The UFC Cashes In, Plus a Truly Riveting 1990s Cowboys Documentary With Ariel Helwani, Cousin Sal, and Bryan Curtis

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Bill Simmons podcast brought to you by the Ringer Podcast Network, where we have a new rewatchables that went up Monday night.

We did Rollerball, which came out 50 years ago and is the second greatest modern sports movie in the whole arc.

When you go longest yard, 1974, Rollerball 75, and then we're off, Rocky, Bad News Bears, Slapshot.

This movie's awesome.

I can't believe how well it's aged.

Talked about it with Brian Koppelman.

Producer Craig was out of his mind.

Really fun podcast, and you can watch it on the Ringer Movies YouTube channel as well.

Coming up in a second, we're going to talk to Ariel Hawani

about this massive, massive Paramount UFC development slash deal, which is going to change the face of how we watch UFC and it's going to change Paramount as a streamer.

And there's so many different ramifications.

We go into all of them.

So get ready for that.

And then cousin Sal, who is going to be on here every Sunday night when the football season starts, but him and Brian Curtis came on because Dallas Cowboys mania is about to happen thanks to this Netflix documentary.

It's coming out this weekend

and

it's just.

It's unbelievable.

And we dove into all the things we learned from it.

It's not coming out for a few more days, but we really just want to talk about early 90s Cowboys and just what an amazing, amazing, amazing, crazy bonkers era that was.

It just reignited a lot of football stuff for us.

So Sal Curtis, second part of this, and then

that's the pod.

Wanted to mention the Celtex that came out today that

Wick Grossback, who sold the team with his family to Bill Chisholm for $6.1 billion,

is not going to be the governor.

Initially, when they said the deal, they said he was going to be the governor for up to three years.

On this podcast, I talked about that I was dubious of that, that it would be three years.

I thought he would be passing the baton sooner.

And now it's literally sooner.

He's done.

It's going to be Chisholm as the governor.

So Wick Rosbach brought the Celtex 2008 title, 2024 title, professionalized the team in all these great ways.

I really liked him.

I thought he was a great owner.

And now

it's done.

Not surprising.

This is how it goes.

This is how it went with Mark Cuban as well.

But

yeah, so that's it.

So now we have the Bill Chismaras officially here in Boston.

We'll see if the team can be half decent.

Anyway, all right, that's it.

Podcast coming up in a second.

We're going to take a break.

Pearl Jam and then Arl Hawani next.

All right, recording this Tuesday morning Pacific time.

Ariel Huani is here.

It's tough to book him.

He's doing like four hours of content every day for Uncrowned on Yahoo.

He pops on here every once in a while.

This is the biggest UFC story, not only of the year, but one of the biggest ones ever, because Paramount just went all in and they bought UFC basically $1.1 billion a year.

It's way more money than I think anyone was expecting.

And there's so many ramifications out of this, but the biggest one is that the whole concept of the numbered pay-per-views and just how we're going to get content is completely shifting.

And the pay-per-view era is basically over.

This is it.

Now the numbers are going to come down.

There's going to be stuff on CBS.

They're going to be making the sport accessible in a completely different way.

This feels like a win was my first takeaway for UFC fans.

Oh, 100%.

And by the way, thank you for having me back on.

It's been a minute.

You look fantastic.

I move everything just to be on the program.

So this is

great, too.

Thank you.

Thank you.

It's gigantic.

So there's basically four entities involved.

Number one is Skydance Paramount.

They have this big merger.

They officially finalized it last week.

David Ellison, the son of Larry Ellison, he wants to make a big splash.

He does the South Park deal.

But, you know, Paramount and CBS, they are in the sports business.

There's the NFL, there's the Masters, there's Champions League on Paramount Plus and then the final on CBS, but they don't own a sport here in the United States.

They had an opportunity to own a sport.

So to me, it's a no-brainer.

You can argue that they paid a little bit too much, all that stuff, but they can own a sport and they could do a lot with it over the course of seven years.

And yes, the number for them.

by themselves is a big one, but I always thought they would get the UFC that is and TKO would get over a billion a year for their rights.

I just thought it was going to be split up.

So that was surprise number one.

We all thought they would go the way of the NFL, NBA, et cetera, where they would split it up among two or three different entities.

They only go to one.

That's surprise number one.

By the way, I think that was happening all the way through June.

I think that's where we were heading, where it was going to be Netflix getting the numbered pay-per-views and ESPN getting everything else.

And I think that's where everybody thought this is where we're landing.

Yeah.

And if you believe Ari Emmanuel and Mark Shapiro, who said on CNBC on Monday, as of late last week, that was the plan.

The plan was the 30 fight nights to Paramount, and then they were going to sell the 13 numbered pay-per-views or PLEs, if they want to call them that now, like WWE, to someone else.

But once the Skydance slash Paramount deal went through on Thursday, in 48 hours, they said it took just 48 hours.

They said, we want the whole freaking pie.

And so that's why it went to them for $1.1 billion a year.

And so it's a win for them because they can own the sport.

Obviously, you know, for the UFC brass, for TKO, it's a win because their previous deal was about $500 million a year with ESPN dating back to 2019.

So now they go from 500 million a year to 1.1 billion a year.

I would say that's a win.

Obviously, as you just said, it signals the end of pay-per-view starting next year, but it did make for a very awkward dance yesterday, Bill, because at the beginning of the day, you had Mark Shapiro, COO and president of TKO, say, pay-per-view is dead.

It's antiquated.

We're off pay-per-view.

Only old things are on pay-per-view.

And then you had Dana by the end of the day saying, well, I actually have to sell a pay-per-view this Saturday, UFC 319, and I have five left on ESPN.

So don't quite kill it just yet.

That was a little bit awkward, but they'll figure it out.

And then we just move very quickly forward.

For the fans, obviously, it's a no-brainer because if you're paying $12.99 for the premium package on Paramount Plus or $7.99 for the Essential package, and then some shows on CBS, it's way cheaper now to be a UFC fan.

Here's the biggest one, though.

What about the fighters?

I had Tom Aspinall, the UFC heavyweight champion on my show yesterday.

He knew nothing of the deal.

He's asking questions like, well, what about my pay-per-view points?

For those that don't know, CERN fighters and the champions will get points based on the amount of pay-per-views you sell.

Well, we're celebrating the death of pay-per-view.

What about the champions who rely heavily on those points?

Do the purses go up as a result of 1.1 billion coming in?

Are the fighters getting any percentage of this deal like they do in the NBA?

50%?

No, as of right now, they're getting 0%.

So there's many different permutations here.

But overall, as far as the fans are concerned, yes, it's a huge win because it's now cheaper to be a fan starting next year.

You left out Redbird, which was the other piece of this.

So Redbird owns 22.5% of Paramount, Jerry Cardinal and that whole group.

And they've been buying up sports.

They own different sports assets.

They own pieces of Teams.

They own a piece of Fenway Sports Group, all these different things.

And they really want to get into sports with Paramount.

That was one of the reasons that they grabbed the big piece of it.

There were no sports left.

This was it.

Like the NFL, I think, now gets the CBS package, gets to go back.

But Goodell, I think that's already done.

Paramount and CBS is getting that.

Other than that, this was it.

This was the one chance to basically grab a big sports asset that you and I have really believed in as.

something that had a lot of potential, plus with people under 30, which I think is a big part of this UFC audience.

What does that look like if you make all of these free?

I think the thing that was the hardest to figure out was how many people were pirating the pay-per-views.

Yeah, um,

what the actual audience is.

I think that was a big issue for Netflix trying to figure out: all right, if we're going to buy out all the numbered pay-per-views, which is what they were looking at,

what's the actual audience?

Because ESPN kept jacking up the prices for those pay-per-views.

They were getting to like 79, what was it, 79, 99, 99.

So, if you're a UFC fan and you wanted the 13 pay-per-views, now you're paying $1,000 a year.

So people are now picking and choosing.

Maybe they're getting three, maybe they're getting four, or they're pirating them.

And I think the big variable that I have no idea what the answer is is

how many people are actually out there to watch these pay-per-views?

You could almost tell me any number.

You could tell me it's 500,000 people.

You could tell me it's like 2 million people.

And what if they put it on CBS and basically everybody can just click on CBS at 8 o'clock on a Saturday night and watch UFC for three hours?

What is that number?

Maybe that's 7 million people.

Could they grow the audience?

And then on top of it, I think a big thing for Redbird is there's ad stuff with this that you couldn't really do the way UFC was structured originally.

You can actually.

put real stuff in here now now that it's free and try to grow it in a way that I think ESPN had a tougher time doing.

Yeah.

And we'll never know that number to your point.

What we do know is is those numbers, as far as the plus pay-per-view numbers, were dwindling.

And that's part of the reason why ESPN probably didn't want to pay a billion dollars for this.

They initially, when they first signed the UFC, they said, we want exclusivity.

We want the whole thing.

And I think it was a great relationship.

I think UFC propped up plus.

And I think ESPN gave UFC the rub.

And if I'm, look, I didn't talk to Dana White about this, but I know Dana White quite well.

Dana White wanted ESPN and Netflix.

Forget the price tag.

He's an optics guy.

There is no chance in hell that he said my top choice was Paramount Plus and CBS.

Even yesterday on that CNBC interview, they're talking about the Tiffany network.

They're talking about like old school CBS.

Dana White's not that kind of guy.

He wanted to be where the cool kids are hanging out.

That's why he always touts social media and the podcasters and all this stuff.

And if you even break down the social media numbers from CBS to ESPN, from everything, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, ESPN blows all things CBS Paramount out of the water.

And so I'm really curious when you're you're talking about those young kids, like your son, like my kids, like my nephews.

Okay, to them, they know ESPN.

They see ESPN.

They see it on their feeds.

They see it on YouTube.

CBS and Paramount, while they have maybe three times the amount of subscribers as far as Paramount Plus versus ESPN Plus, I don't know if those subscribers are UFC fans right now.

They may become UFC fans and UFC fans may come over there, but I'm really curious to see how this breaks down in terms of like the footprint.

As you know, when you're in business with ESPN, they make you a part of the news cycle, right?

They talk about you on Sports Center.

You're on the ticker.

You're watching the NBA finals and I see Isam Khachev and Dustin Poirier's faces on the scorers table.

All that is gone now.

That doesn't happen.

Yeah, you might get an ad read from Jim Nance during the masters, but it doesn't quite hit the same.

And so I think they're going to lose out on some of those things while they're still obviously making a boatload of money.

And what a week for them, right?

Who would have thought, Bill, in 2026, ESPN would be in business with WWE and not UFC or even top rank?

It's a crazy reality that we're living in.

And TKO is obviously making a ton of money involved.

Well, that was the other variable in this.

ESPN ends up with, what does it look like, 10 premium WWE pay-per-views that Jimmy Petaro was on Brian Curtis's Press Box podcast yesterday and talking about they have these 10 signature pay-per-views.

And they're actually going to work with ESPN scheduling to try to, and this is something Nick Khan, I think, has been great at with WWE, trying to figure out where the holes in the schedule are, where it's like August 2nd.

