The Sporting Class: Welcome to Football Coachella

Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out.

I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

So, wait, so is the 10 inches, is that David Sampson, or is that standard length?

Oh, this is standard.

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Of course, we start like this.

Are we rolling, by the way?

We are?

So people are aware of what just happened?

Which is to say that David Sampson tried to orchestrate a pre-show switcheroo only to have it blow up in his face.

I was so close to greatness.

You had a tiny chair in my seat, and I moved it to John, and John immediately realized that he was not.

We're good.

Are we good?

No.

John switched the chair out, switched the chair back in once he realized.

There it is.

John just winked at David.

A team player.

Hold on, let's get your microphone on.

Huh.

There it is.

I want to be louder, too.

How long have you been doing this show together?

Somewhere between

10 years and 50.

Never gets old.

Never gets old.

Jinx.

Tiresome potentially, but never old.

Every time I think

I'm over the metaphor of you guys arguing about which chair you're sitting in, I'm like, nope.

Nope.

If cameras were rolling during our prep, which goes on in between shows and us talking about the different topics we're going to talk about, John has a threshold for subjects that he'll discuss.

He says basically, and I'm paraphrasing, that we can never put him in a position

pounding the table.

Oh, God.

Paraphrasing, but just so you know,

your philosophy around chair integrity should make you more worried about table integrity.

I have

table table integrity.

I do find this to be a high table.

In any case, I believe we have a lot of great things things to talk about today, but John always has to make sure that his chair is right, that his microphone's right, and that he has got sort of the power over us with the subject matter.

And I respect it.

You've earned it, John.

You've had a great run that you still are on.

I respect that we have to kowtow to you and all of your proclivities.

Wow.

Did you see the way he shook his hands when he said the word proclivities?

It's a good word.

You know where the word kowtow comes from?

Yes, I do.

It is, it's actually Asian.

Yeah, it's an obeisance to the Chinese emperor.

You have to prostrate yourself, and that's

reflect in his general direction.

And that's called

K-A-K-O-W.

T-O-W.

T-O-W.

I'm so ready to cancel both of you guys.

And I am now, unfortunately, here to tell the audience that they are correct.

They did originate

in China.

Wait, did you think we were making it up?

I'm just saying

both of you guys are known.

He does.

Apparently.

Both of you guys are look i consider you guys very reliable narrators about many things uh

words often uh

a bit squishy a bit squishy when it comes to the vocabulary we we unveil on the sporting class you know what the you know what the feel of

sunshine on your face in a cold day is called i know this because you said it to me

in the first call we had, I believe, when I joined Metal Arc, which is to say apricity.

Man, you have a good memory.

Apricity is a John Skipper word that I have since stolen.

It's such a great word.

It's an SAT word.

When I studied for the SATs, I had a box of words, not a tutor, I had a box of words that I had to learn for SATs.

I don't know if you took them way back when, whether that was college or not, when you went to college.

I was having the same thought, which is, and by the way, I can guarantee you that no, you'll you'll get you'll give me hell about this, but it happens to be true.

nobody in my town had a tutor for the sat

i believe it it's a whole industry now but i didn't have a tutor i had a box we had a box where you could get it was a box of vocabulary words did you not have is this foreign to everybody but me flashcards yes

did you study vocabulary how was the word flashcard not one of the flashcards

because it was more like gregarious

and you had to learn what that was

doesn't matter i'm here today.

I'm just glad that this is a show where we know the importance of

lying prostrate,

as well as in your age, the prostate.

Take out the extra R.

We should all be checked.

It's an avoidable cancer.

Like colon cancer.

Everyone, they're lowering the age for colonoscopies.

We don't need to get into this now, but it's gone from 50 to 45.

It's going to 40.

I do not appreciate the use of the word get into relative to a canonical.

I like colonoscopies because it's avoidable.

It's cancer that you do not ever have to die from.

Let's just put that on a quote board.

I like colonoscopies, David Sampson.

I will absolutely co-sign that quote.

I do.

I actually go for the double each time.

I get the upper endoscopy at the same time.

That's the throat.

I'm pretty sure.

I hope he knows that.

You get a scope both ways, same time.

Well, you don't know if it's the same time you're out.

I asked my doctor.

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So go ahead, treat yourself to a little luxury, and try Remy Martin 1738 Accord Royale.

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Please drink responsibly.

We're into the show, and we should probably get into some topics instead of, you know, your upper nether regions.

It's not a nether?

Used to be like the seventh planet.

I'm not sure it is anymore, is it?

Haven't they figured out that the planets are different than we thought?

Totally changed it.

There's now, I believe that either Venus or Neptune, one of them's not a planet anymore.

Pluto.

Pluto I think it's outrageous who has the power Pluto's a dog No yes, but I learned it's like changing Roy G Biv who would have the ability or right to change that

Probably Mrs.

Biv.

Do you know what that is?

You never heard of Roy G.

