100 Bold Predictions for the 2025 NFL Season

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Speaker 2 The Heed the Call Podcast

Speaker 2 has an open invite to Kevin Harland for a weekend at a remote locked cabin.

Speaker 2 It's there, Kev.

Speaker 2 Just join us. No one knows anything.
No one ever will. Welcome to Heed the Call.

Speaker 2 Dan Hansis, Mark Sessler,

Speaker 2 Connor Orr, Gravy on the Ones and Twos.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 what's the expression?

Speaker 2 You don't look a gift horse in the mouth, I believe it is.

Speaker 3 I believe it's the second show you've asked if that is the expression, and I believe that is the correct answer.

Speaker 2 And I don't know what it means.

Speaker 2 I mean, I believe I know what the expression means, but

Speaker 2 I don't know enough about horses to understand

Speaker 2 why you would not do such a thing. I guess if the horse was great

Speaker 2 from a,

Speaker 2 you know, five feet away, you don't need to look in its mouth to find more, to find issues with it. I have no idea.
Okay.

Speaker 2 Sound off in the comments.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 when I see, and it landed last week, a Connor Orr

Speaker 2 Sports Illustrated

Speaker 2 offseason column entitled 100 Bold Predictions for the 2025 NFL season. Mark, we do not look a gift horse in the mouth.
We will build content around that.

Speaker 2 That's a gimme. That's a gimme.
We'll take it.

Speaker 3 It's a home run out of the post.

Speaker 2 In early June, we'll take it. We'll take it.

Speaker 3 By the way, gift horse, I've just looked it up and chat GPT informs me that

Speaker 3 it does not mean anything. It's not a horse per se.
It is a gift at all. So this is a gift.
It's not about horses. And

Speaker 2 one of the things that I've not like a horse, like, oh, this horse has a lot of tartar built up, so I'm not going to take the horse. It's not about, do horses have disgusting mouths?

Speaker 2 I don't, you know, they are kind of gross. They've got like big human teeth almost.

Speaker 2 I always had an issue with the mouth of a horse.

Speaker 2 I don't know if you ever saw Mr. Ed or anything like that.

Speaker 2 It's a bit of a weird thing when they flap their gums and then you get a good look at those chompers. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's keep those things.

Speaker 2 Let's seal those up.

Speaker 2 Strong take. take.

Speaker 3 We've waited 12 years, 13 years from you for that take, and here we go.

Speaker 2 So, anyway, Connor, thank you. We are going to now

Speaker 2 consume and cannibalize your content for this show. And

Speaker 2 we're very thought, it's very thoughtful of you to drive us there during this quiet time in the NFL calendar.

Speaker 4 As someone who is absolutely addicted to attention, I couldn't think of any other way I'd rather spend the first day of my 37th year on this planet.

Speaker 2 So, oh my goodness.

Speaker 3 Wait a minute.

Speaker 2 Happy birthday, buddy. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Always, you know, it's always tricky when it is your birthday

Speaker 2 and you don't want to be like, hey, it's my birthday, guys. And then you got to find a little way to

Speaker 2 just drop it in there. I think Connor just, it was a masterclass from Orr.

Speaker 4 You know what it is? I say that to say this,

Speaker 4 that 37 is the, you know, it seems like an obscure age, but if you look at some of the stats, I'm about halfway now to an average male American lifespan. Ego.
And halfway.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 it's great. I'm just, I'm happy to be here.
So this is like, and it's, and this show is a big part of it.

Speaker 2 So that's nice.

Speaker 2 That would be the saddest midlife crisis ever. Like, oh, I'm on a podcast I enjoy.

Speaker 2 We need to go bigger.

Speaker 2 We need to trade in the TNC.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 4 The TNC for some 2C. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Take some 2C and then take out the TNC. All right, enough.

Speaker 2 Stupid. And right before we started, before we get into this list, and we're also going to hit up the mailbag, the long-awaited mailbag that our producer berated the audience at the end of

Speaker 2 Tuesday's show, which I quite enjoyed, by the way. I was thrilled by it.

Speaker 2 A little piss and vinegar from Gravedigger.

Speaker 2 Justin, when I gave, I paid Connor a compliment about the upcoming column we're going to discuss here. And I know, Mark, you enjoyed it quite a bit as well.
You had sent a text earlier this week.

Speaker 2 And Justin then chimed in right before we started.

Speaker 2 I was the first to read it.

Speaker 5 I did not say it in that way. I said, as the first to read the article, I agree, Connor, that it was great.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I'm just saying.

Speaker 3 What did you earn from that, from Dan and myself, beyond whatever you're doing? Yeah, here's

Speaker 2 a classic backfire on this is it really doesn't matter who let it read it for a second or third, but Justin thought it would give him some pop with Connor and Connor doesn't give a shit, but you know what,

Speaker 2 you know, who does give a shit? Dan and Mark, you know, in reverse of he the call, Dan hands us to Mark Sessler. Now we're not happy with Justin, so was it worth, was the juice worth a squeeze?

Speaker 2 I guess is the question back to you now, Justin.

Speaker 5 For me, the action is the juice.

Speaker 2 No, um,

Speaker 2 there we go. No, sit on that, stay on on that.
You actually managed to navigate your way out of that one.

Speaker 3 Dan,

Speaker 3 before you put any blue ribbons on yourself here,

Speaker 3 I just want to say that it was, yes, I maybe read it probably second, and I don't really care about the order, but I sent a text to Connor on our group thread and said, Connor Colin, just wanted to tell you how glorious and wild your 100 article is.

Speaker 3 The writing is my favorite. About 35 minutes pass, and Dan texts back, weird, that's not what you said to me.
So, you know, we're not all pure here.

Speaker 3 That is not something I ever said to you. That is simply a, and I just wrote back to stinky

Speaker 2 house because that's a big

Speaker 1 move.

Speaker 2 Because you were also, in your own way, trying to lift yourself up, and then you were trying to box out Zuzzer, and Tugboats saw right through it.

Speaker 2 So I had decided I'll drop this little grenade in here and then not send another text the rest of the night.

Speaker 3 I should have, if I were in a more noble space, because I was carried away by the piece itself,

Speaker 3 I should have just texted Connor one-on-one. That would have been classier and not involved.

Speaker 2 You said you went with your old Glory Boy routine, and it blew up in your face.

Speaker 3 We've all learned something.

Speaker 2 This is the final episode of Heed the Call with Dan Hanses and Mark Sessler. No.
All right, let's get into it. Let's get into it.
Again,

Speaker 2 100 bold predictions for the 2025 NFL season. Metrics gold.
It did well, I would imagine, right? Connor?

Speaker 4 There's a reason we keep doing it.

Speaker 2 Yes. Yeah, I've seen it aggregated a lot of places.
I have to say, as it's now been a couple of years, Mark, since we stopped writing regularly,

Speaker 2 this is the type of piece that I would have written on the old NFL.com site. And it did actually, as I was enjoying it, I was also thinking to myself, man, this is hard.

Speaker 2 It's hard to write this stuff.

Speaker 2 And you want to be informative and you want to make it fun and you want to put some some jokes in there too and like writing is hard work and uh we did it for many years and now we're podcasters mark um but i just want to say uh it did make me a little wistful for this old the old days when we were doing multiple things at once and that era is over well not for all not for all the articles i was asked to do it doesn't make me wistful for all of them but like i think one thing that i'll say quickly like the arian foster's hamstring injury yet to heal post i don't i don't miss those

Speaker 3 there were a couple of those, but when you have to list 100 things, it would be easy if you were a C-plus writer to have like 51 through 70 kind of just fade, be kind of just, you're kind of throwing them out there.

Speaker 3 You're mailing it in. And like there is not one item here that I viewed as mailed in.

Speaker 2 That's why I was looking at

Speaker 2 two thirds of it.

Speaker 2 All right.

Speaker 2 Have we exhausted? I mean, how many more compliments can we pay before we actually talk about the column?

