All Episodes

May 2, 2025 • 13 mins
Greg Popovich steps down as head coach; to remain as Team President.
Mark as Played
Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello everyone, It's Andy Everett. Thank you so much for
listening to Ticket seven sixty and to my radio show
from four pm to seven pm every day on Ticket
seven sixty Sports Radio AM seven sixty to Ticket Now
stay tuned for the podcast. It's coming up next. Don't
forget to subscribe to Ticket seven sixty dot com. You
can also participate in the show via our feedback talkback button.

(00:22):
Just hit that big red microphone icon at Ticket seven
sixty dot com on the iheartapp enjoy this podcast of
the Andie Ever Show. Here we go on a Friday,
and it is a big news Friday day as we
get things kicked off on the program the final three
hours of our sports broadcasting week here on the Ticket

(00:42):
for our local stuff. And I came in here today
about eleven o'clock and I'm on sites the games last night.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
What are we going to talk about today?

Speaker 1 (00:50):
And it didn't take much longer than that for the
phone to start buzzing, and we now know what we're
talking about. And if you have been living under a
rock for the last five hours and do not know,
Greg Popovich has decided to step down as the head
coach of the Spurs he'll stay in a role as
his team president of basketball operations. I mean, do you
ever at the audio disseminators today or Shane Carter and

(01:10):
of course Michael Bartlett, the producer of this show. You
know it's eerily I've been listening to Doug Gottlieb today
within the Antonio daniels on. I heard a little bit
of a colleague coward with Jason McIntyre talking about what
he thought today, and he's wrong because Phil Jackson's not

(01:31):
the better coach, or neither is Red Arbak.

Speaker 2 (01:33):
He had four teams he had to beat back then.

Speaker 1 (01:36):
But it's almost like we're doing a eulogy's and it's
not that it's a eulogy for his coaching career, but
he's still alive and he's still in good shape, and
people are saying that he's in good spirits and he's
capable of running a basketball team. We do kind of
have to put a bow to day on his basketball
coaching years, but I want to make I think he's going.

Speaker 2 (01:58):
To be around the team for a while.

Speaker 1 (02:00):
He's still going to have some endpoint input in the decisions,
as he should, and I'm sure that the team basically
said you know, you you write your job description and
tell us what you want to get done, and we'll
do it. But to a lot of people are are
kind of in mourning today. I understand why others are
kind of excited about what the future holds. Some do

(02:22):
not like the decision for the Spurs to to keep
Mitch Johnson, But I'm going to give you a reason
why they should.

Speaker 2 (02:28):
You know, here a little bit uh and we.

Speaker 1 (02:30):
Got a bunch of a bunch of Spurs stuff to
get to. But what was your first reaction today when
you saw the uh uh, the ESPN or whatever notification
you got that Pop.

Speaker 2 (02:42):
Was stepping down.

Speaker 3 (02:43):
Well, first off, Andy, I was curled up in a
corner crying, just saying why why I'm I'm in absolute
mourning right now because the past two years I've had
to I've had to go on without Bill Land Spurs
TV retiring, My guy of seventeen years working with Bill Shoning.

Speaker 2 (03:04):
Retires, Pop retires. Andy.

Speaker 3 (03:08):
I swear to God, if you tell me you're retiring
this year, I'm going to lose it and I'm gonna
go pulling Aaron Rodgers and live in the darkness.

Speaker 1 (03:14):
I have way too much responsibility to ever retire.

Speaker 3 (03:18):
The weather right now is gloomy outside. It's very ominous
of what has happened today.

Speaker 2 (03:24):
It is.

Speaker 3 (03:27):
It sucks, but like you mentioned, he's still gonna be
with an organization.

Speaker 1 (03:31):
Everything ends everything, there's a shelf life to everything.

Speaker 2 (03:36):
And we were looking earlier.

Speaker 1 (03:39):
There's Eddie Robinson who coached at Grambling for fifty six years,
and Joe Patardo coached at the Penn State for forty six.
I believe George Hallis had forty years with some breaks
in between for World War Two and a couple of
personal years that he took off. And then you have
Pop and Curly Lambeau and Tom Landry, and that's the
royalty that we're speaking about. When it comes to the

(04:01):
longevity of coaches. I'll go out on a limb right
now because I will probably say, is he in thirty years,
I'll be eighteen, I'll be sixty, I'll be ninety one.
So I would bet that whoever is currently coaching at
every job in North America will not be coaching in
thirty years, and not at the team that they're coaching at.
They may be someplace else, but I doubt very seriously

(04:22):
of over the next thirty years, we see a coach
do what Pop has done for the last twenty nine.

