Colin Cowherd is joined by Chicago Radio Host Danny Parkins to discuss all things Chicago. The two radio hosts talk shop about the radio industry and the difference between the local Chicago audience and being a national sports talk show host (5:00). Next they discuss the NBA's biggest issues and why Michael Jordan is the clear GOAT over LeBron James (21:40). The Chicago Bears have the #1 pick in the NFL Draft so Colin & Danny discuss Caleb Williams and what they should do in the draft (26:10). Danny's upcoming book "Pipeline to the Pros" is coming out soon so Colin asks him the motivation and favorite parts of the book while getting into some personal stories. Lastly they finish with Justin Fields and if the Bears made the right decision to trade him to the Steelers (58:05).
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
The volume.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
All right, a really talented guy. I really hope you
listen to the next hour with Danny Parkins's Chicago radio
host and the most talented sports talk radio host I
think out there right now. And at his age, which
is younger than I would hope for. I was hoping
he was old and beat up. But he's young and
great and he'll come on our show today to talk
(00:28):
to the Bears, the draft, radio, his book, all that stuff.
Before we get to Danny, I want you to grab
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Speaker 1 (01:32):
Well.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
I first heard of Danny Parkins from Nick Wright, who
had said, Hey, I work with this guy. And you know,
Nick had introduced me to two or three people, A
couple of them were just obnoxious and annoying, and then
he introduced me to Danny and told me to listen
to his show, and so I fashioned myself as some
(01:55):
sort of talent scout. Obviously not, but since I started
the volume, I really enjoy it, and so I said,
oh shit, this guy's really good. And then I go
to Chicago regularly and listened, and I thought, Wow, this
guy's about the best young guy I've heard in the country,
because I, you know, I've been listening to sports talk
radio forever and he's come out with a new book
which feels like an intellectual exercise, which I think is
(02:18):
really important in our business, because sports radio can be,
on our best days, somewhat mindless. It's called pipeline to
the pros. He's Danny, you're a really good writer. How
d three small college? Nobody's rose to rule the NBA.
And I'll get to that in a second, but it
it does look a little bit. And when I wrote
a book, it was sort of like, you know, I
(02:38):
just wanted to prove to everybody I wasn't a radio
idiot completely. But I want to start with something else.
I think because I listened now to sports radio, and
you and I contend New York, Detroit, Boston, Chicago, Philly
is better sports talk radio than Los Angeles. That's not
(02:59):
a personal attime on anybody. I do think they're really
talented people in LA. But when the weather's good and
there's lots of options, people bail on teams very quickly
when they're not good. But the hud Levels and the
Buffalos and the New York Chicago, Detroit, you stay indoors
and you watch your crappy teams, and you've got strong opinions,
and you know that fosters sort of sometimes resentment and
(03:19):
ankst with your teams.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
In LA.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
If I turn to sports talk radio, there's a fifty
to fifty shot. It's guy talk, which doesn't really interest me.
So that's my kind of theory on it. Kansas City
is another really good sports talk radio market where you
came from. Do you buy into my theory.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
One hundred percent? I've got some friends, including Nick Wright,
and by the way, thank you for not characterizing me
as obnoxious, even though maybe don't know each other well enough,
because some definitely would. Nick worked in Houston, our buddy
Mike Meltzer worked in Houston, and it's not a great
sports radio market, but you would think that it would
be because there's so much traffic and they love football,
(03:56):
and football dominates sports radio. But there's two shares that
they're getting because there's just other things for people to do.
Warm Weather Miami, they are great shows that have come
out of there, great talents that have come out of there.
They don't get any numbers. I would put Cleveland on
the list great sports radio markets. They pull huge numbers
in Cleveland, love the teams. Minneapolis pulls huge numbers on kfans.
(04:21):
So yeah, I think there's a ton there and it'd
be really nice to live in a place where you
could go outside. But today it's snowed in Chicago. In April.
So we're supposed to talk about baseball in the radio.
I'm like, I don't know, it feels like football weather today.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Well, you know when so I did sports radio for
a while and then I wanted to create mostly out
of survival. When I was at ESPN, I said, guys,
I've got to create a simulcast. AM radio is not
a dynamic next ten year horizon. And so ESPN did
not think I was talented enough to be on ESPN two. Apparently,
(04:57):
so I said, all right, all jettis in this place.
I do appreciate it, and things have gone well. But
when I went to television, I always did a show
with a lot of football. But I think I have
moved in the direction of more football. Part of that
is when you can see a TV number every day,
you see what's working and you see what's not, and
football almost almost works. Secondarily, though big beat small scale
(05:21):
beats up boutique, the NFL makes everything now look small.
I think it's well run. I think sports gambling helps.
I think it's better on television. I think other leagues
have made mistakes. One and done is hurt college basketball mends. Anyway,
what percentage of your show mind about seventy percent NFL.
I don't want to be in the NFL network, I
pushed back. I've talked to a lot of college basketball
(05:43):
in the last two three weeks. What percentage of yours
is NFL.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
Obviously it depends on the time, right, I mean, we
were Cubs Opening Day, We're doing a ton of Cubs.
Were the home of the Cubs. But even leading into that,
the Bears have been the dominant storyline with the last
two years having the number one overall pick. They're the
biggest story in the NFL for the offseason, so obviously
they're the biggest story here. So even with a two
team town, there's only three cities that have two baseball teams,
(06:10):
Baseball on the radio was still incredibly powerful. You know,
the Cubs are the biggest client to my radio station,
six seventy four by far. We're still and I wish
the number was higher. My co host is a bigger
baseball guy. It's over fifty percent for football, even in
opening day week with two teams in town, because it's
all about Caleb Williams and the ninth pick and are
(06:33):
the Bears on the come and all of that, and
the other thing at least in this market. That I
would say is football's the great unifier. When I was
growing up kid in the nineties in Chicago, the Bulls
were king. The Blackhawks weren't even on TV, but there
were people that were Blackhawks fans and not Bulls fans
even at that period of time, and certainly when they
(06:53):
had their dynastic run with three titles, the Hawks kind
of overtook the Bulls as being the toughest ticket in
town and that sort of thing. Cubs and White Sox split,
Blackhawks and Bulls split. Everybody cares about the Bears. Everybody
has an opinion on the Bears. And for the national
side of it, yes, sports, gambling, yeah, fantasy, But I
(07:13):
think like the simplest way to explain it is that
it's every game matters. It's one of seventeen and no
other league has that. If I miss Bulls Hawks, and
I don't talk about it on the show the next day,
we don't get a single text call or tweet being like, hey,
you missed this really important thing. Because if a really
(07:34):
important thing happens, I see about it on social media,
it cuts through. We talk about it. But if you
came on the Monday after a Bears Packers game, or
a Bears Lions game, or a Bear's Jaguars game, or
a Bears Bucks game, whomever. Even if they were five
and ten and you didn't do four hours on the
Bears game, the ramifications who played well, who didn't, who's
(07:56):
going to get fired, who's going to get extended? All
those things, people would think you were insane. So it's
the great unifier. And the thing that it has is
that every game matters, and the rhythm of it, I
think is great. You play a game on Sunday, you
react on Monday. The coach and the quarterbacks speak on Monday,
and quarterback speaks on Wednesday. You start looking ahead to
(08:17):
the next game. Then there's a Thursday night game. Teams
in your division matter. It's just for local sports, radio,
national TV. There's just such a great rhythm of football.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
I feel lucky a lot of times. What I like
mostly is what the country likes.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
I have a growing interest in soccer over the last decade.
My mom was British. I went to England as a kid,
got a little soccer set. The World Cup was going
on at that time. Johann Kroif England I remember Netherlands
was great, England was great, and then in the Northwest
soccer was around me, the Sounders, the Timbers. University of
(08:57):
Portland had a great program. So I've always been more
I a soccer fan than the average person. I try
to invest in the MLS twice, but I'm not Tony
Robbins or Magic Johnson.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
At Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
Yeah. I love NFL. I really really like college football.
I really really like the NBA March mad March Madness
is fun. And I do like an occasional fight, now
more UFC than boxing, but an occasional fight a Saturday night,
I'm going to tune in and buy the UFC card.
So are you aligned with the audience or do you
(09:29):
have to sometimes go I don't care about this, I'll
talk about it.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
That is the baseball part of it. It's not that
I don't care about baseball. I grew up, you know.
I'm twelve years old in Chicago in nineteen ninety eight.
Jordan is completing the third, the second three p and
Sammy Sosa is hitting sixty six home runs and saving baseball.
I love the Cubs. I grew up a Cubs fan.
(09:55):
I'm invested in it. But I can't say that I
care about a bullpen to decision in a game in May. Yeah,
and one of one's sixty two and the minutia of it,
I just I can't yea and so that. But that
is a necessity in Philly sportstock Radio, Chicago sportstock Radio,
New York sports talk radio, we do do some of that.
(10:18):
And that is the part that I mean, if that's
the part that feels like work. Okay, I'm not on
the side of a road. I'm not welding. I'm not
you know, I still love my job every day. But
there definitely is an element of, man, this is a
little bit of an effort. Boog Shambi's terrific play by
play guys, a buddy of mine's the voice of the
Cubs locally, does a lot of stuff nationally, calls the
(10:40):
World Series nationally for ESPN Radio. Him and I were
talking about it one time and he had a great
point about it, said, you know, if they were creating
baseball today, they wouldn't say one hundred and sixty two
games like it makes no sense. But they'll never They'll
never go back because and people always because the numbers
and the that's because of money. Like we're recording this,
(11:03):
the Cubs are getting ready to play a game. It's
thirty eight degrees and it was snowing today.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
Yeah. No, I had this argument years ago. I said,
if I think I did a segment or two on it.
I said, if sports started today, baseball wouldn't make it.
You say, okay, one hundred and sixty two games, slow pace,
no real clock, although they have it now, multiple pitching changes,
any little weather delay, they'll cancel it. Sometimes. Other times
you'll sit in a stadium for three hours. You'd be like, yeah,
(11:29):
that doesn't work. It's not very riveting. On TV. You
would have UFC, NFL, NBA, college sports. You'd probably always
have golf because it's an event and it's infrequent. The Olympics,
it's an event. It's infrequent. But I do think I
will say this. I think Fox, the company I work for,
I think they have the right baseball. They have postseason baseball,
(11:51):
and that's what I care about. I can I can
flip a switch a little bit on baseball and really
deeply care if the Yankees or the Braves or you know,
the Cubs World Series.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
I didn't miss a pitch of course. I mean it
was one of the greatest sporting things in my life
that I've ever watched. And people are crying, and people
are listening to the game on the radio in a
cemetery next to the headstone of their father, you know
what I mean. There is a connective tissue of baseball.
There's a romanticism to baseball. There's a comfort of baseball
that I do like and appreciate, and the history and
(12:21):
how much it matters locally. And people say baseball is dying.
I do think the new rules have really helped it. Yes,
but also it's a twelve billion dollar industry. It's not dying.
It's just football makes its billions with one hundred dollar bills.
Baseball makes its billions with singles and fives. Right, It's regional.
(12:42):
It's a local thing. Your local TV deal matters. How
much money you spend on tickets locally really matters. The NFL.
All that matters. These NFL stadiums are television studios. They
make their money from Fox, CBS, NBC, ESPN, Amazon, That's
how the NFL makes its money. Baseball, the Cubs make
(13:02):
their money from Wrigley Field tickets sold at Wrigley Field
and the Marquee Sports Network, and that's why it's very different.
The White Sox play eight miles south. Their economic situation
is very different. They're in a huge market, but not
as many people go and not as many people watch
on TV same sport. So it's just a It's a
sport of haves and have nots. A lot of it's archaic.
(13:24):
I am drawn still to a ton of it, but
that's more based on tradition and where I was born
than like the current product.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
Yeah, and I also think there are you know, I
think sports is in a really good space for a
lot of reasons. I think college basketball's got some challenges
because of One and Done, but the ignite league that
went or the unite team that left probably helps a little.
Nil probably helps men's college basketball a little. I do
think the NBA, and I'm a huge fan, So I'm
(13:52):
going to Nick's Bulls Friday night in Chicago. So I
love Yeah, I love the NBA.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
There are always at Bulls games in Chicago.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
Yeah, I'm buying a Bulls Blackhawks concert season ticket. My
wife and I are this weekend, so we go to
Chicago a lot, and it's an easy flight. And she
loves Chicago and she loves going out. She really likes
going to NBA games. She really likes fights and NBA
games and concerts.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
It's a great wife. She likes fights.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
Mean I order UFC cards. We got a group getting
together for UFC three hundred and a couple of weeks,
but not at my house. Well, I was like, you
want to do that, okay, fine, but either when I'm
out of town or you go to your buddys. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
So my wife is flying into Vegas to go to
the UFC three hundred with me. And what's interesting is
my wife doesn't love sports, but she likes events and
she likes, hey, let's go get a cocktail, let's go
out to dinner, let's dress up. It's fun. And she'll
ask a million questions, but she kind of has a
sense of it and she likes the event of it.
