Biggest NFL Bummers, JaydenMania, Hot Food Takes, and ‘Mr. McMahon’ With Sheil Kapadia, Dave Chang, and David Shoemaker
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All right. She'll Kapati from the ringers here. We're keeping this on Tuesday morning, West coast time. We're going to talk about disappointments and train wrecks, but let's, let's start a tiny bit positive. You host the Philly, the ringer Philly special for us. You also are on the ringer NFL show, but the Eagles, their defense actually showed up in week three after not touching Kirk cousins in week two.

Hertz is still all over the place. You're in a division where Dallas looks bad. Washington might be exciting with what's happened with Jaden Daniels. We'll talk about that with Chang later. Where are we with the Eagles? Is this team just an enigma? What is it?

Yeah. I think it's the perfect season for Eagles fans. And my, I might've said this on your pod last year, but when they win games, but the fans can still be filled with rage. That's like the sweet spot for a Philadelphia sports fan. And that's kind of what it feels like it is. I mean, Nick Sirianni couldn't have had a worse start to the season. I mean, a coach on the hot seat and he is making bizarre decision after bizarre decision, the on-field product. It's like, are they good? Are they not? They're okay. I think the floor is high. So, uh,

I don't know. I think you're right. They're an enigma. Let's see more. But it's just like any Sunday, anything can happen with this team. Did you ever get an explanation for why he went for it at the end of the first half on fourth and one with a run play with no timeouts left when the only good outcome would have been scoring a touchdown?

No, it's really interesting because they're one of the few teams in the NFL where the owner is like pro analytics and is like, we will give you the resources, follow what the chart says every time. And that's been one of the big storylines of the season is that Sirianni is not doing that. He's kind of going rogue and he's like, I got to follow my gut. And it's like some coaches have earned the benefit of the doubt with that kind of thing. He

He's not one of them. He's coaching for his job. So it's like one of the only situations where ownership, this would be a big deal for them. And you're right. I mean, he goes forward in that spot. He says he overrides the play call from Kellen Moore. So the organization hires Kellen Moore as the offensive coordinator. And then in this high leverage spot, fourth and one, Sirianni says to the media that

that he overrides the play call and it's a disastrous play call. So he said, you know, he thought it was a good call. You get a couple of shots at the end zone after that, but just another bizarre decision that that's really characterized their entire season so far. That was beyond bizarre. Like sometimes you can see the outcome where like, all right, I get it. He's being aggressive. That,

There was no being aggressive about it because there was no scenario where that worked out unless the runner just broke through and ran for 15 yards and scored a touchdown. Otherwise, it's a loss. Every other scenario is a bad outcome. I've never seen anything dumber than that. I thought when they were down 12-7...

I thought for sure they were going to lose. And then I thought he might get fired after the game. Like it was that bad. And then all of a sudden two saints collide Goddard, the one guy on the field who you have to cover somehow gets open for 60 yards and they steal the game. But you're right. It's like, how do you feel good about that? If you're an Eagles fan, other than Jalen Carter was an absolute all time monster in that game. So I don't know what else you would feel good about.

Saquon, Saquon. I mean, he might've saved their season. Yeah, you're right. I mean, they're down three, nothing in the fourth quarter. Devante Smith goes out with a concussion and it was like, is this going to be rock bottom for this tenure? And then Saquon reels off a 65 yard touchdown run. So he might've like, we might look back if they make the playoffs or if Sirianni saved his job and be like, Saquon Barkley saved the season in week three. It's funny because so Swift leaves and goes to Chicago for 24 million.

the Giants decide they don't need Saquon and I guess signed Devin Singletary. And then the Eagles are like, we'll take Saquon. Um, but it was so funny. Like the bears probably should have just signed Saquon, right? If they're going to spend 24 million on Swift, maybe spend 35 million on Saquon. Maybe don't do Keenan Allen, maybe try to get alignment, but it's just, it's so funny when you see the season start and then you realize like,

why didn't they just, why didn't they go this way? Why spend 24 million on Swift when you could just spend 36 on, on Saquon? Anyway, I, I, he's been awesome. I mean, he's, I think he's the favorite for offensive player of the year now in FanDuel. And he's played like it. Yeah, he has. And I've been of the school that like, Oh, running backs, you know, I don't know. Do you want to spend that much on a guy going into his seventh season? I mean,

And he's just kind of like totally changed my mind on it through three weeks. He's just been a revelation where it's like there are plays where you can pause it and you're like, there's nowhere to go here. And then you look up and it's an eight yard run. And then those 12 yard runs that are blocked for 12 yards, he turns into like 40 yard run. So aside from the one drop he had, you know, at the end of that Falcons game in week two, he's just kind of saved them. I don't know where they'd be without him.

All right, let's talk since we just went positive on Saquon. Let's shift and we'll go disappointing. I asked to do five favorites, five train wrecks, five disappointments. What's the title? I did five biggest bummer seasons through week three. So the fan bases are just like, oh, this, you know, this isn't kind of going the way we were hoping it would go. So I was trying to figure out the right way to phrase it through three weeks. So that's what I came up with. So five biggest bummers. We're going to go five to one. So your fifth biggest bummer is who?

San Francisco 49ers. They're one and two. They blow a 10 point lead against the Rams. I'm not writing them off, but if you were a 49ers fan going into the season and you're like super, this kind of feels like a Superbowl hangover season with all the off season drama, you're

now Christian McCaffrey's going to Germany, Bill, which you've been on this for like 10 years. It's not good when a guy goes to Germany. Yeah, I got a bunch of texts. They're like, oh, Germany, watch McCaffrey. Here he is. Yeah, it's like you've been making that joke for a decade and now it's actually a headline. Christian McCaffrey is going to Germany to get his Achilles checked out. So that's not great. They played it without Debo Samuel and George Kittle on Sunday. Their defensive tackle, Javon Hargrave, is now likely out for the season. So it's like all these things...

together. And I actually think Brock Purdy's playing well, like their offense had over 400 yards of offense on Sunday without any of those guys. He was really good. So that's the bright spot. If you're a Niners fan, you're like, we still have Shanahan Purdy's playing well, we can still save this thing, but just the injuries. And then the way the defense is playing and you're one and two, it hasn't gone the way you would have liked.

Yeah. So we're thinking about this three months from now and the Niners are fine. We're like, Oh, remember after week three, we'd probably look back and go, well, Minnesota defense week two, they're buzzsaw, right? Week three, bunch of injuries. They're up 14, nothing, fake punt, game flips, and the Rams just kind of steal the game. And then we panicked. We're like, Oh my God, the Niners. And then all of a sudden they were fine.

I guess the Hargrave thing was the one that really made me pause. Because now you're going to be able to run on them, I would assume. Unless they have some secret dude off their bench who's just going to come in and stuff.

And stuff to run. I already felt like they were a little vulnerable. It felt like you could move the ball on them and throw on them, especially if you're behind. And now it feels like you're gonna be able to run on them combined with like, they pay IU who hasn't really done anything. They get this crazy game out of Jennings. Debo and Kittle getting hurt is the least surprising, you know, like I'm just factoring that in those guys, eight games a year. But, um, my big fear for them, Sheila is that the NFC West might be really good.

It might just be one of those where we might have three playoff sound. I talked about it Sunday. There might be three playoff teams and I don't even know which three it's going to be. I've been really impressed by Arizona. I think they're legit, like a little frisky. So, you know, I look at the Niners and I go, are they one more injury away from being the year from hell team? Cause right now it's either them or the Rams for the year from hell team. Right. Unless you're going to say Cincy.

Yeah, I'm with you. You kind of give their offense the benefit of the doubt. Like the floor is going to be pretty high unless like Purdy goes down or some one more injury happens. But defensively, they make that coordinator change in the offseason. And now they've got injuries and like their defense was not good in that. I mean, their defense, their defense and special teams blew that game. I don't I really don't think it was the offense's fault on Sunday. So you're right. I mean, there's no walkover there.

in the NFC West where you just like chalk that up to a win. The Cardinals can score, the Rams can score as long as Stafford's healthy and then the Seahawks can kind of win in different ways. So yeah, I'm with you. That division's going to be competitive all the way through. Do you agree with me on Arizona? Because I thought they've had two losses...

And I really thought both losses were good losses. I think you can have good losses. I was impressed with how they hung with Buffalo. I was impressed with how they hung last week. I just, I think they're in these games. They hung with Detroit. Detroit was felt like they were going to go up by 30 and they just never did. Yeah. I think offensively I buy into the Cardinals. I think Kyler was a little bit off last week, but he was really good the first two weeks. So I think they're going to be able to move the ball and score most weeks.

They might have like the most gettable defense though in the NFL. Yeah. Like the Lions couldn't put them away last week, but I just think if you look at it week to week, I mean, they just don't have players on defense. I don't know what scheme you draw up there. So that's what I worry about, but I think they'll play entertaining games and I think their offense is going to keep them in a lot of games. Don't sleep on how bad Washington's defense is. I mean, Burrow, I don't, the Cincinnati, I don't think they punted yesterday. They didn't. All right. So on the Niners, last thing.

It's probably more fun for the NFL if they have a year from hell season, just because that's going to infuse some new blood in the NFC. The big picture piece, though, of this is the last year with Purdy on the deal that he's on. And you start thinking about windows of the NFL, which are always three, four, five years, maybe. And then you really have to reinvent your window. And, you know, that was my feeling with them heading into the year. Like, what's the window of this team?

Can they sustain it? Can they extend it? And this has not gone well. Now having McCaffrey hurt, the reason you got McCaffrey for

Not even having to think about the first-round pick is because he's injury-prone. Well, he lasted a year, he got injured. So there's some red flags everywhere, but Rams have red flags, Arizona's defense. Seattle's already banged up. He's lost a couple guys they can't block. So fascinating division. All right, let's go. Your number four biggest bummer. Number four is the Chicago Bears. And I was deciding, should I put them on here? Because if you're a Bears fan, you're like, we still get to watch Caleb Williams every week. We still have hope. There's some excitement here.

But the infrastructure around this guy is a complete disaster. They are 32nd in offensive DVOA through three weeks. They have the worst offense in the NFL. Their offensive line is a mess. Do you want to guess what their running backs are averaging yards per carry?