Speaker 3 (04:28):
I mean, the only one I could say, maybe might
push that would be Mike Tomlin because Pittsburgh Mike.

Speaker 1 (04:38):
DW Mike Tomlin's at seventeen right now, so he'd have
to go twelve more years.

Speaker 3 (04:43):
How old is Mike Tomlin. Mike Tomlin is he was
born in seventy two. So that's I'm trying to do
quick math in my head. That's what fifty four? Okay,
So I mean, no, fifty fifty two?

Speaker 1 (05:00):
All right, yeah'll be fifty He's worth seree, He'll be
fifty three whenever his.

Speaker 3 (05:04):
Birthday is his He just turned fifty three last month, right, well,
that would be eighty three. It's not it's it's he's
not going to coach for thirty more years.

Speaker 1 (05:17):
But to Mike Tomlin could get twelve more seasons because Pittsburgh,
as you said, doesn't change coaches. I've got a lot
of thoughts on Pop today. We'll get into all the
details a little bit deeper in the next segment. But
as I said, everything comes to an end and any time,
and I don't think the ability to coach a basketball

(05:37):
game if you could do it in a less than
I guess for less than a better word, a static
environment where there's no travel and there's no prep, and
there's no post prep.

Speaker 2 (05:47):
Coaching involves a lot.

Speaker 1 (05:49):
I had a conversation on Facebook with somebody a couple
of years ago, and they were talking about when Pop
might retire, and I said, you have to understand, it's
not just standing on the sidelines for two and a
half hours and directing traffic. There's a method of the
madness of knowing who to start, who to sub for,
how to go about it, how do yall officials, how to.

Speaker 2 (06:07):
Yell at your team.

Speaker 1 (06:09):
But more importantly, there is a ton of prep that
takes place before a game and after a game. And
the retort from this person on Facebook was, well, don't
you think Pop has somebody else doing that for him?

Speaker 2 (06:21):
And I said, I would doubt it.

Speaker 1 (06:23):
I have never seen a coach, no matter how long
they've been coaching, that doesn't watch the tape of the game.
After the game, they sit there and they dissect the
entire game, and a two and a half hour game
may take four hours to watch, and then they break
down what they liked and didn't like and they'll mark
things on there for their video guys to pull his
clips so they can explain to players I know from

(06:46):
the UTSA perspective, whether it was Brooks Thompson or Steve
Vinson and now Austin Claunch. When they get back on
the bus, or they get back at the hotel or
they go home, they're rewatching the game and then they're
a value that the video guy are pulling things that
the coaches are specifically looking for. This is a twenty
hour a day job in the regular season, and the

(07:08):
one thing that you need when you've had the medical
issues that Pop has had his rest and for twenty
nine seasons, you don't get a lot of rest.

Speaker 2 (07:17):
Just it doesn't happen.

Speaker 1 (07:19):
And so there's you know, you can make a decision
on a trade, or you can help make a decision
on a personnel move, but you can't necessarily do all
the things that are going to prepare you to coach
a game because you have to be involved in the
film sessions, you have to be involved in the coaches meetings.
There's usually a get together after games with coaches, either

(07:39):
on a plane or in a hotel room to talk
for thirty forty minutes about what they're going to, what
their assignments are, and teams these days now have several
assistant coaches and several video guys, and some of those
guys travel, and some of those guys are only on
the bench at home or on the back of the
bench at home. There's so much that goes in to
being ahead basketball coach that you just can't say I'm

(08:02):
going to sit here and coach the game and go home.

Speaker 2 (08:04):
It doesn't work that way. And it doesn't matter whether
you're read our.

Speaker 1 (08:06):
Block or Phil Jackson or Greg Popovich or somebody that's
never coached before and is doing it for the first time.
That's the preparation that goes into doing.

Speaker 3 (08:15):
This, unless you're Doug Gottlieb, because then you're worried about
your your rach.

Speaker 1 (08:20):
I guarantee you Doug Gottlieb during the season probably slept
an average of about four hours a night.

Speaker 2 (08:25):
If that it's like my regular sleeping schedule. I guarantee
you that.

