machine.
(04:23):
And I think it's pretty clear by the way this
is going to operate, his wife is technically going to
be the managing partner. It's like the Waltons who bought
the Denver Broncos they gave it to the son in
law Penner, you know, even though the Waltons paid for
the thing. But he's the guy. He's the boss. The
wife's gonna be lost. It's pretty clear this thing is
(04:44):
about his son, who I couldn't find his exact age,
but his parent. I mean, this guy and his wife
are seventy one years old, and his son, from by
all accounts, is a massive sports fan and is going
to take this thing over. If not now, I mean,
there's already been reports he's gonna have a massive role.
But this guy's gonna be leading the charge. I was
(05:07):
thinking about this though, typically in the NFL, and i'd
probably say sports franchises in general, but definitely over the
course of the last I don't know decade when NFL
teams have sold, the franchises have been awful. Not necessarily
the valuations right that they're all making money, but in
(05:28):
terms of the team they've been an embarrassment. I mean,
a couple of years ago, when Dan Snyder was basically
forced out, the Washington Redskins had one of the worst brands,
not in the NFL but in the entire league. Changing
their name the owner was a joke. The team always sucked,
it didn't matter it was. It couldn't have been any worse,
(05:50):
and that's usually what comes to market. David Tepper buys
the Carolina Panthers. Wasn't exactly rolling. Jimmy Haslam bought the
Cleveland Brown Mounts pretty well documented. And the thing in
the NFL, and this is again probably true for most franchises,
is this guy's from the Bay Area essentially right his
(06:11):
entire time living in America, he has been. His home
base has been Silicon Valley by all accounts. His son
is a huge forty nine er fan. In a perfect world,
if you want, he would buy the forty nine ers.
They're not available. Josh Harris owns the seventy six ers
and he owned them before he owned an NFL team.
(06:31):
Who do you think he would want to buy the
Philadelphia Eagles. It'd be perfect, you know, synergy with the
basketball team and the NFL team. But guess what can't
do it? I mean, Jeffrey Leary ain't selling. So a
lot of times you have to buy a team that
is in a market that you don't live in, and
you have to choose are you going to move to
(06:53):
that market or are you not? And a lot of
times these guys become so hands on they move there
and they become very very involved. Sometimes no, but how
often do you buy a team with a Hall of
Fame general manager in the peak of his powers and
a young coach that is viewed which is very rare
in the NFL on the defensive side of the ball,
(07:15):
as the equivalent of like Kyle Shanahan and Sean McVay.
Obviously just coming off the Super Bowl, but even if
you just remove the Super Bowl, you would say he
is easily one of the best coaches in the NFL.
And if you could draft from scratch right so obviously
you'd have to factor in age. So if you remove
like the Andy Reid and the Sean Payton, of all
the guys like under fifty or fifty five years old,
(07:38):
he would go in the top five. Like I said,
you usually buy the Panthers, who you're gonna detonate the thing,
or you buy the Cleveland Browns, which need to be detonated.
In this situation, you don't really have to do anything. Now,
we're humans. When you pay a lot of money for something,
you're gonna want to put your stamp on it. But
(07:59):
the See Battle Seahawks for the better part of the
Internet era have been an extremely well run franchise. And
this is where Paul Allen gets a lot of credit
is in the late nineties, Mike Holmgren was the head
coach of the Packers, had been to multiple Super Bowls,
created the Brett Favre situation, helped land Reggie White and
(08:21):
free agency, and became a coaching a head coaching star.
He was already a big name because he was an
assistant for Bill Watsh for a long time in the eighties,
but he paid him in the late nineties eight years
thirty two million dollars, which I'm pretty sure if we
looked around sports, was unheard of when it came to
(08:41):
a coach. That's fucking insane. Now, you know, these guys
are making fifteen twenty million dollars, But nineteen ninety nine
there were probably a lot of coaches making eight hundred grand,
making five hundred grand. Definitely, the assistants weren't making anywhere
near what they make now. So Paul Allen was ahead
of the curve. He realized the importance of having a
star guy run his franchise. And then after they kind
(09:04):
of hit some hard times at the end of the
Holme grewnd era, Jim morri it was just kind of
a joke. They went out and bought Pete Carroll, and
with Pete Carroll they brought in John Scheider and so
consistently that franchise has been good because he's been willing
to pay the coach a lot of money and through
(09:24):
that landed him a general manager that's going to be
in the Hall of Fame. So this guy, who now
for the course of the last twenty five years, maybe
even longer than that, has just been strictly investing into companies, Well,
what does a good investor do? And because the difference
in sports and in business. Right, in business, the Cleveland
(09:46):
Browns Bad organization costs a premium. You know, it's like
it would it be that enticing, but it's pro sports.
They're the only organization you know available I want in
or the Carolina Panthers or whoever. Right, we're in business.
You typically, if you're gonna pay a premium for something,
you're gonna buy an organization that is already well run,
(10:07):
that's making a ton of money, and this is rolling
and then you just let the guys that you purchased
the organization for operate and you make the profits. You know,
I've I would imagine a lot of people listening to
this have known a lot of people, or you know
a lot of you guys know an individual, someone in
your community, someone through a friend who sold their business
(10:31):
to one of these firms and their business. I had
a good friend who's now passed away, but his family,
his dad, when I was a kid, worked in like
the union, and they installed cold boxes in grocery stores.
And he did that my entire you know, youth. He
was my baseball coach in fifth and sixth grade. I
(10:54):
went to college with very close with his son. And
then after a certain point, probably in his mid fifties,
he said, I don't know, I just I'm now the
manager of this company working for people. He created his
own company because he's like, I have all the relationships
with the people running the grocery stores. I know this
(11:16):
business inside and out. So he just created his own
company that like in his mid fifties, and then I
don't know how long later, they sold the company for
millions upon millions of dollars. Because these VC firms come
in and they buy like five of them, and then
they combine them and they pay you you either, you
(11:37):
know a lot of times you get an agreement where
you stay on for a certain amount of time, maybe
two years, maybe five years, whatever, continue your payout, hit
some hit some certain marks, and then make even more
money and then just get out right where. That's usually
how it operates. Because you want to buy a company
that's rolling, that knows what they're doing and is making
a ton of money. Well, in sports is pretty rare
(11:59):
that you get to. You gotta pay a lot, but
you get to get John Schneider and Mike McDonald and
inherit an organization loaded with young players that knows what
they're doing. Typically you buy the organization and then a
year later you will do anything to find your John
Schneider or Mike McDonald. That's not the case here. So
(12:21):
for this family buying this organization, it's about as seamless
of a transition as you can get. And listen, this
guy's been infinitely more successful than more than likely I
will ever be when it comes to his finances. But
my only recommendation would be, because I've been following sports
(12:41):
my entire life, let these guys cook. Man, Let these
guys cook. I'm not saying you can't come in with
certain ideas for the business. Whatever, that's healthy. You always
have to progress and think differently as times change. But
in terms of the football side here it doesn't get
any better. And this guy's coming for the forty nine
(13:02):
ers who Jed York when he took over the organization
hit some speed bumps. I mean, obviously fired Jim Harbaugh,
which did not age well for a couple of years,
and the forty nine ers became an embarrassment, and then
he hired the right to guys in. For the last
ten years his organization has been humming. They just went
on the road with a bunch of scrubs and beat
(13:24):
the Philadelphia Eagles in a playoff game. Why because Jed
York goes Kyle John, what do you need? It doesn't
mean it's always gonna work. You're dealing with human beings.
They're your assets, not computers, you know, not buildings, not
things that you can guarantee the outcome for a short
or long period of time. But when you have John
(13:44):
Schneider and Mike McDonald running your operation, you feel pretty
good for the foreseeable future. So you never know in
these situations. You know, new owners come in, they want
to mix things up. But Paul Allen, who from what
I've heard, was pretty involved, you know, football, basketball. I
mean incredible. Listen, this guy had a lot of money
(14:05):
in the nineties and even the late eighties. He purchased
I did the math, the Blazers in Seattle Seahawks for
like two hundred and sixty five million dollars combined over
the course of like eight nine years. I think he
bought the Blazers in like eighty eight or eighty nine,
and he bought the Seahawks in ninety seven. And because
(14:25):
of the agreement and the trust that his sistery doesn't
have any children who got these assets had to sell
within a year of his passing, and because like the
league gave him a little leeway, they got an extra year.
And it turns out they won the Super Bowl for
that two hundred and sixty five million dollars. He sold
the two franchises in twenty twenty six for almost combined
(14:47):
fourteen billion dollars. That's an incredible return on investment. The
other thing I was thinking is you see some of
these owners, clearly, you know, the families that bought him
in the fifties and sixties for nothing relative to money now,
but even the people that bought it in the nineties
or the early two thousands, and you see their returns
on the valuations. To get a ten X on a franchise. Now,
(15:12):
even if it's a cheaper franchise like five or six
billion dollars, are these franchise is gonna be worth fifty
or sixty billion dollars in the next ten years. It's
hard to think it's gonna get that big. Like I
mean sometimes timing. Listen, I benefit from timing. I'm a podcaster.
If I would have been born instead of nineteen eighty
four nineteen sixty four, I wouldn't be doing this. I
(15:34):
wouldn't have had the opportunity if I wanted to pursue
a career in radio or broadcasting or talking for a living.
Who knows what I would have had to do to
make that happen, right, moving different places, getting radio gigs
in places I didn't want to live. I don't have
to do that. Now. I can build my own studio
and create my own product here and partner up with
(15:56):
Coward and do things that would not been available fifteen
to forty forever up until the last decade ish. And
I feel very fortunate, just like people that struck it
big in the seventies and eighties, if they wanted it
on pro sports, they got those teams at relatively low
valuations looking back, right, because the power of television, and
(16:20):
I don't think anyone could have seen the power of
football and the importance of football. I have a theory.
And now, just the World Cup, I saw a stat
that fifty three percent of people that watched the World
Cup through the group stage and then the first round
(16:41):
of the knockout stage. Over half the people that watched
on Fox hadn't watched a soccer game in a year.
I fall under that category. I don't even know when
the last time I watched soccer game. I do not
watch soccer. I don't pretend to be a soccer fan.
But when I turned on the World Cup has got
a couple things going. One, the broadcast from Fox kind
(17:05):
of has an NFL feel. When you watch these games,
they feel big. Now. Part of that in the NFL field.