It can't be more than like three yards of carry, right? 2.3 yards per carry bill. 56 carries for 130 yards. They had this sequence against the Colts where they have first and goal from the four yard line. They go direct snap to Khalil Herbert. Then they go two more runs to Khalil Herbert. And then on fourth and goal,

They run one of the worst plays you'll see all season speed option with so bad. They lose to who loses 12 yards on fourth and goal from the one like we watched a lot of football. I've never seen that before in my life. So I was thinking like if the athletic came out with an article this week and was like the Bears haven't been practicing this season, I'd

I'd be like, oh, okay. Yeah, no, that, that's what it looks like. It's looked like that since week one. So this isn't like a Caleb Williams take. This is just like, do they know what they're doing there? Because the Colts maybe had the worst run defense in the NFL. They couldn't run the football on them. Caleb Williams, I think dropped back to pass like 52 times in that game. Uh,

they're having issues with just like calling timeouts before two point conversions and stuff. They don't look like a well coached team. I thought their formula coming into the season was very good defense. And can you create like a mediocre offense? Can the line be good enough? Cause I think that would have been good enough, uh, to make the playoffs and their offense just right now is a complete disaster. So, uh,

the bears to be as someone who picked them to make the playoffs. And now they're plus two 90 to make the playoffs after three weeks. Uh, they're having a bummer of a season. They can't block. Yeah.

They are number one on the, they can't block rankings somehow ahead of the Patriots who also can't block. But that play, you mentioned that fourth down play at all the games on, and they were in the left corner TV and I'm watching everything. And I knew it was fourth down, but two things happen. And then I look back and I just see a bears guy going backwards. And I'm like, wait, what? Why is that guy going backwards? I thought it was fourth down. And they somehow ran a play that had somebody go backwards, eight yards, the coaching, the

It's really tough to say this with Sirianni and Doug Peterson and some of the coaching disasters we've seen this season. But I think Iberflues is up there as they seem the least prepared. The coaching decisions during the game are bad. It doesn't seem like they have any idea how to use timeouts or challenges. And then for Caleb, when they can't block for him, they still have him going back.

And, you know, going backwards and trying to look for guys for four or five seconds, he doesn't have four or five seconds. So, you know, before the season, Jaden Daniels was, I think, six to one for rookie of the year. And Caleb was plus 120. And we talked about it on our future pods. I know you did too. We're like, yeah, why are those odds so different? Like what, what, what happens to we have that Jaden Daniels isn't in as good of a situation as Caleb.

And everyone was saying, this is the best situation anyone's walked into. They can't fucking block and their coach sucks. So not a good situation. And you need a coordinator in 2024 where if you don't have a great offensive line, they can scheme around it. Like we see that with guys, Mike McDaniel, Kyle Shanahan, you look at those teams and you're like, oh, they don't have the best offensive lines, but they figure out ways to scheme around it.

and Shane Waldron of the Bears. Like I was like, all right, this guy, it seems like an upgraded offensive coordinator. They're not doing anything to scheme around their offensive line weaknesses. And now you look at Seattle, he came over from the Seahawks and it's like Seahawks look like they're, you know, they're operating a little bit better without him. So now you have to revisit that coaching decision. So yeah, if I were a Bears fan, I would just be like, we can't let Caleb Williams develop

bad habits this season where it's like next year or two years from now, it's like, oh, well, that rookie year, they couldn't block for him. And so he started bailing from the pocket or, you know, he sustained an injury that that has to be like their number one goal for the rest of the season. I thought it was going to be their goal going into last week because they're facing the Colts. It's like that should be a get right game. And meanwhile, they still can't run the football or protect him.

Who leads the league in Zach Wilson's this year of going back to pass, immediately panicking and rolling out to the right and then throwing it out of bounds? Because it's Caleb or Deshaun probably in the finals for that, right? Yes. That's got to be Deshaun Watson, who we will get to here in a minute. Okay. Let's go. What's your number three bummer? Three is the Cincinnati Bengals. And I have been in on the Bengals. I've been saying, the Bengals are going to be fine.

And they're 0-3, Bill, but their offense is really playing well. They have a top five offense by any metric you look at. You mentioned it. Monday night, they did not punt. They did not turn the football over. Seven possessions, four touchdowns, two field goals, and a missed field goal. If they would have gotten one stop on defense, one forced punt, they win that game.

They're 1-2. We're saying, wow, Joe Burrow, Jamar Chase, that looked great. You know, the Bengals kind of turned their season around and they can't get a stop on defense. And so now they're 0-3. We're since 2000. I think one team has made the playoffs after they're 0-3. And so the bummer is just that

Like if you would have told me before the season Bengals are 0-3, what would we have said? We would have said, oh, Burrow's not healthy. Oh, did Jamar Chase get injured? Oh, the offense, you know, it's just not working. No, Burrow's healthy and playing well. Chase is out there. Higgins is back. The offense is working and they're still 0-3. And so now you zoom out and you say, well, they might lose Higgins after the season. And how many healthy seasons are you going to get from

burrow going forward. I mean, hopefully a lot, but you don't know. And so I feel like they're kind of wasting a season right now at 0-3, although I might be the only person in the world who's still like, I'm not totally out on them. It's a long season. Let's see what happens. But yeah, they've just dug themselves a hole unnecessarily. Yeah, I'm looking at the 0-3. So wow, 2018 Texans was the last one, 11-5. Before that, 1998 Bills, 10-6. Whew.

95 lines, 10 and six. It's in the last 30 years. There's been three total. Not likely. Yeah. I'm kind of with you. I look, their defense sucks. I don't know what happened to it. They didn't have a pass rush at all. I don't think Hendrickson's healthy, but it just feels like you can move the ball on them whenever you want. We've seen that over and over again, but I liked how they played against the chiefs. I liked how their offense looked last night against a crappy Washington defense. The question for me is,

What's the seven seed win total? If it's nine, I can't count them out. If it's 10, that means they have to go 10 and four down the stretch. They're in a really hard division, right? And their defense isn't good. And 10 and four doesn't seem realistic to me, but nine and five is inconceivable.

Yeah. It's defensively. I don't know what their answers are. Like they had a couple of defensive tackles out last night, but it's like, you have to figure something out. I mean, their run defense was an issue last year and going into the season and it hasn't been fixed, uh, at all here. So, uh,

I don't know that there is a fix. I think they could be a feisty team. I think their offense, like if you just look at it historically, if you have a top five offense, you're in the playoffs every year. Like you could take everything else out of it. And there's almost no precedent for having that good of an offense and not making the playoffs. That's why I'm not totally counting them out. But it does feel like, man, what a wasted opportunity. They were what?

But seven and a half, what were they? Seven and a half point favorites in week one against the Patriots, something like that. And then seven and a half point favorites on Monday night. You lose both those games. Like they went into the season with an easy schedule. And now two games that were supposed to be easy wins. You lost both of those. So the Pats was indefensible. I mean, they scored 10 points against the Pats. Yesterday they didn't punt. So in two weeks, in week one, they seemed like a team that hadn't practiced or run any preseason reps. In week three, their offense actually looked good and it still didn't matter.

I can't count them out yet because what did we see? The Packers last year were three and six and made the playoffs. Yeah, something like that. So if the Bengals can get to three and six, but I just, there's teams I like more in the AFC, I guess would be the counter, right? Definitely Buffalo. Probably the Jets. There's an AFC South team.

I'd like Pittsburgh more than Cincy. I just think their defense is better than anyone that thing. I would take Baltimore over the, over Cincy at this point. Yeah. And then chiefs. And I, where do you stand on the chargers? It's, I mean, now that like Herbert's dealing with the injury, they have one way they can win. Like they can't win in multiple ways. Maybe their defense continues to play well and they reel off a couple 50 yard runs each week. I think they're going to be well coached and I think they're going to be competitive and feisty.

I'm not sure that they're going to make the playoffs, but I think they'll be in the mix. So they had a bunch of injuries off that week three game. And I think that... So they're going to lose to the Chiefs this week. Suddenly they're 2-2. And maybe they're just going to be too banged up this year. And then Ferbert re-injured that ankle. And that's not going to be right for a couple weeks. So maybe they're out. So maybe we have one AFC West team, one AFC South team. I think that's safe. Buffalo and the Jets...

So that's one, two, three, four. So that would be three from the AFC North. Yeah. They got a chance. So that would be the path for Cincy, right? Yeah. Well, especially like if Cleveland, I'm sure they're coming up right now. They're next. So yeah. So maybe it is nine and eight. Nine and eight's doable. All right. Who's your number two bummer?

Yeah, it is the Cleveland Browns. And there's really a case for them to be number one. I mean, you look at this team. I don't think we've appreciated how terrible Deshaun Watson has been. Like when we talk about it, we're like, oh, he hasn't lived up to the hype. You know, he hasn't been quite what they expected. Last three years, Bill, 39 quarterbacks have had 500 dropbacks. He ranks 36th in success rate ahead of Davis Mills,

Zach Wilson and Bryce Young. Like it's time to take the kid gloves off when we talk about just his on-field performance, let alone the off-field stuff. He's been one of the worst quarterbacks in the NFL for three years. It's been one of the worst Browns quarterbacks like ever. Like Austin had a, Austin Gale had a tweet about that, about,

And the Browns have had two and a half decades of terrible quarterbacks, and he's at the bottom. Yeah, they're 31st in offensive DVOA. They've had offensive line injuries. I understand that.

The quarterback makes the offensive line injuries worse. He's got to be one of the worst quarterbacks to block for. He's a disaster under pressure. He's getting sacked on 12% of his dropbacks. And so now what do you do if you're the Browns? Because of the contract they gave him, which was the only way they were going to get him because they were the only team that was going to give him that guaranteed contract. The minute they gave him that deal, he became the most powerful guy in the organization other than the owner.

Because now if you're the owner, you say we're tied to him for two more years. You're going to bench him for Jameis Winston. And we're paying our backup $46 million per year. And we gave up all that draft capital. So that's one option. Two is you keep trotting him out there. I mean, I don't know where that's going to get you. You've had years to figure this out. And now you have your worst offensive line situation. So you can't do that. And then look ahead to the offseason. Can you run this back?

in 2025 with the same coach, the same GM and the same quarterback and say it's going to be different this year? I don't think so. I think the coach and the GM are pretty good. Like I think they would get hired pretty quickly if they were out there on the open market. And now you have this lawsuit and these allegations of sexual assault. So is he going to be facing a suspension? It's just like this is one of the most hopeless situations in the NFL. They have no chance to compete in the AFC with this guy. And they also have no way out of this.

Yeah. I remember this happened in the Celtics in the mid 2000s. They traded for Vin Baker, you know, max contract. And he had a bunch of problems. It turned out he had alcohol issues and he just, his contract just went forever. And the way the salary cap worked, you just looked at it. And this was like 2000, I might've even written about it at the time, 2003, 2004. And you just look at it and you go, Oh my God.