Biv of course red orange yellow

So you're exhaling your phone is in your hand There's a lot going on right now.

There's a lot going on a lot going on in sports and business Should we start with the draft?

Should we start with the thing that had happened over the weekend?

The thing that John, when he was president of ESPN, was also overseeing in something close to this forum, but not quite, John?

Can you explain the draft as it is today, which is to say the thing that travels across the country, was in Green Bay, Wisconsin, is now fully just part of the sports media industrial complex.

What was it when you were in charge of it?

How different was it?

Well,

for most of the years that I was at ESPN, it was in New York City at Radio City Music Hall.

And

I thought a very smart decision to take it out to fans elsewhere.

To me, the draft is an astonishing phenomenon.

It is not in and of itself particularly entertaining.

And I know that the commissioner Roger himself has said that, gee, maybe they need to speed this up a little bit.

But it is one of those things that is tediously fascinating, right?

You sort of like, it's not interesting to watch, but it's hard to quit watching, particularly if you care about a team.

Since I have for many years cared about the Jets,

it's not interesting at all because you can only be certain that they will once again mess it up.

And

such a fan, so negative.

Negative?

I thought that you were going to say that

you made up something that draws more people in a World Series game.

Thursday's opening round of the drafts this year averaged a combined 13.6 million viewers across TV and digital platforms.

The largest audience for the event shy of 2020.

I don't know what that means.

Outside of 2020.

Oh, it was a pandemic.

So everyone was just watching.

The captive audience is actually being that and Tiger, that Tiger show.

Tiger King.

Tiger King, so we don't count.

Is that how we're doing stats now?

Are we doing all-time X 2020?

Well, further context, because David is is sticklering, viewership increased 11% from last year's opening round, which was 12.3 million across such platforms.

Because it can't be Green Bay, though.

Several hundred thousand people went to Green Bay to watch it, which always makes me smile.

I don't think it matters where it's at relative to the television rating, though.

Being novel, the fact that it's in Green Bay and people are sort of interested in Green Bay may have helped a little, but it didn't make much difference.

It's really, I'll attribute, it's the NFL Palooza is just a gathering of fans.

The entertainment is pretty modest.

I'm not criticizing it because it is a phenomenon, but

it, you know, it's,

I don't quite know what the entertainment is.

You're sitting here.

The entertainment is all the media members who are giving you content hours and hours a day.

Mel Kuyper Jr.

as an example, gets himself in the news because he's so crazy over Shadur Sanders.

But people are watching that.

People are watching different networks, whether it's NFL Network, ESPN.

They're waiting to hear what God bless football has to say, whatever the case is about the draft and the picks.

That is unique.

It is, and that is why people are there and why they care about it.

So, oddly enough, I was in the customs line in Brazil when somebody shouted out, Do you know who the Dolphins took in the first round?

As though the Brazilians were

right there worrying about who the Dolphins took.

Although, to be fair to him, I think he was yelling it in the line for non-nationals.

I was going to say, this wasn't what.

Was he INTU?

This is not immigration and customs enforcement testing your citizenship.

That was

actually.

I think Trump is signing an executive order today that you may that.

Yes, you must acknowledge that he, Donald Trump, is the reason why Shadura Sanders got taken in the fifth round by the Cleveland Browns, which is more or less exactly what his press secretary said, by the way, earlier this week.

I found his tweet to be interesting in criticizing NFL owners and how incompetent they were for not having drafted Shadur Sanders because of what a good father he has and Deion Sanders and what a great pedigree he has.

Pedigree, inherited those good genes.

Now, listen, as clearly, his children have.

Deion is a Hall of Fame player.

We'll grant you that.

But I think that the craziness over Shadur Sanders is only created because the media thought that he was such a high pick.

And the talent people who matter, and I talked about this on nothing personal, they didn't have him there.

And they're the ones who count.

Well, I want to point out from the sports business perspective, from the ratings perspective, right?

So there's this jump on day one relative to last year.

The second night of the NFL draft, because Sanders, Shadur Sanders, was still on the board, surged by 40%,

right?

So you have, to John's tedious fascination point, you have a live event that is unpredictable, that is clearly unscripted.

and you have these characters and these storylines that emerge that is accompanied by a clock that is perpetually ticking down.

And so, there are the ingredients, the basic fundamental ingredients of live sports in a sports-adjacent program.

Right.

Clearly unscripted.

Someone in the media, Stephen A.

Smith himself, said, Hey, this could be collusion.

So, that would collusion by definition.

The accusations of scriptedness also a key part of live sports.

The idea that this is rigged, right?

So you have the meta conversation around what this actually is, as well as the arguments over what should happen and what will in fact happen.

In that way, look, I'm somebody, John, you know from previous episodes of the sporting class, you know that I am the guy who's going to point out that the draft as a concept can be, from a logical perspective, disrupted and turned into all-out free agency and that we can reconstitute the programming.