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 2 We'll dive in. We all loved it, Connor.

Speaker 2 Okay. Thank you.

Speaker 2 And now I'm thinking about it also, the NFL.com thing, it's still on my radar and it's grinding my gears that all three of our bylines have been wiped from the history of that website.

Speaker 3 Mine have not, apparently.

Speaker 4 Not only that, Dan, but one of my favorite stories that I went to look up the other day

Speaker 4 is under somebody else's byline who's still there.

Speaker 2 Justin, can you, and this will be for a future show because it's now reached the point where it's actionable.

Speaker 2 I want to call NFL Media up. I'm going to call their main number, and I'm going to start asking questions about this.
And we're going to do it on the show. We'll do it live on the show.

Speaker 3 I have three letters for you, though. CMS.

Speaker 3 Every once in a while, they would change the whole system, and it would blow so much stuff up. Like, did someone go through and pinpoint us and remove us?

Speaker 3 This is for next time, but it's like, I want to know what our level of vindication is versus annoyance.

Speaker 2 I don't believe there will be be any vindication, I'll tell you that. But I would like some answers.
That's all.

Speaker 2 I want some basic responsibility taken for, I understand that people don't know what a CMS is.

Speaker 2 It's a content management system, and it's all these different websites run on them, and it's how they, you know, essentially get the...

Speaker 2 Thank you.

Speaker 2 It's how it goes from a Word document or whatever to into the system to get up on a website.

Speaker 2 And NFL Media is not the only company that changes CMS systems semi-regularly, but there has to be, well, yeah, we'll stick a pin in it.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 5 It's a fiery spin, three minutes and 15 seconds since you said, let's get into it.

Speaker 2 And you have yet to get into it. Just saying.

Speaker 2 All right. That's fair.
That's fair. It's time.

Speaker 2 All right. 100 bold predictions.

Speaker 2 And you did do

Speaker 2 this is important work in the kind of subhead, Connor.

Speaker 2 You did this exercise a year ago, as you've alluded to. It's a hit.
and you got plenty right. And you spotlighted some that you got right, such as

Speaker 2 lingering issues from the Tom Brady roast, Jaden Daniels, offensive rookie of the year,

Speaker 2 Pats avoiding number one pick, Sanders family in the NFL draft being a big storyline, Cooper DeGene becoming a folk hero in Philly. Great job.
Big storyline. All good stuff.

Speaker 2 And we don't need, like, the next graph being 75 things you got wrong would maybe have been fair and balanced, but we don't need to do that. We just focus on what you got right, okay? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 So let's go through it. Let's go through the ones that kind of jumped out to us.
Some we agree with, some we don't agree with.

Speaker 2 The first one, I don't know if I agree or disagree, but I just found it to be interesting. Number seven on the list, Derek Carr will appear in an NFL game.

Speaker 2 We understand that Carr somewhat mysteriously retired last month, citing a shoulder injury that wasn't even bad enough to have him on an injury report.

Speaker 2 We know the Saints are in a team in transition finally, perhaps, and he wasn't part of their future and all that. I think the question here I have,

Speaker 2 he's only 34 years old, right?

Speaker 2 The question I have, Connor,

Speaker 2 contractually,

Speaker 2 is it an impossibility to get him on the field with someone else?

Speaker 2 Because I would think that would be a bigger landmine for this prediction coming true than actually him wanting to actually play once once he's feeling better, if indeed the shoulder injury is not as serious as it was kind of put forth publicly.

Speaker 2 I wonder if that would be the biggest roadblock and if a Derek Carr return might be forced to 2026 as a result. That's kind of my big thought on that one.

Speaker 4 It would certainly be easier. I would just wonder if there is a situation out there and you can never underestimate the power of boredom.

Speaker 4 I mean, Derek Carr sitting there and, you know, and I'm not, this is not me commenting on Derek Carr in particular, but like everyone always says, like, ah, I want to spend more time with my kids.

Speaker 4 And then you get like, nothing.

Speaker 2 You're overrated.

Speaker 4 And you're just like, f, I gotta, I gotta figure something out here.

Speaker 4 And I feel like, you know, if Jared Goff gets hurt in October and all of a sudden Dan Campbell calls, it's like, hey, let's just, let's just make it happen.

Speaker 4 I mean, there would have to be obviously a reinstatement. There would have to be some sort of compensation.

Speaker 4 There would have to be at a time when your salary cap is already settled, there would have to be an upending of that and not a small amount of money that would have to move hands.

Speaker 4 And so I think it's just one of those scenarios where, you know, if you're one of these top three or four teams that just is so close, I think Derek Carr is one of those guys that is probably on the bottom end of the,

Speaker 4 in that golf bedroom, you know, like in that golf

Speaker 4 section of Walmart where you're just like, okay, like I could, I could probably make it happen with that.

Speaker 3 It kind of feels like when Matt Ryan left and there were all these whispers about Matt Ryan potentially coming back and here or there.

Speaker 3 I guess for me, it's like, how real is this shoulder situation and how much recuperation time? Maybe it's like a November ad for someone.

Speaker 3 Like that, that makes sense later in the year if he's truly healthy.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And Matt Ryan was, you know, cooked.
you know, with a fork sticking out of his back after we saw that Colt season.

Speaker 2 Carr, I know, is nobody's favorite, but I've always found him to be, at the very least, it's a reason why when we've done the Dalton Scale conversation, he's usually been in that discussion.

Speaker 2 Like he's a middle-of-the-pack passer. There are plenty of teams that are going to would love to have a guy like that on their team.

Speaker 2 Maybe the Steelers, if Aaron Rodgers bangs them. We'll get to him a little bit later, I think.
I'll throw out another one here. Kyler Murray will play his final snaps for the Cardinals.
This is one.

Speaker 2 This is number eight on your list. One I totally

Speaker 2 with you on. I think that you make a very good point that Murray's dead cap number almost halves after this season.
So this gives the Cardinals their first realistic out to move on.

Speaker 2 And unless he re-injures himself or craters,

Speaker 2 he'll probably come out of the season being the same general guy where it's like, man, he's got so much talent. And talent means that maybe he's tradable.

Speaker 2 Or as you're pointing out, maybe they can move on in a different way, even beyond a trade.

Speaker 2 There is a lot to this one. I think the Cardinals, how many years are they in with him now? About four or five years at this point.

Speaker 2 It's been at least four years, right?

Speaker 2 Justin, can you check that? Yeah, like, so Murray, I believe, is going to be under a lot of pressure to finally put something together, and he's in a tough division.

Speaker 2 So I can see this going in a different direction.

Speaker 4 So if you look at

Speaker 4 some of the

Speaker 4 Some of the advanced stats, which again is not something that I love to do, but sometimes helps formulate the basis of your preseason predictions because you look at how the year ended last last year, and then you look at the draft, and then you imagine what could be.

Speaker 4 I think Jonathan Gannon's defense is a potential sleeping giant.

Speaker 4 And the additions that they made, like Walter Nolan in the draft, I think this guy may be the most singularly talented defensive player in the draft and could just, you know, but there's a lot that has to work out with him, right?

Speaker 4 The attitude, you got to get him on gear and stuff.

Speaker 4 But if that defense takes a massive step forward and the Cardinals are looking good, and you're still getting that that kind of hard ceiling on Kyler.

Speaker 4 You're a team that's looking at it and saying, okay, we have the coach. The coach is coaching his side of the ball well.
We have Marvin Harrison. We have McBride.

Speaker 4 We have all these talented skill position players. The offensive line's coming around.
Do we want to just keep slamming our head against this ceiling?

Speaker 4 Or, you know, I think Murray would have some value in some other places.

Speaker 2 Talk about him.

Speaker 4 So to me, it makes sense as I, because I believe if you have it, it would have to be a post-June one. I'll have to double-check that.
I'll get banged for that, for saying this.

Speaker 4 But I think a post-June one would

Speaker 4 make that easier on somebody. But everyone also screaming about the dead cap.
We've had historic amounts of dead cap swallowed by teams that even like the Broncos making the playoffs with Bo Nicks.

