The Jets, 'Rebel Ridge,' a Great 'Sopranos' Doc, and Deion’s Rocky Year Two With Sean Fennessey and Van Lathan
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Coming up, we're going to be talking about the Jets and Dion and the Super Bowl halftime show and Tyreek and a whole bunch of pop culture stuff next. It's the Bill Simmons podcast presented by FanDuel. Football is in full action. FanDuel's highest rated sports book is the best place to bet it all. We've been doing pretty well on million dollar picks this year. I love the first month of the season because you have to go into the season thinking, I

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on Sunday night. And that was super fun. I taped the podcast you're about to hear on Tuesday morning, heading into Tuesday night. So if anything happens in the debate tonight, that's completely insane. We didn't know about it. Sean fantasy is up first. We're talking jets, Mets, Knicks. We're talking, uh,

a little Rebel Ridge with him and Van Lathan as well. And then a lot of Sopranos because there's a really great documentary on HBO about the Sopranos that we wanted to hit. And then Van stuck around and we talked about Super Bowl halftime show and Dion and Tyreek. And there's just a lot going on in this podcast. It's really good. It's all next. First, our friends from Pearl Jam. ♪

All right, on Sunday, I texted Sean Fantasy and I said, win or lose on Monday night, you have to come on and talk about the Jets. Normally, we just do Rewatchables pods together, and I feel like every time you come on this pod,

You're either tortured or super excited about the Jets or the Knicks. So now it's Tuesday and the Jets game couldn't have gone worse. And I'm sorry. Thanks for having me back. I think last time I was here, I was screaming about Joel Embiid. And today I'll be screaming about Robert Sala. So thanks for having me. Oh, let's go. So Robert Sala, look this up. He's now 18 and 34 career. There's 201 coaches who have coached 50 plus games.

And he's 183rd in winning percentage now. He's in the bottom 20 all time. And it's an amazing list, Sean, that Hugh Jackson is on that list. Nepo baby David Shula is on that list. Joe Bugle. Mike Nolan, the guy who used to wear a suit on the sidelines for the Niners. He's on that list. The one and only Romeo Cronell. He's on there as well. And now big shot Bob Sala. Are you out?

It's hard to say. They just got their asses kicked by what may be the first or second best team in the NFL, right? So, like, I can take a deep breath and recognize that they played a road game on Monday Night Football against an absolute juggernaut and maybe the best coach in the NFL. But, man, they looked not prepared. And their defense got their asses handed to them. He was completely outcoached, made zero adjustments.

And obviously I've been waiting a long time to root for a quarterback like Aaron Rodgers. And that was okay. That was pretty good, that experience. But the defense, which is, I think Troy Aikman used the phrase vaunted defense like nine times last night. Yeah. They looked mediocre at best. Well, you said this because you were texting our inner circle chat.

And you were like, I don't understand this Jets love at all. Our defensive line is going to be terrible. Why don't people notice that we lost Huff? We added Redick who doesn't play. People are going to be able to run the ball. You basically laid out every single thing that happened in the game. So...

You know, it's a tricky situation because the whole defense is designed around not blitzing and having a strong pass rush and having lockdown secondary. So for the last two plus years of the Salah scheme, it's worked really well because they've had Bryce Huff, who is an undrafted free agent who they developed into an incredible pressure guy. They've had John Franklin Myers, an incredible run stuffing defensive end. And Quinnen Williams has emerged as one of the best defensive tackles in the league.

They also had Quinton Jefferson last year who put a ton of pressure on the quarterback. They lost Quinton Jefferson. They lost John Franklin Myers because they traded for Hassan Redick so they couldn't keep him on the cap. And they lost Bryce Huff to the Eagles who very smartly then traded Hassan Redick who was asking for a lot of money to the Jets. Redick didn't play last night and they're otherwise down three of their six best defensive linemen.

Of course, they got their asses handed to them by a running back that no one had ever heard of until six hours ago. Salah didn't make a single adjustment in the game, and they were playing a bunch of nobodies on the defensive line to undrafted free agents like guys you've never heard of who couldn't keep up last night. So it was, you know, for somebody who follows the team very closely, it was clear that the defense was going to take a step back. The hope was that the offense would take a step up.

Yeah. It just wasn't enough of a step up, I guess. I mean, eight consecutive scoring drives. That's that. Apparently that's a record for the San Francisco 49ers. Have you ever seen anything like that? No. It was horrible. I thought they were trying to start the game. We're going to run the ball down San Francisco's throat and keep our defense off the field. Seemed to be the plan, but they couldn't really run the ball. But they they had that one drive where.

And we were texting about it. It was like, oh, that's what we thought we were going to get with the Jets. Rodgers making quick decisions at the line. Wilson was open and it just seemed like the right mix. And then it just went away and we never saw it again. I thought, so Rodgers looked better than Cousins. Cousins was a statue in that Pittsburgh game. He just couldn't move around. Rodgers could move around a little, but it wasn't the same thing.

mobility that he used to have. Now, he's also 40 and he's coming off a big injury, but I thought there were moments when he just seemed like he wanted to get rid of the ball versus actually trying to zoom out and create time, which he used to be great at. I think the one interception that he had is pretty uncharacteristic for him where he was trying to force it into Garrett Wilson. And you could see it was because he was a little jittery in the pocket. He really didn't want to get hit, but his arm is still money. I mean, he was making incredible throws that

you know, that free play touchdown down on Lazard and also that throw along the sideline down on Lazard. Those are insane. I mean, I've never, I've literally never rooted for a quarterback who could make a throw like that in my entire life. So watching that stuff was really fun.

But, you know, this is an offense that is coached by the immortal Nat Hackett, the run-run pass king, running on first down on like nine of the ten drives that they had in this game. What the fuck is he doing? That was bizarre. The run-run pass king? Is that his nickname? I mean, it is to me and all Jets fans this morning. If that guy was calling the plays and it seemed like he was, that was just

just a masterclass in playing into San Francisco's hands because they had a really stout run defense and Brees Hall, who's explosive, was just getting jammed at the line nonstop. I think he averaged like 2.8 yards a carry. This is one of the most explosive players in the NFL. So that was really disappointing to watch. And you spent a lot of money on the offensive line too. It was interesting when they brought in the backup and they were talking about how he was 20 years old and I was thinking he was like three and a half years older than my son. Yeah.

That is true. Braylon Allen, he's a beast. Yeah, talking shit to the grown men on the Niners. I thought that was amazing. Kevin Wilds pointed this out, and I didn't think it was true, and I looked it up, and he was right. Rodgers hasn't thrown for 300 yards since week 13 of the 2021 season, which was December 19th, 2021. Do you want to guess what the number one movie was that week? I'm going to put all your answers together. Ooh. December 19th, 2021. Ooh.

So there was some December 17th releases too. There were Wednesday, Friday releases that week. Oh God, that's just late in COVID times. It was right when they were like, hey, come back to the theaters. And meanwhile, there was a new strain of COVID coming out. Well, I'll give you three. Okay. Spider-Man No Way Home. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. West Side Story and House of Gucci.

House of Gucci was the one that really hit home to me because it felt like that movie came out nine years ago. Yeah, I think that one was a November release. I will say Spider-Man No Way Home is the number one movie at the box office. Back then. Yeah, that weekend. But I'm just saying to put that in perspective, those were the three movies that came out during Rogers' last 300-yard game. Was he an absolute kook by then? I guess he was, right? He was immunized and all that bullshit.

Yeah, what's it like to root for somebody who could be described as an absolute kook? Thanks for asking. You know, throughout the entirety of him not playing, it hasn't been pleasant. But when he was throwing the ball, I was into it, man. I was like, whatever, what, ayahuasca, you know, vaccines. I'm not thinking about that. What I'm thinking about is darts down the sideline. That was just thrilling. You know, I'm not a huge fan of a lot of the stuff that he's done, you know, in the public eye, but.

For a 40-year-old guy, even if he still hasn't thrown for 300 yards in over three years, it's clear that he's not

over. He's not done. He's not cooked. I mean, the Niners are good and he was able to score on them a couple of times and he made Alan Lazard look like an NFL player, which is something that Zach Wilson was never able to do. So I'm not like completely out on Aaron Rodgers. I don't know how you could be after that game. I do think they also have kind of a cupcake schedule coming up. So there's a world in which they're doing very well. I still think this is a deeply flawed team though. And I'll be honest, you know what? I really started getting nervous.

is when you started gassing them up like six weeks ago. And I was like, oh no. Why is Bill on them? This is not good. I think that was the right instinct, especially after watching Miami, who got completely outplayed for almost that entire Jacksonville game and then would have been down 24-7. ETN fumbles and then the game just flips. And then Buffalo is like barely holding on against Arizona. Yeah.

You know, it just feels like whoever can get to 10 wins in the AFC East makes it. The Jets next three, they're at Tennessee. Tennessee's terrible. Home for the Pats and home for Denver. And I feel like if you come out of that 0-3 after that Pats game,

or one and three after the Denver game, there's some solid possibilities at that point. I was wondering about that too, if he would be canned. It's a tricky one because I think the Pats are going to be a little better than people think. The Jets are also playing three games in 11 days. I have no idea why the NFL just... They have a 40-year-old quarterback and they schedule them to play three games in 11 days. They also have a lot of nationally televised games on the schedule this year. And if they're not good, again, that's going to seem very strange.

Yeah, that Pats game is at Thursday. So they go at Tennessee and then home for Pats like four days later. Yeah, that's really not ideal. I don't know. I mean, this is a... That looked like a 9-8 win team last night. You know, it just looked like a mediocre team. And if they are a mediocre team, you know, my prediction was that they all get fired at the end of the season and Rodgers retires. Like, does that seem right to you? What do you think based on what you saw? I'm not ready to go there yet. He had that one throw...

to Lazar down the sidelines that made me realize, oh, there's nobody quite like this guy in the league, right? Just a couple, he pulls a couple throws out that I don't think anybody else in the league can make. And it still, it feels like he can still do that. It feels like he can still go to the line and be like, they're doing this, so we should do this.

I mean, this is what happens in week one and week two. The Niners just might be, their defense might be just awesome this year. And maybe we were not going to realize that for three more weeks. I think the Pats game is a little dangerous. And that's the one I'm trying to figure out, especially the Pats are home for Seattle this week. Trying to figure out how real that Bengals win was. I read everything. I watched the game again.