There's just nothing going on in sports.

We should put SummerSlam right there and make it two days and try to blow it out.

So I think they're going to work together and try to do these signature things.

But they're paying, I think it was $350 for the 10,

which is money they could have spent on UFC.

So they basically chose those 10 premium events of WWE over the totality of having all this UFC tonnage, which I guess they just didn't value in the same way anymore.

And then from a Netflix standpoint, Netflix could have bought out the number of pay-per-views.

and i think you know they're already in that raw business that was like what 500 500 million dollars a year whatever the hell that was um

they could have the number of pay-per-views with a way bigger audience right netflix has 300 million subscribers yep but i don't think they valued it the same way paramount did paramount has seven i think that i saw they had 7.1 million subscribers that's it they're like the one of the lowest ones if you're able to add a million subscribers

now it's like 14% subscriber growth, which is all they care about.

If they can try to get to eight, nine million subscribers, that's a huge win for them.

Netflix didn't really need it.

You know, it's nice to have, but ultimately it's not like a game changer for them.

For Paramount, it's a game changer.

And for ESPN, I don't know what would you rather have?

Would you rather have the 10 signature WWE events or all the UFC tonnage?

I think I would rather have the WWE stuff.

It's a really interesting question because obviously the WWE fans are super loyal and they'll follow them wherever, just ask Peacock.

It's 10 shows over 12 nights, right?

Because you're getting two WrestleMania nights and two SummerSlam nights, at least for now.

Who knows if they'll add more nights to some of those other shows?

And you can make a case that the WWE package is a little more reliable because you know that you're getting the top stars almost every single month, right?

Those guys are competing every month.

As far as the UFC is concerned, like, look, if you're ESPN, you're saying the last time we had Conor McGregor on our air was 2021.

And here we go.

He's not fighting for four years, and we're never getting him back because the deal is going elsewhere.

And so you can have a streak, as you know, where it goes up and down.

And, you know, there aren't top stars, there aren't top draws, there aren't top champions.

John Jones isn't fighting.

Connor isn't fighting.

Ronda Rousey disappears.

The whole thing we talk about every time.

And so it's a little less reliable.

And so if you're someone like CBS/slash Paramount, as it has come to light over the last 24 hours, because again, the messaging was a little bit funky.

Initially, Mark Shapiro said likely all all of the numbered shows would be on CBS.

And then I was like, wow, that really is kind of shocking because don't you want people to go on Plus and subscribe to watch those?

They backtracked on that one pretty fast.

Then Dana said four shows.

And then even by the end of the night, to New York Post, he said, hey, we're not totally like ruling out pay-per-view in the future.

I think it'll ultimately be those four tentpole events, including the big White House show, July 4th, 2026.

But here's where it gets really interesting.

As you know, WWE can't ever go back on pay-per-view.

Once they made the decision to put all those PLE shows on the network and then eventually Peacock, they decided we're out of that business.

UFC is now out of that business.

In seven years, they won't be able to go back.

And they were the last ones left who, whether they were getting 100 K buys, 200, 500, 600, they were the last consistent entity left that was using pay-per-view.

And despite it going down, still somewhat successful on pay-per-view.

Now that's gone.

And so I asked them and I asked Paramount, what will ultimately be the difference between UFC 326 and UFC Fight Night Omaha?

What's the difference between these shows now?

Because before you would tell me, oh, John Jones has to fight on this date because that's UFC 327 at T-Mobile.

Well, ultimately, they're all on the same platform on the same spot with no extra charge.

So what's the difference now?

I'm worried, just playing devil's advocate.

Ultimately, I think it's a great thing for everyone involved, UFC fans, et cetera, not the fighters, but you know my reasoning there.

I'm worried that now there's not that pressure to stack the deck for the numbered shows because they are behind a paywall and that will thus lead them to kind of take their foot off the guys a little bit and make the product a little more watered down than it already is.

That's my worry.

It's interesting because the pressure would now have to come from Paramount instead of the pay-per-view prices.

But

my interpretation reading everything and talking to people yesterday was that they're kind of moving more toward a WWE model where they're going to have like the three or four signature shows, which In a weird way they were already doing.

They just didn't say it.

Like we knew this summer, like we knew the big, the big show was the vegas show and at the end of june right that was the one where it's like oh this is some of the some of the big some of the big guns are here then the next next month isn't as big of a show and you kind of knew ahead of time which three or four they were stacking up and they're just i think going to be more transparent about it and maybe just maybe it's like they have the one vegas show will be huge They'll have a New York show that'll be huge.

They'll have some show in South America or Mexico that'll be huge.

And then they'll do like a dubai whatever and that'll be kind of the four corners they did specifically say it's 13 premium live events so what is yeah but we both of us know that's impossible they don't have the fighters for it they don't i mean one of the things that's happened even you've you've been a fan way longer than i have i've been a fan because of my son the last seven eight years you could feel um

it's really hard to find the hooks for the main events because they just don't have they they're i don't want to say in a rut but it feels like they're in a a transition.

And it's a little like wrestling where all of a sudden they could have seven guys who could lead a pay-per-view.

But right now, they're really leaning on some of the older guys and then hoping that Taporia is going to be like this massive Connor type guy, which I don't think is going to happen unless he fights Canelo, which I thought was another interesting thing this week.

Him calling out Canelo, I was like, oh.

You want to go on the map, Taporia?

I know it's not going to happen, but if you want to go on the map,

that would be one way to do it.

But

who are the guys who would be the signature main event pay-per-view guys that UFC even has right now, other than Aspinal and Taboria?

Look, they've got four on the books right now.

The fifth is in December, but they haven't announced the card for that because it's a little far out.

I would argue these four coming up are pretty damn good cards.

This Saturday, Dricus II Plus C versus Hamza Shamaev.

A lot of people said that to them is their most anticipated fight of the year.

Like dating back to when we found out that Hamza was going to fight DDP, everyone has been salivating.

Both guys undefeated in the UFC.

Shamaev has been on an incredible run.

So that's this Saturday.

That's pay-per-view number one.

Then you've got October 4th.

Magomed on Khalai versus Alex Pereira II.

On Khalaiv shocked everyone when he beat Pereira back in March.

Also, Marab Douleshvili against Corey Sandhagen.

Like, if you're a hardcore fan, you love that.

Khalil Roundtree is on there against Yeri Pochaska.

That's October 4th.

October 25th is the return of Tom Aspinall defending his title for the first time officially against Cyril Ghana, France.

Love that fight.

It's a heavyweight title.

You know, that's a big deal.

And then you go to the MSG card in November, and it's Islam Khacha moving up to 170 to fight the new champ, Jack De La Mattalena.

Like those are four

gigantic, at least to me, like salivating worthy big time fights.

And so they still have those guys.

Are they million plus buys like they had in 2016 with Connor and Ronda?

No, but they were unicorns.

And so I still think that there is at least, you know, I don't know, eight to 10 solid pay-per-view main events a year.

I'm just really curious how they're going to skin that cat now now moving on to this new era where none of these are going to be behind the paywall.

And I could tell you, a lot of these champions are wondering, all right, so what's going to happen now?

Because like they make a ton of money off the buys.

Does my base pay go up?

By the way, do the performance bonuses go up?

You know, now everyone goes crazy over these 50K bonuses for fight of the night and all this stuff.

Do they at least raise it to 100K, thus changing people's lives?

The base pay now is 10 and 10, meaning if you're a UFC debutante, not like a guy that they signed from another organization, like just a guy who's like six and one coming from the regional scene, you're getting 10 to show and 10 to win.

Do they at least raise it to 20 and 20 or are they keeping all of this to themselves?

Because I think that's a really big part of this as well.

Like, if I'm a UFC fan, I'm happy that I'm getting this all for free, but I also kind of want, or at least, you know, for a minimal cost, I also want to know that the fighters are being taken care of because we've seen what happens to them at the end of their careers where they're left with very little.

It's a good point.

And could this lead, everybody's always wondered, could there be an MMA UFC union or any of that stuff?

And everyone says that.

By the way, this is the time.

If there was ever a time, this is it.

They're literally sitting here watching everyone from the executives go on all these great shows, waving their pom-poms that they have just scored the biggest deal ever, over a million, a billion a year, 7.7.

Like this rivals, this is more than what, you know, the Olympics gets and NHL gets and PJA gets.

Like they are now in the mainstream, right?

Tiffany Network, all that stuff.

And you're sitting there as a fighter being like, wait a second, if I just kind of like band together with my brothers here and maybe we threaten not to show, I'm not suggesting they do that, but like, that's how this starts.

What do we get out of this?

Look at the mat.

Look at all the ads.

What do we get from that?

Like, it's crazy.

But by the way, my prediction is this will not happen.

They've had other opportunities.

They've never shown any interest in doing it.

They're not going to show interest now.

The problem is the careers are too short.

And if you're

going to risk out a year, like in basketball, you can lose a year if you don't want to, but you could lose a year.

You're still going to have a long career.

Football is the one where, even though football has a union, but football couldn't, the average career in football is like three, four years, something like that.

So if you lose a year, you're losing 25% of your earning.

I would assume that would be the same thing for this.

The easiest way to do it is there's like five to six max influential managers in this sport who

work with the top stars.

If those guys came together, and said, yeah, we're going to convince all our guys to do it.

I think it could actually happen relatively quickly.

The problem is those guys, for the most part, are way more concerned with being friends with the UFC brass than doing what's best for their clients.

So there's no chance in hell that they would ever do it.

Yeah.

And then, well, and then from a Paramount standpoint.

So

this would be the zag against what you're saying about how do you incentivize the fighters?

If there's, if they actually elevate some of the Paramount stuff and make it a bigger deal.

on there and there's advertising and there's a chance to be seen by more people, then you would think there's some sponsorship possibilities for the specific fighters.

And there's outside the octagon stuff that maybe, maybe they could get.

I'm a little nervous about it, even though I think it's great because I do think people were picking and choosing the pay-per-views.

I'm a little nervous about how this plays out with the sameness of week to week.

Kind of not as a, like I'm a more, way more casual fan than you.

kind of not knowing when to come in and out.

And now it's like, you know, because I've not like some of the ESPN stuff, I just skip unless somebody tells me you got to watch.

There's somebody on this card, and I'm like, All right, I'll watch it.

Um, but I don't, I don't know the 52-week cycle,

you know, at least in basketball, there's a start, a middle, and a finish.

You know, football goes September and we end in January.

WWE, it's like, all right, we have these signature things, and then there's raw if you really want it week to week.

How UFC figures out how to stagger all their content in a way that makes sense for my brain, I think is going to to be really hard.

And

that's the part that I don't know if they put a ton of thought in yet.

You know, I think that they cater to different people.

There's like the super casual who are going to watch maybe one or two, and then there's different levels all the way to the hardcore who are watching every single one and who are saying there's shows at the apex on Saturday, like this past Saturday, is a can't miss because X, Y, and Z guy's on there.