But every year,

your argument, as it often does, I must admit, that the way it is now is efficient in a way that should be respected, which is to say, look at this live event that is rating.

It's hard to argue with.

Its success is hard to argue with.

I mean, I can personally not find it scintillating entertainment, but it does great.

We loved it.

We wanted it to go as long as possible.

We

need days and days of the draft.

Well, now it's right.

Now it's multi-dayer.

And this is the exact type of event that Netflix would love to have.

It is a live event.

It's not a sports event.

And in terms of people competing for the rights to the draft, Roger Goodell's done two things.

One, he's gotten cities to bid.

There's now like a Super Bowl lineup of cities who are bidding to host the draft.

And it's mostly bad weather cities, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Green Bay, where

they're not going to get a Super Bowl because they sent one up to Minnesota and the owners froze their tookases off, right?

Eagles Patriots 2018.

So that's, is that not recent?

Yeah, I mean, but anyway.

So I don't think, so now I don't believe that those cities are really considered, owners don't like going there for the Super Bowl.

Yeah, but they're going to go because...

Generally, those events are rewards for getting a new stadium built.

Did that not happen in baseball?

It's that for all-star games, they do that, but owners don't go to all-star games.

There's maybe one out of 30 owners who go to MLB All-Star Games, but Super Bowls, generally you get 32 for 32.

You know, there are a few exceptions, obviously, but generally you get that, and they don't want to go to a bad weather place.

But Goodell found a way to get these cities to bid for it, and now he could get the networks to bid for the coverage of it.

And you've created another day.

Very smart business.

Of course, I was at the Super Bowl in Dallas.

No,

yeah, Dallas, Fort Worth, where it snowed and you couldn't get around for three days.

Oh, God.

I was at the Super Bowl in Atlanta.

So going to warm weather cities is not a guarantee that you're not going to get horrendous weather.

And I think they'll continue to go to cold weather cities.

I do believe they kind of have to.

So to John's point, I was going to bring this up in Minneapolis, right?

So that stadium

opened, the new building in Minnesota opened 2016, hosted the Super Bowl in 2018.

And I actually wanted to...

Didn't SoFi far get a Super Bowl in a lot of ways.

Yes, warm weather.

And I want to establish, though, because I think part of what is funny about how sports fans at home

are viewing this stuff, right?

There is a flattening.

It's like, oh, it's at somewhere.

But the behind the scenes jockeying for who gets to host.

Now that the NFL draft is one of these events that you distribute strategically, can you explain how important it is to be a host city and what the available opportunities are to actually cash in?

So when you're a host city city of an event, you try to do it.

Let's talk about the NBA who has a hard time finding cities to host all-star games because cities have to spend money, teams have to spend money, and their season ticket holders are getting screwed because the NBA takes over the inventory for an all-star game.

Much like Major League Baseball, if you had a huge season ticket base, those season ticket holders would have a problem because your location is not guaranteed for an all-star game.

In the NBA, it's a far bigger issue, smaller capacity, where each of the teams get one.

So it's the opposite example for Adam Silver, where he struggles to get people to want to host an all-star game.

For the draft, cities want to hold the draft because it's off-season.

The building, when it's done inside a building, it's not being used.

In Green Bay's case, think about what it does for them when they double the size of their tourism during a winter day where otherwise they wouldn't have anybody.

Well, that's more than double, right?

I'm assuming they got 600,000 people, right?

I saw 250, but I don't know.

An incremental.

Oh, 600,000 people is the aggregate.

I think across the three days, over 600,000 people.

Shattering, by the way, any available projection.

I think that, but per day, I want to say I'm right that it was around 250.

So just a bit of the context here.

So Green Bay's total matched it with Nashville as the second highest in draft history, behind only Detroit last year, which had 775,000

people across the three days, which is staggering.

It's an impressive number.

It's impressive that, and I don't mean this as any denigration because I have been to Green Bay and it is charming to park across the street in somebody's driveway and walk to the game, but I don't think the other tourist attractions are that strong that you would go and you're going for the NFL draft.

To me, this whole thing is an astonishing display of how popular and powerful the NFL is.

It's Coachella.

It's football, Coachella.

It's a music festival.

So I was just in Palm Springs at the same time as Coachella.

There's a whole lot going on in Palm Springs and LA that you could argue that you don't have to just go for that.

I would say, if you want to say Burning Man, where you'd only go but for that.

Oh, we should do a sporting class from Burning Man.

It would be hard to get service.

But

what interested me about Green Bay, I made a mistake on nothing personal.

I was trying to figure out the hotel where Roger Goodell would stay.

And I could, because

there's no possible place.

And

I was told by fans of our show that even teams, when they play Green Bay, stay in Appleton.

Because there's so much more opportunity in Appleton for a good hotel room.

It's the best you can do.

And I had not thought of any

city with a professional sports team that doesn't have the facilities to host a professional sports event.

You do.

It's got to to be the only one in the country.

