Episode Podcast Transcriptions 8 of The Markcast® podcast talking about the CFL, XFL, USFL, and other “alt-football” news, stories, insights, commentary, and more!!!

Episode transcriptions 8 of The Markcast®. The Markcast® is a sports-centric podcast, covering the CFL, XFL, USFL, and other alternative football leagues. Tune in for the latest CFL, XFL, USFL, and alt-football news. Episodes are listed in the order they were recorded. *Please excuse any spelling or typographical errors.

UFL Week 1 Results + Reactions! Winner and Losers From UFL Week 1!!

Well here we are back from Texas. I love Texas, love Texas so much back made it through the Easter traffic, everything back here talking UFL week one here. I see people joining in the chat. Andrew Murray is logging on here. That'll be good. I'll have a little PSA and then we'll get into kind of all of the weeks action. Very exciting. I want to hear everyone's reactions to, I posted on Twitter yesterday grade UFL, week one had a lot of A, B, C mixed overall positive, no alarming gaps, anything coming out of that? Let's get Andy on here. Andy, I want to say hi and then I got a little, we'll do a little PSA here, but how are you doing sir? I'm doing great. How are you doing sir? We're good. We're, we're back from Texas. That is the greatest area in the history of mankind that Texas live. The Choctaw Stadium, the hotel there. I went to a Rangers game. I mean that square mile is kind of reads paradise. Yeah, I mean the sports fans paradise, right? I mean it's just the ability to not only hang out, have some grow up, hang out with some friends, but also go to sporting events. I'm jealous. I have not been able to really do that yet. I have been to Choctaw Stadium. I went to a Bras and Renegades game last year, but I have not been to Global Life Park, the Ranger stadium. I have not been to Texas Live yet. I wish I could have joined you guys. It looked like you had a ton of fun and I'm glad that you got part of the troop together. Yeah, it was good. I want to appreciate, thanks everybody for checking out the show, adding subscribers. If you're checking this out now, if you're finding this like and subscribe, we do our regular Friday episodes every week. Obviously this week was different because of the game, but Mike Mitchell will be joining this week. We'll do a full deep dive into what Mike thought attendance and we'll have TV figures. I don't think we'll get TV till Wednesday because the holiday, but either tomorrow or Wednesday we'll get all that stuff. We'll talk with Mike about that so it subscribe. Good viewership. I think when we logged off the show at 11, because I had to run over the tape. I think we had like 1200 people watching, so thank you everybody. Andy carried that with me and obviously Evan and Anthony in person and then sprinting over to do the media availability and Emory and Greg and Parks and Mike and Jovan and Eric and everybody else for that. So Max Karen as well. So appreciate all of that. My PSA just, and it's not even really a rant, I'm very positive right now about everything but traveling Friday, there was reports coming out about this expansion, trademarking things and all that stuff. I want to get Andy's thoughts. I just want to give my 2 cents. I saw arguing on Twitter about who found the trademarks first on the publicly available trademark database, but we need to focus right now for the next 10 weeks on this. We had 9,100 people in Houston yesterday for the game. Now I know that that's Easter and that's fine. I think that's tremendous attendance. We did good and for the Arlington and everything over the weekend, but it's like the first weekend of games. It's like, oh, where are they going to go next year? You need to be excited right now for Chase Garbers against case cookies first game next weekend. That is what we need to be focused on for the next 10 weeks. Then we can get into all this other stuff, but it's such this sugar rush of like, oh, oh, oh, let's enjoy what we have. Let's build, let's share, see my video, share 'em, see Mark stuff, share it, Mike's articles, Anthony's share and build what we have right now and get excited for that. That's kind of my two steps. There's a phrase I use a lot, which is don't draw the cart before the horse. And I think this is definitely emblematic of how behavior goes in this space where people really want to have a team. They really want to have a team expand to their city or they expand to a certain area that they think is profitable. And look, I'm no stranger to this. I have, I have talked about having a team in my area for God knows how long because I lost my pro team. I want another team. But as you mentioned, the reality right now is they have to take care of their own teams. They have to take care of the people they have right now. They have to take care of the markets that they're in right now because quite frankly, they're not performing at the levels they're going to if they want to be sustainable, long term longterm sub 10,000 attendance is not going to get it done in the longterm. Is it fine the first weekend? Sure, that's fine. I think they need to keep building on those numbers really. I learned a lot from your podcasts this weekend, the whole live show and really getting all the eclectic individuals that we had throughout the entire time, which credit to you for getting all those people on your connections are wide. That breath is insane. And I kept thinking about, oh my God, I can't even think about the connections you have in Canada standing past this once you get back into the CFL talk. But the reality is that you're going to have to have individual owners who are able to fund and keep profit flow coming into the league if you're going to really be able to have something sustainable. And that's just going to be a reality that I think Fox knows and I think that the XFL owners know that has to be part of the equation. Now, when is that going to get done? Remains be seen. But that has to be part of the equation before anyone can even think about going to another city or even daydream about being in another city. You got to get through year one, you got to get through year two, which the USFL got through two years and there still was no expansion. They collapsed some of their teams, so it obviously went the other way. And I think a big part of that was there was no individual owners. So I think before you get that part of the equation involved in the talks, there's going to be no expansion. Sorry. But overall I would say, and I want to get your thoughts because we'll go game by game here, but I thought it was really good. I thought it was an exciting weekend. I thought it was fun seeing, even though it's the USFL, roughnecks whatever, seeing the roughnecks verse, I like feeling like Memphis is an entirely different team for vary reasons, but exciting to watch, so exciting to watch. And here we have the Brams, who knew Chase Garbers is the next greatest. I'm literally tweeting. I'm sitting at dallas Fort Worth, got the TV on the bar like a j Smith and Jesus Garbers are absolutely cooking here, running around. So that's what I liked from the weekend. There was a lot of, and you're going to get this in spring football, the Ramas were not great last year and obviously new coach and quarterback and all that, but I like seeing that kind of stuff where it's not the same status quo where the Chicago bears have been horrendous for an eternity. You can turn things around really quick. It's really flexible that way in terms of getting the fan bases excited. I think if you're the Brahmas, I understand why you did not come out attendance wise on Easter Sunday, but hey, if you're a Brahmas fan, I'm excited now to go to that game next week and that's cool about that. And I think just enjoy having AJ Smith as kind of a co friend, whatever you want to call it on Twitter, but seeing let's breathe new life into some of this stuff. So that was some of the positives I saw coming out of it. What was some of the things that you enjoyed seeing? Yeah, it's funny you mentioned that I couldn't help but think about as I mentioned, the game that I went to last year, the Brahmas and the Renegades game that I brought one of my friends to, and that was a 13 to 10 slug fest where all the Brahma QBs were. They got down to, I believe Jawan Pass at that point. Kirk Bent was in there. There was just a bunch of random guys in the offense. It was future, nothing was getting done. Dallas Arlington had nothing going for them because they hadn't traded for Elise Perez by that point. So I'm having to watch Drew Lit and company just completely toss it around the yard and not get anything done. And it was really tough to watch. It was a tough watch. Honestly, I felt bad. My friend came to it, I was like, I promise it could be better than this, but I can't show it now. San Antonio. Yeah, complete Makeover. This is a completely different coaching staff obviously. I mean basically, sorry. It's basically the Houston Roughnecks. I mean it really is. A lot of the personnel and the coaches and everything are the same that transitioned over. So the roughnecks you're watching on TV are the gamblers from last year. That's still going to be really confusing for people I think. But the San Antonio team, I mean, I just couldn't help but be so mesmerized by the fact that Chase Garber's performed so well to Chase Garber's. I was not familiar with your game. I did not understand the breadth of which you could get it done. But look, I had to see it first because I know the coaching staff talked about it. I know they seemed really excited about him, but I hadn't seen it. I hadn't seen an account and I hadn't seen any other iteration of his past performances. So now to see him come out the way he did out of the gate, that first quarter especially, I mean he was just pinpoint passes, really good timing. His snap to throw ratio was fantastic. I just really loved what he did during the entire game. Yeah, I was going to say, Andy, I got dinner at eight 30, so we got to make sure we get this podcast wrapped up. Okay. I got plans here today. I also liked because I was watching the Ramas game at the bar and then I was able to get the Memphis game on the plane fly at home. So I was actually able to listen to that one and I loved my favorite Sam. The weekend was John Dlip. I wanted to sense that call was terrible. You've had a great first half, but that was garbage and it, so at some point today, hopefully have a good first half of the podcast and then have a bad first half of the podcast and then we can get all that stuff. No, it was exciting. We had, I will say wise, the St. Louis Panthers game until the record breaking kick at the end from the high school kicker. And I've already been tagged MLF football right now. Report Lions have inquired about Jake Bates. That game was a little snoozy until we got to the end. That was exciting. But otherwise, I would say that was probably the low point of the weekend. How did, and we will go game by game here. We get about 1250 minutes in here. How did the main game, the kickoff game come off on tv? I was up in the press box. It was weird. The rock was running around and they were going to do the press briefing with him, but they needed him to do the thing on the field and then Anthony was covering it was kind of a mishmash getting that all going. How did that come across in the Rock and everything else kicking off the season? I think it came off pretty well. Pretty professional broadcast. Obviously Fox has been in the game. They've had their skin this game for a while and I think Kurt Bey has learned a lot. He's gotten better. It's so funny when going back to old tapes and watching him mispronounce teams names or players' names. But this time around, I think he was really good. Joel clad. I mean, he's just dynamite. He loves doing this. He knows all the players. He's got a lot of his notes there. He's really into this whole thing I love. I think that was the perfect duo come out with Brock KI was a little surprised. I thought Brock Kard said on your podcast, correct me if I'm wrong, I thought he said about last time he was on here that he was not thinking about being part of this anymore and now he's actually there. He is on the sideline, so it's good to see him back and he got a lot of interactivity with the coaches and the players. He was talking to Bob Suits for two minutes and I think Bob Suits at one point just blew him off, was like, Hey, I got to do my thing, see you. And just kind of dipped out the interview. But I mean the energy was there. I think the presentation was good. They clearly know what they're doing with this whole product. I actually really liked the one later on the day that St. Louis and Michigan won a lot too. Kevin Kluger I think did a great job. I think that presentation, the Fox presentation of spring football is a really good presentation. It's very professional, it's very well put together. The graphics are good, the stats are there, the knowledge is there. For the most part, I think it's actually pretty well put together. So I have to commend Fox. I think they did a really good job of the kickoff game and just again, having stallions and renegades there, giving both of 'em their props, both of them, their flowers, all the players from both leagues. Their props I think was great. Yeah, the presentation was good. I will say, and I dunno if this is a Fox thing, I dunno if this is a whatever. Now, social, this season now during the games is tremendous in terms of posting. The second the trick plays done, we're posting that the second, the field goal kick, getting all the reactions, all the screenshot, all the tweets. I don't know if that's where we're in Fox people to that, right? But remember last year we'd be sitting and I understood it was a lot of one man or one woman bands running around doing that. Clearly they have people back at Fox hq, they're, Hey, we're clipping these from the game broadcast. We're not, I mean I would see Haley at, because we'd be in the front row, the Dragon scans, go get the video, run back to the computer, put the SD card in, you're like, cut it, upload it, and then run. That is not just having the people here. So I would say tremendous for that kudos because if you're sitting there, even if you're not watching this last weekend, but if you're sitting there on Easter, you're seeing these clips, you're seeing these things come out, you're like, God, I got to go check this out. You had the DO Kilman or Kyle, however you say it, the doves of the world on Twitter, like centers are catching touchdown passes in the UFL. It's exciting. And that's what you need. You need to break outside of just if I follow the UFL on Instagram or Twitter or TikTok, I'm getting this. You need to start getting these things going viral. And I thought that was great. I thought you had last season, the big swing with the battle HOKs game where they were able to utilize basically every rule book to get the three points and all that to get back in the game. I thought this with aj, with the trick play with that, with the field goal kick on Saturday, you had 10 pole moments. I thought from each of those games that were real actual football that I thought gave people an opportunity if you were like, Hey, I'm sitting around. I'm bored. This is cool to check out. So I thought that was great. Yeah, no, it was instantaneous and I really liked that they brought that up. There was one player I remember I saw, speaking of interacting with the media, I saw one player that was trash talking Pat McAfee, but I can't remember who it was. He was going after him a little bit for something about kicking or something. I can't remember. I have to go back and look. But I mean there definitely was interactivity. You had some of the NFL media people catch on and look at it and go, oh, okay, the UF L's here. What's this the usual? We've been through this Merry-go-round. The usual like, oh, there's this new league here. Okay, cool, whatever. So it's a matter of sustaining that throughout the season. Obviously there's going to always be that first burst of additional excitement and intrigue, and then we'll see where it goes going forward. But yeah, no, I agree. I think the social media clipping, the repetitive nature of getting everything up as quickly as possible, I think that's good you put in the work to do that because then you were able to get people catching on and excited and get casuals involved in the audiences. And on Easter it's obviously tough because people I assume are not necessarily on their phones unless they're in church on their board. But if you're a good Easter goer, you don't do that. But no, I think I absolutely agree. I think they were really crisp and they were really instantaneous with their posting And all that. The post-game graphics, I mean we deal with that with the CFL and I. Even when the Mariners play and the Mariners loose or whatever, I like having that post game graphic to be able to tweet to share my opinion on, to be able to see what other R people upset with this, the Kraken. It's just a way to build that. So just tremendous job all across for all of that. Let's get into some football here. So this is the big show down here and I'm learning my way around the stats page right now, so there's a better way to do this next time we can do that. But obviously I was traveling and not in front of my computer to get all of this stuff, but stallions, they didn't clean the clock the quarter, the first half tied at half, then they really got away with it. What did you make? I was press box. I was talking about mango running up and down. He was there with his family. What did you make of the kickoff game? Look, the stallions made a statement, especially that second half. I mean they approached almost 200 yards rushing by the end of the game. They basically came into their job and ran over the renegades in the second half. They knew what their game plan was going to be once they finally got the halftime and got their adjustments. I mean they ran the ball really, really effectively. I can't help but be impressed by what their coaching staff took care of in that second half, Matt Rell came out kind rusty. He threw some fastballs in the first half that I think could have been a little bit better, little less mustard on them because he definitely sailed a couple of passes. The interception was not his fault. That was Deon Kane's fault. And he passed the ball to him and it came out of his hands and into a hands of the DB from the renegades. But then they really started to get going that pass before half when he just threw that deep field throw to Cain for the touchdown. And when he got behind the defense of the renegades, I think changed the complexion of the entire game. If that doesn't happen, I don't know how the second half goes, but they did their job. That was really good. Corral looked a lot better in the second half. I think he's their starter and it is just a testament to the stallions to keep just circling and continue to cycle through all these quarterbacks and somehow change their offense enough to be able to accommodate to all their skill sets. I think that's the most impressive part here. You go from, it's not easy to go from a Jamar Smith to Alex Magoo to a Matt Corral, and they're throwing Adrian Martinez in there too and he's running around. So for them to be able to adapt to all these different quarterbacks and still have a consistent amount of offense really is a testament to their coaching staff. Skip Holtz is a veteran here. Just a really good job for them overall. I was just so impressed by their run game in the second half. Well, and yeah, the quarterback thing, and I mean it was the interesting question, right, because I'm like, I'm so glad I made the thumbnail for this week and I had Jaymar Smith on there and then the depth chart. So I changed it, was able to change it for the YouTube one, but the presumed J Mark coming in and taking care of business and all the history you have with Holt and all of that. So you see Matt Corral as the starter moving forward. I mean, I know we'll get more practices and dev charts and stuff this week, but you think he's earned that? I think so for now, absolutely. And I know there was questions because Jaymar Smith wasn't even on the active roster on Saturday, which was surprising. But look, Matt corral's arm talent is undeniable. He clearly has the skills, the tools. I think it was just a matter of him getting enough reps. He had played limited action with Carolina really in the preseason and didn't look good. But Carolina has been a dumpster fire the last three years, so I don't think that's really on him. And the injuries also didn't help. He had a lot to overcome. I mean, he hadn't been in a real game since January 1st, 2022 in the Sugar Bowl and he got hurt in that game. I remember watching that game. So for him it was just sort of shaking off the rust as I mentioned. I think you have to annoy him as a starter for now. But Adrian Martinez is really interesting too. Don't get me wrong. I really like him a lot. I want to see if they can use him a little bit fast. Adrian Martinez is fast. I love his legs. They need to find a way to use him in that offense. So I mean, that's the thing. They have options and if Crown goes down, I don't think they're hurt. I mean they probably have the best quarterback room in the entire league if you're really looking at it. If you're talking about the skill sets for all those guys and some of the experience with Jaymar Smith, I think they're fine. So yeah, No, I'd say the speed really translated us all up in the press box when the Adrian Martinez would be running around and we're like, man, he's really fast that way in terms of, because I'm looking here at the stat line and everything. Renegades just kind of fell apart. The second half. A lot of struggles there. I was at the bar after waiting for Anthony and Evan who were doing the media availability, had a great conversation with the Luis President's cousin. He was there. Remember we talked with him? Where the heck were we? San Antonio? We were talking with him and he was there. We had a beer kind of talking about Luis. I thought Luis had a decent game. All things consider, like you said, at least the one interception, what did you make of Preez and the rest of, because the renegades, it has always been the offense. It's kind of been the issue here getting everything going. And I think that's the thing. Their offensive line had some issues at the beginning, which I mentioned in your show. There might be some time that is needed for that cohesion to come through and it wasn't really coming through at that moment. And look, it's going to take time to reestablish himself with some of these receivers like Deontay Burnett. I think he can do more to sort of reestablish himself with a guy like him. They need to get the running game going. Look, they got to find a way to use Lety Brown more. They need to find a way to take some of the pressure off Perez. I could tell by the fourth quarter it's going to be on his arm and I don't think he really had the help that he needed. He tried to force a deep pass that got picked off. It wasn't going to happen. There needs to be a little bit more of an opening for him to work within and it can't come from the fact that the other team is just gassing your defense down by 13 points. So you have to find a way to get around that. So I mean, I think Perez was fine. He tried to do what he could. He had a couple of moments where he was really on fire and he had some really nice throws to the sideline and then intermediate routes. But I think that he needs to have a little bit more assistance on offense, and I think they'll figure it out eventually, but it's going to take a couple of moments to figure it out. It certainly wasn't something where I was afraid Birmingham was going to come in and just clean the clock. I mean, renegades were at least competitive for that first half. It really felt like they had Birmingham on the ropes a little bit and then able to tie it going into the half. Perez had the one where he scrambling and the guy was around his legs and he started, I thought Luis looked really good. And you definitely see his intelligence and just kind of the way that he's able to see the field, and we've talked about this before, him being a coach or associated somehow with football as a must afterwards, just a because of the experience, but B, just how quick he is to kind of process and see everything. I really enjoy that. I guess now is the time of any to talk through all this. We'll get through the other games, but the USFL, the XFL, do we like this? And obviously with the Panthers inexplicably beating the battle hawks here. Okay, we'll talk Coach Becker in just a second, but do you like this of them kind of weak stoking the fire? Well, they better post this graphic every week if the XL starts racking up wins. That's all I'm going to say. If they stop doing that, then we'll know where their allegiance lies. But look, I need to see them be consistent with this if they're going to do it. But I personally, I'm a little tepid about putting up graphics like this because you and I have both experienced the throes of passionate fandom from both of these sides. And I know it should be passionate in a positive way, but I hate to say it, it's not been like that. It's not been all roses with some of the people involved in both of these corners. So I want to be a little bit cautious about stoking this fire. I don't really approve of it very much to be honest. And I think they need to be careful about starting that in the trap because I don't think these people, these two leagues, the people in these leagues don't like each other, but I don't think it's in a point of like, oh, I don't like you, but I respect you. No, I don't even think it's that in some ways. So they need to be a little bit careful about starting fires that they're not prepared to try and put out David's upset. Inexplicably. I knew mission. It was inexplicable to me and I watched a lot of Panthers games last year. Just the other thing here, we'll get to that game here. UFL tweet. We're live with Pat McAfee. Hey, we're live. We're live with Angie Murray right now. Guys, come on. Come on, come on. Pat doesn't need the rub. Pat doesn't need the rub unless we're talking Des drawing on there. Anything else I do want to talk about? We'll do the field goal kicks and all that stuff. Anything else with this game? Any other final thoughts? We'll move on to the next one. I think Birmingham's clearly your top team right now and they prove it every year. They just keep coming out on fire and really just put in the work to get their team to look like they do week in or week out. I have to say I'm very impressed with them and they're still going to be on the road going to the next week, but it'll be interesting to see. Look, my biggest thing with Birmingham is what's their home crowd going to be like? And boy, howdy. I can't wait to actually get attendance numbers on their home crowd and really get some of that data. I want it bad. So we'll see. But Birmingham is your top team for a multitude of reasons. Their defense, we'll see how their defense holds up. I'm curious to see if Scooby Wright could stay healthy, if they can avoid some of the injuries that they had last year and not rely on spectacular performances from their quarterback like they did last year with Magoo. I think they'll be okay. Yeah, I just want to point Scott here, ghost and Scott's a member. You can become a member. I think it's 99 cents a month. Just help support. I got the hotel bill for the Arlington trip here yesterday, so this isn't the moneymaking endeavor. But no, I appreciate the support. We had a comment as well, Mike. Yeah, Birmingham always worries me with their attendance, all the success in the world and they certainly have the home side of same. We'll see, we'll see. I mean you can't say anything until we see it, but I definitely think it helps not being on Easter Sunday or whatever, even when we were there the first season and they did good for the kickoff obviously, but it's tough. I don't know why they didn't do it next week. I just would've started next week. I would've avoided all this nonsense this weekend with basketball and having to play. We played at noon or whatever, I would've kicked that down the road, but we'll go to the next game. Just a reminder, we got like 120 people watching. Make sure thumbs up the video. If you're watching on Twitter, make sure hop over on the league, give a thumbs up, subscribe, are giving away two tickets to the championship game. If we hit 3,500, we're within a hundred and change. So that would be awesome to working on that for a long time. But Zach had a question as well. If I'm going to the championship game, I might have to Now, I had a wedding that Saturday and then wasn't going to be able to make the trip on Sunday, but we'll see. I had XFL people. Hey Reid, you coming back out again? I thought that was nice that they asked me like, Hey, good to see you. Are you coming back out? It makes me feel like someone or if they're just like, Hey, do we have to deal with you again here another weekend? Either way, I appreciate being asked, but I like it. Subscribe, give a thumbs up to the video and then get us to that 3,500 so we can, we'd love to give away those tickets and talk about something else because that would be cool. We have been talking about that giveaway for a long time, so here we go. Panthers, battle hawks. This was a little slow. I missed the first little bit transitioning from Choctaw, changing to the hotel, getting to the bar, and I'm like, okay, well I haven't missed a lot on here. What stood out to you about the lack of, I guess, offense for both of these teams at least starting out? Boy, these offenses were slow, really sluggish coming out of the gate. St. Louis had some problems running the ball. They need to figure it out. Wayne Goldman, I didn't think really impressed his first game and there just wasn't a lot to work with there on the run game. McCarran really couldn't use play action effectively the entire game. I think McCarran really came on in the fourth quarter. He looked awesome. He looked like maybe the best quarterback in the entire league. Again, Marcel Aman, man, I'm so happy he's finally starting to make plays because last year he got hurt and he basically took a backseat to the show. That was Hakeem Butler and he was able to really make some incredible catches. One being a huge fourth down catch when they were trying to get their comeback going late in the game. And I have to say St. Louis, I mean they're fighters. This team just doesn't die. They're gnats. They just keep hanging around. They did this last year. It was very reminiscent of that Brams game last year when they got the touchdown, then got not the onsite kick, but the try the fourth 12 try, and then they were able to convert and then they got another touchdown and a three point conversion. I mean they just seemed to find a way to win these games, but this time around that was not going to happen because Jake Bates of all guys kicked a 64 yarder to win the damn thing. I mean insane story for a guy to not kick since high school. And then they just casually trot out, make the first one gets frozen because basically St. Louis called the timeout. So they tried to ice the kicker and it didn't work. He just drilled it again. He had been practicing for the entire winter. It's kind of insane, honestly that he would just come out and do that so casually, I love that. But for St. Louis, it's a huge missed opportunity. It's a huge missed opportunity. They should have won this game. EJ Perry I don't think was very impressive. He should have thrown a pick six to beginning the game. Linebacker dropped it, just point blank on the first drive was not really crazy about Michigan's offense. One thing I will say about them though, I think their defense is legit. Fred goodness is great. Breland speaks is great. Their defense showed up and they kept the battle hawks in check. So it wasn't all just battle hawks didn't do their job, but I do think St. Louis ultimately should have won this game and they didn't. And I think a couple of things, just that field goal is just insane. You have to give 'em credit. That's such a walk off. What an incredible moment for him, an incredible moment for that team. But I can't help but feel like St. Louis dropped one here. And this is funny too because right, isn't this where Justin Tucker had the NFL record as well, right against Detroit? So I mean obviously inside and all that. What's the record on that one? Is that 65? I believe it's at 65 now. I'll double check, but Someone I saw posted, they're like, I was in attendance for both of these games. That's Pretty crazy to think that you're in. Yeah, Dave said the exact same upright. So yeah, definitely it was even going that way. I watched that video a million times of all the fans and they're like, oh no, yeah, 66 yards for Tucker. So tremendous that way. And again, what I like about this, and obviously I shared at the beginning here, where is it? Lion's already looking here the kicker, but this is what we need. This is the kind of stuff that is getting not expansion. This is what we need. I want it to be more than just special teams, people getting the nod, but obviously anybody that can get any job, I don't care if you get a long snapper into the NFL, if this is part of what we're doing, if this is part of what we're, I know Daryl wants to get away from the developmental stuff, but if this is part of going to be the league culture is getting these guys in, this is great. So it's tremendous on that and you have the rock tweeting about that and everything, so you're getting kind of everybody involved. I think it's a good that way. We had a question here about battle hawks. Did this last year slow start and then kind of coming on again, do you agree with that? Do you agree with age being an issue for McCarran? What do you kind because they did this, I do remember last year not being super overwhelmed at the beginning Age. I don't think so. I mean his acumen for the game is clearly on brand. I think he still put some decent mustard on that ball that he throws. I don't think it's really much of a problem with mcc. Karen. I have more of a problem with their offensive setup and I think they're going to have to figure out again how to get all these weapons going. I think their receiving corps might be the best in the entire league because what you have Darius Shepherd coming back who's a great kick returner, you have Hakeem Butler and you have Marcel Aman now starting to come into the fold and they're able to get enough offense going from just their receiver, their receivers alone. I think they're going to be fine, but I'm just a little bit concerned about their running game. I just don't think it was really impressive. Conversely, the Panthers, my God, west Hills was awesome. I mean he just looked like a man amongst boys. He is. Shoulder pads are just popping out to insane degrees and he's just running over guys. He was incredible the entire game. He had some huge runs, great asset for the Panthers to have and I think they need to lean on that more because again, I don't think it's there with their quarterback room. It's kind of unimpressive to me. Perry will do enough. He obviously has enough with his legs. He got two rushing touchdowns and he can scramble out. But from a passing game perspective, I don't think they have much to work with maybe Devin Ross. But their receiving core is a little bit thin from my liking. So the Panthers need to continue to work on their passing game, but for now I think they have to lean on the run game and that's kind of a Mike Nolan coach team. It's defense and it's the running game. That's how he won in San Francisco. That's how he's going to win in this league. That's how they won last year and now they were four and six, but they were sailable to get into the championship game. They still did the thing. So clearly this team has an identity. They just need to know how to lean into it more and if they want to be more consistent on offense, they got to use that running game and they got to lean in the West Hills. He's really good. A couple questions here, Flay. Is Houston good? I'm new to this league. Houston was, well, it depends which Houston you're talking about. We'll get to the Houston game here. But the new Houston, I think if you're a Houston Roughnecks fan, I think Philip is on that video where the guy's throwing himself over the ledge. I think that's where Philip's at today with the spray and the ladder. Mike here, quick question. The NFL team's already calling for Bates. Can he just up and leave the UFL if the NFL guy signs says he locked in for the rest of the season? Rock joked about that. I don't know. I guess what's your thoughts on this? Because certainly the lions aren't playing right now. I mean, do you just sit out and not worry about getting hurt? I mean might as well stick around, but what do you think? I believe as far as the contract goes, they're supposed to serve that unless something happens where they sign a contract with. If there's a specific contract made with the NFL, I have to double check that. But I mean for him, if he should just keep kicking until something happens, if the lions really want him that badly and want to sign him to a contract, then so be it then go ahead. But until then, I think he needs to keep playing and continue performing the way he has one as great as a story as it is. He also needs to show that he can do it again. Of course, for me it's about the opportunity. If it comes along, then yes, he should go ahead and take that opportunity a hundred million percent. But until then you should just keep kicking. I don't think sitting out is really going to do a lot of good. For me, it's about again, putting tape on, putting good cane tape out there for teams to see, even if it's just one kick. I think you need to be able to continue putting in more kicks overall to show what you can do. Yeah, I think that mean this is good. Exciting that we're getting all this right now, but this is definitely, I'm trying to pull up some of the show here, but this is definitely like yes cart before the horror show. Let's get through it mean I know he did it twice in the game. It's still tremendous, but let's get through that before we're signing him to a million dollar contract with the NFL. Zach has a question about the battle hawks. Do you think because he's a Battle Hawks fan, my team's issues are more defensively or coaching. My dad and I go back and forth. He thinks it's coaching. I trust Anthony Beck. I trust the coaching staff. I think they're going to figure it out. And actually the defense looks better than they did last year. Last year they had some real issues with their linebackers and it just seems like they got kind of pled in the run game sometimes. I actually think their defense looks a lot better. And as far as their coaching goes, again, I think they'll be fine. It's more of a matter if they're going to get Bruce Gradkowski and a Adrian McCarran on the same page again, but it's about getting cohesion in the offense. McCarran wasn't there the entire off season, obviously he was with the Bengals and there was questions as whether he was even going to come back. So I don't think even having those reps of the practice time, it's going to take time for that to kind of come back into the fold for them to really get back on track. I think they'll be fine. I really do. And again, I wouldn't be concerned about the defense. I actually think it's an asset this year as compared to last year. And then for the coaching, again, I'm fine with their staff. Beck is going to find a way to motivate his guys and I just can't help but be impressed with how they're able to stay in these games. Even when things look bad, they always find a way to stay in these games. Your concern might shift more to last year when they outright loss to the DC defenders in Seattle Dragons at home and they looked like they just got run over. But again, I think those were defensive issues and that to me seems like it's been cleared up a little bit. Yeah, we're going to talk here about the Houston and San Antonio that, where was it? Oh yeah, let me ask it. He's switching teams now. He doesn't want to be a Houston team. Well, I think you could be a Brams team. I think that's the team. We're going to get to that game here. As I transition, if fla me, if you're new anyone's doing here, make sure you subscribe. Andy and I will be back. Not always this time on Monday, but we're going to at least for the time being and if Andy's got to work or do anything else. But the game plans Monday is I'll post out when it's going live, but I like doing something post-game, even if it's in the evening. Just this is fun getting everyone on here and comments and everybody about that. So coming up to what I think is the biggest story of the weekend except for the field goal kick, I had made this graphic. We're talking bras and what was it? Bras, defenders. Now kids describe God to an illustrator QB one, James Garbers here. This was, and I'm going to get the game stats up. This was surprising to me at least. Mike Mitchell. Well, rude, everyone really liked James Garbers and people, they were sleeping all that. This was a clinic. I mean this was a great game. I mean they beat the defenders. Everyone would say Mike took the upset. Of course Mike took the upset, but this defenders did not look good. San Antonio looked really good. I mean this was just a statement by the Braas. Their offense looked awesome. John Trey Kirkland was more involved than he was last year. He was out on a trick pass. He was obviously catching the ball with veracity. They threw him around on some end rounds. He looked great the entire game. It's great to have him healthy. There's such a huge difference in this offense when John Trey Kirkland is healthy. And as I mentioned before, chase Garber's just pinpoint passes, looked really good the entire game. I can't help but be impressed by him. He proved me wrong. I'll say that. He proved me wrong at least for one week. He proved me wrong. AJ Smith's run offense, looks like it did with Houston last year and everything just looked really crisp and clean. I do want to make sure that their offense has a running game going forward after McFarland running throughout the entire game was great, but I think they need to make sure that they continue to have a running game. They, it might get dicey like it did last year, but having Kirkland in is obviously a huge asset. Cody Latimer, I mean that's such an addition. That's awesome for them in their tight end room. To have someone like him come in like he did from the Guardians, he is going to be a huge asset for Garbers at least to be able to throw some of those seam routes down the middle of the field. I think that's a huge point of emphasis for this offense. Again, just outstanding performance by the Brahma's offense for the defenders. I mean they just kept shooting themselves in the foot. They had two touchdowns come off the board because of penalties. One being a illegal man down field penalty, which is just a killer that keeps happening in the NFL too. And then obviously the biggest one, which was the touchdown throw that ti had. And then two things happened. One, it was a false start. Two John de Lance, the tackle gets ejected for spitting on another player, which basically, I mean Is he in the league? Is he currently in the league By the end of today? I don't know if that's going to be the case because that's pretty egregious. So for him, that might be his swan song. But then immediately following that penalty, Tommo just throws a hideous interception. It gets undercut by the cornerback and goes back the other way. I mean just everything went wrong for the defenders, especially in the third quarter. So for them, I mean it was just a really sloppy game. Could have been more competitive. Absolutely. I think they just didn't play their A game, but I have to give credit to the Braas. Their offense looks really smooth for most of this contest. Really just outstanding job by the staff. And it's a new era of bra football. It's not the same as last year where the team could barely put up 13 points. We talk here and Jen is talking comments. Jen's a member, you want to be a member, get on here 99 cents a month to shoot that. So we had the big trick play here and I had my little tweet about destroying and all that as well. And just to give my thoughts on this, and it is great that destroying is bringing in fans to the league. A spoiler, more people probably watch his content than watch any of the games this weekend, to be fair. But I just don't like singling out a single, they had a cutup and I don't know if this is, I'm not trying to miser a friend Jay Nos or whoever that made that call with the bra. It's like, let's do a super cut of all of destroying plays from his debut. Are we going to do that for every player? I mean if we're going to sit there and for your kicker, if we're going to do the kicker and the super cut of all the kicker who did not make a field goal had this one go wide, right? They were called the timeout and all that. But if we're going to do that, are we doing the Chase Garber super cut or are we doing the Cody Latimore super? That's where I just didn't understand where it came from, but they obviously had the trick play. I tweeted, I don't know if I would trust him kick it from the 58 yard line either. But this was a cool play vintage a j Smith. But what did you make of any of that stuff? I got a little upset about all this. I mean that's the funny thing, right? He missed the steel goal gets iced anyways, so it doesn't even have an official attempt on the statute sheet. And then Brad Wing just walks out there and throws a touchdown past the center. Alex Mollett. It's kind emblematic of what this league is really about. Again, about all the other, it's about everyone. It's not just about one person. And I don't really feel that. Look, I know from a marketing strategy it's important to get someone like Troy involved, but I don't think he needs to be the focus. He really doesn't need to be. And you know what you want to appeal to his viewership fine, but for me that doesn't really matter to me because in the long run, I don't know really what he does besides just being a cheerleader. I'm sorry, but for me it's not the most important or the focal point as me as a fan of a league like this. It doesn't really factor into what needs to be done, which is putting the spotlight on other players. And like you said, if you're going to do that with one guy, can we do that with other guys? If you're going to have all these highlight tapes and all these interviews and all this camaraderie, can we do that for everyone else included? That's the thing. If this was Fox, do you think he gets the same treatment on Fox? Because I think ESPN tends to play this up too. They really like to ham this kind of stuff up. They treat it like it's wrestling a little bit. I definitely saw a difference between the two broadcasts. Again, there seems to be a certain track that both of 'em go on. If this was Fox, I don't know if they necessarily highlight that as much. I think we'll see when the bras are on Fox, we'll see how much Mr. D destroying really gets under the spotlight. Well, and again, Abdul here talking about kind of the number and it is great. I think it's tremendous that we have, it's tremendous to that. But when we're he had the live in-game interview, we had the super cut we had. You didn't score a point. It's just hard. I get wanting to make it be a thing and Cole Kubick and all these guys we're pulling over and the Batman touchdown, let's go talk to him. I like all that stuff. But this was pre-planned. We are talking to destroying no matter what and it's fine. I mean the bras are my team. I mean, I love Wade Phillips. I love, apparently I really love Chase Garber's now, right? AJ Smith and everything else, but I just don't like it could be the same in any of these. I didn't like it in fan control football. Okay, we're spending 87% of the marketing time on Johnny and then we're talking with the other guy. There are other people on the team especially. There's other people that are scoring points. I would rather have the sit down with Brad Wing. Let me think about this. Have you trained and I think, what was it? I know they talked with, I think they did talk with him. I can't remember if it was him or the center that was like, well there was only one route and this wasn't the right route. But I don't know, I just don't like, it feels like we're forcing the square through round hole here. I don't think this league has stars. They have to make stars and I think they have to focus on people who actually are performing. As I said earlier this weekend, potential is great, results are better. And that goes for the football field too. I want to see results on the football field. And I know YouTube subscribers have their own power, but for me, that's not the power that I really resonate with. And I want to see more focus being put on other players who really put forward the products that's actually going on in front of us. Not, oh, I have to go to his YouTube channel to follow his story. That to me, that doesn't really connects. And look, I'm not their demographic for that. Okay. I'll be honest, I'm not the demographic that they're appealing to. They're trying to appeal to his base and his audience. But you got to mix it in a little bit more strategically than just kind of putting it in. So fervently during a game in which I'm trying to learn about the Brahma's roster, I'm trying to learn about, okay, how's this transition going between Houston to San Antonio and what is DC doing? They're having trouble playing in San Antonio again. We saw this back in May in the championship game. They're having their own issues. Can they get back? That's more interesting to me. Okay, so you got to mix it in a little bit more strategically. It's just kind of the same thing with people during the NFL season. There were so many people that are alienated by like, oh my God, I don't want to hear about Taylor Swift. I swear to God, if I hear this one more time, you have to be careful about leaning way too into that and not alienating your core fan base. And if you like it, it's awesome. I'm just sharing my opinion on it. So I do not enjoy it. I do not. Again, I am not in the demo either, but I just, and it could be anybody. It's not like I don't like, didn't matter. It could be anybody in the world. That's my thing. I don't like when we're, I didn't like last year when there's all the marketings around the rock and we got, let's focus on all the players. Let's focus on all that stuff anyway. But yes, feel free to disagree. It's fine. I don't take any offense to that. We will get Mike's question here, comment here as we move to the last game at Memphis. Pretty good. Too early to tell, but they looked good yesterday. Memphis is a totally different team here and I thought this was, it got a little snoozy at the end. I was kind of fighting with the plane wifi to get all this going. But in terms of the words of Evan Wilmore was saying in the group chat, what happened to my Houston roughnecks? I mean, I mean know, obviously we know what happened to Houston, but what do you make of this? I have a comment I want to pull up as well. Jerry Guano is not it, and I don't think this offense is it either. I'm going to say right now I think Houston has the potential to be the worst team in the entire league. They're offense listless the entire time, not really doing it for me. I think for Memphis. They came out really strong. I think Case cookies looked good. He looked like he was finally refreshed after last season. He's had a couple, had a bit of a rough going ever since that championship game in 2022 because he got hurt, broke his leg, and then he comes back and he is trying to play better last year and the Philadelphia's offensive line is just terrible and I felt bad for him the entire season, but now he looks fine. I am excited for him. I'm excited for the Memphis offense. I think John DeFillipo is going to have a plan for him in this entire side of the ball Defensively, they looked good, but I think a lot of teams defensively are going to look really good against Houston this entire season. I mean, this is a tough year for Houston. You lose your players and your coaches, they move the San Antonio, you adopt the gamblers. I'm going to keep calling 'em the gamble next because they're not really the rough next to me either. If Evan Wilmore is wondering what happened to his rough next, they're not here anymore. This crowd, I mean, look, it's tough to have a crowd like this in Houston because you're in Rice Stadium, you're not in your home stadium because the other stadium is undergoing renovations. I mean, they had sub 10,000 people, which is fine. Honestly, I'm just glad that they actually got numbers for what I assume would be if it were a gambler's game. I'm glad that they actually gave Numbers. You would've Mike credit Mike Mitchell for all of that, but Mike's the one getting all the attendance numbers and yes, I'm glad we got that. I want to credit Mike Mitchell so much for getting those attendance numbers. I don't have to go through the superfluous bit of, oh, well it looks like there's a lot of people there. I don't want that. I want numbers. I want fax. I said that on Saturday. I'm glad that this finally came through and now we have data to work off and we know what we need to use. I know it's Easter. That's tough. I get it. It's Easter in the middle of the day, but still this Houston crowd has been jockeyed around a little bit and they're going to come out and watch a product like this every week. That's tough. That's a tough sell. So Houston, just to look really listless the entire game and they kind of almost got back into it in the second half and then they had that unfortunate offsides jump when Memphis was lining up for a field goal and they actually missed it, but the offsides resulted in the first down and that pretty much sealed their F. So really tough sledding for Houston here. What I liked was, at least I was thinking about this, we like the extra points and all that stuff and won two or three, but it really does help sell a game like this where in the NFL, this game's probably done, but when they're like, oh man, this is still a one score game. I think it helps with that of keeping people and I mean, yeah, that's hard to go all the way down the field, get a touchdown, get to three points, do the whatever, but at least you can sell that reasonably where sometimes in the NFL it's like, okay, this game is put to bed. I will say comment wise on the attendance, Mike Mitchell talked about this on the kickoff show, which if you guys haven't watched that on the YouTube channel, appreciate that. But Mike will be back this week. We'll talk through all that. But Mike has said ownership is very realistic about their expectations this year, both attendance and TV wise. I know when the ratings will come out, there'll be a lot of scrutiny and like, oh, did the UFFL versus USFL game do better than the, I know there's going to be all that kind of stuff, but I think expectations this year, we're getting through this year, which I don't always like. I feel like year we're always just trying to get through this year and when you don't have the highest expectations, maybe you're not pushing the boundaries. So that would be my only hesitation that way. But yeah, I wouldn't freak out about 9,000 in Houston. I think obviously we need to build on that. You don't want to drop on that, but I just think that if that makes sense. I don't want to fixate on that too much, but I also don't want to be a cheerleader. No, I agree. And look, I think overall, I'm going to be honest if I'm giving my overall impressions of this entire weekend, I felt whelmed, not overwhelmed, not underwhelmed. I felt, and I think that's honestly fine for the first weekend after all the tumultuous teams being lost and merging and all of that, we went through the last year. I think this is fine. This is okay. As far as what they performed at, I think the football quality was good this entire weekend. I know our colleague Anthony Miller mentioned the offenses were a little bit sluggish. I expected that. I didn't think they were really going to come out of the game look really that good. I think it will get better, the play will get better as these teams get to get more used to their players, their new players that they have. I think things will get better as the season goes along. But I really was fine with the overall quality of the play. I felt watching the games that this league seems to finally be coming to the realization of what they have and what is realistic like you said, and what Mike Mitchell mentioned finally, because I think the last few years, both the XFL and the USFL were maybe a little bit too big for their britches and expected way too much and then we're underwhelmed by what actually was there. And I'm glad that there seems to be some realism in here involved at least. So they know that the quality of football has to be good. They need to survive financially, they need to look into getting individual owners in the future. There seems to be more of a plan. I feel like there's more of a plan this time around and it's weird to feel like there's a little bit of solidity here. And I mean part of it is, I think this should have been the setup from the beginning. You should have just came back out of the Covid pandemic with Fox coming in and saying, Hey, we want to have a majority ownership. We want to bring out these USFL brands. Let's keep some of the good XFL teams and let's make a league and let's see what happens. That should have happened in the first place. Instead we had two years of both leagues coming back and doing their own thing and trying to create division between each other and it was never going to work. I think this is an alternative universe where this should have happened two years ago. Well, and I wonder what that would've looked like. I mean, I've sat there this whole time when I was at the airport bar yesterday, guy, the game's on and Hey, what is this? I'm like, well, he's like, well, is it the U because is that because the USFL? I'm like, well, it was the USFL and then it was the XFL and then they wanted to merge and then no one really wanted to lose hand in this situation. So then, okay, that's a new thing. And yes, I wonder what happens A of covid and Vince McMahon doesn't bleed all that, obviously, but B, yeah, Fox, if they go to this and decide to do all of this together from the beginning, I think we're in a very different situation. I will just say on that and then we have some questions and comments and we'll get out of here. I did, and if guys, you're new on here and subscribe, but Daryl Moose Johnson was on the show last week kind of previewing the season and I thought his, I dunno if humility is the right word, but just his earnestness of we're doing the best we can right now. We're trying to get through the season and then we're going to reevaluate next year. I thought was good. And just kind of like you said, knowing where we're at right now, right where everything's not going to be perfect this year. But I mean everything went off. I talked with a lot of the people with the league over the weekend and I know it's a tremendous amount of work and it's a lot of headache and it's a lot of cat wrangling and it's a lot of kind of all of this stuff. So by and large, it's really hard to kick off a football league and especially redoing one here with two months to go. So I think overall I thought they did a good job. I had a comment here from Jason for you, I really, I'm a roughnecks fan. Am I the only one pissed that they gave away our team to San Antonio Long, one of the best coaches ever. They had insult to injury. We got one of the worst teams. I said this, you can't give the rug, you can't pull the rug out. I've said this and I had a lot of people read, nobody cares. It's just the uniforms. It's just the, I think this is a thing. It very much is a thing. No, you realize what you had when it leaves you. And that's the thing that happened here. The entire team, the identity went westward and went to San Antonio. That's tough to sell to your fans when they actually care. I don't want to hear people say people don't care. There are fans that have at least like us, invest in enough time to go to the games and do something about their fandom, and I felt that way a little bit with the Michigan fans. I felt like, okay, these people have been around for a year, this is cool. Same thing with maybe we'll see that with Memphis next week. I'll be like, okay, some of these people were here last year. They're starting to get used to their fan base. And same thing with Arlington. There's starting to be familiarity and continuity at least finally with some of these teams. And that's a good thing to have. That's something you need to have. But with Houston, I mean that's tough. Like you said, you just ripped out the cords and basically plugged it into an old TV set and said, here look, it's the same thing. It's really not. And that's really tough to sell to your fans. Well, and the tough thing too, we talked about this with Memphis. Memphis got better if you're a Memphis fan. If I'm a Brams fan, it's like, well, I am a bra fan, but if I was a Brams fan last year, you're like, oh man, we got Wade Phillips now we've got all this and it looks like this. Quarterback's going to be fun. So it's hard to be the inverse of that where my team was really good and now none of the things that were my team except for the name are there. And I love Curtis Johnson. I mean, he was on the show, what, three weeks ago. I think he's a great leader of men and all of that stuff, but he is not Wade Phillips and this is not the experiment that we've had the last couple of years. No, it isn't. And I mean that's the thing. It's less familiarity. I mean, Wade Phillips is a Houston guy. His dad was the Houston guy. That familiarity already built in. So you have that. You had one the most exciting offensive coordinators in the entire league, AJ Smith, and you had an identity. They had identity in 2020 when they existed. I feel like Houston doesn't really have an identity now and that's really tough to sell. We had a comment here, Jason. It's refreshing that someone else cares. That guy you thinks for the good show guys, PS the Roughnecks were great both years of their existence. Appreciate it. Jason, make sure you're subscribed on here. I dunno if I've seen your comments before, so I appreciate that. A couple of other questions here, if anyone else has anything and then we'll get out in the north. Can you do the entire show in that voice? I think that was my stuff, but again, people take this step and I know people get mad at me. I'm like, so I mean this. I'm hitting things over here. This is spring football. It's not really not the end of the road. Jenna, she's a member. Jenna's a member. You can be a member. Always get your comments read. Is that how you star actually will bounce back? It's week one. Again, if I was a smarter person, I would go through and like, okay, well how many players were on the Birmingham that were now and then they're back or did they get, it wasn't, like I said in a group chat, it wasn't like JR Smith, Jaymar Smith went out there and beat Luis Perez. I mean it's the stallions but whatever. And then Jordan says Sideline Mikes are the players. Huge win. I love that. I love the coach flip. I think he's a good coach for that and I like him. And the case cookies. Any comments on that or anything else? I like that and obviously Brock Heward, I know you brought him up earlier. I think Brock's going to come back on the show. Brock and I mostly, I just sent Brock Mariner's commentary and he responds, thanks, but I think I'll get Brock back on. So that would be exciting. Anything on the sideline or any of the other mics? No, I loved the back and forth between Chase Garbers and AJ Smith. I mean AJ Smith's play calling is sublime to listen to John. I mean my favorite moment maybe on the mic was when he's shouting at the ref. That was a terrible call. Alright guys, field goal, unit field, goal unit. That was a terrible call and he is going back and forth between two different parts of what's going on in his head. That was really funny. It was almost like a stream of consciousness moment for him. That was really cool. I love some of the, just some of the fire from some of them. Obviously Stoops is always great. Again, just his candidness with Brock Hu on the sideline was great. I think Brock's really got it down as far as roaming the sideline and really trying to get the most out of all these players. ESPN needs to work a little bit on interviewing the player that just got off the field and is too tired to talk. That's something that I have a little bit of a problem with. It's like can we give these guys a moment to breathe and get Back into place? No, it's got to be in the moment. We got to do it right now. No, but they're hyperventilating. That's how I would feel as a football player. I'm like, I don't want to talk right now. I'm just trying to get air back in me. I get it's supposed to be in the moment, but for me, I just think there needs to be a little bit more strategy with that or I don't know. Talked to the kicker who just made a kick. He hasn't been out there. No, we're logging to the kicker. No more kicker Interviews. Just destroying. I'm talking about other kickers. No more kicker interviews. Okay. Reed wants to ban all kicker interviews. Okay. That's my takeaway from today's show. Well, I have a lot of kicker friends. I mean Matt Manel has been on the show. Ernesto Kyle with the Old Ex about mean he's the show, but I think we're good with all that stuff. Yeah, what was it? John here says Brock was the MVP with that stoop interview. Yeah, we saw that the TV was on and then they were out on the sideline, so I was kind of seeing that as it was going. I will say I like the Cole Coop version of like, I'm just going to grab your head with my hand and hold you in. So we do the interview. I like that where Cole's been on the show and I think he'll come back on, but he's not even giving you a chance to get away. It's like, here, I'm going to grab your face mask and come in here. You're doing the interview. Yeah, very strong man edition of the interview. I love it. But yeah, no, I think this is the access is one of the things that fans really come to and especially with just the back and forth between the players and the reporters, hearing the players talk between them and the coaches. That's really an identifying part of the league and it has to be, if you're going to be able to sell this product, you need to do that. Continuing to hear Dean, I love hearing someone like Dean Bino really talked through the plays immediately. It was almost shocking when John de Lance, for example, when he spit on the player, I didn't even see it. And then he gets into it, it is like, okay, we have a personal fo, he's bad on a player and it's just like what? And hearing that live and just kind of being almost shocked by that and him kind of talking through just very calmly like, okay, here's the procedure and this is what we're going to decide on. Very cool to just have that back room with Dean. That camera angle was great, seeing all the TVs and all the angles. That was really cool. I had a question here, and this might be more of an Andy question, but how is the trying technology at the stadium? I mean to me you're just watching the game and they're showing it. I mean nothing stood out to me for the broadcast. I saw more of it obviously flying home, the game yesterday, the Memphis game. But did you like any of that stuff? Oh, that's freaking awesome. Are you kidding me as a guy who's hated the chains for his entire life, I love it. Oh my god. People coming out and actually saying how much distance is actually between the ball and the line novel concept. I mean the fact that they can just immediately on the spot the broadcasters say, so it's about 14 inches short. Awesome. That NFL, where are we on this? This can exist. It has to exist. The archaic dinosaur chain moving methodology needs to go away. I am tired of it. I know it's all funny for people, but it's for the practicality of actually getting it right. I think it's incredibly important and seeing that immediately come up onto the screen when there's a play and not having to second guess it the entire time and having to go through the whole Merry-go-round of ball spotting is fantastic. I love it. I think it was great. It was instantaneous, it was quick. It makes the game better. I like how Mike Pereira, who was already is this experiment of spring football even going to work and then was like, or my forio, right, sorry, I get my mics confused with pro football. Is this even going to work? And then he's like, man, this league has better technology than a league that's been around the hundred. It's like, pick a lane, Mike. You can't pick a lane here. You can't get the clicks for hating on all this stuff. And then also this was incredible, Reid, that's all he does. He can't pick a lane. It's in his blood that he can't pick a lane. A couple here will get out. I know Andy's got to get to work here pretty soon. Is there any chance some of the current NFL free agents sign with these teams just to get on the field? Yeah, definitely can. I mean, this is the one cool thing right now and I definitely think you'll either be seeing, do we have some quarterback trades here coming in? I mean what's cool now is we're seeing what these teams look like and yeah, I mean they were making moves and trades and stuff up until whenever we lose pre guy than there last year. I mean you really, there's a lot more flexibility with this and I will say from the coaches that we've interviewed on the show, there isn't very much a pride in wanting to win. I think USFL season one had a little bit of like, I got my sandals on here. We're at practice. We're not necessarily super invested in if we lose here the rest of the way out. I think all of these coaches, USL and Ville are really invested in that. Any comments on that? Yeah, I mean your director of player personnel should be looking at other people and your coaches should be looking at other players as you're going throughout the entire season, obviously mean, look, the last two champions, two of the last, if you're talking about two major champions the last year, the CFL, I mean the Montreal Ettes get Darnell Sankey and Sean Lemon signed on in the late season and suddenly they have this incredible pass rushing duo and it helps them get 'em all the way to a great cup win. Same thing as you mentioned with the renegades. I mean trading for release Perez, I mean that was seismic. It was huge. It was game changing. It got 'em into the playoffs and it got ultimately results in a title. So yeah, these kinds of late player signings absolutely can happen and they can make a huge difference in the season just even week five or week six when we start to get to the midpoint point. That's really big and I think that makes it more exciting. It makes it more intriguing and it gives these teams a chance that maybe don't come out of the gate so strong. I imagine you're going to see that from, I mean you could see that from the stallions. I mean that guy, what's his name? Potter, I can't remember his first name, but the GM for the stallions, Zach Potter. I mean he's just always on getting player transactions through and always getting in new players. I think they're always going to be active. They're going to always be looking at ways to improve their roster. So yeah, absolutely. That's a huge part of this. A couple here real quick and then I just want to talk what we're excited for next week we'll get out, these are a couple fly through. How do we get injury reports? SI, Mike and Anthony post, they're supposed to be in the portal. So I was on this week and then obviously I was flying out Friday. They should be posting, what did they do? Like a Tuesday, a Thursday? There should be, I don't want to hold too much against them week one because it's week one. We will see now Daryl Johnson said on the show and we got depth chart. It's kind of the same. I don't know if I ever saw in Memphis, or excuse me, I think it was the DC depth chart intel, and again, I'm running around and we were doing the show and stuff, but this weekend was a little chaotic. I think we will get more regularly posted, but they're supposed to be sent out from the teams to us. If you're part of, I get all those emails and then they're also supposed to be in the media portal, so I will keep an eye on those. Like you said, pat mc McAfee hat on Brad Wing and then they talked with destroying trick play. Yeah, what was destroying part of the interview? Like, hey, how are you a decoy in that play? What did destroying add to that interview? Talking about the trick play. I would love to know what that was. Yeah. Did you love being ice before Brad Wing basically stole all of your glory? Was that part of your strategy destroying? That would be my question. Look, I think talking to Bates and Brad Wing is great. I mean Pat McAfee's a specialist. I mean he's going to love just talking to these guys regardless. So that's going to happen. He's going to bring in all the special teamers from this league and talk to only them exclusively the entire season. Although I did see a comment because Pat McAfee hates the XFL kickoff, so I hope he keeps the same energy now with the NFL incorporating that. He was very anti that last thing. Here we have reels and heels. What are you looking forward to in the week two? So I have the schedule here, we'll talk up. This is supposed to be, I mean we're not going to preview this forever, but to me, I mean this Brahma Showboats game, it's at 9:00 AM Pacific on Saturday out here in Seattle. But that's a tremendously exciting game in terms of renegades, battle hawks on that. I think the Houston Defenders game has lost a little bit of luster here coming out of week one. What games are you looking forward to this weekend? I mean, that's one of your best quarterback matchups right there is Chase Garbers versus Case Cus immediately out of the gate. And also I'm excited to see the Memphis home crowd. They have a second year of being able to build on from last year. This could be a really good showing for them. I'm excited about that game. I think there could be a lot of offense in that game, a lot of scoring in that game. So for me that's a great matchup. It is a little bit early, but you know what? You take it as you can get it. Look, the battle hawks. The battle hawks are going to be absolutely ready to destroy the renegades again. I feel so bad. The Renegades got the streaming last year. They were the first home game for the Hawks was to get the ADEs last year too. And they absolutely vaporized them. And look, I think the ADEs are a better team than they were this time last year going to the Baal Dome. But this Battle Hawks team is going to be so ready to get behind this crowd. This crowd is, I'm really curious to see what the attendance numbers are. They're opening up more sections I believe this year if I'm not mistaken. So they're going to be able to just get a huge home crowd behind them. A lot of energy. Again, it comes down to they're going to be able to establish the run game they need to get that going, but I imagine the battle hawks are going to be poised to bounce back from this week. Yeah. We had a question, and this I said the last bit. Jersey King's asked this a couple times now, how do you guys think attendance will be in week two? Yeah, so like Andy said, battle hawks, this will be, again, I wouldn't do the Easter kickoff with the baseball plane across the street in Texas because I walked, spoiler alert, I walked out of the, because it's Choctaw Stadium, it's right next door to the Rangers Texas Live. I walked out of Choctaw to hundreds and hundreds of people at Texas live eating and drinking. It's like they weren't because they don't know, Hey, we're going to the Ranger game here. We're going to go get our World Series ring. Battle hawks are going to bounce back. They always deliver DC I don't think that the poor performance from week one will dissuade. They always deliver. But yeah, Panthers two home games. Back to back is tough there, right? They were at Ford Field and then, yeah, like you said, the Showboats would be questioning. So I don't know. Michigan's a tough market and I don't think they did tremendously well last year. I mean, obviously they did better than teams that weren't in their market, so that's kind of hard. But any thoughts on the Michigan? What did Mike say was like 13,000? 12,000? Oh no, it was 9,000. It was Less than that. Was that Michigan too? That was Michigan as well. Yeah, they both were sub 10,000 for Houston and for Michigan it was 13,000 for the bras. Yeah, let me see here. I got the final number of, because that to me is going to be tough. Yeah, okay. Yeah, you are correct. 94, yes. So you are correct on that. So that we'll see. Michigan, that's a really big stadium. It's really big. It is a big stadium. But I mean your hope with Michigan is that some of the enthusiasm is rubbed off from the Detroit Lions season. I mean the state of Michigan just had an incredible winter for football. I mean January, they got a championship for Michigan, university of Michigan, and then obviously the Lions had an incredible run. So you're kind of hoping to rub that enthusiasm off a little bit. Actually, to be honest, I think this Michigan Panthers crowded this first week was bigger than a lot of the crowds they had last year. I think last year they had even less, if you're talking to me, I would say generously they had maybe two or 3000 at some of those games last year. So for me, that is really good for them to have this crowd, at least for the first week. But we'll see. Yeah, back to back weeks is tough, but the stallions, I don't see any reason why the stallions won't just completely control this game. I mean there's just the better team they have the better offense. I don't think Michigan has it together offensively yet. Their defense is going to have to put in a lot of work just to stop the stallions. But I got to feel pretty good about Birmingham for Houston. I mean, terrible setup. You're going to dc, you're going to face the beer snake, you're going to face the defenders who are also pretty upset about last week. And I think from a discipline standpoint, they'll play a lot better than they did week one. So I got to feel pretty good. If you're telling me to take teams this weekend, I'm going to say I'm say San Antonio, so we're going to take bras, battle hawks at home, stallions on the road, and then DC at home. That's kind of how I feel. I would co-sign all that stuff. So they had a comment here, I guess the Tigers are playing across the street next week as well. So it was comments of, I guess it was the USFL season one where we were talking TV and even last year there's a lot of, do you do the February with the XFL or do you do the April ride and March Madness and all that. And I remember, I guess it was season one in the USFL being like, no, we're doing April because you're going to miss out. All we're competing against is golf and hockey. There's no real temple. And then all you heard during that entire thing was like, oh, there's all this other program. It's like it's always the best or the worst time of the year to do all that. But yes, but you got baseball now and it's nice and people are excited for that. Baseball's I think hotter than it was two years ago with the pitching changes and all that stuff. I know that we go into a ton more Mariner games. So Andy, anything else from you? Like I said, if you're on here, please like and subscribe the video. If you're on Twitter, click over and get the YouTube channel all this. I appreciate it. Mike Mitchell will be back with me Friday. We'll figure out when we're recording this week, get you Mike's thoughts and then we'll try to get some more player coach interviews here. We'll see how we do that way. And then obviously we'll be back Monday. We'll figure out what time we're doing that next week. Annie, anything else from you? I'm just glad to be back on these recaps. It's been a long time. Obviously we hadn't done it in quite a while. I think I popped on once during the CFL season last year, but you had John Hussey and you had Evans Willmore holding down the fort for you on that one, so I didn't really need to contribute on those. I'm glad to be doing this again with you. Always appreciate it. It's always fun to just talk about the evolution of this game, these leagues, everything. And I think it was a good first weekend. Like I said, hopefully I can join you for the next one next time. You either go down to Dallas or wherever you go. Yeah, I think it'd be fun. And then we will be, I'm going to be at that Memorial Day weekend game, excuse me, in Arlington against the Battle Hawks. We're not going to do any show or anything, but I'll be hanging out. We're going to go see an Inflames concert there at Dallas Live. So I'm excited for that. But yeah, like I said, I appreciate it, John, everyone, I'm going to be on John Lewis this show. I dunno when he's posting that video, but we're going to record tomorrow. So I'll be on with John Lewis and we'll be getting, I guess he'll be getting my thoughts. We'll be pontificating through all of that stuff. So I appreciate everyone, we'll see you next time and it's all of my stuff. We'll see you guys next time.

LIVE From the UFL 2024 Kickoff in Texas! UFL Pre-Game Show!!