They're playing in all the NFL stadiums, So there's a
comfort level as a football guy when I see, oh
they're playing at Foxboro. Oh, last night, they're playing in
Kansas City and Patrick Mahomes is there. Oh, they're playing
it so far, they're playing in Seattle, they play in
(17:26):
all the football stadiums, so I feel comfortable, like okay,
and then clearly the star power and as we saw
with the US hockey team, because most humans do not
watch hockey. If you put USA on the front of
the jersey, most of us, despite what social media might
tell in you are pretty patriotic and we're gonna watch
and we're gonna root for you. And obviously the way
(17:47):
it ended was an embarrassment. I mean that goal that
the goalie, I mean that was an all timer and
we got our we got fucking warked. But it was
cool and it felt like a cultural moment. Now, there
are some things about soccer that if you're a football
fan first and not a soccer guy, you're like, why
did these guys lay on the ground so long? And
in basketball, for example, when you flop and you lay
(18:10):
there and you give up an easy layup because you
don't get back on defense, who cares it's twenty five
to twenty and now it's twenty five to twenty two.
But in soccer, some of these guys flop and lay
there and then all of a sudden you give an
advantage to the other team and maybe you give up
a goal. Well, you watch some of these games, you
lose two to one and you can get your ass kicked.
(18:31):
So just lay there and leaving your teammates to dry.
I'll never understand. I won't. I think the flopping is
out of control, but there is no disputing that when
you turn on the World Cup, it feels massive, it
feels huge. I mean that game they played back to
back games in Mexico. I forget whom Mexico played the
first in the first knockout stage, but the second game
(18:52):
against England that felt like an SEC game. That felt
like Alabama versus LSU. Those games at Asteca. It didn't
get any better television wise. It's part of the reason
sports suck so much in twenty twenty. It's like if
there aren't fans in the stadium a huge part of
the viewing experience. It's why college football has become the
(19:13):
second biggest sport in America because if you turn on
Penn State at night against Ohio State, it's fucking awesome.
If you turn on Georgia going to Florida to night
that the crowd plays a huge role. Obviously, the NFL
is you know, the crowds aren't as intense, I would say,
consistently as college football, but the big games matter, right.
(19:35):
You watch a game in Buffalo, you watch a game
in Kansas City, you watch a game in Seattle like
you feel it, you watch it. If the Browns ever
got good, obviously the Steelers like it really adds to
the viewing experience. And watching the passion of all these
people coming over here enjoying what we bring to the table,
because holy shit, we bring a lot to the table
(19:57):
has been incredible and clearly the star. I'd never heard
of this Holland guy, but I might have put a
couple hundred dollars on them when they were sixteen to
one to win it against England. Didn't go my way,
but I was glued and watching MESSI watching him Bape,
Watching all these guys, Harry Kane has been extremely enjoyable,
(20:18):
and whether you like soccer or not, I think most
people would agree, especially in the summer not much going on.
The World Cup has been a massive win and I
think there are a lot of parallels there. And this
is one of the NFL's greatest strengths is their games matter,
and when your games don't matter, right, And let's face it,
(20:41):
regular season basketball, has it mattered in a long time.
You can say, well, it's never matter. They played eighty
two games. Forever. I feel like when I was younger,
guys used to care more. When the talent doesn't care,
the consumer's not gonna care. A baseball game. I've said
this forever every game that was played today. I'm recording
this on July twelfth. I don't think there's one pitch
(21:01):
that actually matters today. I just you can't convince me. Now.
You can convince me over the course of a couple
of weeks if you lose fourteen straight games. Obviously, I
saw the Red Sox won a bunch of games and
they've kind of got back in the mix. So yeah,
over the course of a week. But one individual game,
it just don't matter. And soccer, all these games mattered.
(21:22):
And in football, every game matters, and we understand that.
And in a day and age where we're getting pulled left,
we're getting pulled right, we got a million things taking
our attention. You know, you can doom scroll for hours
like you gotta matter to get my attention. And especially
as you get older, you get families you get kids,
you got stuff going on, you got work. You better,
(21:43):
you better be important. And there is no disputing that
when you turn on the World Cup, it feels really,
really important. And that's why I think when you see
these guys, these multi billionaires, this guy's a tech guy,
why does he want in on the NFL? Because clearly
the return on investment right just guaranteed cash flow every year,
a place, the safe place to park your money. But
(22:05):
you're part of something big, and you're part of something
that matters. And you know, I've seen some discourse online.
These guys aren't from Seattle, you know. Will you be
a Seahawks fan? I grew up a diehard forty nine
Er fan. I fell in love with football and sports
because of Steve Young and Jerry Rice and that team
(22:27):
in nineteen ninety four when they signed Dion Sanders. My uncle,
who lives in Fresno, is in the beer business and
was in business with Eddie de Bartelow in the eighties.
Like my dad loved Joe Montana, like I loved everything
about the forty nine ers, but unlike like Bill Simmons,
still a diehard Celtics guy. I'm at the point now Now,
(22:48):
don't get me wrong, I still watch the forty nine ers.
I enjoy when they win, but I care about my
business first. So if you told me this year the
forty nine ers could go oh to sixteen in my
post podcast, could triple our revenue, triple our listenership, and
our business could be on a much better trajectory. We're
already on a good one, but like could go up
(23:08):
tenfold or whatever. I wouldn't even blame. I don't care
because this is what matters. This is what pays the
bills for my family. And so these guys could be
forty nine er fans. His kid could be a diehard
forty nine er fan. Guess what they're gonna care about
this fall? The Seattle Seahawks. Why because they're involved, it's
their team. It happens pretty quick, and I think this
is one thing I'll never forget. Colin used to say
(23:29):
all the time is take the emotion out of it.
And I think for everyone listening that is, in some
form or fashion in the private sector, a lot of
your emotion leaves the older you get. I'm not saying
from a sports perspective, like if you don't work in sports, obviously,
you're a big Yankee fan, big Browns fan, big Cowboy fan,
big whoever, Laker fan. I get it. But I would
(23:49):
imagine most of you, as you've gotten older in the
industry you're in, are less emotionally tied to things, especially
when it comes to deals, concrete, whatever that might be. Building.
You don't give a shit. And I think that's how
all these guys operate. And you don't get as big
(24:10):
as these guys get, these multi billionaires with them being
that emotionally tied to some I think they'll pivot pretty
easily in Seattle about whether he moves there or not.
Only time will tell, But yeah, what a what a sale.
(24:33):
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New Jersey, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia. UH. Terry Ott Arnold for
(26:30):
those you know if you just were not on the internet,
was released. This is you know week plus old now
from the Detroit Lions. He obviously was involved in a
situation where he got robbed. But you cash Jewelry thought
the guys that robbed him him and his buddies tried
(26:51):
to lure them in and then kidnapped him, pistol whipped them.
And now it looks like he's got red handed and
in major trouble. And it got me. This is why
drafting is so difficult. If you missed it, Nick Saban
wrote a letter to the judge, and in that letter
(27:11):
he said, Terry Arnold wasn't just a high character guy
for me, he was someone that my family became close to,
a guy that would come over to my house. Terry
On Arnold coming out of Alabama would have been viewed
as a good character guy, not as someone who would
have been a red flag. Saban also has a pretty
(27:33):
legendary rant. I think at a coaching clinic about Henry Ruggs,
who is currently in prison, who is another guy that
would have been viewed as a good character guy coming
out of college. There are so many people in NFL
history that were red flag guys. I saw recently Kyle Long,
(27:54):
who now is on CBS's pregame show for the NFL.
He's been with CBS for a long time. He is
Howie Son, Chris's brother, and once got in a lot
of trouble when he was young. He originally started I
think at Florida State as a pitcher that went to
junior college and had a lot of stuff going on.
You can google it, and then it ended up in
(28:15):
a orgon and became a guy that was a potential
first round pick. And he went to the combine and
he said, he told this story of you know, typically
the good character guys, their meetings are easy. A lot
of them don't even have that many meetings because teams
don't want to give it away. But I looked and
I was there with He was in Travis Kelcey's draft class,
(28:35):
and Travis and I were going to every single team
because Kyle Long and Travis Kelcey were viewed as major
red flags coming out of college, and both of them.
Kyle went on to be a pro bowler, injuries derailed
his career a little bit, and is you know, a
huge part of one of the major networks in America now.
(28:56):
And Travis Kelcey is going to go down as the
greatest pass catching tight end of all time and someone
viewed as a cornerstone leader and tone setter for like
a mini dynasty in Kansas City. And Terry On Arnold
who easily could go to jail over this kidnapping pistol
whipping situation, and Henry Ruggs who is currently in jail.
(29:20):
We're not red flag guys coming out of college. So
when you're dealing with human beings, and this is what
vanad who just bought Seattle's gonna learn, that's a lot
different than investing in Square, investing in Uber or whatever
your assets are. Humans and young human beings are flawed
(29:41):
and making decisions. And we've all heard this a million times,
but who you surround yourself with can make or break you. Right,
you know, your friend your close friendships especially can put
(30:01):
you down a path towards success and put you down
a path toward disasters. I was home. This was not
over the last couple of weeks, but at a wedding recently,
maybe like two or three months ago. And this one
guy that we went to high school with, who who
(30:23):
who would have been probably our biggest red flag in
our high school at one point in time. I remember
hearing years ago him, his dad, and his brother were
all in jail. And I was at this wedding and
I asked a buddy, I'm like, whatever happened to this guy?
He was like, actually he was killed. I'm like, how
was he killed? I'm like, oh, you're sleeping with this
girl whose boyfriend was in prison and got out and
(30:43):
came home and caught him and killed him. And as
sad as this may sound is, I wasn't shocked at all, right,
And I knew early on, like in high school, like
kind of avoided the guy, even though I liked him,
like we were. He would he could easily hang with everybody,
but you were hanging out with them, you just knew
(31:03):
something could go bad at something go bad fast, and
got a ton of trouble up until the day he
was killed. And then there are some guys that are
just on the straight and narrow, and by all accounts,
Terry on Arnold was a good guy. But in this
story that I read on The Athletic about the play
by play of this situation, they ranted this airbnb down
(31:26):
in Florida, and the people that were in the community
of the airbnb kept saying, like some of these guys
were like, what is going on here? But they dealt
with Terry on a couple of times like seems like
a nice guy and those people and listen, I'm not
absolving him from his actions because we all make decisions
and as you get older, like you have to be
(31:47):
held accountable for everything you do, no different than getting
behind the wheel of a Ferrari or a Porsche or
whatever Ruggs was driving, and after boozing and flying one
hundred fifty miles an hour into person, there's consequences, and
obviously he's facing them now. But when you go into
these drafts, and I'm not talking about talent, like JJ
(32:09):
McCarthy just might not be able to play right. JJ
McCarthy might just not have the ability to throw touch passes,
comprehend defenses, and run an NFL offense. By all accounts
through two years that would be the case. But when
you drafted JJ McCarthy, you felt pretty good about the guy, right,
the player yet to be determined. That happens a lot.