Speaker 4 Like, it's doable. So stop the stuff.

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 they're the ultimate example, right? Like, we wasted so much breath talking about the devastating nature of the Russell Wilson trade for the Broncos.

Speaker 2 And it was a shitty trade that didn't work out, but

Speaker 2 Smash cut to them playing in January this year.

Speaker 2 He's a good one.

Speaker 3 He's felt like a trade candidate for me for a while.

Speaker 3 Okay,

Speaker 3 the 10th item on your list.

Speaker 2 Oh, by the way, this is the seventh season for Kyler Murray coming up. Right.
Seven.

Speaker 2 Well, remember he had that off-season spat where he wanted the contract and he was one of the first guys to erase his image and the cardinals from his all how many quarterbacks get to go into a year seven on the same team they were in one playoff game i was at that game were you with me mark it was with some of the other you were there for jason and i was there with fan and it was a total no-show disaster in the 2021 season otherwise that's it i mean you got it's it's put up or shut up time arizona and your qb okay year seven and only four of them healthy two so right and he's tiny little man with a giant head and helmet

Speaker 3 He looks like a video game character from a distance.

Speaker 2 He looks like an NBA jam when they have the big heads. Yeah, go ahead.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's something that there's something early 90s about it.

Speaker 3 You have Mike Vrabel will win coach of the year. I mean, this is not a terrible concept.
Number 10. I don't know who else, I don't know who, that's number 10.

Speaker 3 I don't know who else you'd put ahead of him in terms of where we are right now.

Speaker 2 I got to push back on this one. I'm so, by the way, I'm so,

Speaker 2 I think because I'm a baseball fan too, and I had to put up with a whole offseason of like the Red Sox are back and like now Alex Corr is on the verge of getting fired.

Speaker 2 I wonder how much a buildup around these New England teams is just like a very powerful and vocal local media contingent, like letting everyone know that the New England team X is back and be ready for their big season.

Speaker 2 Like, I don't, everyone seems to be penciling in the Patriots to be so much better this year. And yes, I am totally biased because I don't like the Patriots.

Speaker 2 But is there one voice out here that is going to step up and say this team has a lot of work to do and aren't quite ready? Like, it's okay if this team improves a little bit.

Speaker 2 The idea that just because Mike Rabel's there, and I know Vrabel's a good coach, but he ain't Bill Parcells, suddenly this team is going to be like really freaky and is like, oh, but they have a great young quarterback.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he's still not proven either yet on any level. So I just, I'm here to just tap the brakes a little bit on this Patriots hype party that's been going on.

Speaker 2 Justin, raising your hand?

Speaker 2 Was that a hand raise?

Speaker 5 I don't know.

Speaker 5 I'm off screen, so just letting you know.

Speaker 2 No, so now you got to have the bubble up on the show with your hand raising meekly. Go ahead.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I just wanted to add to your point that...

Speaker 5 How many times have we seen the team that spends the most money and goes out and signs the biggest high-priced free agents and everyone's like, oh, they added so many pieces, they're going to be dangerous.

Speaker 5 And then they completely fall on their face because there's no chemistry and there's no like strategy to how they're putting these players together. So, I'm interested to see if it works.

Speaker 5 But to Connor's point, coach of the year does frequently go to a coach who is taking over in his first year with the team. That's however, Ben Johnson seems like a

Speaker 5 he's probably too obvious for this bold prediction.

Speaker 2 But there's also like seven of them, there's seven options here, so I don't know why we would say, like, oh, I don't know. And new coaches, yeah, right.
Go ahead.

Speaker 4 Part of this, obviously, when you're this steeped in the prediction game, is a bit of odds playing. And you have to pick a bad team.

Speaker 4 You have to pick a bad team in a division where they're probably going to be able to make some noise. I mean, three of these teams, everyone outside of Buffalo is beatable for New England.

Speaker 4 And you have to look at last year and say that Drake May was freaking awesome with probably the worst roster in the NFL.

Speaker 4 And so Vrabel gets to, it's like the president who does all the work fixing the economy. And then the next one gets to come in and be like, look at how low gas prices are.

Speaker 4 Like, I think that's kind of what Vrabel is walking into.

Speaker 4 And I think that if you're just, if you're purely looking at it from a predictive standpoint, like Ben Johnson's got to go in and coach Caleb Williams, who God knows what he's thinking at this point.

Speaker 4 Now it has come out that he didn't want to play for this franchise. And he's playing, coaching in the toughest, one of the toughest divisions in the NFL.
He's, again, never held that job before.

Speaker 4 So I just think Vrabel is going to have an easier chance at doing it. And at the end of the day, most of the time, I'm just trying to get the most of these predictions right as human beings.

Speaker 3 And one last thing is Vrabel is a good quote. Like he's good with the media.
And I think that stuff can create a bit of a boulder rolling downhill with these late season awards.

Speaker 5 And they've already given him the award once, and they love to go back and give it to somebody they've given it to so that he already has that favor with the voters.

Speaker 2 Don't get me wrong. I think Vrabel was a very sensible hire.

Speaker 2 And I think Robert Kraft messed it up the first time. And if he would have went to to the Jets, I would have been happy that Vrabel was there.
But I also wouldn't have been thinking, wow,

Speaker 2 we just locked in one of the best coaches in the league.

Speaker 2 I'm not there with Vrabel in the way it seems like a lot of other people seem to be, that he's one of those true difference maker guys. Also, just one more thing on the Drake May situation.

Speaker 2 Who's he throwing to still?

Speaker 2 Who's this guy?

Speaker 3 A guy in a boat.

Speaker 2 Is the guy getting up the boat? I don't know. I know he's a Stefan Diggs, 30-year-old wide receiver, you know, in the middle of a

Speaker 2 pink pony party and coming off an ACL.

Speaker 2 He's penciled in as the number one guy with Mac Hollins, Demario Douglas, Kyle Williams, a third-round pick, Hendrick Bourne, Kayshawn Bhute.

Speaker 2 I mean, I'm just saying.

Speaker 5 Remember the name Kyle Williams. Just remember it.
He's going to be a stud.

Speaker 5 Okay.

Speaker 2 Let's see. Let's see.
Let's see. Let's see.
Let's see. Okay, this one's a little double.
You're all in on the Niners.

Speaker 2 Let's see. Christian McCaffrey, number 14, will win comeback player of the year, and the San Francisco 49ers will win 12 games.
This is very strong. I disagree.

Speaker 2 I think, I'm not rooting for this, but I think we've probably seen the best football Christian McCaffrey has to offer. I think, given the nature of his injuries and his age and his workload,

Speaker 2 that we'd be very lucky for him to stay on the field, period. And when he's on the field, I'm not sold that we're going to get the same explosive player.
And then that division,

Speaker 2 I don't know if any team wins 12 games in that division, let alone the Niners who are coming off in 11 lost season. So I'll push back on the Niners.

Speaker 2 Like when we get to later this summer, when we get to the point where Connor, we're like picking wildcard teams, I could probably talk myself into them sneaking in 10 and 7, 9 and 8, but I can't go here with you on either count.

Speaker 4 I thought because I had to do an initial one of these right after the Super Bowl. And this is when I thought that they were going to run it back with the entire core and not let a lot of guys go.

Speaker 4 Like I had them as a undercover Super Bowl team for this coming season. That's how much I believe in this.

Speaker 4 And I think a large part of it has to do with the back end kind of glad handing that they got after taking it on the chin with the schedule last year. If you, yes, the division is difficult,

Speaker 4 but we're wondering about the Cardinals. At this point, Mike McDonald is already asking questions about who his starting quarterback is after they signed Sam Darnold.
So this may or may not go well.

Speaker 4 And you have the 49ers schedule, which has just giant swaths of it.

Speaker 2 Let's take a look at it.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, New Orleans and Arizona and Jacksonville back to back to back.