There's no way out of this for three years. Like we're, we're basically, we were in the salary cap league and one of our max spots is just a throwaway zero. And this Cleveland situation is way worse than that because it's the quarterback position. Really? It seems like the only move is to bench him. But now you have sullen, angry, overpaid Deshaun Watson on your bench who might, God only knows what he could do for team chemistry. But I, I don't see,

Any other solution other than to just send them away from the team? Just like, well, we'll send your checks every two weeks. If I'm the owner and I, I guess that's what this guy has, I'm thinking,

You guys got to make this work. If you don't make this work, I'll get, bring somebody else in to make it work. It's the owner has to realize this has no chance. And it doesn't seem like that's happened yet. Right. Cause they would have replaced them already. Yeah. I mean, he was, cause he, cause he signed off on it. I, you know, was he a driving factor or did, yeah. So it's like, he's the one that who guaranteed the money when Watson's like, I don't want to go to Cleveland and has, I'm like, uh,

What if we guarantee all the money? Exactly. All right, I guess I'll go to Cleveland. I mean, think about it. No quarterback's gotten that since. There have been a lot of great quarterbacks who have signed deals since. And we thought, oh, is this going to set a precedent for quarterbacks? Nope. No other team has been willing to do this with any other quarterback. They got desperate. They signed him to that deal. They're one and two. They have the hardest remaining schedule in the NFL. If you look at the betting markets and just like, you know, team win totals and Super Bowl odds. And so

there really is no way out for them. I mean, if you look at it, they just said, Oh, maybe Chubb can come back week five. It's like I have Chubb on all my fantasy teams. They're saying like week nine, it's not going to be week five. Yeah. The offensive line injuries, everything. So Russell Wilson has had the, had the biggest dead cap hit in NFL history, which is just like the amount of money on your salary cap to people who are you, who aren't on your team. That was 85 million. I think Watson would be like double that.

Yeah, it's like 170. It's like 170 if they cut him. So it's like, is that feasible? At some point, you're just going to be like sunk cost, nothing we can do. But I don't know if they're going to be at that point yet or not. You know what's funny? You would think in the 2020s, we have the history of all the mistakes people have made over the last however many decades of football or any sport.

We have way better advanced analytics telling us how to make decisions. We have smarter people. We have even podcasts are smarter and shows are smarter. And there's all this good information we have now. And yet we've seen three of the biggest mistakes in the history of the NFL. Russell Wilson, the Bryce Young trade, and Deshaun. Those are, I've been following the NFL for, you know, five decades. Those are three of the biggest mistakes since I've been a football fan. And they all happen within the span of,

Three years. It's crazy. How are we still making mistakes like this? Yeah, I was thinking about it with the quarterbacks, especially, and we'll talk about Trevor Lawrence in a minute here, but watching Josh Allen last night, it's kind of like there is no swing big enough to acquire a player like Josh Allen. He is going to lift everyone around him. You can make mistakes elsewhere on the roster, and you're probably going to still win 10 or 11 games. So when you have a chance to get a guy of that caliber, you can take almost any big swing, and it'll be...

justified. But how many of those guys are there? Three, maybe four. And now you have this big middle class of quarterbacks where it's like, do you want to make excuses for this guy and say he's good and the situation around him? Or do you not want to? Like you could make, have those arguments for basically guys like six through 20, you know, we could say, well, they're good here because their offensive line is good. They're bad here because their scheming is bad. And so you can't take the big swings and

unless you just have a great feeling that it's going to be one of those top four or five guys. Otherwise, the big swings for just like a competent guy who can be good under the right situations, those don't make sense. They're too high risk and too low reward. I would include Dak Prescott in that for $60 million a year. And I might be able to find Sam Darnold or Geno Smith or Baker Mayfield and have an extra $50 million a year to spend on other parts of my roster.

The problem is if you don't find those guys and it's like, oh shit, now we have this guy instead. Then it's trouble. All right. Then you're the Arthur Smith Falcons. Yeah. Then you're the Arthur and you're just punting every year. All right. Once the Jacksonville Jaguars going to be a big storyline this week with the way they played.

on Monday night. I talked myself into the Jaguars going into the season. I know you did too. Yeah. And there was reason to, they were eight and three last year. Trevor Lawrence battles four different injuries. They get bad turnover luck. They get their dropping passes all over the place. It's like this team could rebound and win nine or 10 games. They draft a Brian Thomas jr. Like that. Yeah. I was, I was in, there was a case now they're oh, and three and we all know what's going to happen is that Doug Peterson is going to be out of a job sometime between now and

and the end of the season. And then there's going to be this conversation that I just mentioned. Is it Trevor Lawrence or is it the scheme and the coaching and the supporting cast and they mismanaged the roster?

Last three seasons, Bill, Trevor Lawrence has 39 turnovers. That's second to Josh Allen. And Josh Allen has so many high-level plays that I think the turnovers are completely overrated because he makes up for them almost every single time. That just hasn't been the case with Trevor Lawrence. He has 25 fumbles over the last three seasons, second to Justin Fields. And the worst part, if you're a Jaguars fan, why they're number one on the bummer list is that

he's playing like the worst football of his career right now. I mean, before he was really good at avoiding sacks. Now he's getting sacked on 11% of his dropbacks. His accuracy is not good. He's not dealing with pressure. He had that interception Monday night. And so I think what happens is so many people cling to like what their draft performance

evaluation was of a guy. And they're like, no, he had all the tools. He was a generational prospect that we just become blind to what we've seen four years in the NFL. Like there's not much precedent for a guy having 53 starts in the NFL. And it's like, well, he's not great yet, but he's going to become great.

Most of the time, we know at this point in his career. And so if you're a Jaguars fan, I'm not saying he's bad. I still kind of like Trevor Lawrence. He's young. I think he'll maybe have a moment down the road here or a season down the road where he looks really good. But I do think we need to kind of reset our expectations and be like, this isn't the guy who was getting drafted one overall. This is a guy we've watched in the NFL and he's had what? One above average season as a starter. The first three years were explainable.

Yeah. Right. Urban Meyer last year, he got hurt. So, and that was one of the reasons I was totally into them in year four. It was like, here we go. He's going to be healthy. They finally got him a deep weapon. Like this is, this is it. We're, we're on. And it went backwards. And unfortunately I've watched all three games. I have them on a fantasy team. I have Jack. And I really thought they were going to cover and possibly win last night.

And within what, a half hour, you knew, you knew where it was going. I don't know what the answers are. Like, like Ruiz was on my pod last week saying they're going to fire, um, fire Peterson and bring in Belichick and it's going to happen. And is Belichick going to put up with some of the shit Trevor Lawrence does? Like, I, we've already seen that. We've already seen that with Mac Jones and Cam Newton, some of these other guys. So,

I don't know what it is, but it does make me wonder, should they have waited to do that extension? What was the benefits of doing the extension? Because you still have the franchise tag thing, right? You've never actually seen him be awesome. And you're just going to give him $275 million. Why not wait? I think when you do that, then it becomes a... Then you're going to be paying even more to your... Kind of taking a gamble that this guy is going to be good enough. I also think that...

It's okay for them to have given that to him because you know how coaches and teams in the NFL operate. If Trevor Lawrence was on the trade market right now, I think you'd be shocked by what Trevor Lawrence would get. Would he be worth more if he was on his original contract versus this giant extension? Yeah, that's true. Then the team that trades for him though probably is like, well, as part of the trade, we have to sign him to a new deal as well. So I understand why teams do it. When you think you have a guy, you want

you go earlier rather than later because teams do get desperate. And if you really need to move off a guy like the Eagles had to do with Carson Wentz a few years ago, he was the worst quarterback in the NFL and they got great draft capital from the Colts. So I still lean towards

Pay, you know, if you think if you feel good about it, go ahead and pay them because it's kind of like you always talk about with the NBA. It's still an asset. You're still going to be able to move off of them unless it's like a Deshaun Watson type situation. But yeah, he hasn't had the moment yet. And now it's just going to be like, all right, he's going to be on his third coach in what, five years?

another offensive coordinator and what's it going to look like? Maybe it'll happen for him. It still could. I think he can certainly be a solid starter, but kind of the guy we expected. I was thinking about this. If you flip Josh Allen and Trevor Lawrence,

those two quarterbacks on those two teams, I kind of think the Jaguars are a pretty good team and the Bills are struggling to make the playoffs. Now, it might be unfair to compare him to Josh Allen, but that just kind of tells you the gap between sort of the elite guys and where someone like Trevor Lawrence might be right now. It's pretty rare to just not have a moment for the first four years of your career and 60 plus starts. And then all of a sudden the light switch goes off. To borrow the NBA analogy, and then we'll go like,

It's a little like where the Bulls were with Zach Levine, right? Where it's like, well, this guy scores 25 points a game. He's not a franchise guy, but we don't want to lose him either. And here's a lot of money. And now they're, now they can't even trade them. And I do feel like we've seen teams get into that bind with quarterbacks where like, well, if we don't have them, what are we going to do for a quarterback? And it's like, yeah, but you're a quarterback you can't win with. I think the difference here is

and I include the two of us, we both thought he was going to make a leap this year. There's some sort of disconnect between the talent and what we're saying. That throw he made that the Hamlin pick guy was wide open. I mean, only him and Anthony Richardson are making throws that bad in the league right now. Anthony Richardson is the all-time hit or miss guy. Lawrence isn't hitting like he's just missing. And I think that's the difference. All right.

That was our bummer list. Sheil Kapadia, you can listen to him on the Ringer NFL show and on the Ringer Philly special. Read him on the ringer.com. He had a piece today. Good to see you, Sheil. All right. Thanks for having me.

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All right, my friend Dave Chang is here. We haven't done a pod in a while together. I'm not really sure why, because I see you all the time or talk to you all the time, but somehow we forget to just put the headsets on and start talking. And we have a lot of stuff to talk about because you have a quarterback right now. It is beyond exciting, Bill. I got to be honest. I actually shed a tear last night out of sheer joy. I legit cried. And I don't care. I'm letting the world know.

You literally were brought to tears by Jaden Daniels, 27-yard, falling backwards, getting crushed, touchdown pass to the end zone? Yeah, and then hearing Joe Buck and Troy Aikman say, we have the real deal. It's been almost 30 years since we've had a legitimate quarterback. And I was talking to other Commander slash Redskins fans. We are blessed to have Joe House and Nathan Hubbard, other fans in your life that love this team. And one of them, one of my many friends,

said it felt like they were an MDMA. That's how ecstatic we felt, all of us. It was unbelievable. But one of the best days I've had in a long time. - We first got to know each other when I was still writing for Grantland and I did a piece about how it was impossible to make Daniel Snyder sell the team. This was 10 years ago.