But one thing that I don't think that has been talked about enough in all this, and I can't wait to see what it turns into, and again, you're the perfect person to talk to this about is like, you know, that when ESPN is out of business with a sports entity, they essentially stop covering that entity, right?

It's an NHS.

NHL corollary, yeah.

They're the perfect example.

They left, they stopped covering them, they're back, they've got ancillary shows, they've got analysts, they've got the coverage on Sports Center.

I'm fascinated to see.

how ESPN treats UFC, if history is any indication it will be the same way, and what they lose out from that, because I really do think it's very valuable to have the Daniel Cormier Friday at the weigh-in spot on first take before a pay-per-view where he's breaking things down with Stephen A, having all the stuff on their Instagram, having all their stuff on the TikTok.

Like those numbers are insane compared to what CBS slash Paramount can do for them.

And to me, That's not being talked about enough because at this point, unless ESPN decides to re-up their deal with PFL, so they have a deal with PFL, who's the distant number two.

They've got one year left on that deal that ends in 2026.

Unless they decide to re-up with them, they're going to be out of the MMA business.

And I think part of the reason why the UFC is getting a billion dollars from Paramount, Billion Plus, is because of ESPN.

ESPN elevated them.

Think about where they were when they left Fox and think about where they are now in terms of like what kids are talking about, watching, how they know the UFC stars.

That's a huge, huge deal.

And by the way, kudos to the UFC.

They have always had the great benefit of timing.

When they left Spike, and went to Fox, Fox needed them to prop up FS1, right?

When they left Fox and went to ESPN, ESPN needed them to prop up ESPN Plus.

They leave ESPN to go to Paramount.

Ellison needs them to prop up the new Paramount Plus.

They have been able to really benefit from great timing.

And that's not a knock on them, but they've just been able to be used as this thing to prop up.

And history has shown that they are able to prop those things up.

FS1 dies on the vine, in my opinion, without UFC and Plus doesn't really get off the ground without UFC.

So I think that they'll have a similar success, but now it's totally different, right?

Because there's no more pay-per-view.

And so

that whole breakdown has completely changed.

I think that's that's a really good point, especially about TKO the last couple of years, because Netflix and the raw deal, they are hating Netflix right as Netflix is like, we really want to see what live can do for us.

We need something.

Oh, here's Raw.

Let's grab this.

They get the Paramount.

Paramount is getting bought by Ellison and Redbird.

And they're like, we got to get into sports.

We got to boost subscribers.

Oh, here's this.

This will be the last sports thing available.

We'll grab this.

Same thing for ESPN Plus.

And then this WWE deal that they just did, which honestly makes more sense for whatever this flagship thing is going to be, where you want basically these little signature events, tentpole events that you can kind of get behind.

So the thing you just said about ESPN, it's interesting because I think 20 years ago was probably a bigger deal from a TV standpoint because ESPN was just more in people's lives than it is now.

I don't think Sports Center matters, you know, even 10% like it did.

I think first take matters a little.

But the social stuff and their in and their foothold in all these different social platforms and how big their app is and TikTok and Instagram.

And if ESPN's just like, we're just, we're just out.

We're not going to, we're not going to talk about this stuff the same way.

That is like a massive footprint that they just lose.

I actually, I actually have some of these numbers for my show today.

Thank you to my producers for this.

Take a look at this, Bill.

All right.

This is kind of crazy.

As far as Tick, excuse me, as far as Twitter is concerned, ESPN has 58.8 million, 45 million on their Sports Center account, and 1.6 million on their ESPN MMA account.

As far as CBS, Paramount Plus, and CBS Sports, 1.1 million, 416,000, 1.4 million on CBS Sports, like just that alone.

Just listen to Instagram, $28.2 million for ESPN.

CBS has

965,000.

Sports Center has 38.8 million followers.

Paramount Plus has 1.5 million.

ESPN MMA has 4.6 million followers.

ESPN, excuse me, CBS Sports has 1.9.

In total, if you take TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, ESPN has 300 and 8, 300.8 million followers slash subs.

CBS Paramount and CBS Sports has 32 million followers slash subs.

That's a huge, huge difference.

Now, Paramount Plus definitely has more subs, 77.7 subscribers, million subscribers.

ESPN Plus has 24.9 subscribers at the end of Q1 this year.

But again, I think the vast majority of those, we don't know the breakdown, but

I would venture to guess that right now, a lot of those subs on ESPN Plus were built off of UFC fans.

I would venture to guess a lot of those 70 plus million subs on Paramount Plus aren't UFC fans.

It's going to be very interesting to see in two, three, four years how many of those go from plus ESPN plus to Paramount Plus.

And that's the thing.

We don't know whether that's 475,000 people or 3 million people.

We have no idea what the number is.

For Paramount, all right, so everything we're laying out, it's like, wow, why would they do this?

It seems like they overpaid.

I was trying to think about like when you have a streamer and you're not Netflix.

or you're not YouTube, or you're not ESPN, like, what's your identity, right?

So you're like, you and I are buying Paramount.

We're like, what the fuck?

Where the fuck are we buying?

We're getting

South Park.

We have the CBS.

We have some NFL.

We got Taylor Sheridan.

We have all of his shows.

What do you think?

You have the Daily Show.

You get Showtime.

You get like the carcass of MTV.

You get some Communist Central.

But really, like, you're thinking like a year from now, who are my faces?

Right.

So now you have UFC and you have Dana White and the broadcast crew is like now a face of Paramount.

Taylor Sheridan is a face of Paramount.

Football is a face of Paramount.

The South Park guys, they're, you know, they're, they're like the ultimate disruptors in the comedy content space.

And you kind of see you're moving toward this is like a male kind of like those are things that

There's like a Venn diagram where there's a lot of stuff colliding in that Venn diagram.

And I think that's maybe what Paramount might be trying to look at here is we can have sports and then this content and just kind of go after dudes.

And then you get from CBS, you get people like my dad, who's couldn't be more excited about Boston Blue with Donnie Wahlberg filming right now, getting ready for a September launch.

But you get like older men with CBS and then you get the younger men with some of this other stuff.

And it's like, all right, at least now we have something.

Unlike where like, I look at Peacock now and I'm like, what the hell is Peacock?

Right.

NBC stuff, and that's it.

Yeah.

Premier League soccer, you get that.

So I'll be keeping my Peacock and probably my ESPN Plus as well.

But that's, yeah, that's pretty much it.

And by the way,

how about the fact they have done, TKO that is, has done an incredible job of splitting this pie up in as many way possible.

Like look at how they did WWE here in America.

Raw on Netflix, SmackDown on USA.

NXT on CW,

the PLEs to ESPN.

That's four different entities right there.

And there's even still some talk about their library because the library didn't go to, you know, the vault, if you will, didn't go to ESPN.

So could they sell that off to someone else?

Well, as far as UFC is concerned, okay, now we know that all this is going to Paramount.

They have, Paramount doesn't own it globally.

They have, you know, these rights in different countries around the world.

For example, in the UK and Ireland, they're on TNT Sports, but they did carve out something that now Paramount will get a 30-day exclusivity period when the deals are up around the world to be able to negotiate exclusively with the TKO Brass in order to try try to gobble these up all over the world.

But we go one step further.

They still have something called Contender Series, which actually kicks off tonight on ESPN Plus, which is basically the UFC signs these regional guys, these up-and-coming guys, the likes of Sean O'Malley started there.

And then if they win, Dana White sits there like on his throne, old school Roman Coliseum days and says, all right, we're giving you a contract.

We're not giving you a contract.

They haven't, that wasn't a part of this deal.

So they could sell that off to someone else.

The ultimate fighter is still kicking.

That wasn't a part of this deal.

They could sell that off to someone else as well.

And so they also have Zoofa Boxing, which is about to launch on September 13th with Canelo Crawford on Netflix.

That's a one-off.

And Dana White said yesterday that that deal is done as well.

They just haven't announced the broadcast partners.

So the amount of broadcast entities that this group is

in bed with, in business with, with, you know, Ari Emanuel and Mark Shapiro, Nick Khan, Dana White, like some of the most powerful people in all of sports, media, and entertainment.

It's really staggering to watch how they've essentially like owned all this real estate in a very short amount of time.

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Yeah, so I think where it heads is the big boxing pay-per-views that they're going to do go to Netflix for the most part.

The big WWE pay-per-views go to ESPN.

All the big UFC stuff goes to Paramount, and then the biggest stuff goes to CBS.

So now I'm in four platforms.

I guess the question for me, like we don't know the exact numbers.

Let's say, let's say Netflix was...

Let's say Netflix wanted $400 million a year for the 13 numbered pay-per-views.

And let's say ESPN was ready to offer 200 a year for everything else.

I have no idea if those are the right numbers, but let's say that's about 600 a year.

So we'll round it up.

I'll say they could get 650 a year from Netflix, and then you have your pay-per-views of 300 million subscribers, and they buy it out, and then the rest is on ESPN.

Or you go to Paramount, I get an extra $400 million a year over seven years.

So I'm getting an extra $2 billion,

but way less certainty about my audience.

What would you have done if you were the UFC conciliary?

I would have taken this deal.

This is a tremendous number.

See, I would have too.

Yeah.

You're taking the money.

It's too much money.

You're taking it.

And by the way, so much less pressure.

Now all the pressure is on Paramount and CBS to sell these shows.

Like, we'll just put together the cards.

And, you know, Paramount and CBS are banking on the three letters.

And there was once a time where all the pressure was on the UFC where they're like, yo, man, we need Brock Lesnar at UFC 200 because we need to sell over a million pay-per-views.

We need to figure out how to get Connor to come back to fight so-and-so, Khabib Nirmagamedov, let's say, because we need that 2 million pay-per-views.

They don't need nothing anymore.

And so when they're at an impasse with some superstar, between, eventually they'll be at an impasse with, say, Ilya Tapoya.

And Ilya's like, I ain't fighting unless you give me 20 million.

They'll say, cool.

Enjoy.

It doesn't, it doesn't change our lives.

It does not change our lives in one way, shape, or form if you fight or not because all of it is bought and paid for.

You know what I mean?

And so it's not even, by the way, it's not even bought and paid for to where like, hey, our partner needs these pay-per-view buys anymore.

No, our partner is not even putting these numbered shows behind a pay-per-view wall anymore.

And so for CBS and for David Ellison and for Paramount and for Skydance and for Redbird and all these people, they're like, all right, we just want those three letters.

We want it on our streaming platform.

And we're going to hope and pray that those three letters mean a lot to a lot of people and that they're going to deliver for us.

But if I'm the UFC brass, if I'm TKO, this is the greatest deal in the world.

It's over a billion.

You're now playing with the big dogs and there's zero pressure on you.

Of course, they would listen to this and be like, what are you talking about?

Of course, there's pressure.

We want to put on the best product.

I get that, but it's not the same type of pressure as 2010 when you're out there freaking trying to cut deals with everyone because you are benefiting from the pay-per-view.

Yeah, it's,

I get it.

from everybody's side, but it does feel like something is going to be completely different now.

And I can't can't put my finger on what.