And the NBA games are an event. Uf season event.
She couldn't get my wife to a baseball game or
(14:53):
a football game in the snow. There's not a chance
in hell, you know. So she's not a sports fan,
but she's aware of it, and she asked the right
questions if she asked a question, it's like, oh, yeah,
that's a thoughtful question, and hopefully I'm a sportscaster and
have most of the answers. But I would say this,
I do, and I think sports in a great spot.
I do think it's easier to be a harsh parent
(15:18):
and get soft. It's much harder to be a soft
parent and then pretend to get tough and your kids
roll your eyes at you. The NBA has always been
a player's league. I do think they've crossed a line.
The load management to be is outrageous. Base hockey doesn't
do it, and they have eighty two games, and those
guys are kicking the shit out of each other and
have no teeth and it's hockey. By the way, if
(15:40):
you've ever gone into a hockey locker room in between periods, drafter,
the smell.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
Is, Oh, it's disgusting.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
It is mildew meets perspiration meets death. Those guys work
harder than any pro athlete.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
Colin I lived when I graduated college in two thousand
and nine. Moved in to an absolute shithole of an
apartment by Wrigley Field, about a block and a half away,
with four buddies that I've been friends with since third grade.
And so already we're it's five twenty two year olds,
twenty three year olds in an apartment that we could
afford a block and a half from Rigley Field. It's disgusting.
(16:19):
Now add in that two of the five were big
time hockey players, like state champions in our high school,
played college club hockey, and so they would play in
men's leagues and they would come back with their uniform
and their pads and their hockey sweaters or whatever, and
like dumping in the on the back deck. You could
smell it in the front room and the house. It
(16:40):
is so disgusting. But yeah, Hockey Live by the Way
is great. It's a great time because if you're like, oh,
i've ice skated before, i've skied, I consider myself mildly coordinated.
And then you go out there and you see these
guys are two hundred pounds and they're shooting the puck
one hundred miles an hour and they're hitting each other
on blade. So it's ridiculous.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
In my take is they play, they play hard, they drink,
they sex. I mean, hockey guys are legendary for they
play hard, they fight, they sex, they drink, rinse and repeat.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
Complete degenerous yes, and we love them.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
The best of the best of Europe represented in Canada
and the United States. The NBA guys often on a
Saturday night. Yeah, I'm gonna take a night off. I
think it's egregious. I think it's hurting the league. I
think it's a cautionary tale what you're seeing with lower
quality in men's basketball and massive ratings. You're giving us,
(17:35):
You're giving us effort. And I'm an NBA guy, so
I'm not here. There's a lot of people out there
that are dishonest. They're they're not they're not fair actors.
I think it's a real Mark Cuban sold his team.
I think Mark Cuban sees it.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
So when we watched the NBA playoffs last year, it
was like, holy shit, this is a different sport. Because
I watch I don't know seventy of the eighty two
Bulls games live. I'm a big Bulls fan. We're the
home of the Bulls. Good NBA City. We talk about them,
and they're bad. They're the ninth seed this year, they're
(18:10):
the ninth seed last year. But I watch a ton
of NBA. I stay up late and watch West Coast
NBA on Tuesday night to watch whatever the game is.
I wrote a damn book about the NBA. I love
the league, but they very clearly flip a switch come
postseason in time, and it's kind of insulting. Yes, and
it doesn't mean that they're not a thousand times better
(18:35):
and more skilled than at any point in the history
of basketball, and that it's still a better caliber of
basketball than college basketball. But when you know, even if
I can't really tell, and I could see Steph Curry
drop fifty on a given night and you can see,
you go to an NBA game in person, you'll see
something amazing, which is another reason why it kicks the
(18:55):
shit out of baseball. Because you go to random baseball game,
it's three nothing, You see nothing that's impressive. What the
hell did I do other than have some beers in
the sun. But you go to any NBA game, you're
gonna see something amazing because because honestly, even if the
top three or four guys sit out and you're disappointed
because that's the guy who's jersey you wear, there's more
than three hundred good basketball players in the world. You
(19:17):
know what I mean. So like the eighth, ninth, or
tenth guy on a team that never gets any run
can come in and drop twenty five or drop thirty,
or can do a windmill dunk or whatever. But I
think when we see the switch being flipped in the playoffs,
it's insulting to our sensitibilities.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
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This is a paid advertisement. We'll get to his book
in a second. This is Danny Parkins, co host of
Parkins and Spiegel Show in Chicago. It's a very, very
good show, and Danny, to me is probably the most
talented young sports talk radio host in the country. He's
got kids, he's not that young, but he knows my
admiration for it. And I felt that about Nick Wright
(21:02):
before I had heard Danny. And the book is pipeline
to the pros, which we'll get to. I'm not putting
it off because it's really well written. And no, I'm
not talking to you. I'm talking about my audience is
probably saying, get the goddamn book, Cowherd, nobody cares about you.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
No, No, I worked that little extra plug in to
give you my NBA bona fides. And by the way,
can I because we do not do a ton of
Jordan v Lebron goat stuff, it obviously comes up. But
it's like a little bit like taboo to do it locally.
It's like it's a little hacky. It's like Pete Rose,
should he be in the Hall of Fame. But I
get why it drives a lot of conversation nationally. Can
I tell you the thing that doesn't get mentioned enough
(21:35):
nationally because it's germane to this conversation we're having. Okay,
congratulations to Lebron for longevity, for spending a million dollars
a year on your body and a wild night out
being splitting a two thousand dollars bottle of red wine.
Jordan was doing it.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
With thirty six holes of golf, ten miller lights, a
run at the blackjack table, gambling debt, and like sweating
out tequila and he was dropping forty and he was
playing every damn night.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Yeah, so can we grate on a curve of degeneracy
for the era? Please? Like that? That's the thing that
no one talks like. Yes, the skill is better, the
competition is better Lebron. You know, as an underdog he
loses in the finals, he wins. Whatever. I understand. Lebron
is amazing. I'm not trying to take away from him.
But I'd like to see the guy play thirty six
holes of golf and then go drop forty five with
the next I'd like to see it. I'm not sure
(22:31):
that he could do it.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
No, we all meet guys. I had a friend one time.
He would go to South Carolina in the summer and
he would He didn't have a ton of money, so
I do like a three day vacation. He would golf
thirty six holes three days in a row, get bombed
each night, and I'm talking ninety four degrees in the heat,
and I'm like, bro, I'm nine holes on Friday out
(22:55):
two Miller lights. I'm out. Some guys and Jordan was
one of them have this relentless genetic thing. And I've
gone to college with guys they could drink all night long,
no hangover. And Jordan, to me, is one of those
athletes that is once in a lifetime that did not
treat his body with a great deal of love and admiration.
(23:17):
And just when I saw the MJ story and he
before the Eastern Conference games with the Celtics, He's getting
in eighteen holes in the sun, I'm like, that's my day.
I'm having dinner at five I'm out.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
Guy had pregame steaks, he smoked regularly. He mixed booze
all the time, beer and liquor, like it is insane.
And these guys they're like, oh, we've invested in a
wine company, Like think we have an in house Somalia
for the Miami heat. Awesome, awesome. I respect the professionalism,
(23:54):
but then you also take off when oh man, they
have a two day stayover in South Beach, So guys
are gonna take off. No, no, no. Jordan would close
down the club in South Beach and then go drop forty.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
I always felt this about Johnny bench best catcher ever,
not just because I think he's the best catcher ever,
Astro turf gear.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
Oh absolutely.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
By the way, back then, a lot of day games
he would. Now Bill Plummer was the backup, so he
didn't do both games of a doubleheader, but he would
do Friday night in Cincinnati, Saturday, National TV Sunday. Steve
Garvey told me it was so hot in Kansas City
and Riverfront. Now he was a National leaguer, right Dodgers,
he said, Pittsburgh, Philly and Riverfront. You'd have to put
(24:35):
lettuce in your shoes to keep it cool. He goes
one time in Philadelphia, his cleat stuck to the turf
and Johnny Bench had that gear on and would go
three for four with two jacks. Game goes twelve innings
and he is catching the fourth threads pitcher. People have
no idea baseball players in the seventies to about eighty
(24:56):
five it was one hundred and forty degree field in
the Midwest.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
Oh, I mean, and I listen, I mean different eras too.
I mean guys would have like bags of cocaine fall
out of their pocket on the base paths. You know
what I mean, Like just like what they would do.
Like if you go and bry the way it's why.
Also if you go back and you watch a game
from the nineties, like, oh it was better, Eh, what's
likely They weren't more skilled, they were slow over and
(25:23):
three to fifty percent of the guys were hungover. So
now it really wasn't better. But there is an element
of nostalgia to it and an amount of respect.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
So I don't spend any time on social media. Some
of that is simply because I have a staff at
the volume. I'm very fortunate and a pretty hearty staff
at FS one. I you know, my kids are not
on it. My son never is on it, my daughter
infrequently but used to be. Not anymore. But I wow, yeah,
it's it's pretty toxic. So, you know, I think about
(25:53):
this because one of the things about our business, and
I don't get many people on that. I got to
talk about the business, which is why I'm doing it now.
Because you're you love radio. I love radio, and I
do think occasionally fans like to just hear how you
and I think and talk about this crap. And you know,
I'm thinking. One of the criticisms I've gotten through the
years and even back to doing local is uh, well, Colin,
(26:15):
you said this like six weeks ago, and I'm like,
there's new information. And I always say, you know, if
a pilot came to you and said, folks, we got
a lightning storm that's moved in, and he said, but
I'm gonna fly right into it, there's there's no reason
to deviate. I've got two hours ago there wasn't and
I'm gonna fly into it. You'd be like, oh shit,
I'm going to cancel my flight. So I didn't like
(26:38):
Ryan Poles initially Vlus Jones. I watched them at USC
could not track the ball. I mean that, I literally
text you GMS and I'm like, he doesn't know what
he's doing. That that he can't play, he's a point
that he can't play. So but I watched USC maybe
more than Ryan Poles. And then there was the Chase Claypool,
which I defended because of the body type, but Chase
ended up going sideways and not being very mature. And
(27:01):
so my takeaway is I don't trust the ownership Ryan Poles,
Matt Eberflus and then probably knowing he butchered Velis Jones
and knowing that there are certain things about offense like
line play, I think he's drafted it pretty well that
he knows. He went and got DJ Moore, he went
and got Keenan Allen and moved Mooney and I thought, oh,
(27:22):
and then he brings in Gerald Everett and he's swift,
who's a good he can catch the ball to the backfield,
and I'm like, oh, now a new information. I think
Ryan Poles knows what he's doing. I think his last
six move, I love the Monte sweat move. It got heat.
But I'm like, folks, there's nobody in the second round
as good as Montes.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
Sweat right, no guarantee you to get him in a
free agency, that's.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
Right, But what is the takeaway? Because the Bears eber
Flus has been criticized, the ownership has But where is
everybody sitting on your GM, which in football is such
a substantial position because the rosters are so big and
there's so many moves to make.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
I don't know how you could have any grade on
him other than an A. It doesn't mean that he's perfect.
And you've listed a few of the big misses like
Dayles Jones is the first offensive player that he ever selected,
But it was in the third round. Teams miss on
third round picks all the time. Chase Claypool, it was
(28:19):
a panic move. It was I'm trading away Rokwan Smith.
I'm trading away Robert Quinn. I'm carrying the most dead
cap space of any team in the league. But I
am trying to be fair to Justin Fields, who is
an eleven out of ten as a person, and I'd
like to figure out if I have something here. I've
got to give him something. And he overtraded for the
traits of Chase Claypool, and I think he undervalued the
(28:43):
personal stuff because then when he learned the mistake from
that and he trades for Montes Sweat, there were a
lot of people saying, trade for Chase Young off, that
defense line, more talented, better pedigree player, all of that stuff.
But he loafs, he takes plays off. But in Montes Sweat,
whatever he's got, he's given it to you. And so
(29:05):
I think he that is a director because it's the
exact same trade. It's a second round pick for an
established player that you're hoping to pay. They paid Montes Sweat,
they obviously didn't pay Claypool. So I think also with
anything learning, proving that you learn from your mistakes and
that you don't double down, that's a sign of intelligence
(29:26):
to me. So to me, like it's like, yeah, did
it start a little choppy, no question. But he also
inherited one of the oldest teams in the league with
a ton of bad contracts, a quarterback that someone else drafted,
no first round pick in his first year, so his
first draft picks are second round picks, both of whom,
by the way, pretty good. Kyler Gordon and Jakwan Brisker,
(29:48):
two guys who are starters in one of the best
young secondaries in football. Then when he gets a first
round pick, a lot of us are saying, Jalen Carter,
Jalen Carter, Jalen Carter, you need a three technique for
this defense. He moves down from nine to ten, picks
up an extra fourth round pick, drafts Darnell right right
tackle to support the quarterback. He makes all rookie team,
(30:08):
looks like he's going to be a starter at right
tackle for ten years. And then the biggest thing by far,
and the sweat one was big, and the Keenan Allen
was big. Is he trades the number one overall pick
and picks the right team to trade to gets DJ
Moore gets the second round pick, that is Tyreek Stevenson,
(30:29):
another starter at cornerback who was really damn good last year.