And, and it was, you were talking about putting together a coalition of money to try to buy the team. It's funny, the prices that were being thrown around back then are probably like five times lower than what it is now. Really? Can I raise a billion dollars? It was going to take like $2 billion and now it would be like 6 billion for sure. Right. Um, but that's how bleak it was. And then it got worse and then it got worse and then it got worse. Did you, it almost felt like the Washington football was kind of

not dead, but it felt like it was going on life support with the fan base. Where were you mentally? It's been a dark time. A lot of sadness because for those that are old enough, we're talking about watching the then Redskins at RFK Stadium. That was life. That was what sort of every week needed to start off with was a Redskins win and

You know, you had the Smurfs, you had the Hogs, Joe Gibbs. That was all I knew. And I was, you know, born in a time where we had every opportunity to go to the Super Bowl every year. And it's been heartache and sadness since Dan Snyder took over the team. And it's been a blessing that he's disappeared from my life. I wonder if he's watching. You think he's watching these games? Like, what happens when you saw your team? Do you root against them? How spiteful do you think you get?

Oh, yeah. I thought I've been thinking about that. Does he does he keep like a box seat, you know, for himself? Who knows? Yeah, because at the Clipper Games, Sterling's, I guess, ex-wife now, whatever she is, she still goes to the games and say it's courtside. And I think that was part of the deal. She's like, I'll facilitate this, but I still have to go to the games. And she's there rooting for the Clippers. And it's like, this is weird. Your husband destroyed the team for 30 years. Why are you here? I mean, he will go down as one of the top five worst owners in sports history. Don't you agree, Bill Simmons?

Did you ever have interactions with them? And yes, I agree. I've seen him from a distance and I would talk open shit about him. When we had a restaurant in DC, we would hand out fortune cookies and on the back of the fortune cookies, it would give you, you know, whatever fortune and the backside would say, fuck Dan Snyder.

And he knew that I disliked him and he did not love me from what I was told. So it was weird. The last season he owned the team, I got an invitation to sit with him in the owner's box. I was like, I'm definitely not. Oh my God. Why would he do that? I don't know, man. But I'm just, it's like the witch is dead. God bless.

Robert Griffin III, that was what, a fun, I guess, four months. He's not as exciting, I don't think, as Daniels, but at least back then it was like, hey, we might have our first quarterback since the good Mark Rippon year.

Yeah, I mean, he won Rookie of the Year. He beat Andrew Luck that year. And, you know, that was Kyle Shanahan running that offense. We had all those coaches, Sean McVay, etc. And who knew that that was going to be the only year we actually had a decent quarterback, a good quarterback, something that we could be excited about. And I was thinking last night what it must be like to be a Patriots fan where you had 20 plus years of the same quarterback. Since 2000, I think we've had 27 different starting quarterbacks. And

knock on wood that this guy stays upright. He is very thin and he plays fearlessly. So I pray to God that he's in my life for 20 years. That would be a

As maybe after getting married, my two sons, that would be number four. If he stays around for 20 years. Well, I was watching yesterday. I don't have him on any fantasy teams and I didn't bet on the game. I don't have any futures with Washington. I had no interest at all in the game other than just watching it because I like football. I have a Cincinnati under, so I guess like a tiny rooting for Washington, but I'm watching it. And he just, this is what he did in college. This is why I was afraid the Patriots were going to take him.

He takes these two hits a game. And each time he takes the hit, you just are convinced he's not going to get up, but he always gets up. And you, you see him compared to these giant football players, uh,

even when they were down by the goal line a couple times, you're like, well, there's no way they're going to be able to sneak with him. He's 160 pounds, but he makes it all work and there's a presence to him and an it factor that, I mean, yesterday was his coming out party. There's no question, but this is stuff he was doing in college that all the LSU fans were saying, this guy has it. This guy has it. But,

But yet there's always the injury thing with him that's kind of lingering over every play. It's like watching those crazy wrestlers on, you know, WWE, the guys who are doing like the jump across the ring and jumping out. And you're like, oh my God, is this guy going to live? That's kind of how I feel watching Daniels.

Exactly. I mean, that's why Joe House was labeling him RG4 because he might just not last like three or four games. So maybe just by luck, he's going to stay upright. It's why I sort of wanted to draft Drake May because he seems sturdy and he's young. And I remember pre-draft, I was very upset that, you know, you were going to get him or something.

Thinking that Jaden Daniels is going to be a bust. But I think it I think we might have picked like this version of this year's CJ Stroud, right? Like all the hype was on Caleb. I wanted him. I wanted Drake and, you know, happy to be wrong here because outside of the thought of injury, knock on wood, I hope nothing ever happens to him. Like he plays with heart.

He sort of has that sort of intangible quality that you always talk about in your book of basketball, right? That need to sort of spread the wealth and deflect sort of attention to everybody else. He's also this glue guy that you want. And I don't think we've had that in the D.C. area in a very long time, since Mark Rippon days, for sure. The other funny thing was the quarterbacking has been so bad.

And then last night you had Josh Allen, who was unbelievable and Daniels in his game. And it was, they were the two most exciting quarterbacks I watched all week. And they were kind of happening simultaneously on two TVs. Daniels is so much fun. Like you don't want to leave the room when Washington's on offense. So you know what's going to happen. That last touchdown, Bill.

I mean, watching Ryan Clark do the replay with Scott Menpelt after the fact and just seeing him get crushed, absolutely crushed.

And to throw a perfect ball. Those are the moments that never happened to us. They happened to the Patriots. They happened to every other team except us. And honestly, I screamed so loud. I had not been that ecstatic at a sporting event in a long time. Since basically being in New York during the two weeks of Jeremy Lin. Arguably, you know, the best two weeks of my life as well. That was amazing. Insanity.

People will have no idea. What's been the best Asian sports moment of like, wait, like where Otani like going for 50, 50. Do you, would you put that up there or not? Really? For sure. We, I have a lot of debate with my Asian friends about this. Do people understand that we might have the number one talent, most talented, greatest baseball player of all time, potentially. And it's just not getting enough buzz. Um,

Mainly because he doesn't speak English. Although I think he speaks enough English to bet poorly on sporting events. Sal and I talked about it a little on Sunday about people who are better at whatever they're doing in sports than anyone else who does the same thing. And it's not a long list, but it's definitely Otani is one of those people and Brandon Aubrey, the Dallas Cowboys kicker.

And I'll tell you who's better than all of them. As great as Shohei is, Joey Chestnut is better at hot diet eating than anything else that anybody could possibly do. So you went to that. You saw that in person.

Yeah. Chestnut versus Kobayashi. Had you been to one of those before? No. Why would you go to a thing? It's one of those sporting events, if you can even call it that, that you would just write off immediately. Like, why would you possibly want to watch grown adults stuff their face with food? That's not something you watch. It's like a news clip. That's about it. And I have to say it was one of the most compelling things I've ever witnessed in my life, for sure. So what was compelling about it? The fact that

Think about this. I was watching his, his jaw is bigger than Kobayashi's, but to eat a hot dog in 1.5 bites, a whole one, like, yeah, I just, and 83 of them at that,

uh it is it was hypnotic it was mesmerizing in fact uh the the three olympian swimmers that were sort of the warm-up act they were sitting behind me during the competition and they were amazed right they tried to eat like 50 chicken wings as quickly as possible and they were ill they they said listen if you had two hours an hour yeah not a problem right people don't understand that

It's not a fact that you couldn't eat a lot, but it's the duration of time to eat that in 10 minutes. It's just not something you can comprehend. So I don't say that with any hyperbole. It was one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. When I was watching this last one, I always wonder how nobody has choked yet.

How we haven't just had a mistake. You would figure all these different contests that are televised, something would go wrong and all of a sudden there's five pounds of hot dog in somebody's throat. What would they do? Well, I asked and they train to prevent that from happening. How they train, I don't know. I don't know. But they work to not choke. It's something that they practice during the week in their regimen.

What did he feel like the next day? What does he feel like a week? I wonder what kind of body trauma that is to eat that many hot dogs in 10 minutes. 83 hot dogs in 10 minutes.

We talk about this after a big meal, right? The next day, like how many, how many number twos is that going to be? Seriously. Wait, how many, how many number twos is 83 hot dogs? Yeah, that's gotta be five, five to 10 at least. Have you ever tried to do any of those quickie eating things or no? No. The only thing I've ever done was a Hartford current, uh, had a hot wing eating contest, like the hottest hot wings.

And I won Lunatic of the Week. I was on the cover of the Hartford Courant in 1999. That was it. I thought what was interesting about that Chestnut thing was that Kobayashi, there was some sort of rivalry slash hatred

And it brought out this other level of chestnut. Like he had never eaten that many hot dogs before. He was so fueled by the competition, the animosity toward Kobayashi. And I don't really understand what's happened with those two and what they could possibly be feuding about. Like they just both eat a lot of food.

I know. I thought that was manufactured as well, but it's not. They clearly did not like each other. They kept separate. They did not talk to each other. They didn't look at each other. They didn't even glance at each other. Actually, the most surprising thing, I don't know if it was picked up on TV, there was a woman bawling during the announcing of Joey winning. And I was like, what the hell is going on? It turned out to be Kobayashi's wife, who was just...

Oh, completely. Sobbing uncontrollably. Yeah. It was pretty sad, actually. Did he ever hold the Asian sports championship belt or is he, is he, can he qualify? Cause right now, Tony has it. You know, I, I should put him in the, in the hall of fame. I think technically he does make it, but I can't. It's,

You know, what I'm waiting for, really, the person that would pass Otani for me is a 6'6", 6'7", 6'8", basketball player that plays like Anthony. If Anthony Edwards was Asian, I would stop everything I'm doing. I'd buy a Winnebago and I'd go to every game. It would be all I would do. I would be the number one fan because that would be it. That would be the last piece of the puzzle for me in my life.

Somebody that is a genetic freak. Now you're just going to have to settle for Jaden Daniels and having a fun quarterback. Can we announce right now he eats at all your restaurants for free? Not only that, Jaden Daniels, I'll cook for you anytime you want. I will be your private chef. You can come on any of the shows I do. You have carte blanche for sure.

So you've done how many dinnertime Netflix shows at this point? How many have you done? And we should mention it broke you down physically within 20 episodes. You actually had to have back surgery. This is true. It was the most traumatic. It was your version of Kobayashi eating 83 hot dogs.

So we started this project with Netflix as a sort of six episodic thing. It turned out to be 27. Along the way, I had to get disc replacement surgery. It's a high stress event. Tuesdays, 4 p.m. We're back on second season on October 8th. So you thought this was going to be six episodes and they're like, actually, we'll take 27. Actually, the one person that said that we're going to have many episodes was you. You're the one that said it was going to work. So.

Well, I saw the studio. The show made sense. And you could tell Netflix was using you like some sort of weird guinea pig.

Right. They had no live stuff at all. And when you showed me the control room and there was like this whole other wing of your studio and there was like 50 people back there all figuring out the lab, I was like, oh, I see what Netflix. So when they announced the football thing, I wasn't surprised because it felt like you were the foot in the water to figure out how live would work on Netflix. It was the first thing they did. Right.