The defense looked like 2001, hats on the ball, everyone flying around, defense. And they had a pass rush, which I had no idea they were going to have a pass rush this year, especially with Judon and Barmore out. But they do. And then they were really able to run the ball on the right side, which I don't think... Ramondre was, I think, one of the best running backs in week one, if not the best one. So the way they ran the ball against Cincy, I think they could do against the Jets. I agree with you. And I think they could pressure Rodgers.

So it's a little bit of a scarier game than maybe I was counting on. I thought the Pats were going to be reprehensibly bad, and they're not. I thought that there was one crazy moment, like a real sliding doors moment in the Pats game where Burrow threw the touchdown. I think it was in the second quarter that got called back. And then he threw another pass over the middle to the tight end that got punched out at like the six yard line and fumbled. And I thought if they went in and scored there...

The angles might have been rolling down a hill. And that didn't happen. But I was watching the Pats closely because I was like, I need the Pats to not be good for once in my life. And I was like, oh, fuck, they're good. This is really not ideal. And that was when I started texting you and I was like, okay, so the Dolphins look bad and they pulled the game out. The Bills completely turned their act around in the second half and looked dominant in the second half of the game. And the Pats are going to be tough. And they played hard for Mayo. And even though the Jets have ostensibly an easier schedule,

Man, every team picking them to go like 12-5 or 13-4, that just doesn't feel right. It doesn't taste right somehow based on what they've done. Also, you know...

Joe Douglas, who did pick Garrett Wilson, who did pick Sauce Gardner, who did find Jermaine Johnson at the end of the first round of a draft. You know, he also picked Zach Wilson second overall. He also waited too long to add a veteran quarterback to the team. He also has now taken two consecutive first round picks that I don't think are going to contribute to this team really all that much this year. And Will McDonald last year and Olu Fashanu on the offensive line this year.

you know, it's like you used to say about Belichick. It's like you keep taking guys in the first and second round that don't contribute. That's going to catch up with you. Like those guys are not really playing that much. So this is a team that doesn't have as much depth as you want. The thing I didn't like out of all the stuff they did, because the Giants did a version of this too, where they paid draft compensation to get somebody who played the exact same position as the guy they just could have kept.

Um, or just sign like the giants could have just signed a free agent. Instead they paid a pick to trade for Brian Burns and then just just could have kept tough and maybe even just also kept Franklin Myers. And instead they paid a draft pick to go get Redick. I don't understand the logic of that. I would never want to give up a second round pick if I could have the second round pick plus huff.

I think if you are a cynical Jets fan looking at the strategy, they felt like they built Huff out of nothing and they thought they could do it again with other guys. And so they didn't want to overpay for a guy who doesn't play against the run, who's a positional switch player, who only basically rushes the quarterback. And so they were like, we can find another Huff, we can find another Huff. And then they lost Huff.

And then they're like, shit, we got to get another edge player. They kind of freaked out. It was a little bit late in the game. Howie Roseman, you know, just treating Joe Douglas as a speed bag. If the Eagles want your guy, that's probably a red flag. I totally agree. Because they have pretty good taste in players. I totally agree. And Roseman, you know, Joe Douglas used to work for Howie Roseman. So that whole thing just smelled funny to me from the beginning. And all my Eagles friends, of course, have been taunting me about it all summer. So I feel shitty about that.

That being said, I don't know. Given the schedule, given Rodgers, given Hall and Wilson, there are definitely going to be games where they're going to win 30-10. And I have just not seen a lot of games like that in my life. Actually, there was an amazing stat that I read, which is that they had games in which they scored three offensive touchdowns just twice last year. And they actually scored three offensive touchdowns last night. So it's going to be a better offense for sure. Even Tyrod Taylor, he looked pretty slick last night in garbage time. I enjoyed that.

I also enjoyed it. I've always liked him. I've always been rooting for him ever since he was almost murdered by the Chargers team doctor. I'm also not out on this Jets season. I think one of the things is they're built to have a lead. They're one of those teams where it's like, once we have a lead, we can run the ball, we can do play action. And then on defense, we can just, you know, rush and blitz and do all the Sal stuff. So yesterday was the worst case scenario.

Also, once the Niners realized they could run the ball, that's the most terrifying team in the league when it's like, oh, you're letting us run for six yards of carry and now you have to start moving guys up to try to stop the run. Great. This is what we're good at. So it might have just been a perfect storm. We've seen week one overreactions. I'm not out of them yet. Wilson and Hall are amazing. You have two awesome weapons. They are. One of my big takeaways from the game, and this is something we've talked about a lot over the last two years,

There was no Jets pass rush whatsoever last night, but Brock Purdy was kind of slinging it. Yeah, he was. He looked good. They even dropped a couple plays. Well, you know, the famous stat of the Jets haven't made the playoffs since 2010, right? So that's like winter 2010. I realized...

We first met and exchanged emails in 2011. And we've worked together since 2012. Maybe I'm the problem. Time to quit. Should I put in my notice this morning? Maybe we just should have a more distant relationship. Larry David quit the Jets. Did he though? I think he kind of did. But if they go 12-5 this year, is he back in?

I don't know. I, you know, like, like he, he's my dad's age and your dad, like it's when you hit your mid seventies, you just start going, fuck it. So he's claiming he quit, but I also think he watched the game yesterday. So I don't know. We'll, we'll get a TBD. Maybe he'll come on the pod. Um, it's a bummer that the jets didn't win because I was so excited to take your high from the jets game.

and then spin it against you with the Knicks and Julius Randle just ready to single-handedly sabotage the Knicks season. I was ready to do that. We can do that in a month, though. That's not going to happen. What do you mean? Well, you know, he was upset his jersey wasn't in the window. Playmaking firepower. That's what we need in the playoffs. And that's what Julius Randle provides for this team. It's going to be fine. I'm not worried.

Who are the two unhappy guys that aren't going to be playing in crunch time every next game? Have they figured that out yet? And will they have special seats? I don't know where Devo fits in. I don't know where Dante DiVincenzo fits in the lineup, honestly. He's got to be so bummed out. Yeah, he's turned into a 20-minute-a-game guy. I'm sure he'll be psyched. He was bombed. He bombed like 11 threes in a playoff game. Yeah. He's going to get eight minutes a game given this roster. I don't know. Whatever. They got Mikhail Bridges. That was awesome. Come on. They're good.

You can't make me feel bad about the Knicks. They're good. Josh Hart, all of a sudden, now just a 20-minute-a-game guy. How's his ego going to handle that? Josh Hart had an incredible Simmons-esque tweet yesterday, Bill. It was, none of my parlays hit. Football is so back. Josh Hart did that? NBA odds right now, by the way. We have your Knicks.

have the fourth best odds on FanDuel, 9-1. Mm-hmm. Eastern Conference, your Knicks, tied for the second best odds, plus 440. This is the highest they've been in since the late 90s. Are they ahead of the Bucs? Yeah. So let me try to guess. Is it Celtics, Nuggets, Sixers? Celtics, Sixers, Knicks for the East. Yeah. What about in the West? Um...

Well, for the championship, Celtics, Thunder, right after the Celtics, then Sixers, Knicks together. Yeah, people are in on the Thunder this year. We're really going to miss Isaiah Hartenstein. He was awesome. I like that guy. He seems super fired up to be part of the Thunder with Caruso, too. The Thunder is going to be really good. I think they're live for the Wednesday and all that stuff. All right, so you're not giving up on the Jets. Mm-hmm.

You're super optimistic about the Knicks. And then Mets, are they playoffs? What's happening with the Mets? I was wondering if you were going to ask me. I mean, honestly, they might be the most exciting and resilient Mets team of my adult life. This has been a crazy season. They're like 55 and 29 since May 30th or something. They've been on an insane run. You know, they're in a really, really tight playoff race right now.

And it's the same goddamn problem where when the Knicks get good, of course, the Sixers and Celtics are really good. You know, when the Jets get good, of course, the Bills and the Dolphins are really good. And in the Mets case, the Phillies are a juggernaut and the Braves will not go away. The Braves are missing their ace pitcher, Spencer Strider, out for the year. They're missing their reigning MVP, Ronald Acuna. They're having a huge down year from Matt Olsen. They're missing, you know, their star third baseman, Austin Riley.

And they're keeping up with the Mets, which is killing me. But you know what? I always bitch about not having like a super duper starter root for and not having these great legendary players. Over the course of the last four years, Francisco Lindor turned into it. He just turned into it. Wow. He's like a legitimate MVP candidate.

The entire fan base has flipped on him. He had a really bad first year where he was like doing the thumbs down thing and the fans were turning against him. But man, he's just been freaking nails for three years in a row. And this year has been his best season. Just a joy to watch. Just an old school plays 162 games a year shortstop. He's a wizard defensively. He sits for every goddamn interview after every game and says like, we got to be better. I got to be better. He's clutch. Just a really cool to root for somebody like that. I've been on baseball this whole year.

So good son analogy, you're holding the Phillies and the Braves and you only have the strength to pull one of them back on the cliff and drop the other one. Who do you drop?

Well, I should drop the Phillies. Who would you want to see dropping into the abyss of the rocky ocean? I should drop the Phillies because they're in first place. But honestly, I hope the entire Braves organization like mistakenly gets on Titanic 2.0 and just sinks into the bottom of the ocean soon. Like I just can't deal with the Braves. I'm sick. The Braves have been haunting me for 25 years, so I don't want to see them anymore.

That's our Mets, Jets, Knicks update from Sean Fantasy. We're going to take a break and come back. Van Lathan and Sean and I are going to talk about the Sopranos documentary next. Kick off this NFL season with a win on FanDuel, America's number one sportsbook. Right now, all customers get a profit boost every single NFL game day. That means you can pump up your gridiron winnings multiple times a week. FanDuel, tons of ways you can get in on the NFL action. You can bid on money lines, spreads, player props.

much, much more. It's early in the week. So we're looking at the over correction lines, which to me, Jacksonville minus three and a half right now against Cleveland and whatever the hell we're getting about from Deshaun Watson these days, that line seems low. Jacksonville should have won last week. And then Miami at home, basically getting a point and a half against a Buffalo team that barely held off Arizona. Those seem like the two overreaction lines, but with simple, uh,

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And for a limited time, you can get 10 free boneless wings from Buffalo Wild Wings. Go. When you spend $15 and use promo code, go boneless, which by the way, I'm a boneless guy. Sorry. I just love it.