I think what you said about the pressure about, oh shit, we have this thing in Vegas on June and our top guy just fell out.

We have to make sure we have like

are they going to care in the same way is the question.

No.

I mean, you'll care from a gate standpoint, but the pay-per-view is completely different.

And that's a huge number.

I think right here now, and this could change between now and let's say next year, I think the ones who this affects the most are the kids in good ways and bad ways.

And when I say kids, I mean like your son's age, because I think, great,

they won't have to pirate.

And by the way, a lot of these kids, as you know, aren't even paying for the $12.99.

They will still pirate because they're just lazy and they expect to get everything for free, but it won't hit the pockets as much.

The stealing it for the pirating is part of the art.

Yes.

They love that they save your potential.

Yeah, yeah.

But it's that, I'm telling you, it's that digital footprint, man.

I do not, do not discount social media.

CBS Paramount basically has no presence on social media.

CBS Sports HQ compared to ESPN or whatever is nothing.

And I really think, like, I would get it all the time from my nephews.

They would send me stuff.

They would send me clips.

Like, that's not going to exist anymore.

And so I'm really curious to see how that affects the just sort of general popularity.

Because as you know, five years ago during the pandemic, no one benefited more.

than the UFC because they came back so soon and they were the only game in town.

I was in the A-block of Sports Center, 6 6 p.m.

Sports Center in the middle of spring when it would be like NBA playoff time talking about like random fights that no one cared about because there was literally nothing else to talk about.

And obviously that was an extreme, but all that is going away.

And so I'm really curious what that translates into.

And my prediction is that it will, that demographic will kind of find something else to tune into.

It's going to be fascinating.

One other thing about Paramount that I wish I had mentioned earlier was the whole concept of buying a subscriber base and how these big companies think about, like you buy this UFC audience and even though they overpaid for it, they're still getting this audience and maybe they didn't overpay.

But now they have, I think I said before it was like 7.1 million subscribers.

Maybe that gets to eight now.

Maybe that gets to eight and a half.

But it's people that aren't canceling Paramount once they get it because they love UFC, right?

Once they're in,

They're just in at that point and you can just count on them and there's no churn rate for it.

And that and what all these people care about the most is churn rate.

Like Spotify, one of the reasons the stock is $700 plus dollars is because once you get Spotify,

you kind of don't cancel it.

You don't get rid of it, right?

You have all your playlists on there, you're used to it, and it's just the price.

And, you know, nobody really gets rid of Spotify once they have it.

I think UFC fans, whoever has the UFC content, once they're in on it, and once you know there's enough, there's enough content week to week, month to month, you're probably just,

you're probably just doing the automatic recharge.

I, you know, HBO would have that issue where they would have like white lotuses coming and people get HBO and then cancel it right after White Lotus ends.

I don't think the UFC, I think that would be way harder to do if you can sprinkle the content correctly.

You know what I mean?

Yes, I would say the number one most loyal are the WWE fans.

Like they are the most, they will follow you wherever.

And WWE does a great job with all the other stuff, the documentaries, the behind the scenes.

UFC hasn't really done that as well.

Like WWE turned WrestleMania 9, one of the least liked WrestleManias of all time, into this great behind-the-scenes documentary that they put out back in April.

And I was gobbling it up.

I loved everything about it.

Look at this WWE Unreal that everyone was talking about on Netflix.

So like WWE fans will eat it all up.

And I would say the next tier are the UFC fans who are a little bit more fickle and who will come and go, sort of like boxing fans, but I would say a little bit more loyal to the brand than boxing fans are loyal to a specific brand.

And they will follow.

They will do their thing.

It's just a brand new world and you can never go back to pay-per-view now.

You can, after you tell them,

it's a

zone did this.

Do you remember when Dazone came out with the Pay-Per-View is dead thing?

And now they went, and then they went back to pay-per-view and now they're telling you again that pay-per-view is dead?

Like you can't do that to the public.

Once you tell them once that, hey, you're, hey, you're paying too much.

We wanted to help you because you're paying $1,000 a year.

In seven years, you can never go back to that.

And so what does does this sport look like in 10 15 years as a result of the decision announced yesterday can't wait to see well and then the last piece that we didn't talk about so they had the unicorn of connor

they had the unicorn of rousey for two years and then going back in the 2000s there were a couple other people but they really haven't had the unicorn

somebody who can pull everybody in for a while.

They've had some people that seem like maybe

and it just really hasn't happened in the 2020s.

What happens if they get their version of Caitlin Clark or the 2000 late 20s version of Connor or whoever and get somebody who then becomes a mainstream megastar for like two, three years?

And now that has to be on Paramount and CBS.

We don't have that.

And by the way, we don't know if that's going to, that might not happen.

Like it hasn't happened in golf since Tiger.

Tiger hasn't had anybody like that for basically 15 years.

So maybe it doesn't happen, but if it does happen, it's happening on Paramount.

That person will come.

That is my one prediction that I know for sure.

I don't know who it could be, Ilya, it could be Tom, it could be someone we've never heard of, it could be someone who's in the seventh grade right now.

But those people will always be there.

It could be Brock Lesnar's daughter for all we know.

Like, those people will always be there.

The shot putter, yes, yes.

Who knows?

Uh, they will always be there, they will always come, there will always be superstars.

And uh, I don't think the UFC is struck.

Like, who saw Dricus Duplessis becoming this champ that people love?

Um, Hamza could win on Saturday and turn into like a tour de force that doesn't lose for the next 10 years.

Who the hell knows?

I'm not betting on that fight, by the way.

You know what?

I think if we would have talked six, seven months ago, everyone would be like, oh, yeah, Hamza,

he's unstoppable, right?

He's a locomotive.

I think the cool pick now is Drickus.

I think

the smart mark pick is Drickus because everyone says if Drickus takes him into the championship round, so to speak, three, four, five, he's got this in the bag.

In other words, if you looked into a crystal ball and that crystal ball told you this fight ends in one or two, oh, yeah, Hamza won.

If you look into a crystal ball and it says it went to the championship rounds or the distance, it's Drickus.

I'm leaning towards Drickas.

I just think the guy is impossible to figure out.

But also, like, he could lose in 60 seconds and everyone would be like, of course he's going to lose because Hamza is so crazy.

I think the smart market is minus 260, which I thought

is higher than I thought.

I actually would have, I wouldn't have been surprised if you would have said like 325 or something like that.

What strict is?

Plus 196 on FanDuel.

That feels,

I like that one.

That feels like the pick, in my opinion.

That's the flyer.

It'd be a good one.

All right.

This is all great.

How are you feeling about the Bills?

I put Josh Allen at the top of my QB pyramid.

I don't know if you had any thoughts.

I appreciate that.

I don't know if you're trying to do like some sort of like reverse self-defense.

I wasn't.

I don't do that stuff.

I thought he was the best guy last year.

I mean, he won the MVP.

It wasn't like it was a hot take.

And I just didn't think Mahomes had a great year.

But the Chiefs were.

By the way, there were some people who said Lamar deserved it.

I don't agree with those people, but this, I feel something in the air.

I have to say, I'm reluctantly watching Hard Knocks.

I wasn't a fan when I heard it the announcement because I just, I don't want the distraction.

I don't want to play up to the cameras, but it's fun seeing my team shown in this light because, you know, that's an institution.

I'm a little worried about the James Cook stuff, although just today, Sean McDermott, Coach McDermott, said he's going to be practicing.

I pray to God they figure that out.

And if they do, who's stopping us?

Who's stopping us?

Certainly no one in the AFC East.

You would agree with that, right?

We're going to kick one.

My team's going to be a little friskier this year.

I'm just telling you.

We've got defense.

What's frisky?

What are we talking about?

We've got defense.

It's pretty good.

We're well coached.

What are we talking about?

Six and 11?

How about 10 and 7?

Man.

I discounted the Washington Commanders last year.

Sure.

It was a nice year.

You coached the QB.

This is it.

This is our year.

It has to be our year.

If not now, when?

I'm seeing him on all these commercials, Snickers, Pepsi.

He's the face of the NFL, for goodness sakes.

Everyone has Chiefs fatigue.

There's no way they're going to repeat in terms of making it back to the Super Bowl again.

It feels like our year.

I'm worried.

By the way, here's my prediction.

I'm worried about week one.

I think the Ravens will come in with like freaking revenge on their minds.

And then I think we might run the table after week one.

Like, I could see an 0-1, sky is falling.

Press the panic button on the lower thing on first take.

And then I see them winning 16 in a row.

I wouldn't be surprised.

honestly

have you recovered from the knicks yet i feel fantastic about the knicks i have my gershon yabuseli jersey already i love that that was a great signing yeah that was great i love that signing i am i love that one obsessed with that guy was obsessed with him when he killed canada in the olympics and then what he did to usa love the jordan clarkson signing as well love that we didn't tinker too much with everything else um

Cautiously optimistic about Mikhail Bridges.

I almost feel like they had to do that deal because they gave up so much for him.

I think he will thrive under Brown.

I'm all in on Brown.

I feel horrible for Tibbs.

I've said this already.

But again, just like I was talking about the East, as far as the AFC is concerned, like who's going to stop us in the Eastern Conference?

Cleveland, right?

That's the one that everyone thinks.

Other than Cleveland, who are we worried about?

Atlanta, that's the cool, sexy pick.

Come on.

What are we talking about?

Philly, no chance.

Boston sucks.

Milwaukee would be the one that's kind of just because they have the best part in the conference.

I think you have to mention.

Best player.

They added Turner.

They lost Lillard.

I'm not too worried about them.

They don't really show up it's cleveland had a fantastic regular season and i wouldn't be surprised if they're one and we're two we meet them in the easter conference final we punch our ticket revenge against uh i heard and the thunder and uh around like june 17th or so canyon of heroes parade it's going to be a great 2026 on saturday though nba tv was showing game one of the indie knicks series no i don't mean to do this to you But it was the fourth quarter and there were six minutes left.

And I was like, I haven't watched this since it happened.

I got to watch this.

I will never get over that.

It's unbelievable.

It's unbelievable.

It was three times more unbelievable than I remembered.

Like, Nisma just starts making these crazy shots.

And then I just can't believe the Pacers came back in that game.

Look at the score with like, I think 246 or something like that.

You had the game for 46 minutes.

You're up eight with like 40 seconds left.

But it was, I, I, I had forgotten that that was probably the craziest loss.

I mean, it really was, you know, I say a flute because Indy made every shot.

But if I'm a Knicks fan, I'm looking at that and like, we probably should have made the finals last year.

Why not?

Why can't we just get back?

100%.

100%.

Absolutely.

And I think we beat the Thunder, if I'm sort of

honest with you.

But man, I can't wait.

I keep seeing all this NBI and NBC stuff, like the promos and all that.

I think next year's NBA is going to be great.

It sucks that these stars are out.

I don't wish that upon anyone, but the nostalgia.

And you know what I'm so excited about?

Like the new voices, the mellows of the world.

Like, I'm just excited for the new coverage.

Positively.

Positive media coverage.

I'm just, yes,

I'm going to get some new voices.