Speaker 2 Let's start here because with a 12-win season, you've got to come out of the gates fast, right? So let's see, at Seattle, at New Orleans, home Arizona, home Jacksonville.

Speaker 2 That's a pretty nice start to your season.

Speaker 3 But it's also presuming that the Cardinals and Jaguars have not progressed, which I don't agree that they haven't. I think they're going to be much better.

Speaker 3 I mean, you got to stack wins somehow.

Speaker 4 Right before your buy, you get the Panthers and the Browns, and then coming off your bye, you get the Titans.

Speaker 4 Sorry, Justin, and the Colts, who, I mean, the Colts might not even have Anthony Richardson or Daniel Jones starting at that point. Week 14 of that season.

Speaker 4 And that's when you really start to build some momentum. Chicago, again,

Speaker 4 I don't see the murderer's row. And you get both of your Rams games out of the gate pretty early on.
I just, I really like this.

Speaker 2 You're swinging me on this one a little bit, Kyle.

Speaker 4 There's big swaths to the schedule where, and here's the other thing we won't talk about, right?

Speaker 4 It's not just pockets of friendly games, but it's pockets of building momentum, right? And I think there's a lot of momentum pockets here.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think you're right. I'm looking at the schedule now.

Speaker 2 And apologies, I should have looked at it before, but after that first four, at Rams, at Bucs, that's tough, but I'd expect them to kind of split that.

Speaker 2 Then home Atlanta, at Houston, at Giants, home Rams, at Arizona,

Speaker 2 home Carolina, at Cleveland, bye week at 14, which is a nice spot.

Speaker 2 Home Tennessee, as you said, at Colts, home Chicago, home Seattle.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that...

Speaker 2 Now I feel very confident that they will end up being one of my wild card slash division picks. And Tanahan's

Speaker 2 teams. That's a big number.

Speaker 3 But Shanahan's teams have done this almost every year where there's been a slew of injuries and a good team wins five or six games. Then they win 13 the next year.
And it's happened literally like

Speaker 3 back to back, like five or six years in a row. Health is the key.
They need to stay healthy. But they've done it before.
Like I like teams that have shown they can win 12 or 13 games.

Speaker 3 The one thing on the McCaffrey thing,

Speaker 3 if you look at the list of comeback player of the year candidates, it's not very strong. There isn't a DeMar Hamlin sitting out there.
And unless someone emerges.

Speaker 3 Hamlin didn't win it, even though he was fing dead. But everyone, there was always the guy you're like, everyone just assumes they're going to win it.
And there isn't one of those guys this year.

Speaker 3 Christian McCaffrey is probably the closest to it.

Speaker 2 I think just like Justin stole Jordan's trophy and it's still sitting on the bookcase behind him, I believe that

Speaker 2 Joe Flacco should do what's right and mail the comeback player of the year trophy to Western New York. Like, if the voters got it wrong, it doesn't mean Joe has to get it wrong.

Speaker 2 You know, what you brought it up, Mark. I'm sorry.

Speaker 3 No, but if he if he did it, he probably did it in the shadows. That's the kind of guy Joe Flacco is.

Speaker 4 Hamlin's the last guy to come back from life since from death since this guy over here somewhere. I don't know where he is.

Speaker 4 I'm saying we built a whole religion around that guy, you know?

Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly. We can't even get a trophy.
Can't even get a trophy. What a statement on modern society.

Speaker 2 Jesus.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 One other pro San Francisco take on it because you've kind of swung me on this one now. 12 feels strong, but you know, crazier things have happened.

Speaker 2 Robert Salah is the DC there. They've been kind of searching for it a little bit.

Speaker 2 And I thought, I love Sala the person, but thought he was, you know, over-promoted as a head coach. But he's an excellent DC

Speaker 2 and he's going back to a place where he was familiar. He doesn't have maybe the same stacked roster, but I believe in him.

Speaker 2 And the Huff move was another good one that we just talked about earlier this week.

Speaker 2 There are a lot of pieces in place. And on top of it, if you want to buy into the narrative that was forced down our throat last year, we're tired.
We've had too many deep playoff runs.

Speaker 2 Well, they had plenty of time to recover this offseason.

Speaker 4 With Solid too, Dan, I'll just say this. He's a great defensive coordinator, and he's a great defensive coordinator for Kyle Shanahan because they're emotional opposites.

Speaker 4 And when a season gets long and Kyle kind of has that dour personality, Robert Sala is the one. He understands how to play off of Kyle personality-wise and get these guys back up.

Speaker 4 There's just a lot of reasons why I like this team. I think they're being massively undervalued right now.

Speaker 2 Mark, you're up.

Speaker 3 Okay, number 22 on your list, Connor. The Caleb Williams noise will not die down.
Yeah, good one.

Speaker 4 Good one. I mean, we have a player in.

Speaker 2 What does that mean?

Speaker 2 Connor? What does that mean? It will not die down.

Speaker 4 Well, so we had the great Seth Wickersham book excerpt that came out a couple weeks ago about Caleb and his father literally considering going to the USFL instead of playing for the Bears.

Speaker 4 That's where quarterbacks go to die, you know, voicing their concerns about Chicago.

Speaker 4 And you had the Bears going out of their way to get Ben Johnson in this offseason, who I think is probably, like you said, probably the second likeliest person to win coach of the year, but is mercurial in his own right,

Speaker 4 was very much a specific kind of person as an assistant, not really a, let me bring the whole group in in here and give them hugs kind of person. So there could be a lot of fireworks there.

Speaker 4 And I think that we forget ultimately what most players would tell you that I think played on a lot of teams in the NFL. Chicago is the hardest market to play.

Speaker 4 Chicago and Philly are the hardest markets to play in the NFL, period.

Speaker 4 New York always gets that mantle for some reason, but it's not even close.

Speaker 4 And if you have bad mouthed the area, if you've bad mouthed the franchise, and then you come out and you complete 59% of your passes over the first two games of the season, that shit's going to roll downhill, man.

Speaker 4 That's not something that you just get to walk out of if you're Caleb Williams.

Speaker 3 And for the second year in a row, they've been touted as this. Now's the time that they'll all put it together and make the playoffs and Ben Johnson will change everything.

Speaker 3 If this occurs, as you're saying and suggesting, it is a complete disaster. It is a complete disaster.

Speaker 3 I tend to disagree in the sense that I think that if Caleb Williams has a second year growth under a much more consistent coaching staff that was complete chaos that he dealt with a year ago, was not fair to a young player.

Speaker 3 We've seen this before, that if this is a, if Ben Johnson is what people say, that I think you're going to get a better version of Caleb Williams than anything that he said in a book.

Speaker 3 And I think the book's going to be a great book. I hear that, but like, I think it dies down quickly.
Williams and good play will get rid of it.

Speaker 2 Here's, and this is something that you guys didn't agree with me when we talked about this a few weeks back, but this is why there's no reason why the Williams family should have been involved with this book in the first place.

Speaker 2 Like, because what you're saying, Mark, I don't disagree with. Like, he's in better position to succeed.
But what if he doesn't?

Speaker 2 Like, what if this is a rocky start and FYI, a new head coach and a new essentially program in there, could take some time to find its feet. And by lighting this fire.

Speaker 2 in my opinion, unnecessarily, you just add more pressure to the situation. And to your point, Connor, this is Chicago.
This is a team and a city city that has starved for football success.

Speaker 2 And finally, they've been promised this favored son that is going to lift them out of football mediocrity. And I just want to point out one more timeline aspect of this.

Speaker 2 And good job by the publisher of the book because they found a nice soft spot in the spring to kind of drop this excerpt and dominate the news cycle. You know, week one of the NFL.

Speaker 2 The Bears play on Monday night football in week one against the Vikings.

Speaker 2 That's September 8th. You know when this book comes out? September 9th.

Speaker 2 And if they flop against a very good Vikings team potentially,

Speaker 2 and then this book drops the next day, it's going to be a huge distraction and a huge hurdle for that Ben Johnson and that whole team to navigate. And it just felt also unnecessary.