You know, some people are like boneless wings, depending on the situation. Some people are hardcore wings. I'm a boneless guy. Makes it easier for boneless too. When you try any of the B-dub sauces, you can just smear them right in there. They have a crazy amount of sauces and dry rubs, which you should know if you've been to Buffalo Wild Wings. There's like 26 of them. My favorites, Nashville Hot.

I really like the orange chicken and I'm an original Buffalo guy. And if I had to pick one, I would pick the Nashville hot. Cause I like my mouth feeling hot when I'm eating boneless chicken. Let's be honest wings. They are the one true football food. So the fact that you can get 10 of them free while you watch, I don't know, the first Sunday action when they have all those games and the early games, you're just flipping around. Maybe you got a little multi-view action.

Whatever. Eat some wings while you're doing it. It's awesome. Order takeout or delivery from Buffalo Wild Wings Go while you watch the games this football season. Enjoy your 10 free boneless wings and maybe enjoy some Nashville hot sauce while you're at it. At participating locations for a limited time when you order in the Buffalo Wild Wings web or app. All right, Sean Fantasy still here. Van Lathan is joining us. We're going to talk a little pop culture, the three of us.

Sean, you did your podcast on Rebel Ridge on the big picture. I did this week, which I watched. I woke up on Saturday morning and my wife was like, I'm going to sleep late. And I'm like, great, you should sleep late. And I just watched all of Rebel Ridge. It was great. It played all the hits. I thought it struggled in the middle. It's probably about 15 minutes too long, which I feel like I'm saying about every movie. But but I really enjoyed it. And I thought the lead actor was great. Van, what did you think of Rebel Ridge?

It wasn't what I expected. I expected it to be a display of this man's physical force and him beating the hell out of people who have wronged him. The movie had layers I didn't expect it to have. And just really a fantastic performance. Like, I watched the movie and I thought, there's my black Batman. Ha ha ha!

I'm serious. I was like, that guy, like, there's my Black Batman. Like, the movie actually ended up being, like, a really great script. A little long, but I was really pleasantly surprised. And I had heard the gas on it was so crazy that I didn't think he could possibly live up to it, but he did. Sean, what's his...

Where did he come from? What's his background? And did you know he had that performance in him? Definitely not. It's a really amazing A Star Is Born kind of situation for him. But he's done some work. He was in Barry Jenkins' The Underground Railroad, the Amazon series. He played the rapper in the M. Night Shyamalan movie Old. That rapper's name was Midsized Sedan. Oh!

mid-size sedan. That's okay. Yeah. He's done a few things here and there. You know, the crazy story about that movie where it originally started its production with John Boyega, you know, from the Star Wars movies in that role. And he left the movie under somewhat mysterious circumstances. And he was replaced by Pierre, who's a British actor who most people haven't seen before.

And man, he's a badass. I mean, he is just the Batman call is really fascinating. Chris had something similar because of the way that his character doesn't try to injure anybody. You know, he's not trying to murder anybody while he's doling out justice. He's got this very sort of like disarming quality physically, but he holds the screen. You know, sometimes you see a guy who doesn't, who's very still on camera and just looks into the camera and you're like, that guy's got it. And Aaron Pierre is the actor's name. He's got it.

Yeah, I felt I'd never really had a movie experience with him. I had to Wikipedia him about halfway through the movie. And of course, he's a fucking British man. We just can't win. We can't win. We're the American actors. Kalika literally went, oh, he's British. And I was like, what? I was like, what? He's like, oh my God, he's British. But you know what's funny? Yeah.

Like when you go back and you watch First Blood is obviously the movie that, you know, it's going to be compared to. Because it ripped off the same premise. Is that one of your reasons? It's inspired by. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. But when you go back and you look at the subsequent Rambo movies, John Rambo movies after First Blood, Rambo is the most compelling when he's fucking shit up. Yeah. When he's shooting arrows or setting stuff on fire or beating people up or whatever. But in First Blood, it's not that way.

Like he's most compelling when he's just going like, yo, why are you doing this? Like what, what's with you guys?

Like the most compelling part of it is like this guy being in a different situation where these people are like trying to take advantage of him and him just like pushing back against them. And that tension is the most. And that's kind of the same thing with Rebel Ridge. Rebel Ridge is not at its most compelling when he's getting busy. Those aren't the best parts of the movie. Those are that's fine. But it's most compelling when he's this close to Don Johnson.

And they're talking and they're testing each other. And the psychological part of the movie is the stuff that makes it work, which is hard to do in a movie that's kind of based around this ex-Marine beating people up. Well, that's what the first 20 minutes of First Blood, which we did on the rewatch was way back when, but it's so brilliantly constructed.

And Sean, you did, what was the theme of the big picture was garbage revenge. Yeah. Just like all revenge movies where somebody has been openly wronged and this movie has a perfect openly wronged civil asset forfeiture first 10 minutes of the movie and you're

And you're like, God damn it. What's these cops? What the fuck, man? Yeah. So I would have called that. I like openly wronged. The other version of that is the, oh man, just leave him alone. Cause that's first blood, right? So just leave him alone. He wanted to see his buddy. He just wants to get some eggs. Can you just leave him alone? And it's like, ah, they won't leave him alone. Oh, they're really not leaving him alone. Oh boy. Here we go. But I think what shot, I deliberately didn't read anything about this movie.

I just assumed it was gonna be the, oh, he's gonna get, here we go, he's just gonna beat the shit and kill people and let's go, let's get a body count going. And it zagged really hard on that. And it seemed really, like Van said, really interested in the cat and mouse dynamic with him and my guy, Don Johnson.

40 year anniversary of Miami Vice season one, one of my favorite TV seasons of all time. He creates Sonny Crockett, who becomes the model, the first kind of semi antihero. He's not quite an antihero, but there's some DNA in there that goes. And the only thing better than Don Johnson is evil Don Johnson, who we've seen a couple of times. Evil Don Johnson. And I've always felt like, I don't know why Don Johnson didn't have a better movie career. He's really good in 10 cup.

He's really good in the hot spot. He's been consistently, when you see him, you're like, oh, Don Johnson. I like Don Johnson. And I like when he taps into his evil, Sean. Good villain. He was a hero on that TV series, but his best work

is by far when he plays a bad guy in movies. I mean, he is an awesome bag, or at least a sleaze bag. Well, wait a second. In Miami Vice, he was a hero with a dark side. That's true. He had a drinking problem. He went against the grain. He was like that one of the first, are you going to play by our rules or not? Like that kind of created that. It seems like Sonny Crockett was one mentor away from being a drug dealer himself, right? Yeah, he thought about it.

Yeah. He had the boat. He had an alligator. He was like, you know, if things go sideways, I could also go the other way. What were you going to say, Sean? There's an amazing scene in this movie outside of the hospital where it becomes clear that what they did was wrong. And they're trying to sort of make amends to put the tiger back in the cage. And Don Johnson in that scene, when he's explaining what he's willing to do for the Aaron Pierre character,

And the Aaron Pierre character trying to hold it in and not just strangle Don Johnson. High class stuff. Like I personally wanted to reach through the screen and smack Don Johnson in the face. Like that's how you know you're a good villain. Yeah, it's weird because they released this movie the same weekend as The Perfect Couple or The Perfect Couple, whatever it's called, with Nicole Kidman and Liev Schreiber, which don't think I didn't watch all six episodes of that too. It was a really big Netflix weekend. And...

The perfect couple was just like this new genre of TV we've now created based on season one of Big Little Lies where it's like rich people, a murder.

Oh, famous actress. Wait, there's a zag. Who was the one who got murdered? Oh, it's this person. Oh, these people did it. No, they didn't. Oh, there's a big event. And it's just, we're just AI-ing that now. Like if people are afraid of AI, watch Perfect Couple because that's AI. But then all of a sudden decided it was a black comedy in the end. And my wife and I, we watched all six episodes and we're like, what the fuck just happened? Why did this show exist? I still kind of was mildly entertained by it. But then Rebel Ridge,

was, I thought, really good in a movie I would have paid to see in a movie. Van, you would have paid to see that in the movies, right? Yeah, it would have been hard to get me to go see it, though. Yeah, that's the issue. Because it didn't have a star or you didn't like the theme? Because it didn't have a star. The movie looks kind of like paint by numbers if you just look at the trailer. It looks like the you fucked with the wrong person movie, which is what these movies come down to. And so even to make me watch it, Chris wouldn't stop.

Chris was Chris wouldn't let it go. Like, I've never seen Chris Ryan this excited over something. This is like if the Sixers won the championship, he was really like, man, have you seen it? The next day, man, did you get a chance to watch it? He's like, man, did you get a chance to see Rebel Ridge? Like he was really and he almost never. You didn't know. You didn't know Chris during Den of Thieves because it was like that on fucking steroids and HGH and Den of Thieves came out.

And his recommendations are always so good for stuff that's van coded that he knows I'm going to like. So I had to check it out. But it would have been hard for me to get because I did not hourly recognize Aaron Pierre. And it would just be tough to get me to go to the theater to see the movie. I might have seen it after word of mouth, but Netflix was probably easier sell for a lot of people. Would you put Ciara over me with text recommendations of?

- Pop culture content? - I'd have to think about it, but like CR- - God, this really hurts. Jesus. - But he goes into the deep cuts though. See, he gives some things that, like he goes, bang.

lioness gotta see it and then i'll watch lioness and lioness is fantastic you have never seen lioness we're talking about the whole taylor sheridan dna connection here between i know but that's not fair cr is just blind season tickets for the taylor sheridan universe like very true whatever that oil show is it doesn't matter if it's good or not cr is gonna watch that he's so fired up for land man are you guys up on land man this is the next taylor sheridan show that's coming out i don't know what the details of it are i don't

There's another Taylor Sheridan show that's not the oil show? Or is that the same show? What's the show with Billy Bob Thornton and Jon Hamm? That's Landman. Oh, so that's the oil show. Yeah, yeah. I like to pronounce it like Grantland, Landman. Jon Hamm's evil billionaire oil guy and Billy Bob Thornton's trying to keep it real in the fields. And Demi Moore's involved. That's Landman. I'll watch every episode just for the record. How often can... Taylor is...

fantastic storyteller. He really is. Especially like the first season of Yellowstone. But how many times can he go back to the well and

with the super rich. People are still discovering it, man. I just talked to my dad this weekend. We had our annual pre-Jets conversation and we were like, how you feeling? How you feeling? And then he just spent the rest of the time, him and my stepmom telling me that they knocked out 1883. They knocked out 1923. They're on the third season of Yellowstone and they're thriving. They're trying to watch the Dutton saga chronologically in order. Wow, almost like Godfather starting in the 1910s. Exactly. Oh, I like that. And they were loving it.