(32:32):
Some guys you draft high and they just they're just
not good enough, and sometimes they end up playing for
ten fifteen years as like rotational guys backups nuts. You
just shouldn't have drafted them. While you drafted them, their
talent just wasn't good enough. It wasn't their character, or
wasn't their work ethic, it wasn't their decision making. And
sometimes you draft these bad guys. I have told the
(32:52):
story a million times. I mean it's not my story
to tell, but just because of the public story. But
Tyron Matthew was kicked out of LSU and was probably
the number one red flag in his draft, which looking
back is kind of stupid. You just smoking some synthetic weed.
But he was a guy that clearly one of the
most talented guys in his class. And if he wasn't
(33:15):
kicked out of college and that never happened, he's probably
going in the top fifteen. And said he goes in
the third round and within a couple of years, Patrick
Peterson on the Cardinals like he's a leader of the team,
he's a hardbeat of the team. Then everywhere he went
Houston Texans can't see Chiefs he's the team captain. So
you just never know. You just have no fucking clue.
(33:36):
And the big difference too, in college than in the NFL.
You got a lot more free time in the National
Football League because in college, guess what you're doing in
the spring. You're on campus, you're working out, you have
spring practice. The team has their kind of hands around you.
Now it doesn't mean you can't get in trouble, but
(33:58):
they have way more control. In the NFL, even in
the NIL era, you have more money and you have
way more free time. And as John Baxter, longtime special
teams coach Presno State you worked for Lane work for Hardball,
used to always say, disposable income and free time for
(34:20):
young people can be a deadly combination. And I would
add like surrounding yourself with morons can derail your life.
And by all accounts, Terry On Arnold did not do
a good job of surrounding himself with the right people.
Because I saw Houston Texans brought him in for a
physical if I had to guess, they're doing the agent
(34:41):
a solid to try to make the judge think that
like he's got I think he's in major trouble. My
uneducated guests about the loss system, just knowing, just seeing
some of these charges, I would say he's fucked. And
I would be stunned if Terry On Arnold is playing
in the NFL in twenty twenty six. Another thing I
(35:06):
saw is that Aaron Donald it feels like a lock
that he is going to play this fall. Aaron Donald
is coming back to the Rams, and no basketball is
dealing with this right they've had. They haven't had a
repeat champion in like eight years since the Warriors with
Kevin Durant. And for a long time most of my
(35:27):
life in the NBA, it was like same three or
four teams always winning and the NBA thrived. Like when
I was a kid, the Yankees sort of just rattling
off World Series. Guess what it was great for business?
Guess what every year you know, Showeo Tani and the
LA Dodgers are gonna be the favorite to win the
World Series. Guess what that makes entertaining things to watch?
(35:51):
And I think having the Rams as a team, even
though they haven't won a Super Bowl in many, many years.
But the vibe of are they just unbeatable is a really,
really good thing for the NFL because they had it
for a while with the Chiefs and everyone. I heard
this all the time. I'm tired of watching them. I
(36:11):
cannot watch Patrick Mahomes play another game. I'm tired of it.
Even though every time they played they were sitting like
Cowboys level ratings records, so clearly you didn't mind because
you watched. And I think the Rams, which is weird,
because they're in this major market in Los Angeles, they're
a much bigger national story than they all local story.
(36:35):
I now going to LA with Colin. I'm actually going
this week, gonna be on Thursday and Friday is when
you're there. That's a Dodger Laker town. Like the football
teams feel a distant third, and honestly, they're not even
in the same conversation. The Dodgers and the Lakers are
part of the culture in Los Angeles, the Rams simply
(36:57):
are not. They play there in an incredible stadium which
looks unreal on the World Cup, and by all accounts,
all the players want these grass fields and all these
teams that have turf that put in the grass fields
for FIFA, just have grass. It's it's I am pro grass,
no turf. I don't understand why these owners get so
(37:17):
cheap with the turf. It's just a line item. It'd
be one thing if it was like one hundred million
dollars to install grass and it was five hundred k
to involve you know, install turf. That is not the case.
Just put in the fucking grass. But a lot of
these owners, for whatever reason, push back against it. I
think there's a level of ego that they don't want
to be pushed to like do what the players want.
(37:40):
But you know, it kind of is what it is.
I just think the rams are there is no disputing
on paper. You don't get any better. And this is
a guy who just I've seen clips over the years
of him working out in his own personal gym. He
looks like a just a freak still, so now can
(38:00):
his body at thirty five years old, haven't played football
in a while. It's not like they're depending on him.
If he can just give him twenty snaps a game,
they are going to be a massive, massive story. And
I think it's really healthy for the NFL. When we
went to Newport for the fourth of July, Newport Beach,
(38:20):
I honestly have not spent enough time there. It is.
It's an incredible place. You know, when I go with Colin,
we're up near like Hollywood and where UCLA is. That's
like Los Angeles. It's like the Los Angeles. I mean,
obviously Los Angeles is massive, but like when I think LA,
(38:42):
I think that area right Newport Beach is basically this
area between San Diego and Los Angeles, which is just beautiful.
I mean, it's as someone that left California and whenever
someone asks, like John, are you ever going to move
back in the answer is no, there's a zero chance.
If anything, I'm moving east. I ain't ever moving back
(39:04):
more west. That is one area, Like I got it.
I'm going to pay, you know, fifty plus percent of
my take on pay to the government. Lived by the ocean.
We stayed at a pretty swanky hotel. Now, we never
went on a honeymoon. We got married and then basically
a month later she was pregnant and I kind of
(39:25):
looked at it like, you know, let's take a honeymoon
with a kid. Which isn't exactly a honeymoon, but it
was cool and where we were staying. Someone told me
this is the that they have these. I actually went
there in twenty eighteen for a Fox iHeart. We did
like a golf tournament with Colin and the volume wasn't
(39:47):
even created then, but so I had stayed there before
and it was like, this place is cool. And one
of the last nights we were there, you know, we
were we're having a few cocktails during the day. Jack
was enjoying himself. But the problem is you always gotta
put him in that you got he's got a nap.
You can't keep him in the sun too long. So
you couldn't say the pool. You know, travel with the baby.
(40:09):
Everyone's like travel when they're young. It's like travel with
the baby is not that enjoyable. It's like it's it's
much easier in your home base. But you don't want
to get stuck doing nothing, so you got to get
out of your comfort zone a little bit. But people,
I had someone text me today like, how's your vacation been.
Vacation vacation pre child's a little different than this version.
(40:32):
I wouldn't call this a vacation, but it was enjoyable.
And there was these two Irish guys drinking and somehow,
you know, I'd already had a few. We started talking.
I ended up sitting down there and Jack's there as well,
and they're like, Jack looks just like an irishman, Are
you guys Irish? I was like, no, I actually don't
think so. I think German, Swedish or whatever. And then
(40:55):
he's falling asleep and freaking out, and then I introduced
my something like, oh, I'm Connor's manager, and I'm Connor
McGregor's boxing coach. So Maria puts takes him back to
the room, like no, I'm gonna stay here and have
a few. So I ended up getting relatively intoxicated with
some of' connor's people. Turns out Connor was staying at
(41:18):
the hotel, not in just the the the area where
a peon stay. They have these houses I guess on
the top of the hill where someone told me that
Kobe Bryant when he tore his achilles when he was
playing for the Lakers. They rented out one of these
because they're basically like a home and they got tons
of rooms, tons of space and that's where he rehabbed
(41:41):
during his you know, Achilles comeback, and Connor was staying
up there and I was like, I was kind of
hoping he'd come down, and like I've said this forever,
I'm not a huge UFC guy, Like I don't buy
the pay per views, like I follow the sport through
social media. I admire the mental of the business and
(42:01):
how successful they are, but I'm not like some diehard
I don't pretend to be. I don't like, I'm not
that into it, even though like I respect the hell
out of anyone that's wanted to get in the octagon
and what they did in twenty twenty. They're like we're
coming back when everyone's like hi from your shadow, and
Dane's like fuck this, we're fighting and everyone followed suit.
(42:21):
But I just think that I kind of bought in
because we're having cocktails that his boxing coach was shit house.
I mean, you talk about stereotypical irishmen boozed up, we're
have a good time, and I was talking about, you know,
I went to college with Chad Mendez and they were
saying that Connor respects Chad even though he beat them,
and I was like Okay, I'm fired up for this fight.
(42:42):
And because I don't know what show we've watched on Paramount,
but I like every streaming service I have it, which
I think is a huge benefit because I don't know
if I would have bought the pay per view, you know,
but I have Paramount Plus. They're in business Paramount Plus.
I just click it and there boom, it's on. So
about eight feet ten he comes out. All of a sudden,
Maria looks at me and goes, wait, is that it
(43:06):
is it over? And I'm like, yeah, I think it's
just done. And the thing with I was thinking about this,
Even if you turn on a terrible football game or
a terrible basketball game or terrible whatever, you know it's
sixty minutes long. You know, you got three hours to
just sit there and watch something. You could watch a
(43:27):
blowout of one hundred and fifty to one hundred, and
you got forty eight minutes of basketball. You got nine
innings of baseball, right, you got two halves and ninety
minutes plus. I don't know exactly, not all soccer does it,
but there's always some plus and some extra number with
the running clocks. But you know, in fighting you have
no clue, And I think, like, I don't pretend to
(43:48):
be some fighting aficionado here. I don't think I've ever
seen anything like that, And I think it shows you.
And this is people ask me whenever we're like back
in Lake Tall, like do you ski? I'm like, yeah,
I did when I was like twenty, but I haven't
in fifteen twenty years. Do you want to you want
to come sometime? This went? No, I've retired. I don't
(44:10):
want to break my leg. I don't want to tear
my acl or achilles. I used to love playing pickup basketball.
I played when I was JA at Fresny State. I
used to play in this league when I was working
with the Eagles in the offseason. I used to play
a little bit when I moved back to the Bay Area.
Like it was enjoyable. It was just like, hey, instead
of just running on the treadmill, let's just go get
(44:31):
a run. You couldn't pay me to pay play pickup basketball.
I'm not any good, but I enjoyed playing, just like
a lot of people that aren't any good enjoy playing.
You get a legit sweat, you get to compete a
little bit, you get to play. I'm not tearing my achilles.