And I'm fascinated to see what happens with the inside the NBA guys as well with ESPN because I think that might be a fascinating marriage to

watch from afar too.

But yes, I feel good about the Knicks.

I think Brown will be a new voice.

I think they'll be changed.

I think everyone had their little fun this summer about all the optimistic Ariel.

I can't believe it.

Always.

By the way, not since, dare I say, 1994 have my two teams had a better chance to win a championship.

Not since the Bills were going to their fourth straight and the Knicks were playing the Rockets in the NBA Finals.

And I have to mention, since this is on a very, very special date, August 12th, 1994, I probably peaked as a sports fan, because you'll recall that date lives in infamy.

That was the day that the players went on strike.

And the first place, Montreal Expos, six games ahead of the Atlanta Braves.

I will never forget August 12th.

And so every time I see that, today's August 12th, I remember this.

So like I peaked as a sports fan in 94.

I'm hoping that I just get one before I die.

Whoa, I'm about to talk to cousin Salon, Brian Curtis about the Cowboys mega documentary that's coming out on Netflix.

I would advise you to skip it.

No chance.

No chance I'm not watching.

I'm not a second of that.

Yeah,

I would honestly, as your friend, I would skip.

Okay.

I wasn't planning on it, by the way, if I'm being 100% honest, but I'm like there's a specific episode.

Just

don't watch it.

All about that.

All about that.

Just stay away.

The helmet and all that?

No, it's just stay away.

It's going to bring up some dark, some dark demons.

Is Leon Led and Don Beebe in there?

They are not, but there's some other stuff in there that I'd, you know, this stuff was all 30 years ago.

There was stuff I forgot about.

Anyway.

Ariel, great to see you.

You can listen to him and watch him on the Uncrowned podcast, which is fantastic.

You have like four fighters a day, by the way.

Yeah, we're working hard here.

I appreciate it.

Thank you.

Thank you.

It's Always a pleasure.

Thank you so much.

All right, recording this on a Tuesday morning as well.

Brian Curtis is here from the ringer.

Cousin Sal, even though Dee from What's Happening died today, had decided to power through it.

And it's the funniest female of the 70s for you, or was there somebody else?

I think so.

I, you know, I put Bonnie Franklin from One Day at a Time up there.

No, no, of course it was Dee.

She was terrific.

She'd cut anybody down.

All right.

Well, thanks for gutting through today and talking Cowboys.

So

netflix has this giant cowboys documentary coming out that when we saw the news i don't know how many years ago and it was netflix paying like 50 million bucks jerry jones the way some of these team documentaries work how the patriots thing played out with bob craft um just putting himself over all of it making and you're just like wow this cowboys thing is going to be a train wreck Jerry Jones is going to be all over this thing.

It's not going to be editorially responsible at all.

This is just going to suck.

And then I got an advanced copy of the first seven episodes and it was like last dance level, riveting,

so many things I forgot.

So I implored you guys to watch advanced copies.

Who wants to start?

Because there's so much to go here.

Sal, I told you, like, clear your schedule.

You have to watch this.

Did it exceed your expectations?

Yeah, I mean, I think, well, I mean, this is no great feat, but I think in 18 hours, I knocked the whole seven hours out, whatever.

So, and uh, you couldn't stay away.

I had my oldest son watching with me, and he went out one night.

I was like, no, no, no, stay home.

I'll pay you to stay home.

We need to finish these.

But to me, this was like I fucking loved every, it was like a vial of crack with a, like a sprinkling of uh parmesan cheese and smothered with Michelle Pfeiffer from Greece too, all rolled up and went.

Wow, you felt like you're at the White House.

I think I was at the White House.

I was at the White House.

White House, by the way, not very impressive.

It was basically like a suite at the Quality Inn behind the training facility.

I thought it was going to be like this big mansion.

But anyway, I'm sure we'll get to that.

But yeah, I freaking loved it.

And I got to, I mean, we'll let Curtis join in here, but I took a different perspective of how I looked at some of these guys.

Curtis, did it, did, I mean, you've read every book.

You're a lifelong Cowboys fan.

You thought you knew everything and then you hear this is coming out.

What was your reaction watching it versus what you thought was going to happen?

Well, I did read every word.

I mean, every word that Ed Werder wrote, you know, that was me because these events take place between my first year of middle school and my last year of high school.

Yeah.

So I was at like my maximum sports fandom.

And Bill, I don't know if you've ever mentioned the 86 Celtics on this podcast.

I think I heard it once or twice.

Yeah.

The 92 Cowboys are my 86 Celtics.

I'm very protective of them.

I feel like for the rest of my life, I have to tell people how great they were.

And that when they bring me stories, I'm like, I knew that.

I read that.

Dude, I enjoyed this so much, reliving every moment of this.

I mean, I was ready, as you say, for the Jones family, I mean, Biden family, I mean, Jones family rehabilitation project.

Yeah.

And this was a riveting, fun.

It was like a Western directed by Baz Luhrmann.

I mean, it was, it was just a really, really fun series.

And it's not coming out for a few days, but we, this seemed like the perfect time just to talk about that whole era.

I think what struck me, because it's been,

you know, 30, 35 years for a lot of this stuff, is just how how much I forgot.

I watched all of these games.

And as the years pass, when it's not a Boston team where I can remember the beats of a Boston team, but when it's other teams and when it's 90s NFL, the stuff sort of blends together.

So, like, as you guys know, I am the king of the outside Dallas.

I would rather have Emmett Smith than Barry Sanders.

That's been, I've been on that hill forever.

And one of my big cases was the separated shoulder game.

And over the years, I thought that that happened in the NFC title game or whatever.

and I forgot the context of the giant.

So it was like, it was a lot of like just jogging my memory from what actually happened, but then reinforcing things, you know, that I felt.

And the reality is football just felt like it mattered more in the early 90s.

And I don't really know why.

I know we were younger.

I know it's easier to say stuff like that.

But there was, it wasn't the 24-7 like we have now where everybody has social media, everybody's got a podcast, there's coverage, there's video everywhere.

Back then, it was just like you, you watched the Sunday game.

We had Madden and Somerall.

And you had these big epic teams that felt like these superpowers with the Giants and the Cowboys and the Niners.

Who am I leaving out?

Giants, Cowboys, Niners?

I'm leaving out.

And the Redskins.

Those four from the NFC.

And it was just...

Three of them were always good.

They would always battle.

It would get to December, January.

It felt like the games were the most important things ever.

And Dallas was just great.

Like they, like great to the point that we always used to say it felt almost unfair that it was like, well, we got to fix this.

They got to do something with the salary cap, but you shouldn't be able to have this many good players.

So that was, it made me really nostalgic.

And I don't know, Sal, are we just old?

I think what's going on now is unfair, how we haven't won in 30 years and don't even really come close.

I think that part is unfair.

But I think you're right.

And it's hard to explain to people to say that, oh, football was bigger back then because it can't possibly be bigger than it is right now for all the reasons you laid out right the 24 7 coverage the twitter and everything the all different streams but like you said like aikman young favre kelly sim montane montane like trading off like it just felt huge by every metric i i don't know how to explain it but yeah that was that was the time to be around i'm sorry i'm sorry you missed it cowboys fans i really am sorry hopefully this helps i mean you would think because i'm a pats fan and we won six super bowls in the 2000s and the 2010s i'd be like that was the best era.

And it just wasn't.

It felt like the 90s, the sport was also way more violent, which I think that's one of the great things about this doc.

Just like, oh my God, like, I just can't believe they had this Aikman concussion montage at one point.

And he has, what is it, eight concussions and or six concussions in 14 months or something or nine?

Yeah, it was like five and 12 months and nine undocumented.

Just kidding.

And the guys in the early 90s, but,

you know, this was why, Curtis, this is, I think, when football went up a notch.

I was there for, Sal and I were there for the 70s, 80s, 90s, but it felt like 90s was when everything got cemented.

Even when you look back in the old, like the retro news Twitter account will have like the ratings for 1977.

Right.

And Monday Night Football is like 20th.

You know, and you think like, wow, football, Monday Night Football is only 20th.

But by the time we got to the mid-90s, it felt like football was the biggest thing, right?

Yeah.

The media B-roll from this doc, if you lived in the 90s, I mean, how many Leslie Visser sideline reports are on this thing?

Young Pam Oliver, all of it, yeah.

Madden and Sommerall, you know, and again, that's what made it feel so special.

I think that's what you're talking about a little bit, too.

That's all mixed in here.

Because that Giants game you're talking about where Emmett has a separated shoulder.

John Madden, in my memory, came down from the booth and went to the Cowboys' locker room and said, that's the bravest thing I've ever seen.

And that was like this laying on hands moment.

It's like, oh my God, John Madden said that to Emmett Smith after a game.

I mean, who in the world would have the ability to say something like that now and it would be meaningful?

Right.

Well, and then there was these other beats in there that because we hadn't followed sports for long enough,

like Emmett's contract hold out, which I totally forgot.

It felt like one of the biggest stories of all time as it was happening.

Like, wow, he's going to.

He's going to sit out the season.

Like, they're not going to pay him.

And then that new guy comes in and he's terrible.

But it's tough now.

Like in 2025, guys hold out and you're like, all right, we know how this is going to go.

He's going to, it's like what you're doing with Michael Parsons right now.

It's like, all right, we're going to do this little dance and then we're going to get to August 29th and Micah Parsons will be a cowboy.

When Emmett Smith was holding out, it's like, is he ever going to play again?

What's going to happen here?

They're going to throw this away?

Exactly.

I wonder if Jerry reliving this reinforces what he's doing with Micah Parsons, right?

So Emmett missed two games that year, and they won the Super Bowl, and he won the rushing title, title, which is crazy.

So this is why he doesn't freak out about holdouts because he knows he's going to release the funds, like you said, in late August or early September.

Maybe he does even miss two games, Parsons.

By the way, we'll lose the Eagles anyway.

So that's one game that didn't matter.

But he gets to play a villain for the whole month, right?

I mean, it must have killed him to know that Nico Harrison was the most hated Dallas executive for a minute.

I mean, he's got to get his title back, but he loves it.

Even at the red carpet thing last night, he said, this controversy like this is good for the team.

Like, what?

what nobody thinks that but okay good i guess you have a plan here well one of the things curtis with this doc with the the just the storytelling be it's just perfect ip i think the two best ip for sports documentaries were the last dance and this

because you have jones and johnson and that falling apart You have the Aikman, Emmett, Irvin, like that Troyoka, and all of them have different kind of faults, right?

Aikman is just getting the shit kicked out of him.

Emmett's like the constant overachiever who's underpaid.

And then Urban's just a maniac.

You have that piece, but then you have Jerry and

Jimmy falling apart in a way that now I feel like we'd have more day-to-day, we would have known more about it.

There would have been like little colonels coming out all the time.

We just, the national media didn't work that way back then.

And when Jimmy left, it was like,

he's not going to coach the Cowboys.

It was like the most stunning thing ever.

I don't feel like people would ever be stunned by that in the same way, right?