Gets the first round pick this year, which is going
to be you know, Caleb Williams, a once in a
generation quarterback prospect. He has their second round pick next
year from Carolina and oh yeah, by the way, Dj Moore.
So it's one of the great I mean, people will
(30:50):
reference the Herschel Walker trade. It is truly one of
the great trades in my I NFL history. If Caleb
Williams is everything that you and I in the vast
majority of people think that he will be, They've got
a very good cap situation. They've got very good players
in their athletic prime. Jalen Johnson, Tremaine Edmunds, Montes Sweat,
(31:10):
Cole Comet, Dj Moore. These guys are all twenty five,
twenty six, twenty seven years old, under contract, good players
on rookie deals. Brisker, Gordon Tyreek, Stevenson, Darnell Right, Tevin Jenkins,
who I hadn't mentioned. And now you're going to inject
the ninth overall pick whoever he ends up taking, And
there's a ton of great options, and Caleb Williams in
(31:31):
a good quarterback on a rookie deal. The Bears should
be set up under Ryan Poles for a really long
runway of success here.
Speaker 2 (31:38):
I can't be the only person that has noticed Matt Eberflus,
the coach, has changed his look. What's up with that?
Speaker 1 (31:45):
Yeah, so he credits his wife and daughters. And it's
very weird because when Matt Eberflues talked before the beard
and the little product in the hair, he sounded really dumb.
And now He's saying the same things with like designer
hoodies and a beard and a little scruff and a
little product. And I'm like, a Flues has some swag.
(32:06):
There's like, like, my my coach is like, I'm eflusiastic.
I'm like, that's a really corny dad joke, but I
I perspect it. Uh. He's like for some real he's
like sitting courtside next to handsome Matt Lefloor and I'm like, Oh,
which is the more handsome NFL head coach? Is it
Matt Floor? Is is it Matt Eberflues? Like he's carrying
himself with a little swag. My problem with Eberflus, Yeah,
(32:28):
A couple of assistant coaches, including his defensive coordinator who
he brought over, Alan Williams, left in disgrace. I don't
like hiring a defensive coach. I'm biased to offensive coaches
because it's just sustained success. I think it's the best
way to foster an environment for a quarterback. My thing
was when you hit the lottery of getting the number
(32:48):
one overall pick for Caleb Williams. Are you really telling
me that the best possible person to develop him is
Matt Eberflus and Shane Waldron or would Jim Harbaugh have
been better? Or would Ben Johnson have been better? Would
Ben Johnson have taken this job instead of going back
to Detroit? Because I think this job would be really
(33:10):
damn attractive if it was open and they got a
pretty good offensive coaching staff, because it's an attractive job
and you get to coach Caleb Williams, but you obviously
were limiting your talent tool if you're only hiring for coordinator.
So that was my issue with how Poles handled the coach.
But he swears by him. He swears by the culture,
(33:31):
he swears by the effort, and the team did play
hard and the defense did get better. Yes, did finish
the season relatively strong, and they should be a top
ten maybe top five defense next season. So there are
reasons to keep him. And he's swaggy now, So that's two.
Speaker 2 (33:50):
Yeah. My wife always says that she always my wife
has this ability. It's so I don't have it. That
she had great funny lines and she can hold them
for twelve years and then she'll drop it at the
perfect time, and I'm like, where did you hear that?
Speaker 1 (34:09):
She goes?
Speaker 2 (34:09):
Oh, I heard that in eighth grade, and I'm like,
I couldn't hold up for fifteen minutes. If I went
to out to dinner with you, I would find a
way to get it into the conversation, just to impress you. Sure,
and so one of the things, you know, like one
of her things. She said to me one time and
I made a mistake, and she said, honey, you're either
right or you're learning. She said, unless you keep making
(34:30):
the same mistake, then you're wrong. She goes, you don't
make the same mistake much, so you're right or you're learning.
I'm like, God, I gotta steal that. The other one
she said to me when we started dating about three
years in, I was not a very good dad or something.
I made a mistake and she goes, be a great
example or a horrible warning. Kids learn from both. I'm like,
(34:52):
we're going to do a book now this come on,
You're just you're holding shit now over me. It's like
Joel Ostein meets Tony Robbins. Where's this stuff coming from?
Speaker 1 (35:00):
Yeah, she's a philosopher who loves the UFC. Where did
you find this unicorn?
Speaker 2 (35:07):
So she is big? Speaking of eber Flus, she is
always She is big on current. Her big line is
with everything, your career, your look, just stay current. She said.
You know, musical acts they look backwards. And I've always
had a thing where I always say I'm a windshield guy,
not a rearview mirror guy. Most of that, I didn't
(35:27):
have a traditional upbringing. But I think the point with
Eberflus and I think we've talked about this in our careers.
You and I may have grown up baseball fans. We
shifted to NFL fans and sports talk gambling topics because
that's where the that's where the audience went. It is
how comfortable I am comfortable with sports gambling. The distorted
(35:48):
or the disturbance rates one percent. It's six percent for alcohol.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
You know that.
Speaker 2 (35:52):
The people that go sideways DraftKings told me very early
it's four dollars per bet. That's literally what the average
bed is. So it's hard to break your family. Yeah,
but there are some do gooders, some you know, you know,
there's the kind of precious sports media out there often
that said gambling is the end of society. You're a
guy that is, I believe a poker player. You're very
mathy like Nick wright, you'd be a lawyer if you
(36:14):
didn't do this, or a financial guy right like you
guys are both very mathy. Of course I would never
give my money to Nick because of the black and
tans or whatever he smokes. He gets a sidon miles. Yeah,
he gets sideways very quickly.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
You see, he's been quitting smoking for twenty years while
wearing a nicotine patch and buying cigarettes individually. Yeah, individually
stopping We're stopping off for a Lucy again. Just buy
a pack. It will save us time. You're bumming individual
cigarettes from different people at the casino. You could just
buy a pack. You can afford it. You're on DV.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
Are you ever uncomfortable talking sports betting?
Speaker 1 (36:49):
No? Uh, I blame my parents. My parents were market people,
finance people, and I'm like, that's gambling now. The difference,
of course is Nvidia is not going to zero tomorrow,
and if I bet the over in the Bears game
and it's under that, Beck goes to zero. So obviously
there are differences, but it's all just a market. It's
a market of expectations, and I find it actually really
(37:13):
informative even for people who don't gamble, because they don't
just come up with these things randomly sharp better set
the lines. And there are formulas and Excel spreadsheets that predict, oh,
this guy is gonna have is expected to have this
number of yards That might be relevant for if you
play fantasy football or just who do you like? You know,
there are practical implications to it that I do think
(37:35):
are relevant even if you aren't putting four dollars, forty
dollars or four thousand dollars on the game. And also,
I mean, and this is back to the shop talk,
it is supporting the industry. You know it For a while,
it was beer, for a while, it was car dealerships.
Now it is legalized gambling. And throughout history, prohibition doesn't work.
(38:02):
It didn't work with alcohol, it doesn't work with weed,
it doesn't work with gambling. I'm not saying that nothing
should be illegal, but there's something too. No speed limit
on the autobah, you know, like, just in general, people
are going to do what they are going to do,
and it may as well be regulated and taxed and
(38:22):
try to funnel that money into something productive. Are there
going to be consequences of it along the way, for sure,
But that's why taxes on cigarettes are expensive. That's why
if you walk into a dispensary here in Illinois and
you want to buy a pre roll joint, it costs
way more than it would if I got it from
a dude in the you know, my next door neighbor.
(38:43):
But I know what it's going to be, you know.
So it's the type of thing like it's taxed, it's regulated,
you know where the money goes. So no, I have
no qualms about it. I've been vetting on sports since
I was fifteen years old. I love it, and I'm
thrilled that all of my vices are now legal. It's great.
Everything's coming up me.
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Speaker 2 (40:33):
So the book is Pipeline to the pros. Woes gives
it a great recommendation. If you love basketball, you'll devour
Pipeline to the Pros. So I'm a couple of chapters in.
You're a very, very clever writer, which doesn't surprise me
at all. So let's start with this. Tell the audience
why you decided to write this book and the connectivity
(40:54):
from your family from.
Speaker 1 (40:55):
You, right. So me and my buddy Ben Kaplin, who's
the co author on the book. So Ben played D
three basketball and I went to Syracuse and he was
the starting point guard on our high school team, and
I was the guy who's doing the play by play
on the radio. We've been best friends since third grade.
Nick is my best friend since college. Ben is my
(41:15):
best friend since third grade. They were both groomsmen in
my wedding. So he came to me and he said,
I got this idea. There's a story here. And we've
been going to NBA games our entire life, and I
didn't know anything about it, about all of these D
three guys who had broken into the NBA former Division
(41:37):
three players who made its way to being coaches or executives.
And when he pitched me the idea, twelve of the
thirty teams in the NBA, either their head coach or
their top basketball decision maker had played D three basketball,
And I'm like, that's insane, And I was drawn to
(41:57):
the disproportionate nature of that number. You think cleanest path
at that job would be you play at Duke or
you play in the NBA, whatever the case may be, right,
And so that just instantly fascinated me. And the network
side of it, like networking. You go to Harvard Medical School,
there's a network of the alums. You go to Syracuse
for broadcasting, there's a network of the alums. These guys
(42:19):
all know each other and they're all helping each other,
and they're hiring their friends. And a few people got
in and broke down the door and then they were like, hey,
you know a guy, and they started hiring these people.
And it has as the league has changed and it's
gotten more smart and more analytical, these smart guys from
these liberal arts colleges have taken it over. And I
(42:41):
was just instantly drawn to like the management and the
networking and how some of the lessons in the book
I think are applicable to Hey, are you considering a
liberal arts education? Like it's a basketball book, But there's
a lot of things that are really practically applicable to
any walk of life, I would say. And then, just
like one more personal anecdote, I didn't I almost didn't
(43:06):
take the project on because at the time, my dad
was dealing with dementia and my brother had been diagnosed
with terminal brain cancer. And so you have those two things,
you have a young son, and you have a pregnant
wife with your second along the way, and I'm like,
I am spent. I cannot take on anything else. But
(43:27):
we you and I think are maybe cut from the
same cloth. Like I need more than one thing for
my creative outlet. I need to be intellectually stimulated. And
it's not that I'm not for my four hour a
day radio show, but I've got my ten thousand hours
in it. I know how to do this, And so
I was like, you know, I would really regret it
if I don't partner up with one of my best friends.
(43:49):
And then his father ended up getting diagnosed with a
rare form of cancer and passing away. So from concept
to publishing. We both lost our dads and I lost
my brother, and so that's who the book is dedicated to.
I'm donating a portion of each book sold to brain
cancer research and non or my brother. But like it
was a his passion project became our passion project. And
(44:11):
he doesn't have a media profile, and it's obviously a
niche subject matter. D three guys make it to the NBA.
So the book would have never been made if we
didn't partner up together with my media profile and all that.
So like it. We worked really hard on it for
a couple of years, and uh, we're really proud of
the final project.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
Yeah, you can tell you put the time into it.
It's not only an intellectual project. It's so deep, it's
so smart, it's so thoughtful. And I think you know,
you and Nick are very similar. So you Nick likes
to prod. He really likes to poke people in the ribs.
I don't think you're quite that from what I've heard
(44:48):
on your show. But you you you get exhausted. You
don't suffer fools gladly. You get exhausted very quick with nonsense. Yes,
when when when you you a project like this and
you go through all this drama, and I mean, what
was Nick's first react, because I know Nick read it.
(45:09):
I know Nick so proud of you. What was his
first reaction to it? Because Nick is so competitive and
he loves you dearly. He probably thought, I've got to
write a book.
Speaker 1 (45:20):
That's funny. I wish you know, he got on National
TV and I was like, I gotta get on National TV.
You have to drive really nice cars. Yeah, you know,
that's funny. He he was surprised, really so, he he
he was surprised in the not in that I couldn't
(45:41):
do it, but that I or that I didn't have
the bandwidth for it, but just like the nature of
the project. He's like, you're doing what. He's like, you
and I talk once or twice. We've never talked about this.
I'm like, yeah, man, I don't know. I got a
few other interests, like a few other things, like I
keep surprising you. So I think that he's like, I figured,
if you're writing a book, you're writing a book on gambling,
(46:03):
you're writing a book on on media. You know, you're
writing a book on something like that. So I think,
like the research nature of it and the depth of
the project. But again, like I have to credit my
friend for bringing me the story, and so this is
a thing of opportunity. But yeah, him and I are
always coming up with Nick and I are always coming
up with like we should do this, We're going to
(46:26):
do this together. And we've done a lot of those things,
like you know what I mean, We've we've helped each
other throughout our career. We always have big ideas. Sometimes
our conversations end up like, oh, we're doing it again.