Well here we are, live in Texas. Hope this looks good. Sounds good. Everyone should be. I realize now I'm going to have to change my headphones here in a second, but we are here live the professor Andrew Murray. Standing by. We have Anthony Miller here. Evan Willmore. How are you guys doing today? It's crazy though. We're here. This is, it almost feels like it's like the third different league we've been covering over the last three, four years. So it's surreal to finally be here, but it's an exciting time. I think we're in a world where the USFO and the XFL are merge and we're finally going to see how the final product looks today. So I'm excited to watch the games today and tomorrow. Yeah, I saw Mark Perry post hopefully the last time starting covering the beginning of another league. Evan, we were here last night. Lots of action going on. I'll pull up some comments here as well. How are you doing? I'm doing great man. I think Anthony nailed it. It's like whatever differently that we're covering now and it never seems to amaze me or never fails to amaze me, rather how many changes we have here. But I'm excited to be here, man. First time in Arlington at Choctaw, and excited to see how everything works around here. Lots of people. Chuck, then food is on. Fan, are you ready? Set the stage here. So we're going to have, we're going to go live two hours here. Anthony and Evan are going to be here for the first hour. They're going to start heading to media availability. Professor Andrew Murray is going to be on with me, and then we have guests every 15 minutes. I post it on Twitter. The lineup is in the YouTube description. So every 15 minutes we've got Emory Hunts coming on. Mike Mitchell's coming on. Eric Eger is coming on. Coach Craig Jovan, Alfred, all friends of the show going to be good. If you like any of the stuff that we do, please like and subscribe. Lots of work coming here. We're adding subscribers. We're at the kickoff today. And then if we get to 3,500, we're like a hundred and change away. Two free tickets to the championship game. So I might actually make it to St. Louis. I wasn't sure if I was going to, but I might actually be there. But anyway, two free tickets for that. It subscribe. Lots of work coming here. We'll get into some of the football stuff, but just overall surreal back at Choctaw, how are you sensing the vibe here in the community? I'm relatively surprised to see that all the tailgating going on this morning, there's quite a bit of people out there already outside the stadium and we're three hours away from kickoff. So Arlington has always been in terms of 2020 XFL, 2023 XFL, they were always middle of the pack when it comes to end to attendance. They've always had enough people that come out and enough interest that there was a lot of excitement the last couple days. We've seen a lot of media like the local Fox station, local a BC station was out at Choctaw Stadium with Coach Stoops and fans were out there. So I think as the week has gone on, there's been buildup for more and more excitement and I think there are people that are excited to see the renegades back. I think there's more excitement this year just because they won the championship last year. So I think the expectations are higher. I think there's a lot more excitement that this team could end up repeating. Again, this is a more talented roster than they were last year. So they have the capabilities of doing it. It's going to be very tough. I know we talked about a week or so ago, you got dc, you got St. Louis, you got Birmingham. We're probably the favorites to win the title, but Arlington can be in the running for it. So I think there's people that are excited, especially having Luis Perez back. I think that was a big pickup for them to get him back for this year. He made the difference in their championship team last year, so I think having him back and most of the team is back. So this should be a really good football team. This year. We have a question about Matt Corll. We'll talk about that in a second. Always, guys, if the audio sounds weird, let me know. I think we're all good, but if there's any issues, audio, video, just check in. I can kind of monitor it here. Evan, I had a comment here, I'll pull it up. Talking about attendance. I was a little whelmed last year with attendance. I didn't think it was fantastic. Obviously a beautiful day here today, it's a lot where you can literally see Choctaw here behind us. Rangers are playing at six. I'm going to that game. I befriended the security guard that got me a $13 employee. We went around, I felt very sketched. We went around, I was like, is this legal? But so hopefully you get people out here going to this and then going to the Rangers kind of this complex year. We'll get Anthony thoughts on attendance as well. But Evan, what's your sense mean? I know we looked at the seating charts this week, always tough to judge, but what do you think? Yeah, I definitely agree. I was a bit skeptical at first. Maybe the Rangers game would actually take away from attendance and more of the attention would be on that. I think they're raising the World Series banner tonight if I'm not mistaken. So there's that, but I think because the Rangers game is happening, they'll actually be a decent amount of fans who come to the game because of that and they'll do both. So hopefully that'll increase attendance. I'm not expecting anything crazy. Again, we've had so many different iterations of these leagues that I think some people might be getting worn out, but we were at Texas Live last night and there was a guy wearing a renegade shirt down there, so there is some fan pull. It's good to see. Yeah, so Evan and I were at Texas Live. I was having a Shine b Evan was not. I saw some of the league officials there. So obviously they're peeking around appreciative of what we're doing. I see Andrew Murray checking in. Give me a thumbs up when he's ready to go. We'll pull him on then. Don't forget, Greg Parks first guest coming up here at about 10 minutes. So Andy's fixing this here. Andrew, how are we looking? How are we sounding here? We doing all right? You're muted. So I do know that that is not my fault. That's okay. We'll get Andy on you. No, we'll Andrew's still muted here. Let's get you unmuted. There we go. How are you sir? I still can't hear. Can you guys hear? No. Alright, Andy, see if you can work with that. Let me see if it's our settings as well. Anthony, let's talk this to me. The biggest breaking news coming out is that Matt Corral is Matt Corral as the starting quarterback. I think a lot of people thought Jaymar. Do you know anything about is that an injury? What are we expecting there? I mean, that's a great question. I haven't heard anything about, I mean, I'm surprised that J Mar is inactive. That's I think the biggest surprise of the season so far. I don't think many people are surprised to hear that Matt Corre was either going to start or at least be one of the two quarterbacks that Skip Hols talked about was going to be using two quarterbacks this season. So I don't think that was a surprise to see Matt Crow's going to be one of the two, but for AJ Martinez to take that backup job, that's a really big surprise. And from the injury reports, I mean Jaymar is not on any injury report, so I don't know, it doesn't seem like it's an injury. So I think look, the potential of Matt Corral coming in here, he's already been highly regarded as one of the top quarterbacks in the USFL or the UFL and just the way he's been able to, what he did at Ole Miss, being able to, the way he threw the football, the way he was able to run it as well. He's got a lot of Alex McGoo in him and I think that's what Skip Pols saw in him. So I'm not surprised Matt Corre is going to be as one of the two quarterbacks, but it'll be interesting to see what they use with Adrian Martinez. I can see him as more of a package quarterback for trick plays and running plays and stuff like that. I don't really see Adrian as the guy that's going to be able, who's going to step back and throw five to seven passes a game. It's probably going to be more, I would not be surprised that Matt Rell gets the majority of the Snaps. Well, I just saw that question too and then I'll toss to Evan. We'll get Andy Pop back in there. I think he's good. The question was like, oh, JR, he's QB three because the UFL has that rule. You can have the third quarterback injuries, all that, but I mean he's totally active. I mean you'd have to be dressed right. So what's your thoughts on that? And I'll pull up Andy here. Yeah, I mean I was a bit surprised that they named Matt Corral the starter, but there's no doubt that he's one of the biggest quarterback names in this league. And to be honest, I mean I keep saying the rich get richer with Birmingham. I think that quarterback room in particular that they have between Matt Corral, Adrian Martinez, and even Jamar Smith, he's going to be inactive today. But all three of those guys I think bring a lot of value to the table when you're QB three. The inactive QB three is a guy who led you to a championship in 2022. That should tell you a lot. So I think they think very highly of their quarterbacks and I'm excited to see Corral. Hopefully we get to see a bit of Adrian Martinez around this time last year. His name was gaining a lot of traction in the NFL draft. I think he signed A-U-D-F-A contract, the Lions, and then obviously now he's with Birmingham. So excited to see how it unfolds. I know that Matt Corral's name carries a lot of weight and he was one of my top players in this league going into this season. Andy, let's see you on here. Can we hear now? What's your thoughts? I can hear you, Mike, go. What is your thoughts here? The Matt Carral j Morris Smith debate. Well first of all, hopefully I have more false starts than there are in the entire game, so I'm glad that's not going to happen hopefully anymore. But yeah, it's really interesting that Jaymar is not in the lineup at all, is not listed on the Active Today roster today. I think that's kind of a testament to how much depth there is on the Birmingham's stallions roster in general. But also keep in mind, I mean Skip Holtz has had to have a lot of moving pieces when it's come to the quarterbacks, right? I mean, you, me, Reed, we saw Alex McGoo starting for the Stallions in 2022 and then he eventually got replaced by Jaymar Smith in that game where he came back to win against the generals and he was kind of the anointed starter the rest of the season unless he got hurt and wasn't in the lineup. Fast forward to 2023, Jaymar Smith gets hurt. Alex Mcco comes out and has a spectacular season and now goes into the NFL. So I mean Skip Holds is kind of used to shifting pieces for Matt Corral. I mean, this is a great opportunity. I just hope he stays healthy because injuries have just absolutely plagued him ever since he came out of college and even got hurt in his last game in the Sugar Bowl for Ole Miss. So for him, it's really just the key to staying healthy and I think if you run RPO with him and if you're able to kind of use his legs a little bit more, it could really make some dynamic things happen in this offense. I think that's why Magoo was so effective last year. I mean his legs and his arm were both things that were just fantastic assets for this entire squad. And also, I mean they got injured at other positions too with Cyrus Mitchell and a couple of their receiver Marley Williams. They got really decimated by injuries last year at the receiver positions. Both Scarborough got hurt. So really just a matter of them staying healthy. But yeah, I mean for Corral, I'm not surprised that he's starting and that Adrian Martinez is in the mix. Maybe it's a little surprising to people who follow Jaymar Smith and especially on Twitter. He's very pronounced on Twitter, but I think it's just a testament to how much depth there is on the roster. I'm getting questions here about Luis Perez. I know Andy, you'll have thoughts on that, but we'll circle back. Let's go to Anthony first here. I'm going to get my Andy and my Anthony messed up all day. I have a feeling, but Perez coming back, we're getting comments we saw. See Lindsay Scott as well. So I know you cover the Rene Renegade. You do a great job covering a lot of the teams for Sports Illustrated, but certainly the Renegades as well being here in the Arlingtons. What do you make of the quarterbacks there? Yeah, obviously Louis Brands is going to start, obviously he's the main start of this team. A lot of praise from him, from his leadership ability to how quickly he can learn an offense. His football iq I really think is among the highest in this league just because of all the trades and all the moves that he has been put through the ringer really since 2019. The a f with the Birmingham iron. So obviously not a surprise that he's starting. I know a lot of people have questions about Lindsay Scott and how he's going to be used. Coach D, he hasn't really said it formally, but I know Mike Mitchell and I, when we were on a Zoom call a couple of weeks ago with Coach Stoops, he did say that there could be packages for Lindsay's Scott and I think there really should be packages for him. I think when I saw him in the open practice, he's got a great arm when he rolls out of the pocket, he is pinpoint accuracy with the football. I think with him you can really use him on running plays, play action RPO plays. That's the type of stuff they're probably going to be using him for. So is there going to be a two quarterback system? No, not really. I think Luis will probably get the majority of the plays, but I think Lindsay Scott's going to be used a lot like how Kelly Bryant was using the offense last year where he was mostly just running. I think he threw it maybe once or twice, but for the most part, Lindsey Scott's going to be out there to be a decoy, kind of throw people off. But I would like to see Lindsey Scott throw the football a little bit more this year because I think there's a lot of upside with him where if Luis Perez ever decides that he wants to call it quit for football, Lindsey Scott would be a great replacement for him. Well that's my question to Evan is obviously you guys are, the football experts aren't here. When Lindsay Scott was being courted by the league and coming in, I mean it seemed to me at least our fan base, very excited for that. So obviously you're going to go with Luis as long as you can, but what upside do you see from Lindsay in the quarterback situation there? Yeah, Lindsay's name carries a lot of weight. He's somebody that I'm glad to call a personal friend, very intriguing college career, believed he played seven seasons starting at LSU Go Tigers and ending at Incarnate Ward. So he was in college for seven years. But yeah, I mean he's a bit undersized, never really I think fit the NFL game. Pretty sure when he came out in the draft, he was already 25 years old, so had many camps with Jets and buccaneers, but it wasn't exactly a prime NFL candidate I think for a lot of teams. But I do see a lot of upside in him. I think it's an interesting discussion to be having now that Luis Perez is getting older. We've seen him go through all these leagues. You just wonder when is he going to slow down? And I certainly think that he's still got a lot more gas left in the tank. I'm not rooting against him. He is a spring league legend. We all know that I'm going to give him my flowers whenever I can. But I see a lot of potential in Lindsey Scott and I do think that they found the right guy to take over in the event that Louise slows down or gets injured or this thing keeps going for a couple more years. Any one of those scenarios we think very highly of. Lindsey, Scott, Andy, we'll toss you and then we have Greg standing by. We'll pull him up here in a minute bit and we'll talk more. Don't feel like you got to wax poetic on Louis here for 10 minutes, but I want to make sure you get a chance to comment here. We'll circle back. But thoughts on this and the upside, Lindsay Scott, everything else with the Renegade. I mean time is a flat circle Reed, this guy Perez, just keeps showing up time after time after time. I've been watching this man for five years in spring football now starting with a F. You and I covered game when they opened the USFL in 2022. We see him at the championship game last year. I mean this guy just, he doesn't go away. Don't forget the Jou, the ous, the Jers, of course your team, the Jers, and I mean he's a gnat. He doesn't go away. He just keeps bugging people and he performs well in a way that his football knowledge is. I think he could be a coach after he plays because his football knowledge is incredible. He really just has the acumen to understand the game at a really supreme level. Maybe his athletic traits have never been there and maybe the reason why he's not in the NFL, but I mean there's no doubting his cerebral knowledge of the game of football. So for him to be here once again to start against the stallions again, just as a testament to him. But I like your points on Lindsay Scott, really this whole roster for the Renegades really fascinates me a lot. I'm really interested to see if people like for example, jota Peyton, if he can consistently produce over the season, because I know he exploded in that game against the roughnecks, which I know Evan and Anthony were both witness to, but I just, We have the maid trying to break in the room right now. Sorry, I was trying to mic us and he's coming down. I'm like, ah, the door's coming down. I mean hopefully she doesn't have a battering ram, but just to go off though, I think this Renegade team got stronger. I agree to the points about, as I mentioned Lindsey Scott, one of the names that's really kind of interesting for me to look at is Cameron Hunt, who's the starting center for the team. I know he's played guard. He was drafted by the stallions in 2022. So he has familiarity with that coaching staff. Obviously Jonathan Heinbach, who you've all talked to, the offensive line coach has been on both rosters. So there is some familiarity, some crossover here as well. So that to me is really fascinating just to kind of know that both these teams, these players and the coaches are very familiar with one another. I'll comment your comment here Bobby Scott, we'll get to that in a second. Wide receivers for our, let's pull up Greg Parks here, UFL board. Greg, we look and sounding good. How's everything going here? You look great. You sound great. And I thought, what better time to try my first ZOA energy than on a kickoff weekend for the UFL and it is the official energy drink of the UFL and bye. Gosh, if you paid attention to the Instagram stories of these teams throughout training camp that they almost put this right into their veins. They had it so often. So whatever advertising they use worked for me. So I'm trying it for the first time here today I wanted to say is look at you, Greg, look at you. Look at you. Look at you Greg, and when this stream is done, I want you to keep the same energy about the zone. Yeah, the rock is a really, I am liking this a lot. I don't know if it's the best for promoting football, but it certainly is good to get him on tv. Greg, what's your sense here? I mean I think you're a little bit more of a pragmatic realist like I am here, we're coming today, I'm back in the same hotel I was last year. We got the same kind, different branding, different league stuff. We have different letters on the depth chart. So what are you making them on this? There is a certain level of deja vu that you're feeling. I think I was here last year when we were kicking off the XFL in 2023 and we had pretty high hopes, but I think we were pretty measured in our expectations. And I think it's the same way this time. There's a little bit more reason for optimism. I think just because you have, last year there was the concern of these two leagues potentially taking viewership away from each other. And we've seen online that tribalism between the two fan bases that hopefully goes away for the most part. They still got the XFL and the USFL conferences, but we're all pushing in the same direction this year. And so that concern is out of the way. So it's still spring football, it's still an uphill battle to be successful. But I think when you have entities like Fox Sports, like redbird, like ESPN, again all pushing in the same direction, I do think it gives you a better chance at success than the USFL or XFL individually that we had last year Talking about that the rivalry, right? XFL versus USFL and boiling that to today, especially tomorrow I think is more in their conference games. Anthony, I mean to me that's really smart. Obviously champion versus champion and kind of the both teams, but what do you make of that as the, I don't know if the branding winner maybe as good as it could have, but I think that at least in theory, this is the best way to start out the season with this matchup. You had to have the two champions go against each other and have the tribalism that Greg was talking about be in full fledge with USFL fans supporting the stallions and XFL fans supporting the renegades. I think there could, talking about the marketing side, I really think they could have, I didn't see as much marketing on these games as I really should have. I know on some of the typical FOX shows that they have in the mornings, first things first, I know they kind of talked about it a little bit, but again, I hate when they do that because you clearly know that these broadcasters don't know the league. That's the most frustrating part. I would rather them do a one-on-one interview with Darrell Johnson or somebody within the league or somebody who knows the league better than anybody else. RJ Young, I wish I would've seen him a lot more. I know we have our opinions of him, but he is the Fox expert on the UFL. I should have seen him a lot more on TV instead of Nick Wright not really talking much about it and just speaking in generals about it because there are experts out there that know this league better than the talent that they have at Fox. So I wish they would've done a better job marketing, but that's something that they have been doing over the last couple of years on Fox with the USFL and I wish they would stopped doing it and bring on experts. Now, I'm not saying they need to bring us on, but get Joel Klatt on, he knows these leagues better than anybody else on national television. Put him on TV everywhere and let him talk about It. Well, and they had clad on, I did see him on coward, but it was in the context of like we're talking first round picks and then what do you make of, I mean I did watch that like, oh, let me hear what Joel guy has to say. Evan, in terms of the matchup, in terms of the premier, I hate you where the premier spring league, but there's two premier teams here. I mean certainly a good way to roll out just overall thoughts on that. It's kind the way to kick the season up. Yeah, I mean look, there's a lot to be excited about. Obviously now that we've joined forces, I think there's going to be a lot more exposure on this league. But the take that I always keep having and that I'm going to say now is we're here a couple hours away from kickoff, is just want to make sure that the talent level is right. If you've got more eyes on this with the bigger networks, you want to make sure that you're putting the right product out there and that you have the right players. I work in player personnel, I understand the importance of that. It starts with that on field product. I mean you can do all the great stuff that Fox does from a broadcasting perspective, but if you don't have the players to get it done, it's going to be a pretty tough to be able to enjoy the game and to get excited about it. So I feel like these teams roster wise are very good. I know we touched on that a bit with the quarterbacks. So yeah, I mean I expect it to be a good game. I do think Birmingham will win. I know we're not getting to predictions yet, but I do like the stallions in this game so excited all round. I think again, you guys talked about they pick the right matchup having the two champions go against each other. It was something that I think we had flirted with before the merger had even really been a thing. People were saying like, oh, could you imagine if the stallions played the renegades? Wouldn't that be so cool? And now it's actually happening. So just kind of crazy how things work out, man, I can't stress that enough, just how surreal it is again to be in this position. But yeah, man, overall I feel like we're in a good spot right now. A couple hours before kickoff, Greg talking football here and then we'll get Andy's thoughts as well. We were talking quarterbacks. I had a question. Some started just talking about kind of the wide receiver corps for Arlington and overall bringing in Luis, I want to get your thoughts on that matchup and we'll probably transition to some of the other matchups as we go through these guests. But at least while we have you here at the beginning, what are your thoughts on who do you see kind of going because scary and I think I've had a lot of people comment, both football players and otherwise, Birmingham's going to come in and Molly Wap this. I hope not. I hope it's a little bit more competitive game. But yeah, Birmingham seems far and away, at least on paper, the best team in the league now as Chris Berman always used to say. That's why they play the games. So we'll see. Arlington's receiver core is interesting. I wrote about this in my positional rankings for UFL board that I think they have some interesting pieces. I just dunno how they fit all together really well at receiver with guys like Ante Peyton with guys like Luann Winningham, certainly Sail Canal at tight end is going to be an important piece of what they do in the passing game. So they had to replace a lot of offensive linemen and so how they gel together and work together and how all offensive lines across the league gel together. The one position, and you heard Jim Harbaugh waxing poetic about it earlier this week about offensive lines and how every position relies on the offensive line, but the offensive line doesn't rely on any other position basically to do their jobs. So that's going to be interesting to see where the first couple of weeks is, how do these offensive lines gel together are the offensive lines that are most successful ones that bring players back from previous seasons and have worked together before in those schemes. So I think Birmingham does bring a couple players back along the offensive line. Arlington, I think just one Cameron Hunt, so it's really going to be interesting to see how that develops as well. We'll go to Andy here and I'll get one more for Greg. I see Emory Hunt's punctual standing by here in the background, so we'll get him on here in a second. Andy, the matchup of that, because the continuity, right Birmingham, right Threepeat here coming back in Arlington, we're seeing now the continuity with some of the xl. Is that enough with Arlington and all of this or what are you making To just kind of piggyback off of what Greg was saying and I was trying to point out a little bit earlier is yes, the receiving core for Arlington is a little bit of a mishmash. Avante Payton, like I said, came out in the playoffs and looked really good, but can he do it over the course of a full season? Can Deonte Burnett continues momentum with Arlington that he had with Houston? Guys like Davion Smith, I like Davion Smith a lot. I wonder how much juicy has left. Guys like Letty Brown are a little bit more intriguing to me that are sitting right behind him. I think this Arlington team is still going to go through its growing pains with its offense. Obviously it's going to be working more the intermediate routes. It's not a deep field passing game. It's going to be a little bit more methodical. To Anthony's point, I know he said this on your show the other day, it looked like they're, and Jonathan Heinbach also talked about this too on your show, the practices have been more crisp and they've been a little bit less janky like they were last year. So maybe coming out of the gate, they feel like they're more prepared, but I still think it's going to take time for this offense to gel. So defensively on special teams, I think they're just fine. They're going to be resting on the same laurels they had last year and their coaching staff's going to kind of keep the game manageable. But against teams like Birmingham and St. Louis and maybe something with a more firepower on offense, they might struggle a little bit to kind of get out of the gate again. And it's not because the lack of talent, I think it's just cohesion. Greg, thoughts for you? We'll get you a couple more comments here from you. We'll let you go and then we'll bring on Emory. Like I said, guys like and subscribe. You appreciate the work. Got a lot of guests today, really appreciate everyone the time. Early Saturday morning here. Greg, what are you hoping to see from the game today, from the weekend and then just kind of overall here, just kind of looking forward because we don't even know what expectations are for any of this stuff right now. I mean we're assuming we're back here next year, what are you hoping to see As far as on field? Just clean games. A minimum of penalties, a minimum of turnovers. Turnovers can be exciting but not a half dozen a game. I think that that can be concerning for offenses and things like that. And so close games, competitive games. A lot of what we saw with the XFL last year, I know their margin of victory was pretty small and I think they hit really the goal that they wanted to hit last year in terms of how close the games were into the fourth quarter and things like that. So I think that's really all you can ask for the first weekend and then kind of let the chips fall where they may. In terms of viewership, in terms of what's out there, who talks about the league, that's something that the league doesn't really have a ton of control over at that point either. But to go off of what Anthony said in terms of what kind of marketing was done, and I know this has been a big focus of us in the off season, all of this is stipulating that they only had really less than three months from the time they announced the league to the first game. So that hamstrings league ownership a lot in terms of what they can do from a marketing perspective. But from my vantage point, it looks like a lot of the marketing came down to a mix of what the USFL did and what the XFL did. The USFL had tons of commercials throughout Fox last year. They did that. Again, I don't watch a ton of Fox, but I watch NASCAR and I watch wrestling. I sound like a true southerner. I do live in Florida, but I'm from New York, but I've adopted the southern philosophy of racing and wrestling the two Rs if you will. But the ads during those programs have, you can't miss them. I mean they're all over the announcers talk about the league and things like that. And it seemed like that was the crux of FLS advertising last year. And then for the XFL, it was trying to get in market. The USFL didn't really have to do that as much because of the hub setup, but we're seeing the town halls that we saw last year with the XFL in these home markets this year. And it's a little bit, it's not to the level that you would want, which is I think the main complaint about XFL marketing last year. And it's the same I think with the UFL this year. So all of this to stipulate again that they didn't have a ton of time and while we hope it would be better, we can kind of understand why it wasn't. And just like we talked about last year with the XFL Year two is going to be really important to see What changes they make in terms of acknowledging from a marketing standpoint what they can do better and most importantly, how to get their name out there because name ID is so important and because if people don't know that you're out there, you're not going to tune in. So just getting your name out there, getting the UFL brand out there is going to be a real big priority for this league in the off season. Well Greg Parks, I appreciate you taking the time today, Greg over at UFL Board, make sure follow him over there. Lots of good content. I appreciate that and everything else. Anything else you want to plug and we'll bring Emory in. Nope, that's it. You plugged it for me. Just enjoy the day gentlemen, who you guys are there live. So take everything in and I hope everything works well for you guys. Take care. And Greg, I'm locked in next weekend. WrestleMania, I haven't watched WrestleMania years, I'm so excited. So follow Greg's work for that as well. I appreciate it, Greg. Thank you. And so we're talking with Greg talking about the, I wouldn't want to say the casual because Emory is anything but casual, but Emory doesn't live in this World Day-to-day. I'm really excited to hear we have Emory Hunt here and believe me, I could pick your brain for a million hours about what are the commanders doing at number two here. I'm very invested in this off season as you can imagine, but Emory Hunt, how are you doing sir? I'm doing fantastic guys. I appreciate y'all bringing me on. I'll tell you when I post, when Emory's coming on, I get lots of comments. We're excited everyone's here. Evan and Anthony are excited as well that they can see on here. We will talk games and maybe we'll move to Michigan here, right? We'll do all that. But overall, what are your thoughts here? You don't live in this world. I know you come in and I appreciate you kind of talking the alternative football. What do you make of UFL here? I haven't talked to you since all this merger stuff. Listen, I love it as always. I'm all about more football because it's just another opportunity for these guys to get out here and play. And I'm always willing to dispel the myth that there's not enough talented guys to fill rosters. I've said this before with you even re that if an NFL team wanted its own spring league, they could fund their own spring league. Each team could have their own league, their own team. You bring 90 guys to camp, you cut 45, that's your spring team. So there's more than enough talent out there and that's why I'm excited for the UFL and I do expect it to continue to grow and get bigger. Now that we've combined resources and made it, we have to shrink a little bit to expand even more. So I'm excited to see how it plays out. Let's get Emory's thoughts first and then we'll go around here. So we've talked, we've done Arlington Birmingham, but we have St. Louis here going into Michigan, Emery St. Louis. They're a very loud fan base, obviously missed the playoffs last year because of the Sea Dragons. What's exciting you about what Coach Back and everyone knew we got AJ MCC back. What are you looking forward to here? Continuity is king in football, whether that's the NFL college football, whatever you have guys returning it makes it a lot easier to go into a season. You know what to expect. Guys have worked with each other, the timing should be well. So that's why you see, let's say from a point spread perspective, a seven point favorite going on the road in St. Louis because they have so much continuity. And yes, we like EJ Perry, we like what he did when he came in late in the season for Michigan and was able to do his thing and got those guys playing really good football because he's talented back there. He's mobile, he's an athlete, he's going to find a way to make a way. But can we see that for a full season? And I think that's going to be the biggest question for Michigan, who lost some guys. And also you look at what they have defensively. I'm talking about St. Louis. They're good, they're fast, they're athletic, they have a lot of speed on offense as well. They have the big receiver in Hakeem Butler. So this is a tough matchup, but we've seen this before last year with Michigan and EJ Perry Thein, he's found a way to make the games competitive and won some games in overtime. So I'm excited for this matchup, but it's going to be a tall task for the Panthers against the Battle Hawks. Yeah, that's my question Anthony. I don't see any world here where the Panthers home or otherwise. I think they could play on Mars and then St. Louis. They probably wouldn't. So what do you make of this matchup? Yeah, I think the big thing for Michigan is they're going to have to lead on the running game. They got West Hills, they got Matt Colburn who I think are maybe it may be one of the best running back duals in the league. The two of them together I think is going to be really good. West Hills had a breakout season with the Breakers last year. So I think Michigan is going to have to lean heavily in their running game. I don't love the receiving corps for Michigan, I don't think EJ Perry has enough weapons to really do much offensively. So I think they're going to have to lead in a lot of the running game. But St. Louis is way too dangerous. I mean I can't wait till jour Pearson gets healthy and gets on that field once he's back on the field. That passing game is going to be absolutely. Another guy I'm really interested to see is Wayne Goldman the new running back for the Battle Hawks. He had a good NFL career as a backup running back mostly with the New York Giants. He has some success there. I'm interested to see how he does making the transition into the UFL. I think St. Louis, I think I had them winning by eight, nine points in my prediction. I like him to win this game. I think they're just a superior team or Michigan. I think what helps Michigan, good running game and I think they have a pretty good defense. Frank NDA is obviously one of the best defensive players in this league, but I think St. Louis is overpowered. And one thing about St Louis too, they have really rebuilt their secondary well. That was a defense that wasn't great last year. And I think Anthony Becker did a really good job building that defense this year. I think they're better than they were last year. So yeah, I like St. Louis beating them. Same question to you, Evan. Yeah, I mean I like St. Louis as well. I think Anthony covered all the points very well, but I actually had a question for Emery that I want to ask. Let's go for it. And this is kind of looking in the bigger picture too. We're talking about some of the games this weekend, but just for the whole season, I want to get your opinion on who you think the strongest team is and who you think the weakest team is, at least from a roster standpoint because obviously I know your expertise regarding the NFL, A lot of guys on these rosters that you're probably familiar with. So just trying to get a better idea of maybe where you're at with that. DC has the strongest roster and San Antonio has the weakest. That was easy. That's just how this thing goes. And DC again with the amount of guys they have returning and what they are able to do at quarterback is going to help those guys out. Now there are some teams that have improved in certain areas, but they're, like I said, last year and all throughout the season until sometimes some things change around the way. Some teams are starting the wrong quarterback and this is a league where until the offensive lines gel, you better be able to get out the way. And if you have a guy that can't get out the way, you're going to eat a lot of sacks, man. And so that's probably what we're going to see a lot in this ball game early with Arlington. I know Mr. Spring Ball is back there. Louis Perez is a good quarterback, but you got Lindsey Scott sitting right there, Mr. The offense, and it'll be fascinating to see how long we see before we see Scott this season if he plays today. So that's what I do think DC's rosters legit, their secondary, they take the ball away and they bring it back the other way. So I like to have those guys returning. But San Antonio has a lot of work to do with their roster and it's going to be interesting to see how they work out those little issues on defense. But you got to trust Wade Phillips will get the defense right? But I do like Chase Garbage. I think he's very underrated and we'll see how quickly he can get on the ground running from the quarterback position. Philip had a comment here, woke up at two 30 in the AM to start smoking. I was like, oh, the brisket smoking the brisket. I was like, Philip, you're up. I was up at four 30. I was too nervous for the show. Too excited. One more to Emory and then we'll toss to Andy here. Yeah, everyone's down on San Antonio. I mean they really haven't done a lot. That's my team now. We lost the Sea Dragons. I followed Wade Phillips over there and AJ Smith and everything else. I mean, what is the deal? It just seems like you have so much knowledge in that room and all the other staff they have, It's just about acquiring talent and that's the biggest thing. I don't know from a commitment standpoint how many guys they reached out to that turned them down. But again, this is the purpose of the Spring league is to get those guys and get those guys that game experience. So we may even see a surprise from this team and hey, we'll band together. Nobody believes in us type deal. But it's going to be tough because you're fighting youth versus continuity and experience. And we saw that play out with Birmingham last year in the USFL when they had a lot of guys returning after their championship season. They ran it back once again and route to another championship. So when you have that continuity in a league like this, it is huge. And yes, you may have individually talented pieces, but it's going to have to come together as a cohesive unit. And they do, you're right, they do have two excellent coaches there to get it on the right track, but it's about the Jimmys and Joes and not the X's and Os at some point. Andy, are you surprised with that? I mean in Chase Garbers, and I know Max and he's coming on here in a little bit, I should be excited about all that. And even Darryl Johnson on the show last week. Oh, it's good. We have all this talent coming together and then we still have these quarterback issues at certain areas. And I know Emory's talking, maybe we're not playing the right quarterback right out, but it doesn't seem like San Antonio's anything. I am very skeptical of Chase Carvers just from watching him. But Cal, just from my standpoint, no offense, I think it's funny to hear them sort of talk about him in the same light that they do about PJ Walker, that being the Brahma staff, I find that fascinating. If he can run and throw like PJ Walker, fantastic, great for them. I have yet to see it. So I would like to see Mr. Garber's actually performed to that level before. I'm willing to throw my weight behind the promise. I am a bit skeptical of their operation. The whole setup is just so bizarre to me. I know, look, we've already talked about it on nauseum, but the whole moving from Houston to San Antonio thing is very just odd. And so as far as adjusting to that market, I think that's really the biggest thing. They were getting used to working out of T-D-E-C-U stadium. Now they have to work out of the Almo Dome different setting. So we'll see if they can move that whole operation over there. But it is a bit strange. I think just again, it's a different kind of adjustment period for some of these other teams because it's relocating as opposed to just having your same continuity with your staff and your players. And they do have some of that, but again, it's also trying to readjust to a whole new place and a new community and all of that. So for me, that's sort of their biggest hurdle too. But yeah, some of the quarterback depth on some of these teams, again, what Emory was going off of is with Michigan. I'm not so sure about EJ Perry. I mean, I know he made a couple of nice downfield throws last year. I liked some of his ability to push the ball down the field, but I'm not sure if he can do it consistently throughout the entire season. So yeah, I mean look, I think you have to throw your weight behind the guys that we know about. It's the Birmingham quarterbacks, it's Adrian McCarran, it's Luis Perez. It's the same guys that we've seen because again, it's continuity. But that's, I guess my question for Emory and then we'll bounce back here is the guys we wanted to come back came back, right? We got McCarran, we got Teo. Matt Corral. Now is, are you just surprised that there was no more outreach? I know we're not paying this much this year because right, and the XFL was paying the huntleys and everything more. I'm curious your thoughts. Yeah, that's the interesting part because I would've completely went about it a different way. But it's hard to compete now monetarily when you are in upstart league and you're dealing with NIL money and you're also dealing with the dangling carrot of, hey, you could be in the NFL, you could potentially make it. Your dreams can't come true. But otherwise, if I was a DPP or a GM of one of these teams, I am straight targeting some of these quarterbacks and telling 'em go bypass that NFL process. Talia Tanga would've been one of my targets. You look at jayn would've been one of my targets. You look at guys like DJ Irons out of Akron would've been one of my targets. Joe Milton, one of my targets. I know the money isn't there, but you get at least three games before the NFL draft, so you got a chance to really show up and show out. I know the amount of games on the body, I get that. But listen, you talk about wanting people to tune in. This will get people to tune in. If Joe Milton was starting quarterback for the Arlington Renegades, that's why I was saying, Hey, you got to get Lindsey Scott out there because we know this dude can play every time he's been on a field, whether it's been LSU East, Mississippi Community College, Nichols, UIW, he's balled out. So that's the type of impact we need in the UFL. And I do feel like obviously we're going to watch because we're football fans and we love the UFL, but we're going to get frustrated with the casuals that pop in on Twitter from national outlets that say, AJ McCarran, I don't want to watch AJ McCarran. This league's going to suck. Oh, Louis Perez, this league's going to suck and we're going to get frustrated at them because they're casuals jumping in. But that's why we need the PJ Walkers. We need the Lindsey Scotts, we need the Chase Garber to step in and really ball out and just wow, people see how we got all behind Alex and how well he played. And so that's needed. And maybe after a season we can go back and target some of these guys that are just toiling around on college football rosters. Why is Emory Jones not in the UFL? Right? He's not going to get an opportunity to play in the NFL and he's probably best suited to play here in the Spring League. So there's options for a lot of these guys. It is just that it's hard to compete when the money isn't enough to really move the needle yet. But I think it's going to get there. I'll let you respond to that and then you can respond or answer Emory a question before we get 'em out of here. So what do you make? Yeah, I think the way the league is being built now, they really got to appeal to college fans. I mean, Emory talked about they got to get college stars in here early. They're going through that NFL draft process and be like, Hey, come in here, shell out. Maybe you get a higher draft pick and then you can go on to the NFL because the reality is, I don't know how many, I just think a lot of fans that are going to be watching this, they're looking for college stars a lot of times when they're bringing up these big time players. AJ McCarran, it's what he did at Alabama. It's not what he did as a backup quarterback in the NFL for the Cincinnati Bengals. It's all about what they did. Matt Corral, he didn't do anything special for Carolina or New England in the NFL, but he was a big star in college for Ole Miss. Why do you think guys like Joel Gladden, RJ Young are the ones that are the main analyst for this on national television? Those are college guys. So the UFL has to lean more on finding these college stars. Maybe not the ones that are going to be projected to be the first three, four rounds of the NFL draft picks, but ones that really shelled out, maybe they were all conference performers that are going to be mid to late round picks, get 'em into this league, get people excited about that. Because a lot of times we're selling on the college story, we're not selling on the story of what they did and the professionals, because a lot of times they didn't really do much in the NFL. So it's all about let's get some college stars in here that can really sell this league for what it is. I know Darryl Johnson doesn't want this to be a developmental league. This is a developmental league, let's call it as it's, this is a developmental league to get guys into the NFL. I know that's not the story the league wants to pitch, but I think that's the story they should lean on. Get college stars in here, develop them, get them ready for the NFL, get them moving on. And that's how you build a story with the league. Let's do Evan and I want to get Emery's thoughts on that as well, Evan. Yeah, I mean, fascinating point by Emery. I think that a couple of the names that you brought up, Talia Taga and Joe Milton, I definitely see those guys come into play in the UFL, especially Joe Milton. I mean, hell, before my guy Jane Daniels tore up at LSU, Joe Milton was kind of the favorite to be the best. SEC quarterback and guys still got a hell of an arm. But in the bigger scale of things, I think you brought up a really interesting point, just trying to sell the product. Like, hey, you can come here and play. And yes, it's less money, but it's an opportunity to get reps. And I'll tell you with my work in the IFL, I always stress the importance of game film. I say, look, you come in here, you get game film, you stay healthy, you stay active. That's what these coaches want to see. They want to see that you're playing and that you can still do it at a high level and that you're at your best shape in the event that you get signed to another league. So I think the same applies here with the UFL in terms of moving up to the NFL level. So I just hope to see more of that. I definitely, I'm glad that you brought that up. Emory. Emory, final thoughts from you? I really appreciate you taking the time on a Saturday to do all this. Be curious, and I dunno if you saw Moose Johnson on the show last week. Yeah, we don't want to be a developmental league. We want to change perspective on that. What do you make of that? I know that you've had various controversial takes about how should these leagues actually exist? Listen, and I'm smiling because he hit the nail on the head of what I was saying, what, two years ago? Like, hey, man, stop trying to be the second cousin and be your own. And I'm glad they're going in that direction when they talk about ownership because that's going to help Spawn expansion is going to spawn the rise in salaries and now you're going to be able to offer an attractive package to guy that's saying, man, if I could just get on a practice squad, I could make this amount of money as opposed to being a starter here and getting this amount of money. But now if you can get individual ownership, get a salary cap, you raise a level of pay. Now it's a livable wage for a pro athlete because we all know, and even football players know they're a little bit more realistic than basketball players in the sense that they know there's a line of elite level talent and right there at the line of good talent. That's the difference between a power five and a group of five and an FCS and a D two. We know there's levels to talent and athleticism and football players a little bit more aware of where they are on that scale. And so a league like this will be beneficial if guys can come in and be a pro because that's all you want is to get paid to play ball because we know we, you can't wreck league football. It's the only sport where you just got to go out there and play. There's no Sunday leagues, no church leagues or no around the way leagues that you can go play that gets you healthy and ready to go. So you got to play ball and I think that's where this league can grow, can expand, can attack. And I like that interview you did where he talked about, hey man, alright, we are not going to be a developmental league. I was hoping he was going to touch on the expansion part, but you get another interview with him in the Yeah, Well I'm like whether, what's he going to say right now it's March Because people are like, how did you not ask? I'm like, You'll get another interview with him and you'll get him at the championship game and he'll expand on that. Pun intended. But I do like the fact that we're getting valuable opportunities for these guys to play, especially the offensive line because as much as people that watch the NFL say there's a lack of offensive linemen, no there's not. It's a lack of development and in certain parts, yeah, it is a developmental league because you're going to play, but you can't call it a developmental league because you want to stand alone because development does happen when you play. So in a way, yes it is, but in a way you got to sell it as no, this is something completely separate. This is your own league. You could be a pro here, which is why I like that Luis Perez does come back and tries to be the spring league veteran because you need that. You need to be able to tune into, okay, I'm going to watch Luis Perez play in the spring. I know that means spring ball is around. That's what they have to continue to build, but it takes young players to buy into that that know there's no NFL opportunity for them on the other side. As harsh as that sounds, that's the reality. So let me just settle in here or in Canada, but most importantly here at the USFL or UFL level and just play spring ball three, four years, five years, whatever. You get your football out and then you go and do something else productive as an adult. Well Emery, I really appreciate when a few minutes over with Emery. I don't think anybody will complain about that. So really appreciate it taking the time. We got 270 people watching here and another 156 on Twitter so there should be 270 thumbs up right now. I appreciate Emery, anything you want to plug before you get out? Go and order the football game plan 2024 draft guide over 900 individual scouting reports@footballgameplan.com slash 2024 draft guide. A lot of the guys in that draft guide will end up being UFL star, so why not get ahead of the curve and it helps you out from a betting perspective because now if you know who's on the roster, you know how to wager against these sports books. So it's helpful across all fronts. So football gameplan.com/ 2024 draft guide, Positive comments all around you. Emory, thank you so much. We'll get you out of here. We got Max standing by. We're going to talk a little pro football focus here a little bit. And then just to set the stage, we got about 10 minutes. You guys are going to head, sorry, head to media. Andy's going to stick around. We've got Jovan Alfred coming on, we've got Mike Mitchell coming on, coach Craig Sports and then Eric Eger. So lots of fun stuff still to come here at the halfway point as I totally delete here. My note, they had all of my guests. Max, how are we doing? It's been a hectic week man. There's so much basketball stuff happening right now and that I'm trying to keep up with spring football on top of that. It's a lot right now for me honestly. I have a article here pulled up and let me see if I can just throw it in the stream just so we can see it. Amanda checking in. We'll do a little of a non-football talk here while we got Matt, obviously football, but the Exodus nose here. Here we have a wonderful article, pro Football Talk spring league after spring league after Spring league has failed with UFL, the product of the X-F-L-U-S-L merger change that trend, the experiment begins today. Wonderful, exciting headline, wrong UFL logo on that. Let's go max, let's get Andy talking again and then we'll get the guys here before they get it out of here. Max thoughts of that, like basically why even try? Well I mean I think the why even try is everyone wants to be the one who did it. Everyone wants to be the one who overcame all these troubles, all these pitfalls that have come across all these leagues over the past, what we're coming on 50 years now since the WFL. So everyone thinks they can out business, they can out intelligence, they can out market. And what ends up happening is some of them get closer than others but all of them never fully listen enough to the fans to ever get across the line. And I'm concerned that this one is not listening to the fans enough either. So we'll see. We'll get a follow up on that. Andy, what do you make of it? Because it's like it is just this narrative and that's why I get so hard. I get always get this reads the negative. Nancy, I'm the one here, we're here in Arlington. I'm cut off here, sorry. So what do you make of this? Because like I said, this is the national media, this is to me is always like this is how they're viewing things. Well first of all, Florio is the type of student that would question why we have homework in the first place than actually doing it. So for him, I don't think it really matters one way or another what league there is or what pictures you have to use or what available information there is for these kinds of leagues. The national media is not ever going to be able to put in the proper preparation to actually study these things because they don't care. They don't care. I'm sorry, they don't. So for me I think it's more about what happens at the local level and what kind of media outlets do you have around your own base that you're able to work with and use as the foundation of your league. So I mean look, FOX and ESPN have to do a better job of that because look, they have stakes in this property, they have viewership, they have to to do a better job of promoting this so that these kinds of oversights don't happen more with some of these national media members and they look foolish for being wrong. I mean look, the amount of correcting I've seen sometimes for someone who throws out a wrong player's name or wrong player's origin or some teams' origin or the fact that they say, oh, this player played in the XFL, they played in the USFL instead. That happens all the time. So the more you make those people kind of I guess blush when they find out that they're wrong and there's people that are going to call 'em out on it, then the more notoriety and the more validity you get as a leak. But that comes with time. It doesn't happen overnight and you need that to come over a long period of time. And the XFL has brand identity going back to 2001, the USFL had brand identity going back to the 1980s, what kind of brand identity you can debate about that as far as when they came back in this iteration, but they both had their own sort of style and points to them. So you could point to that as far as what people remember about them, but it wasn't always emblematic of what's actually happening right now. So you have to do your own work at the local level. You have to make sure that your own people are doing the work to promote their league to make sure that other people don't make those mistakes and when they do make those mistakes that they're held accountable for them. Thoughts for you guys? And then I know we'll wrap up here because that's why I'm such an advocate even for the work that you do with Sports Illustrated that Mike does and I wish that the mark did better promoting and building up. So it's something that people take seriously. We see these takes here. How many people are going to these Coach Zoom calls and everything putting in the work to actually cover this, the training camp here, what are your thoughts? I mean you're entrenched in this as much as anyone. I'm just really excited for Monday or Tuesday when we get the ratings and the Mike Folio post is that the ratings are going down, it's falling apart, the league is going to cancel with Midway because that's what always happens. I mean the national media only covers the ratings part And look, I think the reality is we all know this season may not go as smoothly. So I think they're expecting that it's going to be like XFL 2020 where it's like two 3 million viewers a game. And even with that in week two ratings were down by 50%. There were only a million viewers a game and even then they were talking about the XFL falling apart. It's not going to last through the whole season. So the one thing I want to say, Evan, I know you're a part of the IFL look what makes the IFL work so well and the IF L's been around what, 10 plus years? It's been around 15, yeah, 15 years. What makes it work, and Andy talks about it, it's what they do in their local markets. I think the IFL understands they're not competing with the NFL, but they do such a great job marketing in their local markets. Frisco fighters over the last two, three years, they've done a great job marketing. I mean they may not get crazy attendance but they get a lot of attention. One because they're a very good team, but two people care about them and the league understands we need to market into our local market into the people that live in the area and get them excited about it. They know they're never going to get the attention of ESPN and FOX and that, but it's all about, like Andy said, it's all about what you do in the local market. That's what makes leagues like the I Ffl that's been around for so long. The CFL, we all know they don't get crazy ratings even in Canada, they don't get crazy ratings but they market into their local areas and they do a really good job of it to get people excited in their local cities. So I mean the national media is always going to crap on the spring football leagues. We all know it's going to happen at least not until the NFL backs. I think the only way it happens is if the NFL starts their own spring league and they end up funding it, then I think people will buy more into it. Evan, thoughts on that and then we'll toss back to Max. I want to get some more stuff while we got him on Here. Yeah, well I appreciate Anthony here plugging the league first of all. Yeah man, I think it's all about perception and all about how you market yourself until the UFL really figures out that niche and what they want. It's always going to be looked at very differently by multiple different groups of people. Like the USFL had a different brand identity than the XFL. I mean because I was around the XFL more last year, I can tell you their big thing was player development, which we were talking about before. It was all about, I mean we've all heard the player 54 term a million times and XFL to NFL and countless times on the broadcast, that's what they brought up. And then ultimately when you have only one guy that makes it on an active NFL roster and that's the packer's punter who was with the defenders, it's like okay, well maybe we need to change our strategy a bit. So for me, I think you have to market it as player development. I think that's really important. You want players to get better, you care about them, they're good athletes, you see a future for them, but at the same time you have to limit those expectations and say hey the reality is while we want you to develop and be a better player, you might be staying in this league. And again, that's going back to the player point. It's a bit off topic from the perception, but it does help with the overall perception. I mean we talk about continuity so much. I think that if you have the same players sticking around that you'll gain a better fan base that way. I think of Luis Perez, that guy's been around in so many of these leagues now we can just say his name and it's etched into our brains because we've seen him play so many times. So I think all those things come into play. I hope that's something that the UFL can continue to figure out this year like hey, what's the identity? What are we really striving towards? There's a lot of great people working in football ops in this league. A lot of guys that I respect that again have experience doing this before Daryl Johnston is the primary one just because he's got an incredible wealth of knowledge and again, I think we can all appreciate Daryl for that. So yeah, I mean that's kind of where I'm at with everything. We got over 300 people here watching. Make sure there's 300 thumbs up here on the YouTube channel. Would appreciate that. Let's get max on this. I'm going to use the opportunity while I have two people here. I'm going to go take a pit stop before you guys head out. So Max, why don't you go to that and then we'll get Andy and then I'll be right back. I mean in terms of the player development angle, the biggest issue for me was always the framing. You can't frame it as this is a developmental league. You have to frame it as more, this is going to be some sort of battle between the players all for their last chance or the players you remember from college or whatever. Who will shine and who will shrink from the limelight, who was going to come up from out of nowhere and be the underdog story. There's just, if they've marketed the unknown, it probably would be more interesting than marketing the developmental aspect because no one cares about development in terms of the broader audience. There's a reason no one watches the G league. G League plays fantastic basketball every night. No one is watching that unless it's G League Ignite and not anymore. Now the G League Ignite is going away and they're terrible this year. So I mean no one talks about the G League unless there's some sort of policy change or there's some sort of young player playing really well, it gets called up to the NBA, otherwise no one talks about the GG league. So whenever people get so excited for this potential NFL partnership, what I think people don't realize is once that happens the stamp will be forever embossed on the UFL that it is a minor league and it is over that instead of people talking bad about you're going to go from having bad press to no press unless someone gets an NFL contract or a tryout. So you've lost everything once you've become the official minor league and I just think people need to understand that. I mean come on, how much coverage is there in minor league baseball? Just have some perspective here folks. Minor league hockey. Am I missing anything here folks? I don't think I am. Did the world blow up when I was gone? Did we do okay? We got Jovan here standing by. We do Jovan in a second. Andy, any other thoughts on Max here or anything else before we get him out of here? Yeah, I Continuing on what Max is saying and also what Emory was saying earlier, yeah it's hard to pitch it as a developmental league because as Max pointed out, no one really wants to know that development is going on. That's not what people tune in for. But does it happen while players are playing? Absolutely. And look, that happens in the NFL too. I want people to know that development is happening right before our very eyes sometimes with players in the NFL, it's just people ignore that because they look at the stars and they look at the players who are actually playing well and they look at the guys who aren't playing well and being like, well they're scrubs, they can't do it. Look, you can't tell me that you didn't watch Jordan Love all year last year. Didn't tell me that there was a significant improvement in his game. Midseason as the packers were figuring it out in real time, how their offense was tooled. I mean Jordan Love and that offense at the beginning of the year versus the end of the year, night and day. And it was happening because they were putting in the work and the practice and the reps as it was going along. Same thing with Josh Allen. I had kind of a semi revelation about Josh Allen his second year. Now that wasn't one of his great years. In fact it was the year before one of his Pro Bowl years. But there was just something about him that I realized he was starting to figure out and I thought maybe if he can get a hold of this and not look like a baby draft jumping through a flaming hoop, maybe he can look decent. And he did and he started to look better. This happens all the time. Players develop, they need reps, they need practice, they need game tape. It's the same thing here, but again, you can't pitch it like that. You have to say, look, this guy, there's this player we really like, you should pay attention to Luis per, you should pay attention to Jordan Chael, you should pay attention to any number of these players that Scooby Wright, one of these guys. But there's going to be development as you go along and once players get better and they perform better, then you start to take notice of them and then you start to really look at that. I mean that's just how the nature of the game goes. So again, I agree with you, you don't really want to pitch it as being a developmental league because once that happens, that's it. It's a minor league forever and it's branded as such. But you want to make it different. Like Darryl Johnson was talking to you about being last week on the show, then you can't focus on that. But development is very much part of the process, the part of the process in any way, shape or form, even at the highest levels. Alright, let's get you guys out, right? You want to head to media? Anything else from you guys real quick? Jevon, we're coming to you. I'm so sorry. We're running about two minutes behind here. Anything else from you guys before you make it to media? I will just say if you don't want to be viewed as if the developmental league, there's got to be a point where you start paid players, there's stars. I know we're trying to step away from being a developmental league, totally get that. But when you're paying guys 55, $60,000 a year, it's kind of hard to try to pitch as, oh you could build a career off of it when we're not raising money. So I think you have to pitch it as a developmental league until you get to the point where you can financially start paying players more. Because at the end of the day, Luis Press can keep coming back every year. But if you're going to keep paying him 60, 70, Hang on, let me get that going for a second here. My microphone here died maybe just auto powered off here. Max, say goodbye here and we'll get you out of here. Let me see if I can get this thing plugged back in. Well yeah, I definitely agree. It's hard to market to players that this isn't a developmental league, but you can always market differently to players and the fans. Most fans have no idea how much these players are getting paid. I'm sure that it's not even on their mind, but I'm sure they all know it's not that much. And then secondarily, I want to finish on Andy's point, which is development when it's attached to a brand is always more interesting to fans than development when it's attached to something they don't care about. So development on the packers, but if the development happens while a player is on the Packers, that's a storyline throughout a season in multiple seasons when development happens in some other league, no one cares until he signs with the Packers. That's just the way it is unfortunately. Sorry, I want to make sure they get out there. Evan, anything else? I got the mic spec going. That was a power scare there for a second. No, all good points. Always good talking to everybody. Just excited to get over to the game and see everyone. Alright you guys get out. We'll see you over there. Appreciate it. Let's bring in Javan Max. You can either stay or get out of here. Let me mic these. Thanks guys. Javan, Alford, sorry to make you wait sir. How are you doing? I'm doing all right. How are y'all doing? Good. As you can tell. We got moving pieces. Everyone can still hear me. Do I look good? Do I sound good still? Sound good to me. Javan, what are you looking forward to today here we got UFL kickoff. You do a lot of different, the football and all that kind of stuff. How does this resonate with you? What we have going on right now, It is an exciting time seeing both leagues have a very good gear last year. Combining in a one, having under one banner under the notion that this is the best of the best playing in one league. I think that's very exciting to see and to have the broadcast partners back once again for another year where most of your games are going to be on Fox, E-S-P-N-A-B, C, like those things help grow the game. And then with the continued involvement of sports betting involved with these leagues I think will only help the league grow. So I'm excited to see the action, get the two champions from last year gone off against each other To kick it off, you couldn't ask for anything better In your opinion. And then we'll toss here, we'll get Andy and Max, in your opinion, has the marketing bringing in these players, the Matt Corrals of the world, has that done enough do you think to get a casual or a football fan to come into this? I like getting people like you that aren't necessarily in this every second of the day. Yeah, I would say so. I think like you said, having a guy like Macro I think definitely brings the intrigue and intention just knowing some of my friends that are football fans and they're like Macral seen him, remember him with the Panthers, but it's that what can he do factor. And I think outside of having the AJ McCarran last year, everybody's like McCarran, what can you do? And even though he has some moments last year where it was like, wow, this guy could still play Hakeem Butler Temu, those guys I think will help. And I think Matt Corral being kind of that maybe hopefully that new face of that franchise with seeing the success that Magoo had will only help the league because if he plays good and have that PJ Walker renaissance that we saw in the XFL, then that's only going to bring more attention to more Oz. Andy, are you surprised we didn't get more Matt corrals this year? It felt like, and maybe we're just trying to get to next year, but getting some of these other guys than just McCarran and tamu coming back. I mean Brandon Silvers is hanging around, but I feel like that's an opportunity that Emory talked about that as well. I don't know with you downsizing these leagues and only having eight teams, I think it's hard to bring in those guys because they're already cutting players as it is. I don't know how in the world do you expect to import more on top of that? And even if they're maybe qualified players or players that are at the NFL level and you think deserve to have an opportunity, it's still hard for them to kind of justify that, especially when there's so many moving pieces. Again, we talked about continuity with rosters, there needs to be continuity with these leagues and once you have continuity of the league, then other players in the NFL can look at 'em and be like, oh I know that league over there, I can go play for them. I think it's less of a daunting prospect that way then say even for Canada, look I love the CFL, I think the CFL is fantastic, but it is a move to go up there for a player to convince themselves from the NFL to go up there. I don't think that really is something that happens as much anymore. It did a long time ago and it had players going up there because they couldn't cut it here and they decided, well I'm going to take my talents to Canada instead where I can get playing time. That has to be the same thing here. But I think just in the current iteration with there only being eight teams, there's not any expansion talks at the moment or anything with anybody actually. I know there is expansion talks but not amongst the people who it actually matters with then it's not going to happen as far as getting some of these players to come down from the NFL and try to get more game tape. Max quickly, let's get back to Jovan while we have him here, but thoughts on anything with Andy? Anything else? So when you're talking about these established players who are sitting around at free Asians, quarterbacks like Josh Rose Kelman, I mean think about those guys were early draft picks who stuck around for a little while and Kellen, the problem with Corral for him is that he played and kind of embarrassed himself a little bit at some points and not necessarily because he was a bad player or whatever because he was just in a bad place. So however bad he was or wasn't, was it accentuated by everything happening at the Panthers? So he feels like he has to prove himself, but if you're Josh Rosa Killman, you're like, I've already been given these opportunities and I've made all this money and what's the point? I don't want to do this anymore unless I get back in the NFL. That's kind of how most of these players are treating it until they get a check big enough for them to change their minds. So it is what it is. Jovan thoughts on that because Emory, we had Emory Hunt on earlier and he was talking about even coming in here and playing a couple games before the draft and maybe you can help raise your stock that way. I mean how do you think that the players with this league can really stand out? We've talked and we want it to be a developmental league. We don't want it to be a developmental league. Yeah, I think what Emory brought up about the college guys coming in, showcasing, I think we saw that back in the second iteration of the XFL when there was Kenny Robinson when Draft guy and he ended up with the Battle Hawks and May plays and it got people talking like who is this guy? What can he do? And obviously he gets drafted, didn't have the best success in the NFL, but those are the type of guys that you want to go for. And I agree with Max said, if you don't increase the pay, you won't be able to get a lot of these guys that you potentially want to get. And then even to Andy's point with consolidations of rosters, it's tough. We saw Cole Kelly get cut, right? And Cole Kelly what most would say it's that if you're trying to develop the developmental quarterback that you want because he showed something with the show boots but you cut him for a guy like Josh Love who we kind of know what Josh love is at this point. We got Mike Mitchell standing by here, we'll get to him in a second. 330 people watching, make sure your thumbs up, subscribe, get all that. We'll get some comments back on here. People are talking about hitting the drones with footballs and stuff today. Jovan, anything you want to make sure you plug before we get you out of here? I know Mike's got short time as well. I don't want to keep you guys waiting too long in the background. Yeah, no, appreciate you for having me on. Check out Total Sports live total sports live.com got week one, picks up odds and spreads for the UFL season, so got that up live and ready and appreciate you guys for having me on. Do you sense an overwhelming interest right now in that are you seeing decent traffic? I'm always curious about that. It's a little slow and I think that's probably because it's a new name change like UFL. It's not like we've had the X-F-L-U-S-F-L where we can lean on for last year you knew all SF L's back people are going to be checking it out. Now I will say there is intrigue with people betting and wanting to tune in because if you bet just in general for sports that beef markets can be taken advantage of if you just know a little bit of something and you can get very good odds and very good favorites. So hopefully it will increase with more play and if you're the great first week, then I definitely think things will start to boom. Awesome. Jamon, thank you. Appreciate you sitting around here while we could get you on here running a couple seconds behind, so really appreciate it. Thanks Guys. No problem. Thanks. He's been referred to as the Jedi master. We have Mike Mitchell. Mike, how the heck are You? I'm doing well Reid. How are you guys? We're good now. Just make sure everyone knows Mike's popping in today and then we're going to do a long sit down this week. We'll figure out, I know Mike's really busy with work and stuff, but we will have, that will be the episode this week. We'll have a full kind of in-depth week one reactions, all of that. Oh and I should say Andy and I, the page is already made. Andy and I'll be recapping on Monday week one of the UFL. So you can already, the event page is already up on there and subscribe, click the bell. Mike, how are we feeling here? We're an hour and 45 minutes to kick off. Yeah, it feels like Groundhogs Day. We've had so many league launches since 2019. A-F-X-F-L in 2020 USFL in 2022, the XFL coming back in 2023 and here we are with the United Football League, this unique and odd merged U-S-F-L-X-F-L entity. Mike, you stole my analogy. I was going to say that it feels like Groundhog Day. I was literally thinking about that analogy all week. So you hit the nail on the head. Yeah, hopefully this is a regular thing. Now we get to UFL season 5, 6 7. We're not some new leagues coming on CBS next year to try to take over this space, but here we are. I mean it's exciting. I'm excited about the football aspects. You've been debate a lot about a lot of different things. You've had a great show here today, Reid, a lot of great guests. Emory hit on some interesting points, quarterbacks and all that. To me, I'm fascinated by you can argue the quality of the individuals getting the opportunity, but I like the fact that there are four defacto rookie quarterbacks getting a shot. Whether or not you believe in Chase Garbers or any of Matt Corll who happen to, I'm hoping this league becomes a success story for him considering all the mental health issues he's had and everything else. So it's kind of a unique, you split it down the middle, how high of a quality do you want your league to be? Because if you have eight rookie quarterbacks, it's going to be messy. You're going to have rookie growing pains, but in the long run it could pay off dividends wise. So having the Luis Perez's, the AJ McCarran, the coaches that we have going into their third season in Spring pro football, that's going to give a good quality and continuity to the league and there's built-in storylines, which kind of makes this fun. How did the defenders rebound from last year's championship loss? Can the Battle Hawks get to the playoffs they got screwed over last year. Can they make it to the championship game at home? Are the stallions as good as everybody thinks they are? We're going to find out as they match up with teams from the XFL, the best of the best from these two leagues the last two years. As much as they can get there considering financial constraints and everything else is going to be on display and the games are going to be fun themselves. I think we're going to see some exciting games and there's built-in U-S-F-L-X-F-L rivalry gentlemen. If the USFL sweeps today's two games, you'll hear plenty of trash talkers saying I told you we're better than the XFL. If the stallions beat the Renegades and the Panthers somehow upset the battle hawks today, you'll hear plenty of that. So that's kind of fun to me. I prefer that tribalism rather than the one that was kind of separate before. So hopefully this new entity works out in the long run. We got a question here. How's the attendance so far? Where did that go here? And I was just trying to peek at, I do see a little bit of a line. I know that they're opening and I think one of the doors is opening. They're not opening it quite as early. I think media availability, you can get in two hours before. I know Danny and the Rock are doing stuff, I'll be here wrapping up, but hopefully Anthony can go see. Hopefully the Rock doesn't beat Andy Anthony with a belt like he did with Cody Rhodes on Monday. But let's get Mike and then Max on this. So we're talking, I will say I have one comment. I am much more excited for watching this and some of these USFL games last year. I'll admit even as the spring football addicts whatever to go from the XFL and then the weeks and then to go into the USFL and then it's like we're watching Canton with 15 people there and it's whoever's wife freezing in the cold. And so I do appreciate a lot of these storylines and stuff, but to me, Mike, a lot of this has been built just around us on Mike Mul Villa, however you say his name, a tweet this week. These games are on the big market. The networks are going to do better it seems that's kind of the philosophy this year we had that we're going to rely on Dwayne and Danny last year and now this year, well we're just going to put 'em on the better time slots. Is that how you're reading this A little bit? I spoke with someone this morning on the UFL side high up there and their expectations are modest for this season. They feel like they had to kind of put this together and do this quick. They're looking more towards 2025 in terms of hitting their goals. So I don't know if Vegas is going to have over unders on XF, oh, excuse me, UFL attendance. I still Do that Every time. So it is what it is. But I don't know if you had over unders 13,000, 12,000, 14,000, maybe they do a little bit better. You get some walkup. It's Easter weekend. So there's a lot of these different factors. New gas stations open up down the road. But I think their expectations from the sense I got is their expectations are modest now. Michael Movahill, I always butcher people. Yeah, it's an of people's names. It's the same kind of argument they had last year. We saw that there was a direct correlation between big network television versus cable time slots, all that the Derby lead in led to only one of two USFL games that had over a million viewers on average. And that was kind of like an overinflated thing where they had 2 million viewers. I don't think people were tuning in for Todd Haley's brilliance. So that was kind of the story there. So I think their expectation levels are modest and I put out a ratings article at Sports Illustrated, shout out to Casey Sager who's helped me become a better writer who's always editing my stuff, but my expectations were low on the ratings. I hope I undershot it. I hope they do a little bit better. They cross over a million today. But the competition is heavy and I do sense outside of our bubble, there really just isn't mainstream interest or buzz for Spring pro football because people have been there and seen it already. They've already sampled it the last two years. So what is the rope? What pulls you in? So I think that's a big factor in all of this and we'll see how it goes. I definitely think they bought themselves a couple years, so I don't think they're going to go away after this season. I will say that we got 350 people watching on YouTube right now, which I appreciate. I can always tell how many have got another 230 on Twitter. I can always tell are we really popping today? I've added some subscribers, but I have a feeling it's a lot of people that have been through this tour, which obviously we appreciate and please like and subscribe 350, give me the thumbs up Max. We have a comment here, foosball fan. So hype for the rock speech. Do we get another, let's ball out baby. God, if I know at this point, I mean I'm not in for those kind of prop bets. Someone else can be on those predictions, but if it's not Dwayne then is it going to be like Friend of the show, Darryl Moose Johnson? No, I think it's either Dwayne or St Australian. Maybe St. Australian comes out and does something, right? It's got to be someone interesting doing a speech or maybe it's either that or no speech. It can't be someone random. It can't be Eric Shanks for example. It can't be Danny at this point. I'm sorry. I love you Danny. It's your time to find somewhere else to fit into this because some people are getting really tired of you on the fan side. But yeah, I don't know if we should really expect a big time speech this time around because the marketing has not been as over the top, but we're trying to find random things to get people interested. It just seems to be very consistent. We are the best spring league, we're the best spring league over and over again. So we'll see Andy thoughts on any of this nonsense? Sometimes I just don't have a, I'm like Andy, I want to hear from Andy again. Just throw me in. I mean look, we get the Rock coming out and maybe he changes the tagline. Maybe he just says, let's collaborate baby. That's fine too. Whatever he wants to put in there. Unify. Let's unify me. That's great Synergy baby. I just look, two things that I really have to look out for today and for the season in general. First of all, if I can just get attendance numbers from the USFL side, that would be great. I want the attendance numbers and now this fudging of like, oh there seems to be about a few thousand people there not, I don't want generalities, I want numbers. I want facts. Thank you. Second of all, I mean today it's going to be a bit tough sledding just in terms of the TV numbers, Mike, I'm glad you talked about maybe some of the reality points for some of the execs in the league because yeah, they have SIP competition. I mean just today at 12:30 PM Pacific Time, Caitlin Clark who is a National Sensation is playing with Iowa on tv. She's going to be playing on a B, C around the same time. You have a lot of NCAA games going on. Obviously March Madness is in full throttle and not just Men's Women's has been getting incredible ratings of the last few years, especially with some of the notoriety and the stars that are in that league. I mean last year I remember the Women's National Championship game getting 10 million viewers and it was during one of the XFL games and I couldn't help but think just the amount of camaraderie and hype that was around that matchup. So I mean that is something they're going up against ultimately. So TV numbers, if people are expecting there to be 1.52 million numbers, I don't know what they're looking at. I don't think that's really in the realm of reality. I think your article the other day put it into perspective very well as far as the predictions and I think that's just something that also the league is maybe also understanding as well as far as the season and just trying to build off of that going forward. Mike, I'm curious about that and I appreciate you. I like having the, Hey, I just talked to someone this morning and I like that. That's why everyone puts my a little goat and all that. But my fear is when they're like, we're not expecting a lot this year, we're just trying to get through that leads to apathy of like, oh, it's fine. I mean where at least I think the U-S-F-L-I think had a little egg on their face season one going into season two. Like, oh, we're going to take over the world here. This to me is the opposite. I'm fearing. It's like, well it's fine, we'll just kind of get by and we don't really care. I think they think that they're going to reach their potential a year from now. Whether or not you think they will, that's another story. But I think because the way this is kind of put together, I don't want to say haphazardly, but kind of rushed and you see with the Panthers late on season tickets, we've seen this movie before with the Vipers last year. So I think the expectations are modest and they really kind should be, their expectation levels very high when it comes to the football. They think that football is going to be very good. I happen to agree with them. So I don't know if it's a greatest Spring pro football league ever. Let's see the games first, but I do think the quality of play is going to be very good. You have built-in veterans in this space that are actually very good football players, Darius Victors case cookies, et cetera. And then you got all these young talents on the UFL team. So I do think the quality of play is going to be very good built-in coaching staff continuity. If this was the XFL in 2001, Vincent Mann will probably shoot an angle with the rocket Cody Rhodes during one of the games. Look At you, look at Resolve It by halftime. Rock will bloody him up before WrestleMania is a lead, but we'll see. And it's going to come down to them getting all their ducks in a row and doing what they're supposed to do in terms of promotion and marketing. And the thing is, they can't have their cake and eat it too because they're trying to save money. Some media members are already messaging me today that they got, they're getting a little shortage in terms of food accommodations and everything else. So You mean players? No, no, I'm talking media members. No food for the media people. I Saw that. So go. So my sources are accurate. It's cutting corners, scrimping and saving anywhere you can. But I do think that the quality to play, I'm a football fan, I'm into these leagues. I'm going to be into the games. I can't wait till they get started. If you look at it from outside the bubble, it comes down to business for them. And I think if they do 800,000, 900,000 viewers, I don't think anybody should really push the panic button yet. I think you need to let this season ride out. And then, like I said, I've been saying this for so long, these two leagues merge because they didn't see the light at the end of the tunnel. They're hoping that together, they'll see that. And you don't like to hear this word Reid, but they have, I spoke with somebody this morning, they have been talking about expansion. The places they looked at for Vegas, Tennessee, Arizona, Ohio, which was, if they had been 10 teams, Ohio was going to be one of the teams. So first things first before you get to that. But that's the hope. So I think people need to temper their expectations. They really to rope in mainstream and casual fans. It's a process. So I don't think you're going to do that overnight. We got Coach Craig here logging in. We'll get to him in just a moment. Appreciate that. Mike, you are going to appreciate this. We have a question from three times CFLA Gray Cup champion David Sanchez checking in. Thanks for doing this fellas. Any thoughts on field matchups today for anybody betting? We talked a little bit about, I mean we've talked a lot about a lot of these, but Mike rundown, just while we have you 30 seconds each, and like I said, we'll do expanded next week, but give us your thoughts on all four matchups this weekend. I'll go outside the box on this one. I think San Antonio can cover against DC on Sunday. I know everybody's just, look, I predicted that they would finish with a three and seven record, but I think San Antonio is going to be better this year. How many games they win that remains to be seen. It's very competitive division. Chase Garbus is going to have to match up his level of play with AJ McCarran, Jordan Temo and Luis Perez. But I do believe that week one game for DC is a bit of a trap. They're without three of their best offensive players from last year. Abram Smith, Chris Blair, lucky Jackson, the two of those guys are in the NFL. We know Abram Smith, Tores, ACL. So I think DC might have some kinks to iron out week one. I know everybody loves them and Yvonne Hutchins done a tremendous job. They have an awesome coaching staff, but I think San Antonio is six point underdogs. They have a shot there. If Garber's doesn't, I don't want to curse on this show, but if the lights aren't too bright for him against Greg Williams ultra aggressive defense and he's able to contain because they have a lot of Marques Stevenson, John Tre, Kirkland, Cody Latimer, Anthony McFarland, who's getting the start for them in running back. I like these guys. These are young guys who are talented in college that are impressive. So I do think they have some Playmakers there. I think they can make a game of things. So I'm not a big gambler, but if I was going, it's not a popular pick, but I would take San Antonio to cover that one. Everyone expects St. Louis to steamroll over Michigan. Again, there's going to be an upset or two in the first week. There's going to be a wake up call for one of these teams. St. Louis should beat Michigan. But I'm a little weary of that one. Arlington and Birmingham today. I feel the stallions are going to win that game. I just think they're too deep, too talented. Arlington is a different team with Luis Perez at the helm at the controls. They just have to prove to me that they have enough talent on the outside, a wide receiver to compete with the stallions. I think the stallions are a better overall team than them. I'm missing a game here. Memphis and Houston. Memphis. Houston, Yeah. That's an odd one. Memphis is very talented. Very few teams in the league benefited from the dispersal draft process like they did. They've loaded up on veteran, proven veteran guys. The diaries, victors case Cook is, et cetera. Interesting kind of breakers, showboats combination there with Coach Flip bringing a couple of his star players from New Orleans. So I like Memphis in that game. Jared Guano has to prove it to me first. And no, Mark Thompson, I'd be all over Memphis if I was picking, if I was a gambler, I would take Memphis today. I think they're just a much better football team than the roughnecks. We have one more here and then we'll get Craig Zach's side of the question from Mike before we get out of here. Yeah. Oh, in terms of the bras. Yeah. John Lewis had the bras winning one game all season, which was just rude. I was going to have him on the podcast and then I said, no, you can't come on anymore. That's funny. Here's the thing, Reed, all these teams are better than they were last year. It's crazy. The Bramos have 41 new players. I mean they only have nine. Nine. Well Bras, were not. We need back in here. We need Somebody needs, somebody has to lose these games. Law of averages. You can't have eight teams with all five and five records. That's the only mathematical possibility for everybody not to have a losing record. So somebody's going to go, there's going to be good teams that go three and seven. Four and six. Last year we saw three, four, and six teams make the playoffs. We're not going to get that this year, but I think San Antonio's better than they were a year ago. I'd be surprised if they only won one game. But like I said, somebody's got to lose these games. So somebody's going to play the Patsy. Somebody's going to, as they say in wrestling, do the job. They got to thank you here from David Sanchez. Last question from Mike. We'll get Craig in here. Zach wants to know about the kickoff. He wants to know, and we'll talk more about it this week, but we haven't had you on and obviously we had the Darryl Moose Johnson of it all and we want to be more traditional real football. So what's your 32nd take on that and then we'll get you out of here. I appreciate it. I like the old school NFL kickoff, but this has been in the works for a long time, for 10 years plus. You could see this change was coming. Sam Schwartzstein and team was at the forefront of it. If you're going to ask me the NFL kickoff last year versus the USFL kickoff last year, I'd actually take the USFL kickoff. But you have the artificial field position there that I'm not a huge fan of. They have some safety things with the alignment and all that, and I like the fact that keeping the return in the game, I don't know, maybe some people, Reid will watch today's games and go, why can't the NFL use this kickoff? I don't want to try that crazy gimmicky thing they're talking about. So who knows? You'll get opinions all over the place on that one. I would've stuck with the XFL kickoff. And Donald Johnson knows a great interview you had with him last week. It was interesting that the points he made about how this benefits players adaptability into the NFL coverage players and all that now while the N NFL's not using that kickoff anymore. So that doesn't work. And then the other aspect of it was that he wanted to be more traditional and all that. Well, now the new tradition might be the NFL's not going back. I'm sorry. I would love for them to go back to that kickoff. I grew up with it. Love it. I've been watching football four decades. I love the kickoff. I don't want it out of the game. I don't want the a f solution. So this is where we are with it. So maybe people will like the UFL kickoff, the way it's constituted. USFL had a lot of big plays in it. If you can overlook the injuries aspect and overlook the artificial field position, then maybe you prefer what you see in these games in terms of their kickoff. Well, thank you Mike. We have over 400 people watching on YouTube right now. I hope there's 400 thumbs up on the video. Please subscribe if you're not 4 0 9. A lot of work coming down here all the way to Arlington. Andy's going to be back with me Monday. We're doing 9:00 AM Pacific. We're going to do all the recap for week one, and then Mike and I are going to do a full extensive interview. I think that'll just be the episode this week. We'll just figure out a good time to do that. Yeah, we'll prerecord, Mike, anything you want to plug Mike's over at Sports Illustrated that we're working through all those website issues as well. Anything else? A lot of craziness over at si. Shout out to Anthony Miller, who's done a tremendous job. It's like we're building up a division. We've had a lot of hurdles there at si. The traffic's been very good. Anthony Miller's doing a great job, basically covering every team. I don't know how he does it. So shout out to him at Sports Illustrated. Shout out, like I said, Casey Sager a Garcia, who's one of my editors over at Sports Illustrated, shout out to him. He wrote for the XFL in 2020 at their website. Great guy. Much smarter than I, so that's basically that. So thanks for checking out my work and thanks for to all the people out there that are passionate about these leagues and support them. Appreciate you. Awesome, Mike. Thank you so much. We'll see you next time. Let's get Mike out. We got Coach Craig coming on and then we're going to have Eric Eger here rounding out the show and then I'm going to have to shower here again at 11 and then run over to the C DM here. I get really sweaty and the signs on my back. It's a whole thing here. Coach Craig, how are you doing, sir? Oh, I'm doing all right. A little tired now. I worked all night, so you'll have that, but happy to be here and happy for this season to get started And we'll go around the horn here, but let's start you first. What is your thought on the kickoff thing? Like that all came out and then we haven't had a podcast since really, I don't think since all this came about. So to me it's not a great look. What do you think? I think it's interesting just the way it all kind of played out is they were debating the two different kickoffs and then it's like of course right after they pick the one, the NFL is like, oh, we're going to update ours to the XFL version essentially that I think moving forward next season we'll see a flip. Obviously it's too late to try to flip it around now, but I think the XFL kickoff is something that I really enjoyed because it just incorporated a lot of different strategies of how you could approach it overall, even by a team, by team basis. Yeah. Andy, are you surprised that we didn't, couldn't they have just made a reverse call here? Are you surprised? I think it's a spring league, like hey, I don't know. I mean I know it looks bad, but to me this looks worse. I'm just going to be a little bit candid here. It's tone deafness and unfortunately from the standpoint of Mr. Moose Johnson, I think he made a humongous error in trying to pitch this old traditional kickoff. All respect to Mike, I don't really care for the NFL kickoff anymore. I like the XFL kickoff and I prefer it send me to the doldrums for believing that, but that's just how I am. Look, I think it's a humongous gaff because you chose to do something. Look, that not only pushes the game forward, it innovates and it also creates something new and exciting. I think that's what these spring leagues also stand for is trying to create new solutions to some things that don't necessarily work in football or are antiquated or don't really mesh with the TV audience anymore. I think this kind of thing is really interesting and this is why I think it was just an oversight by the league to try and abandon something for the sake of trying to bring in traditional fans. You need to stand out, you need to be unique, you need to have something that separates you from your contemporaries. And when you abandoned something like that, you get rid of the uniqueness and then you have people questioning why'd you get rid of it? If other people thought it was a good idea, why did you give up on it so quickly? For me, it just never made sense that that happened. And look, if people are out here trying to be like, well, they can't predict the future, how would they know? Who cares about the future? You care about yourself. That's what I say. You care about your product. If other people want to follow you, that's fine, but I personally believe that the XFL kickoff, it's a lot more interesting. I'm just going to say it. I think the SFL kickoff is just, it's too easy, it gets too many yards away. I think to me it's a reward that shouldn't be there in terms of the field position, it's not earned and I want it to be earned as a fan, I need it to be earned. That's how I feel and for me, it just felt like a humongous gaff on their part. I think this league needs to learn its lesson as far as when you stick to something, stick with it and don't just change it for the sake of getting a few more eyeballs. Max, I'll give you the floor here. I know you got thoughts. So Let's start with Greg Parks said it better than I ever could in his column about it a few days ago where he basically said the NFL left the UFL behind and that they were willing to embrace innovation while the UFL wanted to stick down and it's Frankenstein, we got an arm from this guy, we got a leg from that guy. We're just going to show it together and make a kickoff. We here from one league and another rule from another league. And Daryl, I hope you know how you look right now, having called the XFL kickoff gimmicky just for the NFL to adopt it and for your darling franchise that you played for and I'm pretty sure you're in the ring of honor for was one of the main people pushing this kickoff. So they're going to be in a position now where they have to say, Hey, we could change the rule back, but our players have been practicing this one kickoff rule for a month. So in my opinion, if they do change it now, it might actually lead to a lot of officiating gaps and it might lead to a lot of confused special teams units. They might have to wait until next year because I mean they've been drilling this other rule for so long. Now We have a comment here and I hope Max know we're peaking viewership right now as Max says now, Mr. Johnson, I didn't say any of that. Max is the one that look, they say the return yards are necessary for springing offenses. Coach Craig and then we'll get to but because that's what I always thought the USFL did. Okay, let's get 'em starting further back, further up on the field. What do you make of that, of those gifty yards? I mean at this point in time we've seen these offenses be able to move the ball up and down the field. We got good defenses, we've got good offenses. At the same time too, we got good coaching staffs that are able to design plays to get the ball down the field and with what we got now too, even with a lot of these quarterbacks returning and everything too, and these teams are beefed up a little bit even more than they were last year. I don't think it's a major issue and plus I just want to see even with the XFL version of the kickoff, it just adds such a different element to the game overall that you can still get those extra yards there too. I don't know why my mic, I think I'm back on here. Luckily my mic died with Coach Craig was talking, so that's always helpful when it's not. I'm in the middle of saying something. Andy, you shook your head about that. Needing the extra yards, The antiquated idea of it being for spring offenses I think is not a logic that I follow. Look like Coach Craig said these offenses can move the ball just fine. These offenses can prepare themselves just fine. I think in general, if you're not moving the ball, that's your problem. You need to strategize better offense and get better players. For me, it's not about where you start that is just so cheap. Give those kinds of yards is very cheap and I don't appreciate that. I think you need to earn it. That's how I feel as a fan. I've always felt that way as a fan. I don't think there needs to be this idea of like, well, everyone needs to just start on the 40 because they're not good enough. Well then what does that say about your product if you really believe that? I don't think that's the right way to go about it. So for me, the XFL kickoff, at least there was a lot of strategy involved with it and there were some really exciting returns. Darius Shepherd who's coming back into this league with the Hawks had some electrifying returns last year and I think for that matter, I just remember it being one of the most important things that I think came back with the XL last year. That was the first thing that I kind of missed when the XL was gone after 2020 was thinking, man, I missed that kickoff. That was the first thing I really thought about because it was just so different that and the point conversion 10 among other things, but really I think just again, it's a way of separating yourself from your contemporaries and instead of just trying to chase the sun and trying to be the same as the NFL, I just think that it was important to have it still incorporated here. And look, if you wanted to test it out a few years then be like, maybe this isn't our thing. We'll try something else. That's fine. You know what, that's fine. That's part of, we talked about development, we talked about development with players, we talked about development with rules, but this one I don't think was for the sake of development. I think it was just one entity being like, well, our kickoffs just seems better and everyone else likes the other kickoff better, so let's just use that one. I think that was the wrong way to go about it. My opinion. We got our last guest here logging in. We'll get to Eric in a second. Craig, before we let you out of here, thoughts, thoughts on the game today and then what are you looking forward to this weekend? I want to go back to the kickoff thing too now that the fact that they're probably not going to switch it over. Just real quick, what disadvantage are these players at now because they didn't have the same, they're going to lose out on NF all tryouts camps just because they aren't used to it. They could have had such an advantage already by playing 10 games through this whole system. So a guy that is a solid kick returner, he might've had a chance just because he's already done it 10 games and he's proven it and he's put it out there on tape that he might get that extra chance and then all you got to do is go into camp and then beat somebody else out. So there's a lot of different ways that you could look at it from that regard too. So the guys that could be missing some opportunities for me, what I'm looking for this week, and I'm just kind of looking for how these teams look altogether too. Obviously some of you guys have been talking about how some of the teams have more continuity than others, especially some of these teams where they've had all these, excuse me, moving parts over the course of the off season. These teams, especially from a defensive perspective, that's the one that I'm looking at for some of these teams that have a lot of turnover on defense. Memphis Showboats are kind of a team like that too. They let go of some really good players and maybe in favor of some players that I thought probably weren't as good, so we'll just have to see what that all looks like. Even Michigan held onto a lot of their guys, but they cut a lot of good players at the same time too. Just a lot of rotating units there overall and I'm really interested to see what DC's offense looks like without their top three wide receivers from last year without Abram Smith, Jordan Teo was going to have to carry this team on his back early on in the year. He really is. Well Craig, I appreciate it. I'm just refreshing stuff over here. Thank you so much, joy. We're peaking viewership right now, which is always good here. Getting into the end, we got our big final guest coming on here, coach Craig, anything you want to plug before we bring Eric Agron? Yeah, for me personally, it's just you can find me on YouTube myself at Coach Craig Sports. I mainly do for UFL over there. It's the U-F-L-D-F-S. I did a little bit of a team preview earlier this week as well, obviously hopefully moving forward we got a lot more trends that we can see from these first initial games. My initial video was a little bit delayed coming out because I was trying to wait for all those depth charts to come in and then adjust from there. I will say too, the announcement of PFF doing UFL earlier this week should make things a little bit easier. Hopefully they have the snap counts because that's going to be a big analytical aspect too. As somebody myself personally, last year I charted all the offensive players for USFL for the last eight games of the year because nowhere else had that information. Well Coach Craig, I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Hopping on here today we're going to bring on our last guest here, Eric Eger, consumer sports Eric, and this is some, I've been tracking all your stuff on Twitter here and as you can imagine as a commander fan mock drafts and everything, I'm very invested in that, but I want to get your thoughts on this U-S-F-L-X-F-L kickoff here with the NFL. We have Darrel on and what do you make of all this? Well, it felt like the USFL just kind of saw the issue or one of the issues, which was no one's returning kicks and ignored completely the underlying reason why the NFL was trending towards no one returning kicks, which was injury rates and things of that nature. They just backed the kickoff up. That's been the case for two straight years. It was sort of the laziest solution to the problem of why aren't we getting kickoff returns? And I think from the perspective of player development, it made some sense, Hey, we're going to develop returners, we're going to develop kick cover men and all this stuff, but then the NFL of course decides to adopt the XFL rule, which now makes that kind of obsolete. I didn't expect them in the last week to adopt the XFL rule of course, but it is kind of funny now that it's going to stick out like a sore thumb If this league lasts until next year, I'm guessing that they'll adopt the XFL rule, assuming the NFL who only has a one year lease on this particular change, adopts it for the next season. Do you buy that these leagues and spring football needs those extra yards to get the offenses going? I always thought the USFL, hey, we got to give these guys as much of a head start as we can. Yeah, it's weird because in the National Football League, right, you had a pandemic year and then the immediate year after something like 49 points a game and then 47 points a game. Now it's about 43 and a half points a game, and it's not necessarily because the offenses go three and out all the time, it's because the offenses get to the forties and punt. And so I'm thinking about this from a betting perspective where I'm still looking at a lot of totals that are in the low forties. I'm guessing by middle of next week they'll be in the high thirties because I don't think that field position is, the field position obviously helps offense, but it helps it less than you think because the way that current offense and defenses are in professional football, you have two high shells and so there's not a high third and long rates, or sorry, three and out rate, there's a relatively decent series success rate, meaning turning one series into another series of downs. It's more that offenses can't sustain multiple first downs in a row to get to the end zone and it's just exacerbated in this league. So I don't necessarily know if the extra fuel position will benefit. It really hasn't benefited points in this league because these teams, there's just not that many big plays. There's not quarterbacks that are capable of it and defenses are really good at preventing them anyway. And so I think it helps a little bit, but not as much as everybody thinks. Andy, I want to give you a chance to respond. I think those are some fantastic points made by Eric Heeger. Yeah, that's kind of the trend we're seeing with offensive defenses. There's the two high safety shell covered. Two, there's basically offenses that are not being able to sustain these long drives. I mean once the advent of the spread option and all the offenses where it was basically all vertical passing games started to come into fruition, the emphasis on defense in response was, okay, well we're going to put more emphasis on speed than we are physicality. And now teams are basically not as getting many explosive plays because that's kind of what they're trying to prevent against constantly. And so there's just all of this underneath work and there's more focus on trying to do it down by, down by down instead of trying to get these big chunk plays, which is not as easy now just based on the defensive adjustments. So I agree with you in terms of that and I don't know if the kickoff is really going to help that in this league, especially in a league where these offenses are sort of makeshift and there's new players and there's people coming in trying to reestablish themselves. I mean, we talked about continuity maybe from a spring league perspective. We know a lot of continuities here, but from an overall perspective, I mean you're talking about the NFL where there's years plural, years of player continuity and coaching where these people know each other's tendencies and cadences and they're able to use that to their advantage in order to make things happen. So I don't know if that's really going to necessarily improve on the offensive standpoint in the spring leagues. I'm really curious to see what the overall points total are end up going to be in this league going forward now with all the talent being reconsolidated and regardless of what the kickoff is, see how consistent these offenses can be. We're peaking here, almost 500 viewers here on YouTube. We got another three 50 on Twitter, which last year the show did terrible. So maybe this means, I don't know if there's more interest in this year or not, but or maybe people just really like Eric, which is also could be the case. We got about 10 minutes left here. We'll toss to max and then we're going to break all this down just at 5 0 2. So really appreciate that Andy. And I'll be back on Monday, we'll do a recap show and then Mike Mitchell who is on, we'll be doing all that stuff coming up for regularly Friday episode. Normally the episodes go there max five 20. Now do you want to go on another rant here while we're peaking viewership? Yeah, I'll go on another rant. I think in terms of offensive output, the far bigger effect was when they neutered the enforced aggression as what I'll call it on punt rules by making it easier to punt. They changed the out of bounds line on punt the 25 and they changed it to touchback 25 too, whereas before it was 35, whenever it was 35, you were putting teams in a real bind to say, we really need to consider going for it on fourth and medium in between the forties. They're going to just kick it now most of the time, even more than they already were. And as a fan of spring leagues, as much as I love the special teams, the biggest action, the most exciting plays are when teams are going for it on fourth down. That's what you're here to see. You're here to see the last chance, will they move the chains or not? And it feels like we want everything to be more traditional instead of making things more challenging and more exciting, ensure punters will hate the fact that there is enforced aggression that it punter's that makes punting harder. But let's be real, Dan wheel's in the league right now, he was able to navigate around those horrific punt rules for him and so that he's a very skilled punter. So clearly, if anything, whenever you're a specialist and you can navigate around more challenged, you're more likely to make it. Whereas for example, whenever they're changing the receiving rules to two feet, let's be real, we haven't had that many, if any receivers break out and really stick around on even an active roster other than special teams guys like Turin. So it feels like we're incentivizing more things to be challenging that won't help players as much and will actually make the game less exciting. And then where we have other opportunities to make the game more challenging and more exciting, we're turning away from it so that instead we can have it be more traditional. It just feels like they completely misunderstand what the goal of spring football is supposed to Be. We are hitting almost 700 viewers right now. Max, in the time that you've talked, it's literally added 175 people I'm watching. You're crazy. Make sure you subscribed. I can subscribe. Thumbs up, give it all that. Eric, since we're talking UFL weekend here, let's talk some actual football gameplay right now obviously we're at CHO Talk stadium. What are you looking for in terms of the Renegades Perez and everything else and everything going on? Yeah, to me, I was really surprised just generally how big the point spreads are on this. You basically have the Memphis game on Sunday afternoon is the only game that is close to a pick, relatively speaking this game that's immediately going to start. The point spread is anywhere depending upon where you look, three and a half to four and a half. And then this afternoon later, sharps are betting that thing out to eight and a half and it's gotten back down to about seven. I have a hard time believing to what Andy was saying earlier, there's so much turnover in these leagues A I really want to see, I always put a little bit more in my model's strength towards coaching in these leagues because I think for example, the San Antonio bras Wade Phillips is what a top two or three coach in this entire league. And there, when you look at championship odds or anywhere from 12 to one to 13 to one, they're one of the worst teams in the whole league. Whereas we've always seen that basically in this league quarterback play, which in the NFL is exactly what you need in order to win championships, quarterback play, there's not a big enough delta in this league for it to matter that much. And then down the roster stuff, it's just so hard for us to predict week to week and game to game, especially considering what are the big things about spring leagues? And you see it most acutely at quarterback is a lot of these players, they get injured more often because they're not experienced enough. They're not. It's sort of this weird thing like Case Cookes is a very good quarterback, but he has to use all of his mental capacity to play the position so he can't even protect himself. So he gets hurt all the time. And that's true about down the roster players across this entire league. So if I'm looking and I'm trying to handicap these games, I'm looking at who the coaches are on both sides. And so this earlier game obviously where you have Holts and you have stoops, that's a pretty good matchup. I don't think that the difference between those two guys is exactly a field goal and a half in this game. So when I look at this game, that's immediately happening in about an hour. I kind of do like the defending XFL champions, especially given Luis Perez and how experienced he is in this league. Matt Carrell is going to get the start for Birmingham over Jamar Smith who is now relegated to third string. I don't even know if he's going to dress in this game or be active. I think that the continuity there, quarterback coach is going to favor Arlington a little bit more than maybe the betting market suggest In terms of, and had Darryl Moose Johnson on last week talking and hey, this season we're kind of getting through here two months out, kind of the best we can we get through this season. What players do you want to see them target, Eric, and what do you want the game plan to be for 2025? And then we'll go to Andy as we were hitting 858 viewers on YouTube. Crazy. Yeah, it was funny, max talked about the kick returners and the special teams guys, Brandon Aubrey for example, being a pro bowl caliber kicker for Dallas and Turpen has been a great returner for them. I think one of the things that I, and I've written about this extensively is the offensive line play in the NFL since the 2011 collective bargaining agreement and then the new one in 2020 has been bad. And I think that one of the, so everybody's talking about Sam Schwartzstein and the kickoff rule and obviously he deserves a ton of accolades for that. But one of the things that they did in the XFL that the original one in 2020 that I thought was very apt was they tried to make sure that the talent level on both sides of the line of scrimmage was relatively equal, which is really hard to do given that the athleticism disparity between offensive lineman and defensive lineman at the highest level is really big, especially early on. And so when I'm looking across here, I think that there are legitimate depth opportunities in the NFL for offensive linemen for this league to come and develop. I don't know how you do that from a broadcast standpoint. I think pro football focus, my old employer being able to grade these guys, that's an awesome thing so that you can highlight some of these offensive linemen that are performing well. But when I'm thinking about this league and what kind of players I want to highlight that is, if I'm looking at the NFL, that is the number one most underserved position group in the entire league. And it's only going to get worse because, and I'm not trying to be a boomer here, but NIL and the transfer portal and things like that at college football, those linemen are going to come into the league oftentimes having played for two or three teams and not being as developed as they were even 10, 15 years ago. This league, that is the number one opportunity. I think if the UFL sticks long-term, it's going to be because they develop players at these positions that the NFL has neglected due to decreased practice time and et cetera. I think that that's the number one, that's what I'm looking for. And I'm hopeful for this lead. Make sure I'm looking here, watch on YouTube or excuse me, watch on Twitter, make sure I hit the link and get on YouTube so you can like and subscribe on, they'll bump the numbers up. I think we have a huge Twitter viewership right now, which I'm trying to figure out if Elon's pushing that. Andy comments on that? Comments on Eric Step? We'll put the show in bed here pretty soon. No, I really love what Eric touched on as far as offensive line development. I mean it's true, it doesn't happen enough even at the highest levels. I mean I think that's why you see a smattering of quarterbacks get injured like we've seen especially last year. I mean one that I can just name off the top of my head, Justin Herbert, I mean Cory Linley to their AllPro center had to retire because of a health issue. And so what happens is you put in a guy like Will Clap and he just functionality cannot do the same things as Corey lens as far as setting protection schemes and blocking schemes and he can't even have trouble with staffing the ball. And that caused issues for Herbert and eventually led to him just getting beat up all season and eventually he had to basically sit out the rest of the year in December. And that's happened to a number of quarterbacks. I think that happened to Case cus that happened to Brian Scott with the Philadelphia Stars in 2022. I mean, their offensive line was not good and they got pummeled the entire season and had to worry about, okay, instead of where's my receiver be? It was where's the defensive lineman going to be? And he's going to be in my face when I throw. And that is so different as far as mental processing for a quarterback as Eric was alluding to. I agree there needs to be more consistency and development overall for some of these linemen and how things shuffle around. I mean, even with Arlington, Arlington Renegades, I mean there's offensive linemen that are shifting around here too. Like I said, Jonathan Heinbach fantastic guest you had last week. He's an awesome offensive line coach, but it's going to take time for him to gel with that new cohesive set and for Luis Perez, hopefully it works and everything goes smoothly. But yeah, there needs to be more offensive line development because the defensive a linemen I'll tell you are getting more and more freakish every year. There are just some absolute animals on the defensive line that just absolutely wreck shop. And I think that's something that going forward, there's going to need to be more of a coming to Jesus moment with how offensive alignment, offensive line development goes, especially if you want quarterbacks and your assets to be protected. Max final comments from you? We'll, talks to Eric and we'll get out of here. I think as far as being a steward of the game, the offensive line development is the biggest opportunity as far as being of service CNFL. But until the NFL is paying buyout checks to the UFL to get players, which will never happen as far as making the UFL able to survive or not, unfortunately, developing offensive lineman is not going to be any more of a help than improving the quality of play, which is obviously quite important, but unfortunately is not going to be what is like, oh my god, people are going to certainly tune in because these offensive linemen are so great and the Path Tech is so great now they can make all these great offensive plays. Unfortunately, it feels like the quality of football, regardless of how good it is, is not going to be enough to draw interest. So it pains me to say that because you think you could put good football on television and people will just watch. But I mean we've seen that you can have really good football games and for example, guardians Defenders 36 37 last year, barely anybody's watching. So it's going to take way more than that for the UFL to have any sort of impact that's long lasting unfortunately. Eric, real quick, can we get your four picks for the games this weekend and then we'll put the show to bed? Yeah, so against the spread, I'm going to go Arlington, Michigan, San Antonio, and then Memphis. Actually Memphis opened a dog, but now they're a favorite depending upon where you look. So I just think in this early part of the season, there's just so much uncertainty here. I have a really hard time and I know Home Road is different because the travel is the same for both teams, but I don't understand how there are two road teams in this league who are touchdown favorite given everything. And one thing that I did think was interesting was we said this on the show, I think last year, the USFL, the quality of play held up last year more than I thought it would, given that the XFL took some of the players from the previous year. I do think we're going to see right away in an hour right away USFL versus XFLA team that won the championship last year versus a team that won the championship the last two years for the USFL, which one of the leagues is stronger because I think that a lot of people would say the XFL was stronger, but actually during the course of the season, not only did Birmingham run away with the USFL, but also I thought that the quality of play in that second league was stronger than most people predicted it would be. Well, I appreciate Eric coming on spending time. All of our guests today, Mike and Emory and Jovan and Coach Craig and Greg Parks and Max has still been on. And Andy, everyone else I'm going to go, I got to get over to the media avail at the stadium if you're watching on Twitter, which for whatever reason seems like a ton of people are, click the link, get on the YouTube, subscribe, give a thumbs up and all that stuff there. Eric, what would you like to plug before we get out of here? Yeah, so Sumer Sports Show with myself and former Falcons, GM and the CEO of our company, Thomas Dimitroff TRO is every Monday and Wednesday on our YouTube channel. Subscribe to our YouTube channel after you subscribe to this one. And then we have actually a Sirius XM draft show every Friday night, channel 80 eights at seven. It's a lot of fun. Really, really fun to talk the Spring League. I think fewer people like it more than we do, so I love being able to come on and chat a little bit. We're back, yeah, we're back here kickoff again. I called the same person that set me up the same room, so we'll see if we do it again next year. But Andy and I'll be back on Monday 90 and Pacific. We'll do our week one. Recap Max. I'm sure we'll be back on and we'll talk negative stuff as well. I appreciate everyone's time and I'll play all this and we'll get out of here. Thanks guys. Go. I don't know who's my pick Go Renegades, right? Let's go to Luis Perez. All right, see you guys. Thanks.