I agree to a point.

Well, you were a Dallas fan, so you were sniffing it out in Dallas.

What's funny is the doc reminded me that a lot of this stuff was kind of on the table.

You know, before that second Super Bowl, Bob Costas did an interview with Jerry and Jimmy together.

And can you imagine the craft Belichick version of that interview?

And the interview's point was basically like, do you guys like each other?

And if you listen to the answers Jimmy gave in the press conferences before the Super Bowl about his relationship with Jerry, I'm like, I can't believe this was happening like days before a game.

It was wild.

I guess we had no mechanism back then to really talk about something that happened.

Like, cause the MJ gambling stuff was all happening at the same time, too.

And when you look back at some of that stuff now, it seems.

bonkers.

Like they're asking him on the NBC pregame show, do you have a gambling problem?

But we had no, we had no internet back then.

We had no way to be like, hey, did you you see that?

What'd you think?

Wow, I thought that was crazy too.

And the Jimmy Jerry, it felt like something was wrong, but you always just felt like stuff was going to work out in sports.

Like, oh, they'll get back together.

The only time I can remember that not being was the Billy Martin, George Steinbrenner stuff

in the 70s and 80s, where it's like, wow, these guys, oh, they fired him.

You know, but it's just like, how is Jimmy going to walk away from that job, Sal?

He had built like the super team of all time.

I know.

And they dangled the Jaguars in front of him.

I remember that being like, what the fuck?

The freaking Jaguars?

The thing's that bad that he wants to go to the Jaguars?

They haven't snapped a ball yet.

But I, yeah, but to the point of like, we weren't finding things out, like Jerry puts it all out there.

So you don't really have to dig.

Like they're caught at a Mexican restaurant before he's even hired Jimmy Johnson, right?

He knew he was going to get busted there.

At the press conference, and he buys a team, he looks at Tech Shram and says, I'm gunning for your job.

And Tech Schram looks like the saddest man on earth because he knows he's not fucking around.

You know, it's like, so Jerry puts, and he still to this day does interviews it three times a week so you don't really you didn't really even need twitter back then for a lot of this stuff you knew what was going on well the landry thing so if we followed sports in the 1980s like we do now

the landry thing for somebody like me living on the east coast where he's like tom landry he'll never get fired the guy's one of the great coaches of all time but meanwhile he'd really been declining for years and years and the team had been declining and he just got old but it still seemed inconceivable he was going to get fired And when Jones comes in, he buys the team and he fires Tom Landry.

What do you remember from that, Curtis, when it happened?

I was 11 years old and I remember that I freaking loved it.

You know, I was just at that age where you're starting to think anything that happened in my parents' generation sucks.

Right.

That's the past.

And here comes Jerry Jones and he's like, I'm going to take your parents, Dallas Cowboys coach, and your grandparents, Dallas Cowboys coach, and I'm going to fire him.

And we're going to start fresh.

And I was like, hell yes, here we go.

I mean, it was like this, he was doing this like, you know, child versus parent thing on my behalf.

And the doc reminds us, he fires Tom Landry.

And then the city of Dallas has a huge parade for Tom Landry.

Imagine Bill Belichick, like a week later, they're just marching him down the streets of Boston.

Like, we just want to thank you, Bill, for everything you've done for this organization.

Yeah, people were horrified.

Yeah.

Well, do you know how old?

I mean, it's what we're watching the doc.

I forgot.

Landry was only 38 years old when they fired him.

No, no, he was no, but he was 65.

I would have thought he was like 92.

You know, 65 is nothing.

He's younger than Andy Reid right now.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

So it was weird, but I will say, like,

I had the same feeling as Curtis.

I was a little older, but I was like, all right, maybe this moves things around.

This moves Anita with Landry.

But then when they traded Herschel Walker, I did not think that was a good idea.

Then I was like, oh, we might be dealing with a madman here.

Fires Landry and trades Herschel Walker.

Where are our chances here?

So I was holding that.

I'm glad Sal said the words Nico Harrison already in this podcast because that was the Nico Harrison trade in the moment in October 1989.

The problem, and they covered in the doc was the way it was reported versus what the trade actually was was so confusing.

Where you get all these players, but then there's these weird secret conditions where if you waive each one, you get this pick.

And it was really about the picks, but nobody, we were like, what?

They fucking traded Herschel Walker for those five guys?

What is this?

Right.

And at that point, you think Jerry Jones is just a complete lunatic.

And it turns out it was a pretty brilliant trade.

When you,

the Jerry Jimmy thing, we've been talking about for 30 years.

When you watch this

with the knowledge of what happened the last 30 years with Dallas, the Jerry Jimmy thing almost makes more sense in retrospect.

Where Jerry just the whole time is like, I'm the GM.

I'm in charge of this shit.

And now we've had 30 years of the Cowboys being terrible.

I do,

did you have like a slide endorse thing, either of you, with

what happens if Jimmy just is the coach the whole time?

How does this play out?

What if Jerry is just a little bit like, I'm just here to put the right people in charge and help them work?

Like, what, what happens to the Cowboys?

So my take on that is it's all Jerry's fault, number one.

He screwed everything up.

But that if Jimmy had stayed, it would have been a fast burn.

Jimmy was Bill Parcells.

He was, I'm coming in for five years.

I'm going to yell at everybody.

And then I'm going to go get bored and go do my next thing.

Because if you look, he actually spent fewer years in Miami, where he was head coach and GM than he did in Dallas, where he was having to share power with Jerry.

Right.

I mean, think about that.

Like, Jimmy was just a fast burn guy.

The other thing that Doc kind of touches on is 1993 is the beginning of NFL free agency.

So all of a sudden, the most talented team in the league has this problem that no NFL team has ever had before, which is like, we got to actually keep all these players who suddenly have this power.

Ken Norton can go to the 49ers and, you know, kill us in the NFC championship game.

And that, that, I think, would, I think Jimmy would have lasted one, maybe two more years, and then he would have been gone, even if he'd had everything he wanted.

Yeah, it's a little like the second apron NBA right now, where all of a sudden it shifted and it just became way harder if you did a really good job building a team to actually keep all the components.

And Cowboys had, you know, these assets, but at some point you got to gather behind some of the assets.

What do you remember about that whole Jimmy era sal?

I mean, I just, what was most fascinating with that, Curtis, how much would you pay for that sign that Jerry Jones claimed he had on his desk that said, if you're willing to give others the credit, you'll conquer the world.

Like, how much would that fetch on?

Thousands and thousands of dollars for me personally.

Incredibly ironic.

It's amazing.

And then he comes out with the announcement that 500 coaches could win a Super Bowl with this team.

And at that point, you didn't really know.

It was like Kobe Shaq, right?

Like, oh man, who do I trust?

If I have, we have to lose one of them.

I'm not going to lose Jerry, really, right?

But who do we trust?

Jerry or Jimmy here.

And then they bring in Switzerland, who had been gone, removed from anything for like five years, which is like Coach Kay coaching the Knicks this year.

You know, it was, it was very weird, but you're like, all right, you got to think he knows what he's doing.

And the fact that you knew Jimmy Johnson was rooting against that team the whole year and gets the boots on the ground.

Like he's actually announcing and he's a commentator during halftime and everything.

He gets to see all that.

To me, that was my favorite part of the thing, though, that those little nuggets that year.

Yeah, some of the stuff when them on the field and just Fox felt they'd finally figured out how to modernize a pregame show.

And, you know, early Terry, early Howie with Jimmy, James Brown.

And it just felt like, and then eventually

our cousin Jimmy started.

When did he start doing the bits?

97?

99.

Yeah, 99.

Yeah.

By that time it had been established as whatever but that was a really fun era too curtis of when coaches would come on tv because pat riley started it he never gets enough credit pat rile went on nba and on nbc for i think one year and was awesome

and then that led to this whole run and johnson was good but then it led to this run of guys who weren't awesome like george sefert who was one of the worst people ever on tv um but it it just everything felt like just like the biggest thing in the world.

I don't know.

Maybe we're just more used to the grind of football now.

And like, all right, week one, up, Thursday night.

And there's more football.

And

there's Thursday and there's Sunday and there's Monday.

There's going to be Friday.

There's Christmas.

And back then it was like, man, Dallas is playing San Francisco.

This is the biggest game of my life.

And I'm not even a fan of either team.

I think we were perfectly saturated back then.

You know what I mean?

Now it's oversaturated.

And now it's like, in addition to everything you just said, we have to wait to see what Stephen A and McAfee say on Monday morning before we can form our own opinions.

It's kind of ridiculous, right?

Somebody's zagging.

Somebody's got to like throw somebody in it.

Yeah.

The

other thing,

and it's weird because this, I'm sure, was not an intent of the doc, but it was just a natural outcome, was how important Madden and Somerall were in it.

Like,

I just, I know we've talked about Madden a million times, but 90s Madden and Somerall, I think, is the most important announcing team of all time.

Like they really elevated.

And when Madden said something like when he's praising Emmett Smith during the game,

or when he was mad at that Switzer went for it on that fourth and one.

That's unbelievable.

That's unbelievable.

You would just kind of feed off whatever his reaction was, and it would just become your reaction.

I don't know if there's another.

Is there another announcer like that, Curtis?

I don't know anymore.

Because nobody says stuff like he did, you know?

Like Madden was not Stephen A.

Smith.

Let us be clear about that.

But when he criticized you like he did with Switzerland that moment against the Eagles, fourth and one, where they go for it twice because the first play didn't count and they still run the same play again, and he would just blast you.

That was huge.

So, what was your single favorite part of this doc, Sal?

Can I just say I felt with Madden and Summerall?

I felt the weather when they were announcing.

Oh, you felt that.

I felt that it was cold.

I don't know if it was the spacing between their words or between, you know, whatever else.

And, and yeah, they were important.

I watched, you watched the old Madden thing, the special, right?

Would you do that for anything else?

Like,

now?

So

my favorite part, the Skip Bayless testimonials really hit home with me.

No, no, I hated that.

The skip stuff, I'm sorry, people.

You're going to have to, it's like the Dr.

Melfi scenes with Tony.

You're just going to wish you could fast forward through them and get to the more tire iron stuff.

But he had to be in there, though.

He was the biggest chronicler of that team.

Like they couldn't avoid having him.

My biggest takeaway or my favorite thing is that I have a new appreciation for Jerry Jones because I looked at it through the lens of him being a gambler.

Like he talks about, and it's all in the first like seven minutes of the thing, right?

He's like, talks about, I had this one well.

I invested $800 million or whatever into this well.

And if this didn't gush, I was in trouble.

And it gushed.

And he's like, he like a flowery description of how it did and whatever.

And then he struck it.

And we knew like Jerry, like.

he took chances.

I think he like owned like Shakey's Pizza.

He like tried to borrow money from his father to own Shaky's Pizza.

But that to me, it's like, oh, yeah, for real?

Shakey's Pizza?

I swear to God, look it up.

Yeah.

Come on, Shaky's Pizza.

Really?

Look it up.

It's right there.

Yeah.

Now we can.

Shake his pizza.