Well, you do have the interesting fact of the Hall of Fames where people are headed to Canton, Ohio and

Cooperstown.

Cooper Town.

Springfield.

Yeah, not a lot of

five-star accommodations, either of those places.

Cooperstown has the Otisaga, which is a five-star.

I've never been to Springfield, but I believe, is that not within driving distance of Boston?

But I may have.

Yeah, it's near, yeah.

I think you can do it there and back.

And then hockey has Toronto, which, of course, has five-star everything.

But it's also just like the, as somebody who has been to Cleveland for the NBA Finals, it's like, guess what?

It's the Ritz-Carlton and then a big drop-off.

And it's just sort of like, but so the question of like, we live in rarefied.

I was going to say, this is the very relatable Rich Guys OnlyFans content that our fans have been demanding.

But it really is like, what's it like to host one of these events and bring the music festival?

It's like, where do the VIPs stay?

It's a major thing.

At Coachella, they're not driving in, sitting in traffic on the 10.

I promise you that.

They're coptering in.

And so when you host, when you put, we did a bid to host the all-star game in 17.

It's about a 10-inch bid.

It's a binder this big.

It's a 10-inch binder of how you're going to host.

One of the sections is how you're going to deal with the commissioner, any owners who want to come.

And I promise you that that's

real.

What do you do with John Skipper when John Skipper comes?

That's part of the bid.

You switch out to the SP at a time.

I hope he doesn't.

I just take a sleeping bag.

Little country boy with a sleeping bag.

So what we have to do to make the bid is we have to meet a hammock strung up between two trees.

Five.

If only.

It's a fight over sweets with you people.

We have to go to the hotel bureau.

And in order to bid for these events, whether it's the draft or an Ostrogam or anything, you have to secure certain suites with pictures and then they get assigned in advance to people.

It's a whole thing.

Right.

Wait, so hold on.

I don't know if it's interesting.

It was never a thing

with me because the Disney policy did not allow us to stay in suites.

Really?

Wait, I want to understand.

You can't stay in a suite at the World.

I can't.

The World Series in Cleveland.

What is your reaction to that?

Are you suggesting you stayed in a king room?

I don't remember where I stayed, but I don't think I stayed in a suite.

Okay.

The president of ESPN does not stay in king rooms, and it's totally fine.

We argue this with players it's in their contracts certain players get sweet it's called sweet on the road go look at juan soto's controls i would have thought sweet on the road was a much more no interesting thing it's not s-u-i-t-e you lascivious

bastard sweet on the road also sounds like an opening act at coachella it's like wow so we are sweet on the road real things on how you operate but okay so so david's giant 10 inch binder Actually hilarious to me, as he is telling you on YouTube.

I I couldn't figure out if it was thickness.

Yeah, I couldn't either.

Width or

height.

It's way longer than 10 inches.

It's a full binder.

It's the size of a loose leaf piece of paper, which is 12 inches, I believe.

But I'm talking about thickness.

The book.

When people say, oh, is that a long book?

You say, what's the thickness of the book?

Why are there so many pages?

Because there's so many things that go into hosting an event.

It's not just, oh, let's do the draft.

And you wait for it.

So is the 10 inches, is that David Sampson or is that standard length?

Oh, this is standard.

This is

every city has to do.

Imagine it's the commissioner's office requires

hotels, it's security, it's transportation.

What does an owner do when he lands at the FBO?

How does the owner, which is a fixed space operation for a private plane, how do you get from there

to the hotel?

Where are the police escorts?

What is going to happen in terms of what's the exact drive time from the hotel where the players are staying to get to the ballpark at these times of day.

You're looking at me like I've got this, like, I'm crazy.

No, no, I'm just

legitimately curious.

What is the hardest part about hosting an event?

Dealing with the personalities.

Satisfying.

Yeah.

Satisfying what the VIPs want in terms of hotel rooms, in terms of car services, in terms of getting back and forth to the ballpark.

That was always the biggest challenge.

Security is a very big issue as well.

uh with how you are going to keep everyone safe and this is both pre and post 9-11 but all of these there's a reason that you takes 10 inches because it's not pictures like it's it's pros and we would have committees set up to fill out different parts of a bid to get the World Baseball Classic or an all-star game.

You're laughing.

I am laughing.

I'll tell you later.

I'm laughing only at

having to prevent myself from making any 10-inch jokes.

What you just said, a series of words, is remarkable, the discipline that John and I had in not acknowledging how

I was trying not to be sexual.

I was trying to be informative, but it's your audience.

Andy used the very good word lascivious.

That's right.

I love that word.

It kind of sounds.

It's automopoetic.

It sounds like what it is.

It's a real flashcard word.

Anyhow, so Green Bay did a great job of hosting, but to the extent that they can, but it's not going back to Green Bay anytime soon.

But the suite of,

so to speak, the suite of options here, right?

There is

in terms of what's up for bid, right?