Yeah, he's figured it out. I think there, I don't understand how he's so prolific. It doesn't make a lot of sense. And it does feel like he's the guy from Limitless. Like he found some sort of pill that allows him to just write every episode of five TV shows at the same time. There's no other explanation. Do you know what's funny about that? Mentioning that, I kind of feel that way in the opposite about Don Johnson. I wonder how bad Don Johnson wanted it.

I don't know because, and I'm not saying that he's like lazy or nothing. I'm just saying that like Don Johnson, every time you see Don Johnson on screen, you go, you know, I could have used more Don Johnson. Like you, you think about roles that Don Johnson could have played, you know, the, and, and,

To me, my favorite scene in Rebel Ridge was when the Wi-Fi is out in the thing and they're trying to figure out what the acronym means for him. And like, they're trying to figure out that he's a badass and he's outside talking. That is such a well-played scene. And I, Don Johnson has this thing where he does it in the scene where you can't think of another actor who would have done it like that. And it's like,

Right there. But I don't know if he wanted to in that era of hyper competitive Hollywood star. It doesn't seem like he was out there trying to be everywhere at one time. It didn't. It seemed like he was very selective and he.

He picked and choose a little bit. I got to say, that's one of the best modern versions uses of the Internet in a movie I've ever seen, where in that moment you're talking about when they see MCMAP or it's the Marine Corps martial arts program. And the female cop is looking at the Wikipedia and she's like, oh, I think his pictures on the Wikipedia. It's like, wow, we are in this guy's the man. I follow Don Johnson on Instagram.

Seems like he's got a great life. He lives somewhere warm and sunny. He's unlike wife number four. They have a kid who played high school basketball. He does walk and talks. Really? Yeah, he just seems, he'll post pictures of him having coffee. He lives somewhere warm in California. And it just seems like he has a great life. I mean, when you're Sonny Crockett for five years, what else is next? You were the greatest TV cop I think of all time. I have him number one still, Sonny Crockett.

Bill, I got to confess something to you. You never watched Miami Vice? No, I have. I've seen it. I'm not as into it as you, but I understand it's important to you. But no, four months ago, you were like, you need to start doing walk and talks when you get out of movies. You need to do the movie bites, instant reaction. I wanted to do that. Yeah. What's that pizza? The Dave Portnoy pizza show. The one bite. One take. One take. He just comes in 50 seconds, just hot on a movie. Wow.

I was kidding, by the way. When you said it to me, I was so mad. I was like, you would degrade me and make me an animal on social media. And then honestly, the last few times I've seen a movie, I was like, Bill is really onto something. I should be doing walk and talks outside the movie theater. Sean, you should do it with the people.

Yeah, right outside the theater with the building behind you and you just grab a viewer and it's like, all right, it's time for one take Sean Fennessey. Hey guys, Cinema Sean here outside the marquee at the Grove. I'm here with the people. We just saw Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice. Guys, what'd you think?

I would watch every episode. What was the title I had, though? It wasn't one take. It was something like that. I can't remember. It was good. I was really mad when you said it. I was like, you must think I'm such a schmuck. But you were right, as usual. Well, I just, you see how many movies a week? 20? No, not that. A lot. I see a lot of movies a week. 10, 12?

The fact that you was trying to get this motherfucker, the fact that you was trying to get this motherfucker to walk around. No, I wasn't. I was joking, but I knew it. I knew I planted the seed. I knew it. It did. It did annoy me. When does it end, Bill? Sean, Sean, what 2024 movie are you the most excited for Dan and I to see? Maybe even together. We were just talking about Saturday night and

And I do really want you both to see that. I'm very interested. You know, Bill, you're a, you are a shaman, a guru of Saturday Night Live history. So I don't see much. If I could remove one thing from my brain that probably like if it like if your brain's an iPhone and it gets filled up and you can't, you don't want to buy any more hard drive stuff for your brain. I would remove a lot of my Saturday Night Live knowledge. There's nothing to do with it. I have nobody to talk to about it.

just to set your expectations they do put a lot of stuff that all doesn't happen in that first night into the movie there's a bunch of SNL history but I thought it was a pretty cool movie I mean you know I haven't seen Gladiator 2 but I'm ready for Gladiator 2 to take over I've talked to two people who've seen it and they were like get fucking ready really? oh really? interesting one person I really trust too

I would have bet that that would have been a letdown in some kind of way. I mean, maybe I'm hyping it up too much for people now, but I heard I was told get ready. Wow. How old's Ridley Scott now? Eighty four. Oh, my God. I think he's older than Biden.

Wow. Older than Biden. Should he run on the Democratic ticket, you think, Ridley? Well, he's not born in the U.S., unfortunately. Gladiator 2. What about that Selena Gomez movie? I saw that. Emilia Perez. I saw it at Telluride. It was interesting. It's a movie that is about...

The Desaparcidos in Mexico and is also a musical and is also a trans coming of age story and is also a movie about a lawyer. So it's a whole lot of movie, guys. Damn. Complicated movie. She's getting some best actress buzz, I noticed. I don't think that's going to happen. Zoe Saldana, though, she of Lioness is in that movie, too. And she's dope. She's really good. Hey, Van, was Rebel Ridge the movie you always wanted Michael B. Jordan to make?

It's funny. I thought about what I thought about was so, you know, John Boyega leaves the film like he basically just like checked out of his hotel and just like walked away. Right. That's what they said. Yeah. They cast Aaron Pierre in two weeks. Like within two weeks, he was on the film.

And you can tell, right, because that might be another reason why some of the action scenes aren't like super well choreographed and he's not doing like high level martial arts and all of that stuff because he's really a ground and pound type of guy. Normally it takes a little while to train you up to do all of that. But I was thinking if you lose John Boyega, what made them go right to Aaron Pierre?

Like what made them say, okay, we know we got this guy. What made them go right to him? I was thinking about other guys that could have been in that role. And if that's the kind of role that like, if, if Mike or another actor of that ilk, like kills that role, it really does a lot for their profile. Like, cause he, I mean, that's a star making turn for him. If you ask me, like, I'm now interested in him. He carried a whole movie kinetically and,

and really showed a lot of dimensions. So I don't know why some of the actors, some of the Black actors stateside, they don't really trust them with roles like that. The thing I've been saying about the Rebel Ridge in particular is that it's a Steven Seagal movie with a New Yorker subscription. It's a movie that is really, really smart, but is basically just, there's an indestructible force that is barreling through this town. And

That's not really it. Like, there are a few actors who pursued those. Like, speaking of Netflix, Chris Hemsworth has the Extraction movies. They're somewhat similar. You know, like, they're sort of like, there's a man on a mission. He's been wronged somehow and he's got to get to the end of the game. But they're hard parts to do. You know, like, it's not easy to carry a story like that and make it seem credible. The fact that we bought into Steven Seagal for like 10 years doing that, it's kind of amazing. Oh, I'm still buying. Shooter with Mark Wahlberg's like that. Mm-hmm.

The Marine with John Cena. Underrated. Might have watched that a couple times. Underrated movie to me, man. Yeah. Shooter is pretty ridiculous. I mean, you know, but that's a fun, fun movie. All right. But don't besmirch Seagal, though. Hey, anybody seen Richie? Yeah. How dare you? Anybody know why Richie did Bobby Lupa?

Seagal was elite. He just asked that one. He's beating people up. I'm like, Seagal was the man. Sean was like Ruiz with Brock Purdy on Seagal. Meanwhile, Seagal was elite. All Seagal did was win games. He just went 13 and four every year for like seven years. He's made 1.7 good movies, in my opinion. Hold on. Let's take a quick break. And then I want to talk about the Sopranos doc.

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one of my three favorite TV shows. I'm not ready to make a list, but it's in whatever. What are the two? It's The Wire and what? No? Is it The Wire? White Shadow is still up there for me just because it was my first favorite one. Sopranos, Wire, Curb, Larry Sanders. There's a bunch. But it's on the short list. And I thought I knew everything about the show. And then Alex gave me this documentary about it. It starts out slow for like 20, 25 minutes. And then

once we start into the making of the show and the auditions, all of a sudden it becomes like the most entertaining doc. And I was just really into it. So I'm probably on the highest end. I think Sean's lower and Van, where are you? Um, I thought it was fantastic. I think that I was able to like, uh,

Take a little bit of the early stuff a little bit more because you had warned me, because if I'd have thought in any way that I was going to sit down and no disrespect to the man and watch like an hour and a half on David Chase, I would have been like livid. Right. Yeah. But it's so imperative that the documentary does that because I was actually unaware of

of what a biography The Sopranos was for him. And it was, you needed that context. But the minute that you see, I just don't care. I love this show so much. The minute that you see 10 different guys reading for Chris and you see actors that you recognize,

other Italian-American stereotypical actors, like every mob dude that had been in a movie that you had seen past, present, or future trying to read for each one of these parts. And you can see Michael Imperioli there and why he nails it. And you can see the moment in David Chase's head that he goes, that's Chris.

The entire thing was like a narcotic. Well, how about they do Livia, Tony's mom. They show a bunch of people doing for Tony's part. Who clearly didn't understand the character, right?

Like Nancy Marshawn clearly understood what they were going for. And it just, you just see how the show could have gone wrong. And it almost gives you a little anxiety too. Like they could have made one wrong decision. It seems like, and a Sopranos wouldn't have been a Sopranos. It's like, I mean, it gets you high. That's so that like 25 minutes sequence alone, Sean,

was why I would recommend this doc for literally anybody who likes this show. I thought when they were showing the auditions, we've seen that stuff. Some of those auditions for movies we like and TV shows are on YouTube. I've never seen it cut that way.

Where it's like, you're just watching all these people and then the person it's like, oh, he's going to get Michael Imperioli. He's going to get it. But the way they cut it, it's like, oh, this is why he got it. I understand. There's pieces of Christopher, just him in that room. I thought that was so fascinating. Have you ever seen anything pull that off quite like that?