We're spinning this thing forward seventeen permutations into the future,
you know. And so when I told him about this,
he I think he wanted to know if I was
(46:47):
going to tell him about it again or if it
was just an idea in the moment. And then damn
near three years later we got we got a book
out of it. Well, because that's the thing, like we're
both doing full time jobs. He has three kids, I
have two kids. We've got all this personal track, like
we were really doing this, and we knew we weren't
like competing. We don't have to be we don't have
to worry about being first to market with a D
(47:09):
three NBA. But no one else is on this corner
give me so, Yeah, Danny.
Speaker 2 (47:14):
Give me a story. Let's do a little tease for
the audience. Give me one of the unconventional paths that
was very endearing and connected with you.
Speaker 1 (47:21):
Okay, well, I mean so. Jeffan Gundy wrote the forward
of the book, and he was the perfect person to
do it because he hired a bunch of former D
three people, including his brother Stan van Gundy. But he
was the transfer portal before there was the transfer portal.
We are one hundred percent sure that Jeff Van Gundy
(47:43):
is the first and only person to transfer from Yale
to Menlo Junior College. He then transfers to Nazareth and
then he finishes at Brockport. Goes to Yale thinking he
playing the IVY League. They say, no, not good enough,
We're not even going to let you try out for
the team. Goes to Menlo, goes to Nazareth where his
(48:04):
dad gets a job. They fire his dad out of loyalty.
He ends up at Brockport, so four schools following his
for the love of the game, and he is convinced
that because short guy, white guy, nerdy guy comes out
of Brockport ultimately that he will never get a shot
but brilliant dude. Through connections, through camps, grinds, grinds, grinds,
(48:30):
works his way up and eventually is on pat Riley's
staff with the Knicks, and Riley leaves he'd been there
through a couple of different coaches. He's there, He's there
for four years. He is named the interim head coach
of the Knicks. He is the head coach of the Knicks,
and the New York Daily News runs a column that
(48:51):
lists back to gambling the odds on who the next
full time head coach of the Knicks is going to be.
Larry Brown's the favorite, John Kliparis the next favorite. Lou
Karnisseca at seventy one years old, is listed at five
thousand to one. Red Holtzman, at seventy six years old,
(49:13):
is listed as a one million to one to be
the next head coach of the Knicks, and Jeff Van
Gundy was given fifty million to one odds in the
New York Daily News. Well, he is the current head
coach of the Knicks to actually keep the job as
head coach of the Knicks, and he gets it. He
perseveres and between him and his brother, who he hired
(49:34):
and Jeff van Gundy, Rich and uh Tom Thibodeau and
Steve Clifford and Andy Greer and all these other guys
that he brought into the league. It's over a thousand
wins between Jeff and Stan van Gundy, a couple of
d three guys. Their name is now synonymous with the NBA.
So these guys who are the best to do it
were doubted when they literally already had the job one
(49:56):
more quick one. Greg Popovich maybe the best coach ever.
He's a coach at Pomona. Just goes into the Hall
of Fame. To April of ninety seven. He is just
gotten a three year extension because he was the GM
and the coach for a minute. In San Antonio. When
the three year extension gets announced, the San Antonio newspaper
(50:19):
does a survey of readers, what do you think of
the Greg Popovich extension? Ninety two percent of respondents said
that Greg Popovitch should be fired in nineteen ninety seven
when he was about to become the dynastic Greg Popovich.
(50:39):
So these guys, they were overlooked for forever and just
through intelligence and being good teachers and good networkers and
hard workers, they rose their way up. I could never
play in the NBA, I could never play in Major
in Wrigley Field or the NFL. But there's something too,
like the work ethic and the intelligence and the networking
(51:00):
that I was just drawn to the story. And I
think we really covered it well.
Speaker 2 (51:05):
It's pipeline to the pros. This is a more personal question,
and we can edit it out if you're not comfortable.
But you had a very you're a smart guy, and
your parents were successful, and you've had a very redeemable
career and an ascending career that very few people have
in our business. And then your brother and your and
(51:28):
father's dying is painful. A brother dying is a whole
different story. And this is so personal. How are you equipped?
You not that you hadn't had struggle, but how are
you equipped to deal with it? Have you been equipped?
How difficult? I mean, that's I can't. I mean, I
(51:49):
get emotional not knowing your brother. I don't know how
I wouldn't be equipped.
Speaker 1 (51:58):
Okay, So that's that's that's a good question. Brad was
diagnosed with glioblastoma June fifth of twenty twenty. My son,
my first son, Owen, was born at thirty one week,
(52:21):
so he was born nine weeks premature. January seventeenth of
twenty twenty. We all know what happened in March of
twenty twenty. I remember vividly saying to my wife in
call it April, no, no, no, no, excuse me. It
was like June first, I don't know that I can
(52:42):
take anymore. It was just super stressed, money stress, pandemic stress,
new baby stress, feeling over my dad's dementia diagnosis was
it was, it was ugly Alzheimer's. It's a terrible, terrible,
horrible disease. I was like, I honestly don't know that
I can take any more. Three days later, my brother
(53:03):
gets diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. You just learn that
you can deal with more than you expect, and it
hurts if you stay in bed, and it hurts if
you get up, so you may as well get the
fuck up. Like that's what I've learned. If I've learned anything,
(53:27):
I have cried, I've been in therapy. I have definitely
not handled everything perfectly throughout this process, but I have
learned that it hurts either way, so you may as
well keep going because your world can change with a
phone call tomorrow. So I don't know if that answers
(53:50):
your question, but I would not have said that I
was equipped to handle it. And it still devastates me
every day that my brother is in here, but somehow
I'm still here and I'm doing what I'm doing well.
Speaker 2 (54:04):
I first of all, I appreciate you answering that it's
probably too personal, but I also think I knew you'd
go to a place because you're so capable that somebody
who's listening to our podcast and dealing with a very
similar situation in the family. And when I heard your story,
(54:26):
it made me think about a friend I had years
ago in Vegas that lost his wife. And so first
of all, I thank you for sharing that, but it's
you know, it goes back to a saying I it's
kind of a cliche, but we've heard it before, as
you just never know what people have gone through in
a day. Just be nice to people. I know social
(54:47):
media does not elevate the life experience. It deteriorates it.
That's why I stay away.
Speaker 1 (54:53):
So that was a.
Speaker 2 (54:55):
Pretty remarkable answer, and I do, Danny, I appreciate that,
and I don't want to end on this because you're
you're not a down or you're you're it's a really
raw topic and I thought it was I wanted to hear.
I wouldn't have been equipped. I don't know how you
would have handled it.
Speaker 1 (55:12):
And I guess I think you probably would have been,
but you don't know until you're confronted with it. And
I'm glad that you haven't been, and you don't want
anybody to to deal with it, and and I you know,
grief is hard, man, Grief is really hard, and yeah,
it is. It is a downer, but it is relatable. Yeah,
(55:33):
there's a there's a thing called anticipatory grief, which I
didn't even know about. But it's like when you get
a terminal diagnosis and then you're like grieving and you're
like waiting for the actual person to die, and you think,
like you have you you're dealing with anticipatory grief, Like
you know eventually your dad's going to pass away, he
has Alzheimer's. You know your brother's going to pass away,
he's got terminal brain cancer. Uh, and then it happens
and it's like, oh, it doesn't actually replace the real grief,
(55:54):
so you just deal with it. And because you have
literally no other choice. But I don't know. Man, buy
a book, I'll donate a portion of it to brain
cancer research.
Speaker 2 (56:04):
And yeah, it's such a thank you, it really is.
So we're thank you you bet. I want to circle back.
Is that Chicago to me is I kind of feel
Chicago people. There is a divide. Sometimes it's financial, sometimes
(56:25):
it's in reach, obviously, between syndicated, national and local. I
think local sports radio is much better than national sports radio.
And I think you're at the top of the heap.
And I say that the best show I've ever heard.
I think you're the best talent doing it in the country.
I think Felger and Mas and Boston have the ability
to be in a in a very tribal town, incredibly
(56:50):
honest and hated and adored simultaneously. It's a really good listen.
Speaker 1 (56:55):
Yeah, pull huge numbers.
Speaker 2 (56:57):
Yeah, it's it's a I used to as I was,
you know, crafting this scrawny physique. I used to sit
in my my downstairs in my weight room and just
sit there and I would watch them for, you know,
an hour. Chicago is to me, it's just everything I
watch on TV. Local TV still matters. It looks like syndicated,
it looked like national. It's I mean, Lester Holt, I
(57:19):
think came from Chicago. My buddy Joe Donlin's an anchor
in Chicago. I think he's as good as local anchor
as you're going to get in the country Chicago sports radio.
To me, I love listening to it because it's just
the perfect mix of tribal, smart insane. Oh yeah, if
you have recently taken a rare you're a liked figure
(57:42):
the voice, You're tolerant, you're bright, but you are a
little bit you kind of moved into a space. As
far as I can tell, you were not really a
Justin's Fields guy. And the city was you know, of
course they're clinging to it working. How the Bears were
clinging to it. They wanted to say, we'll get nine
picks for Caleb Williams. Everybody wanted it to work. So
(58:04):
what is it like now, probably for the first time
in your career as being a villain for a few months.
Speaker 1 (58:10):
Okay, so this is fascinating. I'm gonna take off my
headset for just one second because this will this will
make sense. So because this is there is an exact
moment when my likability plummeted, and wow, I just have
to pull out a prop real quick. I didn't know
we're gonna talk about this hold on. So I I
commissioned a Caleb Williams thirteen Bears Jersey the day they
(58:35):
got the number one pick. So with a week left
in the season, and so Justin Fields is still on
the Bears. It's been He's likable, he's fun, he's exciting.
He was voted the eighty sixth best player in the
NFL coming off of the twenty twenty two season when
they had the most dead cap space and no one
(58:56):
else get on the team. People love Justin Fields, and
the Bears did not try him well and it was
not fair and they did not build around him. In
the situation that Caleb was walking into is a thousand times,
but life isn't fair. And I was like, listen, here's
the thing. I like hangarsteak, but I've got a chance
for eight five wago and it's cheaper for some reason,
(59:16):
for some reason, the wago is cheaper than the hangerstake. Like,
I'm going to go for it every time. And so
when I people were like I, because now everyone's pumped
for Caleb. But I was just like, this is how
it's going to end. And I told them how it
was going to end before they were ready to hear
how it was going to end. And if I would
have just had the take, people would have really disagreed.
(59:40):
But for some reason, the fact that I spent one
hundred and forty dollars on a jersey and like became
a prop comic for a minute and like showed like
I showed you how positive I was that this was
how it was going to end. Buddy? Were people mean
to me on the internet? Like, man, But so weird
(01:00:01):
about the whole thing is that I'm gonna be right.
Like I bet mitchter Bisky at two hunderd to one
to an MVP blew up in my face. I said
there was a zero percent chance the White Sox we're
gonna hire Tony LaRussa blew up in my face. Like
I've been wrong plenty of times. We give twenty hours
a week of opinions, You're gonna be wrong all the time.
But man, did people hate this jersey? But now it's
(01:00:25):
gonna be the number one selling jersey in the NFL
for the next like five years. So I'm a I
don't know if you knew this. I'm a fashion icon.
I'm a trendsetter. I'm ahead of the curve. People are
dressing like me now, and I frankly love it. But yeah,
did I have it on my board that the thing
that would make me most hated is the thing that
(01:00:47):
I have been the most right about. No, that I
did not expect that to be my how my career
is gone. But now people are being pretty nicecause they're
prety excited about Kaleb Boyams.
Speaker 2 (01:00:57):
Should be pipeline to the pros D three small college.
Nobody's rose to rule in the NBA ben Kaplan Danny Parkins,
forward by Jeff N. Gundy. I say this authentically and
accurately and with one hundred percent belief. I think you're
(01:01:19):
how old you now? Forty two, forty three, forty What?
How old are you?
Speaker 1 (01:01:22):
I'm thirty eight.
Speaker 2 (01:01:23):
Jesus Christ. It's disgusting how good you are at thirty eight.
It's really such a bummer. I was hoping you were
fifty four and this was the years of training and
you are really gifted.
Speaker 1 (01:01:34):
And oh, actually, hey, I'm thirty seven. I turned thirty eight,
and I'll tell you're just a jerk.
Speaker 2 (01:01:39):
Now now you're just piling on it. Anyway, You're great
at what you do. I love listening and congratulations on
the book, your career, your ascension, and I love you man.
I think I just think you're just everything wrapped in empathy, curiosity,
Smart's funny and a little bit of a villain. That's okay,
it's fun. Lebron didn't like it in Miami, but you
(01:02:02):
know it is. It's part of the merry go round
of our life.
Speaker 1 (01:02:05):
I can handle it and it's just sports at the
end of the day, so like I can't. I can't
get take it all too seriously. But no, listen, thank
you for the kind words and the platform and supporting
this and trying to hire me a couple of years ago.
Speaker 2 (01:02:22):
And I'm not done. I'm not done with that. So
we'll make another run on that, buddy.