So the teams, when it comes to the World Series, you earn that.

Right.

You win on the field to get that right.

So when it comes to like these bonus events that you get to hand out, so to speak, in the commissioner's office, we're talking about drafts and all-star games, right?

Is there anything else that I'm missing?

In baseball, World Baseball Classic.

It's any jewel event not earned on the field, is how we would describe it.

Because you're right, World Series LCS, that's a jewel event that is earned on the field, but all the other stuff is off the field.

But of course, the real

problem with a single destination for the NBA and the MLB is they play four out of seven.

So not only is it uncertain how many games there will be, but you can't expect fans to show up at

in

wherever

for

and stay for two weeks to see whether they're going to four, five, six, or seven games.

Isn't that the biggest distinction between

the Super Bowl and the Final Four?

I told my audience that I never agree with Scott Boris, but Scott Boris wants a neutral site World Series.

And it's a very interesting thought.

Okay, so you'll give the case for.

This case for a neutral site World Series is that people can plan to be at the World Series, whether they're fans of the team or not.

It becomes an event, and it's in a city where you want to travel to, whether it's Vegas or Miami or Los Angeles.

And the teams, therefore, don't need to worry about...

only

home field advantage through the LCS, where it would remain in the home stadiums where you get the advantage.

But the World Series becomes a seven-game party.

And the way you switch who has home field is just who bats last.

Right.

So you can get the NFL stadium.

The NFL, to the point of Scott Boris, they actually

hand out the Super Bowl.

They don't give it to the team that quote unquote earns it off.

And this is what it would be.

It's making Major League Baseball closer to what the NFL does.

The broadcasters would be happier because the broadcasters apparently

can set up, they can get ready.

When a pro player hosted a Super Bowl, which they did several times in Miami, the amount of time that the broadcaster is on site setting up, it's not days or weeks, it's months.

Like they're cabling stuff, they're doing stuff that they can't do for baseball because they don't have that sort of notice.

Right, right.

The draft, though, when it comes to the, now I want to bring this back to the NFL and jealousy of the NFL, right?

So baseball has a draft.

How many rounds were the baseball draft?

There used to be until every.

One zillion?

No.

So the draft used to be until everybody passed.

It was like a poker game.

The draft would keep going until all 30 teams said they were done drafting.

I don't remember that.

Yes, true story.

Then it's a passion.

Wait, hold on.

Now I'm going to Google what's the longest ML.

I'm going to bet you there was 44 rounds once.

Because that's when you draft people's sons and people's.

We draft the owner's nephew.

I mean, you just draft.

So it actually is, in this case, irrelevant players.

It is players who just get to put on the resume they were drafted.

And we drafted Griffin Conine out of high school.

He wasn't going to be, he went to college, of course, but he got to say he was drafted by the same team that his dad played for.

Now it's 10 rounds, I believe, is what the current MOB draft is.

20 rounds.

It's 20.

Still 20.

It's too many.

You don't need

prospects.

It's so many.

Mike Piat said there's people who never would have been drafted in today's draft.

What do you think?

The number was in 1990, the record.

I'm going to take the over 44.

I was going to say maybe 58.

101.

So that's it.

You get to keep going.

I'm telling you, that's how I'm going to be.

I don't want to do an episode that's just about that draft.

Holy shit.

Really?

Holy sheesh.

It's quite something.

Isn't that 3,000 people?

No, because not everyone drafts.

Oh, so you don't have to draft.

Correct.

And it's not that if you, so here's the funny rule that I don't know, Pablo.

If you pass one round, are you out forever?

Or can you pass in round 69 and enter back in for round 70?

I don't know the answer to that.

So the number one overall pick in 1990, Chipper Jones.

That worked out well.

Now, allow me to scroll to the bottom to find who the last pick is because there were 1,487 players distributed to 26 teams.

You will never have heard of the final pick in the draft, I promise.

And I'll be drafted.

We'll move on and I'll find.

Neville will have spent a day in the big leagues.

My guess is Nor and Triple A.

On theBaseballCube.com, which is the most exhaustive site I have found for like this information, the number of rounds available to click click on ends at 99.

So, like the

HTML code does not even allow me to click

a double-digit thing.

It just means

when they did this, they entered it with only two columns for the number of rounds.

It's like Y2K.

They thought everything would blow up with 9-9 going to 00.

Major League Baseball and every website that cares about Major League Baseball never anticipated that someone would want to find out who the last pick in 1990 would ever be.

Who was the last pick in the 99th round?

Oh, here we go.

So in this, so this is, it's interesting to your point.

In 1990, the 99th round, overall pick, 1,489.

It's just one guy.

It's the only person taken in that round.

And it was Jeffrey Caldwell,

taken by the Houston Astros.

He played, didn't he?

I don't know that name.

Okay.

If you Google him.

The Astros also, it's important to note, were the only team to pick in rounds 75 and on.

So they were just claiming territory while everybody else went to bet.