UFL’s Daryl Johnston Talks UFL Future Plans, XFL+USFL Merger Process, XFL vs. USFL Rules, and More!

Hey guys, welcome to the Mark Cast. Read here. Well here we go. As teased as promised. Big time episode Coming your way today. Hope you guys are excited. Hope you feel like I delivered on this one. Three big interviews. We have Daryl Moose Johnston coming on, executive Vice President of Football operations over at the UFL. We have coach Jonathan Heinbach with the Arlington Renegades and then Anthony Miller from Sports Illustrated. Should be a good one. Just a couple quick plugs for me here and then we'll get to the content. I know everybody is excited. This will be the last show we do before the UFL kickoff next weekend. So no Friday episode will be live Saturday, March 30th from Arlington. We'll have a big guest list. I'll post the event page and the guest list and all of this that this week. But like and subscribe if you're excited for that Should be a fun one. As a reminder, we're going to be giving away two tickets to the UFL championship game if we cross that 3,500 subscriber mark. So like and subscribe if you appreciate the work today, if you're excited for the kickoff next weekend. And then we'll be doing not only we will do our Friday shows kind of during the UFL season, but then we'll also be doing weekly recaps on Mondays following the games, kind of talking about the games and the standings and what did we learn and what are we doing and what are we doing wrong, kind of all that stuff. So getting that all workshopped and set up, but we did that last year with the XFL and with the USFL and then even the CFL. So continuing that in some form, but subscribe like the video if you're excited for that because should have lots of UFL content coming out here and I know we're getting back to the CFL, had lots of questions about that, but kind of focusing, let's get this lead kicked off and then we'll move towards all of that stuff here and start balancing it out a little more. So like I said, Darrell Johnson, great interview talking everything you would want Darrell Johnston to talk about his future vision for the league, the X-F-L-U-S-F-L, how did those negotiations go with the merger and the politics behind that? We're talking the XFL kickoff, the rules, all that stuff. So means a lot, especially the league setting that up. Darrell taking the time to come on, so thank you very much. Appreciate that coach Jonathan Heinbach coming on, taking time on a Sunday. Coach Heinbach is in an interesting situation where he was with the Birmingham stallions back in 2022, won the championship then he was with the XFL renegades last year, won the championship that way and so now this is kind of the coach Heinbach Invitational here for the kickoff with the stallions coming with the Renegades hosting the stallions and Choctaw. So lots of interesting comments from Coach Heinbach getting ready for the season and what's it like kind of all these familiar faces coming back around and his thoughts heading into this season. We chatted with him twice last year during the season and then Alfred, his championship win, so it should be a good interview that way. And then Anthony Miller coming on, busiest man in the spring football here with Sports Illustrated covering all of the UFL stuff. We'll be chatting final roster cuts are coming out for some of the teams getting Anthony's thoughts on training camp and the season and kind of preview and all of that stuff. So three big interviews. I appreciate everybody all the time. Hope you guys enjoy like and subscribe. We'll see you at the end. Thanks. Well here we go. This is exciting. Many emails getting ready for this. We have the executive vice president football operations here. Daryl Johnson with UFL Now. I wore, I did have to wear my Washington commander hat today. I had to make a stand, but maybe we could pretend it's the a F Commanders if that makes you feel better. How are you sir? I'm good, I'm good. No, Dan Quinn is one of my favorite people in the world, so it's all good. It's all good. Yeah, big. Yeah, big off season here for that. That could be a whole different conversation about all that. I say this, we're kind of week three, getting into week four training camp here, welfare check for you. How is everything going? It's been really good. I think obviously it's not been perfect. We've had some bumps in the road, but I think the big thing is overall when we looked at it, it's us trying to hold ourselves to that high standard. So this week we finally got a little bit of downtime and we're able to circle back and go through the onboarding process. Where could we have been a little bit better get to that carwash component where we create all the production elements that will be there as part of the broadcast and in studio and where can we get better there? Offboarding, we cut 136 players on the 16th, 17th. So I think the big thing there was just kind of that travel component, the timing, where's a good time to start, so where can we get better there? So that that's been really kind of us being a little bit picky, but everything being taken into consideration, Russ always tells us we're I think on day 62 or 63 of actually being an official league. So where we are now and what we've done through that process, everybody take a lot of pride in what you're doing. But it is been great to watch everybody still hold that high standard as we're working and moving along. But training camp itself, the players, I think that that was one of the big things. We heard it from the coaches, how hard it was to cut from 75 down to 58. We heard it from the players where when you walked onto the field and it was 58 guys in the USFL, you could look at the landscape and go, I'm going to be good. I'm going to make the 50 this year it's 75. Hearing the guys talking about the first couple of days of practice and looking around and watching the guys and then saying this is going to be a very competitive two weeks to get that roster spot. I think that the hard part about doing the merger, when you talk about the loss of the players that were going to be a part of the league moving forward, the coaches that were going to be a part of the league moving forward. Our first test has really shown that we really did upgrade the level of talent across the league and I still feel like 58 to 50 is going to be challenging. It is going to be even that finer part and I think it's going to be fun for us to see the coaches that back end of the roster, this is going to be the guys that are adding depth and creating special team spots. I feel very confident that everybody's, they've got their too deep just like the n ls as you're winding down and getting ready to start that season opener. So where are those hard decisions now made on that backup depth and how important they are in the special teams component of the game? Is that your selling point? I guess for going into this merger ride and there's a lot of fan bases. I'm in Seattle here. Obviously a lot of these is the selling point because it shouldn't be one plus one is two, right? With the XFL and the US L it should be okay, we're getting these fan bases and then also new fans. Is it that elevated level of football? We don't have the player 54 brand. What is your selling point in your mind of this new merge league? Yeah, it's great that you just said that. We talk about one plus one equals 3.5. We need to be able to do that. It has to be an elevated expectation from us at the top and to start those conversations so it flows down throughout the organization, throughout the league. So that's definitely one of the bigger parts there. As we're going through this, I think one of the things that we've started to have conversations is what do we want our new messaging to be? We do want to kind of move off of the developmental component. We want to get away from the opportunity component. We want to talk about the talent of the players that are in this league. We want to talk about the sustainability of spring football now that these two leagues have joined together and have elevated the talent that we're going to see going to all the various talent halls during the course of the buildup to the season. We talked about the level of talent in this league being the best since you had Reggie White, Jim Kelly, Herschel Walker, Mike er, Steve Young back in the day when spring football was trying to go head to head with the NFL and paying big contracts to get that talent there. This is going to be the first time that you're going to see that type of talent. I'm not saying we've got Hall of Famers on our rosters right now, but spring football that you have seen in other iterations, this will be the best talent that if you're a fan of spring football, you'll have seen in recent history. I know you said a rush job here just with all the circumstances this season getting in your mind, what would offseason look like next year or what would be the ideal in terms of getting the marketing and everything in place? I think we are kind getting through the best we can right now. Yeah, I think the big thing is just getting our calendar set, getting venue availability set, being able to get our schedule set that allows us to release ticket sales earlier. That's been one of the harder things. I think single game tickets went on sale in Detroit five days ago, so it has been challenging. So just having all the elements that we can control next year, going into the off season and making sure that we are checking boxes as soon as we possibly can so we can lighten that burden on the back end of it. And one of the hardest things was venue availability and scheduling coming down to the wire this year based on how we were going to pull this off. So that's something that we'll be way ahead of the curve with. That way we can start to talk to our fans about what the games are going to be in market. So just being ahead of that is going to be a tremendous help and it is one of those things that I'm sure a lot of people don't think about. We get focused on the football, but all those moving parts that are really kind of driving a lot of the revenue components was really late coming on board this year and we've got to be much further ahead down the road, not only for us but also for our fans so they can start to plan. Are we happy with the March 30th? Is that a stop gap this season? How do we feel about that? I think that that's another one of the big items that'll be up for discussion. I think it was a necessity this year to push it back a little bit. We didn't want to get it too far back. We were always talking about trying to find that happy medium in between legacy XFL and legacy USFL. When you talk about start dates, this kind of slotted that we're still having conversations about some of those iconic sports events that we would be in direct competition with depending on the start date, how do we feel about going up against the NCAA tournament when that goes into full swing, how do we feel about being on the same weekend as the masters? So there's some things there that we have to talk about, but again, with the trust and the belief in the league and then the support from the fans and the viewers, that really helps us to have some honest conversations there. And just growing up as a league and being able to do some things regionally that we had to do this year just based on the timing of the schedule that we just talked about, that makes us a little bit more mature moving forward. Can we stay off the busy day of the NCAA tournament on a Saturday and a Sunday because we can regionalize games and maybe steal some windows in there. It's really that first weekend that really is the one that's going to be hard to compete against because the games are on almost all day long. But okay, so that's going to be a challenge for us. How do we do our best job there? But those other weekends do we feel like now with some open windows that we could regionalize some things and have current games going on at the same time. So there's some things that just as we develop and stay ahead of the curve and I think we can navigate the masters as well, there's some things there that we could do. So I think as we start to become a league that has the trust of its fan base and kind of locks them in from a viewership standpoint that they'll come find where we are, that they'll make time to sit down and I think that that opens the discussion to be a little bit more flexible when we want that start date to be on the calendar. You talked about that legacy XFL and legacy USFL. Obviously you've been around kind of both past and I've even had, I'm sure you're a good friend, coach Heba on here this week as well talking and someone that's been on both sides. How was that marrying of the ideas? I want to talk about the rules here too briefly, but there's a lot of things that both leagues held dear and obviously a little bit of shots taken back and forth. So how was this marrying of the two ideas? Yeah, we're all competitors. So we all had the beliefs in what our league had done well and they had their beliefs and what they had done well and that was going to be the biggest challenge. Can we check our egos at the door and really follow what we've been talking about, which is let's make sure we get the best practices in line with the UFL and not let our egos get in the way. So that was something I think we did a really good job of. I mean there were some things that we admired that we liked that the XFL did and talking with Russ Brandon and Doug Whaley and Russ Gilio, there were some things that we had done in the USFL that they liked and thought that we executed very well. So when you can have those open conversations, it makes things a lot easier. And we probably had two or three that were kind of the sticky ones and it was really kind of like you would do in politics. I mean you've got to bring people from the other side of the aisle to your side and see the value in doing what you're doing. So on those items it was a little bit more of a sell, but again, staying in that posture of listen, what is best for the league moving forward. And I think we were able to do a really, really good job there. And as you talk about the rules, that was one of the areas where we can give you some concrete examples of that. Well yeah, because I was talking with people, I said, Hey, I think we're going to get Darryl Johnson out here. They said you got to ask about, because the kickoff rule here, and obviously you were part of both, I think the comments of it not looking like real football might have upset some of the XFL fans, especially considering maybe the NFL adopting it here in the future. Was that really the sticking point? Do you have any clarifications on those comments? I think that was it upset some kind of XFL, like OG homers, if that makes sense. Yeah, I don't think I ever said, I said we wanted a more traditional look. I don't think I ever said it doesn't look like real football. If I did, that was not my intent. I would never disparage anybody. I think what we talked about is it looked more like traditional football, which we wanted movement at the kick and for us that was not the selling point. That was not the huge one. The biggest thing for us is really looking at what do special teams provide for our players. We can have a kante Turpen story, we can have a Brandon Aubrey story, but there's a lot of other stories there where it's the third tight end, it's the fourth safety, it's fifth corner that makes an NFL roster because they've had an opportunity to see how effective he is on special teams as a cover guy and as a blocker or a return guy. So that was one of the big things that we wanted to take into consideration and bring to the table from the USFL side. When we talked about the kickoff, the number one item in this whole conversation is player health and safety. So the returns were almost identical when we talked about the numbers. They were both right around 91.4, 91.3%. When we looked at the medical data, the medical data was on par as well. There was not a significant increase in any types of injuries with the legacy USFL style compared to the legacy XFL style. So that is the most important element that we want to look at. And then we also want to look at what is the best opportunity for our players to get noticed to be seen and have that opportunity to get to the NFL. So we kind of went that direction now with all this conversation about the NFL potentially adopting what the XFL did. That does change things, but what we will do is we will continue to move forward with the plan that we had in place. And if at any point if injuries start to become an issue on our style kickoff, we will make a change. And I think that that's one of the things that we've demonstrated from legacy USFL. We had other situations during the course of our first few years where there were issues and we're not, again, check your ego at the door. We tried something, it didn't work, let's move off of it. We listened to the input from our players all the time, so we want to be stewards of the game that do it the right way. Sometimes we make a decision and it may not be the right one, but this was something that we felt was very important. There were other ones that the XFL felt was very important and we steered their way, but I know that this was the big one and there was a lot of people talking about it. And quite honestly, when you look at our league, we have forehead coaches that want to know why we're doing it this way and forehead coaches that are fine that we're doing it this way. So there are still some attachments from your previous leagues and that's going to be stuff that we navigate through the course of season one here in the UFL. But the biggest thing I want to get out there is if I said it doesn't look like real football, I apologize, I never meant to disparage that style of kickoff. What I thought I said and what I hope I did was more traditional, we want it to look like a more traditional kickoff with movement at the time of the kick. So that was from an aesthetic point and a viewership point, but the most important thing is we can't even have that conversation if our medical data is not similar to what the X l's medical data was. Two questions here. I know you hopped on there earlier, I don't want to keep you too long here. I appreciate your time. You were talking about that the four coaches transitioning and how has that gone with, we had Curtis Johnson on last week with the roughnecks now and transitioning to the USFL, adopting the XFL branding with that and trying to build the fan base there in Houston. How do you think that that's gone, that transition to have the four and four? Yeah, that was one of our unique situations is the Houston market and I think that that's probably one of our best examples because that really comes down to a team that's going to have a lot of change. The roughneck moniker is something that I think resonates a little bit more when you talk about what the city of Houston and the surrounding area and what the oil industry has meant to that community. I think there's a better connection there. So we really felt that it would be good to go with the roughnecks as opposed to the gamblers and then we wanted to make sure that there was balance in how we were bringing in staff. So it was really, okay, Curtis, you're going to have your staff, your roster in place as you move forward, but we're going to bring the XFL moniker and color scheme over to you and it's been fantastic and my happiest moment this year is going to be on the 31st is going to be great to kick off on opening day with Birmingham versus Arlington as our two champions from last season go head to head. But for me, I'm going to be down in Houston because Houston gets to play in a home market for the first time and that's something that I'm really, really excited about. All of our other teams have been able to do that. We were in Birmingham, we were in Memphis, we were in Detroit. Houston was the lone survivor from the merger that never got an opportunity to play in front of their home market. So I'm really, really excited for Curtis Johnson and his staff and his players to finally have a true home game. They were playing in Birmingham and year one they were playing in Memphis in year two. This is going to be their first opportunity. So I'm really excited about that and I think that that creates a great example. I was at the town hall earlier this year in Houston and there's a tremendous amount of support there. They're just happy that they made the merger and that they're going to have football in the spring in the city of Houston. Last one from me here, this is near and dear to kind of a lot of different, the online fantasy sports, betts kind, all that stuff in terms of injury reports this year and trying to kind of broaden that fan base to get people to do that, do you know how the league's going to to be handling that? I know the XFL would kind send them out. USFL was not as transparent about it and I know there's various methodology behind that, but do you guys know about that and trying to be able to make sure that people are informed so that they can follow in bed and do all the fantasy stuff? I think we were very transparent in the USFL. I think we just followed probably a more rigid NFL style of release. So the one thing that we've talked about during the course of the merger, when it's about information that's going out, the most important thing is the information is correct. It's not about who gets it out there first. So the number one thing is the accuracy and if we are going to have gambling, then that accuracy has to be spot on. And so we followed a more traditional NFL style model when you talked about the injury reporting on the daily reports. When we get 48 hours, who's active, who's inactive? We'll have some of the mechanisms that we had in the legacy UFL to make changes there within 90 minutes, within 30 minutes because we actually had a 30 minute change that we enacted I think in year one in the USFL and that was something that Jim Pop brought to the table that I never thought was going to happen and then all of a sudden it does. So I felt that we were transparent last year. I think sometimes we were a little bit protective but I don't think we ever tried to hide anything. I think we really try to stay to the NFL timelines when you get into the game day status report and then the active and active report as we're leading up to the game, we know how important that information is to the sports betting fan community. So we know we have to be spot on and that's why we challenged everybody how important this information is to be kept close to the vest within the league until it's supposed to be released. So you'll probably see something that's more USFL than you saw from XFL last year, but that's not to hide anything that's not a lack of transparency. That's really just our mission to make sure anything that comes out that's sensitive that is 100% accurate when we release that from the league. Perfect. Yeah, I know I always want to make sure I ask that when you get people on because I know that's very important. So Darryl, I really appreciate it. I know it's crazy busy. Thank you for taking the time today and copping on early even so appreciate it. You got it. No problem. Enjoy the conversation. Well the last time, last couple times we've had Coach Heinbach on, I think the first time was the most viewed episode I think we'd had ever for a single guest coming on and then last time I know we went viral for talking about the XFL championship trophy being able to be flipped upside down and drank out of so lots of high expectations today. Coach Hoback, how are you doing sir? I'm doing well. Thanks for bringing up some good memories. It's good. This is exciting. Back again. Now again, first off, we're three weeks into training camp, how is life for you here? Welfare check. It's going well. It's a little bit of Groundhogs day every day in training camp. It seems to be the same routine but the guys have been great. The guys on this team that Rick Mueller's put together on this roster every single day they come in, they're ready to learn, they're ready to put good things on tape and really improve their craft. So I was just talking to a couple guys around the league. I think we only have right now one returning player on the offensive line from last year's championship team, so that just speaks to the volume of how good the talent is right now and just how this league is continuing to evolve In terms of getting ready. We had scrimmages, right? I know we had open practice here and fans coming. How do you feel like the guys are acclimating here and how is the team chemistry coming together? It's a little bit different of a field this season because we've had the opportunity to get together with some other teams. We've had three different occasions, two times we've done an organized practice with the Houston Roughnecks, which has been great, know a lot of their coaches and have the utmost respect for 'em and they came in and it was a very business-like type of a feel at the stadium and I think they wanted to be in the stadium with us. It was great to be at Choctaw just moving the ball up and down the field and doing some situational work and then we get a chance to go against Memphis and kind of a organized practice over at Mansfield, so it's been good. It's kind of broken up the monotony of training camp In terms of obviously being with the USFL here, whatever and then coming back over thoughts here on all this coming together here. Would you have ever expected to be in this situation now and facing Birmingham the first week? I mean kind of a really weird situation to be at. What do you make of this merge premier spring football league now? It's all come full circle. I mean there's so many familiar faces for me in my career. I've spent a lot of time north of the border in the Canadian Football League and to look over across the sideline and see a guy like Jim Pop who I've had, we've celebrated some great Cup championship wins together in Montreal and Toronto together and to see him as part of the brass with the league is great. And then also to see Moose Johnson, who he and I were together in a F back in the day with the San Antonio commanders and with his vision for the league and then yesterday I walked into Choctaw Stadium with Skip Holtz and so it's really neat. Everybody just loves to be a part of something. I think we've got the right pieces to the puzzle. Being able to put this league together, it was hard. It was a little bit difficult. I'll be honest, when the league, we didn't really know where we stood and our contracts ran out, all of a sudden there's talk of a merger. We didn't know which teams would make it and I'm very fortunate, very blessed to be a part of Bob's staff again, but to see those guys across the sideline and in the league just builds the excitement and appreciation to be a part of this. Yeah. What's it like having Darryl kind of in charge of football ops again here and obviously you've had lots of experience with him, but now different feelings here in camp now or how is that going? Well the one thing I'll always say about moose is he's a guy that's not afraid to roll up his sleeves. I remember when we were together in the U-S-F-L-A few years ago when I was with Birmingham, I would see most everybody sees him as on tv, the executive, the ex-player, those type of things doing the commentating, but he's rolling up his sleeves, loading Gatorade onto the bus for players to go have an offsite practice. I mean he's boots on the ground. He's a guy that I think football people respect. I know the coaches appreciate his insight. It's great to see him just on occasion. I know we're both running around with us game planning and practice and he's got a million things going on, but true appreciation and excitement about where these things are going right now In terms of Arlington with Chuck now kind of running his OC difference as for the offense or things you're noticing and different changes there? Well there's always change. There's going to be change based on your roster. I mean we have a lot of new fresh faces, obviously guys like Luis Perez and Davion Smith and Tyler Vaughn, some of those guys were staples for us last year, but we've got new guys coming in with new skills and so the offense is going to change and morph. We're going to try to get the ball in guys' hands and let 'em create and let 'em put good things on tape. I've worked with Chuck before, so very blessed to be with him. He was a head coach at San Diego State when I was working with him. So good to be reunited again and now we've got a background for what our players can handle. Last year I don't think we really knew what we had. We kind of threw a playbook at 'em and saw Woodstock and as people watch this league, those are truly familiar with the league saw how much offense changed, how much defense has changed because you kind of introduce concepts and you see what your players can handle and the guys really took on a great role in putting this offense together. So it's been fun to see year two now picking the ball up and running with it and it's been fun just to see the new guys really elevate because the older guys, they're forcing the tempo. Luis has been a great leader, a great example for the guys, so we've really been pushing them hard and I heard one of the guys say this is the biggest install they've ever had even in NFL training camps and we've got a lot of offense in and now it's our job as coaches to peel it back and make a real concise game plan as we go into week one and figure out who we're, Is it harder building an offensive line now with a couple fewer roster spots than there were? I know that there's some changes here going into this season, Less numbers is a little bit more difficult. When we were in the USFL two years ago had about the same numbers then, so it was a luxury a year ago to have some more bodies in the room, but more is not always better and I say that with a little bit of reservations just because you want to have more time to evaluate players, but I think the quality of player is much better this year. Look at the additions we've put into just into our roster and I'm looking around at the other groups. It's a really seasoned veteran group and not guys that are multiple spring league players, it's guys with lots of quality starting NFL experience and so that's exciting to see the background guys have and the professionalism that walks in the door every day. One of the big conversation points we had when you were on before was the start of the season and obviously this year there was a lot. We're starting a little later here and I think everyone understands why, but thoughts on that. Which the March 30th, you like that? Is that still enough time? I know that was a big selling point for you with the XFL was the earlier start. Yeah, I think it's one of those things you just deal with the schedule. I think hopefully now with us being on major national broadcast is going to be helpful for the league, but for us, I mean we're so much further along year two than year one. I don't know that our camp was any shorter. It's just a little later in the year and I think it gave guys a little bit more of a chance to figure out are they going to sign an NFL futures deal or are they going to come play and get actual film and I think that's maybe the appeal. Sure a little bit later we're backed up to NFL training camps and maybe they missed some OTAs, but I mean players are players and if you play well you're going to get noticed and so we hope to be able to allow guys to prolong their professional career and whether it be with us or somebody else or having the opportunity down the road. I think player wise they probably wanted an earlier start, but for us coaches we're ready to go and we're chomping at the bit to get this first game started In terms of kind of XFL before, there's a lot of player 54 ride and recognizing the opportunity and a lot with DJ and all of that this year. We're the premier league, we're the premier spring football league. You've been around so many of these. What would you like to see this new U l's identity be because it, and again, we're kind of rushed here, headed up this season, but it feels like we're still kind of trying to figure out what we wanted that latch onto. Yeah, I think just putting good quality content on TV and giving these guys a chance to show their skills, I think with having a small group of returning players is good and familiarity with our staff and we've had obviously continuity on our coaching staff. Everybody that is with us currently was on the coaching staff last year a little bit harder because we have a smaller staff size now, so there's a little bit more responsibility on each coach and just with the staff size, that's probably one of the biggest issues that we've had to deal with is smaller staffs and now we've gone to just seasonal pay with coaches and so that makes it a little bit more difficult maybe for retaining coaches down the road. But I think the identity of the league, I think people will see a much improved product, maybe a little bit more polished like it was towards the end of the season last year with the returning players and continuity and coaching staffs. I think all those things definitely play out, but you need new players every single year. You don't want guys that are five year spring football veterans. I mean you want to wish 'em the best. I had two of my favorites, Brian Ertz and Mike Horton who played for us last year and both of 'em are moving on to different phases of their life. Brian's coaching right now and Mike's just a new dad so it's exciting to have a small part of those guys' professional football career. And looking forward to seeing what this new group can put on TV here shortly, What does it feel like the expectations are with the league here now in terms of growth coming out of this and obviously without the competition it's a little more, but obviously there's this immediacy where we still need to make a mark. Have you got a sense of what the expectations are they're hoping to hit? That's above my pay grade for. It's one of those where I try to put together the best offensive line and give these guys a chance to be successful and put an offensive game plan together that is going to make our fans proud. And so as far as beyond that for the large scope of the league, I think I'm going to stay in my lane and do my thing and enjoy coaching. This unit, this group, I just wanted to throw it a shout out to Rick Mueller, our general manager, he's done an incredible job of finding talent, finding players, creating competition in camp and so I think the fans are going to like what they see not just early on but throughout the full season In terms of coaching staffs here, I'll let you go here. I see the time, lots of shuffling everything. When you look over at Birmingham, a lot of similar faces there. Have they set the standard in terms of what your expectations are for spring football team and how challenging is that going to be to come in and see them here opening week? I think it's just day by day. Skip's done a phenomenal job with his staff. A lot of guys returned back from our coaching staff two years ago so I know Bill Johnson and Corey are back over there with Coach Chavis with John, so great continuity on their staff but same thing with ours, Bob is a great one to work for, really empowers his coaches, let us put a game plan together and it's fun to come to work every single day and when really there's only been one run in with Birmingham, our very first walkthrough, we look up and there's like 15 of their guys sitting there watching our practice at Choctaw and I don't think they even really realized what they were doing other than that we really haven't seen Birmingham. They practice in the afternoons, we're in the mornings, we're both super busy. We need to take care of our own teams rather than worrying about the other guys and we'll see them in a couple weeks and it's really a unique setup that we have sharing a practice facility and appreciate what the league has done and given us a chance to showcase what we can do out there. Last thing from me, I know that and obviously coaching and kind of above all this, but we've set up this dynamic of the XFL conference versus USFL conference and we are leaning into the kickoff game and all that stuff. We were talking with Darius Victor, is there any sense of rivalry between that you view that and obviously you've been on both sides of the Warfield here, but is there a sense there of pride of that or is it just these eight teams? I'm curious how you view that as a coach. Yeah, I mean I've been on both sides. I've been a veteran of spring football leagues and love this climate. You're working with professionals and guys that are really trying to make a livelihood and for us as coaches doing the same thing also. Sure there's always competition. You want to win. This is professional football, that's what it is. But there's a common respect all the way across the board for the coaches, for the players, for what everybody is putting on the line and the hours and the blood, sweat and tears that's put into this thing. So sure it's going to be a great rivalry. I think it's going to be good football. I think people are going to what they see and it gives the fans a little bit of an excitement to get their home teams back playing in all the markets. I think that's great. We're excited to be here five of the home games and we only have to travel for five. Everybody else has got to travel for every single one, even if they're home games. So we're looking forward to it and excited to see the fans out here for the opener. It's going to be a great start to the season. Well I'll be down there. I appreciate it. Thanks for making the time today on the Sunday. It means a lot so I appreciate it. Thanks Reed. See you man. Well I spent a good five minutes here trying to figure out which commanders had I wanted to wear to vest, to vest throw and Anthony Miller here. But if I wear commander's hat to troll the executive vice president of football operations for the UFL, I can also do the same for you. So we have Anthony Miller here really nice because we a lot of shots back and forth in private dms. It's good to be on here and we'll be professional and polite today. I really appreciate it. How are you sir? I am doing good. My condolences on Caleb Williams going to bear down instead of take command, but it's been good. I'm doing good. I read these gathering reports and we'll see every day I kind of go back and forth of I'm either heartbroken or not. So Anthony in Arlington here, he's going to join us next week. We're doing our UFL show, had a chance to go to scrimmages last weekend has been a part of a lot of the media calls with the coaches and writing articles for it's illustrated. I have your one here talking about the Arlington cuts today. So timeline wise, final cuts due Saturday. Some of the teams are rolling them out now. How are you? I guess I always just ask to welfare check. We're a week from kickoff, how are we feeling It? It's just a different feeling than it's been in other years because I feel like every year that we're covering these leagues, there's more uncertainty. You just don't know if you're going to get to the next year like okay, the XFL lasted in 20, well at least this version of the XFL is 2020 and 2023 USFL was 22 and 23 and it's like, okay, we've done a couple years of this, you're kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop. When is this actually going to just flop? And I don't want it to, I had love for this leak to work, but there's just so much uncertainty. How is this year going to go? I'm really interested to see what the attendance is going to be like, what are the ratings going to be like? I mean there's going to be a lot more games on national television, which is great with Fox taking about half of the games on their network. But there's just so much uncertainty that I just, I'm playing a wait and see thing. It's going to be a week by week thing. Let's see what happens in week one. Let's see what happens in week two. Let's see if the leaking, there's going to be a dip in some capacity when it comes down to attendance and ratings. It's just a matter of is it going to be a small percentage? If it's a small percentage, then I think it's a success. If it's a big drop, like 40, 50% for both throughout the year, then I think there's going to be a lot of concern about next year. So I know everyone loves talking about expansion. That's all we hear every week. Is everyone like, oh, we're going to expand the 12 teams, we're going to expand it. No, let's get through this year. Let's see if we can make a profit and then maybe two, three years down the road then we can maybe add two more teams. But I just want to see this be profitable with the eight teams they have now. Yeah, I almost kind of did a rant on this podcast, recorded everything else and I decided not to just because kind of keep a professional with Darryl and everyone on here. But yeah, obviously that's like the hot button thing to me save for the expansion talk. I don't sense a lot of hotness right now about this. I think the Larry David on Rich Eisen today complaining about the goalposts and going to the rock about it is probably the most I've seen about this league in weeks it feels like. And like I said, we're eight days from kickoff here. We'll be in Arlington a week from when this episode airs. So that's where I am concerned. Opening game, I'm very concerned. I need to look at ticket sales and how the maps are going, but I'm a little worrywart. So look, people love nostalgia. So when the XFL came back in 2020, I think everyone was super excited. What kind of XFL we going to? It's been 20 years since this has happened, so everybody was watching. The ratings were really good, the attendance was good, everyone was excited to see it. USFL in 2022, I think people were excited. It's like it's been 30, 40 years since this league has come, but now that we've gone through it over the last couple years, I think people are just, I hate to say they're starting to lose patience and they're like, I don't really know if I believe in this thing anymore. I mean these leagues aren't making any progress. In fact, they merge and they cut half of their teams. So it's kind of for the casual football fan, it's like why should I be engaged with it? It seems like these teams are coming and going all the time. It is. Why would I be attached to them? So I mean, yeah, I agree with you. I don't think there's been enough attention on this that we've seen in the past. There was a lot of excitement with the XFL over the last few years. There was more excitement with the USFL in the last couple of years. The UFL is kind of like they put this thing together in two, three months and just hoping that there's going to get a lot of attention. They need to do a lot more in the next week on advertising and getting out on these ESPN shows and Fox shows to really push for this product. Because right now I just agree with you, I don't really see enough of it and I've been looking at Ticketmaster and seeing the seats and for Arlington and at least for Arlington, I've seen there's still a lot of open seats. I mean there's thousands of seats that are still open. Even for St. Louis, I still think there's a ton of seats that are still open to be bought. So I'm really interested to see what if they can turn it around in the next week and get a lot of people in the stands, that'd be great. But yeah, I think I'm trying to be a little cautious this time around and kind of see how this thing goes week by week. Yeah, I think that's how a lot of people have. I know Greg Parks has been on, I always kind of judge a and we'll talk real football here too, if people are listening, I always like to set the stage here with some of this stuff. I judge looking at other people's content as well as my own writers or an upswing in YouTube views people, are they searching that? I don't feel that, and I always kind of judge if I get asked by a lot of CFL people to come on their shows, like the Rod Petersons of the world. I did one podcast this week with my friend with third down Gamble, one of the CFL guys. But normally the last couple of years you go, Hey Reid, tell me about this USFL thing. Hey Reid, tell me about all that stuff. I will say Daryl in his interview I think was very transparent about, hey, we're doing the best we can right now. We're late to the game. We're trying to build all this in two months. This is the situation we are in and we really need to stop down going into next year, which is great. The concern is always like, well, what if there is no next year? That was why I was so upset about the merch when the merch came out and people said, well you got to give 'em time. Then one thing, none of this said has its time. So I think they're aware that this is not the ideal timeline that they're in, but also you could have played this season out or that there was a myriad of things they could have done to get to here. But I do think they're at least aware of we're trying to do the best we can right now. So that gives me more encouragement to hear that if they're self-aware, like, okay, we know this year may not be the smoothest, it may not be the best experience, but what's at least get something out on television and let's show the players are going to shell out at the end of the day. As long as we give the players enough time to go through training camp and stuff like that, the players are going to ball out. Maybe it may not be the best presentation. Maybe those fan experience may not be as great as we want it to be, but hey, at least these players are going to go out. They're going to put a good television product and maybe we can start building for next year. So I'm at least glad that Darryl was open about that because I think a lot of us feel that same way. I just hope that they understand that and like, Hey, we know there's going to be a next season's. The concern is like you said, we don't have enough time. Is there really going to be a next season? If they're aware of that, then that makes me think they have to be like, we have to do this in 2025 and maybe 2025 is the deal breaker year. If they know this year is not going to be it. Yeah, like I said, it's always you put this out and I don't if it's not up to, if we put something out and it's subpar or we do, is there our people engaged? I saw, I mean I noticed that a lot with the USFL, the 2022 season where they have all those eyeballs on the weekend and they have that truncated training camp and those games are really sloppy outside of the home. The main kickoff one and you saw viewership leg after that because you come out, this is your one, but Hein box, he say he feels confident the teams are going and Curtis Johnson was on last week mean it seems like they feel that the teams are kind of up to speed here. You went to the scrimmages last weekend, first off fan interest wise I know was raining. How was that and then how was kind of the football stuff you saw? It took a little bit. I made the comment to you guys at first like, oh, there's not a lot of people here. So I was a little concerned like, okay, it's not the best weather, but the rain held off a lot more fans started coming in around 9 30, 10 and it was actually from a fan perspective, there was a lot of fans out there. There was a couple hundred that were there and I think it was a really good turnout. I think it was just as good of, it ended up being just as good of a turnout as it was last year. So one, I was impressed with that. Two, I will say the Renegades practice this year, that team looks like they're better than last year. And I mean every team should be better. They've gotten, when you cut half the teams and you're inheriting all these good players, you should look better. But I will say the returning players that are coming back for Arlington, I remember last year when I came on your show, I talked about, I had major concerns about the receiving corps. I just didn't think they had enough Playmakers this year. You got Tyler Vaughn, Avante, Peyton, who are back from last year. Both of them looked great. Isaiah Winsted, who wasn't on the team last year, Isaiah looked great in practice. There is a lot of good receivers on the team that includes Sal Cane tight end. This offense looks really stellar. Louis Perez was near perfect in practice. He looked really good offense aligned, just as strong as it's ever been. Coach Beck's done a really good job with that offensive line. That's why he's always been considered the best offensive line coach in these spring leagues. But the offense looked good, the defense was solid. I feel like in general, this Renegade's team is really put together better than they were last year, and I have a lot more confidence that they could play at a high level. They did late in the season last year. Do I think they're going to win the title? I mean, I don't think so. I think there's other teams that are stronger than them, but I do think this team is better than they were last year and they should be competitive. Well, it's interesting because like you said, you're getting the consolidation of these teams, so we're kind of hand cherrypicking the best players and then also you do get some of this continuity now where we saw that with the USFL going from season one to two and just having that, it's so hard to build that chemistry and you make training camp and do all that stuff, but it's halfway through the season before we even see that with NFL teams. And so the continuity of being able to come back I think has to help. And obviously there's kind of the mix and the roughnecks and all that, but in general you're kind of getting a lot of these guys back together. Well, I think the one advantage the Renegades have over, I think any team in this league is Coach Stoops literally brought everyone back. Everyone is back outside of Jonathan Hayes and Tim Lewis. They're not there anymore, but everyone else is back. So this is the same coaching staff they had last year. I think it helps that you have someone like Louise Perez who was in this offense last year, plus Luis Perez has played for 5 million different teams and knows how to jump on a team, learn quickly and move on. I think he's one of the smartest quarterbacks in the spring leagues because he's been traded multiple times. He's bounced between teams and he's had to learn different offenses very quickly and I think that gives him an advantage over most quarterbacks in this league. So I think when a lot of the players are back from last year, the majority of the team that won the championship is back outside of a few players. I think having that continuity is going to be an advantage for the renegades. I think this is maybe one of the tighter knit teams in the league compared to the other seven. Luis coming back. That was a big, big news and Temu coming back, AJ McCarran, besides the Matt Corral last year, we had some of the big names. Okay, we're bringing in and the bents of the world and all that. Are you surprised we're of just doubling down with more of the homegrown talent or is there any quarterback stuff that maybe I'm missing with that? I know the Roughnecks name, their starting quarterback, but you always see these people bring in Mansel bring, it seems like, Hey, we got loose Perez, we got these guys. They kind of know what they're doing. I mean, how many times have they tried to bring in a big name and then they do nothing? I remember Brent Hunley came in last year and was like, oh my God, the rumors where he was the highest paid player in the XFL and he was going to be the star of this league for the Vipers. He ends up getting benched within a week or two. Just because they're a big name doesn't mean they're going to translate into having success. Now do I think Matt Corral could do well with Birmingham? Absolutely. But I mean the reality is Jaymar Smith, I mean Coach Skip Holtz talked about it a few weeks ago in the media availability. He said Jaymar Smith has been in his offense for seven years. He's been with Skip Holtz in college, he's been with him with Birmingham. Jaymar Smith knows the offense better than anybody else, so it's a natural advantage for him to run this offense. He knows how to run it well and he's done it to perfection because he is helped the team win a championship when he was the main starter in 2022. So just because you bring in big names doesn't mean that they're going to be an overnight success To me. And I know that there'll be a lot of this F-L-U-S-F-L kind of rivalry stuff, especially the opening game, but I am worried that Birmingham might steamroll a lot of this stuff and I know that practice, it is hard with all this training camp, but we don't get the same access you would normally. But just in terms of just like you said, the continuity there, how much they know everybody. We're bringing everybody back. I know Scarborough retired, but it feels like that's a kind of a force to be reckoned with compared to maybe the new look roughnecks or whatever. Well, I would say looking at the outlook of each of the teams, I'll be honest, I think there's three really good teams that I feel like can win the championship. That's Birmingham, DC and St. Louis. I feel like there is a big separation between those three teams versus the rest of the league. I feel like maybe Memphis and Arlington are right there in the middle at four and five. I think the two of them are going to battle for that last playoffs spot. But just what I see from St. Louis, DC and Birmingham, those are the three teams. I feel like they're going to dominate everybody in this league and I feel like they're the three best teams and they're going to battle it out for the championship. I feel like everyone else, Michigan, I mean maybe EJ Perry is the starting quarterback, but Michigan's offense is a mess. They have a good defense, but I feel like they have no weapons offensively. So I think Michigan could end up being the worst team San Antonio. There's so many question marks that Wade Phillips has just come in there and just overhaul that whole roster to bring in a lot of roughnecks, but he didn't get all the top roughneck players. So it's like, I mean, who knows what's going to happen in San Antonio? I feel like Memphis and Arlington, they're going to battle it out for that number four spot to see who's the fourth best team. But I think the only concern I have is there's a big separation between the top teams and then the, I don't want to say the bottom tier teams, but the average teams. Well, it was right was Mike Mitchell the other day. We were talking that they had their scrimmage, the defenders, and I know Mike covers them and they just steamrolled, right? Was it Michigan? They played, they scrimmaged against and it was like they just totally steamrolled and it wasn't even close. And like you said, that co-signs with your assessment, but yeah, you get that and as good as this talent is in these groups, I mean it still is it still kind of spring football talent and pools we're trying to work through here, but with DC what is impressing you there? And I assume Temu right is going to be the star of that show. I know Abram Smith got hurt, so I don't know what they're going to do to kind of address that. I know they brought in some people, right? Yeah, I think the running back situation will be interesting in DC, but I think people kind remember this. I'm not trying to knock on Abram Smith, but let's face it, he had one game where he had over two, 300 yards rushing against St. Louis and then really the rest of the season, you look at his stats and he was averaging almost 50 yards a game. I'm not trying to downplay his loss because it is a big loss, but at the same time I look at someone like Mark Thompson with the Houston Roughnecks, he was a lot more consistent last year averaging 70, 80, 90 yards a game. I'm looking for a running back like that versus someone like Abram Smith who had one big game and then you look at the stats the rest of the season and it really wasn't that great. So I'm looking for someone's a little more consistent, but yeah, DC has really put well together. I mean they basically got the bunch back. Jordan Tama is one of the best quarterbacks in this league. Regie Barlow has really coached a very disciplined defenders team and Von Hutchins has really put a good roster together. So I mean you look at this defense, you look at the offense overall, I think DC should be considered one of the best teams in this league In talking, like you said, San Antonio, and that's kind of my team and obviously Trust Wade and aj. But I see no buzz at all about San Antonio at all. I just doesn't even see anything's going on right now. I don't know. Is it just because, I dunno if the media people on some of these teams are pushing out more stuff or I'm seeing more of it, but I don't sense a lot of excitement around the San Antonio fan base right now except for there's some fan accounts that go for it. I think there's just so much uncertainty. We just don't know. This may be the team that I feel like is the most confusing. We just don't know what we know they're capable of. I mean, AJ Smith is one of the smartest offensive minds in all of spring football, but we just don't know what kind of team mean. We know they have Jte Kirkland who's was one of the best receivers in the XFL last year before his injury. We know he's got big play mentality to him, but they haven't been named a starting quarterback yet. The defense went a major overhaul and the offense went through a major overhaul. So you're not going to really know what's going to come from the San Antonio team until maybe two, three weeks into the season. Everyone else you can kind of predict where they're going to go. I think everyone kind of predicts Michigan's maybe one of the bottom teams. You look at St. Louis and DC and Birmingham, those are the obvious top teams, but San Antonio, you're just shrugging your shoulder. I don't know what's going to come for the team. You can expect good defense because Wade Phillips is a good defensive mine. But outside of that, can AJ Smith be able to put this all these different pieces into this offense together and make the high flying offense that the Houston Roughnecks were last year? Yeah, I'm looking at is it going to be dorm? I know, and it's so hard. Basically pre-season and training camp, but we don't know. It's all guessing and assumptions at this point. But Francois or Dormy, right? I mean is that who we're rolling with San Antonio? I remember when they were doing kind of the initial draft like, oh, they're going to bring in someone or they're going to get Ben Crew or whatever. It just doesn't seem like they've ever, that's who we're rolling with. I mean it could be. I would think Dormy would be the favorite. I mean, he came in last year, everything that he went through with Orlando and was able to be one of the top quarterbacks in this league. So it feels like that it should be him. I mean Francois, I mean, no, I don't really see him being in the running chase. I think Chase Garbers is still on the team as well. He could be in the running, but I think Quentin Dormy is the one that I think should be at least the favorite to win the job. But then again, everyone thought Reese senate was going to win his roughneck job and Jared ended up winning that job. So I guess you never really know until they set the depth chart up. Yeah. Let's talk about that a little bit. I have your article here, them naming Mark Thompson. A lot of flux right now. We had Curtis Johnson on last week and what do you make of them naming Jared as a starting quarterback? He has a lot of upside. He's got good size for a quarterback. I think he's got a strong arm and I think what they really like about him and from my understanding is they love his potential. They love his upside. If you're a Houston gambler fan, you've spent the last two years trying to go through an influx of quarterbacks. You had Clayton Thorson in 2022 and he was all right, but he wasn't great. Then he got hurt and Kenji Bahar came in there and you saw the potential with Kenji Bahar being that he was with the Baltimore Ravens, like, oh, maybe you could be the next Lamar Jackson. And last year he got to a hot start and then he got that ankle injury against the Philadelphia Stars and then his season kind of fell apart and then they ended up moving on from him during training camp. So I think they're looking, I think Coach Johnson wants to have more of a prototype quarterback that fits the bill Tall, long stature, strong arm, and I think Jared's got that and he had some success with Tennessee. It wasn't always smooth with the volunteers, but he's got the potential to be a really good quarterback and he's got weapons. I mean, Justin Hall was one of the best receivers in the USFL last year, so he's got the weapons on offense and for the roughnecks offense, you hope that Mark Thompson can be ready for week one. I mean, this guy was the USFL offensive player of the year last year, the last two years, he's been one of the top five running backs in spring football. So the roughnecks really need him to be back. Otherwise they can go with TJ Pleasure who he came in last year to fill in for Mark Thompson when he was out with a couple of weeks with an injury and pleasure is a solid running back. But Mark Thompson is a difference maker. He can catch out of the backfield and he can just run you over. So they certainly have to hope that they can get Thompson back. UFL. Twitter certainly runs through Mark Thompson's fingers right now in his keyboard. He was complaining about the field or the turf. I'm like, do we need to get into all this? This isn't a Cashman field scenario. I mean, they're playing on high school, right? I mean they're playing on this shouldn't be an issue, right? Yeah, I mean I think he made the comment like Arlington's Field is the worst or something like that. I mean, I don't know what the field is made of. I don't know how it's all set up, but injuries happen and unfortunately Mark Thompson had, he was injured last year, so I don't want to say he's injury prone, but this is the second time he's been hurt in two years. So I mean that part of his game, he plays a physical position at running back, so he takes a lot of hits and he has to make a lot of cuts and stuff like that. So injuries are a natural part of the game. It doesn't sound like it's going to be something that he'll be out for the season for because they haven't placed him on the injured reserve list yet, at least from this recording. They haven't done it yet. So it feels like if he's going to miss time, it doesn't seem like it's going to be too much. So hopefully he'll be back sooner rather than later. I haven't here either. Arlington, right, they finalized today. They're kind of ahead of the curve. Some of the teams have to Saturday to do it. Any surprises on that? I remember who was I talking to? One of the recent interviews about just the line of you don't feel necessarily safe where maybe last season you're sitting. Okay, I look around and I can see the talent, but were the talent level so high on some of these teams we're really kind of nitpicking to get this cut down. Any surprises with the Arlington cuts? Devon Darrington was a big surprise. Took him and Devion Smith where they were splitting the Carries last Saturday when I went to their open practice. So I kind of just assumed that maybe he was going to be the backup running back. I mean it's Deion Smith's job. He fits what Bob Stoop wants in a running back in his offense. So I thought it made sense for him to start and Devin Daren to be the backup. But with Devin being released, I think it's probably going to be Lety Brown probably being his backup again. He was the backup late last year for them and he performed pretty well in that role with Devion Smith. So I'm going to assume Lety Brown probably comes in. I know Stu likes did a Hunter who is the third running back on the roster. So I mean Hunter could be seeing some playing time as well. Really other than that, I mean Christian Sam, I know he was placed on the suspended list, but he was a guy who played well in the USFL last year and I thought maybe he could make an impact on the line backing course. So I don't know what happened with the suspension, nothing's been really said about that, but with him being placed on that list yesterday, I guess it shouldn't be a surprise, but at the same time he's a talented linebacker and whatever the suspension is, if another UFL team can pick him up and bring him on their team, I think he could be an impactful player. But really I think the big one was Devin Darrington. That was a very surprising move. So versatile and that was, I don't know if it was a hit on the offense. I think Leddy Brown can come in there and be that versatile back they need, but that was a surprising cut. How is Coach Stoops, does he seem to be enjoying the process this time around? I mean, he's the one, right? His wife doesn't want him at home or whatever. I mean, does he seem to be enjoying this? I know he brings this up a lot of the times where people are asking him, how are you enjoying it? He's like, Hey, I don't have to go to compliance meetings. I don't have to deal with parents or anything like that. I don't have to deal with grades. These are adults. I don't have to worry about them. They're adults. They come into work when they need to, they do what they need to do and then they go off on their own. So I think the schedule fits him perfectly because he's going to work for a few months here, then he's basically off for the rest of the year and he can do his job from wherever he wants to. So I think the last couple years I've seen a difference in him from 2020, I think 2020, he was just a little more serious about it. This was basically his first professional job and it seems like he wanted to be really good at it. Now I think getting into 2023 and 2024, he seems to be a little more relaxed, really enjoying the moment of being a head coach. And I think helping the championship last year really helped because I'm sure it gives him the confidence and gives his team the confidence needed that they can come in here and try to repeat as champions. A lot of pressure on that and high back, I was Photoshopping photos of them with the trophy to get ready for the episode and target's on your back and I know they take a lot of pride in that and being able to do that and how the season turned out for them last year. So a lot of pressure on that. Any other stories? Any other tidbits before we get out of here? I know like I said, we'll convene here next week before the kickoff and all of that, but any other things you're tracking right now? The one thing I'm interested with the Renegades is how they use Lindsey. Scott, I know when Mike and I were on the media availability last week, he had asked about Lindsay's got and Stoops had said that there could be some packages for him. We'll see. He tried to keep it as vague as possible, but it really does seem like they may use, my assumption is they're going to use them very similar to how they use Kelly Bryant last year and how they have some packages where he may be just running the ball or he could be rolling out. I will say when I saw from Lindsey Scott in practice, he looked solid. I think at the beginning there were some times where he was trying to force deep balls and he was trying to force fastest and double coverage. But I will say when he rolls out of the pocket, he is very accurate with the football. So I wouldn't be surprised if they used him for some RPO style plays, maybe rolling him out of the pocket on play action. He could be very good for that. So I'm really interested to see if Lindsey Scott gives his offense a little more creativity and be able to use his ability to run the football Well. And obviously with the new offensive coordinator and stuff as well. I know that last year you were a little lament about a little bit more in Arlington offense, so maybe this time around and it could be a little bit more exciting in that way. But yeah, different quarterback than Perez, so it's exciting to see, but you can't doubt Luis while you have it. So I guess he'll just ride it out here and we'll have to see. He is a spring football king. I mean we all know, I mean he's been in a million of these leagues and he's been successful every time. So I'd be interested to see if this is his last go around or if he's going to continue doing this. But I mean if I was him, I would keep rolling with it because he's been one of the top quarterbacks in these leagues. Well, Anthony, enjoy the week here. We'll see you in Texas next week. I'm sure we'll have a Shiner block or two here after the game. Enjoy your clean shaven Jalen Hurtz quarterback and your Tiny Hands, Kenny Pickett. We will go get Drake May or something in it should be exciting. I think that the East is going to be exciting this year. They're talking about the Cowboys or Matt, the Dak Prescott. I think lots of excitement there with Daniel Jones and everything else. Yeah, it should be Smooth Stanley for the Eagles to win that division, so I appreciate it. Anthony Miller, like I said, check him out. Sports Illustrated, everything else, the hardest working man on there except him and Mike Mitchell. So really appreciate it and have a good night. Thanks, appreciate it. Huge special. Thanks for everybody. All the work it took to get the episode together today. Shout out Jeff, everybody over at the UFL getting the Johnson interview set up means a lot. I know there's lots of spinning plates and things in motion, so means a lot you guys Setting that up, Darrell taking the time to come on. Busy guy. Getting ready for the season, talking, getting the league going here in less than two months, so means a lot. Certainly appreciated. Thank you to Bianca, everybody over at the Arlington Renegades getting Coach Heinbach set up. Again, him coming on the weekend, taking time on a Sunday morning before God knows all the stuff he's working on. So thank you Coach Heinbach. Shout out as well. His five is one offensive line training and then his podcast. And with that being said, coach Heinbach is a fellow, a football content creator, so always want to make sure we get that shouted out. I'll put the links in the description. Thank you very much. And then like I said, Anthony Miller here taking time to come on all the work and articles and the endless supply of things that he's providing right now. Content-wise with him and Mike Mitchell over at Sports Illustrated. So it means a lot. We'll try to get Anthony, I think involved next week as well with the kickoff episode. But we certainly enjoy the sit down and deep dive that we're able to do on this format here. Like I said, that'll do it for me today like and subscribe, big UFL kickoff episode next week, live from Texas. I'll post during the week, but if you're subscribed on here, turn on the bells, kind of all that stuff. You'll get the notifications and it'll be posting everything on Facebook and Twitter, but should be a good guest list. Should be a lot of fun. Like I said, it is not the first rodeo with all this stuff. And then stay tuned, like I said, the weekly UFL recaps here coming out during the season. So hope you guys have a great weekend. Thanks again. Take care.