Not specifically in that way. I mean, I think it's because they were willing to kind of like luxury it in a lot of different parts of the development of the show that most documentaries don't. Usually when you see something like this, it's like 90 minutes and it's cut together pretty tightly and not everybody sits for it. And they just had an incredible treasure trove, I think in part because the show as the doc like really, really smartly positions.

is this is the show that changed TV. Like, it's something that you hear people say, but you don't realize until you hear Chris Albrecht talking about where HBO was at the time, until you hear David Chase talking about how he feels completely unshackled from writing this show the way that he had to write all these network TV shows that he was writing beforehand. So you get to see that, like, in the casting, they get to make different choices. Like, the Nancy Marchand stuff is so cool because she has this consciousness of her persona as an actress, where she's always playing this buttoned-up woman

You know, she's always playing this kind of prim and proper woman. And she's been being asked to cut loose and be basically the villain of this show and be this kind of like woman who never gets out of her nightgown, who's kind of raging against her son. Nagging Italian. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, all that stuff is great. I personally, my favorite stuff, though, was the stuff that you guys were a little bit bumped on at the beginning, the chase stuff. Because...

It's just really unusual to watch somebody who has been so therapized. He's been in so much therapy basically be forced almost against his will to recite his therapy to a camera and Alex Gibney. I didn't think the convention of being in the chair necessarily was perfect between him and Gibney, but the stuff that he had to say

about how he put his life into that show. And then also in the making of the show, how he forced his psychology onto his writing staff and onto his actors. And this sense that this unease between him and Gandolfini, this unease between him and Robin Green, this unease between people not really knowing where he stood, like him basically being Tony, the way that he led, the way that he was brilliant, the way that he was flawed, this mirror of his greatest creation and the way that he worked, I thought was so cool to see.

Um, some of the stuff I knew, I thought you put that well, by the way, some of the stuff I knew, like HBO trusting Chase's vision and ultimately hitting this point where they're like,

fuck it. Make the show you want to make. We got to trust this person, which has been a hallmark of HBO's strategy really ever since, where they're just like, here's one guy. There's no consensus. There's not six people giving notes. We're just going to trust this person's vision. We believe in it. I thought that part was cool. I thought the episode five, which I knew a lot about already when they go to college and Tony's going to kill somebody and witness protection,

and how horrified HBO was by that. And they had the two executives, Chris Albrecht and Carolyn Strauss. Basically like, you can't do this. Nobody is ever gonna like this person again. You can't have them commit a murder. And he's like, no, you don't understand. He has to commit a murder. This show's about a mob. He's gotta do this. He's a bad guy. And then they find this uneasy alliance of, all right, well, the bad guy has to, the guy that he's killing has to maybe do something to make him a little more menacing than it's okay.

Um, but Carolyn Strauss said, when you hit that kind of impasse with a show creator, you kind of just have to go with it, which I thought was a really cool point. Cause I think a lot of networks would have fucked that part up and be like, no, no, he's not killing somebody. If he doesn't kill that person, that episode, the rest of the show can't happen the same way. Um, and then the other, the other thing then was, uh, Chase at some point could have probably ended the show quicker and made movies. Mm-hmm.

And I thought the part two of the doc was about, he kind of realized this was his, this was it. This was, this was the thing he was kind of put on earth to do and to see to the end. And this was going to be his legacy. And he just said, fuck it. I love this universe. I don't want to leave it. And he kept going. But I couldn't believe that he had never thought about putting an end on it.

until Chris Albrecht, the executive, was like, "Hey, have you thought about how this is gonna wrap up?" Was he just gonna keep going and going? I don't know. Those are my biggest revelations. What'd you take from it, Van? - Well, number one, I just thought it was interesting when you put his career in context of when The Sopranos comes out, right?

Cause you know, like that, uh, conceit where the, the, the cop walks into the, to the, to his, uh, his captain's office and he goes, Hey,

I can go get this guy, but you got to let me do it my way. Yeah. And then they turn him loose and then he goes and he conquers. Like that doesn't really happen in real life, right? In real life, you got to work with a lot of different people. But this guy was this guy telling his story his way and he was able to clear everybody out. And he was not a powerful television figure before that. He was kind of a guy that was on his last chance before he went and did something else.

And he was able to tell his story in exactly his way. And it became this huge, huge deal. And he seemed kind of prickly to work with too, which made it even harder. Totally. It did not seem like some of that stuff, bro, some of the stuff where they showed them on set and he's talking to the actors, it did not seem like they were having very much fun when they were talking to David Chase. It didn't seem like that, but.

everything about the show that I didn't know because I started watching The Sopranos when I'm 19 and it seemed like automatically everything was perfect. When you saw James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano, you go, oh, okay, I've seen that guy a bunch of times. It's time for that guy to get his shot. You know what I mean? Like that guy's in True Romance. That guy's in Get Shorty. It makes sense that somebody gave him something where he's the guy now. The Mexican.

Right. Right. Well, all of this stuff had to happen for all of it to kind of work out in this really serendipitous way. It's just it's not an accident. Like it's it's timing, but it's also a lot of hard work and a lot goes into it. And the show could have very easily been bad. I think the weight of the show and how that became evident to the cast after a while, everyone thought they were just doing another mob thing.

Everyone thought that they were doing some sort of, they were buttoning up the great era of mob content that's really over now, right? Yeah. Like almost an homage or one last gasp of it. But then the weight of the show became evident to them as they read more scripts, as they got deeper into their character, as they understood just how genius and brilliant the execution of the show was.

And what that meant to all of the actors and how that changed their lives. It's like very inspiring. The best documentaries to me are the ones that make me go, hey, I want to be like that guy. Or, hey, I never want to be like that guy. Right. That inspires some type of emotion out of you. And it really deepened my appreciation for The Sopranos. And, you know, I do a rewatch per year and now I'm going to get started early. Normally I start over the holidays, but I'm going to do it now. Yeah, that's how I felt as well.

It deepened my appreciation for a show that I already really, really, really loved. There was stuff that I learned so many things that I didn't know, like little subtle stuff, like the cast reading the scripts worried that this was the episode where they were going to get knocked out of the show and how they tried to lobby for him to basically not kill big pussy.

because they liked the guy, ah, get him a season two. And even stuff like Chase, that little tidbit about how HBO called it 6A and 6B instead of a seven season because they would have had to give everybody raises. It's like, shit, man, he's still pissed about this 18, 19 years later. The Gandolfini stuff I thought was incredible. And I've always been fascinated by him. I read all the major Soprano books and pieces about

And it just seemed like it got really complicated the second half of the show with him as he was just putting too much of himself into the character and putting too much of the character into himself. And I thought what Van said earlier about how

Chase was, or Sean, you said it. Chase was putting pieces of, he's basically like a little bit the mayor of Tony, but then Gandolfini was also the mayor of Tony. So you have three different people that are all kind of the same person.

crazy, volatile, up and down, fucked up person, and they're all steering the ship that has 250 people. I didn't know a lot of that stuff. Did you know that stuff, Sean? Not nearly as much. I think I always understood that there was this uneasy...

this tension between Gandolfini and Chase's creation and Chase's point of view on the character. One, the image of him giving the eulogy at the funeral is devastating. Like that moment is so painful. Just incredible stuff. It's so sad. And there's one other really interesting Gandolfini moment, which is that, you know, that moment when he, it's revealed that he has been holding out in contract negotiations. But when he comes back and he finally comes to a deal, he gives each of the cast members $30,000.

But then they ask Edie Falco on camera and she's like, I didn't know that. Which means she didn't get $30,000 from James Gandolfini. Where I was like, hmm. Like Gandolfini was a complicated guy, you know? And he seemed to have complicated relationships. That's obviously one of the, not just like one of the signature TV performances, but like one of the signature character creations. Like you can put that with, you know, actors on stage, great cinematic performances. Like Tony Soprano resonates so deeply in the consciousness of culture.

But he and Chase, as open as Chase is about so much in his life, you still don't totally get to the bottom of what it was between them. He doesn't totally put to words what their union was, what their, where their dissenting moments were. How formatted it was. Yeah. It almost felt like, I felt like Chase was holding back in the interview, didn't you? Like there was some stuff he wanted to say that he was like, that guy's dead now. I'm not going to say this, but.

Yeah, he seemed really conflicted about it. The eulogy had never been shown. It's not on YouTube. Nobody had seen it. And it's so raw and so emotional. And you could see like, you know. I also, I'd forgotten that they made the movie together in 2012.

So it was this guy that he had this crazy complicated relationship with and yet he still couldn't quit him and he decides to make a movie and it's like, you know who I need in my movie? James Gandolfini, the guy that had this crazy thing. He's so good in that movie and I love that movie. I have to say, I've always loved... We were working together when the movie came out, Bill. I remember I wrote about the movie for Grantland because I was like, no one cares about this and I think this is such an interesting film. Not Fade Away, it's called. And it's still basically ignored even though it's him doing the other half of his interests. It's him doing...

1960s American rock and roll culture plus like European filmmaking styles. That stuff is all in The Sopranos, but it's all layered underneath mob stuff that Ben was just describing. This kind of end of an era mob stuff. For me, movie dork that I am, I love that he was always filtering that stuff into The Sopranos. The Sopranos is a weird show. It's a really unusually structured and told show.

You know, Lorraine Bracco's interview was really good too. I didn't, maybe I knew this and forgot that they wanted her for Carmelo and she wanted to zag because she felt like she had already played that character and wanted to be Melfi. But she tells that whole story about the rape episode and how she stopped reading it. And she's like, why would you do this?

why would you do this to my character? And he's like, just keep reading, keep reading. And that choice and that final word and everything the way that constructed, was constructed, I thought that her fork in the road moment is like, should she, that's probably a top three Sopranos episode, but it's also easily the most difficult one to watch. I didn't even like when they were showing the clips from it in the documentary. The other one that I thought was, it just shows how crazy Chase was, was he would get these people together

He would throw out their first five best ideas because he felt like the sixth idea was like, what is that formula? Take your first five ideas. They're going to suck from six on. That's one will go. They would write on a whiteboard all night. He would get up, add to it, and then wake up three hours later and just wipe off the whiteboard. It just sounded like, Ben, we've talked about this sometimes when now in the 2020s, everybody's

rightly so trying to be a lot more functional in a work environment and you know have a lot less stress and a lot less discord and yet you see this show and it's like this show was a fucking maniac show to work on and it led to true greatness right and then you think like was that one of the reasons it was truly great i mean we're i mean we're probably going to get watered down art because we're i mean just the reality of it you know we we're going to elevate

citizenry and citizenship and people and they get but we're going to get watered down art because there's uh there's a certain madness that goes along with it and there's one part in the first part of the documentary where you can track the show literally physically with the change in james gandolfini right he like becomes this brute when the when the show first starts he's

dashing almost like to the degree that he could be but as the show moves on his fingers get fatter he gets balder he becomes Tony Soprano the volume of his breathing goes up throughout the season I always know that yeah it's almost like The Shining with Jack Torrance like by the end of it he's just in a fucking bathrobe on a show of himself

just strangling people, right? Yeah. And like, there's a clip from inside the actor's studio where Lipton's talking to him and he starts to answer the question and the crowd starts to laugh. They think he's doing Tony Soprano, but he's not.