So those are guys who their signing bonus is like $100

and you get them in your system.

And you don't have to do it.

It's the way of doing minor league free agency to fill out your system.

You can just do it through the draft.

Jeffrey Caldwell for the record here.

Did he ever play Triple-A?

I'll bet a dollar he did not.

He has zero statistics of any kind listed.

But he is apparently 54 years old today.

And if you think I'm not going to call this guy up, you do not know how I do my show.

How are you going to find Jeffrey Caldwell?

David, I'm going to, John, I'm going to a town called Bogaloosa in Louisiana.

Bogaloosa, Louisiana.

Where would you expect Bogaloosa to be other than Louisiana?

I mean, does it sound right?

Bogaloosa, Pennsylvania.

No.

Bogaloosa.

You know, the draft is based on talent and people who get paid.

What bothered me about this weekend is that the number of people who had opinions, like on how stupid, including Trump and Kuiper and everybody else, how bad NFL evaluators are.

I'm surprised Trump had a stupid position.

I'm surprised that anybody would have a position.

I guess it's good television, but anyone would have a position that NFL talent evaluators aren't good.

They're the best in the world.

That's why they have those jobs.

Well, I mean,

this story, the Shadur Sanders thing, which again created a lot of buzz that was monetizable for the networks in question,

it feels like a yes and kind of a story, though, which is to say, yes, it is true that the NFL

is really bad at predicting which players at the most important position that they spend all this money scouting that can change the fortunes of a billion-dollar asset.

They're really bad at predicting which of those guys will be good.

So Mel Kuyper is right about that.

And clearly, the way that Dion handled the draft process and Shador handled it, they tried to shrink the market such that they could handpick their

team and it worked too well.

Everybody was like, actually, the market has shrunk so dramatically that nobody wants to take you, which is a function of leverage being talent, overestimating then the talent.

The fact is that he is a Cleveland Brown.

I thought Cleveland was on a list of teams he didn't want to play for.

I may have that wrong as well, Coca, but I thought Coach.

It's hard.

It's hard to tell.

I mean, like Andor Sanders loved playing as the Browns in Madden.

Like, what does that mean?

I don't know, but this is the Kremlinology of the NFL draft process, right?

LaCroix, I think the quarterback position has become so important that teams feel the need to overreach to try to take a player who might turn out to be Tom Brady.

Right.

So for the most.

We're all trying that every year.

Pardon?

We're all trying that.

Yeah.

But I bet if you looked overall the NFL draft, there is a very high degree of correlation between the players taken in the first few rounds who actually end up playing.

Oh, there's no question that the NFL draft first rounders make the team more often and faster than MLB.

That is true because there's no development.

NFL, you're drafted right onto the big league team.

But the similarity would be you're cost control to the point where you're incentivized to actually get this guy on the field so that you use him while he's cheapest.

But

the NFL talent managers

did not believe that he was a first, second, third round choice.

This is a big story because the most prominent draft expert, On ESPN, Mel Kuyper, who has generally been pretty accurate.

He's, I mean, Mel Kuyper is not a joke.

He's a deeply respected person with all the institutional memory, with more institutional memory than anybody else in his business.

And this is, I think, the greatest disparity ever between a player he expected to be taken very high.

He expects him to be a high-impact player who will make a big difference.

Whether you believe it or not, there were some pretty good reporting done.

I did read a thing in the athletic.

They claim they contacted 10 of the general managers and said, where is he on your board?

And they all said he's not on our board particularly.

It is, you have a funny place too, where more NFL teams know who their starter is next year than has generally been the case.

There was sort of, and this is also kind of a weak quarterback draft.

No question.

So I think a lot of people just passed.

They probably didn't want the distraction of Deion Sanders

because among other things, first time your quarterback doesn't perform well, you think Deion is going to be on Sports Center talking about what are they going to play, my son?

You really want that if you don't believe, if you do believe he will be impactful.

I do not believe the collusion

theory.

If you do believe he can make your team and start next year and your team will be better, they would take him.

They are interested in getting better.

I don't think there's anybody who's interested in teaching Deion Sanders a lesson, though there are many people interested in teaching Deion Sanders a lesson, maybe.

But I don't think anybody is going to pass a quarterback who is the fifth best overall player if there was a consensus that he is the fifth best player or even you don't need a consensus you just need one of 32 teams to think that right so that's so here's what all the pundits are getting wrong it's not just that he slipped down to the fifth round it's that 32 teams felt that there were four players they'd rather have each before Shadur Sanders and the Browns were one team who thought all right he's the fifth guy that we'd like and you know of course their track record drafting quarterbacks is outstanding well this this is this is the cosmic signing, not drafting, but this is the cosmic.

No,

all kinds of acquisition.

The Browns have been a phenomenal case study, which is why it's especially funny that the president is taking credit for the Browns doing this.