UFL Championship Location Announced! Roughnecks HC Curtis Johnson, Showboats’ Darius Victor!!

Hey guys, welcome to the Markcast Reid here. Here you go. Finally, people have been clamoring. We love the live shows. We want to get some interviews, some prerecorded episodes. Got you covered today. A couple of great interviews coming up. A head coach for the UFL and then we're talking with one of the standout players for the UFL for the Showboats as well, plus lots of news and notes to get to today. Thank you for checking out the episode back. Here're going to try to do these regularly on Fridays now, but obviously when news breaks I like doing the live shows. I like having the live streams get a lot of good listener viewer feedback with that, but here we are today, got some stuff in the bag like and subscribe for the two free tickets for the UFL championship game here. Just announced today in St. Louis. Should be exciting. I have a big time guest just going back and forth with the league literally right now. Had to pause recording, big time guest interview coming out next week and then I already have another interview scheduled for Sunday returning guests with the UFL another coach so you'll be excited. Should be good so I can subscribe. We'll get two tickets to the championship game when we hit 3,500 subscribers setting up the show today at Houston Roughnecks head coach Curtis Johnson. Delightful man. Had a great chat with him. Hope you guys enjoy that. Shout out to Brittany over at the roughnecks for setting that up. I know lots busy with all the team reps and everything. Been a little bit of a struggle bus kind of getting stuff locked down so really appreciate Brittany coming through with that. And then Andy with the showboats. Andy was with the guardians last year and now he's with the showboats setting up Darius Victor, just the sweetest human being in the world. Really appreciate that. It's always these guys that are on the tear on the football field and they're just total sweethearts so really appreciate the roughnecks team and the showboats and then Pat Rafino coming on today, breaking down all the UFL championship game information here coming out at middle of June for the title game, whether we get Pat's thoughts on that. And then Pat and I, we are going to do an all UFL mark cast kind of preseason team breakdown. So you like all those, the all pro all. We did the all USFL last year and then the all FL, so it's the all mark cast UFL, our preseason roster but basically just getting Pat's thoughts on you roster cuts and kind of training camp here week three and other news and notes this week. So we'll kind of do a round out with Pat. So Chris Johnson talking with Darius Victor, pat Rafino on here, like I said like and subscribe. We'll see you guys at the end. Appreciate it. Hope you guys like the interviews. Thanks. Well here we are, head coach now of the Houston Roughnecks. We'll talk about that here we have Curtis Johnson. Sir, how are you doing? Doing great, doing great. It's good. So we're kind of here what week three of training camp. How's everything for you? How has everything been so far? So far so good. The injuries are starting to soft tissue injuries starting to pile up a little bit. I got to back off a little bit today. We practiced Arlington for the second time. I thought it was a good practice. It was good work man. The quarterbacks played pretty good. Defense was very good. I like our secondary, what they're doing. A couple of our D linemen were out. Ruben Foster didn't do much work but I think we're going to be a good competitive team this year. Do you like the scrimmages? I know. So we will talk the US FL team here now is the XFL kind of all that stuff. But do you like having being able to scrimmage against the other teams? Absolutely. I think it gives you good work. It shows you what they're lacking and what you're lacking. You get an opportunity to see other players and man you get tired of going against the same guys day in and day out. I thought it was good active and good exciting work. In terms of this whole now merged kind of experience everything, what was your reaction to all of that? Because obviously we covered the USFL and XFL and everything here the last couple of seasons. So what was your reaction when you heard all this? I was happy that it was because the one thing I thought the product last year was a little bit watered down both leagues. I think you got the best of the best guys now you also got a competitive league and we are all over the country. We are in the rights places. Three teams in Texas. You love Texas is a big football state. You DC going cab have a lot of guys, St. Louis, we have a lot of people Michigan I thought last year they had great turnouts. Birmingham is Birmingham, they're good. So all the places we are, I think those are the places we should be and I really, really like the product now. It's not watered down In terms of we covered obviously, what did they call it? The dispersal draft and then we had the first round that cuts over the weekend, last weekend. How challenging was that? We were even seeing some of the names. There's only so many spots. There's so many good players. Very tough. Last year we started with 58 players and you kind of knew who the team was even with the 58 there was some that glaring, glaring guys that you knew these guys are not going to make the team. But right now man, matter of fact we cut two players that we had to get back already because the evaluation was good at the time. But man we got a couple of injuries and I'm glad to have 'em back. I think they're really good players. How do you feel like the team's shaping up thus far? Very good. It's a good quarterback competition. Once we settle in on a quarterback, I don't know who it is and I don't know when we are going to do it. I just got out of the meeting and we just talked about all three of them. But I think once that person is kind of the leader and the one I think the offensive will do a little bit better. It's not that we're struggling but it's just we still the evaluation process In terms of being the coach of the gamblers now moving over, what was your reaction kind of hearing that gamblers would be going away and it would be the roughnecks Look, I was a follower of roughnecks. One of my best friends was Brian Stewart. He was the defensive coordinator last year. I followed him a lot. I just thought that he did a great job. I thought that they were the best team for most of the time in the, excuse me, in the XFL and then so I was excited. I was excited about getting the team. I thought man it was just great just being in Houston and playing games in Houston Because in terms of XFL teams sticking around, I mean obviously DC and St. Louis here and obviously they announced today the championship game going to be there, but roughnecks carry a lot of weight back to 2020. So there's a lot of fans and I don't know, it's hard for me sometimes with these spring leagues with two, three years worth of history. I mean the gamblers go way, way back, but there is a very strong following for are you happy to carry that on? Are you sad to see the eighties kind of gamblers go away? Well it is a split decision. It's a draw. So I love the gamblers, I love what the gamblers brought. Jim Kelly played at Miami. I was at Miami for 10 years, had the pleasure of meeting him, Clarence Verde and the friend of mine, he played for the gamblers back in the old gambling day. So having those guys as friends also. But when I met the roughneck nation in Houston a couple of weeks ago, man I just love them. They are really roughnecks. They're good fans, they're great support, they knowledgeable fans, they smart. Look, I'm excited to play this first game so I just go down in their section. I may sit with them for a while but I'm telling you they are knowledgeable. Knowledgeable fans In terms of coming back here, year two now merge, carrying over, feeling more comfort level there. I mean what is kind of the knowledge now being able to bring back in the second season? Well it's just new. It is like the first season. It is another first season. It's a little different from us. We had a different model. We had more of a system where two teams per city now all the teams are on the same city. So one thing you can do, you can practice against any team you need to. It's a more close knit family. I know all the coaches now, whereas I never met most of the other coaches from those other places. So that's a good deal. Which we're still in the learning phase of the new system. Rules are a little bit different but we are just into that also. Yeah, in terms of the hub stuff, obviously different hub situations with the US development, the xo, what's it been like now? Like you said having everything there, all the resources. I mean that's what we talked about some of the coaches last year, all the trainers are there, all the equipment's there, everybody's there. Has it been a nice setup for you guys in Arlington? Look, I think it's been an excellent setup. You can get your help, right? You can get help right away if there's an injury, man, you got doctors, you got everything you got from other teams, you got everything. A player gets cut, we claim the player and he was cut yesterday, he's playing for us today and we had a player do that for other teams also. So just that everybody being in the same general vicinity, man, I think that's awesome. I think it's outstanding. In terms of kind of football, I guess execs, leadership, whatever, having Darryl around, having Russ Brandon and combining the best of both, what is just your take of that and just with all the coaches and you guys just the football knowledge in the room there and how is that working out? Probably it's just as good as the NFL. Both of those guys. Darryl does games are watching. I'm a fan. He knows the NFL, he played in NFL forever. Russ Brandon was at Buffalo for a long time. I remember playing against his team when I was with the Saints, how good they played. Doug Whaley, I mean all those guys. Oh man they were good was with the Steelers. I mean you got a star study lead of players, so I mean administrators and coaches. So I would say this, I think the experience factor is tremendous in what they all those guys have to bring. That's what makes the league so smooth. Would Josh Peterson go into the NFL? Have there been any other tight ends that have stepped up in terms of players you're looking at here? Man, I like our tight ends. I like the two tight ends. We got Woody man, he's good at Bowman. I don't know if they're going to replace Josh Peterson per se, but man both of those guys are great pass catchers and route runners. I wish I had Josh, but these guys will be equally successful. Yeah. How do you balance that mentality wise of wanting to obviously have the best football team going but then also the goal here, I mean we interviewed Coach Beck with the Battle Hawks year last year and he said a successful season for him would be having every player make the NFL. So how do you balance that as a head coach? Well you try to go out and get the best players you can and you get guys that want to and want to play well and if they play well and they do what they're asked to do in this league, I think the NFL will find them. Were you pleasantly surprised with the level of interest that the players have seen in the NFL here coming out of the last couple seasons of these spring leagues? Absolutely. Look, here's what I'm most surprised how well prepared most of these guys are or coming from and getting ready to probably go back to the NFL. There's more N-F-L-X-N-F-L players on these rosters than you could shake a stick at. I mean it is a lot of 'em. Some teams, like right now we have double digit XNFL players and they practice and they play like it. So you can't ask for more than that. Does that speak to the importance of having leagues like this or a league like this now that we're trying to, because this is really, we're putting all the cards in here not to use a gambler's reference or anything, but the importance of having this spring league and alt league like this for these guys to get another shot. Absolutely. There's too many good football players out here. I mean there are more probably good quarterbacks and more good running backs overseas, whatever the position is on street, if you don't have a spring league like that, then the law allows. So I like what we are doing with these leagues because now the NFL, I've had several buddies call about players already. So you love this league you love? I love the timing of it. It's right before the season they'll have a couple weeks and if guys will sign 'em, they have a couple of weeks and then they can go on and play. I had a receiver Zuber, Isaiah Zuber, he played for the Raiders, played for them, then went back, came to us, went back to the Raiders, came back to us and now he's on Birmingham's team. So I mean this kid has a wealth of experience, good player played for the Raiders and now he's back in our league. Yeah. What kind of reaction do you get from other your friends in the football world here of like, Hey, I'm involved in this. Do they get jazzed about now? Do they get what you're doing? Yeah, they love it because football coaches, coaches ask me about players on my team and I'm like Who? You say, Hey we really like this guy. We really like that one because Josh was getting some interest. Mark I run it back, he got some interest last year or Justin Hall got some interest. So they'll call and ask about hey or they'll ask me, do you have a linebacker or do you have a kicker or what do you have? And so it's interesting to see their take on some of the guys because they'll ask me about guys from other teams also. So they're watching the NF L's watching. In terms of your growth as the head coach here coming in here from Tulane and now being able to kind of take over and run growth, have you experienced a lot of growth? Obviously we're trying to build the players up and get them going, but you obviously professionally as well. How do you feel like you've done? I think I'm doing well. I think I'm doing and the reason why I'm doing so well, I got a great staff. If you put great people around you, Chris Wilson, Eric Price, both NFL experience, Chris was with Philadelphia, Eagles won the bowl. Eric Price with Kent was with Kansas City Chiefs and lately with Jacksonville Jaguars. So those guys have wealth of experience. They're helping me. They know the players. All these players are professional football players no matter what league they aren't, don't even act like college players. They are professional, they're in meetings, they got that iPad, they're taking notes, they're asking great questions. So that helps you. You're not Tulane. A little bit of college was, college is a babysitting sometime, but it's not that here. It reminds me of coaching at the Saints and the Bears. Do you feel like your OC has grown with you as well coming from Tulane over here and what you guys have been able to do? Absolutely. Look, I'm telling you, I just love what we are doing here And then the last couple here I'll let you go. I have a question here Pat. One of our writers, one your former quarterbacks, Ryan Griffin has transitioned to coaching. Did you ever he ever kick the tires about coming to play or coach or be a part of the have anything going on here? I would see him twice a year and when I was at the Saints I'd see him and he was always a coaching type guy and I know right now I received a text from him congratulating me last year. But I know right now he would definitely, definitely love to do this. I know Ronnie smart beyond his years, You view this as a good opportunity for coaches, so kind of whatever level to come in and get Great. It's not a good opportunity. It's a great opportunity. Anytime you can coach professional athletes and you can do it for a certain amount of time and you're preparing the team, it's gained preparation and you sharpen in your skills now you can try different things out. You got everyone has a hand in the roster. So I mean it's a great, it's not a good, it's a great opportunity. Last question from me. Like I said, they announced the championship game here today going to be in St. Louis. What would you say Roughneck fans here, we've had again not many years here, but people are invested in this. What would you say kind of the roughnecks fan base and loyal here? Look, look, it's in St. Louis. Just prepared. We going, let's go to St. Louis. Well Chris, I really appreciate it. First UFL coach here of the season checking in, so I appreciate it. Training camp, hope everything goes well and then we'll be down there. We're going, we will be in Dallas for some of the games and maybe we'll try to get to Houston as well. So I appreciate your time sir. Perfect, thank you so much. Well here we are first we're back in the pre-interviewed here. We've been doing a lot of live shows, but this is our first training camp, check-In here we have Darius Victor. Sir, how are you doing? You're our first voice here coming into UFL training camp 2024. Oh man, I'm honored to be sepsis first, but yeah, I'm feeling great man. I'm honored to be here having a great time with training camp and just taking the day at a time. We've been seeing media days, everything coming out, a lot of pictures and getting some glimpses, uniform stuff. How's everything going for you down there? It's been what, two weeks now? Everything's been pretty smooth, man. Shout out to the league for putting everything together, bringing eight teams together, a whole bunch of guys and having everything run smoothly is hard to do. So shout out to the league for making it all happen and making us all feel comfortable. In terms of a little bit of a homecoming here, right? XFL 2020. Now we're back in Arlington here obviously with the Showboats, but how does it feel kind of full circle to be back doing all this three years later, four years I guess later. I'm getting old, man. I just turned 30 yesterday so I'm blessed to still be playing the game I love and actually we had an onboarding at the stadium I played in XFL 2020 Dallas team Arlington. We won that game, so it felt good just being back in there. I was like, I remember that that day. So it's pretty good. It's all like take it all moment. I don't take it for granted. It's a lot of guys that want this opportunity and I'm just blessed to still be playing the game at a high level, so very grateful for that. Well, happy belated birthday here. That's exciting. Did they do anything? Did anyone, did you get a cake Or anything? Oh man, I got a whole bunch of stuff, man. People love me and I'm the guy that don't celebrate my birthday, so I'm just like, no, stop. Don't do anything. But a lot of love, man. Obviously greatly appreciate it and grateful. I see. I'm just noticing here the sweatshirt you have, you guys getting some good merch here coming Out? Oh yeah, definitely. Good merch. Under Armour and the Rock, they've been keeping us a funny looking guy like myself looking really good out here because of the UA and the Rock. So shout out to that Now I know he's healing right now against Cody Rhodes and everything. Have you seen, has ownership been around in that way? I know Daryl Johnson's running around and all of that. Have you guys had a chance? I've met the Daryl Johnson pop and all those guys, but I haven't seen the Rock. I mean, like you said, he's probably busy being the Rock, the coolest guy on earth, so he gets a pass. So back here, the third, fourth kind of however you want to look at this round here, what is it about these spring leads that keeps you coming back? I mean, is it the opportunity, is it the drive? A lot. I just could imagine to go through this, It's a mixture of both the opportunity just for the love of the game and just the great football. I love the game of football, want to play it for as long as possible and I'm still playing at a high level, so I'm just trying to, I'm looking at these rosters and every Roddy roster is pretty stacked. It's like an all-star team. Even our team is pretty loaded, so it's like I'm juiced up for the competition and I'm trying to crank it up this year. Yeah, we've heard that. I think it was Bob Stoops here formerly, right, with the renegades and all that talking just yeah. The amount of talent here where you're combining these teams, do you see that and are you seeing, it must be kind of like a survivor all stars or something where you're like, oh, okay, this guy was on this or this guy. Honestly, it is. It's like the best of the best and a lot of good football players that don't have jobs. So just to imagine put that into perspective and seeing the guys that are here is like, okay, this is the 1% of the 1% type of thing. So I'm excited for how it all shapes out. I think it's going to be down to who execute coaching and it's going to be a lot of close games and a lot of tough fall up battles. What was your reaction hearing all this UFL stuff coming out? As someone that's been in all these and obviously standout in the US about here in the last couple of seasons? I honestly was sad because I lost the generals and I was through a New Jersey general, lost a lot of my teammates, my coaching staff. So it was kind of like a bittersweet moment, but I know it's for the bigger picture type of thing. So I mean this is for the kids coming up after me and all the other stuff. So I got to stop being selfish and look at it from a broader point of view and it's a great thing happening. So I'm excited to be a part of it, be a of history and hopefully I could cement myself into some history here coming up soon. So there's obviously a lot of jokey animosity online with the XFL fans, the US of all fans and all this. Now I know you guys in Arlington scrimmaging together, the teams breaking down. Is there animosity between you got the XL teams and the US L teams? I don't know how the dynamics are. I mean if we would've kept it the same, two league just played each other. Yeah, I think it would've been more, but those guys in Arlington, my QB one, Luis Perez is over there. I can't be mad at that guy. So I mean those are my family. So me personally, I don't have any animosity, but it should be a good bragging rights type of thing. I spell SL, see who wins the championship and hopefully it's the Showboats and that's the plan. Well, there's a lot of, I mean there's a lot of good us and all talent here on this and especially this opening game. I know you're not going to be but formally here of the renegades going up against Birmingham. What was it like from the outside seeing Luis Fez win the championship Last year we were there, man, we went to the Almo for that one. I was yelling at the tv. I already knew it was going to happen, man, when Luis gets in his bag and my thing is if you keep Luis up, he's going to always give you a chance. So I seen it happen, Gary and all those guys are blocking for him and I was like, I was rooting for them. I knew more players on that team even though I'm from Maryland, I should be. When they played DC I was rooting for Luis just because I knew more players. But yeah, I already knew what he was capable of. As soon as I seen him in his little mode calling plays, moving people around, I said, oh yeah, they got this. So yep, Talking now, case Cookes presumably is one of the quarterbacks you have. He was on the show back when he was with the Stars. That was kind of unfortunately our team with the USFL, I had to pick what we were the Philadelphia stars. It was even funny talking with him, like him breaking his leg and then having to get married. I'm a wedding videographer, so we kind of reminisced about all that stuff. But what's it been like seeing him and knowing that he's at least going to be one of the faces of the team And what are your thoughts about the quarterback that you guys have now? The chef man, I've been admiring him from afar for so long. I'm glad he is on my team now. He's a pretty cool guy man, and I'm going to do all my, to do all I can to help him win ball games and keep him safe. So I'm excited to play with the guy. I joked around with him the other day. I'm like, case, where are you from? He was like, California, I think it's California somewhere. I'm like, of course that makes sense. Brady case, just goat stuff. That makes sense. So he's earned the name and hopefully continues to play at the high level that I know he can. So I'm excited to form me, be my quarterback. Has the transition here to a new team been alleviated by having some familiar faces from the generals over there? Yeah, absolutely. It's just, hey, a familiar face always helps. Also, my college teammate is on his team as well. It's actually my roommate for Camp Ty Smith. So it's just a whole bunch of nostalgic feel, type feel, so it's a smooth transition and I'm happy for it. I had the question here as a 29-year-old, but now obviously you've had your birthday as a 30-year-old, your running back. Do you feel like the spring football where it's longer off season, shorter in season, has that helped you prolong your play and has it helped you kind of, I guess excel here further into than maybe you would've otherwise? Oh man, 30 is the new 25. I still got the juice I, I'd be killing them boys at practice still, so I still got it. But the break of course always helps, especially after 10 games, hopefully 12 games, hard, hard fought 12 games, no bad week. So just any amount of that football, you're going to have some aches and bruises and that time off usually helps Talk about spring football just in terms of developing players, recruiting players here for the future and trying to get one of these spring leagues to stick. And obviously we have the competing and all that, but now if this can stick around and being able to recruit players, ffc S players and other kind of developmental players, I think honestly, I don't want call it developmentally because it's a lot of great talent and it's 10 games, there's no OTAs, there's no 17 games, there's no three, four year contracts. So you got to come in ready to play because it's going to, it is going so you got to be available to play. But I do think it's another platform for people to show that they can play and have more opportunities for scouts say in FL to see, okay, that guy played maybe at a small school, now he's playing against some better talent than UFL and stuff like that. But I don't want to call it developmental because the same way I was running guys over in the NFL, running them over now, it's the same thing. It's great talent and most guys actually have played in the NFL in some type of way. I should got to this earlier, but in terms of the hub setup, obviously you did the Birmingham and then kind of was in the Campton one last year and then now what's it like in terms of this one and how is everything there all in Arlington? We talked obviously with players with the XFL last season, but what's it like in having all the facilities there? It's been pretty smooth. I'm still in camp, so I haven't really wandered out in about, but it's been pretty smooth. The weather has been great. It's coming from camp last year, Birmingham was good because I'm a heat guy. I live in Miami. I'm from Africa. I love the heat so people complain about the heat, but I love the heat, I hate the cold. So the weather's been pretty good, so I'm excited for that. And then like I said, I haven't been out and about, but I've heard groggy things about Dallas. I've been here a couple times for football reasons, but not actually just to explore the city. So looking forward to eating a lot of the new food. That's my favorite thing about being in a new city, trying new restaurants. So I'm looking forward to that. I've heard great things though, so I'm pretty sure it's going to live up to expectations. Well yeah, and this season taking place a little bit later, they had the great, I think it was the Texas ice storm here last season before during training camp. So you missed all of that this Year, thank goodness. Yeah, they were going to do the test games and stuff and they had to cancel all that because yeah, the great Texas ice storm came in here. Just a couple more, I'll let you go. I know you've got a million different things. Just talk about the home field advantage here in terms of being able to plan all the markets and obviously we tried to do that with the Canton Hub last year, but having true home field advantages when you're going out and playing, especially Memphis I think had a good showing up for the us. But what are your thoughts on that and kind of where the XFL model here merged with U US FL trying to do that? I'm excited for home and away. There's a lot of other places that crowds showed up and showed the noises, so I'm excited to play in that and I feel like just the crowd and atmosphere always makes you turn up knots and you don't want to let the people down and want to let your fans down. So I'm excited. I've actually been to a Memphis game. We had came down with Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh playing Memphis and I actually went to, I love football, so I just go to the game and watch it. So it was good. I was at the famous Derrick Derrick Dills 1 0 9 return. So I was there watching and I was like, oh, but it was nice. So I'm excited for it. It should be pretty fun to be part of the yacht club officially, so yeah. Yeah. Last question. Yeah, any places you're excited to see again? I mean go back to Audi Field. You go back to the dome. I mean there's even though the XL, there's some iconic places there. I'm excited to play in Memphis, of course that's home now. I'm excited to go back in St. Louis. I played in that dome in 2020. We should be good actually. I'm excited for everything but honestly, but Birmingham be back in Birmingham again. That place was good showing they love those guys out there. Rightfully so. They played good football. So Birmingham, Memphis and St. Louis, those are the three. I was kind of sad though. I wanted to play in DC and in front of my friends and family, but they come to us this year, so unfortunately that sucks. Well you got to avoid the lemons and throwing the lemon wedges and the beer snake and all that stuff. I went there when Seattle played in the playoffs and they threw me out of the section. I was dressed as they said, for your own safety, you got to get out of here. So yeah, DC can be a bug. Roddy Darius, I appreciate it taking the time. This might have to be my U US FL team here, Andy, like I've said, your media guy is great, so I appreciate setting this up. Good luck with everything. I know cuts and everything are coming, but lots of confidence in all this and I'm excited to see what you do this year just with kind of the elevated talent all across the board. Thank you brother, and thanks for having me. Awesome man. Thanks. Well, here we are back here. We have Pat Rafino. We're not streaming today. We're recording. So somehow we're going to talk about different things, but people really wanted to, but this is good I, and I want to get your thoughts on all this UFL stuff anyway, but it is really been a struggle bus getting these interviews going here for training camp. So I don't know if maybe now, okay, everybody's there. We're getting it all figured out. Pat, first off, how are you doing? I'm doing well, Reid. Thank you for having me on. I think how long has it been since I actually did a recorded show? That would be the, I haven't done the recorded show in forever. I mean the last one was is been a really long time. It was like pre-announcement, everything. I was trying to look at that too. It's been a really long time since we, because you know how YouTube organizes everything. Yeah, no, but I don't think I've been on one probably for even longer to be honest. We've been doing the live streams, you and I. So October 27th was the last recorded episode we've done. Yeah, because even your CFL stuff was all live. Yeah. So here we're March 14th, so we're going to talk today, we're going to talk UFL championship game. I want to talk this Mike Mitchell's report about ESPN having a show come out the stream, we'll talk about you all Mark cast list and all that stuff. But we're two weeks from kickoff. How are you feeling? Welfare check, Man, in my opinion, I'm just so invested on football that I really don't care. But what I mean, man, maybe I've lost that oomph. Maybe I'm a Debbie Downer or negative Nancy as people have been called. Maybe I'm the problem. But I mean in the end, I'm more jazzed up about seeing these guys going out to perform and that's if I keep it in those parameters, where are we going that way? If I keep it in those parameters, I don't really care on the exterior business side. And I'm at this point too where everyone thinks that they can do spring football better. So I think I'll see probably five or six more iterations of spring football before I pass away. And that might be a little bit of a down on it. But I just feel like when I was doing this, mark has list, this is what really kind of put me into it, was I was looking at all these guys and a lot of them were like, okay, in the 2019 season he was in a F and XFL 2020 and then Spring League 2021 and then USFL and then XFL 2023 and now in the UFL and I'm like, these guys have played almost seven seasons, six seasons of football, of employed football. It's going to keep coming no matter what. We might have a year or two break, we might do some live streams that the mark has a couple prerecorded of guys talking about the rose colored classes, but spring football is here to stay, in my opinion. It's just always going to have a different name. I'm torn. I go back and forth because this and you all know, and Dorothy, it is been frustrating here just kind of with this training camp just because, and I agree with you and Max we talk and hey, okay, we're almost a football, we're almost a football, but there's just nothing about this in the last two, three months. And I know the merger stuff came late that feels any different than what we did last year. And so I don't know if just combining the teams and airing more commercials we saw with the USFL did with better time slots. And that's not going to be the whole conversation today. I just want to get this off the top, but I just don't see a lot of change happening that okay, well this one's going to top. I mean don't do pre-season, kind of TV ratings, all that. I just don't see a tremendous spike here. I don't feel like content is booming right now in terms of if you put out a UFL training camp preview, it's getting thousands and thousands of people invested in it. And especially with me being a stats guy and an analytics guy, that might not be the best mold sometimes in my opinion. You just need to put out incommunicable content and that gets the most clicks and likes. But on the flip side of that, you know what I was thinking as I am closer to you on the same time zone right now is today obviously the announcement of the UFL championship. Would it be cool if they did a quarter of the Super Bowl media day? Wouldn't that be pretty cool? That's what I'm holding out for right now. If they gave us two days and us, it doesn't have to be me, it could be traditional media sources, whatever, but if they gave us two days of media access where you can even do kind of how Taylor Luan had his podcast set up there and he was just running people through the sit down. It's a doable thing to do at St. Louis. There is a convention center in the Edward Jones zone. Yeah, I like that. I know the CFL is trying to bring that back this next year in Vancouver. And we were obviously with the Lions last year for our show, which did really well and they're trying to incorporate more of that, right? And they're like, Hey, you're welcome to be a part of that. My thing is I think I would like to see that if you're in Arlington, I feel like you get tremendous. I could eat like a king if I lived in Arlington and didn't work. I mean obviously Anthony's got day jobs, but if you were unemployed in Arlington, you would have the best UFL coverage in the world right now. But it's the 99.9% of everyone that's not there. If it was the way it was this year, but last year for me, I would've spent a week in Arlington. I would've grabbed my studio, I would've brought it down, I would ask the UFL, where do I set up? And I'm going to be sleeping in this spot for 20, I'm going to be there for seven days, 24 hours, siphon them through, let's do, and maybe I have to move hotel to hotel or whatever. But I was like, whoever wants 15 minutes of fame in front of my camera, that would I think. And maybe if it's around next year and schedules line up, yeah, I'll do it. That's actually a low key goal of mine. But I mean just who really wants to do that? And not to be selfish, but in your opinion, what would be my ROI on that It just to do it. And that's the problem at this point. It would be the connections. It would be off camera conversations. It would be the fact you show you care and then for every 10 players you interview, two of them go to the NFL, one of them has a great career and then you're hanging out on the couch and then all of a sudden your phone blows up because possible example Kenny Robinson's story got out and you're the one that told it and you're the first thing that comes up and you're like, oh, that's cool. Hey babe, you want to go Chipotle now? No, my last thought on this, I want to get to the news of the day, even last year where we had Josh Lewin and all that, no, even that, if you're going to have, and you don't need to deal with me or Mark or any of these people, just have someone there that's producing this stuff. I think the XFL would or I keep saying that, I think the UFL would benefit from even just having a corporate approved internal voice at least pushing some of this stuff out, even if it's necessarily not something that I would want to listen to every day. But I think you would get casual people on that that listen to a day in the life kind of thing that's produced by the league, right? Yeah. And I apologize, I'm typing right now, but you make it feel more real. It is not Shannon Sharp reading ton Thor sand touchdown to that guy. You got to get people who care and who actually watch the film and can break down. And I was talking to the end zone kid and he asked me to go on this show and he was like, do you have a whiteboard? And I was like, yeah, he is like, could you write the plays that you're seeing and do that because no one's doing that on espn. And I was like, yeah, I mean if I've got time I'll do it. But that should be something where they have the thing where they're pointing. It's not a big deal. It doesn't get too crazy in my opinion. So the other thing, well I guess, so first off, let's talk, I want to talk the UFL, the new show they're having too, and maybe we can have more conversation about that. But the announcement today officially now long rumored officially going to be the UFL championship game going to be, was it June 16th in St. Louis that Sunday, which I have a wedding the day before, so that's kind of tough thoughts on that? I mean, we did the San Antonio. I like that. In terms of a tourist destination more central, it feels to me, unless St. Louis is in the title game, I don't sense bras faithful traveling across the country. Yeah, yeah. I mean I think if St. Louis is in the title game, I think the sky's the limit on people being there. And I think ratings would be great no matter what. If it's a St. Louis Birmingham, I think that brings even more Alabama people there because of AJ and whatnot. St. Louis is very sports oriented. They star for this football team and whatnot and all the stuff we've talked about in nauseum and I think because of the high schools, all that stuff, the seven, eight or nine St. Louis locals that actually play there, that play in the UFL that have ties to the NFL players. You take a guy like Darius Shepherd from Kansas City, and maybe I'm stacking feathers, but what weighs more a hundred tons versus feathers or a hundred versus bricks, it don't matter how much they weigh, excuse me, how much of each it's the same. So when you take things like that, you factor, in my opinion, the starving of football. You could get a lot of people bringing plus ones based off the people that are even a part of the teams and then branch it out and whatnot. And another thing is that a couple of the agents are based out of St. Louis, which we're talking maybe 50 more people, but that stuff matters because you're going to get guys who are a part of the league, or excuse me, a part of the NFL taking pictures that they're supporting these guys or former players and I think that matters to an extent from an optic view. To me it makes sense. I am always surprised that they don't just do Choctaw just because everybody's there, but it's a weird stadium. I don't know if that photographs, San Antonio was definitely not full last year in terms of, I can't remember the number. 23,000 or something. Yeah, it was close to 20 5K, which I mean I take that as a win for it not being St. Louis and not being San Antonio team. Maybe I'm looking at it two half full, but I still think if St Louis isn't in it, you'll get 30 plus thousand people there. I think a lot of people in Missouri would go in St. Louis area. It's something to do Now from a safety standpoint, oh boy, man, some of these kids are going to get their cars broken into. They're not going to want to pay that $20 to have the guy guarding their car, but if you need help with transportation securely in St. Louis, It's good. Yeah, I don't know. I'm glad we got this out of the way. I don't know if this is the good timing of it or if you wanted to do something middle of the season just because obviously I think they, okay, be a season ticket holder and you'll get first right of refusal, whatever to get tickets to this so it makes sense to get out of the way. I don't know, people want dc It's far, it's hard getting into DC and some of these other, I mean I think Houston's a tough one. Obviously Memphis and everything else, so I think you're hamstrung a little bit there in Michigan, so to me it kind of makes the most sense unless you're doing the purely neutral stadium, but at that point then you're negotiating a whole new lease with Lumen Field or something. What do you do? I mean, you got to do one of the ones that are kind of incorporated then. So I think it's the best you can do. Yeah, I mean I think people were asking for it too. I feel like a lot of people, I mean you're also hedging the bet too that St. Louis will be in the championship. I think from actually no a plot twist this for a little bit. I think the optimal attendance would be Memphis and St. Louis, three and a half hours away from each other. Yeah, I mean for attendance for that game. Yeah. I'm very curious. The other news we had, and I'll get the article up here is, and this was exciting to me, I think we were talking about this with John Lewis last week in terms of, again, this getting podcasts out, getting content out. I think just having a staff writer, having somebody involved with the league kind of pushing out stuff that's not the press release, updating the website, but we're going to have Scooby, we're bringing back Scooby and then Daniel dopp, Daniel Dopp dope doing, what was it XFL Today Show last time it was on ES, ESPN too. Riot, but then it was also on their YouTube channel. Yeah. Mean, I don't want to show for myself or anything like that, but it's like how invested are they in this league? How much do they actually know football? You know what I mean? Are they stepping stone? This, I felt like Josh Lewin was pretty in and I think it was you who really turned my head to it to where you were like, he's not a bad guy. He cared When he came on the show. He was awesome. I mean, he came on the show, he was just really busy and I took him not interacting and promoting on social media as a not caring. It was more of a time constraint that he was invested. It was like, I just don't have time to engage with people online all the time. Yeah, no, I mean you really turned me in a positive light to Josh and it just kind of like, excuse me, we've had, we're losing continuity but on some phases of this, but these guys are going to come back and they're going to give a decent effort. I wasn't biggest fan of the show, to be honest with you. I liked the player 54 a little bit more when they weren't talking about the Rock. But at this point with the content, you got you and the other stuff, and it's like get the casuals who are drinking a beer on a Friday to watch it and whatnot or Saturday and then maybe that leads to more people getting it online. I would need to see the metrics to have a bigger take on it, if that makes sense. Yeah, I know if you're attracting any new viewers from this, I think what you're doing is you're showing a commitment now at this point. Fox still hasn't announced there. Obviously we have the E-S-P-N-A-B-C broadcasters, John Lewis and I talked about that last week, and then now we have this announced through ES, ESP N now. I could see the Fox announcement coming out today as this airs Friday. Like, Hey, Joel Klatt, whatever's going to be involved. But to me at least this shows a commitment to we're devoting man hours and women hours. We're devoting production costs and resources and also for whatever it is, I am someone that when I watch whatever it is, it could be a cracking game. It could be a movie, it could be, I like watching, I like having post content where I feel like I'm engaged in the conversation where everything's so segmented nowadays where you don't have 12 million people watching lost every Wednesday and you can go into work the next day. I like feeling even the Kraken and they'll have three, 400 people watching their post game. These two guys I watch Feeling like you're a part of that community I think is really exciting. And so I like how this is the same thing we try to do with our Monday post games or whatever. We'll figure out what we're going to do, but I like having that feeling like you have another outlet immediately after. And yeah, I mean, I think Scooby knows what he's going to know. I mean, they're going to do the research ahead of time as much as whatever, but yeah, I do. Spoiler alert, you and I could talk just as much as some of these SPN people in terms of upcoming games Better. I would argue better. I mean There's cache, there's name and there's name cache to something being on ESPN. So I mean at least it is better than them not doing it, I feel like. Oh, 100%. Yeah. I mean, you got to show at least show up and that's what they're doing. It's definitely not the bare minimum. It's a couple ticks above it. But I mean, on the flip side, how invested do you want to get into something that has never worked? Are you pretty, you said you were excited about this. Are you pretty not so excited, not so bullish? I mean, how invested, it's never worked. If we go off the data, how much resource and time do you want to throw into this? When next year it might not be here. I think it's going to be here next year. I think we get three years. I think we reset and we were back on our three year rule, and by year three we figure out if we're doing this or not, because if not, I got to sell a couple helicopters to start the Quality Football League, The negative Nancy Football League. Any other kind of news notes, we'll do the All Mark as any other news notes, transactions this week, some Panthers, quarterback stuff. Anything else in terms of transactions that surprised you? I know we had the roster cuts. Was that Sunday coming in? Yeah, it was the roster cuts and then the next wave of cuts I think are on the, what's it called, week After next? Yeah, Third or something like that. I mean, the big one was Cole Kelly, but I did my media day with the Showboats and Doug Martin talked a little bit about it and I mean, it just seemed that Cole wasn't athletic enough for their system and that Troy Williams, in case Koch were progressing. I want to talk about this is Chris Orr retired. He's been in the league for two years with the generals, and Chris, to me was a guy a pretty good linebacker. The problem is that they're all good linebackers now because they're condensed teams, but he's a fringe NFL guy. I'd say He's not as good as DeMarcus Gates a little, in my opinion, watching the tape. None of this matters at this point, what I'm saying, but he's a little stiff in the hips, but that's neither here nor there. Still way more athletic than I'm, he's going to be an outside linebacker's assistant or something like that at some school in Texas. I don't remember where it said. Yeah, It's a job though, but yeah. Yeah. But he took and pay aside, here's what bothers me is that he's at Camp Spring Ball is already going on for this major university. You're bringing this guy mid camp to be a coach. Now that's my take. I don't like that ultimatum that he was given for what we know. Oh, gotcha. You have to start now. It's like, dude, you're 15 days in the spring game for the major colleges is a week. Some schools it's a week away. Others it's 15 days. So that's a little disheartening. We saw Bo Scarborough retiring, but we're just seeing guys retire, man. I just think they put the pads on and they're like, I really want to do this for 50 grand. Are you surprised how big of a deal that, I mean, you would've thought that Kennedy was shot. I mean, the UFL did a lot of, I mean, this was a major thing that most Scarborough announcing retirement mean, obviously kudos anyone get, but I was surprised that it was such A, I liked it. I really liked it, and I would hope that they do that for Luis Perez or Jordan ou, because nothing against Scarborough, but I mean, the guy played in 11 games in spring football. When you tell the story of spring football, you might mention Bo Scarborough in the championship game or the playoff game where you have like 140 yards. But when you tell the story of spring football, which will be my argument when I start my campaign for Luis Perez in the Hall of Fame, is it's the pro football Hall of Fame. You cannot tell the story of football in the two thousands without Luis Perez. And if you disagree with me, I don't know what else I can do to convince you. So while he'll obviously probably not get into the Hall of Fame, despite the social media push, we'll have at the time, I do appreciate what they did for Beau, I just hope that you've set a standard technically in my opinion, that doesn't make the most sense. But that being said, it does lead me to think it was an injury related issue. Well, I haven't seen a lot of Chris or stuff today, right? I mean this was like a campaign for Scarborough the other day, right? Was it earlier this week? My tooth? I'm kind all out on dates right now. Yeah, I mean I don't remember when they did it, but I thought he was running for Congress. I thought that's who Robert Kennedy was going to make his VP move over. Aaron Rogers, Bo Scarborough, man of the people. The other thing, no, and I have a question for you. So we have this come out, I guess it was Stoops and Anthony had this out. Coach Stoops was talking about speaking to Perez going to be the starting quarterback, at least week one for the renegades. No surprise, they're right, but I mean, I don't know. I always how many times can you try that Luis Perez? But I mean every time it seems like it works. Well, it's funny, I always make this joke and if it wasn't for Luis Perez, Arlington never goes to the playoffs and everyone's like, yeah, he came on a real strong at the end and I go, yeah, he also threw five touchdowns against him and they're like, what do you mean five touchdowns? I go, yeah, he threw three touchdowns to his team and to the renegades in week one and that's why that win. Put it over a little bit. And it's funny, it's funny, we would've saw two tiebreakers if that whole situation happened as well. Not as dramatic with two, three and seven teams in the other division, but still it would've been something to talk about. So with that being said, I'm not surprised. I was a little surprised they got rid of Drew Plait, which kind of makes me feel like they wasted his time and maybe, I don't know, they just wanted younger blood, but you know that put is not going to be your QB two. Why do you even bring him into camp? I don't think, from what I saw, I've seen some nasty throws from Holton Aler in a bad way. I mean, Lindsey Scott looked so much better than him from the clips of I've seen. So in my opinion, it's the order of things and it makes sense. But on the flip side, what's the word I'm looking for? Don't be surprised if there's a QB injury. Lindsey Scott's pressing hard and they do what they do and Luis is going to be an adult and make it happen. In terms of other kind of training and then we'll get to the All, mark has team here. I know they have the scrimmage clips coming out. Greg Parks commented that there was a lot of interceptions being shown, all that. Are you getting enough between that and the coaches stuff putting out to know how these teams are progressing or is it just hard, even I'm talking with Curtis Johnson and the like, oh yeah, everyone looks good again, we've talked about this wanting an insider wanting to report. Are you getting a sense here? Is week one still going to be a mystery for some of these? Yeah, I think it's mystery until you actually go full speed. Coach Beck revealed that they didn't play 10 of their guys during their scrimmage and whatnot. So this is why I'm going to sound a little conceited. I know how to ask questions to these coaches that get the information I desire. And we talked about this a little bit off camera is when a coach says, yeah, he didn't really fit our offense, most people will be like, okay, cool, and leave it at that. Well, what type of offense did you run Coach? Did you run this offense at New Mexico? Did you run this based off this? And then you break it down and then eventually you get the answer in Lamees terms, but you also get the ability to talk to the coaches and whatnot and really understand, okay, this is what they're thinking. This guy's not a bad football player. And a lot, he talked about it, A lot of his guys went on to go do good stuff in the league like Letty Brown, Caleb Vanesh, Jordan Thomas, Jalen Smith, a couple offensive linemen started and whatnot. Sean Dixon I think played and he was their ninth string of linemen or something like that. So when all this happened, I feel like I'm getting the information I desire and that's actually part of the reason why I clip my videos just from my questions because I don't want to speak or take credit for other people's content one, but I don't know if every Zoom call is like that because when you go to a Battle Hog Zoom call, it's like, oh, how's aj? So what did AJ eat for breakfast this morning? It's like one, there's more members on this team than AJ McCarran and I think AJ is a great guy. I think running down the list. Awesome dude, great player, my number one player in this league in my opinion, but there's 10 other men out there. What makes AJ great? What is Bruce Kowski going to do now with AJ in the second year of his system? A one up you? They had an offensive line coach last year, pat Burs who didn't really play offensive line growing up. You bring in Gino, how is he going to help a guy like Mike Panas who transitioned from defensive line to offensive line and was an all XFL offensive lineman essentially teaching himself and now you have a former NFL center. So those are the things I don't think get related enough. Yeah, because it's hard for me and I do the best and I know that Mike is on some of these calls and Anthony's on and I know, I don't know if we need more robust or if, I don't know what the answer is here, but it just feels like sometimes these Zoom calls are existing in the vacuum and I'm just trying to figure out workshop the best way for lead coverage here moving forward. And that's what I put mine out because I only want people to hear what I have to say and I don't mean that in a selfish reason. Like I said, it's more like a personal, I don't want to speak on your behalf and whatnot, and I've been getting a little bit decent engagement, nothing too crazy and I'm proud to do that stuff because if I can turn on two or three different people to this, it's doing the right thing. And the people who are locked in that don't get to do those calls or have really, I don't want to say they don't contribute anything to the league, but in a media sense, they don't write articles, they don't make podcasts, they don't interview players. They make a tweet here or there. It's cool for them to see it too. And okay, I can use Pat stuff, part of my content and at this point I really don't care about a lot of that stuff. I'm focused on my work and what I do and whether it be on the media side or other stuff and it's like, okay, if that's going to help you get your content out there and you have a bigger reach than me, like good because hopefully you get two or three people to show up to a game. Last note and then we'll do the All Mark House. We'll get out of here. I will say we have a little bit last week talking with John Lewis about the merchandise and kind of lack of, and this has been a common story. Now we have the Michael Strahan. This was the other news, I think it was yesterday. Michael MSX, Michael Strahan, now the official off field apparel partner of the UFL. Maybe we have too much version to this now, Bro. I'm going to be honest with you. I bought some, I'm buying some SA jackets and we're going to make our own stuff. I'm not going to sell it obviously, but I'm just, I'm going to take concepts. I told my girlfriend she didn't like this, she liked this. We're just going to make our own stuff. I mean, we're not going to spend thousands of dollars, but I'm just like, I can get a shirt for five, do this, put a logo here, do that, and it'll come out to the same. There's some stuff I liked with this merch. I don't know what Michael Strahan does, you know what I mean? Well, but this to me, and not to be, again read, you're always going to, but when this is the off field, that to me is the stuff the coaches and staff are going to wear. You're like, okay, I know they're selling some of it and John Lewis had put up and there's some I think shorts and some sweats or whatever that way. But this to me is like, Hey, can we get some free merch for the people that work in the league? That to me it's like when I go to cracking games, I'm like, how come the End stadium broadcast people get every single custom jersey that they've ever made ever. I want that to me is what this feels like. It's like, Hey, let's get some sweet Michael Strahan stuff for Jay and Leah. Oh my God. I mean, yeah, I can't even give you any backtalk on that. I mean they're, It's good. I mean get it, get it while you can, man, I'll take free stuff. Their coaches gear is on point hot. Yeah, no, I've been looking at it and I'm trying to make it for when I go into season. I'm trying to get it for my coaching staff. That's funny. Yeah, I mean I'm a big three quarter zip guy. Stuff like that is kind where I'm pretty good with. So they're doing it and I mean it's impressive to me. Last thing here, and I'll link it. So we're not going to go, I'll publish this tomorrow. We're not going to go point by point here, but I want you to talk through this. Mark cast the philosophy behind all this. We'll talk through some of the names here. Let's try to get out here at 40 minutes. Yeah, no. So AJ McCarran number one, I think he's Pretty well, so what is it? Because you've done this before, so what is it? Yes, Apologies. Apologies. So the All Mark cast team is something I think I've done. This is going to be my third year doing this is my preseason Hallmark has team as you could see, and I will do one at the end of the year as I've once again done for the last three years. So pretty much this is the equivalent of your all league team Reed. I think I'm going to make the investment this year. I know I've talked about it, but I want to do certificates for these guys. I think we're going to do that. You and I, I'll bankroll it. It's not going to cost us that much, but get it on the nice paper. Half of these guys we talked to the other half could reach out to those guys and I think it'd be good for them because I don't think anything happened. But starting off with pretty much our all-star list going up to the top, you got AJ McCarran set the league record or the league record for touchdown passes only in nine games, more weapons on offense, a couple, excuse me, returning starters continuity in the system full send on that. Abram Smith fringe NFL running back offensive line had some losses with retirement, but because they're receiving cores worse, I think Abram Smith is going to get more work, especially there's not going to be, it looks like not too much cutesy Doy stuff with Dre King, so it's going to be the Abram Smith, Jordan Taylor show, Dion Smith, same thing. The receivers of Arlington. Wow, me too much. A little bit older, but the guy did lead the league in rushing I think in 2020 before Pizzagate happened or Pizzagate and Covid, but came on strong last year when Perez came through and when you don't got great receivers, you got to move the ball down the field some way, right? Another guy, friend of my show, Clint Sig, not many fullbacks in football anymore. C Clint's going to replace Josh Peterson maybe as their tight end hvac. We'll see. I know we talked about him as well, but with Clint, very athletic, very versatile and he was a great blocker. He blocked for Mark Thompson and I think the team had like 17 total rushing touchdowns in 10 games, so maybe more. Gary Jennings Jr. Was a guy who was buried under the depth chart in St. Louis goes to Birmingham. He got a couple big pieces there, but I think because of his speed, I think he's rated as one of the fastest players in the league, should have no problem establishing himself, especially after his time with the Carolina Panthers, Hakeem Butler, long, long athletic guy. Man, you see this guy next to you, you'll be mesmerized. To be honest, only expect him to improve you, especially with the additional weapons that they have there. Maybe Butler's not the all UFL wide receiver, but I'm willing to guarantee one of them will be a battle lock. Trey Quinn, that was a guy removed from football for about a year in change, goes to Michigan another year up and down QB play. Now you got EJ Perry there and if EJ Perry's not starting and Danny etling is that tells you something about Danny etling more than it does EJ Perry because we've seen EJ Perry play well, so we could push on with that. Moving down the list you got Jonathan Adams, the OC just raved about how much better he looks this year. Best quarterback he's played with. I love McLeod, but I think there was some fatigue that we're not accounting for with McLeod. Oh yeah. Coming off of, yeah, yeah, yeah. And those who say nay, I question your competency as a man or a woman more than anything else. So that's a guy that I think will continue to succeed in their West coast offense. It's going to get a lot of targets, I'll tell you that much. Sal Canella top tier tight end over the last two seasons of the USFL and XFL. This is a loaded, loaded, loaded, tight end league sage across the board. Yeah. Yeah. And the U-S-F-L-I argue last year had better tight ends. Seven of the eight teams had a tight end that you could be like, yeah, that guy should be in the NFL or could be in the NFL would be a better word. My thing is with their receiving room not being the best that will give cane to get inflated stat lines, especially with Normandy and Latimer, you're going to see them spread it out more. So that's like Canelo when the dust settles, he might not be the best tight end, but he will be the statistically the most aesthetic tight end is what I thought. You go down to my offensive tackles, he got Terry Pool, PFF graded him really bad last year. What they didn't do is account for how that Pittsburgh Mueller's offense took off the second he went there and that's just that veteran savvy Jar Jones, another guy three years running the football of football. This guy's been all USFL two years in a row. He's got a better quarterback this year, which will make him look better regardless of if his skills decline or not. We'll see what happens there. Cole Schneider, he is a tweener to me. He plays center and guard. I kind of put them at guard for my rankings or my team because I wanted to put Mike P who was just getting so much better from what I've been told and hasn't lost a one-on-one. During camp you also throw in Liam Ford now at the other guard, all three of those guys are Muellers up front. They're aggressive and they all probably will have an NFL opportunity in the next year or two. I move over the defense, it gets a little weird here. I don't do the edge. I just go four three, which is four linemen, three linebackers. I keep it simple. If you call me silly, that's fine. You tell me what you want and I'll adjust. But my ends are Breland Speaks who had a little bit of up and downs but really took on those double teams and it wasn't until they got Levi Bell mid-season signing where he kind of got his resurgence again with the condensed talent, some better linebacker play from Michigan speak should have a more consistent season this year, which will allow him to either replicate his stat line or possibly surpass it. Adam Rodriguez is a guy who's been one of the best pass rushers in the USFL for two years. Hasn't gotten an opportunity and a lot of people don't know why. I think it's his size and sometimes it feels like his hand work isn't NFL ready, but regardless, this isn't the NFL, this is the UFL and he's continued to succeed the last two seasons. A couple extra weapons up there on that defense like Chris O there. He's going to be the guy that gets the one-on-ones and if he can do it, he'll make the play. Toby Johnson, NFL veteran, IFL, veteran XFL, this FL whatever it is. Another guy who's gone all league the last two years, 32 years old, but he will be up there with Chris Odom. One of these guys is going to win and whoever wins the most on that defensive front of the roughnecks is going to come out on top and be an all league player. They'll all probably be very good, but someone's going to, when that quarterback gets pushed up in the pocket, who's going to get the sack and that's what they care about. The sacks. Austin Falu often NFL stint, all XFL last year. This guy is a Stout two gap player. He is very violent with his hands. He is a strong guy and he is going to once again, and people have, I think Mike dubbed it and I've said it a couple of times, it's the Abram Smith effect. We're going to see a lot of good plays from this dude and we're going to see a lot of physical demanding of the double teams and hopefully that allows a guy like Kevin Atkins, the other guy playing on that defensive line if they're on a four man front to make some plays as well. My linebackers pretty easy here. Originally I was going to put Chris or if he didn't retire, but it's these three fine gentlemen, Peter Ano, Frank Gida, cabana, Tino, all guys who have been all league selections and whatnot, or excuse me, Tino wasn't, but these are all aggressive, aggressive, aggressive linebackers G. They got better in pass coverage, they got a couple more weapons on that defensive line and it's all going to be a symbiotic relationship as far as helping these guys get to their are high water marks on their potential, not only through skill but stats. Pete is more of a edge rusher, but he does drop back in coverage. But this man, his hands, his violent hands, his ability to get his hips, his unmatched in this league going to my corners. LaVonte Taylor is a guy that probably didn't get the amount of respect that he deserved because he gave up a lot of yards. It was a very bend, but don't break with him and he didn't give up a touchdown last year. But I think this is a guy that if he's using the motivation in the correct way, could easily be an all league player. He's got the skills, he's got the speed, just got to put it all together and I think be a little bit more confident in himself if that makes sense. Because it looks like, and maybe it was the defensive scheme they ran, I don't know. It all comes back to scheme too. We're not sure if that was the case and whatnot, but he did look and I say soft, not from a toughness but soft on coverage going down to D Trayvon ask you Henry, this is a guy who's a savvy veteran and I think being around the improvements in the front seven will be allowed to kind of roam a little bit more as strong safety or free safety and be allowed to make a lot more plays and kind of be in a better situation than what he was in New Jersey where he was kind of sharing the spotlight with a shalom Lui, Kenny Robinson, we all know his story. This is a guy who should be in the NFL. I think he's going to look like a man against boys, hopefully for his sake, which is ironic because he was a boy when he came to this league, my specialist, I kept it pretty simple. He go, Matt Cochlan or Coughlin only missed one kick last year. Louis Aguilar gets hurt. I mean destroying Apparently. I want to talk about that before we get out. So round this out and then let's do that. Yeah, Coughlan is the best remaining guy in my opinion. I mean I like McCain, but everyone else is unproven. Brock Miller, I got to give props to Brock. The guy's 33 years old still doing this. Let's go punters. The way I do my punters at the end of the year is I'll go off return yards, kick coverage and then I factor in, I give him a plus one or a plus two for fakes. So it's not a complex formula, it's just like, okay, these are the metrics you're within a couple points. Let's say the other guy puns it a yard longer than you. Well, did you have fakes? Yeah, you did. Okay. I'm not, I mean for this list I'm the end all be all. But I mean it's an effective formula and nobody last year really lost their mind about the punter being selected. Yeah, good. So very good. I'm going to put the full, I'll put URL up here in the podcast description. Go check it out. Like I said, pat does a lot of writing for the site, obviously when this work schedule allows. And so lots of good stuff on there. Thanks for doing that. The last thing, yeah, I'm seeing now controversy with destroying. I know that he was held and am Amendola was let go from the Ramas. That's my team. And now people are tweeting out, okay, maybe he's has 72% field feelable completion, whatever. Are we sensing now that there's going to be some drama coming out, but I think the league likes destroying being there. They already retweeted today again his YouTube video about his journey to the NFL. See, that bothers me, and I'm actually writing an article right now about it. The league needs to do more to promote these players because they can't pay them what these players should have gotten paid. And I don't think they should make millions of dollars from the league. No, I'm not saying that. But I do think they should make over a hundred K and when you break it down it's a hundred K and 10 to 12 weeks or 16 weeks, whatever. So I mean I think he's a clown soundbite that, I mean I am a little closure to this situation on some people I know who know him, who have known him when he was Donald Dela Hay when this stuff came out about his YouTube channel, I sympathized with him because I do think he should have got paid for his name, image and likeness in the true way. Not just here's $10 million stay at our school. But on the flip side, where were you at in 2017? Brian Woods had a spring league. Where were you at in 2018? Brian Woods had a spring league. Where were you at in 2019? A-F-X-F-L 2020, excuse me, 2019. He was in the CF, But prior they had the a f. He could have tried out for that 2021. So why do you think this is now? That's what I don't get. I don't know man. I think him and Marquette King are good friends and he went to the games and he's an arrogant kid who honestly kind of rubbed me the wrong way. Our one interaction in St. Louis and he thinks he's someone because he is got 5 million subscribers. And I'm like, yeah, I know you talk a lot of smack in those videos, man, but I don't think anyone has ever engaged in physicality with you and I, to me, man, it sums to a bigger systemic issue of just this clout chasing and whatnot. And he's got a camera guy there. Why can't I forget who just made a YouTube video of inside camp? I think it was Madre Harper. Would Madre Harper's camera guy be allowed to be on the field? I don't think so because Madre Harper just created a YouTube channel. He's got 200 subscribers. Would Rohe Bingham do that? Would AJ McCarran do that? Yeah, probably. It's not, you're picketing and choosing and this guy is going to bring eyeballs to your league, but at what cost? Because based off this thing that this kid put out who has no agenda, by the way, and based off the conversations I've had with NFL kickers and NFL specialist, he's not the best guy to be around. But if he adds 2 million eyeballs to a bras game, are we just going to be okay with that? I mean, the rocks a showman and I know he's not really involved. Yeah, I don't know if that translates. I know they think it does. I know they think he's got, what'd you say, 5 million YouTube? I think they think okay with that. No, I think the people that destroying just watch this YouTube channel. I don't think you know what I mean, but I don't know if They're on the phone. Yeah, I don't. So we'll see. To me, if you're starting to alienate people and make locker room issues, that to me is where the problem is. I don't think these leagues are big enough or pay enough to put up with that stuff, so I would just keep an eye on that. But I just saw that today with all that and I know that there was already issues with M and Do getting let go, have their specialists not share a locker. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean it is what it is. I could see Matt Amandola back in the NFL just because that's how Kickers role. Yep. Well Pat, this is good long not live, but we almost went anyway, but we almost went about the same. Anyway, I check out Pat's stuff on still writing for UFL News Hub for Mark, and then obviously writing on the mark has as well. So appreciate that the All Mark has list everything else today, pat, stay safe and thanks again. Yes sir, thank you. Huge special thanks to Brittany and Andy and the Roughnecks Showboats team, steadied up interviews. Really appreciate Chris Johnson taking the time busy during training camp. Coming on Darius Victor, obviously coming up after practice and kind of all that stuff. I really appreciate both of them. Pat working remote, taking time to come on and kind of break down all the UFL shenanigans all Mark has team and kind of all that stuff. Really appreciate that. It should be another big show next week here, hopefully coming out Friday. Keep you posted online, but big time interview, getting scheduled, coordinating calendars. And then I have another interview, like I said, Sunday returning guests. You will not want to miss lots of UFL training, camp preseason previews, everything coming here before we have kickoff two weeks to kickoff. We'll be there. Lots of shenanigans, should have lots of fun guests for that. So be subscribed and kind of stay tuned for all that should be exciting. We'll see you guys next time. Hope you have a great weekend. Take care.