Speaker 1 (01:02:26):
I appreciate you, Colin.
Speaker 2 (01:02:28):
Thank you very much, the Vine, thanks so much for listening.
If you've enjoyed the podcast, take a moment, rate and review.
The volume.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
All right, a really talented guy. I really hope you
listen to the next hour with Danny Parkins's Chicago radio
host and the most talented sports talk radio host I
think out there right now. And at his age, which
is younger than I would hope for. I was hoping
he was old and beat up. But he's young and
great and he'll come on our show today to talk
(00:28):
to the Bears, the draft, radio, his book, all that stuff.
Before we get to Danny, I want you to grab
your smartphone and download the game Time App. It takes
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(01:11):
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Colin download game Time today. Please do that last minute
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Speaker 1 (01:32):
Well.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
I first heard of Danny Parkins from Nick Wright, who
had said, Hey, I work with this guy. And you know,
Nick had introduced me to two or three people, A
couple of them were just obnoxious and annoying, and then
he introduced me to Danny and told me to listen
to his show, and so I fashioned myself as some
(01:55):
sort of talent scout. Obviously not, but since I started
the volume, I really enjoy it, and so I said,
oh shit, this guy's really good. And then I go
to Chicago regularly and listened, and I thought, Wow, this
guy's about the best young guy I've heard in the country,
because I, you know, I've been listening to sports talk
radio forever and he's come out with a new book
which feels like an intellectual exercise, which I think is
(02:18):
really important in our business, because sports radio can be,
on our best days, somewhat mindless. It's called pipeline to
the pros. He's Danny, you're a really good writer. How
d three small college? Nobody's rose to rule the NBA.
And I'll get to that in a second, but it
it does look a little bit. And when I wrote
a book, it was sort of like, you know, I
(02:38):
just wanted to prove to everybody I wasn't a radio
idiot completely. But I want to start with something else.
I think because I listened now to sports radio, and
you and I contend New York, Detroit, Boston, Chicago, Philly
is better sports talk radio than Los Angeles. That's not
(02:59):
a personal attime on anybody. I do think they're really
talented people in LA. But when the weather's good and
there's lots of options, people bail on teams very quickly
when they're not good. But the hud Levels and the
Buffalos and the New York Chicago, Detroit, you stay indoors
and you watch your crappy teams, and you've got strong opinions,
and you know that fosters sort of sometimes resentment and
(03:19):
ankst with your teams.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
In LA.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
If I turn to sports talk radio, there's a fifty
to fifty shot. It's guy talk, which doesn't really interest me.
So that's my kind of theory on it. Kansas City
is another really good sports talk radio market where you
came from. Do you buy into my theory.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
One hundred percent? I've got some friends, including Nick Wright,
and by the way, thank you for not characterizing me
as obnoxious, even though maybe don't know each other well enough,
because some definitely would. Nick worked in Houston, our buddy
Mike Meltzer worked in Houston, and it's not a great
sports radio market, but you would think that it would
be because there's so much traffic and they love football,
(03:56):
and football dominates sports radio. But there's two shares that
they're getting because there's just other things for people to do.
Warm Weather Miami, they are great shows that have come
out of there, great talents that have come out of there.
They don't get any numbers. I would put Cleveland on
the list great sports radio markets. They pull huge numbers
in Cleveland, love the teams. Minneapolis pulls huge numbers on kfans.
(04:21):
So yeah, I think there's a ton there and it'd
be really nice to live in a place where you
could go outside. But today it's snowed in Chicago. In April.
So we're supposed to talk about baseball in the radio.
I'm like, I don't know, it feels like football weather today.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Well, you know when so I did sports radio for
a while and then I wanted to create mostly out
of survival. When I was at ESPN, I said, guys,
I've got to create a simulcast. AM radio is not
a dynamic next ten year horizon. And so ESPN did
not think I was talented enough to be on ESPN two. Apparently,
(04:57):
so I said, all right, all jettis in this place.
I do appreciate it, and things have gone well. But
when I went to television, I always did a show
with a lot of football. But I think I have
moved in the direction of more football. Part of that
is when you can see a TV number every day,
you see what's working and you see what's not, and
football almost almost works. Secondarily, though big beat small scale
(05:21):
beats up boutique, the NFL makes everything now look small.
I think it's well run. I think sports gambling helps.
I think it's better on television. I think other leagues
have made mistakes. One and done is hurt college basketball mends. Anyway,
what percentage of your show mind about seventy percent NFL.
I don't want to be in the NFL network, I
pushed back. I've talked to a lot of college basketball
(05:43):
in the last two three weeks. What percentage of yours
is NFL.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
Obviously it depends on the time, right, I mean, we
were Cubs Opening Day, We're doing a ton of Cubs.
Were the home of the Cubs. But even leading into that,
the Bears have been the dominant storyline with the last
two years having the number one overall pick. They're the
biggest story in the NFL for the offseason, so obviously
they're the biggest story here. So even with a two
team town, there's only three cities that have two baseball teams,
(06:10):
Baseball on the radio was still incredibly powerful. You know,
the Cubs are the biggest client to my radio station,
six seventy four by far. We're still and I wish
the number was higher. My co host is a bigger
baseball guy. It's over fifty percent for football, even in
opening day week with two teams in town, because it's
all about Caleb Williams and the ninth pick and are
(06:33):
the Bears on the come and all of that, and
the other thing at least in this market. That I
would say is football's the great unifier. When I was
growing up kid in the nineties in Chicago, the Bulls
were king. The Blackhawks weren't even on TV, but there
were people that were Blackhawks fans and not Bulls fans
even at that period of time, and certainly when they
(06:53):
had their dynastic run with three titles, the Hawks kind
of overtook the Bulls as being the toughest ticket in
town and that sort of thing. Cubs and White Sox split,
Blackhawks and Bulls split. Everybody cares about the Bears. Everybody
has an opinion on the Bears. And for the national
side of it, yes, sports, gambling, yeah, fantasy, But I
(07:13):
think like the simplest way to explain it is that
it's every game matters. It's one of seventeen and no
other league has that. If I miss Bulls Hawks, and
I don't talk about it on the show the next day,
we don't get a single text call or tweet being like, hey,
you missed this really important thing. Because if a really
(07:34):
important thing happens, I see about it on social media,
it cuts through. We talk about it. But if you
came on the Monday after a Bears Packers game, or
a Bears Lions game, or a Bear's Jaguars game, or
a Bears Bucks game, whomever. Even if they were five
and ten and you didn't do four hours on the
Bears game, the ramifications who played well, who didn't, who's
(07:56):
going to get fired, who's going to get extended? All
those things, people would think you were insane. So it's
the great unifier. And the thing that it has is
that every game matters, and the rhythm of it, I
think is great. You play a game on Sunday, you
react on Monday. The coach and the quarterbacks speak on Monday,
and quarterback speaks on Wednesday. You start looking ahead to
(08:17):
the next game. Then there's a Thursday night game. Teams
in your division matter. It's just for local sports, radio,
national TV. There's just such a great rhythm of football.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
I feel lucky a lot of times. What I like
mostly is what the country likes.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
I have a growing interest in soccer over the last decade.
My mom was British. I went to England as a kid,
got a little soccer set. The World Cup was going
on at that time. Johann Kroif England I remember Netherlands
was great, England was great, and then in the Northwest
soccer was around me, the Sounders, the Timbers. University of
(08:57):
Portland had a great program. So I've always been more
I a soccer fan than the average person. I try
to invest in the MLS twice, but I'm not Tony
Robbins or Magic Johnson.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
At Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
Yeah. I love NFL. I really really like college football.
I really really like the NBA March mad March Madness
is fun. And I do like an occasional fight, now
more UFC than boxing, but an occasional fight a Saturday night,
I'm going to tune in and buy the UFC card.
So are you aligned with the audience or do you
(09:29):
have to sometimes go I don't care about this, I'll
talk about it.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
That is the baseball part of it. It's not that
I don't care about baseball. I grew up, you know.
I'm twelve years old in Chicago in nineteen ninety eight.
Jordan is completing the third, the second three p and
Sammy Sosa is hitting sixty six home runs and saving baseball.
I love the Cubs. I grew up a Cubs fan.
(09:55):
I'm invested in it. But I can't say that I
care about a bullpen to decision in a game in May. Yeah,
and one of one's sixty two and the minutia of it,
I just I can't yea and so that. But that
is a necessity in Philly sportstock Radio, Chicago sportstock Radio,
New York sports talk radio, we do do some of that.
(10:18):
And that is the part that I mean, if that's
the part that feels like work. Okay, I'm not on
the side of a road. I'm not welding. I'm not
you know, I still love my job every day. But
there definitely is an element of, man, this is a
little bit of an effort. Boog Shambi's terrific play by
play guys, a buddy of mine's the voice of the
Cubs locally, does a lot of stuff nationally, calls the
(10:40):
World Series nationally for ESPN Radio. Him and I were
talking about it one time and he had a great
point about it, said, you know, if they were creating
baseball today, they wouldn't say one hundred and sixty two
games like it makes no sense. But they'll never They'll
never go back because and people always because the numbers
and the that's because of money. Like we're recording this,
(11:03):
the Cubs are getting ready to play a game. It's
thirty eight degrees and it was snowing today.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
Yeah. No, I had this argument years ago. I said,
if I think I did a segment or two on it.
I said, if sports started today, baseball wouldn't make it.
You say, okay, one hundred and sixty two games, slow pace,
no real clock, although they have it now, multiple pitching changes,
any little weather delay, they'll cancel it. Sometimes. Other times
you'll sit in a stadium for three hours. You'd be like, yeah,
(11:29):
that doesn't work. It's not very riveting. On TV. You
would have UFC, NFL, NBA, college sports. You'd probably always
have golf because it's an event and it's infrequent. The Olympics,
it's an event. It's infrequent. But I do think I
will say this. I think Fox, the company I work for,
I think they have the right baseball. They have postseason baseball,
(11:51):
and that's what I care about. I can I can
flip a switch a little bit on baseball and really
deeply care if the Yankees or the Braves or you know,
the Cubs World Series.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
I didn't miss a pitch of course. I mean it
was one of the greatest sporting things in my life
that I've ever watched. And people are crying, and people
are listening to the game on the radio in a
cemetery next to the headstone of their father, you know
what I mean. There is a connective tissue of baseball.
There's a romanticism to baseball. There's a comfort of baseball
that I do like and appreciate, and the history and
(12:21):
how much it matters locally. And people say baseball is dying.
I do think the new rules have really helped it. Yes,
but also it's a twelve billion dollar industry. It's not dying.
It's just football makes its billions with one hundred dollar bills.
Baseball makes its billions with singles and fives. Right, It's regional.
(12:42):
It's a local thing. Your local TV deal matters. How
much money you spend on tickets locally really matters. The NFL.
All that matters. These NFL stadiums are television studios. They
make their money from Fox, CBS, NBC, ESPN, Amazon, That's
how the NFL makes its money. Baseball, the Cubs make
(13:02):
their money from Wrigley Field tickets sold at Wrigley Field
and the Marquee Sports Network, and that's why it's very different.
The White Sox play eight miles south. Their economic situation
is very different. They're in a huge market, but not
as many people go and not as many people watch
on TV same sport. So it's just a It's a
sport of haves and have nots. A lot of it's archaic.
(13:24):
I am drawn still to a ton of it, but
that's more based on tradition and where I was born
than like the current product.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
Yeah, and I also think there are you know, I
think sports is in a really good space for a
lot of reasons. I think college basketball's got some challenges
because of One and Done, but the ignite league that
went or the unite team that left probably helps a little.
Nil probably helps men's college basketball a little. I do
think the NBA, and I'm a huge fan, So I'm
(13:52):
going to Nick's Bulls Friday night in Chicago. So I
love Yeah, I love the NBA.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
There are always at Bulls games in Chicago.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
Yeah, I'm buying a Bulls Blackhawks concert season ticket. My
wife and I are this weekend, so we go to
Chicago a lot, and it's an easy flight. And she
loves Chicago and she loves going out. She really likes
going to NBA games. She really likes fights and NBA
games and concerts.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
It's a great wife. She likes fights.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
Mean I order UFC cards. We got a group getting
together for UFC three hundred and a couple of weeks,
but not at my house. Well, I was like, you
want to do that, okay, fine, but either when I'm
out of town or you go to your buddys. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
So my wife is flying into Vegas to go to
the UFC three hundred with me. And what's interesting is
my wife doesn't love sports, but she likes events and
she likes, hey, let's go get a cocktail, let's go
out to dinner, let's dress up. It's fun. And she'll
ask a million questions, but she kind of has a
sense of it and she likes the event of it.
And the NBA games are an event. Uf season event.
She couldn't get my wife to a baseball game or
(14:53):
a football game in the snow. There's not a chance
in hell, you know. So she's not a sports fan,
but she's aware of it, and she asked the right
questions if she asked a question, it's like, oh, yeah,
that's a thoughtful question, and hopefully I'm a sportscaster and
have most of the answers. But I would say this,
I do, and I think sports in a great spot.