Speaker 2 So while as a football fan who likes drama and talking about juicy things like tell all books, I'm for it, but I just found it to be confounding that Caleb Williams' father would make his son's job harder potentially.

Speaker 2 Straight up. Right.
Yeah. Right.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 All right.

Speaker 2 Let's see. Let's see.
Let's see. Let's see.
Let's see. Let's see.
I like this one because people don't want to hear this one because they're America's team.

Speaker 2 Number 57, the Detroit Lions will win 10 games. Okay.
And

Speaker 2 you list which games they're going to win.

Speaker 2 Why aren't you as bullish on the Lions this year as in recent seasons, I would presume?

Speaker 4 That schedule, again, I mean, a lot of it,

Speaker 4 and

Speaker 4 you could probably say that I'm biased to some degree because as I'm writing this stuff in March and April and May, and we have post-draft hype, and then we also have schedule.

Speaker 4 And so people can say that

Speaker 4 I put a lot of strength on that. But I think it's true.
You're coming off of a second straight season where you're just emotionally destroyed and emotionally dismantled.

Speaker 4 And now you're the NFL's cute little plaything to throw on primetime all the time. You have the hardest division or probably the second hardest division in the NFL.
You lost both of your coordinators.

Speaker 4 Your center just retired, which took place even after this article came out. And sure, count the Lions out.
They reloaded. well in free agency.

Speaker 4 I'm not saying anything against the Lions, but like it is so hard to go back out there and to win that many games again year after year. And there's nothing wrong with a 10-win season.

Speaker 4 It's just, you know, you're still a good team, right?

Speaker 3 Yeah, you're not predicting doom. I mean, you have them being, from what I'm looking at here, they would be swept by the Green Bay Packers, which is not a great look.

Speaker 3 I will say this about Detroit. What team went and did what they did last year as ravaged as they were on defense and still went out in one game?

Speaker 3 So you're getting, if you get a healthy version of the team, I don't know why you can't be as good. But winning as many games, it's like a classic thing.

Speaker 3 Like, you don't have as many wins, but I think they can be as good of a team as they were.

Speaker 4 Look at their stretch post Thanksgiving. So you have the Giants, even before, post-buy, right? Vikings at Commanders, at Eagles.
You have your Giants game, which is a little bit of respite.

Speaker 4 Green Bay, Dallas, Rams, Pittsburgh, Vikings at Chicago in the season finale.

Speaker 4 That's two,

Speaker 4 I mean, those are two games that you probably look at, Chicago and the Giants, and you say, okay, you know, you got those. The rest of those, I mean, all these teams improved in the offseason.

Speaker 4 All these teams got better and gave the Lions trouble last year, too. Like, let's not exactly, like, let's not act like the Lions went out and absolutely pummeled everybody here.

Speaker 4 I mean, there were games that,

Speaker 2 to Mark's point, they were absolutely ravaged. And I think the Lions deserve so much credit from the players, to the coaching staff.

Speaker 2 two of those main coaches, which is fair to say, Ben Johnson and Aaron Glenn are both head coaches elsewhere now.

Speaker 2 The fact that they were still able to go, what were they, 15 and 2 or 14 and 3, whatever they were, with that level of attrition, it can only, you feel like what they might lose in coaching potentially, the roster strength

Speaker 2 should go up here. It's like 10 and 7 would be a big, big, big problem for the Lions because it most likely, right, puts them on the road for the duration of the playoffs.

Speaker 2 And other than maybe the 2010 Aaron Rodgers Packers, has any other team ever gone down that road road and won the whole thing? And let's not get anything wrong.

Speaker 2 Let's not confuse this. This is the Detroit Lions, and it's crazy to even say this if you've followed football for many years, they are very much

Speaker 2 right out of the Steinbrenner doctrine right now. Anything short of a Super Bowl would be considered failure.

Speaker 2 So 10 wins is going to put them on a path where it's almost going to be impossible to get to the Super Bowl. So that would be bitter.

Speaker 4 I want to make myself clear in case Justin clips this in a way that makes me seem like

Speaker 4 okay.

Speaker 2 I'm not saying the Lions were overrated last year.

Speaker 4 I'm not saying the Lions were overrated last year. I'm not saying the Lions were overrated last year.

Speaker 2 But if you could trim that, Justin.

Speaker 4 If you take the premium games that were not in conference, and granted, they played in an excellent conference.

Speaker 4 But if you take the premium games that they played, not in conference, there was an overtime win against the Rams in the opener. There was a loss to the Buccaneers.

Speaker 4 There was

Speaker 4 a

Speaker 4 three-point win over the Texans.

Speaker 4 There was a loss to the Buffalo Bills. And there was a six-point win over a defeated 49ers team on December 30th.
Those were your five premium games outside of your division.

Speaker 4 And granted, the division was gangbusters. The division was awesome.
But, like,

Speaker 4 you know,

Speaker 4 could we have gotten an an idea about this Thanos nature of the team that maybe they're just going to come back down to earth a little bit? Like, everyone eventually settles where they need to be.

Speaker 4 And 15 might have just been a little too high. That's all.

Speaker 2 Fair enough. Fair enough.
Mark, let's do one more each. What do you got?

Speaker 3 I want to pick one that

Speaker 3 got on my radar a little bit.

Speaker 3 Gosh, there's a bunch.

Speaker 3 You suggest that the NFL will float a trial balloon for a draft lottery as the sport drifts further and further away from actual athletic competition and more into an engine for various pieces of content.

Speaker 3 All I would say, I think it's intriguing, like it's an intriguing idea, and there have been suggestions of this and whispers of this, and like, look, it's good for the NBA in theory.

Speaker 3 Why not do it here?

Speaker 3 Here's why I think it's just literally impossible. Like, we just have a scenario where

Speaker 3 Justin's Dallas Mavericks overcame a 1.8% chance to essentially win the top overall pick, right? They should not have. And

Speaker 3 there's something juicy about that. But imagine in the NFL, like this six-win Niners team we would just saw, or a seven-win Cowboys team suddenly as the number one pick.

Speaker 3 The first thing you're thinking is, someone cooked this up. It's too conspiracy-laden.
And

Speaker 3 you say it's anti-tanking, but you'd still see teams nosediving at the end of the season to have a higher chance to win the lottery.

Speaker 3 I don't think it solves any of those problems, but creates a conspiratorial tone to it all. Connor, what do you say?

Speaker 4 Well, so here's, I agree with you. I don't think there should be a lottery.
I think the lottery is dumb.

Speaker 4 I think that the lottery just invites, like you said, more conspiratorial thinking at a time when we have issues with officiating and gambling and all this other stuff that's making the sport seem faker and faker and faker, even though it might not be in reality.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 4 you just proved my point, right?

Speaker 4 What would we do if the 49ers or, you know, some other team like, okay, Arch Manning's coming up and then the Broncos win the, or the Colts win the lottery, whatever it is, right?

Speaker 4 We're going to talk for three weeks during the deadest ass period of the season about how the lottery's rigged. And is the lottery rigged?

Speaker 4 And is the NFL draft lottery brought to you by Gillette rigged? Like, is all this stuff? And it's,

Speaker 4 but I don't think they care, right? Like, this goes back to my point on officiating. If the NFL wanted to fix officiating, they would have fixed it.

Speaker 4 But it's better for all of us to be sitting here talking about how it might be rigged. And against the Chiefs, this ref does this.

Speaker 4 But it just fills every dead crevice of airspace. And the NFL loves it.
Jerry Jones was the original all publicity is good publicity guy.

Speaker 4 He understands that this is all good for the league because we're not going to stop watching.

Speaker 4 And all they're trying to do, now that they have a vice grip on the the American public is to fill every last ounce of your attention span with the NFL.

Speaker 4 And the draft lottery does it better than something that we know at the conclusion of the regular season.