UFL News Roundup: Uniforms, Broadcasters, New Merchandise, and More!

Well here we are back again. Happy Friday. Mark Cast here. Lots of stuff to talk about. Didn't know if we would have anything to talk about. John and I have been going back all forth all week here. We have John Lewis here, John Lewis Sports Sporty and I guess a mark cast. Surely he bought that. I wasn't even notified from the shop, so maybe I've been selling hundreds of 'em. I had no idea Very well could be. We were talking fashion today. I figured I got to come fashionable on this. Yeah, so lots of news today John and I. So I'm podcasting under duress Dental surgery earlier this week. Gum reconstructive. Worse than anything I've kind of gone through medical wise, at least in this I have genetics have not been kind to me. So we're here. We kind of expected, okay, Wednesday, okay, Thursday we've been doing the media days and all that stuff, but we have uniforms to talk about. We have new merchandise to talk about. We have the broadcasters. We can talk a little bit about that. Lots of stuff to talk about. I'll roll through some comments here. John, you were on two weeks ago. We had Greg Parks last week. How are you feeling now? We're three weeks out from kickoff. We will be in Arlington. I will be. You can be on the show if you want to be, but either, but we will be live here going March 30th. So we're almost there. How are you feeling? I'm feeling optimistic. I'm really looking forward to the kickoff. It's feels like at least in our community here, that people are getting excited To me. There are a few red flags on some of these rollouts. That's really my only thing about this because you mentioned media days so far the Birmingham stallions are the only media that has contacted me. I'm on the UFL mailing list now. I mean I'm nobody, I get it, but it's like they have contacted me, they allow me to be part of the news conferences, they allow me to download the news conferences. It's only team that I have gotten anything from, which is kind of disappointing because we can give the UFL. It's what we do. We are fans, but we also want to tell stories and pass things along to people who aren't privy to these things. So it's, I think it's a missed opportunity there and I'm sure we'll talk about some of the other things that we've seen PR wise, but the game's the thing, so I'm going to stay optimistic here. Yeah. Now I'll give you just a preface here and I see Zach, we have a comment here talking. I'll pull that up here talking about the format of the show. This might air a little bit negative today just with everything going on is I always put my hand up and then I screw up my hand tracking on my camera there. This could be a little negative today. Now next week I've already recorded one interview, a training campaign I tweeted about yesterday. Surprise a big name. Everyone will be excited for that. I know people want more interviews. Zach has the comment area. Please bring back the format of the show. There probably wouldn't have been a show the last two months, three months if we weren't be doing the little live things and having John and Greg and Andy and Evan and Pat and everybody else. So we're getting some interviews I cannot control the flow of, okay, Reid, we're in training camp. Okay, now we need time. Okay, we're working on it. I have a big name guest I'm working on. Like I said, I already have one recorded and then a couple other spokes in the fire. So I think Pat's going to join me next week. I think we're going to do an all mark cast UFL team listings. Like I said, I already have one interview so I can subscribe but you do not want to miss my big name interview. So they got back to me again this week. We're working on that so it should be exciting. So just stay tuned. But if you're a little like, Hey, I don't want to get too, we might get a little bit nitpicky today with some of the rollout stuff this week does not mean I'm not excited. It does not mean so and subscribe If you want to be part of that, I promise you at least the interview I already recorded here last night, you will not want to miss that. So exciting stuff. Yeah, we got the uniforms and I'll pull up the press photos here. We finally got the release today. I know Mike Mitchell had reported with Sports Illustrated. It was coming. It did not make sense to me. I guess a couple of different ways. So doing a uniform release feels redundant if, because a lot of the uniforms are recycled, right? There's no new uniforms, but my argument would be we are still trying to attract new fans here. So the uniform release and us doing a video about that is not for the people that are watching this that are already subscribed. God forbid we get anybody else like, oh man, there's new uniforms coming out I didn't watch before. These are new. So to me it was backwards. We did the media day, we leak, kind of leaked everything and then today we put out the press release. I just feel backwards in terms of any way that you would generate any kind of excitement about that. I'll pull up the uniforms, but how did you like that we finally come out today? Oh yeah, by the way, here we have this agreement And it came out like this afternoon. It was here at least here in the east. Yeah, this was kind of backwards. I think that there is an opportunity that we talk about all the time. You've got to catch the casual fans, so why not make it a thing? Yeah, some of us will be like, oh, these are the same uniforms that they wore and these are the Under Armour uniforms that the XFL wore. Now all they did was just kind of move that template to the SFL uniform, which there are some little tweaks and I mean very minor, but still you can make it a thing. I mean here's another thing. I've signed up. I'm on the UFL mailing, not just the PR thing but also the fan list where they're supposed to send you emails like, hey, this is happening, this is happening. Check out this news. I rarely get anything from there. In fact, the way that I found out that they had new Under Armour gear on the website today was I was on the website to look to see if they had shipped my UFL shirt that I ordered on February 16th and then I see, oh, they've got some new stuff on here. I'd never even gotten anything. By the way, they still haven't shipped my shirt, but that's my problem. So again, yeah, we continue to say this. There are a lot of missed opportunities Reed, Because again, and I want to talk through these uniforms, this isn't for us. This isn't for you're trying to do and that's again, we've had the conversations in Greg Parks last week is I don't know and I certainly, I appreciate the rock being on Daytona and we're making a lot of that. I want to get talked today as well about where does Danny and Dwayne kind of fit into this because Danny Garcia has seemed to drop off the face of the earth here. I mean I know the rocks feuding with Cody Rhodes and that's been tremendous. He's still taking the time to do Daytona, but it seems to me like, okay, I don't know what we're reaching outside of unless I'm following the XFL on Instagram, which the social teams have done a tremendous job. Anybody involved and I follow all you guys on personally and Jay and Leah and everybody, anybody that's involved in that. Tremendous. But I keep hearing this, okay, well we just need to get through this. We just need to get through this. And it's been where? It's March of 24 now. I've heard that for the last four years. So we got these. Now I will say I am a professional wedding videographer. I'm not a professional photographer. Are I would've photoshopped these a little bit. I don't want to be too critical. John and I went back, I was arguing with Producer Max about that these are not social media leaks, these are the press release photos that were sent to me via the leak. So I don't want to be, but we have markings on some. We have the laptop showing on some, but here we battle hawk's back again. So no real tweaks for any of this stuff. Like I said, we have kind of UFL logo on that. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. I'll pull up the Battle Hawk social as well. I know they have someone there, but thoughts on this and getting the UFL logo on there. Yeah, I mean right. It's a great picture because you can see the whole uniform and if you go on the UFL website, anyone who's out there who hasn't even seen these are on the official UFL website. So you see the markings on the floor. I mean these look like Reed I said to you because I'm old, I remember these things that looks like back in the eighties and nineties when they actually took pictures on film and they would shoot them the frame wider so you could crop things out and you would've markings on the floor and all that. So I just don't know why you would look at that. Why not? I mean anyone could Photoshop that out. It feels Bush League love the uniforms though. I mean I'm glad they kept the Battle Hawks uniforms. Those are some of my favorites. Well I'm surprised because the one thing I thought was Fox two years ago with the initial USFL logos, I thought those were the best videos we had seen of any of 'em and it was like the bright yellow background and the red with the STAs. Lemme see if I can pull that, but I just thought that that was such a tremendous job. The XFL ones last year. I know they were live on, what were they live on? Whatever, they did the show and then they had the videos without all that. But I dunno, just really surprised that this was what we got this time. And I know too that Scooby Wright was tweeting that they were taking photos in the wrong jersey numbers that he was wearing someone else's. So interesting that way as well. But I wanted to see if I could get the SFL one up here. But yeah, thoughts on the actual uniform here? I like it and just from as much as we could take a look at some of these, I still haven't seen a lot of the road uniforms, so I don't know how much tweaking there's going to be done on those, but we've seen some of the home uniforms and I will say I do like that again, that the battle hawks, they kept that whole theme all blue. I wish they bring back the blue helmets, but I was hyped to see the behind the scenes media day stuff, which they're shooting. Obviously you could see it's at ES, ESPN in the back. So those are what they call a lot of people see interstitials or bumper shots that they'll show during the game. You crop that correctly there by the way. Yeah, and these things are, this Looks good, cool, this looks good. And they were doing the bubbles. We had a lot of bubble stuff going on. I thought this was all great and this was fun, This was great. Behind the scenes stuff, that's going to look even better when you actually see what they're shooting there, but that really shows off the uniform there and it looks pretty much the same as last year if not exactly the same. But see, yeah, here was some of the press photos back with the USFL before and I mean just to me you're sending these out and you're posting and podcasters are using them and the YouTube people and even I'm talking bigger people than us. I mean there's huge channels that do uniform breakdowns and stadium breakdowns and football stuff. I was just kind of surprised that that was what we rolled through with that. Yeah, I mean I just thought again, it just feels like it's another missed opportunity rollout for a lot of things. You're right. I mean these are the promotional. Now think about this. These are the promotional photos that a lot of people will use because these are press photos and can you imagine if they use this and there's marking on the floor? I mean it just feels like this is, you said it, we're going to be nitpicky, but branding is very important for this league, not for us. It's for the people out there who want to get involved and are casual fans and when they see stuff like this they'll be like, what is this? And I'm looking on, so I like having to get home in the way. I'm not seeing a lot. I'm seeing a lot of the home jerseys here. I know a couple of the teams had, so we'll kind of go through it, but they were showing the away jerseys as well in the battle hawks. It's more that gray one, right? It's like a nice gray with the blue. That's what they used. Yeah, last year. So I was looking around to see if they were going to use it again this year. I didn't really see a lot of these. I'm looking at videos like this and trying to look in the background because you'd see some people in the background that had the away uniform so you could kind of tell what was going on there. Yeah, so I think it's similar that way replacing the XFL with the UFL, obviously the USFL one's getting rebranded here with the Under Armour and all of that. So I like it. Again, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I don't think we were expecting a big blowout here in terms of radical redesigns, but I just think again, it's all about how you present it. The rock right now with Cody Rhodes and all this is the most basic wrestling promo thing ever. He's with Roman reins and okay, he's going to turn on them at some point everybody can see, but you just sell it, you go through it and this is what we're doing here. It doesn't matter if we've seen all these the last two years, no one's going to care about that. Put this out, put together a press release shoot, have the video crew come in like you did before the XFL ones back were awesome back in 2023. Yeah, and they did it right there. They did it on SportsCenter. It was really cool. Again, ESPN, they're a partner so I don't know why they just didn't pick it up a little more or have these ready to be sold. That's another topic. The UFL shop, we've had some problems, but right now as far as I know, I haven't seen any replica jerseys or authentic jerseys for sale. So you thought that another missed opportunity to me. So Zach hates our live shows, but he does say that you should be a permanent, this man is absolutely awesome. So there you go. So we're waiting them over with content if not with the format here. So some of these, so then the San Antonio one, which I love and that's my team again. So now this is just a crop photo for this one. So again, if you're doing, and we said this before, home and away, full body, front and back, that's all we need. This is great and I love the detail on this. This is a really good view of the UFL logo on there. I think that looks crisp, right? Obviously opposite the Under Armour on the other side you can see the San Antonio, the cool, the weave on that and if you guys want, I can't remember when the XFL uniforms came out. It was Max sent me up with the guy that helps design uniforms and he came on and kind of broke down the whole complimenting of color. We're like the casual people here like oh this is great, but he kind of did a whole color science of all that stuff. So if you search mark cast XFL, that was a pretty good on there. But good to see this come back. I like this. The off black kind of dark gray for the brass is a good look. You are not going to like the video that I'm going to have about grading the uniforms, so I'm just going to tell you that right now. I'm sorry. Well that's a good tease. So what do you have coming out? Well, I am going to do just kind of a pass fail A, B, C, D, F kind of thing. I mean it's all personal opinion, who cares? But this was the San Antonio ones were probably my least favorite. I do like the yellow aways though. Yeah, see again, I want to buy this right now. This is awesome. I would wear that a hundred percent. I think that's cool. I think the bra Bram, I like Brahms and Roughnecks, we'll get to that, but I like something a little different. I like my spring football uniforms to stand out. I mean I'm the one that has it. I'm going to go actually go grab some here. You talk about, Alright, well yeah, I mean I like that there's been some thought that went into these. Obviously with Under Armour, they don't just throw stuff out there. Under Armour is some of my favorite, just personal warmups or whatever or Under Armour. I have an Under Armour shirt that's like a cool gear shirt from 20 or 2009. I still have it because it's so comfortable. It doesn't shrink. It's really good and these are well designed. So yeah, I mean again, I'm not a Brahma's uniform fan, but I love the detail and I do like the away yellows. I mean I did upgrade on that one as far as I graded on a curve with them. Well, I just wanted to say here because I'm here anytime I can show off my official spring league. This is official, this is game Warren Dorothy has one as well. If you want to be jealous, you could be, Hey, if you want to be married to the Mark House here you have that. But Jared has a question here, and this is a very valid, will we ever be able to find official a wage jerseys that was question before XFL 2020 went away. We were never able to do that. We've never been able to do that with the USFL and to me, I'm not always the biggest a away jersey guy because most of the time they're just white. The XFL with this yellow bras, with the gray ball hot, there's enough spice in those where I would want to buy one. I had to do a Dragons 2021 through Dustin with Royal Retros. That was the only way I was able to do that. He, I can't remember what it was, he was like, Hey, I'll make you a custom jersey, anything you want. I was like, well why don't you just do this? Because it, it's never existed in a way to buy. So yeah, that would be a good way to solve it. We couldn't even get, I mean uniforms were rough back in 2023 here with the XFL. I thought my USFL one was a better quality for the replica with the stars, which I do have. Yeah, I did not get any authentic or replica jerseys and I've seen some, there's a website and I don't remember it. Even if I did, I wouldn't pass it along, but they sell replica jerseys that are obviously not licensed and you can really tell, I've seen a few pictures and they look like they came straight from the flea market, but those are out there because there's demand and there are people that are buying them because I have seen them and it's not even people that I really know. It's just in some of the Facebook communities. Yeah, again, and that is a very valid question. It's like not only would you like to buy a home jersey, but could you find an A way jersey? I mean the NFL you can get the first, second and third, the Thursday night action jerseys. I own every commander's jersey that they own and the team has existed for two years and we have three. I don't think they've ever won in the black one, but I have the commander's black one. That's one of my favorites. But yeah, I love the bras on this. I like that it fits in with the San Antonio theme. The yellow, I don't know, to me the yellow, it might just be the lighting here. It doesn't necessarily, this is a nice banana yellow. I really like this color yellow where it's not as, it's a little muted. I don't know why I have this towel here, but yeah, a little more, I don't know. To me it stands out. It pops and as in a wage jersey, I think this is one of the best ones. Agreed. Yeah. Pat says here, it looks like the Gotham team from the Dark Knight Rise thumb. That's right. Well the Gotham Rogues, I will say, and this is no disrespect to our USFL brethren, some of these ones I think, and part of this is we're honoring the history of the USFL. This is the Panthers. We're honoring the history of the USFL things. I like some of the updated design language with the XFL when we're marrying them. What do you see now having gone from two XFL ones now to this and maybe you like the history of all this, is that as jarring or am I alone in that? No, no, I agree. And also if you notice too the XFL jerseys or most of them have they? Well, I think all of the XFL ones have the city name on them. This one, I mean it doesn't, and I assume this is Oh yeah, because that's Danny Edley, right? Well now you run into this too and I can go back and look. I'm just pulling up the Panthers on Twitter here. You do get the thing too where not everything is So here, where can I get back on this? So the why can't I, not all the FL ones are the same on that. So if you go back, see this says San Antonio, but if you go to the Hawks one, it says they're not all consistent. If I remember back and I need to pull up to who the same in that way. But yeah. Yes, it is very different here where you have the names, at least the team or the city name on that versus the SFL one. Yeah, so I just thought if you're going to, I guess that maybe it's a way to kind of differentiate the USFL from the XFL, but just to me, I mean I like the Panthers colors, but it seems very plain to me. There's no shadow around the number, which would be really tough for television and has been in the past. But yeah, I'm not a fan. So let's pull up here. We get a little bit more detail here. So these are obviously the home and the way again, and this isn't consistent, so we've got the St. Louis didn't have, but it's always hard to me, I'm not nostalgic for the old USFL stuff. So when you want to carry over the design language, I get that and we have to honor the past, but it is, I mean at least going off the San Antonio one, that to me just speaks of like, hey, we really took some extra time here to curate something specialized. I do mean to me, I don't know if I'm the target audience, but yeah, to me I like that they wanted to hold on to some of that nostalgia of the USFL because they really had some great designs, but these are so traditional and then you do it and it doesn't even look like the XFL conference one. That's confusing to me, but because you look at it, okay, yeah, we want to embrace the tradition, but there's also A-U-S-F-L patch, there is a Under Armour patch, there's another Under Armour patch on the pants. I do. They all have the logo, the mascot logo on the pants. So that looks good. But to me, why not make them, you don't have to make them all the same, but at least put the cities on there or the team name that would be Michigan. But why not do that? What's interesting too is if you go here, I thought this was interesting Matt here with a comment, is it too difficult to ask to get the shade of the plum on the pan stripe? Correct. Our colors aren't darkish red. So a little bit of issue there with it not being the correct color. Yeah, it looks a little more plum. Again, I'm not a Panther's purist here, but I would understand, hey, we've seen that with fanatics right now in the MLB where the mariners, well, but especially the Mariners have very specific color palettes and the hat that they have custom for spring training does not match the jersey at all. It's not even the same colors. And so you're like, well here it's the sea foam green. I get that. People are very conscientious about that and to me that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, Royal Retros had a great post on that. It was like when someone was comparing, they were showing it was the Mariner's logo from I guess last year or year before and then they showed the new one and it did it look like it'd been out in the sun and washed out and roller retros was like, yeah, we wouldn't do that. Now here's that fits a little bit more I think in terms of the XFL design language, even if it doesn't have the cities on it, right? Here's the Mahler here. Looks not quite as purple. Purple. Well the show boat boats. Yeah. Oh, the showboat, sorry, excuse me. Looks a little bit, at least with the double, the two shade there, I dunno. To me this fits a little bit more into that versus the Panthers Agreed. I like these and I like that on the yolks there they have the cutout for the Under Armour and for the UFL patch. I think that is really sharp. Were the showboats one of the most polarizing teams when it came to the logo and the colors. There were so many people when they came out it was like, oh, I hate these. And other people were like, oh, I love these. I love the color scheme. It's one of my favorite color schemes in the entire league. But I do like that they put a little attention to detail with the UFL patch and the Under Armour patch having cutouts on the yolks And it fits there. Even if it looks like, I mean this is ooc D Reed, but that is not, oh my god, that Is not God. It looks like they taped it on, But I mean my wife has said I'm compulsive, but am I mistaken in that? Is that a Little No, you are not. Because it looks crooked and it looks like someone ironed it on crooked. It doesn't even look like it's stitched on. I didn't even notice that Handout. I will just say though, and I tend to pick it here, but because I'm trying to get away whatever on the Showboats page, they don't have anything from either they have the two hours ago we're talking to International Women's talking about the best fans, but we don't have a lot of, there's no uniformity things on here and then we go back to March. So I wish we get a little bit of media day, but I would've liked, okay, we're getting a little bit, but that's okay. I guess that's your best look at the away. Yeah, and I did see some of these and I think there was another video, it might've been on Instagram that showed the away jerseys. Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of the all white. In fact, I point out in the video it looks like a reverse LA extreme jersey from 2001. Yeah, I mean that's obviously the practice jersey. Philip given this 99 cents, appreciate that John's a member join the club. 99 cents a month. Mark has subscribers on podcasting. I can't feel half my face right now. You know what I'll appreciate? Help me pay for that. Help me pay for that dental build I, oh boy, pay that out of pocket. Yeah, so anyway, back to that. I dunno, to me I like the yellow on this. This is fine. I don't know if I love this purple. I would like a little bit more like a Jo search purple here, but maybe that's the historical, I think they left that behind with the Pittsburgh malls. Yeah, I get that. Okay. Which was absolutely one of the worst color schemes. I'm glad they actually changed it. It was hard and they were trying to placate Steelers and then it Didn't work. Obviously That was different. Okay. But see now here if we're talking design language, so this one go into what I think is this is one of the best jerseys in all of spring football here with the Houston roughnecks on here in the USFL conference XFL team. I want to get a zoom in on the patch here, but you get what I'm saying? At least this speaks to similar design language, even though now you have nice gradients. Some people like gradients, some people don't with the numbering and all of that, but it at least feels like this might be in the same family. But what do you like of the roughnecks? I like it. Like I said, I think those are called yolks. I'm not a uniform expert, but I like that. And plus with the white and then you have the navy and the gradient numbers, which I do love with that helmet, which some people love, some people hate. I like it. It looks different. It's like nothing that's in any other league that I've seen. Yeah, I'm a big fan. Absolutely. Houston's one of my favorite uniforms. I'm not a Biggie fan of the white pants, but it just works with that whole color scheme. And I will say again, just if we're ever having spring football uniform releases again just at any, I've talked about this last time and the time before having all the helmets with all of them as well. This is good because they know this is a standout. But let's get a side angle of this, right? This is one of the standout helmets on here because even on the side it's kind like the three quarters or whatever. Excuse me, what's your thoughts on the patch on here? Getting a little. Does that feel more on there or less? It still looks like someone just slapped it on there. It's got double sided tape on the back. It doesn't. Do you think If we pull that off, is there an XFL logo on that Do you think? I think a hundred percent because if you look at last year's jerseys, I guarantee you you just take that off. There's going to be an XXFL logo under there. Let me get this up here. Yeah, it's going to be and it's definitely, do we have a good, I'm getting the XFL 2023. Well here, this will at least give us here. This is terrible podcasting now. Yeah, there you go. See and they had that cut out there. I mean it's got to be right. Yeah. I can't get into here. Lemme try to get it anymore. And the patch is Navy. See because they couldn't, I mean you could just put that over the logo. You couldn't just stitch UFL over top of the XFL. Here we go. Yeah, here we go. Yeah, I get what you're saying here. You could see, I think it's definitely an iron on patch there. I think that looks like something came from eBay. But again this, well hey I'll say because this is how good we are. We got a knockoff Kraken, we got knockoffs Seattle Kraken practice jerseys from China, but they don't come with the Starbucks logo on it. So then we went and bought Starbucks iron on patches so we could iron 'em onto our practice jerseys to make them look more authentic. So that's, That's commitment. But anyway, but again, this at least to me feels I got to get back. There we go. At least feels like it's in the same design language here. I was going to pull up the roughneck page here. Get a little bit more detail on that. I think it looks really nice. The color scheme is to me perfect for it and yeah, they had some really nice still photos from their media day on. These are the same ones they had on Instagram. Okay man. We're rivaling our YouTube viewership with Twitter viewership right now. This is our Twitter page. It's got 130 here on YouTube, like another 85 over on Twitter. So that's good. That's awesome. I never get that many on Twitter so I appreciate that. Anyway, this to me is great. I know Philip doesn't love all this. He's a roughnecks fan, but you can't be too sad about that. Here I got to get over here. This is another photo. Could have used a little workshopping here. I don't like seeing the laptop on here and the Laptop in the, I mean what is going on? Somebody's laptop in the bottom, the marks on the floor. It just, yeah, it looks amateurish. This is on the website? Yeah. What was I going to show? Can I do this here? I photoshopped. LJ Mar Smith and all of that for the thumbnail. Adobe does it for you now for free, Right? I mean you could at least just, you can use the generative AI on Adobe. Does that remove laptop from bottom of frame? Remove marks from the floor. We got Pat REO here bragging about streaming numbers per usual. Patrick, the streamer man here, that's good. I dunno. Defenders to me never really fits in with the rest of the design landscape. It's a lot of red but obviously this is one that big fan base and carried over and all that stuff. But thoughts on this? Lemme pull up their social. I love the defenders, the whole thing. It's simple but it's like if there's elegance in a uniform, to me it's the DC Defenders now. I think they wore, did they wear all white away or did they wear White Jersey and red Pants? I'm getting pulled up Here. Okay, Again, this is one we haven't, they did wear red. Now here, this is from the defenders. This says photo credit, Jim Cower. Jim, are we the one, are you the one that we need to yell out about the marks on the floor in these photos? Is Jim the official A UFL or is this, but these are actually decent photos. Maybe this is Jim's work And it is interesting that they have defenders on there, which I guess they didn't want to put Washington dc See, I told you it's not consistent. It's not consistent. You're Right. Yeah, I guess they didn't go with Washington and DC or just dc. That looked kind of weird but yeah, it's not. I mean, but still some of my favorite uniforms. Traditional. Yes. Simple. Yeah, but just still they look good. So we had a comment here. Stock speed tech. Glad they got rid of that urban camo look last year, right? I thought that the defenders had a little bit more patterning in the white. Is it just because we can't see it on here? Well it's really hard to tell from there. Now as far as I understand, I've not seen a lot of helmet pictures. I think they are keeping in the helmet just okay. And also there was some talk, and I guess we will talk about the Birmingham in a minute, but it looked like someone had a picture of the helmet and it looked like the helmet had a larger logo on it. But now I really couldn't tell, go back and look at it. I didn't break it down and analyze it that much. Yeah, I'll tell you guys, God bless you. But even when, I think it was the last year they had eight photos per team of all the really helpful but really helpful when looking at all this stuff. This is what, if you're doing this, it is for the people to want to mark out and it's super analyze all this stuff. So that would be what I would Expect. It totally is. And it's like you can now, are people going to say, oh I'm going to watch March 30th because I saw this cool picture of a uniform. No, but it's all about branding and it's about getting the word out there and this is what we are. And when you see that picture to me it's like if this is what you are, people are going to think you're a third tier football league. Again, it's branding. It's the perception that you send out and it's too bad. I think that's a great picture except for the laptop and the marks on the floor. Yeah, because I really didn't, when they came out today, I downloaded all of 'em and tweeted real quick and I really went back to look at them and I was like, wow, this is, I didn't even, I was like, that's interesting. So I don't see a dc I'm looking through this in Twitter here. I don't see anything else from that. Anything else here on defenders? We want to move on? No, thank you. You covered it. Like I said, it's just too bad. I, that's such a great picture and it's just ruined by all that other stuff in there. I'll Photoshop it here. I could probably Photoshop it live on the podcast here. You probably could. Now here, this is where we get into a little, and I know obviously the pants are different here, but stallions a little similar that way with that. This is a great photo of Jim R. What do you make of now? Same thing but just with the UFL logo on it. Well again, I would love to have seen them put Birmingham on there, but I guess they want to go with the traditional, if you look at the original Birmingham stallions now they did change up the logo, not this year, but from the original. Obviously Michigan Panthers really pretty much kept theirs and some others. But I like the new streamlined logo that Birmingham came out with in the new incarnation of the USFL. I like these uniforms. I mean Birmingham was kind of my team. I love the numbers. Some people don't like those square numbers. I love the numbers I think, and those just look clean to me. Those are clean uniforms. I think they look nice to me, this looks high quality obviously Under Armour, similar material, all that. What's interesting to me is if you go back here showing these US L, so we drop the USFL, obviously we're not going to US L logo on it, but drop the USS L logo on the center and then so what do you make here of seeing the front? I mean that's kind of the biggest change of any of these right is And I like that they kept the color code with the UFL, their logo. They made it maroon, they've, they kind of the cutouts there. I think these are really nice looking uniforms even without the USFL plate on the front. I like that. And again, we get kind of a good look of all that. I don't know if we got get side angles of that. I don't know if we get, because that's the practice run. I mean I'm just trying to see if we have any different looks at the away one. But again, it's kind of hit or miss here. CO consists On that, right? And there was a great video today of, I think it was on Instagram with Matt Corral who, and they had a really, really good video of him that was obviously shot for some of the bumper shots that's going to be on the broadcast. I thought it was look really sharp. Question here, where does the XFL conference come into the uniforms? I don't think, I mean there's no delineation that way at all. That's actually a good thing to point out that you UFL, there's a good, I think they could have done something that's actually a great M rider here. That's a great, you could have kept the XFL in the USFL and done something that way with the conferences, but maybe we want to have it in name but not, I do think that that would've been a way to help do something different this year. I mean even like NFL uniforms sometimes they'll have those on there or I still love the Kansas City Chiefs that have the old A FL logos still on their uniforms. But yeah, I mean seems like that would, and it would keep the branding going too that you have to keep that, although the conferences are called XFL and USFL, it would've been really cool to have those. Although you got to wonder, would you want to put A-U-S-F-L logo on a Houston roughneck jersey? Might've been kind of weird. That whole thing is still weird. Do you think if they would've kept the gamblers, do you think they would've done that? I think they have. I bet that they would have. I think absolutely because they would've then you would've had A-U-S-F-L team, which you still do. They are the gamblers, but they're just called the roughnecks and they're an XFL team that's in the USFL conference. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I think they would've done That. Yeah, I think, hey, this is why Zach hate the live shows. But this is why I think sometimes having the live show is helpful. You can get feedback like that. But again, now we're going to, it's a totally different design language again, which I really like the Renegades one and I've seen them obviously on the pants here we see the R. I've seen more use of the cowboy, the bandit. We're going to get into the merger on the site in a second if you haven't been excited enough with the uniform breakdowns here. But I like this. You got the red inside the numbers here with the black. To me, this is an iconic low jersey just because this is one the Rock had for the kickoff. I mean that shot's been used a lot and let's pull out maybe true kind of all that stuff. But it was ill-fitting and didn't have, did not look good on the rock. But to me this is one of the standout jerseys for better or worse from the XFL, but it certainly does not fit into the design language here for going from the Birmingham. I mean it looks like two different leagues, not two different conferences. I love that. And it looks like from that patch, it looks like either it looks like they've either matched the color or they've just made it. Oh, I think, yeah, that is so they did. Yeah. It's just like it is either a blue or maybe silverish now. Again, I think too, that picture doesn't do that blue justice. It looks like it's a little bit lighter unless they change something. But yeah, to me, I have always loved this. This is one of my favorite uniforms too. See to me that's the blue that I think of when I think of red there. You can really see it there. And the red numbers and the black outline. I think that's just so sharp. Yeah, this is probably just the color thing, but that's a great thing to point out. Again, this is, and I am not a product photographer, but this is something that you do need to keep into account too, is that different colors translate differently and kind of maintaining that across. So at least it looks the way in the press photos. Yes, this is definitely a darker blue. Thank you for pointing that out. And you can see the same, the UFL logo on there. Yeah, you can really see it clearly there. But yeah, that's such a good color scheme. And the helmets, even though I would've liked to seen maybe some outline on the R helmet, it's very nitpicky, but the black in the middle and then with the way that it lays out with the jersey. Yeah, I just think those are just sweet. Yeah, I'm not the biggest helmet guy. Usually when it's just like, I liked it when it was, what was it? The dragons back and they had the painted on part of it and I think the Panthers had part. You're doing a little bit more that way, but sometimes just the different stickers on there is always kind of interesting to me. But yeah, again, we would like to see helmets for all of these difficult to look that way, but at least we're getting a little bit through That. Yeah, I mean I feel like a forensic scientist when I was trying to break down and zoom in on some of these helmets to see if there was some kind of change. It was just really hard to tell when you did even see a helmet in some of these pictures. It was, and I wonder, okay, why would they not have the helmets out? Well, they did for that one, obviously, but why would they show 'em off a little bit? Yeah, let me just see if I can, I don't know why it's asking me to upload more on there. But yeah, anyway, yeah, would like to see the helmets on all of 'em. But yeah, there it is. Anything else that we'll get to shop here, new things and then we'll get to broadcasting and all that stuff. Any other thoughts on any other thoughts on the uniform? Well, I have mixed emotions because there was part of me that was hoping there would be a uniform release and it would be like, look at what we did with this uniform and look what Under Armour did with this. So that was a little disappointing. But then there's another part of me that said, well, I'm glad they didn't radically change and we didn't end up with Barcelona Dragons looking Jersey because those kinds of things, they don't look great and they try to be too different. So I would say mixed emotions, but overall I'm happy with what we've gotten there. Yeah, I know there's just not enough time and I know that this is long ranging here and we're trying to get through this season and who knows what's going to happen, but if you don't do it now, I don't see this being a priority moving on next year or whatever. Okay, well now we're going to Reground. I think if you're going to do it, I think you're going to do it now. M Rider. Just a couple comments here. There should be an XL Shield. I think that would've been cool. I think that would've been a really cool, obviously you want to have the under arm patch on there, but I think, I don't know, you put the UFL logo kind of lower on the hip there where you kind of have the fanatics or something, put 'em on the bumper. I think that would've been really cool to put 'em on the front. You'd have an XFL up there, A-U-S-F-L up there. I think it looks like they put UFL on all of them. Yeah. And then Philip Pierce says, I like that all the unis are different. They shouldn't be similar with just different colors. I know. I just like them to be at least kind of in the same design spot. David Best roughneck helmets, epic. They have the best unis ever. I Love those ailments. Love 'em Babe. Love the Under Armour merch. So God, it's better than previous movie leagues. I think the quality is great. I just want that to translate into something that I can buy now. I see. They look really nice and it's just not what you can buy on that. So along with that, we had the announcement today. We now officially Under Armour is going to be part of all this stuff. They are going to be multiyear deal here with, we'll see how long that, but anyway, we have new release. We have some merch on here. You can, I don't think it's shipping till mid season here, at least after the kickoff. But thoughts on this? I just have a couple click that this isn't going to be a deep Dive. I mean to me these look like I love the breaking tea stuff, don't get me wrong. I think the breaking tea stuff is solid and did order a couple that actually came in and I really like them. But Under Armour just makes such well-fitting really well-made shirts that are, I guess Nike is the dry tech or whatever. But I've got a few, like we were talking about at the top of the show here, I've got a lot of Under Armour stuff like pullovers and long sleeve shirts and the cool gear and the heat gear and all that. I love the fit of them. I really like the look of them. Now I don't know if that's a $35 hat or not, but if it's got Under Armour logo on it, you're going to pay about three prices. And I get it. Stock speed tech here, NFL uniforms are not all the same across the board. Very different. I agree with that. We also have decades of history and yeah, the Seahawks is very different than the Brown's name is very different than the, I mean you have a lot of different Yes, I agree with that. But I think at least coming out and launching, yeah, I see both. I see wanting to maintain. But it's still different where it's five and three and it's not four and four. I think if the gamblers had been carried over, I think I would've been a little bit different about that kind of stuff. Having the four and four with the different logos. I will say, yeah, I like how they, let me see if I can get out how they, oh, hang on here. I wanted to get this pulled up the XFL because I thought this was funny because out, hey we have new merge, all this stuff. Yeah, here we go on here. So lemme see if I can share. I accidentally closed out, so I thought this was funny. They tweet that you asked, we delivered because remember had the big tweet the other week about they not having enough merchandise and I like that they use the salute signal. I like that we're getting that mainstream here. And so I responded somewhere in here. I said, there you go. I appreciate that. I asked there it's I asked you delivered. I will say. So now we have, yes, we have hats that you can do. I probably won't, not my style of hat, but we have hats on here. I know you're going to buy a hat, Reed, come on. I don't know. That's a really hard, I'm a big fitted guy. I have lots of these fitted, I mean I have this Harris Tweed Mariners hat here. This is an expensive hat. I mean I don't just, yes They are. We don't just, this isn't adorn by anything, but we have hats. I like that. We have shirts that have the actual logos on the, I was critical about that before. The only shirt that you could have had the helmet on there and not the actual logo. This is kind of what they had the different version of that. But you had just the helmet on there. These are odd though. These sweatshirts are really weird. Yeah, even what is the logo? I like that it's got the big R on the back. The logo. Is that the This is nice, this nice. This is I think red logo little, I can't even get into it to do it. Yeah, here we go. Yeah, that's in there. What's very Odd. There's no way that ships that way. Right? It's going to be a difference. That's how they all are. And people thought that that'ss the men's, we have the women's here. I mean this is across the board. Wow. Let me get down here. Do the stallions have one like that? Yes. There's just the Bur hippy. Yikes. I like the long sleeve shirts. But it looks like you got it in a marathon or something because it's got, it looks like a bunch of sponsors down the side. Oh yeah. And I think it has a date on it too. Yeah, yeah. So you have dc you have the helmet, the DC helmet, something 24, the UFL logo, the Under Armour logo, and then there's something else there. Yeah, I do agree with that. It's like I did the Fun run. I did the UFL fund run. I would love to, this is clean. Super clean. Yep, A hundred percent. It's just normal. I just want normal. I would do, and pricing, I mean this is fine. 40 bucks. I, like I said, be you don't want to know what that Harris Tweed hat costs, but some of these things really, really sharp. I like the black color of that. And that's like a youth, I would fight a child for that shirt, but to me I trust Under Armour and the creative process there. But this feels better what it was. But yeah, still some of these choices. Yeah, I do like that. I ran the marathon. I mean it's cool I guess, but that's too much. And maybe it's just I'm cheap. I don't like T-shirts that have the dates on it. I don't know. I'm not a fan. Well it just says 2024, which is kind of odd too. Was, I dunno. I guess if it was the kickoff date, but they have those limited really scheduled as well. How'd that go? Well, yeah, not very well. I think this is really nice. I mean some of these use stuff, I like the new kind of how we're doing these new, the hoodie kind of the neck. I like the modern take of these. The Kraken has a lot of cool stuff with this as well where they have kind of a new modern take on the hoodie neck line, which I think is, Yeah, I have a Seahawks one like that and it's super comfortable and I like the look of it. It's not just like a hoodie where it's bunched up behind you. You have Seahawks merch? I do, in fact. See there's two Seahawks cups down there. Why do you have Seahawks merch? Because I've been a Seahawks fan since the Steve large days. Probably longer. We don't have Discussion. Probably not. That's funny though. This is nice. See like this one. All right, so you have the Michigan Panthers. So then do they have the little M1 as well? They must, yeah. See then they have the, but that's the women's I don't see, I see a Panthers football. I see that. I don't see the little m. I will say that men, That's the only sweatshirt they have for the men. Why do they get that one? Yeah, that's odd. And that's not a youth. Yeah, that looks like an adult. I will say that. The blue T-shirt though. That's sharp. See Braas. I like the shirt, the see here you got the white with the tiny B. And then you have the women's side, so just the Michigan one. If you're Michigan, you get that Big Braas has that, but that's the different, that's the youth. See, you got to go through here. I love the Battle Hawks, this alt logo, the Battle Hawks one. I do like that and I'm very sad that the long sleeve T-shirt is white. I can't have white T-shirt can't have because it would end up with, I'm too much of a sloppy eater. It doesn't work out. I'm pretty sad. Yeah. All right. Anything else about the merchant here? We'll get into broadcasters that at least the ESPN side of it. Yeah, no, I think the Under Armour is a huge boost to that shop. I mean, I think that's the bottom line. There's some stuff, and it's funny, there's stuff that's on the Breaking Tees website that is, you probably hear my cat meow and she's had enough of this, of us talking about T-shirts and football. It is a huge boost and it's interesting that there are UFL shirts that are on the breaking tea site that are still not on the UFL shop. I just thought that was kind of odd. Yeah, you kind of get that moving back and forth on here. I don't know. It's never really consistent that way. I do think, again, I don't know if that's an Under Armour thing or if that's a UFL thing. I mean sometimes you're dealing with that with suppliers, but you would think that we have the same eight SKUs or whatever across all eight teams In terms of, I have the Sports Illustrated article here. I don't know. They sent out the nice graphic and all of that. But again, so Mike Mitchell had reported here this week that they were going to reveal the broadcasters doing the analysts and the color commentators and all of that. So we got the E-S-P-N-A-B-C side still waiting on the Fox side, which you can presume some of those names. The ones that were involved in the USFL ride, I would imagine the Kevin LERs of the world and Joe Klatts and Kurt Menefee and all of that stuff. But we got the ESPN side weird with the United Football League that all of this would not come out together. Is I, did I not see something recently that at least Fox hadn't talked about The A team was still going to be, it was going to be Kurt and Joel Klatt. It seems like I saw that, but not the rest of the broadcasters for Fox. Yeah, I imagine that, and like I said, Kevin's always a part of that stuff and he's been great and he'll come on the show and he's been part of this since the spring league days and talking for all that stuff, so I appreciate That is one of my absolute favorite play by Play guys. It's so funny. He ends up calling a lot of Seahawk games or a lot of the games I watch I love and then texting him and being fly safe home and he's like, oh, don't worry. But I just love having just that and he's so cool that way. Just that little two seconds of interaction, I'm like, Hey man, hope you had a fun time in Seattle. Like, oh yeah, it was great. He would respond on Twitter. He was great. I have Sunday ticket and I watched Seahawks games and I was like, oh, good. Kugler's doing the game. It's cool. So some of the ones here and they're getting some new in here. We've got the Sam Achos, he was on here before, excited to see Tom Luen bill come back, Eric McLean, Cole Kule, stormy, kind of all friends of the show at that. I like at least where it was before, it's easier getting ESPN people onto for the Zacks of the world, but the prerecorded interviews, it's easier to get ESPN people on Fox people. Kevin used to be able to do whatever he wanted to do and then when it was last USFL season, he's like, you got to go through Fox Comms. Like, sorry, I'll do whatever. SPN people. I could just sends Stormy message and she's like, oh yeah, I can come on whatever at that time. So I do like that at least from a read. And obviously these are all talented people and I think ES ESPN does a good job of having male, female diverse voices and different, all that kind of stuff. But I like it at least from from an access point of view because I like having people mid season. Okay, you're doing the coaching calls and not that you do get to the point sometimes where I think Pat or Andy or Evan could probably speak as good on the game, but it gives you that bump to have an ES ESPN person on there. Any thoughts on the broadcasters kind familiar faces? Yeah, I was disappointed that Tom Hart wasn't part of the play-by-play crew because he got it. I mean, I just remember when the whole lemons thing started to happen in DC and he was talking about the beer snake and he was laughing at the whole thing, but he was laughing as a fan. He wasn't laughing at Look at these idiots doing this. I think he even said in one of the broadcasts, let 'em have the beer snake come on and he just got it. He's such a good play Byplay guy. I'm a big college basketball fan and watch a lot of college basketball and he does a lot of SEC games, so I was sad to see that. And just personally selfishly, I was sad to see that Katie George was not going to be part of the ESPN broadcast because Katie and I used to co-anchor sports together here in Louisville. And in fact, I was just talking to her recently about when this came out and I saw it and I had talked to her and I was like, oh man, I'm sad to see you. You're not part of it. But she has so much on her plate now. She does NBA games, she's on the a crew of college football, so for ESPN. So yeah, I think there was just so much going on that takes nothing away from what we've got here. I was very happy to see Stormy Back and Cole and a lot of those guys. Now, I think Drew Carter is part of this. I think I have socks that are older than Drew Carter. I take nothing away from him because good for him. This guy has rocketed from Birmingham, Alabama and to being a play byplay guy. So I think that's really cool. But you're right, there are a lot of good voices, a lot of diverse voices and ESPN to me it felt like that they did in 2020. I thought they did a good job with the XFL, but it felt like Fox did the much better job as far as the broadcast went is really putting, it opens together. ESPN would just sometimes kind of like, Hey, welcome to Houston. Here we go, kickoff. But Fox had a lot of extra things, I think ESPN to me and Fox did a lot more of that with the XFL and USFL last year. So I think this is really cool. I have no complaints. I hate the Tom Hart and Katie George heart part of the crew. Well, and this just reminds me as also Vice, it is not Vicente here, Greg McElroy. I wasn't always the biggest fan of him, but also pointing out, I know Matt Berry, a friend of the show, Matt Berry was on the, I was disappointed with Matt. Now I'm just realizing this because I'm kind of doing the math and obviously I tweeted this. I've been dealing with my dental stuff all week. But yeah, no, Matt, Barry, I liked Matt because I thought, and this goes back to my point, but I liked Matt because Matt really got all of this stuff and I will say, and just to shout out my wife here watching, I think from school here, Dorothy giving this a dollar 99 here. Nice. Giving this a super chat so you can do that. You are not even married to me. I'll say this, the people that, at least from my experience, the people that ESPN this side has doing it, they buy in. I think that at least to me, there's kind of a thing of like, Hey, we want you to be involved in this and you need to buy in to do this. Right? Every single person I talked to from Stormy and Eric and Cole, they all got the process, wanted to be involved in it. We're excited about that. From my experience at least listening to the games, because again, Fox wasn't as, Hey, come interview all these people. I tried to work around and get the Kevins of the world, but it felt to me a little bit more like, you have to do this. This is a part of your contract, or Hey, why don't you go practice on these games like the Michael Robinsons of the world and kind of doing that and then we'll figure out what else you can do afterward where it felt like there was more buy-in and maybe that's just me and obviously Brock Heward is a standout from that and I do not think that Brock will be a part of this, but Brock, I don't think so. He was only partially involved in the one last year. We'll see. I mean I could send him a message and see what's going on. That's another one. Excuse me, I'd knock my desk. I can text Brock and be like, I'm really upset about the Mariners today. And he'll be like, I understand brother. I just my little, I don't get a lot of big connections, but I like that. But I don't see Brock being involved, but he got it. But to me, am I wrong in that it felt like it was a little bit more like this is part of your contractual obligations? Yes, agreed. I mean they continue to make Kurt Manife the number one play-by-play guy, and it just feels like sometimes he's not super prepared, but he's the number one guy because he's been at Fox forever and there are super cuts of him blowing calls in the XFL and the USFL. I get it, but that's just sometimes for these broadcasters. You've talked to a few, I've talked to a few. It's just something else that's on their plate like you said. But there are other guys like Matt and like you said with Brock. Yeah, I felt like they really got it. Kevin Coogler, a hundred percent gets it and Brock is really good. He was doing Seahawk's preseason games too as well. And so I really enjoyed listening to him on all these things. But yeah, you're right, it feels like some of the ES ESPN people and I mean, I'm not talking out of school here. I talked to Katie George on my channel, but also talking back and forth and she really enjoyed it and there was never a push, I don't think to her to say, you have to do this. This was like, we want to put you on this and have you do it. And she said it was a great time. It's a lot of work. I mean, if you've not worked in television, both of us have worked in television. It's not all glamorous all the time. It's a lot of work. And then when you have things that are piled on top of you on that, then you have to understand that it's like you can embrace it and have fun, but it's also a lot of work. Well, and there's two, remind me of my comment on Kevin Kler being prepared, but yes, I will agree. The other, even if you try to do a good job, you might be someone like Matt Berry that's anchored hour of TV every day and doing this and doing these games. And then as much as you want to be prepared, you have A-U-S-F-L fan. This would've been an XFL fan that I know every second of everything and you say something wrong and you're like, they don't understand. Yes, but to the other point, Kevin Kluger Kugler would say back when he was on the Spring League stuff, you're calling Patrick Mahomes in the Super Bowl. Everybody knows the storylines with that. Whereas if you're calling the Spring league and you're calling AJ McCarran or someone, you got to, even if people know hey are reminding people or hey, this was this unsigned guy from this school and it's coming in and he was left out of this and played overseas and was enough, you got to kind of know all that background. And it is, it's a tremendous more work than just the exes and those of kind of knowing the player stories of all this stuff. And I think that's what of a lot of the good play-by-play guys and gals do they tell the story and these spring leagues are full of stories. And that's honestly why I kind of got involved with doing YouTube and doing some of these things because the stories are so good. I mean, you're going to get good stories on every level, but some of these guys who are trying to make their path up or other guys who have come down trying to make their path back up or just some playing for the love of the game, there are a lot of cool stories and I like there are good broadcasts that tell those stories. It's not all about X's and O's. I'm not going to say Jimmy's and everybody says that Know Jimmys, but it's good. So I'm curious with the Fox, they're saying here, Kevin Burkhart, Greg Olson bat call for the UFL, is that what you want or is that what's going to happen? Like I said, I Can't imagine Kevin Burkhart and then Greg Olson, I mean that was a crew on Fox. Now is that going to happen? Probably not. Greg Olson, I don't know what he's going to do. I mean, which that's a whole thing to itself. That's a whole podcast. I can't imagine that that's going to be the case, especially if Kurt Menifee has already been announced as the guy, Well, I don't know. I mean I love Tom Brady and all that, but whatever, 4 million Greg Olson's getting paid a year. Is it worth 30 to get Tom Brady? Are you increasing viewership by 5%? Obviously they're smart people doing the math, but Right, and I'd like to see, I want to see the streaming numbers on Apple on this Dynasty documentary series on the Patriots, which is incredible. It was based on an incredible book. It's like, but it's got a lot of Tom Brady in it. Is that what's drawing people or is it the story? Yeah, but $30 million or whatever it is with Fox, as we've said before, like 60 million loss for the XFL and Redbird Capital, that's a big deal. A $60 million loss for Fox is a rounding error, so it didn't make that much difference. Are you surprised, and just piggyback on all of this, Mike was on Mark's channel last night coming back and just a couple other talking points here before we get out. I think we've kind of touched least everything I wanted to, if you have any other comments? No, no. United by Football this time, no player 54, no, anything outside of last time we had the ESPN, kind of the, what was it? It was the online streaming pre-game and all stuff and nothing really outside of obviously better broadcast windows. And we've done the whole schedule breakdown and all that. Other people are interested in that, but curious that there's no, with all of this broadcasting power than nothing outside the norm, That was really shocking. And I think when I was on with you and Max, I talked about I really missed United by Football. Those were so good. And then the Player 54, which really got into a lot of the player stories that was based more around for those who haven't seen it United by Football, was more of almost like a reality show that was entertaining. And I don't like reality shows, but Player 54 was kind of that way, but it was more based, it was in training camp and I thought that was just, again, we talk about missed opportunities, but man, those stories connect with so many people and it was a great pregame lead in for the USFL and I think they played, it was, I know it was on ESPN Plus you could watch the Player 54 stuff. Yeah, you've got Fox and ESPN behind this. Why would you not do some kind of, and maybe they're going to announce it later. I don't know. It just seems like that'd be a really cool thing to do leading up to some of these games, even if it's just a pre-game. And even if, what was it? Because the one was just online. It was on the ESPN YouTube channel with Scooby, Scooby Mag and all that because Scooby was on the show as well. I mean those guys got it as well. I think anyone, I did not. And I had a lot of the s, ESPN people on just going back to the broadcaster thing, I didn't have anyone on where I felt like wasn't fully invested in all this stuff. Even people as busy as you, I mean, I think that's cool. I always feel like I'm the nerd, Hey, can you come on and talk about whatever? And then when they get it, you feel like, okay, I'm not a, And I'm sorry re you can tell that when they're on your show, when you're talking to 'em, it's like they're enjoying talking about the league and talking about the stories and those things. It's not just like, oh yeah, thanks for having me and whatever. It's like they are having a good time with it. It was like I had on and they dropped off, but some guy was doing, I think it was like an XFL Seattle podcast or whatever and he was coming on. All I wanted to do was talk about Johnny Manzel and I'm like, okay, you're not. And this was last year, right? I'm like, you're not getting kind of where this is going. Speaking of the player 54, I know we touched on this at the top, but I wanted to make sure we circle back Rock on Daytona, but Danny Garcia seems gone from this world. Yeah, I don't know what was going on because she was the face there for quite a while along with the rock and now it seems like I've seen her post some other things about different businesses, but it's never been a little bit of the UFL stuff. But what's funny, you talk about Daytona after that appearance, I don't know how many people texted me like, oh, they were talking about the UFL on the Daytona 500 pregame. So that connects with people who don't even like what's the UFL is that happening this year? But yeah, I was kind of surprised with Danny Garcia just kind of haven't seen a whole lot of her and maybe it's been all rocking. I do like that Daryl Johnson, you see him at all the socials, they call it whatever the little community get togethers, but I think that's cool. But yeah, it seems like the rock has been like, this is the A tier. I'm going to be on the broadcast. Darryl Johnson's going to be the grassroots local. And then good question, what happened with Danny Just looked here on the YouTube channel. We have 160 people right now. We are one away from 3,300 subscribers. So if you're not subscribed on the channel, if you wanted to be a part of that, maybe we could, I got stuff I could send out, but maybe we could do that and you could say, Hey, send me a dm. Hey, I wish your 3,300 subscriber, but that would be cool. It'd be cool to hit that by the end. I appreciate that. If we ever get to 3,500, I will give away tickets to something. So we were going to do that. And then I would say neither the XFL nor the USFL season last year hit the mainstream audiences. I think clearly from the merging of everything now. So we never really hit that, but we love to hit that get 3,300 here. But yeah, let's get to 35, do a ticket giveaway, all that stuff To me, Danny and the Rock have, max has a comment here. We'll get to Danny and the Rock. It seems like they've transitioned their names to founders. We thought Danny's not on the football anymore. I don't know. To me it just feels like we're getting rid of that. The player 54 really felt like it was a marketing, this is a biopic about Danny Garcia and the Rock buying the football league versus, I mean, it was a good show. I watched Barack going back to Hawaii and crying in front of his Apartment. That was really good. That was good Tell it was Great. But that wasn't about the XFL, that was about the rock And he's one of the biggest stars in the world, so why not cash in on it? I would love to see, I'd like to see them do something that in addition to now they did have, as you mentioned on ESPN, I think it was streaming, they had the XFL pregame and I watched some of it and I thought it was good. I was obviously not the target audience. They did a lot of stuff and I was just like, I don't know about that. But hopefully there'll be a lot more of this and it won't just be like, oh, top of the hour, here's kickoff on any of the channels. Well, here we go. I can proudly say, well, unless anyone decides to go away, we have crossed three, 300 subscribers. There you go. I was part Of history. I feel honored. John was part of our first $10 super chat. You're part of it, cross 300 subscribers, so John's been a part of a lot of stuff here, so I appreciate that. But yeah, stay subscribing, hear lots of work. We'll have more UFL stuff coming out. Obviously I got teased at the top of the show, big interviews next week already have one fan favorite played in the XFL, played in the USFL and that was back, so see if you can guess who that is, sweetheart of a gentleman. And then a couple of big name, really big name interviews, one returning big name I'm working on, and then it would be a new person as well. So big time on there, but that would be exciting. So I appreciate that. Max has a comment here. Speaking of the rock, no project rock merch for sale despite players wearing the merch, a puck in the weight room. Yeah, you see, even the interview I did yesterday, this gentleman had a really nice sweatshirt on. I'm like, I would love to see that go for sale here. They're obviously manufacturing that, but I also heard rumblings from let's say XFL last year from some of the team people. Sometimes it was a little bit of like, oh, I'm taking that merch or I'm taking, sometimes there wasn't necessarily enough merch to go around, if that makes sense. Like, hey, I need to collect enough things so I have enough under arm or things to wear. But I don't know if it's as abundant as people think from looking at the socials thoughts on any of that. Interesting. Yeah, well, I mean again, you talk about it seems like merchandising could be huge for this league, especially from idiots like us who will buy almost anything. But if you have some cool Under Armour stuff, which I think that could be good for the other fans, they'll say, that's a really cool sweatshirt. That's a cool logo. I think it's too bad because the UFL shop, I'll say it myself, the rollout was very poor and I don't think that's a secret to a lot of people who tried to spend money on there. It's been almost a month since I ordered a shirt from there, went on there and it said order unfulfilled. And as I told you, I am also unfulfilled because I like to have my UFL shirt. I would almost rather that they had, and we talked about it before, I won't go keep killing them on the shop thing, but I almost wish they had already had full stock before they opened the shop back up. Yes, I agree with that. It is also like we got to put this online, you got to have the shop open. But I remember the sadness of last time, I think it was the USFL started it and then the XFL continued of not having the jerseys ready by opening day. And I remember this is what I was in because I wasn't doing the podcast for the XFL 2020, I was a fan and I was in Vegas working and I was filming this event at the Ferris wheel and I was literally in the Ferris wheel refreshing the page. They were announcing all the jerseys that night. And I remember getting to the airport the next day and walking back and forth and listening to Mark Perry do a breakdown I think was, what was his name? Connor Folk I think was on there too. But they had done the live, but that's how invested I was in all of this and to make sure I could order it. And I was on trying to make sure I could order it, order it, order it, and then get it ready to go. And it came Christmas Eve day or something before the kickoff, but it was such a part of being a fan of this. And I just think that they just view that as one more thing. But there's so many of these things that are a paramount part of building these fan bases and getting people involved in, because then what am I going to do? I'm going to order something from China, I'm going to make my own. When we did the kickoff last year for the Renegades, there was tons of DIY kind of stuff. And at that point, I'm not going to go back and invest $160 into New Jersey halfway through the season. That's not even going to ship till the end of the season. Well, and that's the thing we're going to kick off as we tape this in what, 22 days? Is that right? Am I doing the math right? So it's like I've been waiting almost a month for a shirt. So if I'm going to go to one of the games on that weekend, am I going to have my gear or not? And I know they're trying, they're going to sell some stuff locally. So if you're in those markets, I guess you'll see those on the shelves somewhere. But yeah, the rollout was pretty weak, I will say. Because my wife was like, we're going to go to a Battle Hawks game here in April. And she was like, well, I hope that they'll eventually put some women's stuff on so she can buy a shirt to go. They finally have it up there. I don't know when it came on, but that is online now as we just saw Lots of women stuff. And again, this is different going through the different, when Paul and I had our drop shift account, but I remember you could just go on and I remember asking Dorothy like, Hey, Paul's going to make a tank top. She's like, I want to eraser back top. And I'm like, I don't even know what that is. I'm like, okay, we can go make that and put a logo on and kind of all that stuff. 175 people on here right now, plus whatever on Twitter. Appreciate everyone checking that out. John, anything else you wanted to make sure we touch on here? I'm going to post the episode when we get off. Obviously it'll be back on the Sports Illustrated website. Appreciate that. And I think that that's helping to scan some of these subscribers as well. But having passed the 3,300 today, which is exciting, That's very cool. No, I think we covered it all. Always. I could go another hour with you as we know. We can go back and forth talking about the UFL. I know there are people that say, yeah, you guys are really nitpicky and we were, but we do it again, as I said to you before, we do it because we care and we want this to succeed. And I'm cautiously optimistic as we are about three weeks away from kickoff. So it's always fun to talk about the UFL and kind of pick on things that we wish were a little better or a lot better. Well, and I get that right. So I get a hundred percent that, but I also don't think that there is any gain of being another bash cheerleader for anything. Right? And we've had long conversations this week with a, the Mike Mitchells of the world and Pat and Evans everywhere else. I do err on more of the atory side of things, even talking. And I have my Kraken haven't had the best season and we're trying to make a push. And even my season ticket holder friends are like, you got to be optimistic here about it. And I'm like, I try just things that been through in my life, and not that I've had the most challenging life, but there's been things that have kind of caused me to be, I'm a little bit more of the realist, pessimistic sort of things. But the reason I do it is because I do want things to be successful. And so it is hard when I get YouTube comments of why do you even care? It's like, no, we do this because I do care because not caring is just packing up the shop and not doing it anymore that is turning off and not doing the podcast. And it's the same with doing these live shows and stuff right now. It's a way to continue doing this by keeping myself sane because I don't think that have the two and a half hour prerecorded, even though I do think we'll have a good episode next week. But yeah, that's why I do that. So it's hard and I understand people feeling that way, but this is why I'm doing it is because we want this to succeed. Because I've lived through and you've lived through you and Mike and all we've lived through all of these different things. It is because we've seen so much of it that we want this To work out. I mean, it's not been that long ago where there was the big news conference with Charlie Ebersol and the whole thing with the Alliance of American Football, and I'm sitting there watching it. I was so excited. I mean, I'm watching the unveiling of this and the announcement of this and I'm like, man, we're finally going to get a spring football that's going to, they've got it all together and then you're disappointed again, again and again. So we just don't want to be disappointed. Like you said, you could just pack it up because the opposite of love is not hate. It's apathy. And if you're just apathetic about it, you're like, you don't care. We care. That's what, we just want things to be good because we care about the product. And just my last thing on this, we're still peaking viewership here, so I appreciate that. I don't want anyone to be like, this idiot needs to stop talking. But we just saw this week that Fanger TRO football, they're bringing back, I think they're trying to launch again, but they're bringing back their weekly, they do a weekly YouTube show and they were going to have some big announcements. And I'm like, I remember when the season one of that came out and Paul and I sat here and said, this is wrong and this is wrong and this is wrong. And they got mad at us and they come on the show and Well, you guys, I'm like, you're just hating. It's like, no, I'm watching eight hours of your twitch streams every Saturday. I'm not hating them. I'm watching this. The people that say spring football is stupid, these players suck. Or the same people, the CFL, that's not real athletes. Those are the people you need to get mad at, not the people. I mean, pat and I, our recapped every single UFL game the entire season. Like I said, Paul and I watched all those stupid fan show football. I am not the enemy here. The person that's watching and giving you constructive criticism of things that are easy to change and then seeing your league go away because you didn't do basically being like, this is why this is going to work. And then it didn't work. And then them trying to do NFTs and being like, that's never going to work. And then it didn't work again and it went away. But yeah, but I am the idiot. Oh, you're the smarter, they're CEO would be yelling at me on Twitter. You're just an idiot. I'm like, okay, I am here. You're not. And I don't want anyone to fail anything You hit, right? It is constructive criticism because you are the target audience. This is what you want to see, and you think that this would be good. And it's not out of the realm of, oh, I want to see Patrick Mahomes playing in fan control football. No, that's not what you're saying. Just like you want to try to get this off the ground because you care people who other people haters. That is the laziest thing. Because if it really is constructive criticism of something that you hope to succeed, it's not hating. It's like I'm trying to just say it's watching someone that a friend or something that's being self-destructive. Like, you've got to stop this and here's why you have to stop this. I can see it. Well, and I will just say that when I get feedback on my feedback, at least it feels like my feedback is heard. I mean, I have heard from the league about things and that at least speaks that they value my opinion in that way. And they don't view me, so I don't care. But at least they don't hopefully view me as some big negative Nancy at least because that is my goal. I have been through a lot of this. So anyway, We all have, and you're right. I mean we could get on here and be fanboy, but I mean they might like to hear that. I don't think the people that are watching right now want to hear you rah rah or hear either of us just rah rah and everything's great. But anyway, to recap, I am excited big time next week. So everything else, but I do, I got to go. I think this is the last go around we have. So I mean we, I'm full speed ahead, going to be retweeting everything, be sharing everything, all the stuff, everything. There's a lot of good being done right now. There's things that could be done, but it is fun to go on to kind of nitpick this stuff. But lots of player interviews next week. Appreciate that. Lots of training, camp coverage. And then we'll be live March 30th here and hopefully John and I think Greg Parks and anyone else, and Andy's talking about trying to go, I have a great spot set up. We'll have a cool background and everything. So anyone that's in town at least talent wise can come hang out. And then we'll be at the game. And then obviously anyone that wants to call in, John, plug your channel. You said you have uniform rankings coming out, which will be exciting. Then John, because John does the good bite size. I like you. Come on here. We just ramble for an hour and a half, but then you do like, this is my targeted seven minute thing, which is good. Yeah, it's John Lewis Sports. That's all you have to look up on YouTube. And I appreciate you letting me get the plugin. I just do. And it is, I'm going to have some uniform rankings. I'm going to tell the whole, and this is a story for another day, but I do want to kind of get into the background of Matt Corral because I think he's a really good story for the Birmingham stallions. So hopefully we'll have a video on that out soon. And I'm sorry about the grade that I'm going to give your San Antonio bras uniforms, but that's the plan that should come out this weekend. John Lewis, John And John. We already dropped down from 300 subscribers, so our, our rant got us away. We lost it. So That's my fault. We were so close. We had hit 33, 300 subscribers. We made someone mad. If you want to support the show and subscribe, 195 people watching this year, three 20 on a Pacific here. I'm going to go rest my gums cracking plate tonight. Let's hope for that. And John, appreciate your time and everyone watching and hanging out. So it's been fun. It has been fun. Anytime.

UFL 2024: One Month Until Kickoff! What You NEED to Know Before March 30th!!