I do think it's easier to be a harsh parent
(15:18):
and get soft. It's much harder to be a soft
parent and then pretend to get tough and your kids
roll your eyes at you. The NBA has always been
a player's league. I do think they've crossed a line.
The load management to be is outrageous. Base hockey doesn't
do it, and they have eighty two games, and those
guys are kicking the shit out of each other and
have no teeth and it's hockey. By the way, if
(15:40):
you've ever gone into a hockey locker room in between periods, drafter,
the smell.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
Is, Oh, it's disgusting.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
It is mildew meets perspiration meets death. Those guys work
harder than any pro athlete.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
Colin I lived when I graduated college in two thousand
and nine. Moved in to an absolute shithole of an
apartment by Wrigley Field, about a block and a half away,
with four buddies that I've been friends with since third grade.
And so already we're it's five twenty two year olds,
twenty three year olds in an apartment that we could
afford a block and a half from Rigley Field. It's disgusting.
(16:19):
Now add in that two of the five were big
time hockey players, like state champions in our high school,
played college club hockey, and so they would play in
men's leagues and they would come back with their uniform
and their pads and their hockey sweaters or whatever, and
like dumping in the on the back deck. You could
smell it in the front room and the house. It
(16:40):
is so disgusting. But yeah, Hockey Live by the Way
is great. It's a great time because if you're like, oh,
i've ice skated before, i've skied, I consider myself mildly coordinated.
And then you go out there and you see these
guys are two hundred pounds and they're shooting the puck
one hundred miles an hour and they're hitting each other
on blade. So it's ridiculous.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
In my take is they play, they play hard, they drink,
they sex. I mean, hockey guys are legendary for they
play hard, they fight, they sex, they drink, rinse and repeat.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
Complete degenerous yes, and we love them.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
The best of the best of Europe represented in Canada
and the United States. The NBA guys often on a
Saturday night. Yeah, I'm gonna take a night off. I
think it's egregious. I think it's hurting the league. I
think it's a cautionary tale what you're seeing with lower
quality in men's basketball and massive ratings. You're giving us,
(17:35):
You're giving us effort. And I'm an NBA guy, so
I'm not here. There's a lot of people out there
that are dishonest. They're they're not they're not fair actors.
I think it's a real Mark Cuban sold his team.
I think Mark Cuban sees it.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
So when we watched the NBA playoffs last year, it
was like, holy shit, this is a different sport. Because
I watch I don't know seventy of the eighty two
Bulls games live. I'm a big Bulls fan. We're the
home of the Bulls. Good NBA City. We talk about them,
and they're bad. They're the ninth seed this year, they're
(18:10):
the ninth seed last year. But I watch a ton
of NBA. I stay up late and watch West Coast
NBA on Tuesday night to watch whatever the game is.
I wrote a damn book about the NBA. I love
the league, but they very clearly flip a switch come
postseason in time, and it's kind of insulting. Yes, and
it doesn't mean that they're not a thousand times better
(18:35):
and more skilled than at any point in the history
of basketball, and that it's still a better caliber of
basketball than college basketball. But when you know, even if
I can't really tell, and I could see Steph Curry
drop fifty on a given night and you can see,
you go to an NBA game in person, you'll see
something amazing, which is another reason why it kicks the
(18:55):
shit out of baseball. Because you go to random baseball game,
it's three nothing, You see nothing that's impressive. What the
hell did I do other than have some beers in
the sun. But you go to any NBA game, you're
gonna see something amazing because because honestly, even if the
top three or four guys sit out and you're disappointed
because that's the guy who's jersey you wear, there's more
than three hundred good basketball players in the world. You
(19:17):
know what I mean. So like the eighth, ninth, or
tenth guy on a team that never gets any run
can come in and drop twenty five or drop thirty,
or can do a windmill dunk or whatever. But I
think when we see the switch being flipped in the playoffs,
it's insulting to our sensitibilities.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
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(20:40):
This is a paid advertisement. We'll get to his book
in a second. This is Danny Parkins, co host of
Parkins and Spiegel Show in Chicago. It's a very, very
good show, and Danny, to me is probably the most
talented young sports talk radio host in the country. He's
got kids, he's not that young, but he knows my
admiration for it. And I felt that about Nick Wright
(21:02):
before I had heard Danny. And the book is pipeline
to the pros, which we'll get to. I'm not putting
it off because it's really well written. And no, I'm
not talking to you. I'm talking about my audience is
probably saying, get the goddamn book, Cowherd, nobody cares about you.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
No, No, I worked that little extra plug in to
give you my NBA bona fides. And by the way,
can I because we do not do a ton of
Jordan v Lebron goat stuff, it obviously comes up. But
it's like a little bit like taboo to do it locally.
It's like it's a little hacky. It's like Pete Rose,
should he be in the Hall of Fame. But I
get why it drives a lot of conversation nationally. Can
I tell you the thing that doesn't get mentioned enough
(21:35):
nationally because it's germane to this conversation we're having. Okay,
congratulations to Lebron for longevity, for spending a million dollars
a year on your body and a wild night out
being splitting a two thousand dollars bottle of red wine.
Jordan was doing it.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
With thirty six holes of golf, ten miller lights, a
run at the blackjack table, gambling debt, and like sweating
out tequila and he was dropping forty and he was
playing every damn night.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Yeah, so can we grate on a curve of degeneracy
for the era? Please? Like that? That's the thing that
no one talks like. Yes, the skill is better, the
competition is better Lebron. You know, as an underdog he
loses in the finals, he wins. Whatever. I understand. Lebron
is amazing. I'm not trying to take away from him.
But I'd like to see the guy play thirty six
holes of golf and then go drop forty five with
the next I'd like to see it. I'm not sure
(22:31):
that he could do it.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
No, we all meet guys. I had a friend one time.
He would go to South Carolina in the summer and
he would He didn't have a ton of money, so
I do like a three day vacation. He would golf
thirty six holes three days in a row, get bombed
each night, and I'm talking ninety four degrees in the heat,
and I'm like, bro, I'm nine holes on Friday out
(22:55):
two Miller lights. I'm out. Some guys and Jordan was
one of them have this relentless genetic thing. And I've
gone to college with guys they could drink all night long,
no hangover. And Jordan, to me, is one of those
athletes that is once in a lifetime that did not
treat his body with a great deal of love and admiration.
(23:17):
And just when I saw the MJ story and he
before the Eastern Conference games with the Celtics, He's getting
in eighteen holes in the sun, I'm like, that's my day.
I'm having dinner at five I'm out.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
Guy had pregame steaks, he smoked regularly. He mixed booze
all the time, beer and liquor, like it is insane.
And these guys they're like, oh, we've invested in a
wine company, Like think we have an in house Somalia
for the Miami heat. Awesome, awesome. I respect the professionalism,
(23:54):
but then you also take off when oh man, they
have a two day stayover in South Beach, So guys
are gonna take off. No, no, no. Jordan would close
down the club in South Beach and then go drop forty.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
I always felt this about Johnny bench best catcher ever,
not just because I think he's the best catcher ever,
Astro turf gear.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
Oh absolutely.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
By the way, back then, a lot of day games
he would. Now Bill Plummer was the backup, so he
didn't do both games of a doubleheader, but he would
do Friday night in Cincinnati, Saturday, National TV Sunday. Steve
Garvey told me it was so hot in Kansas City
and Riverfront. Now he was a National leaguer, right Dodgers,
he said, Pittsburgh, Philly and Riverfront. You'd have to put
(24:35):
lettuce in your shoes to keep it cool. He goes
one time in Philadelphia, his cleat stuck to the turf
and Johnny Bench had that gear on and would go
three for four with two jacks. Game goes twelve innings
and he is catching the fourth threads pitcher. People have
no idea baseball players in the seventies to about eighty
(24:56):
five it was one hundred and forty degree field in
the Midwest.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
Oh, I mean, and I listen, I mean different eras too.
I mean guys would have like bags of cocaine fall
out of their pocket on the base paths. You know
what I mean, Like just like what they would do.
Like if you go and bry the way it's why.
Also if you go back and you watch a game
from the nineties, like, oh it was better, Eh, what's
likely They weren't more skilled, they were slow over and
(25:23):
three to fifty percent of the guys were hungover. So
now it really wasn't better. But there is an element
of nostalgia to it and an amount of respect.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
So I don't spend any time on social media. Some
of that is simply because I have a staff at
the volume. I'm very fortunate and a pretty hearty staff
at FS one. I you know, my kids are not
on it. My son never is on it, my daughter
infrequently but used to be. Not anymore. But I wow, yeah,
it's it's pretty toxic. So, you know, I think about
(25:53):
this because one of the things about our business, and
I don't get many people on that. I got to
talk about the business, which is why I'm doing it now.
Because you're you love radio. I love radio, and I
do think occasionally fans like to just hear how you
and I think and talk about this crap. And you know,
I'm thinking. One of the criticisms I've gotten through the
years and even back to doing local is uh, well, Colin,
(26:15):
you said this like six weeks ago, and I'm like,
there's new information. And I always say, you know, if
a pilot came to you and said, folks, we got
a lightning storm that's moved in, and he said, but
I'm gonna fly right into it, there's there's no reason
to deviate. I've got two hours ago there wasn't and
I'm gonna fly into it. You'd be like, oh shit,
I'm going to cancel my flight. So I didn't like
(26:38):
Ryan Poles initially Vlus Jones. I watched them at USC
could not track the ball. I mean that, I literally
text you GMS and I'm like, he doesn't know what
he's doing. That that he can't play, he's a point
that he can't play. So but I watched USC maybe
more than Ryan Poles. And then there was the Chase Claypool,
which I defended because of the body type, but Chase
ended up going sideways and not being very mature. And
(27:01):
so my takeaway is I don't trust the ownership Ryan Poles,
Matt Eberflus and then probably knowing he butchered Velis Jones
and knowing that there are certain things about offense like
line play, I think he's drafted it pretty well that
he knows. He went and got DJ Moore, he went
and got Keenan Allen and moved Mooney and I thought, oh,
(27:22):
and then he brings in Gerald Everett and he's swift,
who's a good he can catch the ball to the backfield,
and I'm like, oh, now a new information. I think
Ryan Poles knows what he's doing. I think his last
six move, I love the Monte sweat move. It got heat.
But I'm like, folks, there's nobody in the second round
as good as Montes.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
Sweat right, no guarantee you to get him in a
free agency, that's.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
Right, But what is the takeaway? Because the Bears eber
Flus has been criticized, the ownership has But where is
everybody sitting on your GM, which in football is such
a substantial position because the rosters are so big and
there's so many moves to make.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
I don't know how you could have any grade on
him other than an A. It doesn't mean that he's perfect.
And you've listed a few of the big misses like
Dayles Jones is the first offensive player that he ever selected,
But it was in the third round. Teams miss on
third round picks all the time. Chase Claypool, it was
(28:19):
a panic move. It was I'm trading away Rokwan Smith.
I'm trading away Robert Quinn. I'm carrying the most dead
cap space of any team in the league. But I
am trying to be fair to Justin Fields, who is
an eleven out of ten as a person, and I'd
like to figure out if I have something here. I've
got to give him something. And he overtraded for the
traits of Chase Claypool, and I think he undervalued the
(28:43):
personal stuff because then when he learned the mistake from
that and he trades for Montes Sweat, there were a
lot of people saying, trade for Chase Young off, that
defense line, more talented, better pedigree player, all of that stuff.
But he loafs, he takes plays off. But in Montes Sweat,
whatever he's got, he's given it to you. And so
(29:05):
I think he that is a director because it's the
exact same trade. It's a second round pick for an
established player that you're hoping to pay. They paid Montes Sweat,
they obviously didn't pay Claypool. So I think also with
anything learning, proving that you learn from your mistakes and
that you don't double down, that's a sign of intelligence
(29:26):
to me. So to me, like it's like, yeah, did
it start a little choppy, no question. But he also
inherited one of the oldest teams in the league with
a ton of bad contracts, a quarterback that someone else drafted,
no first round pick in his first year, so his
first draft picks are second round picks, both of whom,
by the way, pretty good. Kyler Gordon and Jakwan Brisker,
(29:48):
two guys who are starters in one of the best
young secondaries in football. Then when he gets a first
round pick, a lot of us are saying, Jalen Carter,
Jalen Carter, Jalen Carter, you need a three technique for
this defense. He moves down from nine to ten, picks
up an extra fourth round pick, drafts Darnell right right
tackle to support the quarterback. He makes all rookie team,
(30:08):
looks like he's going to be a starter at right
tackle for ten years. And then the biggest thing by far,
and the sweat one was big, and the Keenan Allen
was big. Is he trades the number one overall pick
and picks the right team to trade to gets DJ
Moore gets the second round pick, that is Tyreek Stevenson,
(30:29):
another starter at cornerback who was really damn good last year.