I remember, like within the last five ten years, Daniel Jeremiah,
NFL Network ESPN he tores achilles playing basketball. I'm like,
(44:51):
I'm not doing it because as you get older, your
body ain't the same. And by no means am I
some Connor McGregor athlete. But I think a lot of
you listening probably agree. That's why a lot of us
kind of morph over to golf. That's my one activity,
you know, beside working out and stuff in a controlled
environment on a treadmill, run outside, hike whatever. But I'm
(45:14):
not doing the sports. Why because my body. I don't
want to be on crutches. I don't want to have
to go to physical rehab if I can avoid it.
Sometimes you can't, but if you can, I'm going to.
And you watch Connor McGregor like his body shot. Can
(45:36):
I tell you about my friends at seat Geek. You
want to go to a game? You want to go
to one of these World Cup games? Actually, uh, good
buddy of my Joey from England said, John, I'm going
to the final there in the final, Well, I said,
you seekek you a baseball fan. You want to go
to one of these baseball games, you in Vegas for
(45:56):
the summer league, You want to go to a concert,
anything you want on they have you covered. There are
more than seventy thousand events listed on SEKE. Concerts, sporting events, festivals,
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link in the description to download the app and have
the code automatically added to your account so you can
use it later. Thanks to Sea Gig. That kick he
(46:44):
had last night, unless it has been debated whether he
was injured before. I saw some people pointing out that
picture or the video of him taking off shoes, acted
like he was kind of weird on the knee, even
though they showed some of his like warm up kicks
before he came out, kind of doing those crazy Bruce
Lee kicks. But like that's what happens when you get old.
(47:08):
And Charles Barkley's been saying this since he's been on
TV father times undefeated Connor. Greg's thirty seven years old.
There's a lot of wear and tear on that body.
And you watched that first moment, and at first live
you don't know what's going on, right, I'm just excited.
Just kind of got me interested. One just being around
those guys and seeing they kind of got me to believe.
(47:30):
And then two, just the hype behind this fight. It's
pretty rare. He clearly is the most famous UFC fighter
in the history of the sport. I thought when I
was at cal Pauly, I was a round one in
Chuck Ladell. He was at cal Pauly Grad. He used
to train in San Luis Obispo. This is like the
peak of his powers in like three four oh five range,
and it was cool the iceman, and then all of
(47:50):
a sudden he got old, and he got old fast,
and then it was just over. That's usually how it
happens in sports. Tom Brady is the only guy that
I can remember who who could play up until an
age when you're not supposed to be playing, and honestly
looked no different. His arm never failed him all the
Ben Roethlisberger's arm was dramatically different. Drew Brees's shoulder stopped working.
(48:14):
He was throwing like fifty million hour fastballs. Peyton Manning
could barely throw at twenty yards his last year in Denver.
That's normal. That's usually how it works for athletes. Tom Brady,
the version of him is an outlier. Aaron Rodgers achilles injury,
broken arm this year. It would be incredible if Aaron
(48:35):
Rodgers can play seventeen games. Besides, like you're wear and
tear of playing the sport, not suffer a major injury
that is not normal at forty two years old, like
Lebron James. How the fuck is he doing that? And
I would say the longer he plays, the more likely,
And he's had over the course of the last couple
of years of growing injury some different things. It's really
(48:56):
really hard to avoid why, because your body ain't the same.
It's very well established at this point in time in
human history. I don't care what type peptides, workout regimens,
protein shakes you're taking, how well you sleep, how many
cold bass and infrared saunas you use. Your body's gonna
(49:19):
give up at some point in time or another. When
you're a high level athlete. Hell, when you're an average athlete.
And so when Connor McGregor that moment was shocking, and
I get why they wrote him. I was watching some
YouTube show and they were saying that broke a gate.
It's like twenty five million dollars. The getting priced last
night was enormous. I mean, some of those people paying
(49:39):
the ticket prices, but that's what you get when you
buy some of these fights. Sometimes they're boring. It's like
Floyd Mayweather versus Oscar de la Hoya, or Floyd Mayweather
versus Mani Paccio. You're like, that sucked. And sometimes it's
like it just ends because the guy gets injured. A
guy can't fight. I have a lo a lot of respect,
(50:01):
and again I don't know haul away from the man
standing next to me, but I do think that a
lot of fighters I get they had fought before a
long time ago, would have just attacked and you could
tell early on he kind of said something was off,
and then by the time when the fight was called,
he's basically just pointing at him, like what are we
doing here? I do wonder how many guys in that
(50:23):
situation against someone that famous in the sport of violence
would have just attacked and made the referee call it.
He did the opposite. He pointed at him early on,
and then at the end he's like, I'm not touching
this guy. He can't move. But that was crazy. I
don't know what else to say. I don't remember an
(50:47):
event that was as hyped that ended as fast. And
when I see, like, you know, the fight ended in
sixty nine seconds. The fight literally ended the moment it
started because he tried. I had that Bruce Lee jump,
you know, three sixty kick and blew out his knee.
And then some of the videos of him leaving after
(51:09):
just in his shorts, barefoot in the back of T
Mobile arena kind of made me laugh. But man, I
can't even imagine the anticipation in that arena when Connor
walks out. They're both in the octagon, and it was like, Okay,
(51:30):
I don't know how this is gonna go, but we're
gonna get a brawl. And then to have the thing
just end, you're like, it's just over. What do we
do now? That had to suck last, but not least
not necessarily a Dad Diaries, But I had this thought
a couple of weeks ago. We went home to uh
(51:51):
Maria was in a wedding, so we went home a
little early and we went up to Lake Tahoe. Some
of her close girlfriends and their husbands were there. One
of a stayed, we stayed together, and the others they
rented a house with their family and we're just all
together hanging out for like three or four days. It
was a lot of fun. And we drove from Sacramento area.
(52:13):
My mom lives in Davis, which is right next Sacramento
up to Top, which is you know, give or take
no traffic can be two ish hours, and her mom
had bought a car seat, so we had a car
seat whenever we come home. Her mom lives probably forty
five minutes away from my mom, so they're in the
same general area, and bought us his car seat. Well,
(52:34):
for whatever reason, the car seat is different than the
car seats we have. And for those of you with
car seat strollers, they just in theory they're easy. There's
always a button and they just collapse. But if you
don't know the button, you're just fucking bending the thing
and you can't figure it out, and eventually you just
want to ram your head against the wall. I don't
(52:54):
know what to do. So I put him in the
car seat and we load up and we're headed to
and he screams at the top of his lungs for
essentially two plus hours. We pulled over multiple times. She
climbed in the back. Eventually we pulled over. We had
to move stuff out of the back so she could
(53:15):
sit in the back with them. Nothing worked, and it
hit me if I was an NFL general manager and
I wanted to evaluate a quarterback in their mental fortitude,
if you could drive for I'd even put the number
like seventy five minutes, but anything two hours, two and
a half hours, three hours with a screaming baby and
(53:40):
not absolutely mentally collapse. You could handle the Denver Broncos
in the fourth quarter. You could handle Will Anderson coming
at you with five minutes to go down four drive
in the field because I broke immediately. It's just it
is this piercing scream that is like anger pain. You
(54:04):
don't even know because they can't talk, and you're just
you're trying to keep your eyes on the road because
you don't want to drive off the mountain. And turns
out when we got there there was a setting where
you could lay it down a little bit farther. He
was kind of a wreck, so it might have been
like borderline child abuse because I couldn't figure out this
(54:25):
car seat, so I got on YouTube. I'm watching all
these tutorials. Didn't really help that much. He still didn't.
He's not a huge fan of this car seat because
in Newport we rented a car and they had a
car seat that came with the car, and it was
the same one and he hated it. He just whatever
reason doesn't fit. I don't know, but if you could
(54:47):
handle your shit for multiple hours, I think you can
play quarterback in the NFL. Because that is the one
thing with crying when especially your first child, you're just
not used to it. You hear baby cries sometimes an
airplane or like your friend's baby or whatever, but you
can always leave. You know, eventually the plane lambs, and
(55:08):
that person has to deal with when it's yours and
yours around and he's just crying. It's just it mentally
tests you. And I'm not proud to say I've broken.
I've mentally collapsed. So maybe what QUESSI should have done
is put JJ in a car with a baby and
just set them from Minnesota to like Cleveland, Ohio, and
(55:29):
just see how it went. Put a GoPro in there
and just monitor that I would do that before I
did the wonder Lick test. We'll be back all week long,
well at least the next couple. I don't know if
I'm gonna do one on on Thursday. I'm gonna be
down doing uh at Fox for a couple of days,
but the game plan will be for the last couple.
I have had a lot of people like, did you quit,
(55:52):
did you get fired? Did they cancel the show? Did
you go become a monk? Where are you? Like? No,
I just too a couple of weeks of my family
in the middle of July when nothing was going on,
and that turns out a lot was going on. Uh So,
I I've I've watched a lot of soccer. I've consumed
a lot of soccer. But hopefully everyone's doing well and
(56:12):
good to be back the volume m
The volume. What is going on? My people? How are
we doing? John Middlecoff three and now podcast? Let's see
if I can still do this. A lot of you
(00:22):
guys have been dming me, hitting me up, as my
mom would say. The on the X Channel, John has
calling severed ties with you. Did you quit? Where have
you gone? So, guys, it's late June, early July, just
taking a little breather, a little family time. Enjoying vacation
would be strong when you have a baby. But I've
been Lake Tahoe, Newport Beach, just kind of hanging out
(00:45):
and uh, hopefully I can still do a podcast because
you know you haven't talked this long in a while. Well,
I've been talking a lot, but just not into a microphone.
We had a lot going on. Seahawks just sold tear
an armed, the stories wild the World Cup is thriving.
Connor Gregor that was It's one of the wildest things
you'll ever see. Aaron Donald by all accounts are gonna
(01:06):
come back. So the game plan will be podcast today,
podcast the next couple days. Not sure if I'm gonna
do one This Thursday. I'm gonna be down in La
for I'm doing the Herd on Thursday and Friday. But
definitely got a bunch of podcasts this week and we'll
just keep home. Definitely some mail bags I haven't we
haven't done one of those in a while. So at
John Middlecoff at John Midlecoff is the Instagram fire in
(01:26):
those dms, you guys know the drill. If you listen
on Collins Feed, make sure you subscribed to three now
you'll never miss a show as well as you can
catch us on Netflix. That's where we will be from
a video standpoint for this podcast. So I appreciate everyone
that's watched, and let's just let's just dive into some sports.