A happy Friday everyone. A weird time today, end of the week, but I think this will be good news. Roundup here. I know another live episode here. I had really promised myself going to get back on the horse, start scheduling interviews. Luckily a lot of the new USFL teams have old XFL team PR people so that's really great. But we were out of town last week and then getting back this week just didn't have enough time but going to get some player interviews scheduled next week and then a big time, I think a big time here. Guest scheduled here potentially week after next. So if you're intrigued like and subscribe here, if we hit 3,500 subscribers before we make the kickoff here at the end of the month, you could get two free tickets. Otherwise maybe we'll do the championship game but like and subscribe, become a member, hit join the community. I think it's a dollar a month here, Greg. Not that you are not a big guest, you are also a big time guest, but this would be exciting for both of us. So how are you doing Greg Parks UFL board here. Yeah, look, I understand my role so I appreciate you having me on here on this Friday night live show. Reed always love going live with you and hearing from the viewers and the questions that they have and being able to address some of them and talk a little training camp, it's great to see players with helmets on and I think the pads are going on tomorrow, so really excited about everything we're seeing in training camp. Yeah, it's good. It's kind of a weird spot here like okay, I want to get Anthony Miller on here maybe next week or the week after when we're, is Anthony going to go kind of see some drills? I know you've been in some press, some team head coaching with Skip Holtz and all that and I know Mike's been doing that and Pat and everybody so we'll get kind of the reports. It's such a frustrating watching a Mariners spring training this week and Brock and soccer down there and they're interviewing the, oh my god, I wish if only there was a time here maybe where I didn't work and I could be there or we're doing training camp in the city. I think that would be another cool way to do it, but we're getting a lot of videos and stuff coming out. Are you whelmed overwhelmed with the amount of content? I think they're working hard. I think the team social people are working hard. Absolutely and my spring break for school just happens to coincide with not next week but the week after and I thought wouldn't it be cool to be able to go down to Arlington for a few days and catch a few practices and talk to a few coaches and things like that? Not knowing what the UFL schedule Is be like next year. We don't know if they're going to start the same time they could start back at the old XFL schedule and if that's the case I would kind of have to take time off, which is hard to do. So it's something I'm really considering. I don't know if it's going to be worth it because I really don't know. I haven't heard from enough PR people to know what kind of availability there is even to just watch practice to report on that stuff or not. So that's something I'm going to have to do some digging on probably this weekend. But yeah, I think the content has been fantastic. Look, I never had an Instagram until a few days ago because so much of the content for the teams was being put on Instagram. They're putting some stuff on Twitter, which obviously I have, but so much of it's being put on Instagram that I felt like I was missing out so I signed up for Instagram. I haven't posted a thing, will not post a thing probably, but I'm following all of the team accounts in the league account just because there's just so much video, so many pictures being put out and you're right, I mean you couldn't ask for anything more in terms of the content that the social media managers and the have been putting out since the day the players reported to Arlington. So that's been really cool to see. Yeah, no friend of the show and former hub member Jay Oaks running wild there. I know Leah's doing that. I know some of the people from last year got moved on to other things but exciting for that. We have here Evan checking in here, evening chance wish I had the same tree as Greg. She patino and yeah, I wore this old school crude angle from this angle. You suck. I thought you would get a kick out of that. I pulled this one out the closet just for you Craig. I love it. If I'd have known we should have coordinated. I have the Miz hello I'm awesome T-shirt that I could have worn and we could have matched wrestling shirts but instead I'm wearing this whole thing so maybe next time. Yeah, and I know what you mean with the whole I would love to have the residency down there. Paul and I back I think when we didn't really know maybe the scope of how big or little this podcast would be like man, we could totally take a week and go and do live shows and all that. I don't know if the viewership is there for that to take off with the freelance life to know all that, but I do think that'd be cool. I mean Arlington's set up in a good way and I think that even when they did the Arlington announcement back for the original XFL here last year and I went down there and Danny and Russ, Brandon and everyone and they said having the teams together that is going to allow us to generate a lot of that stuff and then obviously when we go play in the cities that will translate over. How are you feeling just casual market wise here? Things are progressing and we will talk football here I promise, but I just want to get some wide range. Is this resonating now? I mean this is the month. I mean we're 29 days away. I kind of feel like XFL 2023 in terms of the marketing in actual home cities. They're doing these in-market sort of meet and greets with Moose Johnston there. Some of them have Russ brand, the head coaches that's what XFL 2023 did and you're not seeing the local press. I mean if San Antonio for example was practicing in San Antonio, you'd probably have a beat writer coming up with stories every day. He'd be there at practice every day. He'd be interviewing players after practice coaches after practice and he'd be submitting them to the newspaper. The UFL simply does not warrant someone traveling even from San Antonio to Arlington, let alone from Memphis or Detroit or anywhere else to, as you call it kind of a residency in training camp to report on these things every day like you would if they were in the home market. So I think that's really what they're missing out on. It's nice that they're doing Zoom interviews with the head coaches and things like that, but without having the boots on the ground in those markets at a consistent basis, I do really think it's hurting. I see somebody mentioned Arlington's event was very well attended. That's what it seemed to look like. St. Louis seemed to be or theirs is coming up. Actually there's another one recently that seemed like it was well attended. Maybe it was the DC One, DC one Or something like that. So these are markets DC and St. Louis and to a lesser extent Arlington that have responded well to these teams in the past. So no surprise they're doing well, but it's those other markets that the Houston markets, the Memphis markets, some of those places that may need a little leg up to get to the fan response of some of their counterparts where I think it might be really hurting not having them there Because we had talked and that kind of spurred some of my discussions with some of the team PR people this week that for example the Battle Hawks very highly attended media when they do the availability with Coach Becker whatever and the Houston one was not, I think they had one person I think on there in terms of kind of getting that and so it is hard and especially if you're Houston, you had the team in 2020 and then they went away and then it was back, but it was then with the SFL and that was for the XFL. It gets a little murky that way and yeah, I've tried to convey that as well and again, I think our target audience is kind of invested regardless, but I'm like, I do think that it would be cool to, we got to spread these coaches out more. They're busy now with training camp and people want to talk to them and it's always that balance of the time everybody wants to talk to you is the busiest time where I understand you're doing the football but you need to be able to set aside some time for that And it's not just the local reporters and things like that. It's places like us UFL board. The only reason I was on the call on Wednesday with Skip Holtz is because Mark Nelson, the editor and owner of UFL Board happened to get a media advisory from Birmingham's PR people and that's the only one we've received from any of the PR teams. They were really good. I know XFL 2023 was really good when we covered it at XFL board. The XFL PR sent out an entire list of okay, here are the PR contacts for each team, here's the practice schedules, here's the media availabilities for the entire training camp and we've received nothing like that. The only team that's reached out to us with media is the stallions. I would love to jump on these media availabilities with these head coaches and these players and things like that but it looks like I'm going to have to go seek them out to do that. And again, I know we're just little old UFL board and we're kind of a drop in the ocean sort of what the league is looking for in terms of coverage, but it is important as well to reach out to as many media entities as you can because any coverage that you get for a league, this is going to be good coverage. That's actually a really good point. I forgot that when the XFL last year and it was like, okay, here's all the people we're doing Monday, Wednesday we're going to do the coordinators or whatever this day. I also got the Birmingham one because obviously the USFL stuff last year was wonky. You have media people with agencies that were kind of doing the hubs and stuff if you want all that, I've sat down and pieced all that together this week. Yeah, like okay, Andy with the Guardians is now with the showboats but what's their email and all that stuff so we can get all that but no, I think that's surprising that UFL board did not, yeah, I had to do the groundwork on that but obviously I'm not with HUB or anything so it made sense for me but certainly would not make sense for you because that would probably be why there was only one person at the Houston media availability is like maybe you didn't know what was going on. Yeah, I think the Birmingham people have done a really nice job. I think there were about 12 people on the call not counting the PR people who were on the call as well and Coach Holtz, I think there were about 1112 media actually on the Zoom call and I think Coach Holtz was only asked five questions because he's quite verbose. He likes to give very detailed answers. So in the half hour or so were on. I was lucky enough to be one that got to ask a question but didn't get too many questions. But yeah, I mean just being on these calls and being able to write stories from being on these calls I think is very valuable for these leagues. I am Max here says, I mean technically I guess I'm towards, I mean Sports Illustrated is happy enough to host the content that we do and this will be on there as well. Chris is talking about video freezing. I'm not seeing any sort of tech issues on my end and no one else is mentioning that, so I just wanted to keep that in mind when I'm at the home studio here, I got the terabyte, I got the gig speeds here, I'm pretty good, but I want to talk teams and kind of thoughts now that we have all that, but before we get are you surprised uniform wise? I really thought we were going to get a uniform drop this week because I was of course going to be out of town on a cruise ship with no wifi and I thought well this would be a wonderful time to do that, but with the players padding up and everything, are you surprised that's not, I mean because presumably at least the USFL teams are going to have new uniforms or at least tweaked. Yeah, I mean it looks like Under Armour is going to be doing a lot of the, we've already seen some of the players reveal their, I guess their packs of materials that they've received, shorts and T-shirts and things like that and that's all Under Armour so we can assume that Under Armour is also doing the uniforms. Look, I just don't think there's enough time to do the kind of redesign that would be necessary. I think a lot of it, at least for this year is just going to be take what the uniform was in 2023 and just transpose it onto an Under Armour uniform. It feels like just yesterday Reed, that they announced the league. So I mean things are moving quickly and with everything that they've needed to do to get ramped up here in the last two months, I just don't see any kind of real thorough redesign as you mentioned, tweaks perhaps here and there, but I would be surprised if it's anything more than that. Yeah, I have those error. Hopefully Fanatics is not involved. Yes, I've been tracking them. I dunno if you're a baseball guy, Greg, but quite Baseball is having some problems with their uniforms. I see. Yeah, of yeah, my buddy was down there. I said have you gotten any photos of any private parts? I want to know how bad it is but I don't know To me, and we kind of already, I don't want go too far down this but get your thoughts. They did the shop, we're adding items on there but it's still like okay, we have some hats and some of the old USFL hats and some of the old, yeah, I think people want to spend money here and I understand that there's other priorities but I don't know the combining, you would just think like, okay, we have all the FOX people now and we have red people, let's get this lease going. I mean you can't even buy the old, it's not even like I can go buy the old, who would I want the stallion jersey or whatever right Now. Yeah, the only reason I would think that there might be a jersey or some kind of change would be if we had color scheme clashes, if one of the surviving USFL teams had the same or too similar a color scheme to a surviving XFL team that there may have to have been some kind of change to the uniforms. But short of that, I really don't see anything. I know you're a close watcher of the UFL shop and I totally agree if people want to spend money on this product, don't stop them from spending money. Put as much stuff as you can on there. I remember your epic rant about the trucker hats that came out for the XFL in 2023, so that's burned in my memory from one of the episodes we did together. So I know how close to your heart the shop is for these leagues, but I do think you have a broader point that people are going to go to the shop the first day it's open and if they see that they don't have what they want, they might not come back. They may not be paying attention and checking every two weeks to see what's being added piecemeal here and there. So ideally you want to make a splash right away and again, I think that's another victim of just putting this together so last minute and just trying to make sure you hit the field and some things get left behind and hopefully for next year we say this all the time hopefully for next year, hopefully for next year, but hopefully for next year if we make it there, that will be something that takes care of itself over time. Yeah, I mean that's the thing when I have an addiction to find that it's really like I will say if you, a friend of the show he was on last episode, John Lewis Sports did a phenomenal unboxing breakdown of the football and comparing the new UFL football he has, if you think I got a half problem, John's got a football problem because he's got like four USFL balls just from the last whatever and all this stuff and Everything seems so expensive. I dunno, I look at the prices on there and I'm like I can't in my own mind convince myself to spend that kind of money on some of those products. I bought the non-named XFL one last year and I did my little video because I also have a jersey addiction and I had to return to, I'm like I cannot in my life justify and it took three weeks to get a response back and I was like, I want to make sure we have the time codes on all these emails because I've tried to initiate this return process and it might've taken 60 days, but I'm like, I want to make sure I'm not on the cutoff here. I'm trying to get all this set back In terms of major, I'm looking at the UFL site right now. Let me see if I can get this on here. They have the major story they have football wise here, Perez tmu a couple days ago on here. Oh yeah, we'll talk about destroying. Thank you Pat. Big news here, how big of a deal is this getting both of these guys back to me, Luis continues to defy expectations just because I would always think, oh he is passed this prime now he one that championship. I'm asking, I'm like how big is it getting both of these returning stars back for their teams? I think it's huge and you add in a Adrian McCarran as well and I think the big three so to speak, from the XFL coming back, I know there was some concern at one time over how much money they were or were not paying quarterbacks and that seemed to be what the holdup was for McCarran who was very public about his questions about the pay scale and things like that related to the union and all. Then Tama was kind of silent, but if you tried to put two and two together you thought maybe there was an issue with, I mean he's not exactly a guy knocking on the NFL door unfortunately and I think a lot of fans of the XFL and USFL would say he probably deserves a better shot than he's received so far, but for him to wait out so long without really any NFL opportunities to weigh, you have to figure it could be a pay thing. And then I think we always kind of assumed Luis Perez was coming back. I know when it was announced that Luis Perez and Jordan Tamma were returning. I thought Perez was already returning. I didn't think that was news, but Perez is only 29 and I know he feels kind of to us spring football people 10 years older just because he's been around the block so long and he's been around so long but he is just 29. So I know people are already wanting to replace him on the death chart with Lindsey Scott and hold nailers and stuff like that, the quarterbacks that they have on the Renegades team. But I think it's really hard to replace a guy who walked in the door and was the reason that team won the championship. I mean he would have to fall flat on his face in training camp to not win that job. So I think some of the people who are projecting Lindsey Scott as the week one starter for the renegades, a little premature on that call Because I saw something came out, aler was like, oh I'm the lowest on the death chart right now. And that was surprising and it was like, well no, I mean I think you bring in Perez at least it's his job to lose at that point. And then Lindsay Scott I think people have said has a lot of upside, but yeah, you certainly don't bring Luis back to have him sit back up immediately. Yeah, the other thing is for the eye-popping numbers that Lindsey Scott put up in college, you have to remember he did that incarnate word, which is an FCS program and I know it's just the UFL, it's not the NFL, but it's even a pretty big jump from FCS level to starting in the UFL. So give 'em some time, let 'em watch and learn from a veteran like Perez. I mean I can't think if you're Allers and Scott to real, I mean rookies if we're talking experience wise, I can't think of a better veteran to watch and learn from in terms of preparation and things like that than Luis Perez. Pat has a comment here, tmu and Perez are staples of these leagues or then they go to the NFL or not. It gives fans a familiar face story to relate to. Yeah, I mean do you see it positively or do you see it, wow these guys, they're back again now. I mean think you can look at it both ways of that. I mean Temu has definitely had his shot to latch on with the chiefs and I think it was the Lions, right? Yeah, I think it was the Vikings with Temu this year. But I think it's sort of the double-edged sword that, and Anthony Beck made a comment regarding this last year is he said, I would like to go into 2024 having to replace every player on my roster because I want every one of them to go to the NFL. And so there's that thinking that's going to legitimize your league in the eyes of fans who may not otherwise watch the league but maybe hear about it through watching NFL games and hearing about UFL players having success in the NFL, Brandon Aubrey for the USFL. I think that was very valuable for them. But the other side is the actual fans of this league. You want the Jordan Tam, who's the Louis Perez, I know Perez was at the Arlington meet and greet the other day. So a familiar face for Arlington fans to draw them in and fans want someone who they can associate with their team in their city. So I think for fans of the UFL, you want players, the level of tam, not just names that carry over from year to year, but players who play extremely well and good players who carry over from year to year. But in terms of drawing new fans, I think you want a certain percentage to graduate onto the NFL so that fans of football who may not have heard about the UFL or may not have otherwise checked it out, hear about these players having success in the NFL and they may decide, let me see what this is all about next spring. It's hard I think, I don't know. I kind of look at it a couple of different ways here. I want to make sure I note too for the cutdown dates, and I have this because Mike was reporting March 10th is going to be the first cut down date for training camp coming down the partial rosters and then final rosters there on March 23rd. So maybe we can do something there like the week of the 11th or whatever, kind of figure out what's a little more semi finalized rosters with these guys returning with the AJ McCarran. I think that's great for if you're a holdover from this league before big picture thinking. I just don't know if the league is doing enough to incentivize new customers of this at this point. We've lost eight from the two leagues and now we're bringing these. Okay, these are the, at some point I don't know what the marketing plan is to get outside people invested in this versus just like let's retain the people we had before. And you're talking bringing new fans in. Yeah. How bullish are you for kickoff this year in terms of we can talk ratings a couple of weeks. Are you bullish to beat XFL last year? Well, in terms of players, I don't really, I'm not sure there's a connection there. I know we're talking about bringing temu and McCarran back and pivoting from there to drawing new fans. I'm not sure if those two are necessarily related and I'm not sure if you mean for them to be related or if you're just kind of jumping off to a new topic but It just kind of came to my head. It's a slight swerve. Okay, that's fine. No, I agree. I think there's a lot more commercials about the UFL than there was for the XFL. I think it's closer to being on par with what we saw ad wise from the USFL in previous years. I thought they did a really significantly better job in terms of marketing with commercials than the XFL did in 2023. Part of that is the league, but part of that is also your TV partner willing to put those ads on the air. And with Fox owning the USFL, obviously they had a bigger stake in it than the ESPN did for the XFL. So that seems to be really the way that they're going. I don't know if there's any kind of viral marketing, certainly destroying being on one of the teams may attract fans through social media and through YouTube that otherwise wouldn't. But I think putting the rock and ownership on college game day and on NFL on Fox I think was good but they really haven't done much since then to appeal to a wider base of fans. And I think that's even more necessary now because you have this space where there's no football and you have to kind of remind fans that hey, football may be over for the NFL but we're starting up here at the end of March. Whereas you could kind of connect those two with the XFL when it ran at the end of the week after the Super Bowl, you maybe didn't need to do so much reaching out to fans the way you have to do now to sort of bring them back into football once again. And I haven't seen outside of television ads, I haven't really seen a big push. Now I'm not in a city that has a team so I cannot speak for the home markets and what's going on there, but I haven't seen a significant amount of push beyond those television ads. Yeah, I'm worried And just to kind of relate to it, because we got tmu and them, it was interesting to me because the narrative with them coming back was like, oh, these guys are returning. But then you had someone like Matt Corll coming in and he was like, oh well this guy, this hack couldn't make it and now look at him, he's going to the spring league. He's like, you getting different narratives there from the, at least what I'm seeing on Twitter and the more of the casual fan base. Do you think highlighting someone like him, right, he's with Birmingham, I mean is that a better way to showcase to bring in new guys? Here's a guy that was just drafted just in the NFLA couple years ago. I think so, but I don't think as a league you could hang your hat on that as a way to market because ultimately it's up to each individual team as to who they sign and who they bring back and who they think is the best fit for their team. I think spring football, at least for the first few years, is always going to have that problem of the casual fan kind of snaring on social media about players slumming it in the UFL. I mean that's a stigma that you're going to have to shake by being a successful league and that's going to take time. You can't expect fans like that to take you seriously your first year. They've seen so many spring leagues come and go and so that's something that you're just going to have to grit your teeth and get through until you get to year 3, 4, 5 to where you're taken seriously as an actual football entity and not just, oh, this guy couldn't make it in the NFL. So he's playing the UFL now. I have a comment here Gary. I do have two friends in not and followers have either have asked me when the UFL started. To me that suggests, or at least to have some interest, I also, I was just picking up my car at the shop, I had to, excuse me, my oil chains and the lady came back in and got my keys and she goes, oh, I saw your car had the dragons, I still have the old dragons. She goes, they're gone now. Right? But that's merging. They're getting together, she's not. I go, yeah, I said I got to get home here. Can you give me my keys? So I go live at five o'clock talking about this. So yeah, I mean I guess that's anecdotally two different examples here of that working. You were talking about destroying and him the viral bringing him in and that's gotten a lot of traction. I've seen a lot of YouTube videos and stuff. Pat was sharing this today in our group chat destroying this was on his Instagram. I have to share a locker with another kicker and a frowny face and he's obviously with Matt ELA there with the, I dunno, that to me doesn't speak very well. What do you think about that? I dunno, I don't want to read too much into it. Like I said, I think he can be valuable for reaching out to fans. I've seen the YouTube videos where this isn't just a gimmick. I mean he was a kicker in college and he's been working on his craft. This isn't something where they just sign him and it's just say a gimmick so to speak. He's been working at it and he's been training and he worked out for Mark Little Bridge, San Antonio's general manager. And so I dunno, this tells me San Antonio has too many players on the roster. They got to have 75 players. What's the deal here? They should have enough lockers for everybody. Are they trying to sneak an extra player or two on the training camp for roster here? Sam with Sam Sha Sport said he's probably sharing because he is only going to be there for a couple of weeks anyway, so it doesn't necessarily matter if What, maybe that's what the frowning faces for. He knows that too. But I know, I mean because here I am someone that here I'm very invested in the NFL combine right now and with the words that Caleb Williams has spoken here over the last couple days. So you got to read into all this stuff and if he's coming in here and I don't know, you don't want people invested in this and if he's coming in and they're like, oh, I'm holier than thou or whatever because I have 4 million YouTube subscribers or whatever, that to me that would rub me the wrong way if I was another special teams member there or anybody else on the team. Well, and that's the thing about a league like this where everybody's getting paid the same amount. Those kind of mistakes get you cut and teams won't think twice about it because it's not like they spent a high draft pick on you. It's not like you have this roster bonus coming up or if they cut you, they have to eat a bunch of money on their salary cap. No, I mean this is UFL football so everybody's in the same boat here, so you really have to mind your P'S and Qs. Yeah, Denzel check and we up late me that's like a Denzel. We're talking through it. Yeah, just right. I don't know. I think it feels like a gimmicky signing to me. It feels like he was involved before. I mean he's got to win a spot there. In terms of talking teams, and I don't believe the whole power rankings thing here, but you were on the call with Coach Holtz. Birmingham to me is coming in with the most momentum even compared to the renegades who won, they won the X, but we could get into all of that losing record and all of that stuff going through. But what do you make here of the stallions coming in and if they pants the renegades opening the weekend, I think that would be very interesting to engage in the online stuff after that. Yeah, I may have to log out for a few days if that's the case. Look, I think the stallions have one of, if not the most talented roster in the UFL. They've won the UFL champion, the USFL championship two years in a row. They've added to that this off season. I mean they've, they've been one of the winners of the off season just based on the personnel that they've added beyond the players that they've brought back from 2023. I mean you talk about a Matt Carrell, you talk about a Slade Bolden at wide receiver, a lot of these guys who are being brought in can be difference makers and if you want to compare it to Arlington, certainly Arlington I think has a strong roster, but how much of that momentum can carry over to 2024, that end of year momentum. They were not able to put it together for an entire year the way the stallions have. So I hate to lean too far in the renegades direction when you just haven't seen it on that same consistent basis, the level that you've seen it with the stallion. So stallions, every team got stronger this off season I think without a doubt just based on how these rosters were put together, how the other teams were dispersed amongst the eight surviving teams. But I think even admitting that every team got better, I still think the stallions got better than at least half the league. Probably, I think it was Bob Stubs had a comment that maybe it was Anthony that shared it. But yeah, these are all star teams right now just because the cohesion of the talent that way. And I've known even obviously the CFL team's happy that some of the players, there's not as many players tied up down here so they can get it when these cuts come, I think going to be alarming for a lot of these guys, even if you've been carried over because here now, okay, we didn't know we get a spot and I'm on here. To me it is like you're on the boat on the Titanic and there's so many tickets and you're just trying to make sure you're one of those. In terms of have you enjoyed now, because I know you were more XFL heavy, have you enjoyed deep diving into these USFL rosters now that kind of all this is cohesive? Of course. I'm still trying to get used to the coaches and the players and things like that and there seems to me to be a very limited amount of information online that I can really dig into from the USFL the past couple of years there wasn't a situation that I could see where the XFL last year had every week and all the team and each game by game stats and everything like that. If that was out there for the USFL, shoot me a link on Twitter because I haven't found it. And so it's been a process. It's going to continue to be a process. I hope people are patient with me because it's going to be a full year of learning and then you kind of take what you learned this year and what you watched this year with your own eyes and you get a better feel for it heading into 2025 probably. Again, that's tough here. How much do we invest in this? I mean I know that we talked here, the casual media going in. I mean even from this, the Sports Illustrated thing kind of spurred my, because I'm really okay and we will be there. We'll be there in the Arlington and I have all that booked and hope you or whoever wants to zoom in and I'll be there. But it's hard to even as a fan of one of these to be like, let's get, and so especially to have to deep dive and relearn all this stuff now doing way more work that you guys and Mike and Anthony and Pat do writing articles and stuff. I couldn't imagine trying to get that on again out. Who knows if this is going to wind out. Yeah, I can tell you that. And I expressed to you my weariness last year with all of the ratings stuff and you're living and dying week by week with the ratings because you truly don't know what the future of that league holds. And I can tell you that at least for now, and maybe it'll change once the games actually start, but I don't feel that same weight of the future that I did for the XFL. And maybe it's just because the XFL letters are no longer there aside from being part of the conference. And that's something that the idea of the XFL and what it stood for has attracted me ever since 2001 and that's not there now. So this is a spring league that I'm covering that features former XFL teams, but I don't feel as invested in it at least yet that I felt about the XFL. So I think being able to keep it at arm's length is going to be good for my sanity and good for my mental health and everything like that. And it is kind of like if you want something to happen, do the opposite. So I wanted the XFL to survive so I was all in. So maybe if I back away then this one will actually last. But I'm covering it and I'm churning out articles and analyzing the rosters and teams just like I would with the XFL. But that internal feeling, it doesn't feel the same. It definitely feels different. And so again, we'll see if that changes the closer we get to kickoff. Yeah, I think we're, and I've said on here, but kind of adjusting coverage and like I said, trying to do some more prerecorded stuff next week and get some player interviews and stuff. I think the days of the sixth interview two and a half hour mark cast are probably just for sanity's sake being able to cover this and stay excited about it. In terms of, I think, do you put Birmingham number one of all the eight teams right now? And I know we still have cuts and everything and figuring out, but just now that you've had a chance to simmer with the rosters? I think so. I think they're number one. I'm not going to go through the whole list or anything like that. There are plenty of power rankings out there if you want to find them and people have their own reasoning for it. But I would say Birmingham based on winning the championship in the USFL the last two years and then improving as I see it upon their roster heading into 2024, I think they've got to be number one In terms of a team you might be a little bit weary about right now. I know Arlington is showing a blow on the list, but there's quarterback concerns I think across a couple of these teams right now. And I think that's why as Mike Mitchell reported, you see some teams have reached out to Kellen Mon and to Trace McSorley who were NFL practice squad players and it's intriguing to think about which teams, you look at the quarterback rooms of all these teams and you're like, oh, they probably don't need 'em, they might need it. So you kind of in your mind imagine what teams reached out to these players, but Houston's a team that I'm not really sure about that I have some real questions about after going through, especially after the dispersal draft and things like that. So I'm wondering how they'll play out. That might be my biggest question mark right now is the Houston team Why, and I want to pull up the roster just so I can kind of refresh myself. But yeah, I mean it's a weird situation we're bringing in and you lose, you had a lot of the momentum I think that the Houston team have and now replacement with the XFL. What is it about Houston besides, because I think marketing wise, I think they're going to have a tremendously difficult time as well, but just in terms of player wise, why are you so concerned? Yeah, I think there's some depth that's needed. A lot of those positions, I don't see a lot of names that jump out to me when I look at these rosters. I look for the names that have had that NFL experience that have been in NFL camps that have had even success in the NFL. And that's not always the players who stand out. I mean you look at Marvis Bryant who had 14 catches with the Vipers last year. So NFL pedigrees don't necessarily always translate over to a spring league like this, but that's where I look and there are a lot of unfamiliar names to me on that roster. And not to toot my own horn, but I'm familiar with quite a few players that have come out of college in the NFL recently. So if there are names that are unfamiliar to me that's kind of what gives me pause and then depth at certain positions as well. But certainly not writing them off or anything like that. There's plenty of time to continue to add players throughout training camp. I think when we see cuts come down both to, I think 58 is the number, the first cut and then the final cut to 50, these teams are all practicing together. They're all watching film of each other. They're going to have numerous scrimmages against each other. So if there is a player who is overlooked by a team or a team just has tremendous depth at a certain position and a guy who otherwise would've made the roster gets cut, you're going to see other teams pounce on them. And so this is a good situation to be and if you're a player who gets cut because you're being seen very closely by seven other teams in the league. Well, and especially where at least right now with training camp, the teams are sharing, two of them are each sharing fields. There's a good opportunity there. These coaches and staff just go back and forth anyway here of what you have going on. It's funny, I was looking here just with CJ Johnson, I had this bio pulled up here with the rough accidents. I've enjoyed this. The UFL is the premier spring football league, which is funny because we've started calling ourselves the premier CFL podcast, America's Premier CFL podcast. I can't remember. I had some feuds with someone in the CFLA long time ago, but we've always been America's premier CFL podcast. And I like even in the bio here it says again in 2024, he was named head coach for the Houston roughnecks at the UFL, the premier spring football platform formed by the merging of, even in the bio. This isn't even in the press release, even in the bio we got to have that. Yeah, that's funny. But in terms seems a little insecure maybe by the league, huh? League League, yeah. No bit in terms of team building here, at least we have people that have gone through this before now where I think we had, and I love Coach Bach and all that. We had some guys back before, okay, what are we doing here? We've all kind been through the platform here, even if it's on the felipo switching teams and all of that. But you feel like at least now we had kind of set rosters, these guys kind of know how this operates. I think it's a totally different beast of trying to build these teams up over, what is it, four or six weeks at training camp? Yeah. And I think it is going to be interesting to see how that plays out on the field. I know the USFL had some carryover from 2022 to 2023 and I'm not having not paid that close attention to it, how much the on-field product improved because there was that level of carryover. I know they did have to replace forehead coaches I believe in the second year. So maybe with offensive systems changing and things like that, maybe there wasn't as much carryover as there might be otherwise. But you've got a lot of head coaches returning in 2024 to if not their teams, then they've brought a lot of players. Wade Phillips bringing a lot of roughnecks to San Antonio. And same with Coach Flip in Memphis bringing a lot of New Orleans players over. So system-wise, a lot of carryover on these teams from 2023 to 2024. And it would be interesting to see how that affects on-field play because you would think that it would improve it. Obviously the on-field play is going to be improved just because you've gone from 16 teams to eight and you've condensed and you've taken the best players, the all-star teams as Bob Stoops called it. But I am curious to see how much cleaner the game is. If you watched the XFL last year, you had a lot of, Luis Perez was still trying to get guys lined up in the right spot in the championship game in Arlington. And so there was a lot of that. There was a lot of pre-SNAP stuff going on that you hope gets cleaned up with these guys. So many of them having a second year in their team systems and sometimes a third year. Now, In terms of, and I don't want to do a deep dive on the rules, but as someone, I want to get your thoughts that especially now that they're talking the NFL commission, the committee, the rules committee talking about like, hey, we might look at the XFL kickoff and we had Darryl Johnston talking that didn't look like real football. We're not using that, them getting rid of that. I mean that was the standout aspect of any of these leagues. No, I agree. I was pretty, and I wrote a pretty deep dive on the rules on UFL board and I was pretty on most of them. Take the USFL rule, that's fine. Take the XFL rule, that's fine. But for me, the biggest miss was not keeping the XFL kickoff and the idea that the NFL and I don't believe that the NFL is going to implement it. I think you rarely see the NFL take such a drastic step and change on-field play in such a drastic way as this would. So I think they'll find a way to probably incorporate the kickoffs more into the game but without such a drastic move. But even the fact that they're talking about it, the fact that they're considering it kind of makes Moose Johnson look a little silly for saying, ah, that doesn't look enough like football when the NFL is considering it. I mean, come on now. So you don't know how much is going on behind the scenes in terms of a tug of war between the USFL people and the XFL people and how many people are counting rules. We had five XFL rules and four that means we have to get one more us How much of that is going on? Because that's certainly what this feels like. This feels like, okay, the USFL acquiesced on a couple of these XFL rules, but now we want our kickoff rule because we need to have A-U-S-F-L rule in there and we need to take out it. So you don't know how much of that is going on behind the scenes. But look, ultimately all of that said, ultimately the goal of this play for a spring league, like the UFL should be to A decrease injuries and B increase returns if the USFL kickoff does that and doesn't compromise the integrity of the game. I know I've seen people speculating that by moving the kickoff back to the 20, you're basically with a return giving the team the ball at the 40 45 yard line, which is that's a bit artificial for my taste. We'll see how it ends up playing out, but if this increases returns and decreases injuries on the kickoff, that's the whole point. And so I'm ultimately okay with it, even though I think the XFL kickoff was really, and I also made this argument that when you are a spring league, and I've made this argument on social media too and I know some people don't like to hear it. When you are a spring league, you have to have something that differentiates you from the NFL. You cannot be everything. The NFL is only with lesser players because people aren't going to watch that. You need to offer something different. And they're doing that with the broadcast innovations. I know, I don't know what's going to stick around as far as broadcast innovations for 2024, but we've seen the coach to quarterback communication. We've seen the mid game interviews on the sidelines, things like that. But I think that also extends to on field play and some of the rules, the fourth and 12 rule or whatever it is this year, I think is good to keep that sort of thing. And I think the XFL kickoff, it was lauded by people who didn't even care about spring football. There were people saying, Hey, that's really cool. And so I think you need that to attract looky-loos as you kind of call 'em, to people who are going to tune in to see what this project is all about. And if they see something different and cool, they may decide to stick around. And so taking that out I think really hurts that aspect of just trying to be different than the NFL, which I do think you need to be to a certain extent. Yeah, it was funny just talking about it does feel exactly like you said that they had, we have to have equal numbers even as much as like, well, it's four and four, but we'll move the one XFL team to the SO. It really feels like we're counting all of that. It was funny too, talking about the kickoff, Tom ERO was on today at the combine with NFL and they were even talking about doing a fourth and 20 at some point. I'm like, oh, it's like flip the field challenge. It's like the A f and the FCF F and all that. These are good ideas, but I agree with you. That's why I always like, and I watched wrestling for a long time. I was never the technical study and the craft of all of it stuff. But something like the elimination chamber you're trying to get friends to watch, I know that just happened in Australia and you're like, Hey, do you want to come? Oh, well what's, it's this big pod and they're in all these chamber. That sounds awesome. You need to have it. Yeah, I agree. Well, it is the football that plays in the spring and it's not quite as good players. That's what kills me when the NFL season starts with all the CFL guys and they're like, I thought the whole point was your game was different because it's so, there's no need to compare at all because if you have enough differences, it's just a totally different game. We didn't compare Fanger TRO football to arena when it is a totally a video game account. You need to have some differentiating factors here and Max has a comment. Yeah, league marketing screams no identity. We play football. I agree with that. Yeah, for sure. And it's early and they haven't played a game yet. So the identity is going to take time and your identity is going to be paired with the teams that are successful, the coaches that are successful, the players that are successful. That's going to be in large part your identity. And since we haven't played it down a football, it's kind of hard to do that. You can kind of manufacture what you want your identity to be. And I agree with Max, the UFL hasn't gone out there and done that. They haven't said we're spring football, but this, they've said, as you've pointed out, we're the premier spring football league. Okay, well what does that mean? That means nothing to people who don't already watch spring football. So yeah, they're behind. I mean, when you announce your league in January and you're kicking off in March, you're going to be behind on some of these finer details and we can quibble about what's a detail and what's a major part that we think is important. I mean, there are people who think that marketing and creating an identity is an important part of year one before you kick off. And there are some people who may look at that and say, Hey, we just got to make sure we get these players out on the field. The marketing and the identity, that's a detail we'll deal with later when we get to year two or three. So yeah, it's frustrating because we're in this space now where they're having training camp and unless you're following these teams on social media, you're really hearing nothing about the league itself and the kickoff. Yeah, like you said, kind of at the top, I don't know what that would've been to have to incentivize someone from a market outside of Arlington to go in. I mean, I remember even because I used to work at Fox, I don't work there anymore, but I have friends that worked there still. And when the Sea Dragons, I don't think Aaron Levine was running sea dragon spots on the Sunday queue it sports or whatever. I don't know how much that kind of played across here. We had another comment. Oh, it wasn't much. Yeah, talking, just talking about the inflated. I think that to me was the problem with the USFL kickoff was inflating back, you're untouched to the 35 yard line, so it kind gets there. Tim Kaber pointed out UFL week five will be going up against the AFL's kickoff on NFL network. That will be the big ratings till that week. Well, I hope that Fox is able to draw a better rating than NFL network, so maybe it'll be a small discussion point that week. Anyway, We'll talk about that. We'll wrap up here at the top of the hour if you guys have any more questions or comments, get in. Max had a comment and I wanted just talk in a little more football here about the brass and just kind of their quarterback kerfuffle right now. UR publicly announcing like I'm not doing the XFL again, even though we did that before with Normandy on there, we signed Tom f Flaco and then Chase Garber is like, that's the team. That's my team. So that's why I'm more invested in this as well. But that to me, I don't know what AJ Smith's going to do with that. Are Tom f Flaco? Is that the next coming? No, I see Tom f Flaco is the number three. I think if there is a competition it's more between Dormy and Chase Garber's and I think Dormy may have a leg up on that, even though Garber's was more recently in an NFL camp. But I really think with the A J Smith offense and the run and shoot, I think it's really more what quarterback is able to adapt to that. Dormy certainly didn't run that last year. Garbers didn't run it when he was in an NFL camp or anything like that. So they're going to have to learn a little bit of a different language, I think in camp this year. So I'm not sure what spots are up for grabs and what aren't, but Dormy certainly showed toward the end of the year in Orlando last year that he has the makings of a starting quarterback in a league like this. So I would not be afraid to if I was the Brahmas to go into week one with Quentin Dormy as the starter. So yeah, that remains to be seen. I think there's a lot of camp battles going on at quarterback out there that we just don't know all that much about because nobody's writing about the ins and outs of everyday training camp like you get in the NFL. I mean you pulled up the ufl.com website and there's nothing about anything training camp wise. I know we're only on day three or four of on-field workouts and such, but they don't have anybody writing articles for them on the site or anything like that. So we're really left to pick out the Instagram and Twitter videos of what's going on at training camp that are posted by social media admins, which is not a great place to be, but I guess we'll all be surprised when cuts come in when death chart are released. Well, and that's the problem, and we needed, forgive me, I'm forgetting his last name. He was on the podcast. We needed the Josh gentleman that was doing this is the week in the XFL and remember he was writing the art. He was kind of their writer that they brought in kind of midway through. We need that here and we've talked about that before. You need something. The USFL struggled with this as well, especially being in Birmingham, but having, yeah, because I totally agree with you. The cuts are going to come out. We're going to have no context for why any of this happened. And as someone, I'm very much attracted to the personnel side of these leagues and doing deep dives into the rosters and the players and the depth charts and everything like that, and kind of feel like you're getting hung out to drive by the leagues because you have no idea what's going on with any of the teams or anything like that unless you get on the immediate availability with a head coach. And they're not going to say much, I don't think in terms of, and again, it's very early, so I know Coach Holtz mentioned in terms of the quarterbacks, they're all, he doesn't have a depth chart right now, which understandable, but he's seen Jaymar Smith for three years, so he knows what he's got in him. And then he's got a couple new quarterbacks in there, another holdover I believe he's got on that team as well. So yeah, it It's just a waiting game now. Yeah, Joshua Lewin. Yeah, that was the guy. And I think that too, and I think when this will get deeper in and you'll have, I know Pat does the battle Hawks calls and stuff like that, but I do think a lot of the casual guys, most of the mainstream media don't even even know enough for Karen. It is still more about like, okay, tell me about this league. Tell me about what is the vision for, and I remember when they were used to do the USFL stuff and they would have all these guys, they would send, not never to us, but they would send them to whatever big mainstream, and I would love to watch any USFL or XFL for the first five minutes of the interview isn't explaining this is what the XFL is. It would be really cool just to come on and be able to ask. The same with the coaches. They're still like, well, Heinz Ward was always going to, what's it feel like coach? And it's like, why don't you ask about the team at some point versus hey, and obviously he's gone now, but I mean those mainstream outlets know their audience and they know that their audience isn't familiar with this league. So they've got to kind of set the groundwork in their own articles for what this league is. Because if you're covering the San Antonio bras and you're talking to Heinz Ward about the ins and outs of the third wide receiver, someone reading this article is going to be like, wait, San Antonio bras, what the heck is that? So I mean, the idea of who's winning the third wide receiver battle in camp is going to be so far removed from what a lot of the people unfortunately reading that article are going to be interested in, are going to be thinking about, Yeah, well, what are we doing here? Right. That's why we're here to provide a little more in-depth knowledge for those who seek it. It was funny, that woman that was getting my keys, I was like, yeah, I got to go. She's like, oh, you must be like, no lie, you must be. I said, no, no, no. I talked to very smart people. I said, I just asked the question, Hey, hey, you're very well connected. And that's just as important. That's just as important. Are you surprised just rounding out quarterbacks. Are you surprised? Boy, Brandon Silvers? Are we just aged out? He is with the battle house, Right? Is he Oh, he's, he's like, okay, that's right. Okay, okay. Okay. Are you surprised that he's not in a more prominent role? No. Yeah, I forgotten he was with that. I did. That was a late night Friday thing. I think that was right before he went on the cruise in that came, That was Anthony Beck had been teasing a big addition and then they released the Brandon Silver's news and people were like, what? That's right. That's right. Okay. No, but look, I was really for as well as Houston did last year, at times I was not impressed with silver's body of work in that offense. So to see him come back as a backup doesn't surprise me. Now St. Louis is going to have a very strong backup quarterback. I mean that is a really good one, two punch. I mean, I would say average starting quarterback, but when you talk about him as a backup, I think he's going to be one of the best in the league to be quite frank with you. So a good addition for St. Louis, but as a backup, not as a starter. I just remember doing that interview with him and he was just like, yeah, I'm in my truck. I go fish here on the weekends. He is in a good spot. I mean, I think it's a far cry from the XFL 2020 fan event when he was announced and stuff, and I have my signed shirt somewhere, but I mean he had his time in the sun, his half quarter, what was it? Quarter million from the XFL 2020. I mean, you think about it, that was four years ago. I mean, he's four years older now than he was then. So transitioning from started to backup in that time is not completely unusual. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Greg, we'll wrap up here. Comic binge. They're going to check it out later tonight. That's great. Yeah, weird time. I appreciate Greg making the time late. I don't want to keep him up too late here on the east coast, but I appreciate it. Like I said, I'm doing more, try to get some interviews this week, now that everybody's there, we've kind onboard, but I've deal with this with the CFL too. They're like, we're so busy. I'm like, I understand that this is when everybody wants to talk to you. But we've tried to do that working on big interviews for that coming up here in the next couple of weeks. And then, like I said, maybe we'll do once we get through the combine, maybe John Vogel can come on or something and talk about some cuts once we get through the roster. That was like this week too. I'm like, this is horrendous. Because a lot of football people are like the Rick Ellas of the world, the drum vogels are doing combine stuff. So thankfully we're not in the weeds that much. I mean, that's their real jobs doing that. Yeah, I know when I'm done talking to you, I'm going to go watch today's workouts for the combine, but it's kind of that rough period because for the UFL, there's training camp, but again, we don't have a lot of news to talk about coming out of that. So we haven't quite reached cuts yet. We're after all the roster additions, but we haven't reached cuts yet, and there's not a lot of news coming out of training camp. So we're kind of for the UFL in a little bit. As much as there is still going on, it's a little bit of a dead period for news and things to talk about anyway. Well Greg, I appreciate you tiptoeing here for an hour as we've kind of talked about news kind of didn, but I think that'll be good. Appreciate it. Check out all Greg's work on UFL Board really. I mean, I know Mark Nelson, but really the one man show there, it's kind of like Mike and Anthony on the Sports Illustrated. I hope that that is appreciated by the leagues, the work. I mean, I come here and talk for that. That's not a challenging the work that all you riders are do, and I'm always blown away by all that and just the time spent. So I hope that that's appreciated by any coaches or players or league people. It needs to be said. Of course, I do it because I love it. I enjoy writing, I enjoy analyzing and covering football. And the second it stops being fun, I stop doing it. It's not my livelihood. So I'm kind of doing it as a side gig and I'm enjoying it and getting as much out of it as I can. So yeah, I hope everybody checks it out. UFL board.com. I have a couple columns every week and check 'em out. Well, thanks Greg. Enjoy the combine. I'm like my heart on this Caleb Williams train right now, and I don't know, understand. And then Drake May is going to be a bust. And then I don't, Jane Daniels is two pronged. This is all of my mind right now For the commanders man. You're into over analyzation season at this point, and from this point forward until the draft, you might as well just tune out every scouting report you hear, because it's just going to be contradictory information. It's going to be smoke screens, it's going to be all kinds of stuff, and you're not going to be able to live and die with every one of 'em. So just tune all that out, man, Every single one. Because I've never Seahawks and we never really lived through, I was never as hardcore as now. And it's like every single one is different. It's either going to be like, oh, now I'm hearing Caleb's the bust, and he should have gone in the fifth round. So Yeah, the truth is always somewhere in between. So we'll see. Awesome. Greg, thank you so much. Appreciate it everybody, and we'll see you next time.

UFL 2024 Rules, Game Ball, and More! Latest United Football League News and Transactions!!