Because to your point, John, I think

the through line in all of this is that you can believe, yes, and you can believe that every NFL general manager is acting with total self-interest and zero whatever, ethical integrity, and still think that they passed on Deion Sanders' son because of self-interest, right?

So the whole idea is not that there wasn't some

motive that was,

you know, whatever, defensible.

The idea is that Shadur Sanders just wasn't worth the headache that they presumed.

And so when the Browns take him, It's just telling that the Browns are the same team that gave everything to sign Deshaun Watson, who had dozens of sexual misconduct lawsuits outstanding against him.

Right.

So the whole idea is that team.

Very different.

Should we're saying having a bad day?

No.

Dad.

But versus being a.

But this is, this is, I think, what is so important for people to realize, though, is that when it comes to what qualifies as a headache, right?

You are doing two things.

Number one, categorizing what does this mean on a day-to-day level when it comes to who my boss is?

And they were afraid that Deion Sanders was going to appoint himself their boss, which is, I think, the nightmare that Don was alluding to as well.

And then, second, it's,

I mean, it's the obvious one, right?

It's, is this guy actually worth the trouble?

And they don't think that Shadur Sanders is anywhere close to the prospect or player that they're going to be able to do.

What Andrew Berry said, though.

Andrew Berry, the GM of Cleveland, came out after he was picked and said, hey, listen, at fifth round money, This is a good deal.

This is a good player.

We had him valued higher.

We didn't take take him.

We value a bunch of guys in a draft.

We have a whole draft board with hundreds of guys on it in baseball, literally hundreds of guys.

And we have next to them who their agent is and whether or not we want to deal with that agent, what their demands are, if any, and then what we would pay for that player.

So we have a big board.

In football, you assume they do the same thing, sort of who, where do we view this?

And if the Browns viewed Sanders as a third round pick or a second round pick, but they knew that no one one else was going to take him or they were willing to take the risk that no one else would take them.

And when he's on the board and available at five, they grab him.

If they thought he would have been available at six, my guess is they would have done that as well.

But they thought there was a chance that someone would jump in at five to grab him.

But this is the comedy of the Browns, right?

So this offseason, for those not clocking the Browns' acquisitions, they've acquired four quarterbacks.

I think they drafted one in the third round.

Yeah, they drafted Dylan Gabriel.

And then they have Flacco, Flacco, Watson, Kenny Pickett, Deshaun Watson.

Who am I forgetting?

It seems like five.

Watson, Flacco, Pickett, Gabriel, Sanders.

One, two, three, four, five quarterbacks

on one team.

Clearly, they're not going to make it.

Our friend, Mr.

Lebetard, is of the opinion and his show that there's an opportunity where

Sanders could be the starting quarterback for the Cleveland Browns, and this is a great pick for them in theory.

Sure.

I'm of the opinion he won't even make the team.

This is why the draft is good television.

Yeah.

Is that everything is on the table and you don't actually get proven wrong until months later.

And so everybody is plausibly at the table arguing.

And in the case of Deion Sanders and Shador Sanders, it's like, guess what?

We just birthed.

We birthed a superstar, not in terms of talent, but certainly in terms of

attention

drawing ability.

So it's a Caitlin Clark situation where next year's draft will not have the type of attention unless they can find another first-round pick who's a supposed first-round pick to drop down.

This was a perfect storm, what happened this weekend with the NFL draft.

Sanders is a personality, and then he didn't get drafted where people thought.

And it just created, think about next year where you've got Arch Manning about to be drafted, the biggest quarterback family ever, maybe.

A family that, by the way, had also previously, yeah, I would say so, also previously had said, you don't want to take our son with Eli.

They did a version of work that went over far better because Eli was a better prospect and maybe they handled it in a way diplomatically that was quite different from the public theater of Dion retiring his son's jersey after going like 13 and 11 in the Big 12 and also not having the grade that Eli got.

But when I was talking to NFL executives this weekend, like, what happened here?

It's not collusion.

It's a test of power

in which every NFL team was like, until the fifth round, this guy is not good enough to demand the treatment, the power that he thinks he deserves.

I think that's well put.

I do.

We did a bunch of things on this.

I think John Elway was the first guy.

Coca told me that, and I remember this barely Out of Stanford.

Elway did not want to play for a certain team and so would not allow himself to be drafted or signed with that team.

Told the Colts in December 82.

So this is a long time ago.

I apologize.

But then it sort of sat dormant.

Eli Manning did the same thing.

And Sanders

tried to do the same thing, and it did not work.

And there could be people who have all sorts of thoughts, but the reality is Elway and Manning were good.

professional players.

Yeah, they're number one overall picks.

Potentially Hall of Famers.

Is Manning in the Hall of Famers?

Certainly.

And Manning.

Eli get voted in.

Did he get voted in, Coca?

I think he did not.

He did not.

He failed to secure enough votes during his first year of eligibility, but the presumption is he will be in the Hall of Fame.

He has a real puncher's shot.

He's got rings.