He's just talking like there's a point where, and that's another source of the friction. That's a point where he completely rests the character away from what it was before. And it starts to become more in line with like who and what he is. And I really feel like that happened to everybody else as much. I feel like for, for everyone else around it, they were sort of in his orbit and they were circling around the weight of what he was doing. But like,

He got a, it got a lot darker that I can't even remember the episode. I can't point to the episode where Tony becomes an,

a complete total asshole where he completely breaks bad because I keep reaching for Tony Soprano throughout the entire season. I'm looking for the shred of goodness in him no matter what. I know what he's been through. I know he has mental health issues. I know he had a fucked up relationship with his father, with his mother, his sisters out there. So no matter how bad he gets, I'm

I keep searching for the good in him, like to the very end. Like, I believe like Tony is outwardly racist. You guys know how I am about this. And it's one of the funniest scenes in the history of the show. The guy is standing there looking at Tony and Tony is being. Oh, Meadow's boyfriend. Meadow's boyfriend. Right. He's being outwardly racist towards him.

And I kind of give him a pass. I understand him a little bit. I mean, I don't. I'm like, Tony's a racist, but like, I'm kind of like, it's Tony Soprano because there are other situations where you see him getting along with, it's complicated. He's complicated. And more than any other character I buy into his complication. And bro, we don't do complicated well anymore. Yeah. We do either. You're a good, you're a good person or you're a bad person.

You're trash or you're cool. You're canceled or you're active. The complicated characters, we don't do them anymore. And the complicated people, we don't really do them well anymore. They show us the Gloria Trillo stuff too in the documentary. And that part of that show is as far to the edge, I think, as I've gone with Tony. Where he's so violent and so hateful towards her. But also the show is sort of like, this woman is also crazy. This woman is also unwell.

And so that like the show is kind of, they're just bad for each other. Yeah. And they're, they're so destructive and he keeps, but he keeps finding himself in all these destructive situations. So it is him really. He's kind of seeking it out. Yeah, exactly. So he's searching for his mother. Like he's you, but you get it though. It's like they, they've done enough of the groundwork for you to, to like under, it's like a reverse Luke arc.

Luke comes from being a guy, I don't know anything. By the time Jedi comes around, Luke can do everything. Tony actually starts out kind of benevolent and ends up Darth Vader, but you understand. But he was always Darth Vader, I think, is part of the point of the show. It kind of rope-a-dopes us with the first few episodes. It was always in there. But see, it was always in there, but I'm not sure if he was always Darth Vader.

I think he had to make a choice as more was hoist upon him. Because think about it. Tremendous loss. You know, Jackie dies. There's all of this. There's a power struggle. He had to kind of do... Well, his family tried to put a hit on him. I think that was probably the breaking bad moment, right?

Right. And so I think he has to I think he he gets he has almost a second adolescence, I'd say, during the show as he grows from mafia kid capo to boss. And by the time he becomes Thanos, he doesn't feel like there's anyone who can touch him or hurt him.

- You know, the reason I was always, like I'll always defend Tony, not that they need my defense, but every decision he made on that show, and I think this was one of the things that comes across in the documentary that Chase was passionate about and Gandolfini was passionate about, the decision was always authentic to Tony the character and what he would do. And I remember like even Sex and the City, which is a show with way lower stakes,

Had that season when, uh, when Carrie Bradshaw starts having an affair with Mr. Big when he's married and gets caught and Mr. Big's wife falls and breaks her tooth. And it was just,

You just kind of never looked at her the same because it was like, I... Listen to you. I thought you were... Bill, you bad bitch, you. Well, I thought you were a different character than this, Carrie Bradshaw. I believed in you. You're like the Manolo Blahnik. Bill, you're on... I want to get Glee in here. Like, listen to you. Okay, I didn't realize. Here's the thing. From an authenticity standpoint, I thought they did it because it was... But I thought...

I thought they did it because it was a good art for the season and not because it was authentic to that character. I didn't think she would do that. And I think with Tony, the entire time in the Sopranos, all the decisions that he made, I was like, yeah, he would do that. Yeah, I get that. And that Breaking Bad was the same way. Like you understood the methodology behind their decisions.

If you can nail that all the way through a series, that's, I think, the hardest thing to do. That's why Breaking Bad did it. Mad Men, when Mad Men started to get a little rocky there in the last part of the show is because we were like, I don't understand what Don Draper's doing here. He's kind of over the map. He's doing this, now he's doing this. And I always felt like that Tony was authentic. Can we talk about the season finale stuff? I mean, the last episode? Can I say one thing that still gets me about Tony, though? Just one thing. Yeah, go ahead. Killing Chris.

I guess I get it, but I was still aghast. And every time I watch it, I still am like, that was a hell of a decision right there. Like, I don't know if I sometimes totally buy that he would have made just the snap decision to kill Chris like that.

I don't think it was a snap decision though. I think, I think it was building up to that for 20 episodes. And he was like, this guy's a bad apple. He's going to continue to haunt my life. And, um, I have a chance to just eradicate this now.

I think it's consistent with what happens in mob culture as well. Like, I don't think that that's such a leap. I think the other thing too is Chase was always very direct, even in interviews at the time that he was like, Tony Soprano is evil. He kills people for money. Like you do not lose sight of the fact that even though you love him and even though Gandolfini is a, you know, such a compelling and in many ways lovable character,

He's evil. This is the absolute darkest layer of society that we are portraying in this movie. It doesn't mean you can't have empathy for the experiences that he's had as a person, but don't lose sight of the fact that he will kill his own family to protect himself. So, you know, I never really bumped on any of that stuff in the show when I was watching it because I was like,

he's a figure of Satan, really, in a lot of ways. The one line he wouldn't cross was, he is at one moment, I think the show's called Night Cat, when they had that great argument with Carmella. And he puts his hand up like he's going to hit her and then he ends up just punching the wall over and over again, which they show in the documentary. It's like the one line he won't cross, he even hits AJ.

I guess he would never hit metal, but that's, you know, but he'll, he'll basically, he's going to on the bingo card of bad TV people, he's going to do all of the bad things, but that seemed to be the one line they would never cross on the show. The season finale, um, which came out 17 years ago and now I really like, and it really made me mad when it happened. I thought they did a nice job of, uh,

framing some of the decisions, some of the behind the scenes stuff of how some of the cinematography they did. But I thought, I forget what the second director, I thought he made the key point when he was basically saying like, this is art. You want people to keep talking about art after it's over. Every TV show just ends and 20 seconds, 20 minutes later, you move on to something else. And David didn't want to do that. And I was like, holy shit, what a great way to put it.

Because we're still talking about it 17 years later. I got in an argument with Sal about it six months ago. Because Sal's still mad 17 years later. But has that moved up the rankings for you, Sean? That last episode? I liked it at the time, even if I didn't totally understand what he was doing. I find it is... The documentary does a really good job, I think, of effectively recreating those final seven or eight minutes of that episode, which are so compelling.

And the way that it's cut and you're sort of like always looking around the corner of the frame to try to figure out what's going to happen next in the way it lingers on the guy who goes into the bathroom. You know that the door is always opening into the diner. The tension in that in that framing is just a great filmmaking. Right. So set aside the fact that we don't actually, quote unquote, find out what happens to Tony or his family.

It's so, so, so well done. And then I think the way you framed it, Bill, is exactly right, which is like, it's still interesting to pick apart and to think about and to try to better understand

And I think that the show is so emblematic of the shift in television to a kind of ambiguity and a moral gray that we weren't ready to accept something that didn't say either this guy died or the show got canceled and we'll never know what's going to happen to them. This was something effectively totally new. And the show was often compared to great novels. And that was like the ending of a great novel, that there was a kind of like interpretive quality to it.

that holds up to this day. So I really, really like it. I'm very pro the Mad Men finale personally. I did it with Greenwald on Stick to Landing. I still think that's right up there in the conversation to your point. But the Sopranos ending I think still works brilliantly. I think at the time I felt manipulated because I felt like the tension that Sean's describing in the last couple of scenes that I deserved a payoff.

that after making me, you know, Meadows trying to park a car and all of this stuff is happening. I'm like, my God, my heart is racing. Like something's going on. Then it just goes off. I'm like, oh man, you're fucking with me. And that's something that the show would never do. The show didn't used to do that. It didn't use to fuck with you in that way. And also I think that the DNA of the show being so grounded in, you know, mob culture and depictions of that, you always get a resolution when you're watching something in the mafia, somebody goes to jail, somebody gets killed.

uh uh somebody or somebody rats out everybody else and goes into witness somebody rats out everyone else sofia coppola's character is mercifully killed um and like and so you always get it but here you didn't get that you didn't get an out you didn't get like uh uh you didn't get a a a a morality lesson like in funny games when you know he goes hey the minute that like

the guy picks up the remote and rewinds the TV that you guys should have cut the movie off because you know that there's no way that these people can survive now. And you're just watching to see how they die. And I'm like, don't indict me. You made the movie. You know what I mean? And so with The Sopranos, you're looking for some kind of resolution that's going to make you either feel better about the world that you just devoted six years to or eight years to or worse about it. And you don't get it.

You get what you get in life, which is there it is. Everyone dies and nothing is clear. Like that's right. Like you. Yeah. Like it's you. You get that. I mean, it's just it's how it happens and they don't bail you out. And so you you have to make a decision for yourself why the Sopranos was so good to you.