Speaker 3 You also mentioned that Adam Schefter will announce this during Monday night football in late November. So that's precise.

Speaker 4 You know what it is, too? But they're not going to do it. I said, right? Like, it's one of these, like, it's going to be like Giants Seahawks.

Speaker 3 Like, nobody gives a f ⁇ central, right?

Speaker 4 And then all of a sudden, they just go down to Schefter on the field, and it's like, well, interesting, Greeny, that, like, I was talking to some people today, and like, the NFL might consider a draft lottery, and then it's like, holy banana shit, you know, and but that's how it goes.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 2 I said it the week after the draft. I think it's going to happen.
I think it's going to, I think the NFL is not going to be able to help itself.

Speaker 2 I also, it, it just annoys me as a sports fan how hung up fans are about conspiracy theories and

Speaker 2 the idea of fake or lottery meddling and all that stuff. It's like, I don't know why people are so obsessed with that shit,

Speaker 2 but it does drive, like to your point, it does drive discourse. It won an election.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Come on.

Speaker 4 Like, you know, we're that, that's how we think, and the NFL gets that.

Speaker 2 Right, right. And, but, you know, I just think the theater of a lottery is something the NFL is, it's going to be very difficult for them to look the other way on eventually.

Speaker 2 All right, let's see. I just want to throw one more out there.

Speaker 2 It kind of is frustrating to me because,

Speaker 2 what was it? Number 92, amid a culture rebuild centered around

Speaker 2 selflessness, Jets coach Aaron Glenn will forcibly retire Jumbotron Diva, attention hog, Fireman Ed.

Speaker 2 I think it's, and Connor comes out of the New York media. That's where you may, you know, cut your teeth.
And Jets fans

Speaker 2 also have a very,

Speaker 2 overall critical take on Fireman Ed. I just feel bad for Jets fans speaking as one that we can't even get a beloved mascot.
We have to ruin that too.

Speaker 2 So Fireman Ed has been relentlessly mocked and picked apart. And

Speaker 2 we're told that he sucks and he we he should be the coach should forcibly remove him from the the game day exercise

Speaker 2 and um it's not like necessarily a shot at you connor because you're this is just something that's been out there in the discourse for years as long as like nfl blog culture has been around because i was a part of nfl blog culture for a long time and it's jets fans themselves that that turn on fireman ed to the point where right around the time of the butt fumble era fireman ed was so mercilessly uh mocked and kind of attacked inside that stadium that he briefly quit the job.

Speaker 2 I just don't understand, like, as I get up on my soapbox as a long-suffering Jets fan, we can't even pull it together to just let Fireman Ed be like a cool part of the fan experience in that godforsaken stadium, that sardine can.

Speaker 2 Like, can we just leave Fireman Ed alone? Because I will tell you something. He actually is or was a fireman.

Speaker 2 The guy's, I think the shoulders that he sits on, I think he was a fireman too, or it's his brother-in-law. It's just like a family thing, and it's, it's

Speaker 2 a place of passion, and yes, he cashed in on it as much as he could. But at the end of the day, it's a guy up on the jumbotron chanting four letters in the name of the team three times.

Speaker 2 And when things are going good at the Metal Ends for the Jets, which is not often, it's a very fun, exciting thing to be a part of.

Speaker 2 So can we all just shut the f ⁇ up and get off Fireman Ed's ass and just let him be like a silly, passionate fan? We get behind all these other dumb fans everywhere. Why do we have to?

Speaker 2 It's a very cynical New York thing and a cynical New York media thing. It is.
And I'm just not about it. Leave Fireman Ed alone.
I'll take your questions. Okay.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 I respect that.

Speaker 2 I didn't expect that.

Speaker 2 I know, I know. But I've always wondered why we needed to

Speaker 2 tear him down. Like, the Jets need a sacred cow that needs to be set on fire.
Like, we need more of that. We have to do this too.
I'm a real thing, though.

Speaker 3 Like, I will say, if you go to each individual fan base, do you remember Big Dog, the guy that was in the front of the dog pound, and they'd put him on Monday Night Football all the time, and he's like, got the mask on, swinging a bone?

Speaker 3 Like, I grew up thinking, like, this guy's cool. Like, I love this guy.
And, like, when you dig into Brown's subculture, he was hated by many, many people.

Speaker 3 And a lot of it was people at the stadium themselves who thought he'd swallowed up attention from other fans dressed and all this, but they just generally focused and zone in on their own mascot guy.

Speaker 3 And it seems to be built on hatred, not love. So, I don't think it's just Fireman Ed.

Speaker 2 I would say you could type in Fireman Ed, and there'll probably be a million Google results about sure.

Speaker 2 And you could type in that guy and then see what that is. Well,

Speaker 3 that guy was pre-blogs, number one, but I hear what he's saying.

Speaker 2 Right, but I'm just, yeah, I think. And if fans have an issue with one fan kind of serving as the avatar for the greater culture of the fandom, it's a celebration of all you, you dummies.

Speaker 2 Like, right, right. Fireman Ed

Speaker 2 personifies this, like as a jets fan you've been beaten down and you and you suck and you've been told you're suck and you're an embarrassment and yet here you are sitting on your brother-in-law's shoulders trying to rouse the team to success and some some level of being prideful about your favorite team and i i don't know i think we're in the right i think we're in the right dojo in terms of having a fireman in that city representing that market and whether we want it to be be a rotating cast of people to shed light on some of the bravest people in the region where I live and I work.

Speaker 4 I mean, I think we're in the right dojo. I just don't think, like, what rubbed me the wrong way, and granted, you're right.
I am 100%

Speaker 4 part of the issue with cynical New York media. I think I get that, you know, poured down my throat on a daily basis.

Speaker 4 But last year, the Instagram Live complaining about the video screen time going down, I was like, all right, buddy.

Speaker 4 Like, you know, the Jets have a lot of shit going on, but it's like, to come on and be like, do you guys think that they're showing me a little less?

Speaker 4 And like, you know, it's like, dude, like, you know, you've been doing

Speaker 2 part of the problem.

Speaker 4 Like, you want to give, like, like, how cool would it be to give five tickets every week to someone who was a 9-11 responder from FDNY and let them wear the hat and do JETS Jets, Jets, Jets?

Speaker 4 It captures the same brotherhood and the mentality without like, it has to be somewhat about me, right? I think it has to be about firefighters. That's what I think.

Speaker 2 Okay. Pro-firefighters.
That was quite a pivot. That was quite a movement of the goalpost there.
Yeah. I'll have to.

Speaker 2 Yes,

Speaker 2 I too support 9-11 just to get that on the record and the brave men and women.

Speaker 3 I'm somewhere in the middle.

Speaker 2 All right.

Speaker 2 Good job, though. Check it out over on SI.com.
Connor, beautiful work, and I'm glad we were able to mine it for content ourselves.

Speaker 4 Thank you guys. And thank you also

Speaker 4 this year in particular. There's like, I always put a couple weird ones in there, like very strange.

Speaker 2 Yes, very funny.

Speaker 4 And this year, my excellent editor, Mitch Goldich, who's a fan of the show, and he would be happy if I said this,

Speaker 4 said that I initially had a prediction about

Speaker 4 someone blowing up a marriage with a Torrid affair. And he was like, listen, I showed this to like eight people at the office and like no one thinks it's funny and it's really upsetting.

Speaker 4 And I'm sitting over here like, This is comedy gold. And then I read it the other day and I was like, it's actually pretty fed up.

Speaker 2 And I'm really glad he took it out. So thank you.

Speaker 4 Thank you to Mitch.

Speaker 2 Way to go, Mitch. All right, we'll be right back to hit the mailbag.

Speaker 2 Hey, yo, taking a break here to talk about the Patreon, patreon.com/slash heed the call.

Speaker 2 If this program isn't enough and you want more, not just more, you want different, you need to check out the Patreon, Mark.

Speaker 3 It's a journey of the senses. It's a journey of the senses.
And I think each one of us has a chance to go down very bizarre and different avenues than what we do on this show. And so dive in.