Well, happy Friday everybody back here, another live episode, but I think that's okay here. Good catch up. In an ideal world where maybe we're sending out Gameball press releases, no, at five 30 in the morning, happy to go live and kind of do all that stuff as it happens. We are timing. This week we had the rules come out on CFL free agency day and everything else, so we are here now. Your catchall, all the UFL rules, the game ball, merchandise, all the transactions, AJ McCarran, everything else. We have John Lewis here looking snazzy. I like putting my studio to shame. And then we have Producer Max here kind of keeping us on track today. I'm max a part of the workforce now, clocking in and clocking out here so Max is here catching up on everything today and then I'll be out of town next week. So knowing that uniforms and all this cool stuff will be coming out, but in the meantime we'll do this. John came on back before kind of ending the season I think looking forward, I like to do a welfare check before we get into everything. How are you feeling here? It's like 42, it wasn't a cool number to do today, like 40 days to count down, but how are you feeling here heading in? Well, I'm feeling optimistic about this. I laugh because I think one of the times that we talked about if the merger talk, it's like why would they bother with UFL? What kind of cache does the UFL have? I mean we all remember the old one, but I'm looking forward to it. It seems like as you guys know, because like there's this trickle of information and then that turns into someone opened a fire hydrant. So it's been interesting to see what happens within the next, what'd you say? 42 days or so. But no, I'm cautiously optimistic. I mean I'm old. I remember the original USFL, so if we can just, we've got two or three seasons here so far, so I'm staying positive on this. Yeah, I think and I want to get Max's thoughts on this. I think in the perfect world there was a ton of news this week. I wasn't really, I was very whelmed by how everything came out and I know we're kind of, well it's post Super Bowl, we don't have a lot and who really cares about, I felt like anything this week, excitement level wise, it was kind of like the bare minimum. Okay, we're getting everything out, we're giving everything up Max, how did it suit you? This was the most information we've gotten this week I would say since the initial merger talks It like, oh yeah, we have this thing, we have that thing that we were finally having, but at the same time it still doesn't feel put together. For example, the shop disaster, we'll get into that later. The Under Armour situation, not a fan of that not being resolved either. You have murky player transaction situations and also you have the natural skepticism of all these things are confirmed now, but is it really going to be as good as it was whenever you're taking away all these things that made the league, the leagues as good as they were taking away roster spots, taking away players, taking away teams. It's going to be interesting to see how it all melds together. And just for the record, this is why we have Max and John today because a little optimistic Max is a little pessimistic so I think together we'll get to all that. Yeah, it feels like we're getting there. Like I said, still I want one of these and whether it was the schedule last week or the rules, I just want one of these to really kind of hit and just, I dunno, I want anything to spark maybe even the way the SFL stuff to kind of do its initial launch, but speaking big news today warranted its own press release, the AJ McCarran signing and this was weird. I know John, I know you're off of Twitter a little more on threads. There seemed to be this big who's going to break the scoop of the AJ McCarran signing even though he was released from the Bengals and we kind of knew all this stuff and we had the Howard getting involved and Marty was talking. He's actually finally kind of signed. Now, John, on your level, is this warranting the press release everything this morning? AJ McCarran returning to the league, what do you think? We had the Matt Corral stuff as well this week. We can talk about it, right? No, yeah, I get it Sounds like I'm missing a lot over there on Twitter. No, I think it did because McCarran, he was one of the stars of the league. I don't know if he resonated outside of our niche of spring football, but I mean he got some attention and he was the XFL record holder. I guess there are a lot of people that did that since there was only really one season of the XFL in 2023. But I think it warranted that because you make a good point there Reed, about we needed some news to hit the shop. As Max said, it's underwhelming and the schedule, that was fine. That got a little momentum, but I think it's not getting the outside momentum because this league has to get casual fans. But I think for us basement dwellers who like spring football, I mean this warranted a press release. I think that's mainly who's I think going to the UFL site right now. I don't know that the casual football fan who's just wondering what's next in pro football is visiting the UFL site that much. Yeah, max in terms of, and I think there was a different narrative where I think people are excited, the AJ McCarrick, the Matt Corra thing, it was a little more like, okay, he maybe it was washed out or didn't work out and he's trying to revive what do you make of the agent and then that differing where it seems like there's two different narratives on these two different players On Corral. It just kind of feels like it's another guy who was talented player in college who didn't work out in the NFL, who was a decent draft pick who didn't work out was trying to the Spring League just add another name to the long list. He could work out. He could not, we'll find out McCarran, I mean obviously he was a statistical leader. He was winning MVP awards or the equivalent of offensive player of the year because the XFL did not want to have an FVP award because of reasons. And also on top of that, it's a Battle Hawks player and arguably the most prominent battle hawks player. So I think anything that happens on the battle hawks that is important to that team, you could argue warrants a press release just because of the attention that team gets. And so I think the reaction to McCarran is fair and I get the muted somewhat or less positive reaction to Matt Corral because he's more of an unknown at this level. John, I'm a little over the battle HOKs hype right now. Just a little. It feels a little because the stallions I think obviously did a great job with the US FL and building that fan base and we've been out there and we have tons of hardcore Gregory's of the world that listen to the shows every week, but with the battle hawks, it's that way with the XFL where I'm like, okay, I'm a little over this now. It's not even like you won anything. I mean spoiler alert you didn't even make the playoffs. Are we over that or are you kind of still numb to the whole battle hawks? I mean I'm all right with the battle hawks. They're fine and it's not like I'm a fan or anything, but no, I mean I get it. If you are the UFL, you've got to feed into the Battle Hawks because they were the premier team even though they didn't make the playoffs, you're right, you didn't win anything but the fan support there and now to the point where most likely that's where the championship's going to be. I mean Max guys, has that even been official yet or is that another one? Someone's going to try to break that one here pretty soon. Well, RJ put it out right Max and then took it back, so I think it's official just not officially now it's Max. If I read that correctly. I mean that would be the logical assumption. I would not say it is any more official than RJ Young put it in an article and that everybody else wants it to be true. People have been reporting that going to be in St. Louis since what last summer. Everyone just wants to speak this new existence and we'll find out whenever we got plenty of time to worry about that. But St. Louis the brand, I think that was a good spring football brand, much like you mentioned Birmingham too, and what are they going to do with all those quarterbacks down there? That's what I'm still trying to figure out. But no, I mean I get the St. Louis hype strike that while the iron is hot because if they come out and kind of flop, then you got to wonder where's everyone going to go with this? Yeah, it's, it's a lot of pressure on Beck. Coach Beck and I remember he, well, we have it where they were changing the playoff rules and then they didn't really write and that's why we didn't report that. And then I even remember when we had the schedule out and we had the press release in front of us and people were like, well, coach Beck said they were, I'm like, this is the official release right now, but a lot of pressure on that. We had seen, I think it was Wednesday before this came out, Brandon Silver's also joining the Battle Hawks Max, what do you make? I'm like, oh, is that the big signing is the smoke and mirrors with aj, but to have the Brandon Silvers on there as well, does, does he even make the roster at this point? I mean I love Brandon Silver, I have his, I've redone my office, but I had a signed shirt behind me for many years. I mean Manny Wilkins hasn't played significant numbers of snaps in the quarterback position since what his preseason time with the Packers. So I'd say by default silvers is the backup unless there's a massive upset on the part of Manny Wilkins. So yeah, I don't think Brandon Silver is getting cut. I think he's the certified backup and a veteran option behind McCarran. We're kind of getting in, like I said, heading ended break. We'll do kind of full training Karen previews. I know Pat is going to do quarterback rankings and stuff on his channel, analyze and educate over the weekend. Pat would've been on to just him crazy with work as well, but I think we'll get Pat on. We'll kind of do deep dives of all the teams. We'll figure all this stuff out but and then where's Corral ending up? Is that with Birmingham? Is that where he's going? Right, yeah, and I mean how many quarterbacks can skip Holts have down there? I know you want some camp arms, but it seemed interesting to me on paper. I thought J Bar Smith going in was going to be the guy and then our guy rj, he's got other ideas and then they add Matt Corral to the whole thing. So yeah, I don't know, but yeah, he's ended up there. It seems like a few people had said the phrase the rich get richer down in Birmingham, But I don't know. To me that's a fine signing with him. I mean I remember him getting drafted and that was kind of one of the weaker classes here the last couple of years. I think that's fine. He's close enough to having been on anything versus we got to get Johnny Menzel back or whatever. I think he's kind of had been in whatever Max, because I know this will get a R out of you. We're seeing a lot of comments at Canton for the championship game, not St. Louis, besides space. I mean I think you'd want it in the dome regardless, but thoughts Canton just because the USFL had a cup of coffee there. I don't know if that would be my game plan. USFL fans want everything done their way and it just does not reflect actually growing interest in the league. Putting the game in Canon would not grow interest in the league whatsoever. It would not attract fans and on top of that, the ticket prices would be bargain bin basement prices just like they've been the past two years. There is no logical reason to put it in Canon other than to appease USFL executives the same way. There was no logical reason to have the kickoff be the way it is, but they did it anyway. The same reason why they have four USFL teams and four XFL teams, even though one of them is actually an XFL brand because they just had to appease the USFL executives and coaches and the XFL side, everything's half and half. So no, I don't think Ken is a good idea and I don't think it has to be St. Louis, but I absolutely don't think it can be in a place where a team is not located and it definitely needs to be one of the more popular teams. I would really don't want to see a title game somewhere where the brand is strong. I don't want a Houston title game. I definitely don't want a Rice Stadium Houston title game to be before. It's hard because bordering on, and I know Birmingham had a lot of this season one going into two of like, okay, well they're the home team and they had, was there more preferential treatment towards them or have is there an asterisk there? And we're bordering that way with the Battle Hawks just in terms of like, okay, now we're doing the press release for AJ McCarran and then we got Beck on that. We're doing all this stuff. I liked Almo Dome. I thought that was great. Obviously I was at the championship game. I don't think my wedding schedule will allow us to be at the championship game this year. We'll probably do a show. I just don't think I can get out Sunday morning to do it, but I thought that was fine. Kind of a central location. I mean this time around where most of the team is being central in East Coast, obviously I think St. Louis makes a little more sense, but I liked it, especially when you had Seattle and Vegas fans last time. I thought the Almo dome worked well. We have a little bit of a breaking news I guess here we'll bring to you. Mike Mitchell just had an article out. Any other thoughts, John on the, we can always circle back later, but on the McCarran, anything else? No, I mean, yeah, I think St. Louis is going to get some preferential treatment and I think that some of the other teams outside of Birmingham are going to have to maybe earn some clout with all this, but you're right, I mean I can understand why they would want to put it in St. Louis and I had asked Brian Kennedy, who is a sports reporter at KMOV, I had him on my channel and ask him, do you think that if the St. Louis Battle hawks aren't in the championship and the championships in St. Louis, are you really going to, they're not. The guess is they're probably not going to sell the 400 level like they're doing for these first few games. My favorite was last, not this last Gray cup but two gray cups ago. It was in Regina and the rough riders were not in the championship game, but the rival, the Winnipeg Blue bombers were and a lot of the Saskatchewan fans that had bought tickets hoping that their team would be in the Great Cup as opposed to selling the tickets to Winnipeg fans just sat at home and it was like a half empty stadium, which I thought was the great irony of the CFL we're, we're shooting ourselves in the foot here, so whatever, max, anything else? I got the article from Mike. I'm going to pull, we have some training camp details, which is exciting. Yeah, I'll make this one quick. So the other thing I really don't want with the title game is I don't want it in a stadium that's going to be getting renovated soon because you could get a much better experience from that same stadium if you just wait a few years. For example, the Liberty Bowl is getting renovated right now. Well, not right now. They just finished raising a significant amount of money to start renovating it soon. So I would wait until 2026 or 2027 to put something in the Liberty Bowl for example. Also, I'd rather they didn't stick it in a large open air stadium and if they didn't put it in St. Louis, I really think DC is an attractive option, especially when you consider the attendance from the 2023 XL tile game. If it was like 22,000, I think that was the number. So I mean the DC stadium capacity is like 19,000. You can take a little less capacity, jack up the ticket prices and you have a ton of premium hospitality options at that venues and it would be such a great crowd experience at that facility and I just think it's kind of in the way. It's the gym of the league in terms of the most quality atmosphere you can get ignoring the number of fans. Even if you only have a Threequarter full stadium, it's still super loud. I like the dc Hopefully they'll allow people in the beer snakes section that are DC defenders fans that we all know how that worked out. We had comments here, updating the St. Louis turf and everything. I will say, and I laugh when you talk about doing a, Hey, let's wait until 20 27, 20 28. It's kind of like I have my merchandise comments yesterday. People just give them time. Yeah, because time. That's the thing that all spring football leagues just have a wealth amount of this time. This is interesting here Mike. This is just coming out from the UFL Sports Illustrated site here, which we're part of as well. This will be on here afterward. Appreciate that. I got it on the CFL side as well this week with our CFL free agency, but we have some training camp details. This just came out XL and nothing really breaking, but it's interesting. So the teams will be practicing together down in Arlington training camp beginning February 24th. We've known that, but Mike's got the breakdown here where the defenders will be playing, practicing with the rough next year bras with the Panthers, St. Louis BA Hawks and the Memphis Showboats and then the renegades and the stallions kind of cross crosspollination here, whatever. Max, any thoughts on this you think? This is interesting. I mean I haven't really cared as much about the alignments this year because the setup is so different and all the history that we had before with the, oh, we're going to pair the Texas teams together here or whatever that, and also you don't have the same personal history the same way you did before some of these pairings. So I'm less interested in the pairings, I'm more interested in the facilities, but I'm sure they're pretty similar. If not, they might even be just the exact same ones they used last year for the XFL. I haven't had a look though. Yeah, Newsom, south Lake Carroll and then the old state, the Renegade Stadium and then it was the northwest ISD one or whatever. So as long as it's all those ones, it's the same ones. But yeah, I mean it all looks good. I don't remember all the exact details on the training campaign, but I think it was still better than what it was for the USFL before. It's the carryover raise on that contract, so it's the best compromise you could get out of a bad situation. John, in terms of, I would disagree a little bit with Max in terms of when we were doing the schedule rundown last week with Andy, maybe not for training camp, but some of these matchups on paper are exciting to me. Obviously we have the stallions versus renegades stallions versus battle hawks. When that comes up, circling things on there, even if the teams are finding slightly different, I like having the conferences. I think that's kind of what we wanted it to be and then people were like, no, they can't do that. What do you make of this kind of the cross-pollination and building on at least not the history between the two leagues as much, but these marquee, the defenders playing anyone in the USFL feels like a big deal to me. Oh, I totally agree and I'm glad too because I think we had talked about this before too, about how it would be a shame for the XFL and the USFL brand to just go away. So I'm fine with the conferences and it also makes a division between fans whether that's good or bad of the USFL lovers and XFL haters and vice versa. I do wonder how much we're going to get out of training camp though. I'm hoping that the UFL really kind of goes in on sending out content and I kind miss the United by Football show, remember that? I don't think they did it last year in the USFL, but they did it the first year and it kind of told a lot of the players stories and you really got some behind the scenes stuff. So I'm hoping that maybe the UFL will do some of that this year and I think that when you tell those stories and those kinds of shows, I think you can build some casual fans up like that Shark Dog became, he was a minor celebrity there for a While. Yeah, well I was trying to think of the other side, Matt, what do you make of that? Well, I guess my question would be I feel like social has been getting a little bit better, at least from what I'm timing of posts and stuff, but I feel like we're doing better. How do you feel overall marketing wise going into this, at least social media? Are you asking me? Yeah. Oh yeah. So I'm a fan of the fact they got the town halls going for all the teams. I'm a fan of the fact that social media seems to be largely put together and by the way, I should have said this earlier, I'm completely happy about and excited for the games as much as anybody else. I mean obviously, but the lack of the promotion didn't feel very strong during the NFL playoffs. We got that nice pre-game mention and we got the moment with Jimmy Johnson and Dwayne. That was good. We had the game day moments but then after that on a national broadcasting scale it's been kind of muted compared to where you would want it to be, especially spring football just got stronger or whatever and then your advertising muscle does not really feel like it's any stronger than it was. In fact, it kind of feels like they're intentionally cutting back to say some dollar bills. But I'm happy that at least the local marketing efforts that they had before carried over, I wish it was at the standard where it needs to be instead of just where it was. I like the town halls seeing NI know DC just had one, right, seeing them kind of running around the stadium. I will say, yeah, I mean tomorrow as this is kind of going out would be a XFL kickoff date, whatever. Certainly different here where we have a month and a half. I don't know where you slot in the marketing here coming up. I will say the Rock is so involved right now in the WWE E really kind of surprised just in the last three weeks here and really just has kind of become a pivotal of John. I don't know if you kind of follow any of that, but he's turning heel and he's feuding with Cody and I mean really as much as I've seen him devote to that, so I don't know where is the rocks head at with any of this stuff, but I just dunno where we slot here because the XFL did a good job kind of slotting pre-up bowl going in or the US FLI don't know where we air in this stuff and let people know now that there's a month and a half to go. Yeah, I saw it and there are a lot of people that are starting to turn against the rock now. I saw some social media chatter against that and the Rock Dene Johnson has said that he is as hands-on with this league as he was with the XFL, which is kind of surprising but I do wonder if there's a little bit of a lull right now and I wonder if to Max's point there, if they start to maybe do a little bit more of a push here in the next, I won't say couple of weeks but maybe some stuff comes out because social media is free so they can push some stuff out on social media through training camp. But I think once March starts, I think that's a really opportunity to start. A lot of the casual sports fan attention is going to go to the NCAA tournament but I think you can squeeze in there and hopefully we'll see a little bit more of a push as we get closer to kickoff, which we've got a while, but I'm really hoping to see that I can understand the lull right now. There's really not a lot that I think could grab the casual van and bring them in here a month and a half away. I will say. And like I said, I think that if you want a little bit of constructive criticism here, I know we will talk about the merchandise here coming up, but I think the teams are doing really good and we've had the scheduled releases and we can talk about times a day and all that. I joke online, right, because it's, hey, it's five in the morning, we have my time, but either it's like joking here. The main XFL account I think could do better because what happens and I follow, I have it turned on where I get the notifications when the league posts. I don't have all the team ones and the teams will do all this great stuff all day and then whoever is running the XFL one will log on at noon and just retweet 18 things and then log off again and then log back on at three and retweet 18 things. So I think overall the league one could do a little bit better that way, kind spreading out and parsing, but I think the teams max to round this out and then we'll move on to the game ball and stuff. I've been pleasantly surprised with the team stuff right now. Yeah, I mean they seem to be keeping attached the way the team account, not the team account. The league accountants were set up right now still bothers me because it's like we Need to have them. Yeah, except for that. Except that it's the XFL parenthesis UFL or whatever. Yeah, USFL parenthesis UFL and they won't get the gold check for the other one but they'll have the gold check for one and it's only going to cause more confusion and it seems like their logic is will leach off our spot in the algorithm by holding onto our names and it's just like you're only going to be able to play this tight rope so long before eventually it's going to confuse people so much that you're going to have to make a decision on committing to this brand. Currently this brand is nothing more than what's on the league balls, what they say on TV and what's in the advertising. There's no outward pushing on all their posts. It's like whenever you see your account name, unless they have a hashtag that's the UFL or we are the UFL or this is the UFL schedule, you wouldn't even know if it's a UFL account if it's coming from the league because it's going to say USFL or XFL. That's the logo you're going to see. They still have the logos on there on I think one of them at least I think both of them. So I think the USFL account is still USFL, right? The XFL one is the USFL is still the USFL account. Yeah, the logos are all not in conjunction with each other. It is a mess. It just disturbs me for if you're going to push a new brand then commit to it and they don't commit to it and it bothers me. Well I'm still like this when I post the Twitter thing and I'm like hashtag ufl, hashtag United Football League hashtag. I'm trying to get anything. I'm like, I still kind of go back and forth If I just call this the UFL rules, is that enough cache now or do I need to have United Football League? I don't really know. We'll get into the rules first up because I think we'll get a little bit quicker through this. So we have the league ball, right? This is always exciting. I know Seth was order number two on the site. John I think was up through as well in the top 12. I was number 11. Number 11. We showed this when the rock was on Fox but then I feel like this is different in the back now where we have the conferences and all of this. I'll defer to Max first on this. Thoughts on the game ball. What did we make? It's simple. It has a logo and I'll say this, it doesn't look ugly, which can not be said about some spring football footballs in the past a F where the ball legit was ugly and looks like a college football with some tape On it. What a wrong opinion Max but go ahead. Sorry. It's a ball that's completely bland and has no style and also has a really expensive chip in it that the fans can't touch so don't like it. Anyway, this one at least has some reflective material on it. No signature. This is the United League and now Danny can't just push herself all over this league. She could the XFL. So take that for whether you like it or hate it, the whole like, oh yeah, we're going to have each conference on that and then we're not even have a logo. It just text is kind of bland to me and disappointing, but I like that they have the team logos on the balls. So that's all I got. Yeah, me personally, I mean the XFL ball was the coolest. I mean in my opinion I have it somewhere here with the tip on the end that was supposed to whatever. I liked the SFL one before where at least we had the stars on the just anything to make it be a little more different. I saw comments on the ball talking about the large amount of the paint on it, potentially making it slip more slippy trying to catch the ball. I don't know if that's the thing but John, I'm not the biggest fan of this logo so this is a hard sell for me anyway. But what do you think? Yeah, I mean I like it but it also goes back to USFL and the XFL. Were supposed to be 50 50. There you go. Yeah, I mean that was a Good one. This is the best. This is awesome. A hundred percent And what you can't see, you can see there, but if anybody looked at the actual detail of that ball, the grip on it, I mean it's incredible. The little xs on there. I mean that probably my favorite spring football and I've got a few, but it just seems like the XFL ball was the same way as the USFL with the shiny logo and kind of a simple design. I was hoping for a little bit more of some color in there, but I did order one and I know we're going to talk about the shop, but what was interesting was that's the ball that you're showing there. That's the one that I ended up getting I think today or either later that day they added where you could get the different team balls, which is fine. I mean might've gotten, I don't know who I would've gotten if it would've been Birmingham or St. Louis or somebody. I don't even know Renegades because they were a champion, I don't know. But yeah, I've got the league ball so I'll take that. But those are so much nicer and I do like the subtle logo on it with the teams I saw does the back. It sure would be nice if there was a picture of the back. Does it have the conference layout on it? This is that on the backside of it when we have the team? That's a good question. I don't know. Even if you can click on there and see. I don't know. I don't want to criticize too much, but I do because here you can see the battle hawks, that's obviously the underneath, there's no other photo of that. So I don't know. Does it say the hot stamp compliment conference marks? So that's got to be on the other side. So it's got to be the, it looks like the one sold out already. It looks like the bras has sold out already. Max 175. I saw people going crazy, but I think that's the price. This is an official game ball. I thought that was the price of the NFL one as well. I can't remember the cost of the NFL one. I thought it was like 200, but I think that's for the Is over 200, you're right. The authentic one is over 200 and then there's a replica version that's like, I don't know, a hundred or less. I don't know. I don't know how much that one is, but if these are authentic balls then 175 is fair. If it's not an authentic ball then 175 is absurd and it doesn't really say, it just says official ball, but that doesn't mean it's authentic. That just means it looks exactly like it And it comes from big game. So I want to give them credit. They do really good work with these and I'm thinking that for $175 and it being big game, that should be an authentic ball Hopefully. But it's the league's discretion, so what kind of ball they want to sell. So no way to know until you get one in your hands. Yeah, I don't know. The logo thing is fine. I mean I know they did that before. I prefer, like we said, how the exit fell, did it, it's pretty simple. The silver, I dunno, it's not super inspiring to me. Not that I think that you want things to be outlandish, but I thought the FL ball had enough to make it stand out. Again, we'll get to the rules here in a minute. I like having things that are a little bit differentiating when we're talking like, hey, well what's the deal? Oh well because this ball, they got the tracking thing on it and then they could do the kickoff or whatever. I like having the little different things so they can kind of do that. Anything else on this we can get to the shop in general. Max? John, do you have anything else on the ball? No, I'm hoping that it'll get here sooner rather than later and I'll give you a report on it. The only thing I have for you is that naturally, as long as these leagues try to angle to be in partnership with the NFL, they're going to try to make their ball look like an NFL ball and feel like an NFL ball. So this blend look does not surprise me at all, even if it's disappointing. So this is, oh, so Max sent me the, okay, we have other photos of the ball. So in terms of the shop itself here and so this went on yesterday. I really, let's just get whatever up here. They've added more stuff today. John was pointing out they have the UFLI like this with the black and gray with the logos and all of that stuff. I was just so annoyed yesterday when the press release came out at five 30, that was kind of all I focused on and then when I got up I go, okay, let me kind of look through all of this stuff. And I had put out a tweet where I was talking where I was very underwhelmed by the quality of the teams and I didn't want to be too harsh, but we were launching all this stuff. I found the options here and just to, if people aren't on Twitter, the balls are obviously added. The only renegades shirt that you can get with the Renegades logo on it has the schedule on the back. I've been told two of the schedules are in fact incorrectly marked. So take that for what you will. And then the other options you have are with a helmet with the renegades. So you can't get just Arlington renegades thing without that. And then obviously you have this polo, not a lot of options for sweatshirts and crew sweatshirts and black shirts, white shirts, whatever. Tweeted that out. I heard back from the league and they wanted to know that more items would be coming and I certainly understand that the things I'm looking for, even hats, there's no XFL hats on here. The only hats you have are the carryovers from the USFL, but we don't count the gamblers now they're the roughnecks. And so we really only have three teams. Am I talking just a black flex fit? I got a lot of hats. Max initial thoughts on kind of the shot, like I said a lot of my pieces yesterday and was told it felt like my opinion was heard but maybe not appreciated. So what did you think? It's not enough stuff. It's not enough interesting stuff. And on top of that, some of the stuff they have is straight up poor quality, like having mismatching schedules is very bad form for example. And then also none of the stuff they have, or at least for the XFL teams, I haven't looked at all the USFL style stuff, but it seems they've retained a lot of the stuff they had and some of that looks nice. Some of it's a little bland. I'm not a fan of the camo hats. Sorry, This is like stuff they had before, right? I mean they had this show bus so not we didn't make anything. Yeah, like I said, until I see otherwise it feels like they're doing their most to avoid making as much stuff as possible so that they don't have to spend as much money and until it's proven otherwise, until I see some more stuff other than if they just make all this new era stuff for the XFL teams and make nothing else, that's not enough. So unless I see some Under Armour stuff or something else that's distinct, maybe something from home field that makes a lot of college sports and hats, those are really nice. If they make something like that, I'll be interested but otherwise I'll just be disappointed. Honestly, kid here has a comment. Hey guys, you're doing the best. I totally understand. I get it And I never do because we'll talk rules and stuff, fear as well, and I talk social media, I never try to criticize without giving what I think is something that is easily done. Like I said, having black white shirts with the team, logos that they added with the league logos, having blacks flex fit hats. I'm not doing this as a commercial on here, but this is the market no one has ever bought. Paul and I used to buy stuff, we would make our own words, but this is just me on the, and I know this is like a drop shipper and they send that and you got to go if they're going through new. But my podcast that sells no merchandise, that has of any kind should not have better, more robust options and especially when you're launching this because like John said, oh I went back today and they had more footballs. If I was someone that I went on yesterday, I'm not checking again today and tomorrow, oh what did they get? Now I kind of go on and look. I sent it to my friends who are sea dragon ticket holders. They went on and looked and they said not a lot of options. Seems overpriced. I'm probably not going to look back again. John, you're the optimist here. So what do you think? Well again, I mean I had the credit card out and logged on because our boy Seth there, as you said, he sends me an email at eight o'clock local time and in the morning it's like the shop's open. So I'm like, I immediately log onto my computer, get the credit card out. I knew I was going to buy a football but I was like, okay, I love long sleeve. So I was like I'm going to get a UFL long sleeve, I'll get a St. Louis, I'll get a Birmingham. And they had no, I didn't see except for a polo. All they had was a UFL branded polo, none of the UFL T-shirts. And another thing I noticed, they don't have any women's clothing either. So not that my wife is really dying for any UFL merchandise, but I mean it's probably 99% men but you would think that there would be some women's merchandise. That's why I think especially with the Under Armour, as Max pointed out with Under Armour, I think there's got to be some more merchandise coming. So we've had some added today and then so I did buy a UFL T-shirt today and then had to pay shipping on top of what I paid for shipping yesterday, but I begrudgingly did it. But I'm reluctant to go back on next week and say, oh well there's three or four more things I want to get and I'm going to have to pay shipping again. But I'm really hoping that they will continue to add and add and I'm hoping the T-shirts are good quality from, I think Breaking Tees is the merchandiser for this. I'm not totally sure, but that's what it looked like and I think they make pretty good stuff. So I'm optimistic about that. I'm looking here, I have two cracking hats right here next to me. I am your target demo for all this. I think I probably have 15 Washington commander hats. Don't tell anyone but I am your target demo. And so that's why I'm just like, these are the people and had David had the comment here, you only have one chance to make a first impression. We'll hide that so we can see Max and that's all I'm saying right? And I understand more stuff going to be added and I understand that we're working through all that but I don't know how the XFL had their shop and the USFL had their shop and then when they merge now we have less combined. That's just hard for me to comprehend. Max, anything else on this? Well here go John. Sorry, Sorry Reed. I was just going to point out the stuff that you have on your site, is that Shopify or one of those Kind? Yeah, it's like a dropship. So I get it. It's not apple to apples But nevertheless, if you went on the old XFL site, they had the same kind of stuff. They had the tumblers, they had the plastic cups, they had the slides, they had all of that kind of stuff was up there. So that's what now if I remember correctly, they ended up adding a lot of that stuff later on so maybe we're going to see the same thing here. And if I'm not mistaken, also the old XFL shop is still up there and I think it is a Shopify shop And it was always weird with the XFL because the WWE was still fulfilling orders through that and it was going through all that. I will say I had, like I said, comments yesterday, give them time. The best piece of merchandise XFL 2020 ever was the starter jackets and I have one, it's got the see the Dragons logo and everything on it. I got it to me the week the league shut down because of covid and I understand different circumstances but you don't always have all this, well we've got nine months to get all this going if you're so cash stard Max, anything else on this? Because I don't want to be the negative Nancy, but I did want to say my piece On, I'll say two things. First off, I don't know if all of them are made by breaking tea because all the ones that I saw that had breaking tea or were named breaking tea and have a helmet on it. So I don't know if any of the other ones are breaking tea or not. I haven't really bought anything. I'm not really buying tons of merch right now, but I don't know who else makes the rest of those. Second thing off My grace to a league who is owned by a massive media corporation and by a private equity firm that has billions of dollars and money to spend and the rock whenever they can't get more deep stuff in a shop than a limited selection of T-shirts and not even hats for a significant proportion of their teams about a month before kickoff. My grace for that is pretty low. So it would be one thing if they had the basic selection they have for those USFL teams for all the teams, then I would at least be like fine, I would still not be happy but I probably would not be bothered. But you can't give a pass to a massive corporation just because they have a hard time. It's your fault. You're not dedicating the resources to let your shop be better, to have enough employees to have the resources you need. And I'm willing to give all the benefit of the doubt to every employee in the league. I am not willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the owners. They have proven with the way they have run both of these leagues over the past couple of years that they deserve to have everyone be skeptical of them after how they've treated us these past couple of years and how they treat their players and their coaches and their employees. They deserve that. Yeah, this is basically becoming read show and tell here but I mean this is the But anyway words, I agree and like I said, I think that the team, the people that we know that are working kind of hand in hand in the social and all that stuff, I think they're doing a tremendous job. I just think overarching, I did not hear one person that was super people either say like, oh it was fine and more stuff's coming or they were disappointed. The other big news here and then we'll get to comments of question, all that stuff actually F Phil UFL rules coming out, wonderful timing for me. Half hour before we're going live for C ffl free agency opening and they're like here's the rule. Not only, okay, so the one day you don't do the five 30 press release, you do it like at 11, that's the C. Okay guys, I got to get one or the other here. Big takeaways, right? We're doing the USFL kickoff, which I think is a mistake, I'll voice that in a minute. We're doing the XFL extra points. We'll go to max first on this. Big takeaways from the rule books, It's another case of we got to have everyone's perfectly half and half with no consideration on what's actually a smarter decision. We got to appease Daryl Johnston, we got to have the USFL kickoff, we got to have certain technology used a certain way, we got to get rid of the ball spotters even though that made everything more efficient and it didn't cost that much and it was just a logical choice to make all so that we can appease both sides of the equation as much as possible. No one gets to have more pieces than the other because God forbid we actually try to build something better instead of just trying to smush two things together into some soup. And with that being said, most of these rules were things that we've already liked from past leagues anyway and so other than those small things that I have griped with about philosophy and small choices that I don't like, whatever. If you want to go against the NFL themselves who themselves is looking at the XFL style kickoff be my guess, you're going to have to implement it anyway if the NFL chooses to use it or else you're going to look really weird. So have fun with this mess while we have it And get, I understand what Max is saying. It does feel that way. We're trying to marry these two and you two need to work together here. We're going to duct tape your hands and you got to work through all this where special teams are we just seen with K tur. But if that's a mode that we're going to get players to the NFL having to kick off the more mirrors that at least are, I do get that that they're saying that and I'll have more thoughts about that. I will say he's now at Amazon and people that follow Sam short scene on Sam's been on twice in the past. If you look at the channel, you can just search the channel. His interviews, he would come on again, but Amazon and there's all clearances and stuff where he can't, he's like I can't do NFL or you, he is like I can't do any podcasts. But interesting private thoughts with Sam kind of about all of this stuff. But if you want to know his thoughts, we did the XFL or we did him on after everything collapsed and then we had him on again talking to the US FL rule. So interesting deep dive like 40 minutes each time with Sam kind of talking about all that stuff. John, what did you make of the rules here? Yeah, I agree with Max. It felt like there's a 50 50 split and maybe I'm in the minority. I don't know. I love the XFL kickoff. I think it was safer. I think it looked cool, but Darryl Johnston said it doesn't look like football. So he wanted that. It seems safer to me. I do and I know Brandon Aubrey, he was the big story last year, but to get rid of the extra point kick, it's like the old world football league's action point where you have the tiered system and XFL did that as well. I really liked that. I think it adds to the game. You're never out of the game and you can add those points. So I'm fine with the rules. It was the whole onside kick rule, so to speak, where it's either fourth and 12 from the 28 or the 33. I guess they made some kind of some kind of a compromise with that. But I like the rules. I think they're fine. I think they're different enough to distinguish this league from the NFL, but they're similar enough that people, the casual fan out there who wants to watch pro football, they'll understand it. And I think the NFL can always take away something like Max said, the NFL was looking at the XFL kickoff. So I'm okay with it. I like it. I hated Darryl Johnson's comments about how the kickoff did not look like football. You can think that you don't say that, but I mean Darryl's the same one that came out that's like I'm befuddled why our ratings are so terrible. I also probably wouldn't have said that Darryl. So I mean I appreciate the transparency and the honesty here with that. But I've said before when you have one of the, what is the elevator pitch for this league? And that's probably what I look at. You're talking to people like what's the deal with the exit fell well, the rock owns it and you can go for three points and then they have a unique kickoff. You kind of got to have a couple of things, right, because double forward pass that works. But that's not, we saw it with what the Landry Jones infamously and all that stuff, but there's not. And so I don't like getting rid of things like that. I also hate the USFL kickoff and David has in the comments here because it does artificially inflate the yardage back and we're just kicking the ball further back and that's not letting players get untouched to the 35 yard line or whatever isn't exciting. And I think I understand why they do it. Hey, let's kind of give these offenses a get go here, but I don't like that. So kind of a multitude of reasons there. Max, any thoughts on that? Yeah, I mean I think it's just a way to artificially inflate offense. Also the idea that the XFL kickoff doesn't get touchdowns isn't true. It's just a smaller sample size. You only had half of one season and for one of them and you had a full season where you had one touchdown, but in the other half season you had two and a half season. So the idea that you can't get touchdowns out of an XFL kickoff just isn't true. It just relies on creativity instead of just giving away yards. That bothers me that Daryl doesn't says doesn't look like football. Whenever he participated in the league that originated that kickoff and was totally pumping it at that time, but now that he was competing against the league that used that kickoff, he just wants to slide it. It's very two-faced and is one of the many, many reasons I do not like that man. And I'll be very clear about that. I do not like him want one bit. I do not have my green X in him anyway. But other than that I'm interested to see. There's still some things that are unclear, like technology wise. Are they going to be doing the automatic first downline thing again, I don't think that's been confirmed. The USFL and XFL crews are mashed together, so you have that new factor going on too. Everything's still pretty half and half there. Oh, one more thing. The fourth and 12th, which I believe was closer to the USFL style, AJ Smith is licking his chops right now thinking about how he can just hog the ball whenever he is coming back. He was converting fourth and 15. It's crazy. Could you imagine him going for fourth and twelves? Anthony Beck's probably licking his chops and I'm so going for it in the first game, just like I did last year. Agent McCarran is licking his, I feel like we're inflating offense to such a degree to where it's going to make things look impressive until you realize it's because we're intentionally making it easy. So take that from what you'll, Doesn't it feel like they're taking the punters out of this a little bit too? Because if I understand the punting rule, correct, you can't cough and corner punt. It comes out to the 25. Is that right? Am I right about that or am I wrong? Yeah, it was similar. Sam was talking about that to me. He doesn't like how they, he's, I feel like they're not really understanding some of the rules that were there before. Max, any thoughts on the punting? I Haven't checked the yard lines for the cough coffin corner kicks, but the 2020 XFL was the 35 from what I remember for the coffin corner because they really didn't want people kicking the ball out of bounds or doing touch backs. They wanted to guarantee a return. So 25 All touch backs kicks on the 25 point that goes out of bounds inside, we'll consider setback. Yeah, so that's more how the XFL was trying to take a little bit more of that, Except it's less strong of a punishment and honestly a lot of teams will just take that and take the 25 just fine. Whereas in the old league with 35 teams legitimately were afraid to do it. They would pooch kick it on purpose and make it land at the 12. Right. That's A good point. That's a good point. Whereas this version, it's basically just saying you can have it, you won't get an extreme benefit from a coff corner kick, but you won't be punished and I want teams to be punished. I want returns. It was like over 60% of punts were returned in the 2020 XFL and I'm pretty sure the 2023 way was pretty similar, but this is going to result in a lot more punts without a return and that's disappointing to me because the whole point of this is that we need more plays, we need more action, we need more excitement, we need less dead plays. So this is another case of your PS in the USFL people just because, and it's not actually helpful, it just makes your product more boring, but that's just me. That's just my opinion. Don't fight me. We have dealing comments here. Does max hate puppies? Max hates skins, but then we have someone asking for you to be UFL President speaking the facts. They're very, very divisive here on the, I will say this, and I remember when the max, who was the guy that had the leaked podcast at the bar that was talking about all the, they're changing the rules and talking through all that moley or something. Jim Mosley? No, no, it was Manos. Jim Manos, yeah, Emma, ONNS. He was like an old Bills guy or something and he was talking about not Trubisky, Nathan Peerman and all that, so that was funny. That was a conversation, But the thing with that was they were trying, even the XFL originally, and Sam talked about this, I think in the interview when we're doing that, and I like that they're doing the one, two and three and you have to run the play, right? Because it doesn't incentivize anybody to go for two or three points if I can just kick a free point every time. But if you're forcing yourself the teams to run a play after the touchdown, you're going to get, well, we might as well just go for two because two versus five or whatever. But there was debate and Sam had talked about that. Well, how much do we want to remove kickers from all of this? Because obviously you can still do the field goal, but you have this and like John said, was special teams obviously kind the puncher limiting. We had a comment here, how does that help any punter make it to the NFL, having this so differing there? I do like that you have to run the plays here like the XFL feels. I'm glad that that stuck around even if we lost the kickoff. What'd you say, John? Yeah, again, as Max continues to point out, it's all compromised and people don't tune in to football games to watch the Kagan game, so I get that to a point, but it just feels like, and that's a really good point. It seems that at least it's been a small sample size, but it's the special teams players who have had the most opportunity to move to that next level, not just because of these tryouts or going into training camp, but they get into training camp because what these teams have seen on tape and it feels like you're taking some of that out and this is supposed to be another league of opportunity and all that and the player 54 and all of that. So that's a little disappointing because I think it does limit some opportunities for special teams players to move on to that next level. Just laughing at the player 54 that Moj with the BC Lions was down at the, he was at Vegas for the Super Bowl and he was doing interviews and the Rock just happened to walk by and it was right when they were getting ready to do the Rock and Roman reigns and all that stuff and he's like, oh, rock, you're really taking the Battle of Alberta to another level because obviously Roman Reigns had a cup of coffee with Eskimos and then the Rock. I'm like, we're really pushing the narrative here. Okay, now we're moving the CL stuff into the rock and all that. I do like the two feet. I've seen a lot of SML people now. That's what makes it better than I think the two feets better. Max, any thoughts on that or anything else on John's comments? I'd rather they inflate offense with one foot catch for safety and for quite frankly helping college players develop into NFL players because you're going to have a lot of young players than have two feet catch and make it just as hard as the NFL is for a receiver right out the gate. Second off, just to go back to the punt rules really fast, this is stuck in my craw. Okay, listen, if the punt rules didn't help players get to the NFL, how come Dan Wheeling made it? If the punt rules didn't help players in the NFL, how come the increased degree of difficulty made it more impressive? Their ability to punt the ball deep if I don't buy that argument because the results, the proof is in the pudding. If anything, the difficulty helps 'em keep the ball in balance. It helps them roll the ball in without getting the end zone. It them more precise, it makes it more challenging, it makes 'em more frustrating, but I'd rather have trial by fire than them not being able to make the cut. So I don't agree with that notion and I think the idea that a rule being hard inherently makes it worse for special teams guys whenever they need to have difficulty in precision and repeated reps is bad. Whereas if you have extra difficulty for a receiver whenever it's so hard for them just to focus on running routes and catching the ball to then on top of that, put on the two feet difficulty. Whenever they're just trying to make a camp, no one is really worried yet about an XFL receiver, A-U-S-F-L receiver being the tow drag swag guy and making fantastic catches and starting consistently, that's not a realistic expectation for any X-F-L-U-S-F-L-U-F-L, even CFL receivers for the most part. So that's why I don't like that David says he is going to customize the team jersey with a puncher on it, but I just say you want trial by fire with special teams, but then you're okay with, you want the one foot, but two, I Justify my reasoning. I justify myself. John, any other thoughts on the two? Because I like that. I think what Fanger TRO football did the one or I can't remember what their rules were. I did laugh. The NBA was showing a LED floor that they're going to use for the all-star game and I'm like Fanger TRO football sitting there like Damnit, we had our chance, but I think the two feats good, I'm okay with it just because that's what these receivers are going to have to do to get to the next level. But I will say being devil's advocate and as Max was saying, if it starts to cut down on offense, then you might want to revisit that because you don't want seven three games as finals because that's not going to catch, I keep saying casual fans, but I really believe that for this league to succeed, it can't be us just watching this. It's got to be some outside people and they don't want to watch seven three games because people already scoff at spring football. There's a lot out there. It's easy to do because of the history of spring football, but if this will work and it will get guys to the next level and you can have the offense, it might be a lot to ask, but the bottom line is I'm okay with it. I think that's going to help these players more than anything. Again, just surround out my, someone that covers the CFL as well and they deal with a lot of are they better than the NFL? Are they worse is the talent level and it's the same with this when it's obvious that talent level is not the same, right? By and large, I appreciate having differences so you're not as focused on, oh well clearly these guys, I like having not bells and whistles but having a little more the CFL game completely different and trying to change that. I like having enough differentiating things that you're concentrating more on just that being a unique game versus the USFL last year, which was like this is the NFL light and they're playing in the spring and they use the same music but they just have less people in the stands. I like having a little bit more, again, I didn't always like what the XFL, what they wanted their persona, what they wanted their brand to be, but I at least appreciated that they had their brand max And they really leaned into gambling. I noticed that the X-F-L-E-S-P-N really they did not shy away from gambling Was the Ian Fit Simmons the day that he was at Cashman Field and for the second half of the game talked repeatedly. He had the over under. He's like, oh, I have my receiver. I'm like, I am so tired of hearing dude about your bet here, homie. I understand that's not the most exciting game right now, but That's how you make those kinds of games exciting. Yeah, because Vegas didn't have a lot of excitement. They did not. Okay, I'm going to pop a shot now. If you care so much about gambling, why don't you release accurate and consistently timed depth charts if you care about gambling, why? Well, we dunno this issue, you can't criticize it yet. We don't know. No, no, no, no. But this is about the past. This is about what happened in the past because you talked about how the old XFL cared about so much about gambling and then they drop the ball and then they had social media people talking about how debt charts don't matter and injury reports don't matter and we're only going to give it out to the media. We're not going to post it on our website, we're not going to post it on social media. And then when people wonder why it's so hard for people to be involved in gambling and fantasy football for spring football and it's pretty obvious why. So if you would like to actually use that and leverage that as for your marketing, then you need to commit to it instead of sucking at it. But whatever, maybe they've finally gotten the message down, Remember then because the XFL would do that. Then the US FL was it Sam got, Sam Shady got one of the depth charts and then they're like, you need to take that down. You can't post it. It was like, okay, what are we, if you have any questions here, we'll round this out here pretty soon. I mean we've touched on all the major points I wanted to, if you have any questions, put 'em in the comments. Do we know, I know you talked about the technology, are we doing chip ball? Do we have chip gate again? Is that what's happening or are we still TBD on that? I have not heard anything about. You might have Max. I have not heard anything on any kind of technology like that. I haven't heard anything. I hope they keep the first down line. I actually thought that was really cool, the automated first down line. I thought that was awesome. I hope they keep bolt six for replay reviews just like they were using in both leagues. Other than that, I don't want a whole lot of extra technological influence. I don't want them to try to test anything terribly new right now. I want that to be for way down the road. The other thing I wanted to talk about, because now the ha McCarran transactions final, I thought since we had a few minutes, we could kind of give our thoughts on just briefly on who you would predict to start for each team before camp starts. Give it five minutes and then let it rest. Now we kind of have a full picture of who's going to be the quarterbacks in these Leagues. Well, I got to up, do we have rosters here pulled up? I got to pull up. I got a list on my phone I can share with you if you want real Quick. I can tell you this. I'm still trying to figure out, like I said earlier, the Birmingham situation. I mean it's like, again to me, Jaymar Smith is the starter. I mean I don't know how I could go against that, but then they ring in Matt Corral and then they had the draft pick. So yeah, I don't know. Is it league here? League Rules career. Where's the rosters here on the website? I'm looking at their teams. Am I slow here? I just pulled it from Wikipedia because someone made a draft page and they update it, but some of the ones are hidden so you'd only be able to find it if you went to the 2023 season version. But I made a list of all the ones that are potential starting candidates and I'm just going to text 'em to you right now. Okay, someone's saying UFL newsroom. I'll give them a Yeah, newsroom does have a draft page that they update with the rosters, but it's not like it's to the minute the league is supposed to get it first or whatever. I don't want to get any spam wear going to the site Stefan. So just say I don't want teams U-S-F-L-U-F-L teams. Arlington Renegades. Well hey, if they got it on here, coaching staff. Oh this is okay, this okay. Alright, broken clock here. We got it. So we got renegades here. I like this quarterback. Luis Perez, Lindsay Scott, Holton, aler, Theise. Perez rides again there. John, what do you think? A hundred percent. I mean I think that Lindsey Scott maybe has a chance. It was funny that Holton Ehler said, they pretty much said that he said on a podcast that the coaching staff or management told him, well, we really want a younger quarterback to come in here and challenge Luis Perez and maybe win the job. So I don't know if they don't have a lot of faith in Luis Perez, but man, that guy's got such a track record. I don't know why you wouldn't. So I'm going to ride that Perez bandwagon all the way Max. I'm still amazed at that. I mean good for Luis Perez here, but what do you think here? I love Luis, but I think you got to bet on talent and I've never been more impressed by an FCS quarterback that's not NFL level since Lindsey Scott. I mean he set all the records, he won the Walter Payin award, he did all of it. So on talent, I have to pick Lindsay Scott just for that, but I do think it's going to come down to the wire just because of all the experience Perez has and his adaptability is so far ahead of any typical spring football quarterback, especially who else is in that room? I had imagine the learning curve for Scott will be tougher and that in the early days he's going to struggle and then as he gets settled in at the end, the talent's going to show and they're going to have a tough decision. I Thought AORs was going to make the, I really thought he was going to make the cut with the Seahawks. Reed. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you, but No, you're good. I'm a Seahawks fan, so I watch a lot of the preseason and I thought, man, this guy's pretty good. He was very fun to watch when he's coming in there. I mean obviously he's playing against fourth and fifth stringers, but he was fun to watch when he got in. Yeah, I would track a little bit more of the commander's preseason surprisingly enough. But we were at the game. Drew Locke was there. I think AORs played a little. We did go the one preseason where he beat the Cowboys, which was probably the Seahawks playoff win for that was probably the height of the season there at that point. It does make sense what you're saying though with Lindsay coming in a little more inexperienced, pushing Luis plus Luis is going to have no issue with competition and he'll be happy to if he lose his out, happy to mentor and kind of all that stuff. I don't see Louis as having any sort of ego of any kind of, let me help kind of make this guy be better Max. But I will just say I like this roster. I'm not trying to sha for UFL newsroom, but I like how this is laid out. Yes, it's solid. They got to keep the website maintained at the least so that people will keep coming back. The thing with Aler for me is he was not my favorite American Conference quarterback or anywhere near it whenever he was playing, I was a bigger fan of Seth Henigan at Memphis who's still there. He's got six years senior, fifth year senior, whatever's going on with covid years stuff. But I wasn't that impressed with Holton AORs comparatively at ECU compared to even Tanner Mordecai when he was at SMU. I was more impressed with an Alton AERs and he's completely slobbing in at Wisconsin now. So I would not expect AERs to be anything more than a backup for this team. And if Scott does win that job, just watch Perez get traded again and end up on another championship team on the front playoff front. Just watch it A hundred percent. I can totally see that. Before we move off the renegades and Philip had a question, are the renegades going to have a banner hanging ceremony? Can't imagine that, but what else is chalk Todd doing mean? Yeah, what else? Hang it in the corner. What else are we doing? I mean I think they could hang one and then stick it in a closet till the team comes back for another year. But it's funny, we could do a banner hanging ceremony because it'll be the top champion first champion. Just do a ceremony for both teams at the same time. Be like the Battle of the Champions, bring out the trumpets or whatever. I don't know. Birmingham Did it. Yeah, they did do it. If the Lakers can raise a banner for their in-season inaugural tournament win, I think that we can hang a banner for the Arlington Renegades. I will say that. Alright, so let's go here. Stallions. So we don't have the updated on here, right? Because we're missing corral right on here. So Jaymar Smith, Jayla Morton, Adrian Martinez. We'll go first to John here. This is right. Are you all in on Buckham? Are you stallions? Oh Yeah, totally. I'm giddy up on that side of the conference, but I think to me, Jaymar Smith, because he had, I mean he got hurt in the first game of the season, so he was already named the starter and then of course Alex Magoo took over and blew up. So to me, he's the guy. But there's been a lot of talk about Adrian Martinez, who I believe Birmingham drafted and drafted early if I'm not mistaken. So Max, you might know more than that about that, but to me Jaymar is the starter. I don't know that because I think he just has so much talent and I think Skip Holtz has a lot of faith in him. There's a personal bond there with Jaymar that doesn't exist with Mooch other players on spring football teams. With that being said, the talent corral had coming out of college is clear. However, once you've been in the NFL for a period of time and your confidence gets shot, you don't know what you're going to get coming out the other end. Sometimes you get Ben de Gucci and he lights it up and sometimes you get guys like Cole McDonald to our as re would say, a wet fire or whatever. So you don't know what you're going to get. So we'll see. But I certainly think there's going to be a lot of conversation and hype and I don't think it's settled at J Mar's starter, even though you probably would be the favorite because Yeah, I don't think it's settled at all. No. Are we surprised Ucci decide he signed back on with the Broncos, right? Are we right? Am I making, is that a fever Dream? Yeah, he did, but I'm not surprised at all. I mean, He was the one and down that he was like, I don't want to be, he Was blatant the entire time. The only reason he was here was to get back in the NFL and he's just going to hang on into those coattails until he gets kicked out again. And when he does get kicked out again, he's still young. He's got a lot of time left to come back and do an AJ McCarron type of season if he wants it. DJ P says, I wonder who the Braus Strider will be. We're moving through. We're getting there. We're anything else? John here? I mean, like I said, we'll do full roster breakdowns when I get back from vacation and we'll get on, maybe John could do the Birmingham, whoever, but we'll get all that and Hawk and all that stuff. We'll figure all that out. All right. Going to the defenders here. And this doesn't have tmu, right? Because he's official. Official back note Max? Or is it still not? They haven't announced it yet. I thought they did announce it. I know Mike posted about it. Have they not announced it yet? I don't know. Oh, and then Jake Russell co confirmed with, I don't think it's of official yet, but TE is back. Mike's reported that Jake Russell with the Washington Post, which God bless. I'm like, Jake, you worked for the Washington Post. Why are you dealing with UFL impressions? Anyway, we'll go first to Max on this. It is got to be Temu, Right? It can only be Temu. I don't even understand why the other two guys are really on the roster. Honestly, You got to have backups. You Are going to have better options than those guys if you want backups. That looks like Camp Arms. You're right. Yeah. I'm sorry. I don't like either of them and neither of them really fit the de King mold either. I mean, Francois definitely doesn't, and McLendon is a weird, slower but taller version. You could make it work with him as a running quarterback, but it's not going to be as shifty as agile, as impressive, as threatening as De was in any way. So maybe they're just buying their time, maybe they're hoping one of these guys can really take a boost. I was not impressed with either of these guys. And I think the hype for Jalen McClennan in particular was completely, I don't even know where that came from because you look at his P FFF grades, you look at his film, you're like, there's nothing that stands out and there's a lot of, there's not that many great amazing decisions either. And then Francois was a complete wreck both on and off the field last season. Well, That's what I was going to say. Are we surprised that he's even here still? I mean the thing I remember about him is when he got in the huddle and told him to shut the F up, that's the one thing I remember from him last year. The Dormy controversy. Yeah, He was the one with the Dormy, right? That said that he was giving away the playbook, right? So it is just classless, I'm sorry, but I can't support that situation. But I love Reggie Barlow and he did a lot for Derrick King and now he's the quarterback coach at SMU and I'm happy for, I hope that Reggie spoke to him about that and gave him some advice because I think D's going to have quite a steep learning curve on how to be a coach for the first time. I was just perusing Twitter here. This is a tangent, but this is Colin Coward. That's the Washington commanders winning the division next year. That is probably the greatest tweet I've seen in my life today. Very excited there in terms of, yeah, the Francois thing, I feel like we've done this. So the DC brings in someone else or they still, I mean they have wins a cutoff I guess to get someone in there. They've got to have a few weeks. I mean Cam doesn't start for another week and there's always guys that get brought in after the start of camp, so there's time they can find somebody. There's always somebody. I wonder where Eric Dungy iss up to right now, for example. I don't know where he's at, but there's got to be a better option than Jalen McClendon and Deandre Francois is your backup quarterback and if there isn't, then trade for somebody because some of these teams have four quarterbacks. You've got to find someone. Alright John, anything else on that? We'll punch through Here. No, I think we covered that one. Yeah. All right, we'll get here. We will roll through this and then we'll try get out of here. So the roughnecks here, Philip saying bring back pj. I don't think PJ's coming back. Kenji Behar reads to that Jira guano. What do you think? What do you think? Max Kenji got cut, so I don't know why he's here. Okay, well so hey, we're we're not criticizing PFN today. Hey Alex, I said is I don't know why he's here. I don't got anything else to say than that. I don't know why he's here. He's got cut anyway. Reed sin, is that it? Well, Jerry Guano has had quite a few cups of coffee on NFL practice squads and training camps recently on again off again all during a rookie year. He is on again off again. So clearly there's something, the NFL seasoned him and the XFL had him with their Palmer camps and he was always a Jordan Palmer guy from his draft prep onward. So clearly there's things people are seeing in him that hasn't played out in his performances on the field in college and he had a few impressive moments in preseason play with the Cardinals, so maybe he can put up a fight. But I think what Reed Sunnet showed in that one game before he got injured, which was tragic, he was by far the most offensive engine that they had at quarterback for the bras that whole season. And then after that, immediately things became a struggle until the very last game they put up all these points against the defenders. Then Parker Romo, who was perfect on the year, misses the one kick that would've put the pressure on the renegades to actually win that game instead of basically play like it didn't matter. And then everyone acts like Perez had a bad seat in the renegades whenever the game didn't even matter, but whatever. I take ette, Right? Yeah, I think guano it is interesting because yeah, you mentioned he was at Tennessee, he was just a disaster there. But to Max's point, the NFL has seen some things in him and that might be one of the more interesting quarterback battles there of the eight teams. But yeah, maybe Nette might be the guy, but I'm interested to see what guano if he might have a chance in that. It's funny you're just talking like this is all coming back and see we lived through a whole CFL season after that. I'm like, oh yeah, okay. I remember the Miss Field goal. It all comes back to me like a fever dream here. Anything else with the roughneck Max? No. No. Alright, let's get in here. All right, the Showboats, remember when it was Andy and I, we had, what was it, bill here you guys are hating on. You're hating. You don't even know how good the showbox are going to be. Ryan Willis here, Cole Kelly, Troy Williams, case Cookes, captain, chef case, whoever. We'll go to John first on this one. They got some options here. I think The chef's going to be cooking down there. I think there's a reason that they wanted to bring him in. I think what DeFilippo wants was it was like, it almost felt like he's trying to put together A-U-S-F-L or XFL all-star team down there. I think if they can find an offensive line to give case CUAs some time to throw, I think he can be a very, very, very good quarterback. Max go to you. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think for the backup quarterback spot is interesting because you have Cole Kelly who was there last year. I don't know why Ryan will is here. He was cut on January 26th, so I don't know why he's on there. So again, that's truth. I dunno why he's here, but Case cooks definitely the favorite to start by. I'm intrigued in a backup race because Cole Kelly, he's got the physical specimen talent to him, but the performances just weren't up to par. And Williams, I'm in intrigued by because he was in that, he was playing in that title game last year for the Mallers from what I remember. So I mean, you got to say he has some experience. Maybe you pick the guy that's been put in those pressure situations as your backup and even though they're both relatively young players, so it's not like you're mentoring, but you pick the quote experienced guy I guess as your backup Max. Remind me with Kelly, I know they were kind of a 500 team. Was he replaced or did he replace the He replaced the starter there, right? Yeah, he took over a couple games into the season, I think from week onward, but his performances just weren't that good from what I remember. It's very average. You're right. Are we surprised? Case hasn't been able to strike more here back again. I mean he kind of feels like he's just kind of resigned to this life now. I mean, what do you expect? I mean, it's very hard for any quarterback from spring football to stick. I mean it's sticking around. It was PJ for a bit and other than that, McCarran I guess made it back, but he was already there. This was just a date He chose the UFL Max. He said, I don't want to play in the NFL. I'm coming back Until his season ends. And then he picks up a practice squad Check next year. I was told he chose Choosing both. He's doing it both ways because he knows that he can get picked up halfway into an NFL season. He doesn't even really have to be there for camp anymore. So he's getting all the money he can get while showing his kids what he can do on the field because he's just that cool, which is fine by me anyway. Give me case cookies is all the way and hopefully he gets another shot, but it's just an uphill battle for anyone that isn't a completely dominant player As a quarterback. John, anything else here? We'll get to the Panthers. Nope. Yeah, I'm on the chef wagon there. David's cheek here. Max. Anyone cut here before we go down This list? No, all these guys are still there. This is brutal. Yeah, John, go first. I mean this is brutal. I think I really thought that the Panthers were going to find another quarterback. I mean, I don't know. There are some people that are on the Danny etling wagon and I get that, but I think Davis Cheek played maybe two plays last year and I don't know that he played at all. They don't have a starter there to me. Someone's got to start, but to me they've got to bring somebody in. I like Davis Cheek and also I'll let you go, but I just want to make sure I mentioned because there's someone missing and I was checking to make sure EJ Perry is missing from this list and he's talented enough to start. So we'll see you anyway. Reid, it's your turn you go. Oh no, I was just going to say, yeah, this was Ralph on that. It crazy to me. Brian was worried. I still floating around here, still being all this stuff. Yeah, I, I'm with John Super. Not impressed here with all this stuff, but they had issues last year, right? So who do you see Me? Yeah. Yeah. So I liked Davis Cheek when I was watching his film from Elon. I was impressed. There's still question marks over how is that's going to translate from Elon to here and also how it's going to translate to Mike Nolan's system and the way they run things. But EJ Perry has been so lauded in NFL circles as a sleeper guy whenever he was coming out of the draft and things just didn't work out for him in the NFL. So if he can stay healthy and get playing time because for whatever reason he was on the Panthers last year, but he just didn't get play that much. I think he had one start and then I think it was either injuries or something else happened that he wasn't able to play and then he got picked back up on the NFL and he got let go again and now he's back here. So I would like to see Perry win it. I think he's the most talented player, but I think it's really between Perry and Cheek. Unless Danny Etling has some kind of weird career resurgence that I don't expect. Danny etling ISS one of those guys. Are we sure he should still be sticking around the NFL, but he's kind of somehow found a way. So maybe he'll prove me wrong and then we will have a big parade for him. John, anything else here? We'll get the last two teams. We'll get out of there. Well, I'll say that if you really right now, to me, if you want to look at the Panthers offense, you need to scroll down a little more and start looking at the running backs. It seems to me like that's the only way that these guys are going to get any offense going. Yeah, this is going to be rough. Okay, this is our team here, team of the Mark cast, the Brams here. Don't really want to buy any of the merchandise yet, but we can talk about the team. I know this list has been updated. Kurt's gone. Cohen's gone, right? Cohen's gone. Jack's gone. Max. I know you were happy that Jack Cone. We don't like to see anybody get Cut. Stat's also gone, by the way. I don't know why he is here on both. Wasn't he on the site for Houston too? So they double listed Sunnet You observation, but is Sunnet gone? He's in Houston. Okay, so he's in Houston. Okay, so ignore that. So we got Quentin Dormy and Chase my, I think you said Gerber's was my guy, right? I think Garber's is the favorite Garber just based on talent. Yeah. And his brother is, I don't watch college. I'm sorry, I just, Yeah, and his brother is playing for UCLA right now. So they're kind of like a football family going on over there. But I mean just based on talent, based on the NFL experience, the pedigree, you have to go with Garbers, but Dormy is not going to go down without a fight. He was an established starting quarterback in the XFL last year and he wasn't terrible. And also he was in a bad situation. So maybe he can shine with some better structure, with some better talent, with some better decision makers and maybe he'll prove me wrong and maybe he isn't just a doormat. We'll find out. But it's really between those two, it's two horse race. I'm so disappointed. I was really hoping Kurt had this big, I am choosing not to. He had this big, I really wanted Kurt to be on this team and then I could hate my quarterback. I mean, this would've been pure drama all season, right? It could have been a feud and then I could have requested to have him come on the podcast and then he could say no and then it would be like a Brian Scott thing all over again. Except that was a different situation because he was, we all remember how all that worked out. But John, what do you make of this? Yeah, I was more excited with some of the guys let go, but obviously Dormy and Garbage. Yeah, I like Dormy. I don't know that he'll be the starter, but yeah, as Max was saying, when he had the opportunity to play, he was just in such a bad situation in Orlando when he had the opportunity to play. I thought he was really good. So I would like him. Now, again, I'll defer to Max on Chase Garber's there. I'm not sure. Yeah, but Max, he texted me when gone, excuse me. He said when Coma was gone, he said Garver is your guy. Oh, okay. I don't know if he's my guy as much as he is the guy really. He's your quarterback and the guy, He's your quarterback read and he's the guy that it would be the expected starter based on pedigree and based on whenever you have coaches talking about how they want to bring in talent at the quarterback position and you land a guy like this, it was fringe seventh round, rafted. It ended up being undrafted guy went to training camp. You're going to expect that guy to be the favorite compared to a guy who was very unimpressive in college and did not make any kind of mark on the NFL in Quinn and Dormy. So, All right, we go ahead. Now, I'm going to tell you ahead of time, max, you're going to get triggered when I switch over to this page here. So I'm just giving you that. So we got the Hawks here. Tiano gone, right? AJ and then Brandon Silver's on here. Manny Wilkins, aj, I mean we talked about this off the top or aj, right? Yeah, I mean it couldn't be anyone else. My only curiosity is whether Anthony Becks wants to use Wilkins in a Dear King kind of role more frequently now that he's had more time with the team. I think they could mix it up with him a good bit That Tiano cut to me was, I mean, I guess it was ahead of maybe they knew that McCarran was coming back, but I was kind of surprised that he got waived. I wasn't because they brought in Silvers. We knew they were bringing in silvers and Silvers is a much more experienced and established quarterback. And Tiano is not the kind of guy who was going to want to be a third stringer who's never playing because he had his own decent pre-draft campaign and he has some talent and it was impressive. I remember Argo's guys were in love with him whenever they brought him up to camp. So he doesn't want to sit around on a third stringer and he doesn't have any special ability to be used in certain packages like Manny Wilkins can to be sort of a kind of running quarterback. So it just made sense for him to go, I hope he land on his feet somewhere. Well, Why are you surprised? No one's picked him up. There's still time DC give a ring ring and then In Michigan, right? We'll get, Yeah. Yeah. He should be on a Zoom with Mike Nolan anytime. Yeah. What was I going to say here? All right, anything else here, John? Battle Hawks? No, the Max Borge thing. I think for the Battle Hawks, I mean we're talking about quarterbacks, I know, but their running game, I mean they got some questions there, so they might need AJ McCarran to have another 26 touchdowns or whatever this coming season. And then finally we have it. We got a super chat, very rare Super chat here. Cards Nation Kaka order, baby. Let's appreciate that. Don't get a lot of, I listened to my post game Kraken podcast and they only get, they got like 500 viewers for the post game. Oh, thanks for the super chat. Thanks for the super, thanks for super. I'm like, I get one every four months of I'm lucky. So I mean, I Know the only reason I'm on here is because I'm a 99 cent a month subscriber. That's the only reason I got this invitation. I appreciate it. Yeah, you can become A member. 99 cents gets you a membership. It makes me feel good. Just when I look at my little analytics and I see my little pitiful rad ad revenue, I'm like, oh wow, I got a third of 99 cents here for John Lewis for the month, so I appreciate that. Bought my way onto the podcast. That's funny. Dollar and 33 cents to you. I like that joke. That's funny. Max, anything else here? No, other than got to love the 99 cent Army read. You got to love it. And despite all the frustration, the irritation, I'm just glad we have a season this year. It really felt for a long time, anything was possible and we could always still lose it at the tap of a button. So hopefully the ownership realizes their mistakes and appreciates the potential these leagues, these players have and truly makes something great and commits to it. My experience in the past tells me they are not so committed. I want to be proven wrong. Hey, you were there. You were almost to a positive comment there, max. And then you let it trail out at the end. I got to keep it real. I have hope, but reality says I should not. Well, I will say, and I'll toss to John there, I will say this, and it is interesting to me that I was always the big USFL hater or I was, what was I? I was the XFL hater when I said that they were going to get delayed and then it got delayed and then I was the big UL hater from all the US L people. But now that they're all right, we're all like, Hey, we're all UFL now the big, now I'm the big UFL hater and they're like, oh, reads so negative about the merchandise and he's so negative about this. And I'm like, again, I want this to work with RU here super sick now I've got three here, Man. Oh yeah, here we go. I'm Rolling, I'm rolling. I'm going to go. I can buy the Snickers bar of the store. But I've seen all of these from a fan or on the podcast I've seen, I've lived through all of this. I was nothing but me wants this to work. But when I see things that are, again, max and I have talked about this for years, unforced errors, there's so many things that go against all of this. And it's the biggest I about, so the unforced errors of having the UFL T-shirt on the shop the day, the launches, there's just stuff like that. That's what I'm nitpicky about. I leave the football and all that stuff to all the genius you guys and Pats and everybody, Andy and everyone else that comes on. But from just the fan perspective, that's where I can talk about here. And we'll go to John, our ship. My father-in-Law used to, when my ship comes in, our ship has come in here four 90. I don't think we've ever had a Four. We're going another couple hours, aren't we? Yeah, We're going. But John, anything else here? We'll round it out and then I'll get my final pray. Lou, we'll get out. Yeah, Reed, I think you make a good point. There's a reason if we didn't care, Boo boogie robbers checking in. Sorry to interrupt. All right, Boogie, Let's go checking in here, let's go. But if we didn't care, that's where when you start to get apathy from people who want this to work, that's when it won't work. That's when it dies off. So yeah. Okay. We're going to complain about, yeah, we wanted some more T-shirts. Yeah, we want some more merchandise. It's because we want these things to work and we're kind of monetarily invested, but we're also emotionally invested. We want these things to work. We want to see these players move on and we want a little something for ourselves here. It's great Spring entertainment. Yeah, and Chris is telling you there, I mean I know you hate these spring leagues is why you talk about it all the time, but no, I mean I'm more optimistic. I think though, kind of circling back to what we talked about to start off, I'm more optimistic with this because of the financial backing that it has because of the outlets it will be on with Fox A, B, C, ESPN. But also saying that I know that if this does not work this year, I don't know when we're going to see spring football on a level like this or on a scale like this again anytime soon. Yeah, I agree with that. And I think, I don't know, this is the best chance hoping that anything that they, if you've learned anything at least the last three years at least maybe of it. But again, we still see some of this kind of coming and going. So I don't know Max, any final thoughts on here? I want to add it, but we're all up to here with the BS right now about how these leagues are being run. And also by the way, speaking of bs, no uniforms either. Well, they're going to come out next week. I mean they spoil, they're going to training camp, so they're going to be next week. I will be on the cruise to the Cabo. Hopefully they're out next week. I mean, just because they should be out next week doesn't mean they'll be for sale. Will they be only register for an email list and then you have to wait until the start of the season to actually pay to order one? Who knows anything's possible. But doesn't it make sense for them to roll out those uniforms right before training camp because say, Hey look, here's what these teams are going to wear. By the way, training camp starts this weekend. Yeah. Yeah, they'll be, and again, it'd be Great if they operated based on what makes sense. It makes too much sense, right? Let me just say this. We'll see we we're a premium. We're paying for the premium cruise experience. I'm allotted like four wifi devices. We'll see if there's even there comes out. But I have a feeling it's going to be kind of the same whatever. John, I hope you're seated down here because you're really going to lose your mind here. Are you sat down here, Chris, $10. Chad. We're doing Act my age here. That is crazy. He about the good worker. Good hear you John and Max Antidepressants. Hey, we don't need to make Fundamental Health. I don't appreciate that. But I do appreciate the super chat. That was worth 10 bucks. Come on. This might make more money than our now John, I was going to say I know that John, John, I hold the record with John for the most viewed video on your channel. I don't know if any of 'em, I think our Gray Cup show finally beat all of that with the 67,000 views. But I think you had a good long run there for a while with the king of History. We ended up for about 20,000. I think It was good. It was good, it was good. Alright, so like I said, rounding out here, appreciate the super chats, appreciate everyone like and subscribe. We'll do training camp stuff when I get back. We'll figure out uniforms, I don't know. But otherwise, this is a good round out. We got everything that we did here, three 30 on the Friday, so appreciate John. Go check out his channel at John Lewis Sports. John does a lot of great shorter content. The more we just ramble on here for like eight hours. John does a lot more targeted. Let's talk to quarterbacks. Let's talk this. Let's talk the team legacies and all that stuff. Max, anything else from you? No, I've already said my piece on everything. I'll, I'll save one opinion for you whenever we get off. I want to finish the point, but everybody else knows it already and I'm just so glad we're here. Despite it all, despite it feeling kind of gloomy because of everything that's already happened up to this point, there's always a chance to turn it around. There's always a choice. And if they just make the decision to commit anything's possible. John, anything else? I didn't want to make sure you got anything you want to say? No, That was it. I appreciate being on it and being able to talk to you. I've listened to you two talk a lot and I was glad to be part of the conversation. That was a lot of fun. Well, this worked out. Thanks everyone. Have a safe weekend, get ready training camp and all that stuff. We'll see you soon.

CFL 2024 Free Agency News Roundup!!!