Like why you, why Tony resonated so much with you, why you wanted to see the villain win, why you care so much about his family. They don't give it to you. They don't give you the big bad wolf. Like they don't give it to you. And like at first as a younger man, I needed it. Now I really appreciate that they didn't do it because that's not the way the world works. I've also rewatched this show. I think I've done three or four rewatches at this point that I really appreciate now how many things they,

threw into that final episode that were either callbacks to stuff from earlier or full circle stuff. And they did a good job in the documentary pointing out like he says in season one he has the toast to the family when the power's out at Artie's restaurant and he says like hey it's about

It's the little things. These are the good moments right here. And then in the last episode, AJ brings that up. He's like, didn't you say once it's all about the little moments, the good moments? And Tony's like, oh, did I say that? I don't even remember. And you realize like, oh, this guy's been full of shit the whole time. That was great. Had you put that together before? I hadn't put that together. I did the fourth rewatch before.

I finally realized, but it's, I mean, to expect somebody to get that in the final episode in 2007, when the show's been on for eight years, like nobody's going to get that. Yeah. It's really cool. Um, but I thought that was pretty neat. And the other thing I never noticed, but he pointed it out, um, was how Tony kept entering his own POV and how they filmed it.

that way where he kept going in and how like the, the stuff that Chase had seen over the years that kind of shaped that, but that was pretty cool. It was nerdy filmmaking, but anyway, uh, I thought it was worth, I thought it was worth watching. I wish they had interviewed more people. I wish it had been three parts, not two, but, uh, for the Sopranos, then I I'm feeling another rewatch coming on. I haven't done it since summer of 2022.

Yeah. I don't do a full, I rewatch in some capacity every year. Sometimes I don't do like a full rewatch, but I get to a point to where there's really the reason why I rewatch it all the time and the wire too, is because there's so much content.

that it makes me actually less selective. - You picked up new stuff, yeah. - Yeah. - Oh, new content that's, yeah. - No, no, no, no. So what I'm saying is there's so much content. When I put on HBO Max, I get paralyzed by all of the choices and I go, I'm just gonna watch The Wire season three. - You know, my wife put it, she said this before, it's not a new point, but when we were watching the documentary last night, 'cause I made her watch it with me, and she was like, you know,

really miss these people. We haven't done a rewatch in a couple of years. Like I feel like all these people are my friends. And she said that there's certain TV shows like that where you're like, I'm getting together with my friends again. Christopher's back in my life. And, uh, I thought it was a good way to put it. And I thought that was one of the reasons the sex in the city crushed on Netflix. Cause people are like, Oh yeah, I miss these four. Let's I'll run these back. Um, I think that's a hard place for a TV show to get to. What's weird is the Sopranos

one of the most violent show about an evil character. You wouldn't think those were friends. Same thing for The Wire. It's like this is a world you wouldn't think you'd be like, oh, these are all my friends. But that's kind of how I feel about The Wire too. Anyway, all right, Sean, we're letting you go. You have stuff to do. Van, you're sticking around. We got one more segment. Thanks, Bill. Go Mets. Thanks, Sean.

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All right, since we have Van on the pod, we got to rip through a couple topics. Deion, Colorado, go. Getting as bad as it could possibly get right now. You predicted this this summer. Yeah, it just didn't seem like a lot of the issues that were present on the team from last year had actually been fixed. And you're looking at the same stuff. You're looking at offensive line problems. You're looking at defensive line problems. You're looking at the inability to cover. The team is, of course, very top heavy. I'm not saying anything that anybody hasn't said.

And even some of the guys that broke out in the first game of the season, like Jimmy Horn, did not do really that much against Nebraska. It seems like in a situation with him, he really shows out against lesser competition, against competition where guys can cover and maybe the scheme is better. He has some problems. But more so to the point now when you look at Colorado,

I'm starting to see stuff that maybe I didn't see as much last season on the field. Like Travis Hunter in that game against Nebraska where they were thoroughly dominated seemed like he was fed up. Like he wasn't actually believing. Because one thing I will say is for all the struggles that they had last year, you saw some cracks and stuff like that in terms of the coaching staff and stuff. But the team seemed like they had a great bond between them. It seemed like they were...

they were okay with one another. There was always some different dust-ups and you heard stuff coming up, but it wasn't until the summer that you got all this information about just how fractured the locker room could be or might be. And so now you have to wonder what's gonna happen with the Colorado experiment. And you have to wonder where it's going. - Why do people care so much? - Because it's interesting.

If you had to condense it down in one sentence, why do people care about this team that's basically a below 500 college football team? Because we love Deion Sanders. There are a couple of people in every sporting generation that rise to the level of mythic figure. And Deion Sanders is one of those people. Deion Sanders is a guy that like, you know, locked down one half of the whole field, becomes a huge pop culture star.

Prime time. He's great at baseball. He's great at football. He's a generational athlete, but he's not just a generational athlete. He's a generational talker. He's a generational cultural figure. He's a generational style figure. He just means something to someone. And then to see Deion Sanders' maturation when he's finished with his playing career and he becomes a leader and a man of God and a family man and a father, you just believe that Deion will win at whatever Deion decides to do. And he will win.

Deion Sanders will win. What will happen is this. Travis Hunter will get drafted high. Shadu will get drafted high. Deion Sanders will walk away from Colorado tens of millions of dollars richer than what he was when he got there. And his son will go to the NFL and his adoptive son will go to the NFL. Deion Sanders will win. The question is whether or not Colorado will win.

whether or not they will be markedly better off after Deion Sanders leaves. Besides the financial, I'm talking about on the football field. And I don't think that they will be. I liked it last year. We talked about it a year ago because I just hate the college sports infrastructure. I was so excited somebody was coming in and was just like, fuck this and just blowing it up and zagging in the hardest possible way. And I was like, I hope this works. And now a year later, it feels like we're headed toward what you just laid out.

He's going to get a couple of kids drafted. He's going to leave. I don't know what's next for him. Like what, what's next for him? I mean, it depends if, if he wanted to continue to be a college coach, I remember he had great success at Jackson state for what they were doing at Jackson state, right? He won the SWAT twice. So it's not like he hasn't ever been successful as a college coach. If he wants to continue to be a college coach and broken record, everybody's saying this, it would take,

the demonstration of building a program that maintains a competitive and structural consistency that people can believe in. Deion Sanders and Matt Rule came in at the same time. He beat Matt Rule last year. He beat Matt Rule last year because Matt Rule is the coach of Nebraska. He beat Matt Rule last year because Nebraska turned the ball over a lot.

Also, there was a little fool's gold in there. But now when you look at the team, one team was essentially 28 points better. The game was 28-10, but it wasn't that close. One team was way better in the trenches at doing the little things, made less mistakes, the entire nine. So it seems that one way is winning over the other way. So Deion Sanders would have to prove that

He could really do this at this level. And he just hasn't proven that yet. He's proven that he can be noticed, that he can be disruptive, that he can garner headlines, that he can win in spots or have success in spots. But he has yet to prove that he can win consistently at that level. And it's just a fact. Yeah, you're basically running your own little mini corporation. Yeah, I mean, a little harder than where he was the first job.

There are all kinds of guys, right? Like, for example, Marcus Freeman right now at Notre Dame. Great young coach. Great young coach. Notre Dame ends up losing a weird game every single year that they shouldn't lose. They just lost Northern Illinois. They lose tomorrow. Should they lose to a 3-9 Stanford team? And you wonder, what is it about this guy's process? Brian Kelly at my school, at LSU, my beloved LSU Tigers.

We come out stagnant and flat at the beginning of the season every single year. We lose big games when the lights are on us. And you wonder, not that Brian Kelly can't be a successful coach. He's one of the most successful coaches of his generation. But what is it about these guys' process and preparation that

to where they lose in situations like this, or they can't get over the hump in situations like this. And Deion Sanders doesn't have nearly the accolades or the winning percentage of those other two guys. But if we're asking those questions about those guys, we're certainly going to ask those questions about him. Well, a year ago, you came on and we were talking about if this Colorado thing keeps going the way it's going, what's next for Deion? I think you did a top five programs you'd want him to take over. Now it feels like the ceiling of that has lowered.

Right. You'd have to be you'd have to be moronical. You have to be a moron to it. What it looked like at the time was this. What it looked like at the time was that Deion Sanders was had the ability to catch lightning in the bottle and make everybody want to come to where he was and participate in this. Right.

and that he was going to attract the best athletes. He had Travis Hunter, right? He was able to get Travis Hunter to not go to Florida State and come to Jackson State, right? So you felt like his ability to do that was going to turn a situation to where he didn't have as many resources as some of these other programs and make Colorado automatically competitive, which it looked like, right? TCU, Nebraska, it looked like he could do more with less. Now, it's starting to look like

that he can do less with more because the school has been financially successful, right? They're getting all eyes on them every single time. The lights are on Colorado. The attention is there, but the team can't function.

So it doesn't look like resources are an indicator of how good of a coach or how good of a job he's going to do. So if he ended up at Florida State or if he ended up, you know, at a Notre Dame or any of the places where these coaches are, quote unquote, on the hot seat, which I don't think Norvell or Freeman is actually on the hot seat. But if he ended up at any of those places, it doesn't look like he has the institutional consistency to run them well. I'm not saying that that's true. It's year two for Dion. But I'm saying the team, it's not just that the team is losing.

It's how they lose. They lose at the fundamentals of football. You lose at the things you have to do right. Yeah. So it's really right now, outside of an opening game loss, the loss that they had to Nebraska, I mean, Bill, that's as bad as it can go.

And if you're, and for all the people out there that, because there's a part of this that, you know, you shouldn't say this because there's a cultural loyalty to Deion. I love Deion. I love what he's been able to do. Love him as all of that. But like, if you're looking at the results on the field, he hasn't proven that he's a great coach at this level. It's just a fact. And it might be a level below. We'll see. What's your biggest college football story right now? Thing you care about the most? Not LSU. Besides LSU, a couple of things. Number one, I care about the

relative lack of strength that we're seeing in the SEC. The parity of college football is really interesting. We've had a couple of years now where I think things are changing a little bit. So like top 25 parity or like top seven parity? No, I mean, when you look at the game now, I think NIL and the transfer portal have leveled the playing field to a degree to where

I don't see the monsters just beating people's heads in. Last week, something of an anomaly, but you saw Northern Illinois beat Notre Dame. You saw Boise State in Autzen.