Speaker 2 Yes, Friday Fun Show.

Speaker 2 The Rolling Thunder podcast with Mark and Jason Zumwalt. The Throwback Podcast with me and my bosom buddy Bob Castone.
It came from the subreddit every month.

Speaker 2 The Silver Horses newsletter with Mark Sessler, HTC at the movies. I mean, what else could you ask for? Well, let us know if you want more and we will potentially add it to the Patreon.

Speaker 2 So patreon.com slash heedthecall where the fans go for the extra juice. It's all about the juice.

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Speaker 2 Thanks, Mark. I appreciate that compliment.
You're welcome.

Speaker 2 All right. We are back.
All right. Justin, you pop in a second? Let's make sure he doesn't have a milkshake or a vape pen.
You ready to

Speaker 2 smoothie. It was a smoothie.
I said to Justin

Speaker 2 during our, you know, we have a little content call as a group every week. And I said, I checked back on our last show, and I was just like struck by how take no prisoners.
And he was a little sassy.

Speaker 2 He was like a sassy queen.

Speaker 3 Little curt, little agony.

Speaker 2 Yeah, like he had a little piss and and vinegar to him, gravedigger.

Speaker 2 And I thought the coup de grace of it all was when he just went off on the audience for not providing enough quality mailbag content.

Speaker 2 So did people heed the call after they were

Speaker 2 brutally roasted by the producer?

Speaker 5 People heeded the call. They heeded my advice to give us good, unique, yet concise questions that aren't like forming lists or like doing a deep dive on 15 different team situations.
They did it.

Speaker 5 They did a good job. One of the questions actually was, why do you hate the listeners? Which we did not include, but I appreciated what a terrible question.

Speaker 2 But yeah, please answer.

Speaker 5 Oh, I don't. It's like we said on the show.
Good coaching makes you better listeners, and it makes us better.

Speaker 2 Don't patronize.

Speaker 2 You've already achieved what you set out to do.

Speaker 3 It's always that last comment from Justin.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we don't need the victory. Right.
The old victory

Speaker 2 Skip through the field. Good job, Justin.

Speaker 2 That's producing. I saw a couple people were like, I was so happy to see how happy Dan was when Justin was on

Speaker 2 that just vengeful screed. And I was like, yeah, because that was passion for a guy that wants the very best version of Heed the Call to show up in the feeds of the world twice a week.

Speaker 5 Exactly. And we got some good questions.

Speaker 2 All right, let's start with Danny Mac. Why don't get going right there? This is a good question.

Speaker 2 Who's your Washington? And who's your 49ers from last year? I.e.,

Speaker 2 the out-of-nowhere team and the team with Super Bowl expectations, who crater

Speaker 2 Connor?

Speaker 4 I mean, could I be cheeky enough to just literally flip the two teams?

Speaker 2 I like that. Like, wondering if you're going to do that.

Speaker 4 Washington is my 49ers and 49ers are my Washington, right? I think that, again, and like this is going to be so tedious, but

Speaker 4 when the NFL tries to just jam Jaden Daniels into every corner of the schedule and it's constant prime time, especially at the beginning of the season, they kind of got Jets treatment, if I remember correctly.

Speaker 4 This is just hard. And the NFC East out of conference is brutal.
I think NFC East gets NFC North and AFC West this year.

Speaker 4 So, you know, again, this is a commanders team that got better in the offseason. This is a commanders' team that was great.
This is a commanders' team that beat the Lions.

Speaker 4 You have all of those things are true. This is also a commander's team that played a lot of close games last year, that won a lot of close games last year.

Speaker 4 We just need a bigger sample size to decide whether that's just your milieu, that's who you are, or if, you know, like every other team, it's just some years it doesn't work out. I don't know.

Speaker 3 I don't see the Washington as a crater candidate, but a regression one, yes. I I would put Pittsburgh there.
That feels almost too obvious.

Speaker 3 Like there's a implosive nature to what might happen to the Steelers if they don't figure their shit out over the next month.

Speaker 3 Another riser for me, I'm not saying they'd go be Washington, but I think the Raiders, so much has changed and there's a lot to like. And I wonder if the Raiders might be for once

Speaker 3 like a 9-10 win type team if they get lucky in a couple games. Okay.

Speaker 2 Back to the Commanders, because I do two things with the Commanders, because I'll talk about like what were their two like big acquisitions: Debo Samuel, who may or may not have a quarter left in his tank at this point, but he was kind of talked up as, oh, here's a missing piece, and people are trying to make 2025 Debo Samuel, 2022 Debo Samuel, and I need to kind of see it in a new offense.

Speaker 2 Even Laramie Tunsell, and I like Tunsell. Everybody likes Tunsell, and he's paid to be seen as one of the best left tackles of the league.

Speaker 2 He was also the highest penalized offensive lineman in football last year. So it's like, it's not like those two guys are going to necessarily put them over the top.

Speaker 2 And then one last name I want people to remember. And I don't want to be overly negative about the commanders, but the way Jaden Daniels is being talked about this offseason is the way C.J.

Speaker 2 Stroud was talked about last offseason as the rookie who went off and

Speaker 2 really balled out at an extremely high star level. And then you just pencil him in to be an MVP-like player in year two.
And sometimes these things don't go in a linear fashion.

Speaker 2 Sometimes it is one step forward, two steps back, three steps forward. Like you just, just don't assume Jaden Daniels is going to be an MVP-level player this year.
That's all.

Speaker 2 I like that, though. And because you talked me into the Niners half an hour ago, Connor, like, I would flip them.
Those would be my picks. Yeah.

Speaker 4 And again, you know, there are, you know, Jesse Minter, Jeff Fulbrick, you know, Steve Spagnolo, like all these guys are paid to fit, you know, Vic Fangio, again, twice.

Speaker 4 Like, all these guys are paid to figure out Jaden Daniels. Maybe he won't be figured out, but all these guys are paid to do it, and they might do it in an offseason, right? I don't know.

Speaker 2 Go ahead.

Speaker 2 All right, let's see. Let's go with Matthew Angriest up next.

Speaker 2 Bill Dan watched the four-part Scorigami documentary being released by SB Nation. Better yet, a Patreon Group Watch.

Speaker 3 Patreon Group watch.

Speaker 2 Is this like an April Fool's thing? Like belated?

Speaker 2 Are you honestly telling me

Speaker 2 that there is a four,

Speaker 2 one, two, three, four

Speaker 2 part documentary

Speaker 2 about Scorigami, the most pointless bullshit stat that gets shoved down everyone's throats for five months every year?

Speaker 2 Like, are we serious? Four parts? I mean, is each installment 30 seconds?

Speaker 2 Because in that case, I would watch, I would watch a I would watch a four-part, two-minute documentary on Skorigami.

Speaker 2 But I'm assuming it's probably something in the 30 to 60 minute range. So we're talking that this might be a two to four hour investigation

Speaker 2 of finging scorigami.

Speaker 2 I mean, go to hell.

Speaker 2 And may God have mercy on your soul.

Speaker 3 I, in the past, was,

Speaker 3 I thought scorigami was a cute thing. Maybe more in my youth.
I enjoyed it to some degree. This is an example of there is 92% of content that is out there is unnecessary.

Speaker 3 And this falls right into that bucket for me.

Speaker 2 Some would say this show also is in that bucket, just to be fair, to be fair and balanced.

Speaker 3 Some clearly do because, you know, the vast, vast majority of the human population do not listen to this show.

Speaker 2 Yeah, relative to, yeah.

Speaker 4 This is a John Boyce production, and I would just say that there is a possibility that it is making fun of itself in some way, shape, or form, because John, I don't know if anyone follows John on social media.

Speaker 4 He's like one of the funniest people in the sports sphere while also doing some very cool visual and data work and all this kind of stuff. But

Speaker 4 I just, it may be, it may be not exactly

Speaker 4 what you think is like, it may be like absurdist in some way, shape, or form.