Um, I believe we were the first live series, uh, that wasn't sort of limited and certainly the first live cooking show. Yeah, sure. But it makes sense. Cause if you're doing live, there has to be some sort of unpredictability to what, what you're watching and with the cooking, which, which you hate, but it's actually good for the show. Something might go wrong as you're cooking.

I mean, for those listening, if you haven't watched the episode with Bill Simmons and Bert Kreisner, you should watch it. I think we got to get Bill back on again. I love Bert, but Bert certainly was talking a lot. I burned out a high usage rate. I was just I just said some picks. I just rebounded and moved the ball and said picks. I want to get you on the show cooking. Okay.

We did talk about that. That's what the world needs to see. I want you to make your red sauce or something and let the world know that Bill can actually cook. Well, I can only cook like four things, but I can cook. And some of the stuff I can cook are now, you know, there's been a lot of, it upsets me, but there's some food that we grew up with that is now considered, you know,

Bad, dangerous, unhealthy. What are you talking about? Mac and cheese. Mac and cheese is never been more out. No, that's not true. This is one of the things. And Bill has really perfected the art of goading me into doing things I don't want to do. That's why we have French fries named after him at a restaurant in LA. Yeah, that's true. That's why he wants to challenge me on things. He claims that he makes the best mac and cheese anywhere.

I just said, no, that's not what I said. You've already twisted my, I said, I could make mac and cheese as good as something that an actual chef could make because I don't think mac and cheese is that hard. You just have to load cheese and make it taste good.

That is basically what I said. You're claiming you make the best mac and cheese in the world. I just don't think the bar is that high. And I think a lot of people could make a really good mac and cheese. And I think my mac and cheese is delicious, but it's all store bought. And you find that completely offensive. And I get it. No, it's it's OK. You know, Sarah Lee had semi homemade on the Food Network. This is how Bill Simmons cooks. It's OK. Whatever it takes to win.

But you never took that personally and decided to make your own mac and cheese in a restaurant. No, because I don't want to embarrass you on the one thing that you think that you're good at. We did it with the fries. I made the mistake of telling you that I thought the Four Seasons of Beverly Hills at the bar, which I only had once, had awesome fries. And you're like, what? And then you got furious and you took the fry challenge. When I was on your show...

You made the, what was that called? The thing you made? The Tim Parmo, which is the Timpano based out of the movie Big Night with Stanley Tucci. And it's basically this giant lasagna in a pot with multi layers of things. It takes many hours. And, you know, live TV is you want to do things you've never done before and to sort of

take it out of the pot the way we did. That was scary. I didn't know it was going to work. It was actually one of the highlights. You used food from a bunch of different good chefs, too. Yeah, we put everything that's an Italian-American sort of culinary staple, right? Chicken parm, pasta rigatoni, et cetera, meatballs. We actually, you know, your mom made meatballs for the show. Right, and she was all excited about it. All right, we're going to take a break, and then I'm going to enrage Chang with a food takeover.

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And this will be maybe a little AFC South. If the Texans win this, they might be cruising to the AFC South. So those would be my four. Of course, with the multi-view builder this year, I don't know if you've noticed that you can even customize which four NFL games you want to watch. So if you'd like three of those, knock out the fourth one, you know, like go into the multi-view builder, throw in the one you want, log in, select, build a multi-view, pick out the four games you want to watch.

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makes you so mad you can't even respond for a couple seconds before you then respond and then you just berate me for the take and here's you've been you've been priming me this for a couple months now you won't even share me you you wouldn't let me know like two months ago you you want to wait for this moment to let the world know this hot take we've lost the narrative with pizza we've gone too far i blame some of the people we know and pizza that i love to eat

But we have now drifted down the river away from our pizza center point. And it's become all about the dough and how it's cooked and the kind of bread and the ingredients and the tomatoes have to be perfect. And it's like, you know what also is good? A fucking slice of pizza. How about cheese and sauce with a thin crust and it comes out of the oven and it's cheesy and the cheese is melting all over my mouth.

And I actually have a whole bite, you know, 10 bites in a slice versus two. And then it's just a bunch of bread with the best possible ingredients and arugula and all these dumb things. You know what's good? Cheese and pepperoni and a lot of tomato sauce cooked with cheese getting brown on top. And I don't know why we just can't keep doing that.

Why do we have to change pizza? I love pizza. Why are we moving in this new direction with pizza? And all the chefs and all the best food people are like, this is a great direction. It's awesome. And it's like, is it? Are we sure? Wow.

That's not necessarily a hot take if you're wrong, because I didn't know that the listeners of The Ringer on Spotify or listen to Dave Portnoy. This is crazy. This is fucking crazy, Bill. You think this is my one bite take? Yeah. You're basically saying like pizza's got to be this one thing. It is beautiful, that pizza. Yes. You're saying it's got to be this...

Like this throwback idea of a simple slice of pizza, right? Cheese pizza. I get it. I like a big triangle piece of pizza with, I like sauce on it. I like cheese. I want to make sure the cheese is cooked enough and I don't like a lot of bread. And every time I go, I was at Bianco's last week. I love Bianco's. It's fantastic. I think he has a couple of the best pizzas I've ever had, but I'm also, I don't like to eat the crust. Some people do. I don't, I just like the pizza part.

What do you mean you don't like the crust? Come on. I'm not a crust guy. I'm not. But that's the thing. It's like now I'm looked down on that I'm not a crust guy. I'm a sauce and cheese guy. What about the sauce and cheese community with pizza? Yeah, there's nothing wrong with the crust. It's fine. Why did we have to get so artsy fartsy with pizza? Why can't somebody be like, you know what we're going to do? I'm going to make the best version of the pizza that you grew up eating.

And it's going to be big squares. Like when we go to New York, all the New York people are like, oh, our pizza is the best. Oh, there's nothing like New York pizza. It's like, it's just these giant slices, but they're really good. Yeah. You and Dave Portnoy, you are the only two people in the world that want pizza this way. I'm not the only two. There's other people. No. Listen, we're talking about our good friend, Chris Bianca. The reason why people are talking so...

about pizza and they're so infatuated with all of the ingredients, the toppings and the sort of single origin flour, et cetera, is because of Chris Bianco. This guy. And it's delicious. And I've been there probably 12 times in the last year. But I guess it's better today than it's ever been before in America. There's high level pizza. So this is like its own category. It's almost like don't call it pizza. Call it, use it, create a new word for it.

And then the old school, cheaper, less thought put into a pizza that I also really like. And I feel like that's getting shoved out to the side. Why can't we also spend time trying to make that kind of pizza better? And we have both leagues, basically like two conferences in the NFL.

Well, I know there's a couple. What you're asking for are like the old school slice shots. And I believe that that is going to come back in Los Angeles, in New York. Oh, so here I am. Yeah, let's go. It's everywhere. Let's go. I'm tapping into something. Listen, I'm going to give you a comp that you might understand a little better because I believe it's sports, you know, adjacent is, you know,

How would you feel today if you had someone on your podcast that was in basketball and they would say, well, American Americans still produce the best basketball players in the world. That's it. America is the best at basketball. Yeah. What would you say to that? It's true. What about all the international players? There's a lot of good international players, but I think there's still more good American players versus any other country. Right.

Is that going to continue, you think? Or is it going to be maybe one side or the other? I think the seesaw will be foreign players, American players, which right now is like this, and it might end up tilting as the years go along. I think a lot of people would say that the best pizza in the world is in Italy, right? And there's many kinds of pizza in Italy. I think it's safe to say that America produces the best pizza in the world across the board.

and all kinds. And that's why I don't think the slice of pizza that you're talking about has gone anywhere. It's just there. There's just more shine on these more bespoke artisanal pies, right? That were sort of the progeny of Trisbyaco. So let's come up with a name for them. It's like a high-end pizza. It's like Pizza 2.0. Yeah. Yeah.

But original pizza, the sliced pizza that, again, your son probably doesn't really know that much about. Right. It's not the pizza that you get delivered from Domino's or Papa John's. It's it's yeah, it's it's like the slice that you would get on your college campus at two in the morning. I want the best possible version of that where it's. Yeah, I feel like we're not making that as much anymore. I have trouble finding that, especially in L.A. Now, granted, I know we're in a weird pizza spot in L.A.

But also I think the younger generation, right? They don't necessarily gravitate towards that. They want the pizza 2.0. Can we bring in Kyle? Nephew Kyle, can you come into this just as a tiebreaker and somebody who's eaten a lot of pizza? Do you like pizza 2.0 or pizza 1.0? 1.0. Easy. I don't mess around. Okay. Can you explain to Chang Wang?

It's just what it's like bacon, egg and cheese. I just don't feel safe going around trying to find them out here. There's there's a couple of names that people told me I stick to it. If there's a weird logo on the pizza place, I probably won't even go in if it's it's like it looks good. You're a son of New York. How the hell would you even think about eating a bacon, egg and cheese in California? You don't want to admit the truth. Some people just want pizza 1.0. And every once in a while.

go nuts. I'm like, I'm going to do the pizza 2.0, but sometimes pizza 1.0 is great. Pizza 1.0 isn't like a Roy Hibbert center. It hasn't died. It's here. They're everywhere. I feel like it's dying. All the chefs care about pizza 2.0. Chris Bianco actually has a pizza 1.0 at the row. He has that other pizza shop. You don't go there. It's delicious. They make the pizza 1.0 at the Bianco one.

Yeah. Pane Bianco. Have you not had Pane Bianco pizza? I haven't. It was always about to be open and I haven't been there yet. Well, put it this way. Imagine pizza 1.0 with pizza 2.0 ingredients, quality level. That sounds amazing. Yeah, it exists, Bill. It's here. I will say the Rosa Pizza at Pizzeria Bianco is the most creative pizza I've ever eaten still. The one with the pistachios and onions and what cheese is that in that?

it's just mozzarella, but the audience, they may be confused here because they might think this endangered species of pizza 1.0 isn't there. I'd argue that one of the things that is happening right now across America, New York Times had an article recently that there's pizza, better pizza ever in every city. It's like better to eat pizza now. And it's not all Neapolitan pies, which are thin crust pizza.

The 1.5 version is what I'm talking about, that classic sliced New York style pie, but it's not made with crappy ingredients. And for example, one of the reasons I don't love that dollar slice pie in New York City, Kyle, you know what I'm talking about? When you're a drunk, they're great. Dollar for a slice of pizza, you can't beat that. But the ingredients are sort of just, eh, they're good enough. Now, what if you made that kind of pie with the best quality ingredients? And that is happening.