But I do want to start with the Seattle Seahawks,
who sold for nine point six billion dollars. One thing's
(01:50):
pretty key in this modern day world of pro sports
valuations and franchises, you need a lot of money to
get involved the day. And Paul Allen, which listen, one
hundred ninety four million dollars in nineteen ninety seven was
a lot of money. I remember I heard someone say
this the other day, like in the Really When reality
(02:12):
television show and some of the game shows that happened
when I was in junior high in high school, if
you want a million dollars, it felt like the equivalent
of giving someone twenty million dollars now, so one hundred
ninety four million dollars a ton of money. He co
founded Microsoft, and obviously he's passed away now, but his
sister just sold the thing for nine point six billion dollars,
(02:35):
which is a crazy amount of money. I mean, Seattle's
not exactly Chicago or New York City or the Dallas Cowboys.
So the evaluations in this league, the safety your team
can suck. You can win zero games every single year
and still make money because of the league's television agreements.
(02:56):
It's what makes football so unique relative to basketball and baseball.
The NBA salary caps gone down, why because of the
local television networks, which were a huge part of basketball
because they have eighty two games, are falling apart. Cable
networks aren't going to exist. Obviously in baseball, the local
(03:17):
inventory is massive. The NFL is all national games. We
don't have local broadcasters. They're only on the radio. So
the national television revenue entice his guys like this, who
from what Wikipedia said, he's worth like fourteen billion dollars
to want to get involved in the league. Now he
was already a minority owner in the forty nine ers.
(03:40):
Super successful guy started some microsystems back in the early eighties,
came over here from India in the seventies, went to Stanford.
I mean, an incredible success story. Just was watching a
Stanford business talk that he gave. I mean, this guy
came from nothing and wanted no part of being employee.
This guy, once he went to college, wanted to start
(04:02):
his own thing. Wasn't afraid to fail. So I admire
that mentality. Props to that guy who is crushed in life.
It's obviously since Sun microsystem became an incredible part of
a venture capitalist firm that invested in some of the
most successful companies over the last several decades in the
Internet era, so that this guy is a cash machine.
(04:23):
And I think it's pretty clear by the way this
is going to operate, his wife is technically going to
be the managing partner. It's like the Waltons who bought
the Denver Broncos they gave it to the son in
law Penner, you know, even though the Waltons paid for
the thing. But he's the guy. He's the boss. The
wife's gonna be lost. It's pretty clear this thing is
(04:44):
about his son, who I couldn't find his exact age,
but his parent. I mean, this guy and his wife
are seventy one years old, and his son, from by
all accounts, is a massive sports fan and is going
to take this thing over. If not now, I mean,
there's already been reports he's gonna have a massive role.
But this guy's gonna be leading the charge. I was
(05:07):
thinking about this though, typically in the NFL, and i'd
probably say sports franchises in general, but definitely over the
course of the last I don't know decade when NFL
teams have sold, the franchises have been awful. Not necessarily
the valuations right that they're all making money, but in
(05:28):
terms of the team they've been an embarrassment. I mean,
a couple of years ago, when Dan Snyder was basically
forced out, the Washington Redskins had one of the worst brands,
not in the NFL but in the entire league. Changing
their name the owner was a joke. The team always sucked,
it didn't matter it was. It couldn't have been any worse,
(05:50):
and that's usually what comes to market. David Tepper buys
the Carolina Panthers. Wasn't exactly rolling. Jimmy Haslam bought the
Cleveland Brown Mounts pretty well documented. And the thing in
the NFL, and this is again probably true for most franchises,
is this guy's from the Bay Area essentially right his
(06:11):
entire time living in America, he has been. His home
base has been Silicon Valley by all accounts. His son
is a huge forty nine er fan. In a perfect world,
if you want, he would buy the forty nine ers.
They're not available. Josh Harris owns the seventy six ers
and he owned them before he owned an NFL team.
(06:31):
Who do you think he would want to buy the
Philadelphia Eagles. It'd be perfect, you know, synergy with the
basketball team and the NFL team. But guess what can't
do it? I mean, Jeffrey Leary ain't selling. So a
lot of times you have to buy a team that
is in a market that you don't live in, and
you have to choose are you going to move to
(06:53):
that market or are you not? And a lot of
times these guys become so hands on they move there
and they become very very involved. Sometimes no, but how
often do you buy a team with a Hall of
Fame general manager in the peak of his powers and
a young coach that is viewed which is very rare
in the NFL on the defensive side of the ball,
(07:15):
as the equivalent of like Kyle Shanahan and Sean McVay.
Obviously just coming off the Super Bowl, but even if
you just remove the Super Bowl, you would say he
is easily one of the best coaches in the NFL.
And if you could draft from scratch right so obviously
you'd have to factor in age. So if you remove
like the Andy Reid and the Sean Payton, of all
the guys like under fifty or fifty five years old,
(07:38):
he would go in the top five. Like I said,
you usually buy the Panthers, who you're gonna detonate the thing,
or you buy the Cleveland Browns, which need to be detonated.
In this situation, you don't really have to do anything. Now,
we're humans. When you pay a lot of money for something,
you're gonna want to put your stamp on it. But
(07:59):
the See Battle Seahawks for the better part of the
Internet era have been an extremely well run franchise. And
this is where Paul Allen gets a lot of credit
is in the late nineties, Mike Holmgren was the head
coach of the Packers, had been to multiple Super Bowls,
created the Brett Favre situation, helped land Reggie White and
(08:21):
free agency, and became a coaching a head coaching star.
He was already a big name because he was an
assistant for Bill Watsh for a long time in the eighties,
but he paid him in the late nineties eight years
thirty two million dollars, which I'm pretty sure if we
looked around sports, was unheard of when it came to
(08:41):
a coach. That's fucking insane. Now, you know, these guys
are making fifteen twenty million dollars, But nineteen ninety nine
there were probably a lot of coaches making eight hundred grand,
making five hundred grand. Definitely, the assistants weren't making anywhere
near what they make now. So Paul Allen was ahead
of the curve. He realized the importance of having a
star guy run his franchise. And then after they kind
(09:04):
of hit some hard times at the end of the
Holme grewnd era, Jim morri it was just kind of
a joke. They went out and bought Pete Carroll, and
with Pete Carroll they brought in John Scheider and so
consistently that franchise has been good because he's been willing
to pay the coach a lot of money and through
(09:24):
that landed him a general manager that's going to be
in the Hall of Fame. So this guy, who now
for the course of the last twenty five years, maybe
even longer than that, has just been strictly investing into companies, Well,
what does a good investor do? And because the difference
in sports and in business. Right, in business, the Cleveland
(09:46):
Browns Bad organization costs a premium. You know, it's like
it would it be that enticing, but it's pro sports.
They're the only organization you know available I want in
or the Carolina Panthers or whoever. Right, we're in business.
You typically, if you're gonna pay a premium for something,
you're gonna buy an organization that is already well run,
(10:07):
that's making a ton of money, and this is rolling
and then you just let the guys that you purchased
the organization for operate and you make the profits. You know,
I've I would imagine a lot of people listening to
this have known a lot of people, or you know
a lot of you guys know an individual, someone in
your community, someone through a friend who sold their business
(10:31):
to one of these firms and their business. I had
a good friend who's now passed away, but his family,
his dad, when I was a kid, worked in like
the union, and they installed cold boxes in grocery stores.
And he did that my entire you know, youth. He
was my baseball coach in fifth and sixth grade. I
(10:54):
went to college with very close with his son. And
then after a certain point, probably in his mid fifties,
he said, I don't know, I just I'm now the
manager of this company working for people. He created his
own company because he's like, I have all the relationships
with the people running the grocery stores. I know this
(11:16):
business inside and out. So he just created his own
company that like in his mid fifties, and then I
don't know how long later, they sold the company for
millions upon millions of dollars. Because these VC firms come
in and they buy like five of them, and then
they combine them and they pay you you either, you
(11:37):
know a lot of times you get an agreement where
you stay on for a certain amount of time, maybe
two years, maybe five years, whatever, continue your payout, hit
some hit some certain marks, and then make even more
money and then just get out right where. That's usually
how it operates. Because you want to buy a company
that's rolling, that knows what they're doing and is making
a ton of money. Well, in sports is pretty rare
(11:59):
that you get to. You gotta pay a lot, but
you get to get John Schneider and Mike McDonald and
inherit an organization loaded with young players that knows what
they're doing. Typically you buy the organization and then a
year later you will do anything to find your John
Schneider or Mike McDonald. That's not the case here. So
(12:21):
for this family buying this organization, it's about as seamless
of a transition as you can get. And listen, this
guy's been infinitely more successful than more than likely I
will ever be when it comes to his finances. But
my only recommendation would be, because I've been following sports
(12:41):
my entire life, let these guys cook. Man, Let these
guys cook. I'm not saying you can't come in with
certain ideas for the business. Whatever, that's healthy. You always
have to progress and think differently as times change. But
in terms of the football side here it doesn't get
any better. And this guy's coming for the forty nine
(13:02):
ers who Jed York when he took over the organization
hit some speed bumps. I mean, obviously fired Jim Harbaugh,
which did not age well for a couple of years,
and the forty nine ers became an embarrassment, and then
he hired the right to guys in. For the last
ten years his organization has been humming. They just went
on the road with a bunch of scrubs and beat
(13:24):
the Philadelphia Eagles in a playoff game. Why because Jed
York goes Kyle John, what do you need? It doesn't
mean it's always gonna work. You're dealing with human beings.
They're your assets, not computers, you know, not buildings, not
things that you can guarantee the outcome for a short
or long period of time. But when you have John
(13:44):
Schneider and Mike McDonald running your operation, you feel pretty
good for the foreseeable future. So you never know in
these situations. You know, new owners come in, they want
to mix things up. But Paul Allen, who from what
I've heard, was pretty involved, you know, football, basketball. I
mean incredible. Listen, this guy had a lot of money
(14:05):
in the nineties and even the late eighties. He purchased
I did the math, the Blazers in Seattle Seahawks for
like two hundred and sixty five million dollars combined over
the course of like eight nine years. I think he
bought the Blazers in like eighty eight or eighty nine,
and he bought the Seahawks in ninety seven. And because
(14:25):
of the agreement and the trust that his sistery doesn't
have any children who got these assets had to sell
within a year of his passing, and because like the
league gave him a little leeway, they got an extra year.
And it turns out they won the Super Bowl for
that two hundred and sixty five million dollars. He sold
the two franchises in twenty twenty six for almost combined
(14:47):
fourteen billion dollars. That's an incredible return on investment. The
other thing I was thinking is you see some of
these owners, clearly, you know, the families that bought him
in the fifties and sixties for nothing relative to money now,
but even the people that bought it in the nineties
or the early two thousands, and you see their returns
on the valuations. To get a ten X on a franchise. Now,
(15:12):
even if it's a cheaper franchise like five or six
billion dollars, are these franchise is gonna be worth fifty
or sixty billion dollars in the next ten years. It's
hard to think it's gonna get that big. Like I
mean sometimes timing. Listen, I benefit from timing. I'm a podcaster.