I know.

Now we got it.

So that, that to me was the big, oh, I understand Jerry more.

Doesn't mean I hate what he's doing less, but I do understand him.

Well, you understand Jerry more and then you understand how the last 30 years happened.

Because the same irrational confidence to be like, I'm throwing everything into this last well and I'm going to fire Tom Landry and hire Jimmy Johnson is the same piece that leads to the last 30 years.

But I mean, Curtis, the thing I was the most worried with this, especially after the craft experience,

and I had the opposite experience when we did the Celtic stock, like the owners just trusted us and let us do our thing.

Jerry sold this to Netflix and Skydance and

the worst case scenario of just being a Jerry Hagiography.

It really wasn't.

I actually thought they were like, it was like a warts and all Jerry.

I mean, obviously they could have gone further with how dysfunctional, I think, some of the family stuff is and having his son, you know, basically the two of them and whatever is going on with credit grabbing in that family.

And who knows?

But I thought for the most part, pretty fair, right?

I didn't hear the words paternity suit anywhere in the documentary.

And that might have been the price of admission to get in.

Yeah.

And when it starts, all the main characters, Jerry, Troy, Emmett, they're sitting in front of these like Western movie sets.

And it felt like when a billionaire invites all his friends to his birthday party and they have to come and they're sitting in front of some very elaborate kind of thing.

And everybody's like, oh, what are we doing?

By the way, I got worried with the first five minutes.

I was like, oh, no.

It was a little overproduced.

Yeah.

And then it just settles down and becomes awesome.

By the way, the Way Brothers directed this, who I think are really great.

Great job.

It settles down in seven minutes and we're off.

Two things save it to me.

One is it's not really the Jerry story.

That's kind of woven in there, but it's really the story of the 90s Cowboys, which is the story you want.

Thing number two, and this is my MVP of the whole series, is Michael Irvin, ladies and gentlemen, the playmaker.

I mean, you mentioned the Cowboys White House where

the partying happened that was over by the practice field.

All the players in the dock are like, you know, we don't talk about the White House.

And Michael's like, actually, let's talk about the White House.

Let me tell you all the stories of the things that happened.

Let me tell you about the time I stabbed a teammate with scissors.

Like, he goes into all that stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's amazing.

I was not expecting that at all.

I was expecting kind of the sanitized Michael Rubin interview, but he was like, No, no, here's everything that happened.

Let's go.

And that's the other thing.

Documentaries kind of ebb and flow with maybe the best eight interviews in the documentary.

That's why, like, Last Dance had you have Michael, you have Phil Jackson, you have Steve Kerr, you have Scottie Pippen, you have people who are actually compelling to see interviewed.

This one has Aikman, who's been, you know, I think the, he's the best broadcaster in the league out of all the ex-players at this point he i think it's lately that he grabbed the title but i do think he's the best guy you have michael irvin who was on tv forever you have emmett who's done some tv stuff who's pretty competent you have jerry who's a character you have jimmy johnson who's been on tv forever and then you have dion

who has had multiple documentaries about him.

So just you start with those six.

It's like, yeah, of course this is going to be good.

Not to mention all the other stuff.

but I thought Urban was

like, actually, I had forgotten how compelling of a 90s character he was and how many jokes we used to make about him.

And he was one of those guys.

It was just like, I don't know if this guy's going to be alive in a year.

And somebody's still alive now.

I mean, it was

up for a murder for hire thing.

Like, thank God he wasn't killed in that.

Had you forgotten about that?

That was another one I had just forgotten about.

A Dallas police officer.

What's the person who was alleged?

That's a rumor.

Yeah, yeah.

No, he's a national.

He was my favorite of the bunch.

And by the way, you can't say enough about Aikman.

Even if you don't think he's the best commentator,

Joe Buck should be propping him up.

The fact that he could speak coherently at this point,

he's created on a concussion curve.

He's the greatest analyst of all time.

There's no question about it.

There was some stuff I just forgot because I'm older and my brain.

Just the sports info sometimes just gets squeezed out.

I totally forgot about the Steve Berline

coming in and then Aikman being ready to play.

and then they're like no we're riding with burline he's hot that would i was thinking like now in 2025 i think that would actually cause a riot yeah i think that would cause a sports talk riot nobody would know what to do on first take with that situation right bill skip bayless six to eight klf in dallas that was every segment just that was the a block every night trust can you imagine i don't know if there's a better what should they do because benching the hot quarterback is always dangerous but then aikman and then he was pissed about it So that piece was awesome.

I forgot that Niners game where they're playing Steve Young with Montana on the bench, like the theater of that.

It's hard to explain like how important that everything about that was because Montana was the best quarterback of all time.

This would have been like doing this to Brady and like with Garoppolo in 2015.

It was just inconceivable they weren't going to play him.

And then Dallas is trying to beat them and all the history of those teams going back to the catch.

That was great.

And then the Bills stuff, which has been in different documentaries, but

I'd forgotten that in that last Super Bowl,

yeah, the Bills, maybe they're going to do it this time.

And then it just like went off the deep end again with them, like it always seemed to do.

But what else did you just forget that you hadn't thought about in a while, Curtis?

Jerry Jones was tied to Jimmy Hoffa like early in his business career.

That was,

whoa, I didn't remember that one.

Yeah.

The Eikman part, I remembered him getting knocked out of the NFC championship game, the second one against the 49ers.

I forgot that the Super Bowl was a week later.

And he goes out there and plays in the Super Bowl.

This is a guy who has no memory to this day of the NFC championship game.

No memory.

A week later, he's playing the Super Bowl, and I forgot how just kind of bad or mediocre he was in that game.

And of course, knowing what we know now, it's like, of course, of course he was.

That's another piece of this, like the whole, the lack of knowledge about CT, concussions, all that stuff.

By the way, Sal has no memory of the game Romo when he dropped the PAT against the CT.

He's blocked out that entire three hours.

Leave meeting here where

he doesn't remember any piece of it.

Sal, was there anything you completely forgot out of this when you were watching?

I completely forget, but I forgot what a train wreck Charles Haley was before we even brought him in.

Like he pissed on the 49ers GM's desk, and it was widely known.

And they still, the Cowboys are like, yeah, let's bring him in.

Jerry's like, imagine like Zach Lowe defecated on Jimmy Petaro's desk.

And you're like, yeah,

that would have been a better story.

Maybe that'll come out.

Let's spread that rumor.

But yeah, that was great.

I'm trying to think what else was good.

I mean, Michael Irvin with the fur coat, I can never see that enough times walking in his first day of the court appearance.

Like that was tremendous.

Steven shoving Jerry after the Dion deal, which was the angriest Jerry ever was, right?

He even admitted he cried after that 20, but they go down 21-0.

They lose to the 49ers.

uh they come back as you pointed out you were sending text of the box score it was crazy how the cowboys just dominated them that game um but yeah i like this is another like pro jerry thing like and you have to as an entrepreneur you should appreciate this like jerry's like the rest of the league i got this fox deal done um i'm gonna sign dion he's got his son is shoving him up against the wall and he's like laughing he's like i'm gonna sign this nike deal and then i'm gonna get sued by the league but i'm gonna counter sue for more and scare the out of him and everyone's going to back off.

Like, he really did put this league in the position it is right now.

Yeah, the Nike deal, I forgot how

kind of crazy it was that he was just like, Yeah, I'm going to do my own thing.

Fuck you guys.

When you have a league where everybody is sharing revenue and it's supposed to be equal to some degree, it's like, nah, we're actually not equal.

Dallas is bigger than all you guys.

I thought the one thing I didn't feel

like in the first part, I thought they could have spent five more minutes minutes on how the Cowboys post-JFK in the 70s

just all of a sudden felt like they were the most important franchise.

Like for me as a little kid, and a lot of it had to do with the cheerleaders and the TV show.

I had that.

Those two things, right?

And so by the time we got to like when they, when they beat the Rams in the NFC title game, it just felt like Dallas was the center of the universe based on stupid stuff like cheerleaders and

the who shot JR,

plus that they are relevant.

So then when it kind of died in the 80s and they got replaced by the Bears and the Niners and the Redskins and the Giants and Dallas was kind of fading away, I would have spent like a tiny bit more time on that.

Like Jerry saw, no, actually, this should be the biggest franchise and went all in on it.

But other than that, I don't really have a lot of notes.

I thought they

thought they nailed it.

I wish they would have had a little more on the family.

Yeah.

Like what would you, what would you have wanted from the family side?

Well, you bring it up, but the Dallas, the TV show kind of fueled, like gotten everyone prepared for this crazy rich family, right?

It's fighting, drinking at the owner's meeting.

Everybody gets drunk and kept tells Deadward, stick around.

I'm going to fire this son of a bitch.

Like, it would have been like the season finale of every season of Dallas, which was great.

The only other thing I thought, I don't know if, Curtis, did you miss the Steve Walsh stuff?

It was Steve Walsh, right?

Again, played for the same bus.

It was going to be, it was Aikman Walsh.

It was, it was toe to, they were toe-to-toe for a while.

It wasn't automatically Aikman starting for a second.

Yeah, I think that's fair.

They've had like three minutes of that.

And people forget how crazy that thing that Jimmy Johnson did was.

So he drafts Troikman 1-1 in 1989, and then he spends the first pick in the supplemental draft a couple months later on Steve Walsh.

The Cowboys turned out to be the worst team in the league that year.

So he gave up the number one pick in the draft the next year, number one overall for Steve Walsh after drafting his franchise quarterback.

But Jimmy was just firing so many bullets, and that was part of his style, right?

Like, I'm going to make 20 draft picks, and I'm going to just bet that like five of them will work out, and I'll trade the other ones away.

But yeah, that was that, that should have at least worn it 30 seconds.

The Switzer Aikman stuff, which I, I knew because I read a couple of the books.

Um,

though, that I was surprised they went as hard as they did into the racist stuff with Aikman, the allegations.

And they covered all that.

They did not cover

some of the other stuff that's in the Bayless books.

I remember, Curtis, you wrote about this for The Ringer in 2016, that at one point, Switzerland's camp was spreading all this stuff about Aikman, that he was gay.

And it became like a story in Dallas.

And the story was that these guys hate each other so much that Switzerland side is actually maybe spreading some of this stuff.

The doc did not touch that, but it did touch the racist stuff.

I was surprised that it didn't touch both.

It was interesting.

And I wonder about that decision on their part, but you got the key detail there, which is Barry Switzer's camp was doing this while Barry Switzer was coaching the Cowboys

about his all-world quarterback.

And you're just thinking like that happened.

And the doc reminded me that some of that stuff was kind of out there on Super Bowl week.

Like people were talking about it in the media.

Yeah, they have to do a press conference about it.

I know we're rehabbing everybody.

We're rehabbing Jerry.

We're rehabbing everybody, but we don't need to rehab Barry Switzer as an NFL coach.

I mean, I felt the dog got real close to trying to do that.

It's like, okay, the players liked him.

I wonder why.

I felt like that was coming, but that might have been Jerry's one note.