Speaker 3 That I would check out, at least to begin, yeah.

Speaker 5 Okay. This is going to be available for everyone, free to watch, in September.

Speaker 4 So we will

Speaker 3 revisit then. The same day the Caleb Williams book comes out.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 All right.

Speaker 2 Actually, it looks like it launches, it already launched, according to that.

Speaker 5 Yeah, for the subscriber Patreon.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah. I mean, if you're one of these idiots that have been texting me and or tweeting me for years now about how amazing Scorigami is, put up or shut up.

Speaker 2 Like, this John guy sounds like a good guy. I like

Speaker 2 subscribe to his Patreon. And instead of sending me Scorigami bits on social media, like put your money where your mouth is and just go enjoy it.

Speaker 2 Go, go, like, luxuriate in this amazing data point of pro football. Like knock yourself out.
Finally, there's a place for you to point all of this passion.

Speaker 2 Someone has put together a four,

Speaker 2 one, two, three, four-part documentary on finging scorigami. And now you finally, people, have a place where you can just celebrate it in unison.
Like it's hands across America.

Speaker 2 Like it's damn live aid. Go, go fill up RFK Stadium and enjoy Scorigami together and leave me the hell alone.

Speaker 2 From Eric Blasell. I like this one.
This is a good one. Is Dan aware of the buttery, smooth voice Mark uses whenever he is in the hosting chair?

Speaker 2 I don't miss many shows,

Speaker 2 but when I do, Mark steps in and I think he's capable. I've been saying for years, Mark as a host,

Speaker 2 is absolutely a great option, and now we're getting to see it in the Heath of the Call era.

Speaker 2 But I also, it's kind of news to me that the show continues when Dan, the old Zeuser, is not around. So,

Speaker 2 can we fire up a little bit of

Speaker 2 the most recent Mark Sessler? And we'll see if the voice is altered in any way from a typical Sessler experience. Here we go.
Misses Dan, like the desert, misses the rain. Uh-huh.

Speaker 2 And we do.

Speaker 3 We do. We do.
This is Mark Sessler and typically and Dan Hansis, but he is, I guess we're not allowed to say where he is. And I understand that for his own sanity, but he is not in Los Angeles.

Speaker 3 Justin, you're here, and you've been

Speaker 3 as stalwart as ever this week, getting us through a couple shows.

Speaker 2 Two of these. Thickest thieves, these two.

Speaker 3 Well, we've not done this show yet, so I don't want to preconceive that it's a success.

Speaker 5 Right. I got us through one show, and I've prepped us for a second show, and hopefully, you can drive this bus over the finish line today, Mark.

Speaker 3 It's, you know,

Speaker 3 we did a little bit of a trick where we did a little draft stuff last week with Dan, and then you and I did what was about 11 to 12-minute news topper on Monday morning.

Speaker 3 And I mean, the reviews have been

Speaker 2 incredible about the eject feminism that you and I.

Speaker 3 It's sort of like, I think someone called it like a Laurel and Hardy minus

Speaker 3 like the humor or organized skits.

Speaker 2 Oh,

Speaker 3 I think.

Speaker 2 Wait, let me answer. Hang on, hang on.
Okay.

Speaker 3 That was not buttery.

Speaker 2 No, I wanted the humor. I wanted the laugh chart there.

Speaker 2 Connor, I, first of all, again,

Speaker 2 I love Mark and that host chair.

Speaker 2 That was the Laurel and Hardy response.

Speaker 2 I think it is, there is a little bit more of an NPR,

Speaker 2 just a little bit, a smidge of Mark NPR. But if that's where Mark's creative mind goes, when it's like, okay, Dan's not here.
I'm kind of driving the bus.

Speaker 2 I'm going to kind of latch on to some other people in the medium that I respect and how they would sound.

Speaker 2 Like, if that's where he goes, even not on purpose, it's just something that happens naturally, I'm all for it. Like, I think Mark is a brilliant man and a really talented person.

Speaker 2 So I would never say, oh, that's funny, or like, it shouldn't sound that way. If this is where Mark's mind takes him,

Speaker 2 buttery voice, buttery sessler, butter sessler, give it to me. Give me all you got.

Speaker 4 I totally agree. I liken it to when you get a substitute teacher in high school.

Speaker 4 Within the first two minutes, the way that that guy walks in and sits in the chair, you're either like, okay, I'm going to have to do my work today or I'm going to run this motherfucker over and I'm going to spend 45 minutes in the elevator.

Speaker 4 And I think that's one of those deals where Mark has that like,

Speaker 4 I can command a gravity as soon as I sit down at the chair.

Speaker 2 Absolutely. He's kind of like it's almost like in the Tom Hanks movie the guy that's like I'm the captain now

Speaker 3 Well, that is the

Speaker 3 only thing is that is not the attitude I take when I if I think Justin knows that I'm spending at least a third of the time in self-deprecation mode wondering you know like I think I even mentioned on our Friday fun show it's like this is the point when people realize where the hell is Dan like I mean I get it you know like I I'm more of like a you you talk you talk I'll throw something in You talk, you talk, I'll throw something.

Speaker 3 And that is typically where I feel comfortable. But, like,

Speaker 3 we had fun on our Friday fun show. I think it was a little different, though.
I think it was a little bit, Justin, I said, like, did that go well? He goes, well, that was a little different.

Speaker 2 It was like, okay, turning on the computer now. There's so much right now.
This is good. The reason I asked Justin to cut a full minute of that is because I knew Mark would like.

Speaker 2 like set himself on fire with uncomfortable vibes just watching that. And he did.
So you kind of make sure the audience sees that, Justin. Yeah.

Speaker 2 we love you, Mark, and you did a great job. I never feel uncomfortable knowing that you're in the host chair.
Um, all right, let's see. Last one, this one's for Connor from Chris Bailey.

Speaker 2 Question for Connor: Oh,

Speaker 2 he has to keep one retired jerseys.

Speaker 2 Uh, listener note, Connor doesn't believe in retired jerseys, or more international games. Uh, listener note, Connor doesn't believe in anything over the Atlantic Ocean.
Which does he choose?

Speaker 2 Chris Bailey with a trenchant question. Okay, Connor, take it.

Speaker 4 I would keep retired jerseys because the problem would

Speaker 4 exacerbate to a level where it would have to be fixed on its own without me removing it, no matter what. International games would not, right?

Speaker 4 So I can take international games out of the fold and then let retired jerseys f themselves up because they're going to in every city and in every team and allow nature to just take its course.

Speaker 4 And then that way I get rid of all international games and we get to keep all the games, which is what we should be doing.

Speaker 2 Applause.

Speaker 2 Hold for applause.

Speaker 2 And by the way, there are

Speaker 2 overseas listeners that have taken issue with some

Speaker 2 comments that Connor has periodically made on this program over the last eight or nine months.

Speaker 2 We'll be tackling that head on on the next edition of It Came from the Subreddit, where Connor has a quick cameo. So check that out.

Speaker 2 Also, we have over on the Patreon a new Rolling Thunder Throwback Podcast is on its way back.

Speaker 2 There's another, Mark, there is a new edition of Silver Hoses.

Speaker 3 You know, unbelievably, you've gone down this road.

Speaker 2 It is silver horses.

Speaker 2 It's incredibly impressive.

Speaker 3 I would challenge you to look at

Speaker 3 any one of these.

Speaker 3 Connor is involved in these sometimes too, so you never know what you're going to get. It's a little bit of

Speaker 3 an

Speaker 2 imaginary. So that's coming back too on the Patreon.

Speaker 2 All sorts of great content.

Speaker 2 You've got to get on the Patreon and support the show.

Speaker 2 Thank you, everybody, for checking us out. Another week, heeding that call.

Speaker 2 We'll be back next week as we tease the Dalton scale returns as we figure out the prime meridian of the quarterback position. So make sure you're there Tuesday, first thing in the morning.

Speaker 2 Till then, heed the call.

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