If I would have been born instead of nineteen eighty
four nineteen sixty four, I wouldn't be doing this. I
(15:34):
wouldn't have had the opportunity if I wanted to pursue
a career in radio or broadcasting or talking for a living.
Who knows what I would have had to do to
make that happen, right, moving different places, getting radio gigs
in places I didn't want to live. I don't have
to do that. Now. I can build my own studio
and create my own product here and partner up with
(15:56):
Coward and do things that would not been available fifteen
to forty forever up until the last decade ish. And
I feel very fortunate, just like people that struck it
big in the seventies and eighties, if they wanted it
on pro sports, they got those teams at relatively low
valuations looking back, right, because the power of television, and
(16:20):
I don't think anyone could have seen the power of
football and the importance of football. I have a theory.
And now, just the World Cup, I saw a stat
that fifty three percent of people that watched the World
Cup through the group stage and then the first round
(16:41):
of the knockout stage. Over half the people that watched
on Fox hadn't watched a soccer game in a year.
I fall under that category. I don't even know when
the last time I watched soccer game. I do not
watch soccer. I don't pretend to be a soccer fan.
But when I turned on the World Cup has got
a couple things going. One, the broadcast from Fox kind
(17:05):
of has an NFL feel. When you watch these games,
they feel big. Now. Part of that in the NFL field.
They're playing in all the NFL stadiums, So there's a
comfort level as a football guy when I see, oh
they're playing at Foxboro. Oh, last night, they're playing in
Kansas City and Patrick Mahomes is there. Oh, they're playing
it so far, they're playing in Seattle, they play in
(17:26):
all the football stadiums, so I feel comfortable, like okay,
and then clearly the star power and as we saw
with the US hockey team, because most humans do not
watch hockey. If you put USA on the front of
the jersey, most of us, despite what social media might
tell in you are pretty patriotic and we're gonna watch
and we're gonna root for you. And obviously the way
(17:47):
it ended was an embarrassment. I mean that goal that
the goalie, I mean that was an all timer and
we got our we got fucking warked. But it was
cool and it felt like a cultural moment. Now, there
are some things about soccer that if you're a football
fan first and not a soccer guy, you're like, why
did these guys lay on the ground so long? And
in basketball, for example, when you flop and you lay
(18:10):
there and you give up an easy layup because you
don't get back on defense, who cares it's twenty five
to twenty and now it's twenty five to twenty two.
But in soccer, some of these guys flop and lay
there and then all of a sudden you give an
advantage to the other team and maybe you give up
a goal. Well, you watch some of these games, you
lose two to one and you can get your ass kicked.
(18:31):
So just lay there and leaving your teammates to dry.
I'll never understand. I won't. I think the flopping is
out of control, but there is no disputing that when
you turn on the World Cup, it feels massive, it
feels huge. I mean that game they played back to
back games in Mexico. I forget whom Mexico played the
first in the first knockout stage, but the second game
(18:52):
against England that felt like an SEC game. That felt
like Alabama versus LSU. Those games at Asteca. It didn't
get any better television wise. It's part of the reason
sports suck so much in twenty twenty. It's like if
there aren't fans in the stadium a huge part of
the viewing experience. It's why college football has become the
(19:13):
second biggest sport in America because if you turn on
Penn State at night against Ohio State, it's fucking awesome.
If you turn on Georgia going to Florida to night
that the crowd plays a huge role. Obviously, the NFL
is you know, the crowds aren't as intense, I would say,
consistently as college football, but the big games matter, right.
(19:35):
You watch a game in Buffalo, you watch a game
in Kansas City, you watch a game in Seattle like
you feel it, you watch it. If the Browns ever
got good, obviously the Steelers like it really adds to
the viewing experience. And watching the passion of all these
people coming over here enjoying what we bring to the table,
because holy shit, we bring a lot to the table
(19:57):
has been incredible and clearly the star. I'd never heard
of this Holland guy, but I might have put a
couple hundred dollars on them when they were sixteen to
one to win it against England. Didn't go my way,
but I was glued and watching MESSI watching him Bape,
Watching all these guys, Harry Kane has been extremely enjoyable,
(20:18):
and whether you like soccer or not, I think most
people would agree, especially in the summer not much going on.
The World Cup has been a massive win and I
think there are a lot of parallels there. And this
is one of the NFL's greatest strengths is their games matter,
and when your games don't matter, right, And let's face it,
(20:41):
regular season basketball, has it mattered in a long time.
You can say, well, it's never matter. They played eighty
two games. Forever. I feel like when I was younger,
guys used to care more. When the talent doesn't care,
the consumer's not gonna care. A baseball game. I've said
this forever every game that was played today. I'm recording
this on July twelfth. I don't think there's one pitch
(21:01):
that actually matters today. I just you can't convince me. Now.
You can convince me over the course of a couple
of weeks if you lose fourteen straight games. Obviously, I
saw the Red Sox won a bunch of games and
they've kind of got back in the mix. So yeah,
over the course of a week. But one individual game,
it just don't matter. And soccer, all these games mattered.
(21:22):
And in football, every game matters, and we understand that.
And in a day and age where we're getting pulled left,
we're getting pulled right, we got a million things taking
our attention. You know, you can doom scroll for hours
like you gotta matter to get my attention. And especially
as you get older, you get families you get kids,
you got stuff going on, you got work. You better,
(21:43):
you better be important. And there is no disputing that
when you turn on the World Cup, it feels really,
really important. And that's why I think when you see
these guys, these multi billionaires, this guy's a tech guy,
why does he want in on the NFL? Because clearly
the return on investment right just guaranteed cash flow every year,
a place, the safe place to park your money. But
(22:05):
you're part of something big, and you're part of something
that matters. And you know, I've seen some discourse online.
These guys aren't from Seattle, you know. Will you be
a Seahawks fan? I grew up a diehard forty nine
Er fan. I fell in love with football and sports
because of Steve Young and Jerry Rice and that team
(22:27):
in nineteen ninety four when they signed Dion Sanders. My uncle,
who lives in Fresno, is in the beer business and
was in business with Eddie de Bartelow in the eighties.
Like my dad loved Joe Montana, like I loved everything
about the forty nine ers, but unlike like Bill Simmons,
still a diehard Celtics guy. I'm at the point now Now,
(22:48):
don't get me wrong, I still watch the forty nine ers.
I enjoy when they win, but I care about my
business first. So if you told me this year the
forty nine ers could go oh to sixteen in my
post podcast, could triple our revenue, triple our listenership, and
our business could be on a much better trajectory. We're
already on a good one, but like could go up
(23:08):
tenfold or whatever. I wouldn't even blame. I don't care
because this is what matters. This is what pays the
bills for my family. And so these guys could be
forty nine er fans. His kid could be a diehard
forty nine er fan. Guess what they're gonna care about
this fall? The Seattle Seahawks. Why because they're involved, it's
their team. It happens pretty quick, and I think this
is one thing I'll never forget. Colin used to say
(23:29):
all the time is take the emotion out of it.
And I think for everyone listening that is, in some
form or fashion in the private sector, a lot of
your emotion leaves the older you get. I'm not saying
from a sports perspective, like if you don't work in sports, obviously,
you're a big Yankee fan, big Browns fan, big Cowboy fan,
big whoever, Laker fan. I get it. But I would
(23:49):
imagine most of you, as you've gotten older in the
industry you're in, are less emotionally tied to things, especially
when it comes to deals, concrete, whatever that might be. Building.
You don't give a shit. And I think that's how
all these guys operate. And you don't get as big
(24:10):
as these guys get, these multi billionaires with them being
that emotionally tied to some I think they'll pivot pretty
easily in Seattle about whether he moves there or not.
Only time will tell, But yeah, what a what a sale.
(24:33):
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New Jersey, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia. UH. Terry Ott Arnold for
(26:30):
those you know if you just were not on the internet,
was released. This is you know week plus old now
from the Detroit Lions. He obviously was involved in a
situation where he got robbed. But you cash Jewelry thought
the guys that robbed him him and his buddies tried
(26:51):
to lure them in and then kidnapped him, pistol whipped them.
And now it looks like he's got red handed and
in major trouble. And it got me. This is why
drafting is so difficult. If you missed it, Nick Saban
wrote a letter to the judge, and in that letter
(27:11):
he said, Terry Arnold wasn't just a high character guy
for me, he was someone that my family became close to,
a guy that would come over to my house. Terry
On Arnold coming out of Alabama would have been viewed
as a good character guy, not as someone who would
have been a red flag. Saban also has a pretty
(27:33):
legendary rant. I think at a coaching clinic about Henry Ruggs,
who is currently in prison, who is another guy that
would have been viewed as a good character guy coming
out of college. There are so many people in NFL
history that were red flag guys. I saw recently Kyle Long,
(27:54):
who now is on CBS's pregame show for the NFL.
He's been with CBS for a long time. He is
Howie Son, Chris's brother, and once got in a lot
of trouble when he was young. He originally started I
think at Florida State as a pitcher that went to
junior college and had a lot of stuff going on.
You can google it, and then it ended up in
(28:15):
a orgon and became a guy that was a potential
first round pick. And he went to the combine and
he said, he told this story of you know, typically
the good character guys, their meetings are easy. A lot
of them don't even have that many meetings because teams
don't want to give it away. But I looked and
I was there with He was in Travis Kelcey's draft class,
(28:35):
and Travis and I were going to every single team
because Kyle Long and Travis Kelcey were viewed as major
red flags coming out of college, and both of them.
Kyle went on to be a pro bowler, injuries derailed
his career a little bit, and is you know, a
huge part of one of the major networks in America now.
(28:56):
And Travis Kelcey is going to go down as the
greatest pass catching tight end of all time and someone
viewed as a cornerstone leader and tone setter for like
a mini dynasty in Kansas City. And Terry On Arnold
who easily could go to jail over this kidnapping pistol
whipping situation, and Henry Ruggs who is currently in jail.
(29:20):
We're not red flag guys coming out of college. So
when you're dealing with human beings, and this is what
vanad who just bought Seattle's gonna learn, that's a lot
different than investing in Square, investing in Uber or whatever
your assets are. Humans and young human beings are flawed
(29:41):
and making decisions. And we've all heard this a million times,
but who you surround yourself with can make or break you. Right,
you know, your friend your close friendships especially can put
(30:01):
you down a path towards success and put you down
a path toward disasters. I was home. This was not
over the last couple of weeks, but at a wedding recently,
maybe like two or three months ago. And this one
guy that we went to high school with, who who
(30:23):
who would have been probably our biggest red flag in
our high school at one point in time. I remember
hearing years ago him, his dad, and his brother were
all in jail. And I was at this wedding and
I asked a buddy, I'm like, whatever happened to this guy?