Like, I don't care what you say about being this doc, but can we make it seem like Switzerland was somewhat confident?

My memory of this 30 years ago, Sal, was they won despite Switzerland.

Yeah.

Is that fair?

Yeah, I think so.

I mean, listen, I was at that Super Bowl and the last one we won, and I was in the end zone that O'Donnell was driving on before he threw the interception.

So it was like kind of scary.

But

yes, they definitely won despite it.

Look, like I said, he went out of his way to get the best player in the league, a two-way player.

They're paying Dion way more than they're paying Aikman and Irvin and all these guys.

And they all embrace him.

I don't know how they got that past those guys.

Just like, all right, he's going to play two ways.

So he deserves more money than you.

I guess that was it.

but yes i think uh it was yeah he was he kind of just got in the way and the fact that he had a freaking full-out brawl or just a like a just a conflict with his quarterback we haven't seen that in a long time and aikman still seemed mad about it 30 years later curtis you notice that like he he was not like yeah you know time passes he was still like fuck that guy

maybe that gets hit by a two by four for for good reason i mean again it's like troy aiman's like what what did i have to do to earn your respect?

I mean, can you imagine a quarterback being treated like that now by his head coach?

The power dynamics are just completely different.

Well, that's, and that's going back to the nostalgia piece.

You know, when we have like, like some of the Patriot stuff that was happening in the late 2010s that like ESPN and Seth Wickersham was writing about, it was like

the Garoppolo, Brady.

Belichick, Kraft, this is, there's a lot of passive aggressive stuff going on.

This was just aggressive back then.

This is like a coach leaking shit about his quarterback and the quarterback just openly shitting on the coach.

They had great NFL films footage of, you know, Aikman just complaining about the coach on the sideline, calling him buffoon.

This was, this made the pat stuff look like a one out of 10 from a dysfunction standpoint.

Sal, did this.

Did this make you like Jerry more or less as your Cowboys owner?

Because you haven't won, you haven't even made the Super Bowl, much less won one one in 30 years and yet this was such a great era and he was responsible for it so how do you balance that it's just like i i i remember that we were once great and i and then i i forget that we can be this great and then it's like oh i watched this like what the hell did he do how does this happen but as a as a fan of the cowboys i don't respect them more but i feel like as a fan of football you should respect him coming out of us he made this league yeah as big as it is so um your fantasy teams, your everything, I don't know if it exists without Jerry Jones.

Right.

And then even go to the arena.

What's your take on that, Curtis?

It made me love old Jerry and remember how exciting it was to have him as the owner of my favorite team back then.

It also reminded me that what Jerry wants most in the world is, A, to just have a job.

Like, just talk to me in the draft room so I can pretend like I understand why we're drafting Tyler Booker.

That's one thing.

The other thing is he wants to be a character in the prestige TV show that is the Dallas Cowboys.

And literally, in this case, is the prestige Netflix doc of the Cowboys.

That's what he wants.

And that's the Micah thing, right?

He just wants it to be after a long standoff with Jerry Jones,

Micah Parsons signed the biggest deal for any defensive player in league history.

Like he just, he just wants to do that.

And you can see in this doc, he got addicted to that in the 90s.

Like he got addicted to being a character, not just an owner, not just a winner.

Yeah, I think you could genuinely make the case.

I was thinking about this after I watched it.

This is probably the most memorable NFL owner ever.

It doesn't mean he's the best, but it's like the same way like Sal and I, Steinbrenner, just sticks out unlike anyone else.

Like, and even like when we were little kids, like Charlie O'Finley was just crazy, but they went on that sub of the A's.

But these owners that also become characters and parts.

just part of the history in a completely different way, which I think Kraft tried to belatedly make it seem and he just wasn't.

Like he, it was Brady and Belichick that whole time.

Jones was just, I remember meeting Jones in, I think it was 2010 at the All-Star weekend, whenever that was for NBA, at a bar in the four seasons.

And I was with some ESPN higher-ups and we met Jones and he was at the bar and he had girl on each side drink drinking whatever whiskey or whatever.

And he was just exactly like I would have thought.

You know, I was like, hey, Bill, how are you?

And it was, it was just like, this guy's a fucking character.

He's out of, he's out of like, like a Taylor Sheridan show, which he literally was because he was in the Taylor Sheridan show.

You forget about like the, you talk about the telecast and Madden and Summerall and how much it meant.

Jerry put himself on the sideline.

It's such a big thing that an owner is there on the sideline.

And that cutaway at the end of a game, God forbid the Cowboys lost.

I don't even know how much it's worth to the network, but we could all see it in our heads, right?

30 years later, them losing whatever to the Dolphins in the Thanksgiving game, or you don't see it.

Now it's a Taylor Swift cutaway that you hope to get like five times.

So he might have invented that, but he definitely also invented the let's let the cameras into our draft room so they can see us celebrating the picks because Jimmy talks in the doc about what the fuck are cameras doing in here?

We're trying to pick our roster.

I'm trying to think anything else.

I think we hit everything.

I would just say the thing I'll say is, oh, I'm sorry.

I got it cursed.

I was just going to say, like, as, you know, a child of the 90s uh and you guys lived through the 90s the thing that made me a little sad is how old everybody is now i mean how many thick voices are in this documentary jerry's jimmy's berry's you know rupert murdoch is in this dock in his 90s you know phil knights in this dock george w bush's voice sounded awfully thick in this and i'm like man everybody's getting older all those times are getting away from us Yeah, and then Aikman just looks as handsome as ever.

Oh, my God.

He looks like he might be 32.

What did you have, Sal?

No, the Aikman thing I was going to bring up is like, I feel like his playing career, his attitude mimicked his broadcasting career.

Remember, he was, I don't want to say vanilla, it's the wrong word for his first few years of broadcasting, but then he got angry.

He's now angry in the booth and he gives you like a raw, you know, it's unfiltered and you kind of see like he gets mad at the players and everything.

And you saw that the last three, four years of his career on the Cowboys sideline.

But by the way, that was one of the saddest things.

He's gaining all those concussions.

Like, I mean, it's just like a screen pass to Daryl Johnston was the best he could do for like four yards those last three years.

It's like, please get the morphine drip on him already.

This is so sad.

And there was a good what-if that I had forgotten when the left tackle got in the car accident.

Eric Williams.

Yeah, yeah.

That probably swung a Super Bowl.

Yeah, so we've had injuries swing Super Bowls, but not

the late night car accident when something bad's about to happen.

And that the Cowboys were at the scene, the other players.

Right.

I hadn't forgotten that detail that they were running up and looking at the car after the accident.

What?

So most disappointing was that the White House wasn't a palatial mansion for me.

Yeah.

It just looked like a run-in-the-mill house and, you know, like Monrovia.

Right.

Right.

Yeah.

There wasn't, there couldn't have been 50 girls in there, right?

Women and they're only jumping around, right?

I think it seems like there was like two and three in and out every night.

I did have more questions about that because they said it was four bedrooms and it just didn't seem like enough bedrooms.

Right.

Yeah.

Probably needed maybe some other stuff in there.

All right.

So how do you think?

How do you think this is going to hit this documentary, Curtis?

Because it does.

The last dance had

the

pandemic.

The pandemic and no sports whatsoever, and

is the all-time best possible setup for a doc.

This is

before the NFL season starts, and you can binge it it all at once the binge element of it which last dance didn't have

i mean you guys lived it i lived it too like it's impossible to stop watching like you just you all right and it's definitely the first one of those in a while we're like all right and now all of a sudden you're five hours in so i think it's going to hit pretty big i think so too because just think about this when was the last time jerry jones was complimented on an nfl podcast

people won't know and they're going to turn this on and be like wow wow he did the the Fox deal.

He did the Nike deal.

Wow.

When you're 30, you probably don't know any of this stuff, right?

Like my son wouldn't know one of these things.

And to your 86 Celtics thing, I'm just like, you know, you'll remember that Emmett Smith was also awesome.

I know we've decided as a society that Barry was better or whatever, but like these guys were awesome.

These guys kicked everybody's ass in the 90s.

That Cowboys game against the Giants, that New Year's Day game, I was in Las Vegas with my friends Harry and Darren and Joey, and we had lost all our money.

So we had to watch that game at my aunt Chippy's house on my cousin Mickey's 25-inch TV.

I'm trying to think like that, things like that, as shitty as that was, that made it so much more important.

There's not any scenario that I would have to watch it on a 25-inch TV.

Thank God knock would at this point.

But yeah, I mean, it was the greatest.

And I think it's going to be good.

Normally, I thought, I was like, oh, man, this might be released like a week too late because now it competes with hard knocks.

and everything.

It shouldn't.

It really shouldn't.

It's great.

And I think he'll knock it out in a couple of days.

I actually think Emmett's a a big winner out of this.

He still holds the record, by the way.

Yeah.

Right?

Like, and like pretty, I was looking at the league leaders or the all-time career leaders.

Only one who even has like a puncher's chance of thinking about it is Derrick Henry because these running back careers go so fast now.

You know, Emmett was just grinding out.

1,500, 1,600 yards a year forever and was really durable.

And even when he got hurt, could still play.

But

I'll fight the Emmett versus Barry.

I'll fight to the death.

I've talked about it on the pod.

I just like, if the goal is to actually win Super Bowls and not just have cool Twitter clips and a fun Madden rating, like you want Emmett Smith.

God bless you, Phil.

Five yards of carry.

He showed up for every game.

He was tough as fucking shit.

He blocked.

He was just there.

He's still, to me, in the in the Mount Rushmore for me.

So

no doubt about it.

I have no dog in this race.

Good for you.

I'm glad you said that i don't know if you're kissing our ass or what i don't know why you would have to but that's uh that's the right thing

and i think irvin is one of the best playoff receivers we've had

i do think aikman's overrated but i don't think it's his fault because in the 90s you could just kick the shit out of quarterback so it's like playing nine years in that era is a fucking miracle Yeah, it's tough because great offensive line, great, what are his stats supposed to be?

If you have the greatest running back of all time, the running back with the, you know, the record, what, how, what is his stat?

All he had to be was accurate and a great leader.

The birdline thing wasn't awesome for the Aikman arguments, yeah, maybe not.

Yeah, yeah,

I mean, that's I know, but I'm 81.

You know, he did have a loaded team, anyway.

All right, I'm glad you guys enjoyed this.

I had a great time.

Um, Curtis, would this have been the number one team you would have wanted to cover?

Yes, yes, I would have never slept, but I would have

slept, and I would have been drinking with Jerry at the owners' meetings.

You know, I would have been peering through the windows of the White House.

It would have been an interesting beat.

There are four bedrooms in the White House, Curtis.

They would have given you one

at least gotten a couch.

Time shot or something.

Sal, Curtis, great to see you as always.

Thanks, both.

Good job by you.

All right, that's it for the podcast.

Thanks to Sal and Curtis.

Thanks to Eduardo and Gahal as well.

And I'm going to be back with one more podcast.

I think we're going to have a Thursday podcast this week and not Sunday.

So one more coming for me this week.

I will see you then.

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