Gets the first round pick this year, which is going
to be you know, Caleb Williams, a once in a
generation quarterback prospect. He has their second round pick next
year from Carolina and oh yeah, by the way, Dj Moore.
So it's one of the great I mean, people will
(30:50):
reference the Herschel Walker trade. It is truly one of
the great trades in my I NFL history. If Caleb
Williams is everything that you and I in the vast
majority of people think that he will be, They've got
a very good cap situation. They've got very good players
in their athletic prime. Jalen Johnson, Tremaine Edmunds, Montes Sweat,
(31:10):
Cole Comet, Dj Moore. These guys are all twenty five,
twenty six, twenty seven years old, under contract, good players
on rookie deals. Brisker, Gordon Tyreek, Stevenson, Darnell Right, Tevin Jenkins,
who I hadn't mentioned. And now you're going to inject
the ninth overall pick whoever he ends up taking, And
there's a ton of great options, and Caleb Williams in
(31:31):
a good quarterback on a rookie deal. The Bears should
be set up under Ryan Poles for a really long
runway of success here.
Speaker 2 (31:38):
I can't be the only person that has noticed Matt Eberflus,
the coach, has changed his look. What's up with that?
Speaker 1 (31:45):
Yeah, so he credits his wife and daughters. And it's
very weird because when Matt Eberflues talked before the beard
and the little product in the hair, he sounded really dumb.
And now He's saying the same things with like designer
hoodies and a beard and a little scruff and a
little product. And I'm like, a Flues has some swag.
(32:06):
There's like, like, my my coach is like, I'm eflusiastic.
I'm like, that's a really corny dad joke, but I
I perspect it. Uh. He's like for some real he's
like sitting courtside next to handsome Matt Lefloor and I'm like, Oh,
which is the more handsome NFL head coach? Is it
Matt Floor? Is is it Matt Eberflues? Like he's carrying
himself with a little swag. My problem with Eberflus, Yeah,
(32:28):
A couple of assistant coaches, including his defensive coordinator who
he brought over, Alan Williams, left in disgrace. I don't
like hiring a defensive coach. I'm biased to offensive coaches
because it's just sustained success. I think it's the best
way to foster an environment for a quarterback. My thing
was when you hit the lottery of getting the number
(32:48):
one overall pick for Caleb Williams. Are you really telling
me that the best possible person to develop him is
Matt Eberflus and Shane Waldron or would Jim Harbaugh have
been better? Or would Ben Johnson have been better? Would
Ben Johnson have taken this job instead of going back
to Detroit? Because I think this job would be really
(33:10):
damn attractive if it was open and they got a
pretty good offensive coaching staff, because it's an attractive job
and you get to coach Caleb Williams, but you obviously
were limiting your talent tool if you're only hiring for coordinator.
So that was my issue with how Poles handled the coach.
But he swears by him. He swears by the culture,
(33:31):
he swears by the effort, and the team did play
hard and the defense did get better. Yes, did finish
the season relatively strong, and they should be a top
ten maybe top five defense next season. So there are
reasons to keep him. And he's swaggy now, So that's two.
Speaker 2 (33:50):
Yeah. My wife always says that she always my wife
has this ability. It's so I don't have it. That
she had great funny lines and she can hold them
for twelve years and then she'll drop it at the
perfect time, and I'm like, where did you hear that?
Speaker 1 (34:09):
She goes?
Speaker 2 (34:09):
Oh, I heard that in eighth grade, and I'm like,
I couldn't hold up for fifteen minutes. If I went
to out to dinner with you, I would find a
way to get it into the conversation, just to impress you. Sure,
and so one of the things, you know, like one
of her things. She said to me one time and
I made a mistake, and she said, honey, you're either
right or you're learning. She said, unless you keep making
(34:30):
the same mistake, then you're wrong. She goes, you don't
make the same mistake much, so you're right or you're learning.
I'm like, God, I gotta steal that. The other one
she said to me when we started dating about three
years in, I was not a very good dad or something.
I made a mistake and she goes, be a great
example or a horrible warning. Kids learn from both. I'm like,
(34:52):
we're going to do a book now this come on,
You're just you're holding shit now over me. It's like
Joel Ostein meets Tony Robbins. Where's this stuff coming from?
Speaker 1 (35:00):
Yeah, she's a philosopher who loves the UFC. Where did
you find this unicorn?
Speaker 2 (35:07):
So she is big? Speaking of eber Flus, she is
always She is big on current. Her big line is
with everything, your career, your look, just stay current. She said.
You know, musical acts they look backwards. And I've always
had a thing where I always say I'm a windshield guy,
not a rearview mirror guy. Most of that, I didn't
(35:27):
have a traditional upbringing. But I think the point with
Eberflus and I think we've talked about this in our careers.
You and I may have grown up baseball fans. We
shifted to NFL fans and sports talk gambling topics because
that's where the that's where the audience went. It is
how comfortable I am comfortable with sports gambling. The distorted
(35:48):
or the disturbance rates one percent. It's six percent for alcohol.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
You know that.
Speaker 2 (35:52):
The people that go sideways DraftKings told me very early
it's four dollars per bet. That's literally what the average
bed is. So it's hard to break your family. Yeah,
but there are some do gooders, some you know, you know,
there's the kind of precious sports media out there often
that said gambling is the end of society. You're a
guy that is, I believe a poker player. You're very
mathy like Nick wright, you'd be a lawyer if you
(36:14):
didn't do this, or a financial guy right like you
guys are both very mathy. Of course I would never
give my money to Nick because of the black and
tans or whatever he smokes. He gets a sidon miles. Yeah,
he gets sideways very quickly.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
You see, he's been quitting smoking for twenty years while
wearing a nicotine patch and buying cigarettes individually. Yeah, individually
stopping We're stopping off for a Lucy again. Just buy
a pack. It will save us time. You're bumming individual
cigarettes from different people at the casino. You could just
buy a pack. You can afford it. You're on DV.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
Are you ever uncomfortable talking sports betting?
Speaker 1 (36:49):
No? Uh, I blame my parents. My parents were market people,
finance people, and I'm like, that's gambling now. The difference,
of course is Nvidia is not going to zero tomorrow,
and if I bet the over in the Bears game
and it's under that, Beck goes to zero. So obviously
there are differences, but it's all just a market. It's
a market of expectations, and I find it actually really
(37:13):
informative even for people who don't gamble, because they don't
just come up with these things randomly sharp better set
the lines. And there are formulas and Excel spreadsheets that predict, oh,
this guy is gonna have is expected to have this
number of yards That might be relevant for if you
play fantasy football or just who do you like? You know,
there are practical implications to it that I do think
(37:35):
are relevant even if you aren't putting four dollars, forty
dollars or four thousand dollars on the game. And also,
I mean, and this is back to the shop talk,
it is supporting the industry. You know it For a while,
it was beer, for a while, it was car dealerships.
Now it is legalized gambling. And throughout history, prohibition doesn't work.
(38:02):
It didn't work with alcohol, it doesn't work with weed,
it doesn't work with gambling. I'm not saying that nothing
should be illegal, but there's something too. No speed limit
on the autobah, you know, like, just in general, people
are going to do what they are going to do,
and it may as well be regulated and taxed and
(38:22):
try to funnel that money into something productive. Are there
going to be consequences of it along the way, for sure,
But that's why taxes on cigarettes are expensive. That's why
if you walk into a dispensary here in Illinois and
you want to buy a pre roll joint, it costs
way more than it would if I got it from
a dude in the you know, my next door neighbor.
(38:43):
But I know what it's going to be, you know.
So it's the type of thing like it's taxed, it's regulated,
you know where the money goes. So no, I have
no qualms about it. I've been vetting on sports since
I was fifteen years old. I love it, and I'm
thrilled that all of my vices are now legal. It's great.
Everything's coming up me.
Speaker 2 (39:01):
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Speaker 2 (40:33):
So the book is Pipeline to the pros. Woes gives
it a great recommendation. If you love basketball, you'll devour
Pipeline to the Pros. So I'm a couple of chapters in.
You're a very, very clever writer, which doesn't surprise me
at all. So let's start with this. Tell the audience
why you decided to write this book and the connectivity
(40:54):
from your family from.
Speaker 1 (40:55):
You, right. So me and my buddy Ben Kaplin, who's
the co author on the book. So Ben played D
three basketball and I went to Syracuse and he was
the starting point guard on our high school team, and
I was the guy who's doing the play by play
on the radio. We've been best friends since third grade.
Nick is my best friend since college. Ben is my
(41:15):
best friend since third grade. They were both groomsmen in
my wedding. So he came to me and he said,
I got this idea. There's a story here. And we've
been going to NBA games our entire life, and I
didn't know anything about it, about all of these D
three guys who had broken into the NBA former Division
(41:37):
three players who made its way to being coaches or executives.
And when he pitched me the idea, twelve of the
thirty teams in the NBA, either their head coach or
their top basketball decision maker had played D three basketball,
And I'm like, that's insane, And I was drawn to
(41:57):
the disproportionate nature of that number. You think cleanest path
at that job would be you play at Duke or
you play in the NBA, whatever the case may be, right,
And so that just instantly fascinated me. And the network
side of it, like networking. You go to Harvard Medical School,
there's a network of the alums. You go to Syracuse
for broadcasting, there's a network of the alums. These guys
(42:19):
all know each other and they're all helping each other,
and they're hiring their friends. And a few people got
in and broke down the door and then they were like, hey,
you know a guy, and they started hiring these people.
And it has as the league has changed and it's
gotten more smart and more analytical, these smart guys from
these liberal arts colleges have taken it over. And I
(42:41):
was just instantly drawn to like the management and the
networking and how some of the lessons in the book
I think are applicable to Hey, are you considering a
liberal arts education? Like it's a basketball book, But there's
a lot of things that are really practically applicable to
any walk of life, I would say. And then, just
like one more personal anecdote, I didn't I almost didn't
(43:06):
take the project on because at the time, my dad
was dealing with dementia and my brother had been diagnosed
with terminal brain cancer. And so you have those two things,
you have a young son, and you have a pregnant
wife with your second along the way, and I'm like,
I am spent. I cannot take on anything else. But
(43:27):
we you and I think are maybe cut from the
same cloth. Like I need more than one thing for
my creative outlet. I need to be intellectually stimulated. And
it's not that I'm not for my four hour a
day radio show, but I've got my ten thousand hours
in it. I know how to do this, And so
I was like, you know, I would really regret it
if I don't partner up with one of my best friends.
(43:49):
And then his father ended up getting diagnosed with a
rare form of cancer and passing away. So from concept
to publishing. We both lost our dads and I lost
my brother, and so that's who the book is dedicated to.
I'm donating a portion of each book sold to brain
cancer research and non or my brother. But like it
was a his passion project became our passion project. And
(44:11):
he doesn't have a media profile, and it's obviously a
niche subject matter. D three guys make it to the NBA.
So the book would have never been made if we
didn't partner up together with my media profile and all that.
So like it. We worked really hard on it for
a couple of years, and uh, we're really proud of
the final project.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
Yeah, you can tell you put the time into it.
It's not only an intellectual project. It's so deep, it's
so smart, it's so thoughtful. And I think you know,
you and Nick are very similar. So you Nick likes
to prod. He really likes to poke people in the ribs.
I don't think you're quite that from what I've heard
(44:48):
on your show. But you you you get exhausted. You
don't suffer fools gladly. You get exhausted very quick with nonsense. Yes,
when when when you you a project like this and
you go through all this drama, and I mean, what
was Nick's first react, because I know Nick read it.
(45:09):
I know Nick so proud of you. What was his
first reaction to it? Because Nick is so competitive and
he loves you dearly. He probably thought, I've got to
write a book.
Speaker 1 (45:20):
That's funny. I wish you know, he got on National
TV and I was like, I gotta get on National TV.
You have to drive really nice cars. Yeah, you know,
that's funny. He he was surprised, really so, he he
he was surprised in the not in that I couldn't
(45:41):
do it, but that I or that I didn't have
the bandwidth for it, but just like the nature of
the project. He's like, you're doing what. He's like, you
and I talk once or twice. We've never talked about this.
I'm like, yeah, man, I don't know. I got a
few other interests, like a few other things, like I
keep surprising you. So I think that he's like, I figured,
if you're writing a book, you're writing a book on gambling,
(46:03):
you're writing a book on on media. You know, you're
writing a book on something like that. So I think,
like the research nature of it and the depth of
the project. But again, like I have to credit my
friend for bringing me the story, and so this is
a thing of opportunity. But yeah, him and I are
always coming up with Nick and I are always coming
up with like we should do this, We're going to
(46:26):
do this together. And we've done a lot of those things,
like you know what I mean, We've we've helped each
other throughout our career. We always have big ideas. Sometimes
our conversations end up like, oh, we're doing it again.
We're spinning this thing forward seventeen permutations into the future,
you know. And so when I told him about this,
he I think he wanted to know if I was
(46:47):
going to tell him about it again or if it
was just an idea in the moment. And then damn
near three years later we got we got a book
out of it. Well, because that's the thing, like we're
both doing full time jobs. He has three kids, I
have two kids. We've got all this personal track, like
we were really doing this, and we knew we weren't
like competing. We don't have to be we don't have
to worry about being first to market with a D
(47:09):
three NBA. But no one else is on this corner
give me so, Yeah, Danny.