He was like, actually he was killed. I'm like, how
was he killed? I'm like, oh, you're sleeping with this
girl whose boyfriend was in prison and got out and
(30:43):
came home and caught him and killed him. And as
sad as this may sound is, I wasn't shocked at all, right,
And I knew early on, like in high school, like
kind of avoided the guy, even though I liked him,
like we were. He would he could easily hang with everybody,
but you were hanging out with them, you just knew
(31:03):
something could go bad at something go bad fast, and
got a ton of trouble up until the day he
was killed. And then there are some guys that are
just on the straight and narrow, and by all accounts,
Terry on Arnold was a good guy. But in this
story that I read on The Athletic about the play
by play of this situation, they ranted this airbnb down
(31:26):
in Florida, and the people that were in the community
of the airbnb kept saying, like some of these guys
were like, what is going on here? But they dealt
with Terry on a couple of times like seems like
a nice guy and those people and listen, I'm not
absolving him from his actions because we all make decisions
and as you get older, like you have to be
(31:47):
held accountable for everything you do, no different than getting
behind the wheel of a Ferrari or a Porsche or
whatever Ruggs was driving, and after boozing and flying one
hundred fifty miles an hour into person, there's consequences, and
obviously he's facing them now. But when you go into
these drafts, and I'm not talking about talent, like JJ
(32:09):
McCarthy just might not be able to play right. JJ
McCarthy might just not have the ability to throw touch passes,
comprehend defenses, and run an NFL offense. By all accounts
through two years that would be the case. But when
you drafted JJ McCarthy, you felt pretty good about the guy, right,
the player yet to be determined. That happens a lot.
(32:32):
Some guys you draft high and they just they're just
not good enough, and sometimes they end up playing for
ten fifteen years as like rotational guys backups nuts. You
just shouldn't have drafted them. While you drafted them, their
talent just wasn't good enough. It wasn't their character, or
wasn't their work ethic, it wasn't their decision making. And
sometimes you draft these bad guys. I have told the
(32:52):
story a million times. I mean it's not my story
to tell, but just because of the public story. But
Tyron Matthew was kicked out of LSU and was probably
the number one red flag in his draft, which looking
back is kind of stupid. You just smoking some synthetic weed.
But he was a guy that clearly one of the
most talented guys in his class. And if he wasn't
(33:15):
kicked out of college and that never happened, he's probably
going in the top fifteen. And said he goes in
the third round and within a couple of years, Patrick
Peterson on the Cardinals like he's a leader of the team,
he's a hardbeat of the team. Then everywhere he went
Houston Texans can't see Chiefs he's the team captain. So
you just never know. You just have no fucking clue.
(33:36):
And the big difference too, in college than in the NFL.
You got a lot more free time in the National
Football League because in college, guess what you're doing in
the spring. You're on campus, you're working out, you have
spring practice. The team has their kind of hands around you.
Now it doesn't mean you can't get in trouble, but
(33:58):
they have way more control. In the NFL, even in
the NIL era, you have more money and you have
way more free time. And as John Baxter, longtime special
teams coach Presno State you worked for Lane work for Hardball,
used to always say, disposable income and free time for
(34:20):
young people can be a deadly combination. And I would
add like surrounding yourself with morons can derail your life.
And by all accounts, Terry On Arnold did not do
a good job of surrounding himself with the right people.
Because I saw Houston Texans brought him in for a
physical if I had to guess, they're doing the agent
(34:41):
a solid to try to make the judge think that
like he's got I think he's in major trouble. My
uneducated guests about the loss system, just knowing, just seeing
some of these charges, I would say he's fucked. And
I would be stunned if Terry On Arnold is playing
in the NFL in twenty twenty six. Another thing I
(35:06):
saw is that Aaron Donald it feels like a lock
that he is going to play this fall. Aaron Donald
is coming back to the Rams, and no basketball is
dealing with this right they've had. They haven't had a
repeat champion in like eight years since the Warriors with
Kevin Durant. And for a long time most of my
(35:27):
life in the NBA, it was like same three or
four teams always winning and the NBA thrived. Like when
I was a kid, the Yankees sort of just rattling
off World Series. Guess what it was great for business?
Guess what every year you know, Showeo Tani and the
LA Dodgers are gonna be the favorite to win the
World Series. Guess what that makes entertaining things to watch?
(35:51):
And I think having the Rams as a team, even
though they haven't won a Super Bowl in many, many years.
But the vibe of are they just unbeatable is a really,
really good thing for the NFL because they had it
for a while with the Chiefs and everyone. I heard
this all the time. I'm tired of watching them. I
(36:11):
cannot watch Patrick Mahomes play another game. I'm tired of it.
Even though every time they played they were sitting like
Cowboys level ratings records, so clearly you didn't mind because
you watched. And I think the Rams, which is weird,
because they're in this major market in Los Angeles, they're
a much bigger national story than they all local story.
(36:35):
I now going to LA with Colin. I'm actually going
this week, gonna be on Thursday and Friday is when
you're there. That's a Dodger Laker town. Like the football
teams feel a distant third, and honestly, they're not even
in the same conversation. The Dodgers and the Lakers are
part of the culture in Los Angeles, the Rams simply
(36:57):
are not. They play there in an incredible stadium which
looks unreal on the World Cup, and by all accounts,
all the players want these grass fields and all these
teams that have turf that put in the grass fields
for FIFA, just have grass. It's it's I am pro grass,
no turf. I don't understand why these owners get so
(37:17):
cheap with the turf. It's just a line item. It'd
be one thing if it was like one hundred million
dollars to install grass and it was five hundred k
to involve you know, install turf. That is not the case.
Just put in the fucking grass. But a lot of
these owners, for whatever reason, push back against it. I
think there's a level of ego that they don't want
to be pushed to like do what the players want.
(37:40):
But you know, it kind of is what it is.
I just think the rams are there is no disputing
on paper. You don't get any better. And this is
a guy who just I've seen clips over the years
of him working out in his own personal gym. He
looks like a just a freak still, so now can
(38:00):
his body at thirty five years old, haven't played football
in a while. It's not like they're depending on him.
If he can just give him twenty snaps a game,
they are going to be a massive, massive story. And
I think it's really healthy for the NFL. When we
went to Newport for the fourth of July, Newport Beach,
(38:20):
I honestly have not spent enough time there. It is.
It's an incredible place. You know, when I go with Colin,
we're up near like Hollywood and where UCLA is. That's
like Los Angeles. It's like the Los Angeles. I mean,
obviously Los Angeles is massive, but like when I think LA,
(38:42):
I think that area right Newport Beach is basically this
area between San Diego and Los Angeles, which is just beautiful.
I mean, it's as someone that left California and whenever
someone asks, like John, are you ever going to move
back in the answer is no, there's a zero chance.
If anything, I'm moving east. I ain't ever moving back
(39:04):
more west. That is one area, Like I got it.
I'm going to pay, you know, fifty plus percent of
my take on pay to the government. Lived by the ocean.
We stayed at a pretty swanky hotel. Now, we never
went on a honeymoon. We got married and then basically
a month later she was pregnant and I kind of
(39:25):
looked at it like, you know, let's take a honeymoon
with a kid. Which isn't exactly a honeymoon, but it
was cool and where we were staying. Someone told me
this is the that they have these. I actually went
there in twenty eighteen for a Fox iHeart. We did
like a golf tournament with Colin and the volume wasn't
(39:47):
even created then, but so I had stayed there before
and it was like, this place is cool. And one
of the last nights we were there, you know, we
were we're having a few cocktails during the day. Jack
was enjoying himself. But the problem is you always gotta
put him in that you got he's got a nap.
You can't keep him in the sun too long. So
you couldn't say the pool. You know, travel with the baby.
(40:09):
Everyone's like travel when they're young. It's like travel with
the baby is not that enjoyable. It's like it's it's
much easier in your home base. But you don't want
to get stuck doing nothing, so you got to get
out of your comfort zone a little bit. But people,
I had someone text me today like, how's your vacation been.
Vacation vacation pre child's a little different than this version.
(40:32):
I wouldn't call this a vacation, but it was enjoyable.
And there was these two Irish guys drinking and somehow,
you know, I'd already had a few. We started talking.
I ended up sitting down there and Jack's there as well,
and they're like, Jack looks just like an irishman, Are
you guys Irish? I was like, no, I actually don't
think so. I think German, Swedish or whatever. And then
(40:55):
he's falling asleep and freaking out, and then I introduced
my something like, oh, I'm Connor's manager, and I'm Connor
McGregor's boxing coach. So Maria puts takes him back to
the room, like no, I'm gonna stay here and have
a few. So I ended up getting relatively intoxicated with
some of' connor's people. Turns out Connor was staying at
(41:18):
the hotel, not in just the the the area where
a peon stay. They have these houses I guess on
the top of the hill where someone told me that
Kobe Bryant when he tore his achilles when he was
playing for the Lakers. They rented out one of these
because they're basically like a home and they got tons
of rooms, tons of space and that's where he rehabbed
(41:41):
during his you know, Achilles comeback, and Connor was staying
up there and I was like, I was kind of
hoping he'd come down, and like I've said this forever,
I'm not a huge UFC guy, Like I don't buy
the pay per views, like I follow the sport through
social media. I admire the mental of the business and
(42:01):
how successful they are, but I'm not like some diehard
I don't pretend to be. I don't like, I'm not
that into it, even though like I respect the hell
out of anyone that's wanted to get in the octagon
and what they did in twenty twenty. They're like we're
coming back when everyone's like hi from your shadow, and
Dane's like fuck this, we're fighting and everyone followed suit.
(42:21):
But I just think that I kind of bought in
because we're having cocktails that his boxing coach was shit house.
I mean, you talk about stereotypical irishmen boozed up, we're
have a good time, and I was talking about, you know,
I went to college with Chad Mendez and they were
saying that Connor respects Chad even though he beat them,
and I was like Okay, I'm fired up for this fight.
(42:42):
And because I don't know what show we've watched on Paramount,
but I like every streaming service I have it, which
I think is a huge benefit because I don't know
if I would have bought the pay per view, you know,
but I have Paramount Plus. They're in business Paramount Plus.