If Sanders ends up having a good career, it's a success for the Browns.

They got a fifth-round quarterback who's a producing big leader.

But just imagine, though, like if you're said to go back to the full circle part of this, right?

So not only do you have Deion Sanders demanding that you play Shadur Sanders, you also have literally Donald Trump.

Like, enjoy, distraction feels like an insufficient term, actually,

for what that story is going to be for the next year.

If you'd like to understand Donald Trump's acumen at running an NFL team, he did run a

USFL team.

There's a very fun

film called Small Potatoes, directed by Mike Tolan, about that tenure.

His

proposition is that what went on with the generals, remember he assigned Herschel Walker

to some astonishing contract.

The other

owners did not want to see those kind of salaries.

They weren't looking to sort of outspend the NFL the way that the ABA was with the NBA to get big stars.

President Trump had the theory that that was wrong.

He may have been right.

The USFL did end up failing.

But he did end up with the best player in the league, Herschel Walker.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

We did an episode of Pablo Tori Finds Out in which we examined the alternate universe in which Donald Trump buys the Buffalo Bills, by the way.

So he goes to the USFL because he is denied access to, we talk all the time on the show about the most exclusive clubs.

NFL ownership, you know, of course, being the thing that never accepted him.

And so instead of owning the bills,

he becomes what we now know today.

It reminds me a little of Mark Zuckerberg and only through you, you know him, but only through the lens of the social network where all of what he started with Face Smash or whatever it was called was about him not feeling popular and not getting into the clubs that mattered in his mind.

And the irony of what Trump did is he felt that he couldn't get into an exclusive club.

So what do you do?

It's an old story.

When you don't get accepted to a club, as Jewish people, we learn this in Hebrew school.

When we're not allowed, when it's an only goy club, what we're taught is by the club.

Only goys is a very different subscription.

Correct.

But there are clubs like that where no Jews are allowed.

By the way, Augusta used to be that for a very long time.

And what we're taught is, okay, we're going to buy it.

And once we buy it and own it, then we can do whatever we want.

Trump did something similar when he couldn't become an owner.

He just decided, all right, I'll run the country.

It's not a terrible plan in terms of ego satiation.

And I dare say that the country is behaving a lot like the general graph

that was the economic future of the USFL.

It is a current issue that I'm certainly not defending it other than to tell you that it is very hard to judge it right now.

We will be around to judge it in a matter of years to see

whether the economy talking about Sanders or Trump.

I'm talking about Trump.

We cannot evaluate.

So forget all the noise of the incompetence, but the concept of reducing trade deficit, the concept of trying to figure out our own country's deficit and deciding whether or not it's being done correctly or incorrectly.

I know that people like you like to judge it as it's happening, but it's hard to do that.

You have to take a sort of longer view approach.

I appreciate the rational.

perspective.

I'm sorry to be rational.

I would just remind you that

I think it's pretty clear how the Cleveland Browns are going to do,

even though it's not technically

true yet.

It is not clear.

What's their record going to be?

There's an over-under of four and a half, I believe.

Right now, they're saying that they're going to win four and a half games, I think Coca told me.

Was there over under?

I may, again,

I think you could.

You would be pretty close every year for the last, what, 30, 40 years if you had their over-under at four and a half.

I mean, it's not Bernie Cozar would like a word with you.

So that's not totally.

Is he more than 40 years old now?

Did Bernie Cozar last play?

You're asking me if Bernie's more than 40 years, but he played within the last 40 years.

I'm turning 40 this year.

You're telling me, you're asking me if Bernie Kozar and I are roughly the same age.

No, no.

I know Bernie Cozar is older than you.

Okay.

I'm saying when did Bernie Cozar last play?

And I'm going to guess in the 90s.

96.

So that is not that.

He last played 30 years ago.

They were good.

Didn't I say 30 years?

I thought you said 40.

I might have.

I'm not going to argue with you.

I just feel like

whatever.

I'm a ride here.

You just view the world that things are going to happen the way you expect them to happen because you don't agree with how things are happening now.

So your view is it won't work.

I hope,

David, that you're right about the U.S.

economy.

I don't have any evidence that you are.

Recessions happen.

I don't care.

I'll be very atypical.

I care less about the economy than that they're sending four and seven-year-old citizens back to their supposed home country.

We can certainly talk about

right now.

I feel like we can judge everything as it relates to what is the discernible strategy on a level of principle and simple logic.

I just like that a show that is more sophisticated than any other when it comes to sports and business, we end on a note of quote unquote, recessions happen.

Haunting.

Sometimes things are easily explainable, but well misunderstood.

Oh, God.

Explicable will be a slightly better choice of word there.

Yeah.

I was just trying to not use an SAT word again.

John Skipper, David Sampson, thank you for your verbosity.

And please stop making the 10-inch gesture with your hands.

This has been Pablo Torre finds out a Meadowlark media production,

and I'll talk to you next time.