So pizza 0.0 is drunk pizza. Yeah. That's like, I think the best drunk pizza I've ever had is the Prince Street pizza. Those big giant Sicilian squices where they put like 700 pepperoni on each, each slice. And it's two in the morning. It was like, ah, you need to soak up all of that booze. So that's 0.0 1.0. So you're telling me that the 1.0 version is,

1.5. Yeah, 2.0 is a lot of new toppings, a lot of people putting their own spins on pizza. But I'm with you. I like all the pizza. I'm just saying. We're going to agree to disagree. Yeah. I have my next food take for you. Let's hear it. Clam chowder. We're doing it wrong for the most part.

And the reason I know this is when you actually have good clam chowder, it makes you mad at all the other clam chowder. So Simmons family, Cape Week, my dad's family, they all got together and chatted. We went to lunch at the Chatham bars and whatever it's called. And they have clam chowder there. And it was the best clam chowder I've ever had. And they did a couple of different things. And I just think it should be translatable to all the other people who make the clam chowder. One, not too thick. Two, not too many clams.

People make clam chowder. They just like throw 700,000 clams and just like you eat every bite. It's like the right mix of like the potatoes have to be soft. It's not too thick. They also put this, they did this bacon. It's like these bacon bits they put like in a little circle on the side so you can mix the bacon bits in.

And they had like the right crock, which I think is another piece of the clam chowder experience. Like the crock is super important and it was really good. And I just feel like everyone else who makes clam chowder should just go there and see what they're doing and just emulate it because it's always too thick. There's always too many clams. It's always in the wrong kind of bowl. And I think clam chowder, people mess up more than it's good. And I just want us to be better at clam chowder.

Bill, I don't disagree with that hot take, but I have a hotter version of that hot take. All right, let's hear it. Probably no one will agree with me, particularly no one from the New England area. I, David Chang, make the greatest clam chowder in the world. I really do. What? Yeah. When have you ever made clam chowder? What the hell are you talking about? I make clam chowder all the time. For who? And we're talking about the New England stuff. Me, my family. You have not had it. I guarantee you, if you eat my clam chowder, you're going to be like...

Man, that is the best clam chowder I've ever had. So without giving away your secrets, what is the secret? So number one, it starts with the root. You're right. Most clam chowder is garbage because they add cream and they add other things that sort of emulsify it and makes it too thick, right? Yeah. And also...

You said it right. You can't sort of keep it in there because as it cooks, as you continue to serve it, it's going to break down. And that's another reason why, because it's full of starch, that the soup will get too thick. So you sort of have to cook things separately and add it. Adding the bacon bits or the lardons is a great idea. I actually will steal that one. But the one thing that I do that changes the...

the clam chowder is I don't add the clams until the very end. I cook the clams separate. Interesting. Because clams become like the texture of a rubber to a number two, like pencil eraser. It's terrible. Right. So you also need to have enough broth clam. So people may add too many clams, but not enough clam broth. So I'm just saying, are you celery pro celery in your new clam chowder or no? No, I'm not really. That's a little bit ambitious for me.

All right, now I'm gonna have to make clam chowder for you. And when I make it, my only ask is that when you taste it, you gotta let your audience know that Dave was right, this is the best clam chowder I've ever had. - So the mistakes, first of all, I don't believe you. You're not from New England, so there's no way, there's no way you'll know how to make the perfect clam chowder. I'll just challenge you right now. Second,

The mistakes people make with the clam chowder, I really want them to stop making it. It doesn't have to be like a fucking milkshake. Well, first of all, Bill. Clam chowder, they want to go like, oh, it's creamy. It's like, no, it doesn't have to be that creamy. It's actually better when it's not that creamy. What we need to do is stop other cities from making New England clam chowder. San Francisco, I don't know why the fuck they make clam chowder in a sourdough bread bowl. One of the dumbest sort of combinations you could possibly do. Clam chowder is put on too many menus, number one.

It's a great point. I don't understand the bread bowl ad at all. It's like, how can we get more starch into this? Let's have a bread bowl. I don't need a bread bowl. I mean, if you go to your like corporate cafeteria and they serve clam chowder, that's a no, you do not get that. Don't order that. You got, you got to get it from a clam shack, something like that, where you hear the new England accent, where it's, you don't even understand what they're saying. Like these are signs that it's going to be a good chowder or, you know, I have to make it free. That's it.

Well, the other, the cousin of this is the French onion soup, which I think it's screwed up a lot. No, no, no. But just the same mistakes with the French onion soup where people will put in

just too many onions, right? Or they'll try to do it in a bowl that's not the perfect bowl. If you're doing the French onion correctly, you want the cheese to like burn on the sides of the crock. You want it to not have too much onion in it. You don't want too much bread in it. It's got to have the right. French onion soup has like a high margin of error. Like it's really hard to not enjoy even a mediocre bowl of French onion soup. I always get it knowing that it's probably a B minus to a C minus. Yeah.

And I want to be pleasantly surprised if it's better than that. Right. Going back to the chowder. Here's another maybe hot take that people may not even know exists. I think the best chowder isn't the New England clam chowder. It's Rhode Island clam chowder. Do you even know what that is? It's clear. It's just a clam broth with some potatoes and bacon in there. It's super light. It's great.

Typical Rhode Island. They always have to do their own version of something. Accents, clam chowder. I got one beef with one of your hot takes of Lake because you are really peppering your podcast and the podcast that you're on, The Ringer, with a lot of food takes and a lot of food comparisons. You said the veal chop is this thing that's hit or miss. I don't think it's ever a miss. It's always... If it's not cooked enough, if it's too fat...

If it's too fatty, there's a bunch of ways it can go wrong. I don't think I've ever had a bad veal chop. I don't know what that means, that it's hit or miss. I think most people would say that a veal chop is one of the most dependable things you can order. So you think I should change that analogy to French onion soup?

But I don't even know if that's the right wing too because most people enjoy the French onion soup. Like, I don't think I've had French onion soup so bad that I was like, oh, I don't want to eat that. I don't know what it is. So what's a good analogy? Because for people listening, the one that used it for was Devin Achey and the Dolphins running back where it's like the hit or miss scenario of spending $45 on them. I think the hit or miss scenario is simply this. And it's something that I feel like as you get older, you might –

experience. It's when you order fish, right? At any kind of restaurant. It's not even too fishy. You're like, why did I get that? I'm enjoying everything else except this. Everyone else ordered the right thing. I don't know why I decided to order fish. And it's usually hit or miss. Usually if it's good, you feel great. You feel like you won the ordering. But if it's bad, you feel like you need it. Well, that leads me to hot take food, hot take number three, which will

Either be the one you agree with the most virulently, virulently? Violently? Can't speak. Or the one you get the baddest about. So as I said, I was in the Cape for like eight days. And I really do think seafood in New England and off the Cape is the best seafood. There's Maryland people who are like, fuck you, we have the best crabs. Like, I get it. This is totally provincial. But that said, scallops in Massachusetts and especially on the Cape

I just love scallops. And the reason I think I'm in the right on scallops is it's the one thing you order where you always feel like they kind of cheated you on the portions, right? It's like all of the scallops, like for an entree and it's like, then it comes out and it's like six scallops. Like they could barely...

They could barely spare the scallops. It's like, man, I wish I had nine scallops. These are delicious. So anyway, I had scallops and must have ordered it four or five times in like eight days. I was just putting in with everything. So two things off this. One, why hasn't anybody come up with scallop chowder yet? There is scallop chowder. I've never had it. I've never seen it. It's usually seen as like a scallop corn chowder. That's like weirdly a classic combo.

Feels like scallops are sitting there. Anyway, we came back from the, from the Cape and my wife was at the farmer's market and they have like a really good fish place at the farmer's market. And I was like, let's get scallops. We'll buy a bunch of scallops. I'll finally have enough scallops. So she, she pan fried the scallops, did these breadcrumbs and it was absolutely delicious. And I was like, why aren't scallops a bigger deal? Scallops are the fucking best. And I don't know. I think scallops is the most underrated food.

I can't believe, Bill, I'm going to agree with you here. We finally have agreement. And I'm not just saying this for saying it. It's true. Scallops underrated. But also one of those things where I think people either get them frozen or they're sort of past their sell by date and they get ammoninated. But you need them fresh. You need them like right, basically pulled out of the ocean.

And when I mean fresh, we'd get them at the restaurant. They're literally pulsating. They're alive, right? Right. You can eat them raw. You can pop them in your mouth like they're an M&M. And why scallops are so good is they have a high sugar content. And when they're cooked and you get that caramelized, scallops are just one of the most delicious things you could possibly eat. And the fact is this, if you had to ask me where the best scallops in the world are, I would say maybe the cold waters off of France. But I would bet

That if this was like a World Cup of scallops around the world, we're basically France or Brazil, like New England area. It's that good. The scallops that are produced in the New England area, off the Cape, Nantucket, it's, yeah, we're number one. Number one, America produces that region. Everywhere else, not so good in America. The only place scallops are really truly made is Maine to Nantucket.

So what is your number one way to prepare a scallop for an entree that you're buying into? Because I like the lightly breaded kind of scallop with some lemon on it. Maybe something a little spicy, but not too spicy. And then you want the big fat. Just stick your fork in and go.

So I'm a no bread kind of guy. I understand. But yeah, I like the tiny Nantucket Bay that are like really, really small. I can eat those literally raw because they're so sweet. Or if you're going to cook them very quickly, just, you know, a little bit of butter, a little bit of lemon juice, salt and pepper, and that's all you need. But I would probably say the thing that I love the most of those giant hockey puck main diver sea scallops that.

are just super sweet and one of my favorite things to eat. And I think that is just simply pan roasted, a little bit of butter, salt, pepper. That's all you need. Maybe a sprig of thyme. But it's hard to get because, again, it's only really produced in that area and you don't want to get it frozen. Right. So if we're getting on the West Coast, it was found, they shipped it. It was in ice for two days. It was in the fridge. I don't think I've ever ordered scallops.

In California. Ever. I don't think I would either. But when I'm in New England, I want to get them all the time. So it's interesting because people always, when they ask about like Massachusetts, what's the food? And people always say lobster roll.

Lobster rolls are good, but to me, the scallops and the right kind of clam chowder are the two best New England things that I feel like I can't get anywhere else. I got to do this thing for Amazon Thursday Night Football. We're going to compare the iconic foods of different cities. I've asked you this already. I want to know if your answer's changed. When we do the New England Patriots versus whatever team, what is the food that is most representative of New England? Is it the clam chowder or lobster roll?

I think people would say the lobster roll, but I don't necessarily agree with it. But as a local, you would say it's not lobster roll, it's chowder, right? I would say the clam chowder. That's where we're going to go. But a lot of people would say lobster roll. And really the stealth answer is scallops. Because I just feel like the scallop level in that area is just so much higher than any other area in the United States. There's no contest. They're not going to say like cod or something like that?