Speaker 1 (08:30):
Now I'll say this, Doug Gottlieb has a lot of
help in Fox Sports. Here's the topics we got for today.
Here's my opinions on them. You know, I can. What
I do when I prepare for this show is I
come up with ten to fifteen topics that I want
to talk about, and we win on them down to
what we have time for in the hour. And I
have an opinion on every one of them, and I

(08:52):
kind of I may jot down a couple of ideas
that I want to remember for me to preparation this
show is twenty four to seven putting together everything that
I've done for the last twenty four hours to be
able to do the three hour show. Takes about forty
five minutes to an hour to accumulate what I've either

(09:13):
kept track of in my mind or put on a
note in my phone or given myself a voice text
or whatever, Hey let's talk about this tomorrow, or I
emailed you or I texted you about it. So the
sports talk host is in twenty four to seven prep mode.
Getting everything ready to go for show doesn't take as
long because you've been prepping every minute of the day.

(09:35):
A basketball coach is much different on game days. With Gottlieb,
he's either not doing his show, or he's doing his
show after he's done his practice or his shoot around,
or he's doing part of the show. He's not leaving
stones unturned from the basketball standpoint to do the show.
It does the basketball coaching stuff, I assure you, takes

(09:56):
far more time than for Jason Stewart or Bauer to
call him up and go, hey, here's ten topics we're
going to talk about today. Twenty minutes later, you can
have an opinion all ten of them.

Speaker 2 (10:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (10:10):
I wonder if maybe what I would say accelerated. Possibly
the decision of Pop making this announcement today was you know,
obviously the little health scared that he had a couple
of weeks ago with the fainting. Because you and I
have both talked about it, and you've talked about it
numerous times. Is Pop could be all well and dandy,

(10:35):
but the travel, the stress of having to deal with
the games day in and day.

Speaker 1 (10:41):
In, the travel of itself is detrimental to older people.

Speaker 3 (10:45):
And that could have been something that he looked at
and said, Man, this is me talking, not Pop. He said,
you know, hey, I sat there at the dinner for
two or three hours and I got up too quick,
or you know, maybe something didn't medicine wise, didn't act
with them the proper way. He's like well, maybe I
don't want to possibly deal with that on travel days

(11:08):
and things like that.

Speaker 1 (11:09):
Here's the decision, though, that the organization has to make.
Who's going to be the coach, who are we drafting,
what lottery guys are we looking at, who are we
inviting to training camp? When are we having training camp,
Which training camp are we going to? And all of
those things are going to take place in the next
two months. May is lottery month, in june's draft month,

(11:29):
and then you've got two weeks of accumulating free agents
and signing them around July tenth or twelfth, and so
the next say seventy days are critical to what's going
to happen once October OL's around. You can't wait till
October to make a decision on whether you're going to
coach or not exactly. And if you don't want Mitch,
if you didn't want Mitch Johnson and all the other
candidates that are possibly out there, which we'll talk about

(11:51):
in a little bit, then you have to make that
decision now, and you have to let your team know.
You have to let your players who are player options.
You have players who you may want to resign, You
have players that you want to sign, here's what we're
doing so that there's no questions. You can't have that
linger post draft into June and July and then at
the last minute go okay, here's what we're going to do.

(12:12):
And and if you're even if your decision is Mitch
Johnson needs to have a game plan. And I've got
a lot of thoughts on him as the next coach,
and I think there's a lot of players on this
team that want him to do that.

Speaker 2 (12:23):
So we'll get into that as well.

Speaker 3 (12:24):
I do think it's funny real quick of in typical
pop in spurs, you know, formation of we get the word,
we get the email, you know, hey, get a retire
step down whatever, and then not more than less than
ten minutes later, pop's light. Yeah, I don't want the
limelight on me. Hey, by the way, Mitch is the
head coach. Yeah, talk about Mitch, don't talk about me.

(12:47):
Let him answer the tough questions. See how he does
in the end of quarters. We'll get into that coming
up here in just a little bit. Uh.

Speaker 1 (12:54):
And I've got some I've had some people ask me
today what I think about Mitch Johnson being the coach,
and I I'll give you what I think and we'll
talk about that in a little bit as well. Let's
talk about our favorite pop moments and a few other
Greg Popovich stuff coming up. In the next segment, we'll
get into the games from last night. The CJ Cup
Byron Nelson is back underway after a rain delay.

Speaker 2 (13:15):
We'll touch on that. We've got Caitlin.

Speaker 1 (13:18):
Clark news, We've got NCAA news, and a whole bunch more.

Speaker 2 (13:20):
It's straight ahead on the ticket.
Advertise With Us

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know
Dateline NBC

Dateline NBC

Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com

On Purpose with Jay Shetty

On Purpose with Jay Shetty

I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!

Music, radio and podcasts, all free. Listen online or download the iHeart App.

Connect

© 2025 iHeartMedia, Inc.