Speaker 2 (47:14):
Give me a story. Let's do a little tease for
the audience. Give me one of the unconventional paths that
was very endearing and connected with you.
Speaker 1 (47:21):
Okay, well, I mean so. Jeffan Gundy wrote the forward
of the book, and he was the perfect person to
do it because he hired a bunch of former D
three people, including his brother Stan van Gundy. But he
was the transfer portal before there was the transfer portal.
We are one hundred percent sure that Jeff Van Gundy
(47:43):
is the first and only person to transfer from Yale
to Menlo Junior College. He then transfers to Nazareth and
then he finishes at Brockport. Goes to Yale thinking he
playing the IVY League. They say, no, not good enough,
We're not even going to let you try out for
the team. Goes to Menlo, goes to Nazareth where his
(48:04):
dad gets a job. They fire his dad out of loyalty.
He ends up at Brockport, so four schools following his
for the love of the game, and he is convinced
that because short guy, white guy, nerdy guy comes out
of Brockport ultimately that he will never get a shot
but brilliant dude. Through connections, through camps, grinds, grinds, grinds,
(48:30):
works his way up and eventually is on pat Riley's
staff with the Knicks, and Riley leaves he'd been there
through a couple of different coaches. He's there, He's there
for four years. He is named the interim head coach
of the Knicks. He is the head coach of the Knicks,
and the New York Daily News runs a column that
(48:51):
lists back to gambling the odds on who the next
full time head coach of the Knicks is going to be.
Larry Brown's the favorite, John Kliparis the next favorite. Lou
Karnisseca at seventy one years old, is listed at five
thousand to one. Red Holtzman, at seventy six years old,
(49:13):
is listed as a one million to one to be
the next head coach of the Knicks, and Jeff Van
Gundy was given fifty million to one odds in the
New York Daily News. Well, he is the current head
coach of the Knicks to actually keep the job as
head coach of the Knicks, and he gets it. He
perseveres and between him and his brother, who he hired
(49:34):
and Jeff van Gundy, Rich and uh Tom Thibodeau and
Steve Clifford and Andy Greer and all these other guys
that he brought into the league. It's over a thousand
wins between Jeff and Stan van Gundy, a couple of
d three guys. Their name is now synonymous with the NBA.
So these guys who are the best to do it
were doubted when they literally already had the job one
(49:56):
more quick one. Greg Popovich maybe the best coach ever.
He's a coach at Pomona. Just goes into the Hall
of Fame. To April of ninety seven. He is just
gotten a three year extension because he was the GM
and the coach for a minute. In San Antonio. When
the three year extension gets announced, the San Antonio newspaper
(50:19):
does a survey of readers, what do you think of
the Greg Popovich extension? Ninety two percent of respondents said
that Greg Popovitch should be fired in nineteen ninety seven
when he was about to become the dynastic Greg Popovich.
(50:39):
So these guys, they were overlooked for forever and just
through intelligence and being good teachers and good networkers and
hard workers, they rose their way up. I could never
play in the NBA, I could never play in Major
in Wrigley Field or the NFL. But there's something too,
like the work ethic and the intelligence and the networking
(51:00):
that I was just drawn to the story. And I
think we really covered it well.
Speaker 2 (51:05):
It's pipeline to the pros. This is a more personal question,
and we can edit it out if you're not comfortable.
But you had a very you're a smart guy, and
your parents were successful, and you've had a very redeemable
career and an ascending career that very few people have
in our business. And then your brother and your and
(51:28):
father's dying is painful. A brother dying is a whole
different story. And this is so personal. How are you equipped?
You not that you hadn't had struggle, but how are
you equipped to deal with it? Have you been equipped?
How difficult? I mean, that's I can't. I mean, I
(51:49):
get emotional not knowing your brother. I don't know how
I wouldn't be equipped.
Speaker 1 (51:58):
Okay, So that's that's that's a good question. Brad was
diagnosed with glioblastoma June fifth of twenty twenty. My son,
my first son, Owen, was born at thirty one week,
(52:21):
so he was born nine weeks premature. January seventeenth of
twenty twenty. We all know what happened in March of
twenty twenty. I remember vividly saying to my wife in
call it April, no, no, no, no, excuse me. It
was like June first, I don't know that I can
(52:42):
take anymore. It was just super stressed, money stress, pandemic stress,
new baby stress, feeling over my dad's dementia diagnosis was
it was, it was ugly Alzheimer's. It's a terrible, terrible,
horrible disease. I was like, I honestly don't know that
I can take any more. Three days later, my brother
(53:03):
gets diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. You just learn that
you can deal with more than you expect, and it
hurts if you stay in bed, and it hurts if
you get up, so you may as well get the
fuck up. Like that's what I've learned. If I've learned anything,
(53:27):
I have cried, I've been in therapy. I have definitely
not handled everything perfectly throughout this process, but I have
learned that it hurts either way, so you may as
well keep going because your world can change with a
phone call tomorrow. So I don't know if that answers
(53:50):
your question, but I would not have said that I
was equipped to handle it. And it still devastates me
every day that my brother is in here, but somehow
I'm still here and I'm doing what I'm doing well.
Speaker 2 (54:04):
I first of all, I appreciate you answering that it's
probably too personal, but I also think I knew you'd
go to a place because you're so capable that somebody
who's listening to our podcast and dealing with a very
similar situation in the family. And when I heard your story,
(54:26):
it made me think about a friend I had years
ago in Vegas that lost his wife. And so first
of all, I thank you for sharing that, but it's
you know, it goes back to a saying I it's
kind of a cliche, but we've heard it before, as
you just never know what people have gone through in
a day. Just be nice to people. I know social
(54:47):
media does not elevate the life experience. It deteriorates it.
That's why I stay away.
Speaker 1 (54:53):
So that was a.
Speaker 2 (54:55):
Pretty remarkable answer, and I do, Danny, I appreciate that,
and I don't want to end on this because you're
you're not a down or you're you're it's a really
raw topic and I thought it was I wanted to hear.
I wouldn't have been equipped. I don't know how you
would have handled it.
Speaker 1 (55:12):
And I guess I think you probably would have been,
but you don't know until you're confronted with it. And
I'm glad that you haven't been, and you don't want
anybody to to deal with it, and and I you know,
grief is hard, man, Grief is really hard, and yeah,
it is. It is a downer, but it is relatable. Yeah,
(55:33):
there's a there's a thing called anticipatory grief, which I
didn't even know about. But it's like when you get
a terminal diagnosis and then you're like grieving and you're
like waiting for the actual person to die, and you think,
like you have you you're dealing with anticipatory grief, Like
you know eventually your dad's going to pass away, he
has Alzheimer's. You know your brother's going to pass away,
he's got terminal brain cancer. Uh, and then it happens
and it's like, oh, it doesn't actually replace the real grief,
(55:54):
so you just deal with it. And because you have
literally no other choice. But I don't know. Man, buy
a book, I'll donate a portion of it to brain
cancer research.
Speaker 2 (56:04):
And yeah, it's such a thank you, it really is.
So we're thank you you bet. I want to circle back.
Is that Chicago to me is I kind of feel
Chicago people. There is a divide. Sometimes it's financial, sometimes
(56:25):
it's in reach, obviously, between syndicated, national and local. I
think local sports radio is much better than national sports radio.
And I think you're at the top of the heap.
And I say that the best show I've ever heard.
I think you're the best talent doing it in the country.
I think Felger and Mas and Boston have the ability
to be in a in a very tribal town, incredibly
(56:50):
honest and hated and adored simultaneously. It's a really good listen.
Speaker 1 (56:55):
Yeah, pull huge numbers.
Speaker 2 (56:57):
Yeah, it's it's a I used to as I was,
you know, crafting this scrawny physique. I used to sit
in my my downstairs in my weight room and just
sit there and I would watch them for, you know,
an hour. Chicago is to me, it's just everything I
watch on TV. Local TV still matters. It looks like syndicated,
it looked like national. It's I mean, Lester Holt, I
(57:19):
think came from Chicago. My buddy Joe Donlin's an anchor
in Chicago. I think he's as good as local anchor
as you're going to get in the country Chicago sports radio.
To me, I love listening to it because it's just
the perfect mix of tribal, smart insane. Oh yeah, if
you have recently taken a rare you're a liked figure
(57:42):
the voice, You're tolerant, you're bright, but you are a
little bit you kind of moved into a space. As
far as I can tell, you were not really a
Justin's Fields guy. And the city was you know, of
course they're clinging to it working. How the Bears were
clinging to it. They wanted to say, we'll get nine
picks for Caleb Williams. Everybody wanted it to work. So
(58:04):
what is it like now, probably for the first time
in your career as being a villain for a few months.
Speaker 1 (58:10):
Okay, so this is fascinating. I'm gonna take off my
headset for just one second because this will this will
make sense. So because this is there is an exact
moment when my likability plummeted, and wow, I just have
to pull out a prop real quick. I didn't know
we're gonna talk about this hold on. So I I
commissioned a Caleb Williams thirteen Bears Jersey the day they
(58:35):
got the number one pick. So with a week left
in the season, and so Justin Fields is still on
the Bears. It's been He's likable, he's fun, he's exciting.
He was voted the eighty sixth best player in the
NFL coming off of the twenty twenty two season when
they had the most dead cap space and no one
(58:56):
else get on the team. People love Justin Fields, and
the Bears did not try him well and it was
not fair and they did not build around him. In
the situation that Caleb was walking into is a thousand times,
but life isn't fair. And I was like, listen, here's
the thing. I like hangarsteak, but I've got a chance
for eight five wago and it's cheaper for some reason,
(59:16):
for some reason, the wago is cheaper than the hangerstake. Like,
I'm going to go for it every time. And so
when I people were like I, because now everyone's pumped
for Caleb. But I was just like, this is how
it's going to end. And I told them how it
was going to end before they were ready to hear
how it was going to end. And if I would
have just had the take, people would have really disagreed.
(59:40):
But for some reason, the fact that I spent one
hundred and forty dollars on a jersey and like became
a prop comic for a minute and like showed like
I showed you how positive I was that this was
how it was going to end. Buddy? Were people mean
to me on the internet? Like, man, But so weird
(01:00:01):
about the whole thing is that I'm gonna be right.
Like I bet mitchter Bisky at two hunderd to one
to an MVP blew up in my face. I said
there was a zero percent chance the White Sox we're
gonna hire Tony LaRussa blew up in my face. Like
I've been wrong plenty of times. We give twenty hours
a week of opinions, You're gonna be wrong all the time.
But man, did people hate this jersey? But now it's
(01:00:25):
gonna be the number one selling jersey in the NFL
for the next like five years. So I'm a I
don't know if you knew this. I'm a fashion icon.
I'm a trendsetter. I'm ahead of the curve. People are
dressing like me now, and I frankly love it. But yeah,
did I have it on my board that the thing
that would make me most hated is the thing that
(01:00:47):
I have been the most right about. No, that I
did not expect that to be my how my career
is gone. But now people are being pretty nicecause they're
prety excited about Kaleb Boyams.
Speaker 2 (01:00:57):
Should be pipeline to the pros D three small college.
Nobody's rose to rule in the NBA ben Kaplan Danny Parkins,
forward by Jeff N. Gundy. I say this authentically and
accurately and with one hundred percent belief. I think you're
(01:01:19):
how old you now? Forty two, forty three, forty What?
How old are you?
Speaker 1 (01:01:22):
I'm thirty eight.
Speaker 2 (01:01:23):
Jesus Christ. It's disgusting how good you are at thirty eight.
It's really such a bummer. I was hoping you were
fifty four and this was the years of training and
you are really gifted.
Speaker 1 (01:01:34):
And oh, actually, hey, I'm thirty seven. I turned thirty eight,
and I'll tell you're just a jerk.
Speaker 2 (01:01:39):
Now now you're just piling on it. Anyway, You're great
at what you do. I love listening and congratulations on
the book, your career, your ascension, and I love you man.
I think I just think you're just everything wrapped in empathy, curiosity,
Smart's funny and a little bit of a villain. That's okay,
it's fun. Lebron didn't like it in Miami, but you
(01:02:02):
know it is. It's part of the merry go round
of our life.
Speaker 1 (01:02:05):
I can handle it and it's just sports at the
end of the day, so like I can't. I can't
get take it all too seriously. But no, listen, thank
you for the kind words and the platform and supporting
this and trying to hire me a couple of years ago.
Speaker 2 (01:02:22):
And I'm not done. I'm not done with that. So
we'll make another run on that, buddy.
Speaker 1 (01:02:26):
I appreciate you, Colin.
Speaker 2 (01:02:28):
Thank you very much, the Vine, thanks so much for listening.
If you've enjoyed the podcast, take a moment, rate and review.
Host
Colin Cowherd
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