The cod's kind of boring. Even though cod's good. Baked cod's good. I'm a fan. It delivers the goods, especially if you put some stuff in it and get a little excited about it. All right. So basically this is all leading to could somebody ever create a scallop pizza?

Pizza 2.0 with scallops. No, no, no, no, no. That should never happen. Maybe that's a challenge for you on. So next time I come on, maybe it's like a, maybe it's like a scallops thing. How do we get the scallops in LA fast enough? So they're not,

You know, we can get them live in the shell. So that's one way you can do scallops. So maybe that's what we'll do. Maybe we do like the whole fish thing. All right. Yeah. Done and done. You have to go. Congrats on having a QB. Don't forget dinner time with Dave Chang. When do you come back? October 8th. And when are you doing Amazon football stuff? Next week should be my first bit for Amazon Thursday Night Football. And you have a podcast with The Ringer as well. You're a busy man. That's right. Good to see you, Dave Chang. Thanks, Bill.

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Find your next experience with Chase Sapphire Reserve. Learn more at chase.com slash sapphirereserve. Cards issued by JPMorgan Chase Bank and a member FDIC. Subject to credit approval. Terms apply. All right, David Shoemaker is here. We've worked together since 2011 at Grantland and then at the ringer this whole time. He is involved in the Mr. McMahon documentary we did on Netflix. You can see him in HD.

Uh, he's in, I think every part, all six parts, he's in the glue guy spot for the, for documentary where you make these things and you need somebody to kind of walk you through stuff, set stuff up, do the big picture things. How, how long was your interview for that?

Uh, good question. I mean, listen, we did it in phases, right? I mean, by the time that it was time for me to do the glue work, we had done most of the material, but they were already making cuts of the documentary. Yeah. So I did, I did a bunch of interviews sitting in my living room, just like on a zoom call like this. And then they,

And then they sort of use those as placeholders. And then I went and sat down for, I think it was a couple of days just sitting in front of a camera, you know, just in a, in a, it's weird, right? It's weird to do those because after a while you almost forget you're being filmed and that it's going to be shown on HD everywhere.

Yeah, it's very strange. I've done a lot of this stuff in various forms over the years. And in some ways, it's very comfortable. And also, I've had a lot of these conversations with the people who are interviewing me for the documentary. We've talked about all this stuff before. So in some ways, it's comfortable. And in some ways, your eyes kind of go into soft focus and you realize you're sitting in front of a million bright lights.

in an empty office trying to act like you just were interrupted while you were doing your work and make it seem natural. So it's very strange. So we were working on this documentary really since pre-COVID was when we started doing the, I think the deal and then really started working on it in detail once Chris Smith came aboard in 2021, 2022.

Oh, yeah. It was before COVID the first time. I mean, I remember the first time I met Chris was at a little bar in Soho that's been there for a million years. And we just like, you know, he just wanted to talk about wrestling. And you set us up. That was obviously pre-COVID because we were out there in public. And it was it's that's a man. It seems like so long ago now.

Yeah. And I don't want to say too much because I don't want to prejudice how people watch the documentary. We really want people to sit down and watch it. But just the, the backstory of it was Vince wanted to do a documentary and, um, the WWE, cause I had done the Andre, the giant doc, and he was like ready to tell his story. And a big thing for us is like, well, if we're going to tell your story, it's gotta be everything. It's not, we're not doing a hagiography. We're not doing autobiography. Like it's gotta be warts and all. And he's like, I'm ready to talk about everything.

And so the next step was finding a director. And the best thing was with Chris was he wasn't a wrestling fan and we decided it would actually be more interesting. Let's get somebody who doesn't know this and just, we immerse him into this world and he's experienced everything for the first time. And then we can kind of help him with the wrestling stuff. So we get all these interviews and we're going and probably working on it for over a year, a year and a half,

And then the first wave of stuff happens with Vince. And for the next two years, we're trying to figure out, will we have to audible on the fly again? What is this going to mean? What's this going to mean? There's a couple of times where I think both of us thought this thing's going to get shelved. This won't happen. But the big thing for me, and tell me if you agree, we were trying to do a balanced portrait

as balanced as we could of somebody who for 50 years had this outsized impact on not only completely changing professional wrestling, but culture, television, cable, the pay-per-view model, the streaming model. There was just nobody like him. There was no promoter like him. And so the big thing was like, how do we capture that impact? And then the second thing was, who is this guy?

Yeah. What's real and not real. And that's where we kind of gravitated toward with the doc. But then all of a sudden there's a twist here, there's a turn here. And it was there ever a point where you were like, this is never happening.

I mean, listen, it's such a big project and especially being as, you know, entrenched in the wrestling world as I am. There is there. I mean, the whole thing just felt so daunting. You know, I mean, it was like it was an absolute yes. The idea was brilliant. We had we had it was you have to do it. Right. But as like but as a but as someone who does this kind of, you know, works in this world so much, I'm just like, I don't know if we'll be able to get there. You said Vince was eager, you know, was actually wanted to do the documentary at first, which is 100 percent true. But

I mean, I don't think Vince, it sounds so weird to say, I'm not sure Vince knew what it meant to do the documentary. And I'm not sure that he knew what story he wanted to tell, or I don't even know if he knows who he is enough to tell that story. You know, I mean, there was a whole, it was really hard just to, even when he was,

you know, pseudo eager on the first phase of the documentary, it was really hard to get beyond surface with him, you know, and, and Chris did a good job. Chris Smith did a, did a good job of sitting in front of him and just sort of staring him down until some things started coming out. Yeah. Um,

But it was... Vince is, even prior to everything coming out over the past couple years, is just the most bizarre subject to try to do this kind of project for. Because...

Even when he was eager, he wasn't there on time or on the days that he was supposed to be there. He always had people with him. There was always people lingering in the background, making sure nothing weird happened. Yeah, and reminding him of things in his past. There was always a team. Everybody...

Listen, Chris Smith, the entire production team have done so many documentaries of this sort and of all sorts. You know, they've been working in this world forever. Chris is one of the best ever to do this. To say, I mean, yeah, this is the guy that did the Tiger King. And none of them had ever experienced a working situation like we encountered in Stanford, Connecticut. Right. I mean, it was I mean, we would show up to shoot.

And then just be like all day long, be getting updates from Vince's secretary about his ETA, pushing that like six hours, eight hours before the shoot, pushing it back an hour, pushing it back another hour, pushing it back another hour.

And then he would like roll in at 11 p.m., you know, pitch black with his like little his little crew around him and shake everybody's hand and say thank you for being here and then go into hair and makeup. And then, you know, and just emerge in the same outfit that he was wearing for every shoot. It was just such a bizarre situation. Yeah. And we were in this situation where we kind of knew everything. Like we're making this documentary, we're making it for people everywhere.

on Netflix and around the world and hoping 100 million people watches it, right? Yeah. So we're making it for everybody. And we made a decision that, you know, the A story is about Vince. Yeah. The B story is about the 50-year history of wrestling. And there's a lot of beats to it. And,

you kind of, there's no way to just separate those because the 50 year story or the last 50 years of wrestling is Vince's story and he's part of it and you can't separate those in any way. But, you know, there's so much wrestling. There's, I don't know how many dozen episodes of Dark Side of the Ring at this point. And WWE's own in-house, you know, documentaries that they've done. The Undertaker stuff. They're,

there's so much wrestling content. So I, I'm sure like the die, die, die hard wrestling pants are going to watch this and be like, Oh, I knew all that. I didn't learn anything from it. So that was a big obstacle for us. It's like, yeah, a lot of this stuff's already out there, but what's not out there is like,

Who was this guy? How did people relate to him? How do people feel about him now? You could feel that in the interviews, like the way people talk about him, like they're reverential about him, but they're also seem like they're a little afraid of him. And just trying to capture this big invincible dude who also had a lot of skeletons and demons and did some bad stuff. Let's be honest. Uh, yeah. Some incredibly bad stuff. It looks like, I mean, it's, it, it was, um,

Yeah, it was people were seemed people did seem a little bit apprehensive to be in front of the camera. And these are all, you know, trained wrestlers and actors and people that wouldn't normally be performers of the last 50 years. Yeah. Is this OK with Vince? He said, I could do this. And yeah.

And yeah, I mean, I think it was being not just talking about Vince, but talking about it on the record and for this kind of project. I think, you know, in the back of everyone's mind, even before the allegations came out, they probably knew that they were...

they were going to be logged into history for whatever they were saying. I mean, you're right about all the stuff that's come before, all the other documentaries. I mean, part of what makes Vince a really difficult character and in some ways a really interesting character is his timeline is inextricable from WWE. There's very little personal life there for us to go into, right? I mean, because he and the company are...

are entirely intertwined. So we do tell a lot of the history of WWE, and a lot of it is you're staring down the history, the timeline, the big events that they've already laid out in the past. And in some ways, you're dependent on that, and you try to break free of that as much as possible. But really, it always comes back to Vince, and it always comes back to just...

his version of events, him staring into the camera and trying, I mean, in, in, in trying to explain himself for the first time in his life, you know, just to talk about himself in this way for the first time that he's ever done it. A lot of times he couldn't. No, he absolutely. And I think that's there. I think that's there for everybody to see. It's, it's, it's a, it was a, it was a very, very unique experience. I mean, I mean, listen, I talk to people, WWE all the time who, and, and,

they always ask, I mean, from the moment we started doing this, they would always ask me, what was it like to be in that room with Vince? What was it like? Like, how did, like, did he really sit there for four hours and just answer questions? You know, you're just like, whatever. He's never done it. I mean, the amount of access just that just in terms of hours of him sitting still and asking questions is entirely unprecedented. And, and,

you know, a lot of that stuff's in there as a, you know, you and I have seen so all the footage we've seen so many cuts of this. I'm sure there's diehard wrestling fans that would just pay anything just to see the raw footage of it sitting there because it's, it's, it's the volume. That's the real, that's the real amazing thing. But I think the story, four hours in the cutting room for that,

I think this easily could have been 10 parts, but we didn't want to do it that way. There was so much. We had four hours of Vince's interview on the cutting room floor because he sounded like a frog one day. He didn't have a voice. I mean, there was so much good material. But I think that the story that Chris and his team were able to tell is pretty amazing. Yeah, I think if I had to describe it, where it landed was...

all the stuff that happened with Vince the last two years, how did we get here? Yeah. How did we end up in this spot from mid 2022 on where he's about to sell the company and then all the skeletons start popping out and then it just keeps getting worse and worse. And then every time it feels stable again, something else happens. How did we get to the last two years? Exactly. And I think, you know, that's where, that's where we got with it. I think as a wrestling fan,

There's so many like small things that I felt like I was, you're, you're a 10 out of 10 with the, what, you know, I'm probably like an eight or an eight and a half. There were so many things I had no idea. Just sprinkled. Even like that gorilla monsoon was supposed to get the WWE and he didn't like, there was like 50 things. And part of our job, but we would tell Chris with the cuts, like,

yo, you got to keep that in. He's that, that's never, that's never been out there before. Um, I'm sure like somebody like Dave Meltzer probably knew a bunch of this stuff, but I don't think most people did.

quietly, my favorite thing in the whole documentary, I can finally say this out loud, because as a pure wrestling nerd, barely involves Vince. But we all know Vince has talked before about how his favorite, how his idol, his childhood idol was Dr. Jerry Graham, this wrestler that worked for his dad with the bleach blonde hair and drove the fancy cars. And Vince just wanted to be this guy so much. There's a, if you, if you watch closely, there is footage of Dr. Jerry Graham entering the ring in which to me,

It looks like he does the original version of Triple H's water spit. Oh, wow. And Triple H has never said that there's an origin story for it, but Dr. Jerry Graham sure does it in that clip. So when I saw that the first time, I almost fell over in my chair. So, all right, this thing's coming out. What happens next? Like, what would be your prediction for the next week or so? Because I think we both have complicated feelings on it because...