Austin, one of the toughest venues to play in all of sports. You see Oregon need a late field goal to beat them, right? You see Cal beat Auburn. Normally when you match up an Auburn team with a team from up there, you know, Cal kids, they're too busy protesting to care about football. So normally when you match them up, you see them get just dominant. It's just not the same anymore.

And I think it's interesting to see where college football is going with the transfer portal, with NIL, and with a lot of the athletes that are coming out of the South decided that they're going different places. You might see a change in the guard in terms of the power structure of the entire thing. Well, I'm sure it's much harder to have continuity these days. And then also a coach like what's happening in Boston College right now. Everyone in Boston's all excited because Bill O'Brien came in, turned it around. And it just feels like overnight you could

Have a contender. All right, next topic. Tyreek Hill, how big of a story is this going to get over the course of the week? We're taping this on a Tuesday morning Pacific time. I don't think it's going to be that big of a deal. Okay. I think that, just to be honest with you, I think that we've made our decision about this issue. So what happened to Tyreek Hill is a shame. And you can look at the video and you can see the cops overreacting to what happened.

To say the least. To say the least, right? You can see that happening, right? I think that there was a legitimate time in NFL sports culture where there was an opportunity to leverage the power of the American athlete in order to really address some of the issues that they face as being black men in society. And I think we punted on it. I think that with Colin Kaepernick

And just the entire, so interesting that that happened around the same time that the Super Bowl stuff was getting involved. I think that around that entire time, you guys can say, people can say whatever they want about Colin Kaepernick and what they think about him as a man or what they would have done or whatever. The important thing was that the conversation was being had

about who these guys are and what these guys are when they're not in jerseys. The conversation was being had. And it was important a conversation to have. And to be honest with you, when the NFL made the deal that they made with Roc Nation, people turned the page on it.

Like that was a singular thing that happened. People turned the page on it. People said, okay, well, now Roc Nation is involved with the NFL. There's no way that Jay-Z and Roc Nation would do anything that will be involved in anything that is less than nutritious for black people or for this cause. So, you know, however way, whatever way you have to say, Kaepernick wants to still be in the league, so it must be okay. Jay-Z is here now with Roc Nation, so it must be okay.

So Tyreek Hill saying now, I saw him on CNN saying that, you know, I want to make a change. I want to do this. I want to figure out a way. We didn't done everything that we can do. We've protested. We've done all of this stuff and none of it has worked. Well, we haven't seen any of it through because we've chosen as a society, in my opinion, our entertainment over our humanity and dignity. We chose football. And it's when I say we, I'm talking about

Van Lathan Jr., the average person. We chose football. We chose entertainment. We chose tradition. We chose the game that our fathers and mothers gave us over dignity and over humanity and over what it would mean to envision a society where Tyreek Hill would not have been treated like that.

And this is for everyone. I've seen videos of when we talk about policing culture, we often racialize it and make it about the way black Americans are treated by the police. But when we're talking about policing and getting to the center of what we expect from people who are supposed to serve and protect.

the, the, the poor white boy from denim Springs. I'm talking about all types of different people who run up against cops who feel entitled and who use their authority to cross lines. And I'm not going to be hyper for both. I'll stop here. But what I'll say is like, we'll forget about this. Tyreek Hill will catch touchdowns. Like we'll move on. We've already made our decision. And our decision was that we loved, uh,

we loved football more than we loved a fight for dignity or humanity. - It felt like this, there was a similar thing from late 2010s all the way to maybe 2014 Ray Rice range, when it felt like every year the NFL had some sort of issue

or controversy that made all of us go, kind of sucks to root for this league, right? And I ended up getting in trouble at ESPN with one of the things. But the concussions especially felt like it was going to be such a big part about how we talked about football going forward. And were we signing up to watch these people basically get their brain mushed? They had to figure this out. They figured it out to some degree.

It's still a really violent game, right? And at some point, I think all of us had to look in the mirror who love football and it's like, am I signing up for this or am I not signing up for this, right? I know they made it safer. I know they put some effort into it. It's still not that safe. I went through it when my son was playing football there for a couple of years. It's like, am I complicit that I like this?

And it feels like in 2024 post-COVID, people are like, you know what? I love football. I miss football. And there's this other stuff that comes with it. And that's just what's going to happen. Couldn't be more right. And by the way, we can sit here and talk about football. We make the decision every single day. You make the decision when you pick up your iPhone.

You make the decision when you go out, when you eat food. You make the decision every single day. You make the decision. You choose a little bit over what's convenient and what you like and what makes you feel good. You're not here for that long. You'll be dead way longer than you will be alive. And you make the decision every single day. The only thing that I ask from people or I ask for myself is just to understand that that decision was made.

to understand that Tyreek Hill was pulled over and treated that way by the police. And you care about that because he's going to go out and catch touchdowns for the Dolphins, right? But there are going to be other people that look all kinds of different ways, but particularly Black people that is going to be in that same situation. And you won't even have the opportunity to care until it's on video in front of your face. And then you have to decide what kind of America that you want to live in. So, you know, it's like, it's nothing to like,

When I saw it, I'm like, oh, well, you know, that's obviously a problem that still exists. It's obviously something that's still going to happen. Even in the NFL, structurally, the NFL is a racist league. Structurally, it is. And the only reason why I say that, I'm not talking about Colin Kaepernick and how he was blackballing, how his career was taken away. The NFL had a different set of parameters that it used to judge black players cognitively

When it came down, we, we, these guys were awarded money. Like structurally, that is a racist conceit. Well, they had to create a rule to have people interview coaching candidates that weren't white.

Right. And so at the same time, once again, like we talked about before, it's complicated. So much of the workforce is black. It's enriched so many young black men. So many people are indifferent. It's not an easy answer. It takes nuance to have the conversation. But more than that, it takes bravery. And I think we lost our bravery when the kneeling

And the movement there dissipated. We chickened out, but we got our football back. And once again, I'm not letting myself off the hook here, not in any way, shape or form. I can't understand why, but during the pandemic, when I saw bubble basketball and I saw sports with even with no people in the crowd, it made me feel like the world was going to be okay.

It literally did. It made me feel like, oh my God, okay, how could the world end if they play basketball in Orlando? I have basketball games to watch. You know what I'm saying? And it just completely, like, by the time I realized that the moment had passed, I had pulled my Saints gear back out. Any thoughts on the Super Bowl halftime show before we go? Oh my God, man. The thoughts that I thought was congratulations to Kendrick. Well, boy, boy, boy, we know how to spend some mests.

We relitigated Lil Wayne's whole career. We relitigated Kendrick's career. It was Kendrick against Wayne. It was actually it wasn't Kendrick against Wayne. Those guys are fine. We know that. But it was like Roc Nation against Young Money. All of this that goes back to one video that started this entire culture of rap beef from like 20 years ago. This whole thing is it has to do with that. It's just so funny to me, man.

They pick Kendrick and it's like, of course they pick Kendrick. Other than Taylor Swift, he's the single hottest musical star we have right now. He's having a moment. It totally makes sense that he would play there. Like I went there and I think 2013 Beyonce played. I was there when the Pats won their first Super Bowl in 2001. U2 played.

I mean, for the most part, they just pick an artist that makes sense for the city. I guess when it was in LA and they did the whole homage to LA hip hop, I think that maybe made people think that was a new model going forward. But to me, having Kendrick play the Super Bowl made total sense. But what do I know? Let me ask you a question. I'm going to make you the head of the NFL right now. Yeah. Would you allow Kendrick Lamar to play Not Like Us

in its entirety or the more controversial parts of the song at the Super Bowl where he's calling Drake the P word and all of that stuff. Is that a Super Bowl appropriate song? He's got to do it in some way. Would you come and say, okay, you can't call him this. You can't say this because there's going to be a lot of Americans. A lot of people know about this, but there's going to be a lot of Americans watching the Super Bowl like knee deep in some nachos going, Drake likes young girls?

What is this? I didn't hear about it. You know what I'm saying? I think what happens, because if you follow the Super Bowl halftime show, it's usually a montage, right? He's going to play like nine songs. So he'll play like 90 to 120 seconds and not like us, but then it'll move into some other thing. So I think it'll organically solve itself. I think if

If he put the Drake parts into the halftime show, that's about as aggressive of an act as you could do with the halftime show. And by the way, is Roger Goodell really going to have an opinion on this? Have you seen the people around him? He's going to... Yeah, we better talk to Kendrick about Not Like Us. I'm pretty sure he doesn't probably know the inner workings of what's going on in that feud. What's crazy to me, though, is that it felt like this feud, which dominated 2024...

It felt like it was on its last legs. And now we're going, it's not even mid-September yet, and we're just gonna be talking about Super Bowl halftime now coming up. And this is gonna get probably more buzz for a Super Bowl halftime show than anything I can remember. Normally, for a couple years, nobody even wanted to play the Super Bowl halftime show because they didn't pay you anything. It was more expensive for the artists for themselves to do it than what they got paid. And now it feels like it's back.

in the biggest possible way. I don't ever remember discourse like this about the halftime act. It's funny. Drake said something. Drake said he made a vague reference to like round two.

as if he was going to kick it back off again. This was a couple of weeks ago. And everybody was like, ah, come on, man, let it go. We don't need a round two. You lost pretty decisively. And he did lose pretty decisively. Guys, it's okay. He lost. People lose. Jordan missed shots. Your favorite people, he lost. Decisive, over, swag. Not like us, maybe the biggest diss record in the history of hip hop. Definitely top five. Anyway, and so after he says that,

Kendrick Lamar ends up doing the fucking Super Bowl. It's one thing to have your diss track ringing off in the clubs. It's one thing to have your diss track as people's ringtones back in the day. But to do the diss record at the Super Bowl in front of the entire world. The biggest audience you could possibly have. Nuts. Flawless victory is over. Pack it up. Everybody come back in 2025 with your best albums and let's see what happens.

You can hear Van Lathan on the Higher Learning Podcast with our friend Rachel Lindsay. You can hear him on The Ringerverse as well. And you can hear him every once in a while on The Rewatchables. We're due for another one at some point soon. Good to see you, Van. All right, brother. Good to see you too. All right, that's it for the podcast. Thanks to Sean Fantasy and Van Lathan. Thanks to Steve Cerruti and Kyle Creighton for producing as well. Don't forget, you can watch clips from this episode on the Bill Simmons YouTube channel. And I will see you on this feed on Thursday. I want to see you.

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