I just click it and there boom, it's on. So
about eight feet ten he comes out. All of a sudden,
Maria looks at me and goes, wait, is that it
(43:06):
is it over? And I'm like, yeah, I think it's
just done. And the thing with I was thinking about this,
Even if you turn on a terrible football game or
a terrible basketball game or terrible whatever, you know it's
sixty minutes long. You know, you got three hours to
just sit there and watch something. You could watch a
(43:27):
blowout of one hundred and fifty to one hundred, and
you got forty eight minutes of basketball. You got nine
innings of baseball, right, you got two halves and ninety
minutes plus. I don't know exactly, not all soccer does it,
but there's always some plus and some extra number with
the running clocks. But you know, in fighting you have
no clue, And I think, like, I don't pretend to
(43:48):
be some fighting aficionado here. I don't think I've ever
seen anything like that, And I think it shows you.
And this is people ask me whenever we're like back
in Lake Tall, like do you ski? I'm like, yeah,
I did when I was like twenty, but I haven't
in fifteen twenty years. Do you want to you want
to come sometime? This went? No, I've retired. I don't
(44:10):
want to break my leg. I don't want to tear
my acl or achilles. I used to love playing pickup basketball.
I played when I was JA at Fresny State. I
used to play in this league when I was working
with the Eagles in the offseason. I used to play
a little bit when I moved back to the Bay Area.
Like it was enjoyable. It was just like, hey, instead
of just running on the treadmill, let's just go get
(44:31):
a run. You couldn't pay me to pay play pickup basketball.
I'm not any good, but I enjoyed playing, just like
a lot of people that aren't any good enjoy playing.
You get a legit sweat, you get to compete a
little bit, you get to play. I'm not tearing my achilles.
I remember, like within the last five ten years, Daniel Jeremiah,
NFL Network ESPN he tores achilles playing basketball. I'm like,
(44:51):
I'm not doing it because as you get older, your
body ain't the same. And by no means am I
some Connor McGregor athlete. But I think a lot of
you listening probably agree. That's why a lot of us
kind of morph over to golf. That's my one activity,
you know, beside working out and stuff in a controlled
environment on a treadmill, run outside, hike whatever. But I'm
(45:14):
not doing the sports. Why because my body. I don't
want to be on crutches. I don't want to have
to go to physical rehab if I can avoid it.
Sometimes you can't, but if you can, I'm going to.
And you watch Connor McGregor like his body shot. Can
(45:36):
I tell you about my friends at seat Geek. You
want to go to a game? You want to go
to one of these World Cup games? Actually, uh, good
buddy of my Joey from England said, John, I'm going
to the final there in the final, Well, I said,
you seekek you a baseball fan. You want to go
to one of these baseball games, you in Vegas for
(45:56):
the summer league, You want to go to a concert,
anything you want on they have you covered. There are
more than seventy thousand events listed on SEKE. Concerts, sporting events, festivals,
you name it. Get out of the house, go enjoy yourself,
and save a little money while you're at it. Cuz,
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(46:17):
John John ten for ten percent off your next set
of tickets at Sea gek. That's ten percent off any
tickets with John jahn Ten. Make sure you click the
link in the description to download the app and have
the code automatically added to your account so you can
use it later. Thanks to Sea Gig. That kick he
(46:44):
had last night, unless it has been debated whether he
was injured before. I saw some people pointing out that
picture or the video of him taking off shoes, acted
like he was kind of weird on the knee, even
though they showed some of his like warm up kicks
before he came out, kind of doing those crazy Bruce
Lee kicks. But like that's what happens when you get old.
(47:08):
And Charles Barkley's been saying this since he's been on
TV father times undefeated Connor. Greg's thirty seven years old.
There's a lot of wear and tear on that body.
And you watched that first moment, and at first live
you don't know what's going on, right, I'm just excited.
Just kind of got me interested. One just being around
those guys and seeing they kind of got me to believe.
(47:30):
And then two, just the hype behind this fight. It's
pretty rare. He clearly is the most famous UFC fighter
in the history of the sport. I thought when I
was at cal Pauly, I was a round one in
Chuck Ladell. He was at cal Pauly Grad. He used
to train in San Luis Obispo. This is like the
peak of his powers in like three four oh five range,
and it was cool the iceman, and then all of
(47:50):
a sudden he got old, and he got old fast,
and then it was just over. That's usually how it
happens in sports. Tom Brady is the only guy that
I can remember who who could play up until an
age when you're not supposed to be playing, and honestly
looked no different. His arm never failed him all the
Ben Roethlisberger's arm was dramatically different. Drew Brees's shoulder stopped working.
(48:14):
He was throwing like fifty million hour fastballs. Peyton Manning
could barely throw at twenty yards his last year in Denver.
That's normal. That's usually how it works for athletes. Tom Brady,
the version of him is an outlier. Aaron Rodgers achilles injury,
broken arm this year. It would be incredible if Aaron
(48:35):
Rodgers can play seventeen games. Besides, like you're wear and
tear of playing the sport, not suffer a major injury
that is not normal at forty two years old, like
Lebron James. How the fuck is he doing that? And
I would say the longer he plays, the more likely,
And he's had over the course of the last couple
of years of growing injury some different things. It's really
(48:56):
really hard to avoid why, because your body ain't the same.
It's very well established at this point in time in
human history. I don't care what type peptides, workout regimens,
protein shakes you're taking, how well you sleep, how many
cold bass and infrared saunas you use. Your body's gonna
(49:19):
give up at some point in time or another. When
you're a high level athlete. Hell, when you're an average athlete.
And so when Connor McGregor that moment was shocking, and
I get why they wrote him. I was watching some
YouTube show and they were saying that broke a gate.
It's like twenty five million dollars. The getting priced last
night was enormous. I mean, some of those people paying
(49:39):
the ticket prices, but that's what you get when you
buy some of these fights. Sometimes they're boring. It's like
Floyd Mayweather versus Oscar de la Hoya, or Floyd Mayweather
versus Mani Paccio. You're like, that sucked. And sometimes it's
like it just ends because the guy gets injured. A
guy can't fight. I have a lo a lot of respect,
(50:01):
and again I don't know haul away from the man
standing next to me, but I do think that a
lot of fighters I get they had fought before a
long time ago, would have just attacked and you could
tell early on he kind of said something was off,
and then by the time when the fight was called,
he's basically just pointing at him, like what are we
doing here? I do wonder how many guys in that
(50:23):
situation against someone that famous in the sport of violence
would have just attacked and made the referee call it.
He did the opposite. He pointed at him early on,
and then at the end he's like, I'm not touching
this guy. He can't move. But that was crazy. I
don't know what else to say. I don't remember an
(50:47):
event that was as hyped that ended as fast. And
when I see, like, you know, the fight ended in
sixty nine seconds. The fight literally ended the moment it
started because he tried. I had that Bruce Lee jump,
you know, three sixty kick and blew out his knee.
And then some of the videos of him leaving after
(51:09):
just in his shorts, barefoot in the back of T
Mobile arena kind of made me laugh. But man, I
can't even imagine the anticipation in that arena when Connor
walks out. They're both in the octagon, and it was like, Okay,
(51:30):
I don't know how this is gonna go, but we're
gonna get a brawl. And then to have the thing
just end, you're like, it's just over. What do we
do now? That had to suck last, but not least
not necessarily a Dad Diaries, But I had this thought
a couple of weeks ago. We went home to uh
(51:51):
Maria was in a wedding, so we went home a
little early and we went up to Lake Tahoe. Some
of her close girlfriends and their husbands were there. One
of a stayed, we stayed together, and the others they
rented a house with their family and we're just all
together hanging out for like three or four days. It
was a lot of fun. And we drove from Sacramento area.
(52:13):
My mom lives in Davis, which is right next Sacramento
up to Top, which is you know, give or take
no traffic can be two ish hours, and her mom
had bought a car seat, so we had a car
seat whenever we come home. Her mom lives probably forty
five minutes away from my mom, so they're in the
same general area, and bought us his car seat. Well,
(52:34):
for whatever reason, the car seat is different than the
car seats we have. And for those of you with
car seat strollers, they just in theory they're easy. There's
always a button and they just collapse. But if you
don't know the button, you're just fucking bending the thing
and you can't figure it out, and eventually you just
want to ram your head against the wall. I don't
(52:54):
know what to do. So I put him in the
car seat and we load up and we're headed to
and he screams at the top of his lungs for
essentially two plus hours. We pulled over multiple times. She
climbed in the back. Eventually we pulled over. We had
to move stuff out of the back so she could
(53:15):
sit in the back with them. Nothing worked, and it
hit me if I was an NFL general manager and
I wanted to evaluate a quarterback in their mental fortitude,
if you could drive for I'd even put the number
like seventy five minutes, but anything two hours, two and
a half hours, three hours with a screaming baby and
(53:40):
not absolutely mentally collapse. You could handle the Denver Broncos
in the fourth quarter. You could handle Will Anderson coming
at you with five minutes to go down four drive
in the field because I broke immediately. It's just it
is this piercing scream that is like anger pain. You
(54:04):
don't even know because they can't talk, and you're just
you're trying to keep your eyes on the road because
you don't want to drive off the mountain. And turns
out when we got there there was a setting where
you could lay it down a little bit farther. He
was kind of a wreck, so it might have been
like borderline child abuse because I couldn't figure out this
(54:25):
car seat, so I got on YouTube. I'm watching all
these tutorials. Didn't really help that much. He still didn't.
He's not a huge fan of this car seat because
in Newport we rented a car and they had a
car seat that came with the car, and it was
the same one and he hated it. He just whatever
reason doesn't fit. I don't know, but if you could
(54:47):
handle your shit for multiple hours, I think you can
play quarterback in the NFL. Because that is the one
thing with crying when especially your first child, you're just
not used to it. You hear baby cries sometimes an
airplane or like your friend's baby or whatever, but you
can always leave. You know, eventually the plane lambs, and
(55:08):
that person has to deal with when it's yours and
yours around and he's just crying. It's just it mentally
tests you. And I'm not proud to say I've broken.
I've mentally collapsed. So maybe what QUESSI should have done
is put JJ in a car with a baby and
just set them from Minnesota to like Cleveland, Ohio, and
(55:29):
just see how it went. Put a GoPro in there
and just monitor that I would do that before I
did the wonder Lick test. We'll be back all week long,
well at least the next couple. I don't know if
I'm gonna do one on on Thursday. I'm gonna be
down doing uh at Fox for a couple of days,
but the game plan will be for the last couple.
I have had a lot of people like, did you quit,
(55:52):
did you get fired? Did they cancel the show? Did
you go become a monk? Where are you? Like? No,
I just too a couple of weeks of my family
in the middle of July when nothing was going on,
and that turns out a lot was going on. Uh So,
I I've I've watched a lot of soccer. I've consumed
a lot of soccer. But hopefully everyone's doing well and
(56:12):
good to be back the volume m
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