The documentary we were working on for the first two years of the decade ended up having a morph for a bunch of pretty awful reasons. And then it easily could have shifted that that became the documentary. And we really tried to stay at least somewhat true to the documentary we were trying to make from the beginning. But now what happens over the next week or so?

I honestly have no idea. Yeah, I don't either. I really don't. I mean, you mentioned, and we should say, I mean, WWE was involved at the beginning and is no longer involved in the documentary, right? So like, I don't know. They were not involved in Final Cuts or any of that stuff. Yeah. But we did have access to their entire library. Yeah. Everything we wanted. That was part of the deal. And then I think that the most appealing thing to me is that

I think a lot of docs have, have gone that hagiography route, that autobiography route. And, uh, and I don't feel like this is it. We really tried to have balance in every direction as much as we possibly could. And whether people agree that that's how it played out, I don't know. But, um, there's just not a lot of documentaries that have balance like that anymore. And I think that was really important to all of us.

No, I mean, I think there was some there was certainly a benefit. I mean, obviously, Vince wouldn't have sat down initially if he didn't, you know, if he wasn't comfortable doing it. And obviously, we were able to make a documentary that we did because we had that freedom then in the end to to to not be bound by him. Yeah.

I think it really worked out for the best, but in terms of what happens next, I mean, I don't know. I mean, the, the, the people that work at WWE might've got, you know, might've snuck screeners somehow, but for the most part, they're going to be seeing it at the same time that, that the world sees it. So, uh, I mean, I know your phone will be blowing up and, and my phone will be blowing up just with people who are seeing this stuff for the first time. Um,

it's really hard. I mean, I don't know without this documentary what the future of Vince McMahon, what the future of WWE looks like. And presumably there won't be any relationship there going forward. Well, but the irony of this doc coming out when it has and what's happened with Vince, the company is the strongest it's been since when? The late 90s? The early 2010s? This is

been an absolute gravy train for them. They have the most stars they've had in a long time. They're making money hand over fist. They're about to start this new Raw deal, ironically, on Netflix, which I think probably helped us save the documentary and the fact that Netflix was paying all that money for Raw. But it's weird that all of that stuff's happening without Vince, who was the

number one, number two, number three, number four, number five reasons the company's in the spot it was in originally. One of the strangest, I mean, kind of postscripts, the sort of, you know, to the whole, to the Vince McMahon story is that for years, even when wrestling fans like you and me could look and say that it wasn't true, there was a perception from Vince inside WWE in the media world at large that Vince had this

magic pixie dust or whatever, that he was the, he, he was the thing that made WWE so great, right. That it was his creative genius that made pro wrestling as we know it. So great. And we could, like I said, we could look at it and be like, come on, there's other people that could do this job, but now it's been proven to be totally untrue. There's other people in charge now and the company's twice what it was when he left, you know? And, and, um,

Obviously, his contributions to the business are unmatched. But he's, you know, I think that magic had been gone for a while. And now it's on display for everybody to see how great the company is doing. It really is a very bizarre time for this to be coming out. But, you know, fitting in a certain way. Yeah, it's weird because there's been a lot of books written about him. They've done a million documentaries about everyone in the WWE universe to varying degrees of quality.

But I felt like I knew a lot. But when you see it all put together, I think the one thing that really surprised me, and maybe this will come through for people who watch it, is just how many times it intersected with pop culture in these kind of influential ways that I don't think maybe wrestling, and a couple people say that during the doc, like you kind of don't understand wrestling.

that wrestling, which is over here and people make fun of it. It's for booger eaters, all that stuff. And then it's like over and over again is crossing over into all these parts of business and culture. And, uh, and I think seeing the landscape of that over 50 years, I thought was really interesting, especially the way that Vince saw over and over again, pieces of turf opportunity, um, the way that he thought about business, uh,

just really aggressively over and over again. So from that standpoint, I hadn't really pieced it all together in my head until Chris did it. Yeah, I think watching it, people really get a vision of that that they might not have gotten before. I think wrestling fans in particular, you know, like you said, some of them will feel like they've seen all this and you have like been to a lot of these places in history before. Yeah. The story that's being told, I think is bigger. And I think in terms of a,

that you can watch with, you know, your wife, with your girlfriend, with your friends who aren't into wrestling, whatever. I mean, I think that this is going to, this is going to be, this is a story that's being told in such a way that it can really be appreciated by just anybody. I mean, it's, it's, it's our goal. We, we weren't trying to go for the 1% diehard wrestling fans. They're trying to get everybody to watch it. Yeah. You know, and at that, if, if we were making this just for you and me, it probably would have been,

A lot more hardcore and there would have been some stuff in there that, you know, my wife wouldn't have cared about. Sure. I mean, if we had made the Andre documentary for just you and me, it wouldn't have been the documentary that people still talk about now. Right. It wouldn't have been the documentary that like brings non-wrestling fans to tears every single time. You know, I mean, it's it's a it's an incredible it's it's a it's an incredible thing.

daunting task to take something like this on. So I, well, the thing you have to know is the wrestling fans, the diehard ones are, they're all maniacs. They all really give a shit. They've all seen everything and they're probably not going to like whatever you make. Right. Yeah. You just have to go into it knowing they're going to watch this anyway, but they're probably going to be unhappy with five different things.

Sure. I mean, Cody Rhodes wins a world title at WrestleMania and there's some number of people sitting in the football stadium saying, man, that should have been ricochet or whatever, you know? I mean, like there's, there's all, and they're going to wrestling and that's why they, and they, and they believe that they're a hundred percent right and that everybody else should probably agrees with them. Right. I mean, that, and that's, we're all, that's, that's what being a wrestling fan is all about. So sure. There's going to be parts of the documentary where you say, you know, why didn't they ask this question or why didn't they double down? Why didn't they go more into this? I mean, there's,

There's a lot of reasons why, but like we're telling you're telling one big story, right? And not every single little thing is going to be there just the way that every different person wants it. Those are the decisions that, you know, you and Chris and everybody involved had to make. What was the biggest cutting room for Ouch for you?

For me, it was the whole Evel Knievel story that we had to take out. Oh, God, that was so good. I thought that was so good. I'm going to try to see if Chris can put that as like a deleted scene or something. Because we had a bunch of stuff from Vince in the 72 to 76 range that just for the story, sometimes you have to

cut stuff because it's just better for the way the narrative moves but you're like oh man i don't want to lose that but we love that evil kenevil bit there was an early cut of that that was like the first thing we even we ever saw from chris oh yeah it was the lead of the second episode and we were oh my gosh it was so great i mean there's a lot of that stuff i mean you mentioned all the stuff that the influences on culture and the way that culture influenced wrestling there are a lot of moments like that that that you get into the weeds a little bit with vince or with other people and and and

It just doesn't fit with the bigger picture. Even though we're trying to trim this down to six episodes, I mean, it's a ton of real estate. Yeah, six hours. Six hours that easily could have been 10. And probably in certain people's hands would have been 10. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there were some quieter moments with Vince where, you know, you could see him on the verge of getting really introspective.

it just don't really make sense in a documentary like this. You know, I mean, how long can you just stare at his face, like wondering what he's thinking? But when you're watching it happen in real time or even on the first cut, you're just like, God, that's so good. That's a real moment right there. But then you realize you have so many other big moments that we really have to hurry up and get to, you know, that people really want to see. It was certainly the strangest documentary process I've ever been involved with. I will say, though, I've worked with a lot of people and I've done a lot of these at this point.

I just could not believe how good Chris and his team were. I've never worked with a team quite like that. We had the final cut of the sixth episode of this with 14 cuts. I've never worked on anything that had more than five or six or something of an episode. And each cut was different. And it was just... I think all of us at some point, you just realize like, hey, we've spent so much time on this. This now has to be good. And those guys...

these are just really hard to make. And I hope people appreciate that when they watch it. Like there's so much precision and care and time to every editing choice, how things move. It's amazing to watch. It was, it's true. I mean, you, you watch so many cuts that you just go blind to it at a certain point, but that team never went blind. Right. I mean, they just, everything was just,

incredibly well done. And Chris, I mean, like you said, we picked somebody who wasn't a big wrestling fan. He's an expert at making documentaries about odd subcultures, you know, and he came in with wide eyes and just threw himself into it. And I mean, it's almost like we had conversations that were almost like, you know, when you watch wrestling with like a young, with your kid, when they're little, they're just, they ask you a question and you ask, but you ask them, they ask a question that's just so clarifying.

clear and obvious that you haven't thought about it since you were five or whatever, then you're just like, oh, yeah.

Well, let me think about that for a minute, you know, and you'd like to you that it started and there were just so many moments I had just like sitting at a coffee table with Chris just like going over notes going over video going over, you know, whatever we were doing the kind of in the researching phase. And yeah, I mean, just watching him get get invested, get enthralled and just, you know, and figuring out this story was was just so

so incredible and I think that the final product really really you know his vision really comes through Mr. McMahon on Netflix it's premiering September 25th so basically late night we'll see how it goes Shoemaker what a ride for us yeah we'll both go into hiding after this interview and reemerge you know post apocalypse we'll see what happens alright good to see you you too man

All right, that's it for the podcast. Thanks to Kyle Creighton and Steve Cerruti for producing. Thanks to Shio Kapadia and David Chang and David Shoemaker. Don't forget the new rewatchables went out Monday night. We did Over the Top. You can find it on the Ringer Movies YouTube channel. You can find all this stuff from this podcast on the Bill Simmons YouTube channel. And you can find Mr. McMahon on Netflix September 25th, late night September 24th. I will see you on this podcast on Thursday. On a seat there, on a way so

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