Well happy CFL free agency day, everybody. Also UFL rules release day. It's like they never, what is the least convenient way that we can do this for Reid? If it's not eight in the morning and it's here, it's on CFL free agency so we'll do that. If you want the UFL talk, I think Pat's working remote. I think Andy wants to get on maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow. So if you want UFL stuff, we'll do that. I've been talking with Sam Schwartzstein behind the scenes interesting stuff on that but we are talking CFL free agency today. I was thinking this is Jason's brain tiled. Thank you Jason. Coming on. We didn't do anything like this last year. I felt like we must've done prerecorded stuff, the live episodes now. But Jason, thanks for a suggestion. We do this, why don't you say hi, what do you have going on? Not too much. I actually taken the last couple of months off from YouTube so this is kind of me returning to the fold, going to be doing a lot of free agencies. I'm probably going to be doing a video on every team and all the moves that they've made as well as a top 10 free agents signings list as well. So a lot of stuff going on in my channel coming up and looking forward to getting back into it. Yeah, let be excited. We've kind of been snoozy here as well with CFL and UFL and I think this will be a little bit more how this channel and habits as well here moving forward. Jason's like me, we got to work, we got to do other stuff here. Evan also taking time out, schooling here. Evan, how are you doing sir? I'm doing good man. Excited to talk about some CFL stuff. It's been obviously a couple months since we've done that really since the Gray Cup, which is coming up on three months ago but it's that time of the year they're making moves and excited to dive into it. Yeah, I will just say I am disappointed in CFL because last year we got to do all the off season stuff. They had the coaches and GMs and the league was really great with scheduling and I was able to talk to the Sask people and I had on Sean Burke and everybody with Redx and this year it was like we're just doing a big group zoom call which does not do anything for me. I mean if you're dunk or whoever, I know Mike Mitchell was probably part of that. We can write up quotes to kind of do that but I really needed that so I am sad that we didn't do that this year so obviously I'll voice that to the league as well. But getting back into it like it subscribe if you're on your when you and UFL stuff schedule release last week and then obviously we'll be talking the rules and all of that as well. So Jason, we've been talking and I'll pull up I credit to three donation here with their kind of free agency tracker. I'll pull up here in a second. Major storylines today, I mean we have AJ Ette, we have Matthew Bets here, RIP BC Lions going to the Detroit Lions, which is interesting. What's kind of your major storyline that you've been tracking here? I think it's the Saskatchewan Rough Riders personally and just the makeover of that team under Corey Mace. I don't think their defense was a major problem last year but I think they've added a lot of quality players on top of that. Jamir Thurman, one of my favorite players in the entire league, played with my T Cats last year. I think it's going to be addition to the middle of that defense. I think that Malik Carney also coming over from the tie Kats, but as you mentioned a Joe led, I think that's going to be kind of a tone setter on that side of the ball for Saskatchewan and kind of changing their identity to being more of a run heavy team under Cory Mace. So I'm really good to see how Saskatchewan gels with all these new moves and of course as well coming over from Winnipeg. Yeah, because Evan, I was shocked when they had that AJ and obviously Toronto here this year and we've been talking a lot kind of in our group chat behind the scenes, them having to make a bunch of changes now. We got a paycheck, Kelly Moore and I think he was restructuring as well, but seeing AJ go to SaaS, I'm like it's kind of a waste just based on what Saskatchewan's been the last couple years but obviously kind of the revamp with coaches. Did you view it that way or are you excited for this move for him? Evan, can you hear me or you're frozen? Oh, you're not asking me. Okay. Yeah, you're all good in terms of AJ Ette, yeah, I mean I think him going to Saskatchewan I think is really good for the culture. He gets to be back with Corey Mace, who he was with in Toronto. Again, really like the culture fit. That's not something that's been talked about a lot. Obviously he's a really good player, one of the best free agent running backs on the market. I will say significant loss for BC though I think in my head I kind of pictured him being there. It made a lot of sense. We knew that BC's run game was lacking to say the least last season and we'll get into the guys that they added in some of their things. But yeah, AJ going to Sask, I mean massive boost and they had Jamal Morrow who I thought was decent but it's pretty clear now that he's moving on as well and he has his own market. So yeah, overall I think it's a good pickup for Sask. I mean can't not like AJ Ette in my opinion. He's one of the most maybe polarizing players in the CFL just with his attitude and his persona again all goes back to that culture fit. So yeah, I'm definitely excited to see what he can do there. It's interesting because we live through the whole Cody Ferdo of it all in Saskatchewan here and now you have someone AJ outlet, big time personality. Jason, do you think that that fits in there? Do you think he'll thrive in that? I mean I know Argos are big but you're still kind of enveloped in kind of all the other stuff there in the greater Toronto area. Do you think that he'll thrive in this? I think so. I think that it gives them a player to market around especially I think he has one of the biggest marketing opportunities of any player in the CFL. I think just the Thor look to him, the celebrations, all that. So like I said, I think he's going to bring a lot of energy to Saskatchewan. I think with the new coach coming over and Corey Mac being familiar with him, that helps as well. So I'm really excited to see how it works out in Saskatchewan and I think that think a lot of it will come down to Trevor Harris' Health. I think that if Trevor Harris is healthy with this team, I think they could make some noise in the west next year. Yeah. Evan, what do you make of that? I know we talked, I think Corey Mais is higher, I think came right at the end of our off season talk here at the end of the last season, but kind of rebuilding that culture here, I know Della Galles, right kind on the move and bcs have been looking at him. Trevor Harris, has he come back? Is that enough there? I'm kind of curious what Saskatchewan does for the quarterback. Yeah, well I mean just on the topic of Corey Mays first and the whole Saskatchewan culture and identity, I mean I think Corey Mays is a great fit for that. First of all, he's a player's coach and he's super young. I think he's 37, so brings a different type of young energy to that team in terms of fit for some of these players. Like with aj it was interesting, just going back to the point initially, the fact that he signed there is interesting because again, had he gone to BC you feel like he would be set up for more immediate success. Where Saskatchewan is obviously going through a rebuild, it might take a bit more time but with some of the guys they're adding, it really might not be a rebuild. I think they're in win now mode and maybe that's the way that that front office and Mace look at it because there is pressure there. I mean I think Saskatchewan has one of the best fan bases in the CFL. They have a good football culture at least amongst their fans, but I don't think that's been in the building the past couple of years. It hasn't translated to on-field success so they really need to pick it up quickly and so far, like I said, I think Mace has done a good job bringing in some guys and then just in terms of the quarterback situation with Trevor Harris, he's definitely older. Do I worry about his health a bit? Yes, but I think that it was the right decision for him to come back. He did play well in the few games where he was healthy last season, so I think that if you give him the right weapons again and bolster that talent around him, which they're like I said, doing a good job of then he will succeed there. Looking here, and this is neat here given the three down this little free agent tracker, I like this kind of being able to go team by team but maybe we'll kind of touch on each team here. We'll get out, won't be too crazy today timeline wise, Mason finds sticking around there, weird to me that he's still kind of the primary secondary option there, if that makes sense. Jason, we've lived through this. Do you see them making other moves here? What do you see Saskatchewan doing for that? We know what fine is at this point. Well there's not much out there currently on the quarterback free agent market, so unless they like to bring in somebody like Taylor Cornelius, they're certainly not bringing back Duke DAG gala at this point it doesn't seem like, so I'm very interested to see what happens with that. I was very, it really surprised me that they brought back Mason fine as the backup back there. Like you said, instead of Jake, I thought Dagal played better than fine last year, so I think we got a good look at both of those guys and I thought that Dagal looked better so that really shocked me and Dag Gall, like I said, is one of those guys that's still out there. Maybe he goes to a team like bc so I'm very much interested to see how they do next year. Well yeah, because then Dan Evans, right, he's on the move. I guess you want to drop that. I mean I don't know if he bounces around there. I mean we kind saw what he did with BC last year with Brenda Adams and all of this, obviously Jake Winkey moving on here as well from SaaS. Evan, any other thoughts on this roster development we can start touching around to some of the other teams. Yeah, well Dane Evan's retired so he's done, he's coaching high school football now, but anyway with SaaS, I agree with Jason. I think Mason fine, it's nothing against him. I understand that the appeal of having a quarterback that's been in the building now for a couple years, maybe that's worth developing, but in my opinion Jake Doga showed more upside so I thought that he would be the guy that they kept. I understand that his numbers weren't great last season but he was kind of forced into a bit of an unprecedented situation. He didn't have the pedigree yet. I think he started a bit too early, so I'm a bit surprised that they didn't bring him back. They're going to let him walk, go to another team, he'll probably be the primary backup for somebody. I'd imagine BC seems like a good landing spot. I would definitely take him over Taylor Cornelius and no shade to Taylor but I just, again looking at the quarterback market right now, I think Dole Gall would be a better fit but I definitely agree if Trevor Harris goes down again as we've pointed out, he's old, hopefully they can do some stuff with Mason Fun there. I agree with that as obviously I have my BC Lions and I think Dole Gall follows me on Twitter, which also just kind of helps bolster my opinion of you as a player. But Jason, I agree I don't want Corn Dog. I love Corn Dog. We've tracked him through it and we can move up to BC if we want, but I would take dag dag gala there as a backup. I think we saw a little bit of what he could do and obviously didn't kind of get the full treatment there in sco. What do you think BC is going to do and let me move up to their roster here. We can chat through that In terms of backup quarterback situation specifically. Yeah, First off and then we can attach the other releases and everything else. Yeah, I think D LA Gala is the more likely option. I think that Cornelius, he's been, he got released a few weeks back so he's actually been free to sign with teams for a while now. So if he hasn't been signed already, I think the chances of him being signed by a team, you'll probably get into a camp this year. But in terms of being a primary number two guy, I don't think the league that way, especially the way that it was a very long sample size that we got of him starting in Edmonton, so I think at the end of the day, D gala is much more likely to end up here in BC or maybe they just go the inexperienced route and go with a dunk rookie quarterback and take that risk behind be Adams. Yeah, and obviously here we saw today adding Dakota PCO is kind of the third short yardage quarterback there, Evan stand back. That was kind of one of the big signings BC had or I guess it wasn't, now they're kind of official but it had come out. Talk about that, I know you're high on stand back obviously losing Dominic Rimes here, a little bit of moving pieces here for the offense. What do you make of what BC is doing? Well, I like stand back, don't get me wrong, but I still feel like BC missed out a bit and part of that was because Brady Olive Oliveira resigned in Winnipeg. That was significant. People thought that he would be obviously the top back available coming off the incredible season that he had and he's a Canadian national which makes it I guess better depending on how you look at it for at least the roster rules. But yeah, William Stanback, it's not a bad pickup but again it's like you missed out on Vera, you missed out on Ette. Stanback as good as he is with that market that was available, it still kind of feels like you're settling a bit, so I hope Will has a good year. I think him being back with Vernon is a great pairing for the culture. Just looking at some of these other signings, I mean Dakota Pup I would say is one of the better short yardage quarterbacks in the league and the whole short yardage quarterback idea, I get that that's a bit controversial, but we saw him in the Gray Cup score multiple touchdowns and he had a stint in the USFL as well. Jake Hardy's an interesting one, people probably aren't going to talk about that. He is a veteran but I believe he came over from Montreal and was again one of these older guys that if I'm not mistaken, I think he had a lot of injuries and just never really, really got around to playing much and obviously won the Great Cup with Montreal and now is going to a BC team which has a decent chance of running it back you might say, or at least, well they didn't make the Great Cup but getting into the playoffs again and hopefully getting over the hump, but none of these free agent signings for BC are really eye popping to me. Again, stand back is obviously the big one but still feels like they lost some significant pieces and today, especially with the news that Matthew bets is now gone to the NFL, which we can maybe dive into a bit here as well. That's a significant piece that going to be really hard to make that up. Just a question for Jason and then we can talk through that. Yeah, the stand back thing, injuries and all that, are you worried here, is there too much wear on his body? I know he kind of started picking up again at the end of last season, but thoughts on because big name and it's exciting, but how do you feel kind of long-term here? Yeah, it's a potential high reward because we have seen what stand back can do what he's at his best and he definitely had some of his better games towards the end of last year like you said. But it's interesting considering like Evan said, all the different free agent running backs on the market. Obviously Vera, but also you got Kadeem Carey who's still out there from Calgary, so it's very interesting to see that they decided to sign stand back. Right. I know we got released a few days earlier so he was open to signing with BC earlier, so it's very interesting to see what happens with that. Obviously he's reunited with Vernon Adams there, so excited to see how he does, but I haven't seen the contract details with it, so maybe he's getting paid a little too much. I don't know. I haven't seen those numbers so depending on what the contract is really it determines how much risk there is there with that signings, but I think at the end of the day if stand back can be 80% of that player he was a couple years ago, it's worth it for BC because they really didn't have that element of that power running game the last couple of years. Evan, are you surprised that RA stayed in Winnipeg because obviously much demand I would imagine, I know that BC was one of the teams that was you kind of recruiting him but surprised that he took it there. I mean a good contract for him, but I think it seems like it was more of a loyalty to Winnipeg. Yeah, I honestly wasn't surprised. I knew that he might be available and teams obviously inquired they were offering up some incredible sums of money for him. I think there was a figure in the $700,000 range, which I was saying for a Canadian running back in the CFL is very significant. I mean that's like market defining type of money, but of course he didn't take that, took the hometown discount to stay in Winnipeg and I think it'll work well for him. I think he really fits well there and maybe it's like an unfinished business type thing after the loss to Montreal, but it is a shame that he wasn't, I mean he was available for other teams, but the fact that I think ultimately he just had too high of an asking price. I mean again when you're looking at $500,000 plus and that's kind of the low offer for a guy like that. I mean had he signed with another team, I mean that would've been probably that team's really only free agent move. If you look at cap space and things like that, I mean shelling out that much money for a running back just seems excessive. So maybe that played a role as to why he stayed in Winnipeg was just the market being the way it was. Teams having to offer up significant sums of money and of course get your bag as they say or whatever. And again, the fact that he stayed loyal I think is really good, but something tells me there might be more to that than meets the eye. But again, good for him, good for Winnipeg. I'm sure he'll do great things next Year talking about BC and let's get Evan's thoughts on this then we'll jump back to you Jason, in terms of the Matthew bets of it all moving on, I think that's cool. Obviously going to the Lions and Fitz, that kind of Dan Campbell and in Hutchinson, kind of all of that stuff that they have going on with the defense there. Evan, what do you make of him jumping ship and then we can go back to Jason Now. This one was surprising to me and part of it is just because Bets is a bit older. I believe he's 29. There was no doubt to me that he was an NFL caliber player. I mean you saw what he did in BC last year. You look at the tape, I mean it's one of these guys that was developed through the CFL where you're like, yeah, he could have a chance in the NFL and sure enough he has got that now and I'm also surprised at the timing. I thought this might happen a bit earlier on, but they waited until the official CFL free agent window, which means he was probably weighing his options and ultimately look good for him getting an NFL opportunity whether or not he actually makes it onto the practice squad or active roster through training camp, we will have to see. I'd like to think that the odds are against him as they are for most guys coming down from the CFL, so it's nothing personal, but the thing is if he doesn't make it and gets cut at the end of August or whenever the NFL trims their rosters we saw I think of like a Sean Lemon and I know Matthew Bets isn't as old as a Sean Lemon, but Sean Lemon was a late season ad for Montreal signed around the same time late August, early September and then goes on to have a dominant season and you're still fresh in the playoffs at that point because you haven't been playing a full CFL season prior. I could see a situation like that where Matthew bets goes and signs with a contender in the CFL if he does not make an NFL roster and again continues right where he left off from 2023. Yeah, I'm excited for him. Obviously he was on the show late in the season talking towards the playoff push and a really great guy and no nonsense. And again, there's a million factors to go into making the NFL roster, but certainly personality wise entering in there, I think that he's a super hard worker. Jason, we talked this transition and Evan, in terms of going from the CFL to the NFL being on the defensive side, is that more or less, I mean do you see him making the spot there and then obviously any other thoughts on him jumping back if it doesn't work out? Well, just to piggyback on the point about the age of bets when he signs this deal, most CFL players, they go to the NFL signed before at the age around 27. So he's definitely on the older side of that and I think considering that they brought him in here at his age, they don't see him as really a developmental player that you want to keep around on a practice squad. So I think that he actually does have a legitimate opportunity to be on the roster. I don't think he's going to be a guy that hangs around too much on a practice squad if he does get cut down there mostly just because of his age and NFL teams prefer to keep younger guys at that spot, but like Evan said, he could be a huge late season edition for one of these teams. I was really hoping that he went to Hamilton. It was rumored that they really put in a big offer for bets but a big loss for BC as well. And another thing in terms of filling the shoes of Matthew Betts, one guy I want to point out is Daniel Joseph who they added this off season finally he was their first round pick back in, I believe it was 2021 or 2020 and he finally decided to come up here and sign with the BC Lions national guy. So maybe he's a guy that potentially could start pretty early on in the CFL career now that he's up here. So it's going to be very interesting to see what they do ratio wise with vets going to the NFL. But yeah, huge loss for bc but it just makes more sense for vets to go to the NFL. It almost always makes more sense the players to take the opportunity down there. Evan, any other thoughts on BC because I want to talk about Edmonton. Do you have any other final notes here? So moving on here, and we missed a lot of this obviously we haven't been on, but obviously the mcg, the big MacCleod, Bethel Thompson, I can't remember if that was even in the picture when we last spoke here back before a little bit of our hiatus. Evan, what do you make here? And Chris Jones making lots of moves here. What do you make McLeod and initial thoughts on Edmonton then we can dive into some other players. Yeah man. Well Edmonton always stays busy and the MBT signing made a lot of headlines. I know that this did happen after we've last been on the show or talked or whatever. Yeah, I remember he was at a free agent camp in Houston and I knew a couple people that were out there and they were all telling me every CFL team was there and they had a close eye on him. They almost went to that event exclusively to watch him and it was pretty clear even by that point he was at this free agent showcase thing, but all eyes were on the CFL at that time. And I remember we did discuss this at the Gray Cup too with Farhan and Dave, a possibility of McLeod returning to the CFL. Now it's happened and it happened perhaps on the least predictable team, which made it even more interesting. Now McLeod, that signing was certainly a bit controversial, but I think what you have to understand is the way the fans look at this situation is a lot different from say Chris Jones or other personnel people, the decision makers not just in Edmonton but perhaps in the league. Look at that obviously Trey really turned around Edmonton season last year when he got the opportunity to start after Cornelius was benched. Really turned things around in the second half of the season. I mean it was night and day really compared to what they had before. But I think the reality, the way that they've looked at it maybe is that Trey is still developing, he only had so many games and while yes he did play well, they were able to start winning again. McLeod just provides that veteran option. He can teach Trey forward some of these tendencies and things like that because he's had so much success in the CFL. So I'm not against it at first I was a bit taken aback, I was confused. I mean again, with the money that they're paying him, it's clear that he's going to start, it's not going to be some competition or anything like that. He is their guy now and again, a lot of the people, I mean look, we've sung Trey Ford's praises and it's a shame that Trey isn't going to be the primary guy this year, but you got to keep in mind MBT is aging. There's always that chance for an injury and Trey could just end up stepping right back into the role that he was in for the second half of last season. So there's a lot of things you have to weigh there ultimately, now that I've had time to think about it, I'm not against it, but hopefully we do see Trey at some point this season and it's pretty clear that they're obviously going to try and bring him in on some package plays so that he still sees playing time and it doesn't hinder his development. I just pulled up here because I was like, what is the context? So up to 500,000 with incentive. So yeah, clearly this is our primary guy. I'll let Jason talk here, but I will say, and this is a pro McLeod Bethel Thompson podcast, we have Pro m be Thompson everything. I'm very against this and I think that obviously there is some sort of personnel issue between Trey Ford and Chris Jones I think is very clear at this point and him kind of begrudgingly putting in Trey last year and turning things around just to me and especially with all the changes there and I understand that the football and the field is different than we got to market to the fans, but thinking here, kind of all the goodwill going into the end of the season and kind of returning everything, now we're going to bring in the veteran and I get McLeod to me feels better than maybe a Beau Levi. I think that McLeod's got a little bit more goodwill. Maybe that's just talked with him on the podcast, but to me Beau is kind of the superstar echelon like hey, we're bringing him in. I don't know, McLeod, it feels a little bit more down to earth, but to me it's still well cloud it's old obviously kind of this last go around here, but I would hate to see you burn all the goodwill that you had and the development that you had with Trey and the goodwill that you had with the fans. With all this Jason, am I kind of out of left field or what do you think? I kind of like the signing personally. I think that as good as Trey Ford looked towards the second and half of last season when he was starting games, there were some very notable low points where, I mean there were some games where he was passing than a hundred yards before the fourth quarter. So I mean the consistency I don't think was quite there and I think he's definitely worked keeping around as that one B option. We've seen last year how many teams had to start games with their backup quarterbacks, eight of nine teams. So I think that we're going to see Trade Ford this, it's inevitable. I think that it's good to bring in a guy that's going to raise the floor of this offense and that's one thing you got to keep in mind with Edmonton is that they desperately more than almost any team other than maybe Ottawa, they have to win next year. And I think that McLeod actually does give them more of a win now option. I think you pair him with Curly Gittens Jr. We'll talk about more of their additions in a second, but I think that Curly GIS Jr had a down year last year with Chad Kelly, but the year before he was a legit number one receiver with McLeod Bethel Thompson as his quarterback. So really excited to see what he can do with McLeod in Edmonton and I'm really excited for this edition. I think that at the end of the day, the CFL, you need two quarterbacks and I think that as long as there's not a personal thing, like you said with Trey Ford and Chris Jones, I think if Trey Ford can accept this role, it might be beneficial for him in the long run. I just always remember talking to Trey Ford, he was sitting after practice and he was at Commonwealth on his phone doing the interview. Beautiful sunshine, just happy guy. I'm like, man, it was kind of a roller coaster follow up question to Jason. You mean in terms of Win Now just fan and everything with Ottawa and Edmonton, is that what you mean in terms of just trying to keep these fan bases? Yeah, I think in the CFL you can't have more than a handful of down years or even a few down years without losing a lot of that fan base in Edmonton it's been more dramatic than pretty much any other team in the league in terms of the downturn of attendance. So I think at the end of the day, Phil building starts with winning and I think that they desperately need to win next G rls jobs are going to be lost. Evan, in terms of additions here with Edmonton, Jason touched on Curly, anything else there getting rid of the corn dog, any other roster moves Dunbar are being released as well? Yeah, well I mean I'll talk about the two specialist additions but before that really quickly, just to put a cap on the MBT tray thing, like Jason pointed out, if Edmonton doesn't win this season, they might have to give it another shot, right? You're talking about guys potentially losing their jobs and more turnover because football's a winning business and Edmonton has not had a lot of that unfortunately over the past couple years. So bringing in McLeod Bethel Thompson as a more stable and reliable option I think is just because again, they didn't have the success or enough success last season to keep Trey Ford as the starter just because Trey Ford is still considered a developmental guy and yes, he showed a lot of good, but as Jason pointed out as well, the consistency was really up and down. And typically when you're committed to a developmental quarterback that happens at the start of a rebuild, but it feels like Edmonton's been rebuilding kind of every year. And at this point again, you're just ready to have that more sustained success and consistency. But I will say it's certainly one of those moves that's a decision and that is worth arguing in one direction or the other. Now looking at some of the other guys they've brought in, they poached both of the Toronto specialists, Boris Beatty, the kicker, and then the best returner in the league last year, Jevon Lee, I feel like those are both pretty critical additions. They're going to get overlooked. A lot of people say, oh well Edmonton's one of these teams that was at the bottom of the league in 2023 and all they're adding is specialists. But I mean you see how special teams, it continues to come up in these conversations at any level of the game, how important it's, I mean look at what happened in the Super Bowl with the 49 ERs in that whole situation where it wasn't really a muffed punt, but it was like, I don't know, I can't explain that I'm not, that's too many and o's for me, but the bottom line being special teams is really important and for a team like Edmonton with the situation that they're in, like the win now kind of aspect, special teams can win new games in some cases and we saw Jevon Lee Boris Beatty, how reliable those guys were and how they turned up in big moments last season, which helped propel Toronto to have the greatest regular season record in CFL history or at least tie it. So I think those are really critical additions. They're not the sexy additions. It's not some big edge rusher the million yard receiver. I mean I know they have Curly Gittens who Jason pointed out had a good year with MBT in Toronto at one point. But yeah, I mean I think you can't overlook what they've done up to this point. It's interesting, it seems like when they had Cornelius there and okay, we're going to bring in these receivers to try to elevate our quarterback and clearly that didn't work and now I think we're spending the money on that. Jason, follow up thoughts for that or anything else? It does feel like Edmonton like you said, really is in win mode right now. Any other thoughts on kind of the roster editions? In my opinion what it looks like, what they're doing is they're addressing the special teams, which cannot be understated for this team in particular. They have struggled over the past 10 years or so more than any other CFL team in terms of special teams. They just had that streak broken this year where they didn't have a kick return touchdown for what was it, almost 10 years or something like that, or a return touchdown of any kind. So that's a big deal for this team getting a guy like Jevon leak that obviously was special teams player of the year last year in the CFL and then Boris b, honestly, I'm going to make a top 10 list, like I said at the beginning of this live stream of the top 10 free agent signings by personal list and he's going to be on the list personally because I think that Edmonton arguably had the worst kicking situation CFL last year with Dean Faithful all things considered. But I think that Boris Speedy also on kickoffs, he has by far the strongest leg in the CFL and that can matter. It's not the NF kicks going into the end zone for a touchback. You got to be able to getting extra yards on a kickoff can matter a lot for starting field positions. So I think Edson looking to address their special teams with the additions this off season and then I think that they're looking for internal improvement in terms of the trenches on the roster, I think that you look out there on the free agent market, there's not a lot out there in terms of offense and defensive linemen. Maybe they bring back AC Leonard, but that's up in the air right now and I think the defensive backroom, I think I like a lot of their defensive backs there. I think they started mostly first and second year players last year and a couple of those guys really look like their S So I think at the end of the day if they can get that internal improvement in the trenches, I think that will do a lot for Edmonton's chances next year. Ed, anything else here? We'll scroll along. Alright, talking here at Calgary big, what was it we added in? We brought it in Shilts. I was trying to remember, look at this bringing in Shilts, putting it Mayor is going to have some competition here. Tommy Stevens obviously figuring out Evan, we'll go to you first. What do you make of Calgary getting competition trying to figure out this quarterback situation? Yeah, well Calgary had a lot of questions going into the free agent period. They had, I mean look at how many guys they had to resign so they had a lot of stuff going on. But look, I mean they were able to resign a lot of the critical players, but I'm really going to focus on the additions, right? I mean that's what the show is about really. The new faces, obviously the res resigning are important, but the two guys that I want to talk about that they added are Matt Shilts and Mario Houston. So I'll start with Matt Shilts. I felt like Calgary was a really good landing spot for him. I felt like there was some rumblings at one point about maybe Drew Brown going to Calgary and challenging Jake Mayer for his spot. Obviously Drew Bound ended up in Ottawa, we'll talk about that later. But you look at a guy like Matt Schultz and I feel like he brings that nice veteran presence. He can challenge Jake Mayer for the job, but it's still mayor's to lose in my opinion. But again, just gives you something extra to work with. And we saw Matt Shilts is still a viable option. He was able to perform in Hamilton last year. Wasn't anything crazy but again a reliable starter and just that in itself is hard enough to find. So the next guy I'm going to talk about, like I said, de Mario Houston was the CFL interceptions leader with Winnipeg last year. Really liked that edition. I don't remember if Calgary had any significant defensive backs last year and I might just be blanking, but if I don't, yeah, typically if I don't remember it means that it really wasn't in place. So when you go out there and you sign the CFL interception leader, that's significant and outside of the picks, I mean I really liked to Mario Houston's game in general felt like him and I mean Winnipeg has a ton of really good dbs. I feel like bringing him in is a significant ad, especially again for the room that they had. I mean that's really I think night and day compared when you're looking at 2023 to 2024. Jason, thoughts on that? Thoughts on Evans and I'll have a follow-up question for you. Yeah, I think that I was going to say about the Deir Houston edition, I believe the leader on the stamps and interceptions last year was Cameron Judge who linebacker. So that shows you that they didn't really take the ball away a lot in theary when your linebacker leads you an interception. So I'm interested to see how that addition does. And I think that it's always interesting with defensive backs whether or not they can replicate those takeaways year over year because sometimes teams stop throwing in their direction. So interested to see how Houston does next year with Calgary. And I like the Matthew Shilts edition, like you said Evan, I think that it's a guy that will push Jake Mayer, but he's not a guy you're going to look to as a huge, could be a mentor for Jake Mayer. And I don't think that it's realm of possibility that Jake Mayer could bounce back this year. We see it all the time in the CFL. So I think having that support option there and having an option to even go to Jake may struggled. They had really no one to turn to. I don't think they really trust Tommy Stevens as a legit starting option despite the fact he's been in the system for a few years. So it's going to be Matthew Schultz to support Jake Mayer this year in Calgary and it's good that they have that option. Yeah. Evan, in terms of the mayor thing and Jason bounced back, how long do we give this Jake Mayer experience? I mean I think he deserves another year. Look, I think the general consensus on Jake Mayer from a lot of people in and outside of the league is that he had a down year last year, but there's still the potential and you're just hoping at this point that he's able to capitalize on that potential because it feels like he keeps showing these flashes year after year after year. And that's why Calgary committed to him as the starter over bull I Mitchell because they felt like boli I was aging. We want a younger guy, Jake Mayer has enough tools to do that. Again, unfortunately last season probably didn't go as he hoped, but I still feel like he has a really high ceiling. I am still years later in that Jake Mayer fan club just because I've seen when he does flash these moments of greatness, they look really good and we'll see what happens. I think again, the CFL is a very year to year league, which is why typically I say one year with a lot of things because after that, I don't know, it feels like you can in some cases at least rebuild pretty quickly with the way contracts are structured. But yeah, no, I mean I think Jake Mayer deserves another year and I don't really think you question it. Jason, Tim Capper here with Alwis Flight Tech podcast. How's a comment? Remember mayor restructured his contract to help the team? Was mayor on some sort of big long-term deal here. I think he had guaranteed money as part of it. I think him and Cornelius guys to sign deals with guaranteed money as part of their contract. When they cut Cornelius, did they lose that or did he use up his two years of that? No, they actually are the first team with a dead cap on their CFL salary cap since they've introduced this rule. So it'll be interesting to see how much money is on the Elks for red cap next year, but CFL salary caps not that high so any dead cap can make a difference. So it's going to be really interesting to see. And one point I wanted to make in regards to Jake Mayer is that one thing he owned compared to a lot of other guys around the league is that he could stay healthy and I think durability is a big part of the equipment. Yes, not play well last year, but he got 18 more starts under his belt and maybe that experience, what he went through last year help with that. And also they're getting back Malik Henry from injury, he might be their biggest addition and he wasn't really an addition because I think he tore his Achilles week two or something last year. So him being back in the fold, he was their best receiver of the year prior. So I think that can really help their offense next year, Elks, as they're getting out of the coaches cap pits and all this stuff. Now we got the corn dog money on there. Evan, anything else? We'll scroll on down. Alright, we talked about Sask, all that stuff. Okay, Winnipeg here, obviously we talked to RA and all of that St Struggler coming back. We can talk about that as well, but Evan kind of initial thoughts on Winnipeg? Yeah, I mean St STR was the big addition. There were some rumblings that he was maybe thinking about a return to the CFL and we were so wrapped up in all the MBT stuff for a while. I don't think our minds were on reer, but I feel like it's a good ad. The difference is I don't think Reer is necessarily viewed the same way as he was when he was in the CFL, whatever it was five seasons ago. I think times have changed. I think now he's more of a role player, right? He's a pretty strict, not a short yardage quarterback, but a guy who's going to run maybe more than he passes. Clearly he did both at the NFL level. But yeah, I mean I think Reer coming back, just like I was talking about at the top of the show with a JO let and Saskatchewan culture, right? I mean you saw what Chris Reer did when they won the gray cup and he was out there in that fur coat raising the thing. And man, it's like you just love to see that. I mean, it brings that sort of passionate element and again, Winnipeg is one of those teams that has a really great fan base too. So to see Chris come back after all these years, do his time in the NFL, get that opportunity appear in a couple games, it's very wholesome. So I'm interested to see his role specifically this year, how much they actually use him. I have a feeling it's going to be less now that he's older compared to what it used to be, but he's clearly succeeded in the CFL before. So this isn't something that you really have to question much. I'm having to look on here like, okay, what's going on with you, Brad, because I kind of lived outside of the CFL. We'll talk Ottawa here in a minute. Yeah. Jason, are you nostalgic about the St Struggler of it all? I know they have the cool social media posts with the fur coat and all that stuff. Is this a big bump? I mean I'm happy to see 'em back in the CFL, but I don't think it was the most necessity signing in the world. I think that at the end of the day, I think he's going to be able to help the team in some ways, but how much of a difference does it really make with all Avera back there, all the other guys they already have on offense. Clearly offense was the priority for Winnipeg this off season. I think that they really wanted to prioritize keeping their playmakers around not just Dalton Schoen and Brady Oliveira, but also Drew KY that have been there for a few years now and been very productive players for them. And they've let a couple of guys go on the defensive side to M Houston, who we just talked about with Calgary. Ricky Walker was supposed to sign with Calgary but actually backed out. I think that's the first guy I've seen back out of a deal that was reported on last week, but he looks to maybe be on the outs there. Jackson Jeff Coat looks like he is going to retire or he did announce his retirement the other day. So I think they prioritized being good on offense or retaining the core of their offense rather than the defensive side of the ball. And I generally agree with that as a philosophy in building a football team. Yes, they lost Jim Mark Hardrick on the offensive line. They'll have to find a replacement for him. I believe they had a guy, drew Richmond who was veteran offensive lineman, had been in the system for three years. American guy that was potentially going to be their solution at that right tackle spot with Hardrick on, but at the end of the day, he actually decided to retire as well. So it's going to be very interesting to see how they solve those spots, but at the end of the day, I think it's what they were prioritizing. Yeah, obviously with Vera, all stre can come in and just kind of be that package guy. Evan, any other thoughts? Anything on Jason? Any other additions here? Yeah, well I think one of the things that was discussed when we were at Gray Cup in regards to Winnipeg was the age of that team and some guys were probably going to retire. I know Jason touched on, he didn't retire, but he's still not there anymore. He went to Saskatchewan off to a different team. I think the most significant loss is Jackson Jeff Coat. And that was really surprising to me that clearly he had a market based on what I was reading, but I think he decided it was just I'm either going to be here or I'm just going to be done. I say it's surprising because yes, Jeff coat's 33 years old or on 34, he's a veteran, but he played really well and he's continued. There were some people that thought that Willie, and I'm in belief for this too, everyone talks about Willie Jefferson on the Winnipeg defensive line, but I look at Jackson, Jeff Coat and I think he's just as good, to be honest, at least in some areas. Yes, Willie Jefferson is the athletic three. I mean his numbers are off the charts in terms of measurables, but Jackson Jeff Coat has consistently produced in the CFL since he arrived in Winnipeg in 2017. Every season he's gone out there and performed really well, especially last season I feel like I don't have the numbers with me, but he was getting up there in sacks. So yeah, it's sad to see him go. I mean I understand it. It's the nature of the game and he felt like he did his time. He had a fantastic run there in Winnipeg, two Gray Cup championships, so congratulations to him. And I exchanged a couple messages with him the other day. So yeah, I mean, just hats off to him on a great career. Jason, any other final thoughts on Winnipeg here? We'll move on just in terms of obviously last year in Gray Cup and coming up a little bit short here, things they need to do going into this kind of off season, pre-season, whatever. No, not really. I think most of the work has already been done with all the resigning they've done. I think when you have a team as talented as they are, I think that retaining a lot of the pieces of the roster is more of the bigger thing. I think that they need some youth in other spots, but I think they'll address that some of their American free agent signings and through the draft. So I don't expect them to be busy the rest of the week. All right. Let's move along here. Talking to Hamilton. Let's go back to Jason first and foremost here. Your team. You got the big Jersey on here. How is Hamilton doing here? Well, I mean since the last time we talked, I think that Bo Levi Mitchell decided to restructure his contract with Hamilton and come back to the team. That was very shocking to me. I thought he was as good as gone after the comments after the playoff loss and the fact that he only played but five minutes of that playoff loss this year. But I mean, the fact that he's back on a lower price point I think alleviates some of my concerns. It looks like they're going to go with him and Taylor Powell, which doesn't really excite me too much as a quarterback in 2024 in the CFL, but we'll see how it works out. Maybe there's a bounce back under Scott Milanovich now as the head coach in Hamilton, I think you're seeing a little bit of a culture reset. Maybe Simone Lawrence does not get resigned here. He's currently still unsigned here by the TCATs and it would be hard to see him somewhere else. But I think at the end of the day, maybe a change that's needed to reset the culture and the leadership group. They are in Hamilton after the change in head coach and the general manager. So it's going to be very interesting to see what happens with Hamilton going forward. The big question right now is Tim White, I think they really have to do everything possible to resign Tim White because the options out there are not very good. And you look at what Tim White's been able to do the last couple of years. Last year, number one in the CFL in catches this year was number one in the league in receiving yards. So he's a proven guy in this league, and there's not many other options out there in terms of guys that can really fill that role as one of the alpha receivers on your team. Yeah, I saw the report he's holding now. He wants 300,000. I think Dave Campbell was like, you're going to be sitting a while or doesn't know quite if the demand is there in that regard. Evan, in terms of the quarterback thing here, bill, this really feels like we just, I dunno, this to me doesn't excite me. We're kind of rolling back and the Taylor Powell of it all, like Jason said, this is kind of our last gasp and then next year we'll kind of figure out what we want to do. What do you make of Hamilton? Yeah, Hamilton's in an interesting spot. I really expected that they might've done more by now and they were one of the teams to watch, I think for a lot of CFL fans in terms of this free agent period. But a lot of their guys, like the one splash signing that I think they were close to making that we talked about earlier was Matthew Bets. But that's off the table now with him being on the way to the NFL quarterback situation there. I mean, look, I think Scott Milanovich can improve Bo Levi Mitchell, but again, we all know he's still not the future. So you still have a decision to make there after 2024. So if you're a fan, you're still kind of sitting there wondering, okay, well even if Levi plays better next year, that still might be it for him. And we obviously know how rough 2023 was for him. So hopefully things can turn around there. I mean, I have a lot of trust in Milanovich in terms of the guys they've added Dwayne Hendricks and Jamal Peters, I'd say are significant additions both coming over from the Argos. Really like Jamal Peters. He was a late signing last year from what I remember, but then came in and played really well. And then Dwayne Hendricks is an interior lineman. He also has played really well. I feel like he's more maybe a bit under the radar. Fortunately he got to play in Toronto, so a bit more exposure with their success. But yeah, overall, I mean Hamilton, I don't know, they're kind of in the middle right now. As Jason said, they still have a couple things that they need to figure out before we're really like, okay, is this good or bad? But yeah, I thought they would've done more now, to be honest. Yeah, don't know how you can be. I think you can be pleasantly surprised once the season goes out, but I can't see being a T cast fan right now, being psyched, especially just the piss poor, the last and gray cup and all that stuff. I mean, Jason, just in terms of the vibe there, I know where it's not as dire like Edmonton and Ottawa, but like I said, what are you sinking your teeth into? Yeah, exactly. I think that with the new coaching staff, it may take a while for this team to rebuild the roster in certain areas and obviously the CFL, everybody's in Win now mode. Everybody wants to win this year, but I think in terms of Hamilton, they may be a little bit more realistic in terms of not expecting really to be that top team in the East division. So I think it's going to be very interesting to see how it plays out this year. I think that, like I said, there's some change in certain areas like the line backing core Jordan Williams, a very interesting trade that they made a few weeks back, actually very convoluted trade. I think there were like eight draft picks involved with Toronto, just flipping back and forth. So it's very interesting to see that move that they made. He's an interesting player because a few years ago he actually was CFL Rookie of the year with bc, but then he kind of got overtaken by some other players that emerged as linebackers there in BC and then was traded to Toronto last year where he played a pretty big role. So excited to see what he can do as a guy with a very high draft pedigree was the former number one overall pick. So I think they're really going to lean on him given what's out there in the line backing market. They lost Jamir Thurman to the Saskatchewan rough riders as well, so it's going to be very interesting to see how that position group sorted out. And then you got the influx of Toronto Argos, like Evan was saying with Barlow, interesting rotational guy last year for the Argos. I believe he had eight sacks in a rotational role, which is very good. So you hope maybe playing an expanded role of that, maybe that becomes a 10 12 sack kind of guy and maybe becomes that Alpha pass rusher that Hamilton was really missing last year and they hoped they were getting when they signed Jager Davis back from the Argos and that just really didn't pan out. Dwayne Hendricks really good run stuffer for that Toronto defense last year. And then Jamal Peters was really a tie cat killer during his time with the Argos. I believe he had a game in 2022, so not last year, but the year before where he picked off Dane Evans three or four times. It was something crazy like that and I think having him on this side of the rivalry could make a difference to that defense. Yeah, okay. Jason Silver, Jason's, you never know who would've saw Montreal, right? Yeah, I think, no, let's get to the Argos here. I was like, are they next? So let's talk Argos here. We have been, and obviously Mike Mitchell and covering the for CFL versus the Sports Illustrated. Then I don't know if I've said it on the CFO podcast, we're going to be hosted on that as well, our CFL coverage. I'll be posting this on after. So that's awesome for Evan and Jason and just better exposure for everybody, so I'm kind of excited for that. So thanks for that. We're on there with Mike and Anthony. And Anthony I think right now is in, where's Costa Rica, right? And CFL, this is what we do. I mean Anthony's on the beach somewhere doing this, but we've been talking a lot with Mike about the Torontos kind of being raided here and falling apart. Evan, what do you make of this? Because there's been a ton of shuffling here with the Argos and kind of figuring out the Chad Kelly salary and everything else that we have going on. Yeah, Argos have lost a law and it started before even the official free agent period because a Darius Pickett whose situation was up in the air, was released early to go sign with Ottawa. Yeah, I mean look, there are additions, which I'll talk about in a minute, are good, some of 'em. But I mean you knew that with how good that team was last year, that teams were definitely going to want to poach some of that talent and they haven't been afraid to do so. Now the way Toronto has approached this, I think they're under the belief that they can develop the younger talent that's already in their building. They say, well, we don't need to poach these other rosters in return. We can just develop what we already have. The guys that you haven't seen yet, and there are some younger guys there that we didn't talk about as much last season that maybe we'll be talking about more this season with the losses. But with that being said, let's get into these additions. Jake Rena I think was part of the curly gittens trade. I'd say that's underrated, especially when you lose Dwayne Hendricks and a couple of the other linemen. I think Jake Rena has always been a force with the Elks. Again, maybe you don't hear about it as much because they haven't had the team success that you'd like to see. But I've always been a big Jake Raz and the guy came out of a D three school, really cool story aside from himself as an actual player, Tunde Adelade, that one was recent, him coming over from Hamilton. I know a lot of the Toronto people were really excited about that sighting or signing, excuse me, I remember his name. I don't remember him being maybe as dominant last year. I mean I could be mistaken. I just didn't get a chance to look at him in depth, but still a signing that people seem to really enjoy. And then the last one I'll touch on here is their kicking situation with Rim. Hopefully I'm not butchering that name, but Hara. Yeah, it's club. Yeah. Yeah, so that's a really interesting one. You lose Boris Beatty, you're like, okay, what do we do? Rim proven CFL veteran had time in the NFL has been in a lot of different places. So definitely feel like that's an interesting replacement. Again, bit outside of the box, they could have gone a couple of different ways there, but not against that addition on special teams at all. I like Rena. He's been on the show, he was on the show I think two years ago. I think he had some issues last year. He was involved in one of the injuries. I think he hurt. So looking to be a bounce back there. I know the Michael Ball, RIP with the Saskatchewan refer riders voice I think was very critical on all of that. But yeah, I guess ballsy not being part of the RYS anymore. I'm not laughing anyway, yeah, Jason Argo's got a lot of work to do here. Certainly not going to go the record they have last year, one of the winnings in CFL history. What do you make of this? Yeah, absolutely. I think it's just that there was no way given what they were able to accomplish in the regular season last year, that they were going to be able to bring back a better team on paper than they did last year or even the same team. There were just so many guys that were going to hit the free agent market that were going to command a big salaries by CFL standards elsewhere. And I think that they did a pretty good job. I think they did a really good job in terms of retaining a lot of the key parts and positions on the team. They got the entire offensive line coming back. I believe they're all under contract for most of 'em are under contract for two years now. And then you obviously have Chad Kelly who had the extension earlier in the season that he signed. So I think having the offensive line and quarterback set, I think that's a huge component. I think they still brought back to Boris Daniels, Diante Cox's back. So I think the offense is going to be very good still the question that running back with a Joe Ette who was obviously such a force for him, but I think that maybe they were wise to not spend a lot of the portion of their salary cap on retaining a running back in that case. And then I think the Rena trade, I think that adding the star power that he brings kind of offsets a lot of the losses that they had in terms of those two defensive linemen that are going to Hamilton in Brandon Barlow and Dwayne Hendricks. So I think that at the end of the day, there's still some questions with the Argos, like you said, they have some work to do in terms of replacing a lot of the players that they lost. But I think considering the fact that they were going to get poached either way going 16 and two last year, I think they've done a pretty good job and I think that they're getting a little too much hate right now in the general discourse. Hey, hey, hey. But Evan here, obviously losing aj, Andrew Harris retiring. I mean, what do we do here? What did the heart do for the running back situation? Develop the young talent, bring in new American free agents. I mean they've been making some moves. Again, bringing in these first year guys, rookies, whatever you want to call 'em, like Jeff ett, just one up there. I was really pleased about that. Kind of helped him along to get in that position. So I mean, again, a lot to prove next year, let's put it that way. But again, I think they're very confident and more so than maybe other CFL teams just because they've had that proven success in the past. And I feel like with player development, they do a really good job. I mean, hell look at Quantas stickers, that guy's probably going to the NFL now was just out there at Shrine Bowl was one of the best stories there, had a really good time. So you look at things like that and it's like their scouting department really does their due diligence. Yeah, it is interesting though. And the last question here for Jason on this, your thoughts on that. I know Mike was talking with a lot of the guys involved, Argos football ops people and like Evan said, we don't need to pay for any of this. What do you make of that as a mentality? It is a stance whether you agree or not. Yeah, I mean you can't retain everybody and that's a fact. I think that you have to decide what positions on your football team are important to the core of your team wants to become a winning football team. And I think that Winnipeg has done a pretty good job at doing that the last couple of years. Winnipeg's actually been able to keep much more of their team together than a lot of teams that have had success over the CFL's history. But I think even then they've had to make some tough choices over the last couple of years. I think a couple of years ago, I know they have Kenny Lawler back, but remember when they lost him to Edmonton? So I think at the end of the day they had to make some tough choices and I think that there's still enough here. I think they have to answer some questions in the defensive backfield. I think they lost a lot of guys in terms of the secondary there. But I think with Jamal Peters going to Hamilton, that's a pretty big loss for them, but I think they can replace those players generally speaking. And that's generally a position that comes at a lower cost than others. So I think it's very interesting to see what they're going to do the rest of the season and then the rest of the off season that is. And I think in terms of the running back position, a name to keep in mind is Kadeem Carey who potentially could get for cheap considering the year that he came off with Calgary. So it's going to be very interesting to see what they do to solve those few positions that may look a little weaker on paper with his team. But like Evan said, they have a tremendous record in terms of player development. I just like, well, you can't retain everybody. Well, we're not going to retain anybody, don't worry. I did the joke that the Toronto losing to Montreal last year and getting just smothered was in setback to Toronto fan base attendance for the next generation of hands. Moving to Ottawa here, we got two more Ottawa, Montreal, we'll be good here. I figured hour 15 will get out. I don't want this to be like, I want someone to theoretically be able to watch this over the course of the week. Evan, thoughts for you? The Drew Brown trade where he ended up there, Dom Rimes getting signed at BC and the receiving court, they're getting shake in that period. What do you make of what Ottawa's doing? I love what Ottawa's doing. They've made some swings and I think they're all the right swings. Well let's start with Drew Brown, kind of the elephant in the room again. Couple different places he could have gone. I like the fit in Ottawa. Looks like they're going to have a battle in camp between him and Jeremiah Maoli. Who do I give the edge to in terms of that competition? I mean, drew has a lot of hype as a young guy, so we will see, but I think his upside, there's a lot there and we've talked about it before. Sometimes when a guy goes from a secondary or complimentary role and then becomes the starter, his play can drop off a bit. But again, with the things that Ottawa is building around him, look at Dominic Rimes next guy on that list. I mean huge addition from BC for them. And I mean that's actually where Rimes started his career I think back in 2017 in the CFL. Played a few years there, then went to bc, now he's back. That's going to help Dominic Rimes out a lot or Drew Brown, excuse me. And then upfront you've got Darius Bla who came over from Toronto. I think he's a great lineman, a guy that doesn't get talked about enough. And then finally a Darius Pickett who again I feel like is super underrated. Another guy who doesn't get talked about enough who also came over from Toronto. And that deal keep in mind was done before the true free agency period because a Darius picket was released from Toronto early. But yeah, I mean just those four signings right there and they're not done. I think they're doing some great things. And again, that's what you want to see from a team that has had some serious misfortune and some records that you really want to look away from and move past from over the past couple years here. So really what they're doing really hope that they can keep it up and maybe get another piece or two to really wrap out what has been, I'd say a phenomenal class. Even just with four editions right there. Well, no, we had a lot of talk going into the off season. What is Ottawa? We like Sean Burke and he's been on the show and I think when they did that whole behind the R thing, I thought it was really good just showing the inner workings of how this organization kind of looks for talent. Obviously the Moz, miss Fortunes, all that. Jason, are you as high on Ottawa here going in? Well, one thing you can say when you look at Ottawa last year, what were the three biggest issues if you had to point for the overall season? Probably their quarterback play and the health of the quarterback position. The lack of explosiveness in terms of the wide receiver talent that they have and just a lack of elite playmakers in the secondary. And I think they addressed all three with these additions. I think Drew Brown, could he flop a lot of these other guys that have started only a handful of games then go somewhere else. And again, a starting opportunity, sure. But I think at the end of the day it's worth taking a swing on. I think he's probably the most promising looking of those kind of guys right now in the CFL and I was kind of hoping that Hamilton would make that move, but at the end of the day they decided to go a different direction. I think Dominic Rimes really provides that potential field stretching explosive element if he can stay healthy. He's obviously played in Ottawa before back in 2019 I believe he had over a thousand yards with the team, so I think he could be a very effective player there. And then I think a Darius Pickett is one of the true superstar defensive backs in the league. And yes, I consider strong side linebacker, defensive back position because they're more similar body types than traditional linebackers. So I think at the end of the day, those three guys can make a massive impact on this team this year and just got to hope it all comes together. Yeah, Evan, because with Mozilla and all that, we don't know what is, it's been so long now and coming back and with the multiple injuries. So I mean I think Drew Brown great kind of insurance policy there. Jason said probably one of the best that was available on the market to get. Any other thoughts on any of the roster stuff or Mozilla or anything else? I mean, I'll say with Drew Brown, the fact that they traded for him shows that it wasn't just interest. It's a certain level of commitment and when I say he might have the upper hand on a guy, it's just because of how much they were willing to put in. They essentially got him early, they traded for his rights, whatever. Kind of weird how it works out. I don't think you trade for the player directly up there. You trade for rights and then the guy signs later, but it was pretty clear Drew Brown was going to Ottawa with that trade. So yeah, I think it's good. Really like what Otto has done and again, last season I was really thinking that that was going to be when things turned around and I've really been pounding the fist on the table for that team for many years. So again, now that they've made some swings here, I mean really, really hope it goes well because again, like Edmonton, those are the two win now teams in the CFL. And when I say win now, I mean right now when the season starts immediately. Jason, any other thoughts here? We'll circle down to the ettes. No, I just kind of hope Edmonton that odd while finally gets its act together because it's been tough to see both of those two teams struggle for the last three years since we came off of Covid. Well, I mean in the time that we've done the podcast, I don't know what you have to be a fan of if you're an Ottawa fan at least I think, I don't know with Edmonton and just more of the historical and the City of Champions and the history of the last all these years and what five Great cups, all that. I dunno what it is to be an Ottawa fan here in 2024. So hopefully, yeah. Okay, here we go. Evan, last team, your reigning, defending great cup champions here, obviously losing the stand back and all that Sewell, right? Did Armando, where did he end up Yet? Yet? Nowhere yet. He requested his release though, so that's an interesting situation. But I will say with Montreal, another team that has some significant losses and you look at their two guys that signed with the NFL, Austin Mack and the Wall uac, both of those guys were very effective players, not just in the Gray Cup that we saw, but throughout that entire season. Austin Mack in particular was fantastic. We sung his praises many times when we were doing regular shows back in the CFL season last year. So I'd say they've probably lost more than they've added, but I don't feel like they're in a bad spot. With that being said, their additions, they're not bad, they're not anything like your socks off. Sean Thomas Arlington think he came over from Hamilton has always been a complimentary back in his career. Tevin Jones, like guys getting older, think he came over from Saskatchewan, has the NFL pedigree, but I don't know. I mean is he going to fill Austin Max shoes entirely? Probably not. So maybe they'll again develop one of these Americans, maybe find another Austin mat because keep in mind, he was technically a rookie last year. That was his first season in the league and he caught on pretty quickly to say the least. So yeah, I mean Montreal after a championship season, sometimes you do see these changes and of course with them winning the championship, I think attracted eyes towards their talent and they lost two guys to the NFL, which of course congrats to both of them. Austin went to the Falcons, I think Lewa UAC went to the Buccaneers. So both of those guys on the way to the NFL great to see, but at the same time it leaves a hole and you're going to have to fill that somehow. And we've seen it with other teams too. I mean BC and Matthew bets, I know we didn't mention it earlier when we were talking about Hamilton, but Tyreek McAllister really happy to see him get an NFL opportunity. I think he, he's one of those guys again, he's young enough to where he can actually make an impact and push for a roster spot, not just a camp body or anything like that. So yeah, ultimately look holes to fill, but I think they're still working on it. Tim here commenting, he thinks Amando, they probably asked him to restructure his contract and he says, remember Reggie White Jr will be back healthy in 2024 was out the entire 20 last season. That's true, yeah, with Montreal, no one really had any expectations and then you win and then you're like, well now there's a lot of expectations around that. Jason, final notes, thoughts on all this and then we'll put things to be here pretty soon. Yeah, I think that in terms of their additions, I think Isaac and Demi Bergland is not too bad of a replacement for a al ak. I think he's a guy with a lot of potential former first rounder, I believe third overall pick from Calgary a few years back and he had produced pretty well with Calgary, so keep an eye on him. I think Kevin Jones, couldn't he be Austin Mack? I don't think so, but I do think that he can be a productive receiver. I believe he had a very productive season last year in Saskatchewan. Surprisingly, it kind of surprised me when I looked him up and I think at the end of the day, I'm not really going to doubt this team any longer given the fact that last year I really thought their wide receiving core was really lacking going into the season, but then they pulled Austin nack out of nowhere. So I think at the end of the day, I trust this organization right now. I think they resigned a lot of the key players, especially on the defensive side and I think that at the end of the day they'll be able to be a very solid team again this year. Before we get out of here, I guess final, Evan, who do you feel strongest for here in terms of their moves? You're heading into the, at least just through all this free agency stuff? Yeah, I mean you heard me raving about Ottawa feel pretty good about them. I think that's going to be my winner in free agency so far. But of course there's a bunch of other teams that are making moves. It's always fun to follow this process because I feel like everyone says winners and losers and free agency, but I feel like it's pretty balanced in the CFL because there's just so much talent available. You're always going to get somebody that can produce and that can come in and have a good year, maybe replace somebody that you lost. The other thing I want to touch on here, not necessarily it's related to CFL free agency, but it isn't, I would definitely keep an eye if you haven't already on the CFL transaction wire. Just because for anybody who is a fan of all leagues, a lot of XFL and USFL guys making their way up to Canada and look, I don't know how many are going to make final rosters. It's probably not going to be a ton just with the numbers game. These guys are all, a lot of them are first year CFL players. Some of them had been in the CFL prior to XFL experience or whatever and they're making a return, but a lot of them are heading to the CFL for the first time. So keep an eye on that. There are some names, like I mentioned Jeff Bette earlier. That's the guy that I think could break through as we like to say because that is a bit difficult to do in the CFL when you're young and you're an American. But yeah, I would just keep an eye for that as well because those obviously aren't going to be listed on all the guys that we talked about, but they have added some talent that we didn't discuss during this stream that still could make an impact in 2024. That's a good point. Jason, who are you HIAs on? And you can't say the T cast. I wasn't going to say the tide catch Jessica's the quarterback situation by itself, but I would say Saskatchewan. But it's always interesting to see the teams that make the biggest splashes and I think they are, without question being the busiest team in terms of adding players from other teams. I think the question of whether or not it's going to be one of those teams that gels quickly and has success right away or is this going to be another Ottawa situation like Ottawa a couple years ago, remember they signed a bunch of guys day one, a free agency and the results just didn't change. So very much looking forward to seeing what they do, but on paper I think they've added the most talent. Yeah, I like what Edmonton's doing the save for the McLeod thing not there. We'll be curious. I would like Saskatchewan to be better here. I mean again, we have a very limited history of covering this league, but I would like to see some switch of Ottawa not always being at the bottom. Edmonton, not always being at the bottom, Saskatchewan, kind of all that stuff. Last thing for me, and I mentioned it kind of during the stream, but we're going to be now and obviously we're going to be on YouTube and everything, but the CFL podcast is going to be over on the CFL at Sports Illustrated Fan Nation site. So I'll be putting it up on here and they'll be sharing it, what this comes out. But make sure you follow them. Mike Mitchell's writing for them now both on the UFL side, they have the UFL page and then the CFL page. Anthony Miller's on there and then our podcast is going to be on there as well. Have a good exposure for that. And they do a lot of stuff on Facebook as well, kind of sharing that stuff. Evan, anything else from you before we get out? I don't think so man. But another good show and always exciting to talk about this wide variety of players that comes into a league like the CFL. Yeah, exciting. Get back into the CFL stuff. We'll be starting to do more UFL training, current previews coming up here. Once we kind of get through all of that stuff, I'll be gone next week going to Cabo on the cruise with Dorothy and my mother, so that should be a wonderfully fun. So if the world that breaks next week, maybe I'll be at port side on the laptop, but otherwise that'd probably be off. But I do think the podcast is going to exist a little bit more in terms of 10 pole events right now like this and we'll get some CFL stuff coming up. So appreciate it. Stay subscribed and thanks Tim for checking in and everything else and we'll see you guys next time.

UFL 2024 Schedule Released, What YOU Need to Know! Week By Week Analysis!!

Well, happy Monday here. Welcome to the Markcast Reid here. It been a while, probably the longest stretch it's been since the show. I think we did the supplemental draft here about two weeks ago. Sent Andrew Murray the link he's getting on. I was making coffee, getting ready to go here. Wanted to make sure we got on here. James, checking it. Let's go Mark ca. Appreciate it. Yeah, like I said, lots of things going on. Glad that we could be back on here. Today, the UFL 2024 schedule has been announced and while we wait for Angie Murray, I want to please comment any complaints against the schedule, any compliments. I've seen the DC Defenders fans complaining there's no Saturday games, right? Or they want more Sunday games. So let me know what you want. I will just say if there's, and I said this before with a supplemental draft, if anybody in the world is ever listening to this from the UFL, I understand that the West Coast is probably not your target audience here for the 2024 UFL season. There is no need for an 8:00 AM Eastern Press conference when seven of your teams I think are in the central time zone 7:00 AM. It kills me. We go out Friday two five, we're doing all this. Two five schedule's coming. Sunday schedule's coming. I got up at six 30 today thinking maybe I'd swing and kind get ready to go here. I think we had always planned on going at nine. I wake up poo poo, it's been gone 5:00 AM press release moving on. If you want things to matter, make them matter, but it's such a complete fumble of the ball here coming out Friday into all of this stuff and then here we go, 5:00 AM press conference, here's some Pokemon whatever animated or here's some emojis and then moving on. So that's my 2 cents. I am excited for this. As I've said, we will be at the kickoff game here on March 30th. Have all that booked. We'll posting all of our other stuff, guests and all that. Don't know about the championship game book the wedding here in the off season for that Saturday. So that might be a quick turn, but we will do that here at Denzel. Checking in. What up? We got Jenna here checking in from Southern California. Really appreciate that. So we'll get the schedule pulled up here. I see Andrews getting ready to go here. I just have my rant. So I think that that's out of the way and feeling refreshed here until all of this went down, but we are here. Dan Quinn is my head coach now. Apparently we have Cliff Kingsbury. Lots of things going on in breed's life here. Andrew, I know that we had talked and you said I feel refreshed. I am negative refreshed now coming into today. How are you doing? Just because of everything that happened this morning. You're negative, refreshed. I was so excited. We talked about this last week. We're going to do the schedule. All this. I wake up whatever time Dorothy got up, 6 25, Seth texted me, he's like, Hey, did you see this? I'm like, is out. It's done. It's done. It's all done already. Here we are here, we got 55 whatever people watch right now. We'll go through all the numbers, everything. What do you make here? How are you feeling today? Let me get the schedule pulled up. I mean it's finally out. I am glad that there's at least something concrete that people can start planning around and have time to look at for not only their viewing schedules but also if they want to travel the games that's finally in full view about a little less than two months out from here from the start of the season. I will say the unceremonious release of it is to be expected. I think at this point, considering everything that we've gotten from both of these leagues the last few years doesn't seem like there was going to be a big rollout. The 5:00 AM release time is hilarious for US West coasters as you were going on and on and on about I know for, I just wanted to get it out now I'm done. I've set my piece. I'm good. I mean for me it's all information at the end of the day, but I understand. Look, I mean we'll go into it a little bit later, but obviously with there being no West Coast teams, maybe there's no appetite to please the West Coast market, so have at it as you will, but that was a very USFL move I will say because that's definitely something they pulled off last couple of years and I understand that there's no teams that really, not many teams that are west of Texas, so I understand that there's not really a need to placate to them, but still I understand your voracious attitude about it. But again, and this is why I said reach, I understand, but I think except for dc, seven of the teams are in the central, right? Because Memphis is central. Birmingham is central, right? St. Louis is central, all the Texas teams and then that's it, right? And then you have DC so I just don't understand this. Even the USFL in 2022 was that they did one thing per hour, which by the end of it you're like, okay, we're done. But at least that was kind of a clever way to do it. I'm available for consultation free of charge here if anyone wants to do that. I checking in here. I'm getting everything pulled up on here, but no, so we know all of that stuff. Let's just check in here. We'll get a couple comments we get out of the way. Christina, I got vacation time ready to go about hooks, battle Hawks versus Battle Hawks versus Rev next. Kaka. Yeah, Christina is one of our new members. If you wanted to be a member join. I think it's a dollar a month but it gets your things spotlighted on there. Jordan checking in as well. Andy, any other UFL thoughts while I get the schedule plugged up and we'll get into it. I want to make sure this is a little timely. Well, I just wanted to say I'm glad that you had that stream with Mr. Vogel and were able to get that information out about all the things about the draft of dispersal draft. All the players have been reallocated, so having John on there was really great. As far as other information, what is going to come to fruition? I mean we really have most of the major information. I think the only thing is obviously training camp, see who shows up, who is going to be in the throes of being acclimated to the team who is returning. There's a lot of that still to be discussed in the next couple of weeks, but I would say for the most part, I mean most of the major information is there, the allocation of where all the seats are going to be in terms of each stadium. I'm still curious about as far as where everybody's going to be sitting. We've seen some things, obviously your friend, our comrade, I guess Corey putting out information about the Memphis and where some of the seating charts are. Same with the stallions. That's the only thing that I'm still curious about, but most of the information I think now we have set in place. Yeah, it's funny. I've seen some, I'm just adjusting. I got a new little poster there in the background. Do you like that? My Winter classic poster I've revamped. I have no beard, no comments about the beardless read here, but that's good. Some interesting seating charts I have seen the stallions one I thought was interesting and then the Memphis one, it's like we've learned from the XFL, we're only going to put people on the one side of everything. I will say and just a comment as well, I posted yesterday like hey, we're going live about all this. Not to throw Mark under the bus, but Mark commented B Brendan, a couple others. Are we done with the recorded shows? At least for this kind of stuff. This is where I want to be. We have comments here coming in exciting for that, but for the sustainability of Reed's Welfare and the podcast, I do think we're leaning a little bit more into this. Not to say that we won't get but these two and a half hour pre-scheduled whatever, that was awesome. I've had a really busy last month, which is great for my personal life and just business, but I also don't know what I'm doing for two and a half hours to predu interviews in the off season. I think Hussy and Evan and I are going to get together for a c Ffl free agency one. So stuff will be coming, but what was I supposed to talk about the last three weeks? So we're into all that. So we have here the opening weekend. We knew March 30th, St. Louis Battle, so we knew the dc Okay, I read all this and this off the top. We have the opening one and then we have the actual, okay, March 30th year, brilliant. Hee stallions, Arlington Renegades, who know about that one o'clock eastern on Fox. Then the other three we are going to have the battle hawks traveling to St. Louis or traveling to Michigan. I think that there's issues with the dome hosting four o pm on Fox and then we have the two ESPA games on Sunday. The DC defenders at the Brahmas would like to see that open at home and then the Memphis Obos at the roughnecks. I want to talk about kind of the network delineation of everything, but what do you make of just that? Now that we have the opening slate of games, For the most part you're getting a lot of U-S-F-L-X-F-L crossover here, which is good. I think you want to showcase that immediately and say, Hey look, I know you thought these two teams were in different leagues. Guess what? They're all together so that's good. Obviously most of these stadiums we're familiar with Rice Stadium being the question mark. We're not sure how that's going to work out and what the setup for that is going to be for Houston, but everything else is familiar. You and I have both been to the Alamo Dome, I've been to CHOC to stadium, you've been to Choctaw Stadium, so I'm familiar with that set up. Fort Field I haven't been to yet, but obviously they hosted games there for the Panthers last year, so a lot of familiarity. I do think it's funny that the Battle hawks for the third straight time by being put on the road for week one, everyone makes so much of a big deal about how much home field advantage they have. Well maybe both leagues or any iteration of anybody who has ever watched the St. Louis Battle hawks understands that and decides not to get that for some reason doesn't want to spoil that out of the gate. It's really funny to me that they just keep putting them on the road in week one. Now I know obviously it must be like whatever the Edward Jones dome must be doing something and there can't be, there's not really enough space for all these teams to be able to play in their home markets the first week, but I do find that really funny for once again, they are going to be on the road. Well, I think that's the plight of the St. Louis Battle HOK fan. I'm just commenting Mark, I see your comment here. I'm just commenting some questions we can get to in a minute. Yeah, that's the plight that the Battle Hawks fan is we open on the road, we travel, like I said lot at least a lot of the matchups have to do with stadium availability. It's the same with the CFL. When we get that, I'm like why aren't the Argos at home? Because they got to deal with BMO Field has a lot of different, what do you call that? Inhabitants? A lot of people using all of that. Yeah, we have Andrew Sam motocross is at the dome March 30th, so that is for that some key breakdowns here and it was funny, Mike tweeted this. I was like, how did he get this math so quick? And I'm like, oh, it's from the press release because I was like, wow, Mike was crunching the numbers here really quick. I was really, and by 6:30 AM wake up call. It was really stuff. So we know this 43 UFL games, 40 regular season, the two conference, one championship game divided into USFL and XL. Andy, have we got your thoughts because when we were on here talking about this conference breakdown, that's not how they're going to do it and I didn't realize it was so controversial. I think this is the smartest thing to do. I think you paid the money for all these trademarks and everything. We're not going to let go of this ip. We're going to keep the conferences. I think that's hot. Yeah, I think we discussed it a lot. At first I wasn't so sure about the idea of keeping both of these entities around, but now that they have gone through the entire merging process, I suppose it makes sense now that you have the IP still in your back pocket, you still have the XL and you still have the USFL, so how much division that's going to create between fans would still remain to be seen. But I do think that there's a lot of positives in terms of keeping both of the ips and knowing that you still have those copyrights in your back pocket. And again, familiarity teams and players and fans that know which league both teams are represented by and not saying necessarily that they're going to another division or they're going to get commandeered or bought out by another conference. So that familiarity is there. I am really curious to look at some of the TV scheduling, which I know we have a lot of thoughts on, but I will say from the outset, this is fantastic. How many different big networks that they have this on? There's none of this FX stuff. There's not all these FS one games, there's no peacock, there's none of this. It's just basically network television for the most part. Obviously a little bit of cable there with ESPN and then ESPN two and one FS one, so you're getting it out there and you're putting it on major networks, which is really good. That's the combined power of having both of these leaks together and that's what both were missing the entire time because they split the difference as opposed to when we saw basically an iteration of this in 2020 when the XFL was on all these networks. So we're kind of back to equilibrium here and we're able to have all the resources and all the network contracts formed together again. Yeah, I mean this was the prince that was promised, right? This is why we're merging. It's because the XFL better business model, the XFL was able to engage fans it seemed at a higher rate being in the markets, the USFL, their hub model. Obviously it's the slow growth as well, but we're kind of combining those now. We have the power of everybody, we don't need to compete. Yeah, I mean you go back and even the XFL, I think this and just from the pure numbers and we'll get into the week by week here, but this to me even on paper is a far better schedule than even the FL. When you look at the breakdown here, 10 a BC games, 21 Fox games, that's expected, right? Fox carrying a lot of this stuff, ESPN 10 and then only two games, an ESPN two game and then an FS one game that to me, like you said, this is something you can tout and say this is if you're network executives, if you're UFL people now I always keep wanting to say XFL or USL, but if you're UFL people here, you can tout we are putting this in the best position. This is why we are merging. And you can say that earnestly right mean by all accounts and we'll get to, there's some overlapping games and we can look at time zones or times that the games are, but on paper this looks good and you can earnestly say, we are making an effort here to make this work. Yeah, no, absolutely. You finally have numbers that you can show a lot of network numbers and look, here's the reality of the viewership and we've talked about this a lot is what kind of market share are you going to get of all these football fans? The thing that I really jumped out to me about a month ago or a month and a half ago now was when Sport Aico came out with an article talking about the TV ratings from last year of all network televised entities in the US last year of the top 100 programs, 96 of them were football games. These are college football or is professional football. The live audience has been completely captivated by live football. It's absolutely obliterated the market. It's taken out everything that's non-sports related and even sports related. It's completely dominated. So if you are somebody who's working in this league, you're looking at that number and you're just saying, I want a piece of that. Now how do you get a piece of that? We'll get into, but that's a whole nother part of the puzzle. But the point is the live television audience is looking at live sports and specifically football crazed people like us are looking at something like this and trying to get people involved as much as possible and putting it in front as many eyeballs as possible as part of it. Marketing is the other part, but this is a huge first step. Yeah, I will say, I'm sure I said this many times on here, just having more football isn't enough. I think the marketing, the messaging needs to be worked on. We've mentioned that. The other thing that will be interesting to track, I don't know if you have been in depth with this. I've been talking a lot with going back and forth with Paul formerly of the Mark has and all this here over the last couple of weeks, but there's a drama now surrounding our friend Dwayne the Rock Johnson, one of the main marketers of the XFL of the UFI still, I'll call it the ex like that. Basically he's headlining WrestleMania this year presumably, and he's taking the spot of Cody Rhodes and it's this whole drama where people got hurt and Brock Lesner kind of got canceled with the whole Vince McMahon thing, but now they're bringing in the rock against Roman res, which probably shouldn't have been last year, but they're bringing him in thinking we're going to save WrestleMania with the Rock v Roman and the fan Outlash has been very, very negative. Like, Hey, we've been on Cody Rhodes this thing, this is the rock big footing. This is just like Hulk Hogan used to do and all this very negative around the rock because I was going to be curious, how do we do this buildup? Does this helper hurt the UFL with the rock on tv, right? He had come out a couple of weeks ago and like, Hey, I'm going to be a part of all this, but now where he's, and they're monitoring and everything, I don't know if they're going to make changes, but I saw a lot of tweets like the Rock Black Adam failed, the XFL failed, they had to merge and now he's coming back and he did a lot of it. It's just interesting. So I'll be curious if any of that. The Rock is not a very popular person right now in terms of people that, not the casual fan, but a lot of the people that you're trying to attract to the X-F-L-U-S-F-L thing here. I'll be curious to see All due respect to the wrestling world. That is a niche aspect of this and I don't know if that's necessarily what they're aiming to get involved here. I understand now if it was Vince McMahon involved, I'm sure that would be a different story still, but I mean that's another parallel universe I think about a lot, but I still think that the Rock is still going to bring notoriety to the casual fan. Again, I can't tell you the number of times I've told people in the last two years and saying, Hey, the Rock has a football league. People's years perk up. They're like The Rock one's a football league. Okay, is it the USFL? I'm like, no, it's not that one. And then it's a whole thing about miscommunication as to which league it is and then it's always something along that nature. But look, he's going to appeal to a casual audience now is he going through a bit of a rough patch? Yes, but to our knowledge, there's nothing really that controversial that he's done that maybe other celebrities or other big name personalities in the last 10 or 20 years haven't done that's really absolutely destroyed their reputation and made it problematic for them to be in TV or in front of us. So if he doesn't have that on his slate, then he is really not going to lose that many people. He's going to lose niche fan bases I argue, but I don't know if he's going to necessarily lose the casual audience. So I think for them it's a long gameplay and they're going to continue to put him in front of TV as long as casual fans continue to be involved in him and that he has name brand recognition. So I appreciate that concern from Wrestle Mania fans, from superhero fans and all them. I get it. That's part of the piece. I think they're more concerned about the casual audience piece. That's fine. Keep in mind me R gets like 1.8 million viewers every week. So I mean I think UFL would kill for WWE race. Anything else on the breakdown here? I mean obviously Fox 21 games, they're a heavy investor in that right? FS one max was texting me surprising that FS one that we were trying to build into the sports network really only has the one game and we can look at where that's being placed here, but a lot of the emphasis on the main ESPN, but those secondary channels really not getting a lot where even with the fx, right, with the XFL abstract, we're really trying to make this be a thing and really never clicked. No, I mean I think I recall there was a game, it was actually the Seattle game. It was where the roughnecks went to Seattle and I want to say it was a Thursday night on FX during March Madness and I mean the opening night of March Madness and that was not the play for getting exposure. That to me was a really big mishap that kind of skewed the ratings. Obviously the ratings were all over the place last year. We looked at it from both leagues every time there was anything where it was FS one versus Fox or if it was FX versus ESPN versus a B, C, the numbers were skewed and that showed people just don't have those cable channels anymore. People are cut cord cutting, they don't really care for that. They care more for streaming, which it's funny to see the peacock thing come to fruition now. That's another conversation we can have, which is obviously the USFL tried to get ahead of the, Hey, we're putting in on an exclusive streaming game, only people need to come find peacock. Well, when you have a league that's just still starting up, I don't know if that's going to work, but when the NFL does it all of a sudden then you get 23 million people watching it. Of course people still complained. A lot of people said, are you kidding me? This is not just free. Are you out of your mind? People still watched it, but that's because they had the brand and the recognition and there was going to people who were desperate enough to watch it. So it's interesting to see that sort of beta tested almost with the USFL and then it actually happening with a bigger entity and obviously wrestling has a lot of programming on Peacock as well, so I think it's interesting to see obviously not maybe those numbers not being as skewed as they were. Of course, I think ESPN is probably going to still be a little bit less than a B, C or Fox. That's just the reality, but it's not going to be such a disparate difference like it was with FX and FS one. The interesting thing too. Yeah, and I remember, I want to read out this press release. I'm just laughing reading this, but WWE, just to go back to it has been used as a property in the past Netflix now, right? Is acquiring the WWE rod, okay, we're going to use that to draw people to Netflix, right? We're going to pay a lot of money to get that. We, as you said, learned last year. This is not a property yet that will do that. As we saw with the fx, as we saw with the peacock Ben Fisher when I had an interview with him last year with the Sports Business Journal and he said this much, all the ratings does is show whatever the bigger network is. That's what it doesn't matter the matchup, but in the time, time matters. But it doesn't matter if it's two undefeated teams or if it's a two and eight team versus a 500 team if it's on the biggest network window. And I think we're seeing that here. I think they've learned we just need to get this in front of as many people in the world as we possibly can and then hope for the best and we'll see. Because if it doesn't generate off of this slate and we'll go through the week by week here, we'll get, I don't want to delay too long here. This will not do it. I was just laughing here where it's like all UFL games will be broadcast on a B, C, Fox, ESP N FS one, espn, two games on ESPN and a BBC will be streamed on ESPN plus and Fox Games will stream on Fox Sports app. All games will be streamed via TV everywhere. What does that mean? All games will be streamed via TV everywhere. Shouldn't they say mobile device? I think that's a little strange. Is that what that means? I don't know what that means. I think it means just accessible through different TV outlets. I'm not sure what that exactly means because you don't stream. That's a very boomer line, almost boomer generation line. Like yes, we're going to stream through the tv. That's not exactly how it works. That's a Bit of a, it's on the YouTubes. I got to go on the YouTubes here. Yeah, exactly. It's very Much Thanks for luck in the mar cast on the YouTubes here. Yeah, it's a very odd phrasing there. El also, why did they capitalize everywhere? This press release has a couple of Everywhere. Interesting Everywhere And we're streaming everywhere. As long as we're up at five in the morning, we're going to stream everywhere. I didn't that was a proper noun, but okay, There we go. All right, so we know all this we know and because I think the interesting thing was there's a couple of regional games. I think I saw Mike post in the chat or something, so it's not actually streamed everywhere. If there's going to be ally locked out games, we know the stadiums, right? We did the rice thing that got announced last week and I think that was the hold up of why we didn't get the schedule and there's always this word that's the MLS and I don't know if that has anything to do with the, I think that we need to get the stadium locked down. It's the same thing with Cashman. We got Rus Brandon here through Combined Reach. We have exceptional platforms they experience we're equally excited. Bill Wagner here. We're can't wait to kick off. We're excited. Nothing with that ESPNs, Tim Reed and all of that stuff. Season tickets available. Single game tickets will be available for pre-sale starting February 20th and on sale February 22nd so you can get all of that stuff there. So that is very exciting. Do we want to get into the week by week? Do you have anything else you want to get to before that? We'll talk more about the stadium matchups later, but yes, I am very excited about the week to week. Of course. Yeah. Andy has his list power rankings of home field advantage for the UFL, so we'll get to that at the end and you can leave your comments on that. So again, all times Eastern, seven of your teams are in the central time zone. Anyway, so we've talked about this, the Fox, this is tremendous, right? Battle hawks, renegades, tremendous. I think this is as good as you can do for a kickoff game, a championship, all of that. We've already done the other ones off of that. We're showing Michigan. I think the brass will show out here starting off this 4:00 PM on Fox DC Defenders and then the Memphis Showboats here, like you said, learning about the riot. We talked anything else on week one here? Yeah, again, I really love that you get the champions matched up immediately. That's in the best interest of both leagues. You get the showcase the best of the best presumably. Obviously both rosters have gone, undergone a lot of overhaul. All of them will, but I think there's still a lot of returning players. There's a lot of returning coaching staffs. I think that's an important element here. And so there'll be familiarity. I do think it's interesting that it's being played in Arlington. Obviously it's been in Choctaw Stadium now. It was opening last year as well, the opener that you went to. So they seem to be getting a lot of favoritism in that way. Arlington's opened all three week ones every time that they've had a League XFL in 2020 XFL in 2023 and now the UFL for Michigan. That's exciting. I'm really curious to see what the appetite of Michigan fans is after. Obviously an uproarious run by the Lions just completely revolutionizing interest in Michigan football. Obviously you had the Wolverines winning the national championship, so a lot of great times for Michigan football fans. Does that enthusiasm carry over into week one? Again, you get to host the battle hawks and congratulations on not going to the dome week one. So you better take advantage of that. That's fantastic as well that both games being on Fox is interesting. Again, it's going to be, so my mind's going to have to get used to the idea of, again, just seeing both of these teams on one channel too, like one A, B, C and one Fox. But then again, it was like the Sodex felt 2020. So if you remember that, it's not that different. But seeing the Panthers and the stallion specifically facing XFL teams, again, that's great to see that crossover. Yeah, tie here. Excuse me. Detroit is in the Eastern time zone, so six of eight, six of 8, 6 8 are in the central division. So sorry about that. Yeah. Shark here. Yes, the home team. Yes. It should say stallions at Renegade. Yes. St. Louis at Michigan. Yes. The home team is on the right. We know that just because Renegade Arlington's hosted. I will say I wish, and maybe I could book around here. I booked, we will be in Arlington for that kickoff game. Would've loved to go to San Antonio here for the Sunday game and do a little river walk tour. I could have done that. Well, I guess I would've had to ping down and go back up. But anyway, that will be exciting. This will be the true testament here in this, because I've gone all in on the Brams and I've had a lot of DC Defenders fans say like, well, you're a Commanders fan, why aren't you going to be a defenders fan? Like, yo, I got Wade Philip, I got AJ Smith and all that, and we have our history there and everything with San Antonio. That is kind of my favorite city of Texas. But this will be, if the defenders come in and pants the brass, I will be a little embarrassed there for that. But the 12 game there, the Sunday, that's also Easter Sunday, right? And it's like MLB kickoff or not kickoff, MLB, what do they call that? Opening day? MLV, pitch off all of that stuff, that whole weekend. So a crowded sports here and it's like we're going on the elite aid of March Madness, but then 3:00 PM here. Good, good timings and everything for that. So I think that that sounds good so far. Week two here, Memphis is going to be opening up. We got, so this, this the first, no, so ESPN Sunday night, so the ESPN Sunday game. So we're getting those going Week two here. We're opening Memphis 12 o'clock Renegades add the Battle Hawk show, at least they will be able to open. That will be 8:00 PM kind of prime time there on a B, C for the Battle Hawks. Panthers hosting again, the stallions on ESPN and then the Houston Rev Nexts going to dc so we don't have to wait as long. We don't have to wait until week three or four for the Battle Hawks and the defenders as well. Poor Renegades. I mean this is the second year in a row that they've been sent as the first visitor to St. Louis. I mean last year it felt like they were getting sacrificed on a pike. At least this year maybe there won't be as much misalignment. I mean their office was obviously in taters last time they went to St. Louis. So this time around maybe with Elise Preez around presumably, and they have a better offensive setup. Maybe it won't be as much of a kill shot for them, but still, I mean I feel bad for them going to St. Louis again. And this is a Saturday night primetime matchup too, which is really cool. I think St. Louis, for the most part, has only been playing in the daytime for all of their games. So for them to get a primetime matchup here on a BBC is fantastic. That's awesome. I love that. That may be one of my favorite time slots in the entire schedule after looking at it. Yeah, they say here Abdul Renegades will be during Final Four, so I'll be interested to see how many viewers there will be. Yes, I think the attendance will be phenomenal, but yes, I agree and it's a tough, I don't know if you just wait until, what would it be two weeks later and go and they you too late into the NFL. I think they're really in the rock of the hard spot here. I think ideally they would've started again in February, but I just don't think there was enough time with all this merger talk and that's why we're doing the March 30th. I think there's a couple of things I thought about sort of re-looking at the Schedule one look, you're going to cross over into March Madness, so might as well avoid as much of it as possible. Like I said, that opening slate, as I mentioned last year that happened with Houston, Seattle and all the other teams, it was so tough because that whole opening slate of March Madness games is such a rush. There's all these teams, there's all these games going on. It's just so hard to compete against that. Whereas this one, you're starting on the weekend of the Sweet 16, the Elite eight, and really you're only dealing with the Elite eight because of the Saturday and Sunday. So that's fine. You can sacrifice to that and then the final four and then the games will be over soon. So I think that's fine. The second part of it is the season ends on June 16th. That's right around when schools are finished and kids are getting out of school and then all the people are going on vacation, they're leaving town. So you're kind of still able to get all those audiences, the family audiences before everyone scatters for summer holidays. So I think that's another part of it as well. And again, I think I still have to look at the weather element of it. Obviously the later you start the hotter it is, and some of these territories are not conducive to really colder weather because a lot of it's really, it's deep south, it's Alabama, it's Memphis, it's really hot in some of these areas, Texas obviously. So you have to at least keep it in a reasonable time slot or schedule for everybody in terms of not potentially getting overheated during the playtime. So I think it's fine in that regard too. I think the schedule about where you're going to have it, ideally We have Abdu, a couple clock comments. Abdul Elite a games Saturday at six and eight 30, Sunday at two and five during the UFL opening weekend. So are we trying to kind of program around that a little bit? Well, you got the one o'clock game. No, it says yes. You see they're starting later in the day Saturday. So football will be wrapped. Shark do a lot of football fans watch basketball. The idea is we're trying to get any casual, do you lack anything involving the ball? Please come watch us. Yes, I understand that we have different audiences here, but I will say I don't give a rip about college and basketball. I went to Gonzaga. We do quite well, but my XFL friends who we've got reimbursed for our season tickets here for the Sea Dragons, they would be watching March Madness. They will not be watching the XFL that weekend. If they are to intersect, Well answer at least personally to answer that question. I watch basketball after football season's over. Well, football season now is All year, baby. It really doesn't matter at this point. But for most people, obviously once the Super Bowl is done, then people start to turn their attention away and say, okay, what can I bet on? What can I watch? What can I do to kill my time? And that's when basketball comes back into the fold. So that's usually when people start to care about basketball. I could not give a rip about the NBA if I had a team. Like I said, if I had an NBA team, I think it'd be different, but I don't. So for me, it doesn't really matter that much until we get later into the season. Same with college basketball. I mean once you're getting to conference tournaments in March, then you start to actually care and then you have March Madness. But before that regular season play, not very consequential. So again, this is delving into a little bit. This is where you're going to start to test those markets. You're going to test the NBA markets. You're going to test March Madness, you're going to test the baseball markets. We talked about the regional markets, but again, baseball I think is different regionally based. I care about my team. You care about the Mariners. Do you care about anyone else? No, not Really. Like the finger game. No, I care about the Padres. Do I care about anybody else? I mean some of my divisional rivals maybe, but I don't go on my way to watch them, so that's different. So I think for them, like you said, can you appeal to the casual audience? That's really what we're trying to get here. Philip here has Easter Sunday games, the UFL tradition. I certainly don't like it. Easter is incredibly early this year. Someone whose wife teaches and spring break is kind of based around that. It is incredibly early this year with that March 30th. I didn't like that when Andy and I went to Birmingham and that was Easter. I mean thankfully that isn't like the mom. I missing Easter and I'm disowned from the family kind of thing. We're like, Hey Christmas, I'm going to be gone for Christmas. I got to go to the UFO game. But I think we're going to do it that we'll talk more about the championship game. I know that Mr. RJ Young is reporting that it's going to be in St. Louis. I imagine that's what it is going to be. I just don't think it's official yet. I think that's one of those maybe that got published a little too early. I don't know if I will be at that game. We'll see. Like I said, I booked a wonderful couple at this beautiful hotel downtown here on the 15th. That would be a quick turn already giving up my Calgary BC game that day. I'm looking here at what's happening in the schedule. But the other thing I was going to say, oh, we had a comment, but we'll, oh, this Dylan talking about he thinks the Battle Hawks defenders rivalry is going to be pretty noticeable this year. I do think that will be in terms of social media, I was a little impressed with some unimpressed with others of kind of the stuff we did today with the schedule releases, but I do think at least in terms of that, whoever's running those accounts, Leah and I don't know who the defenders have now, but I think they're doing good. Anything else? Week two here, we can move on. No, well we'll get into, if we're going to keep going through the schedule, I'll go ahead and get into what I feel about the DC defenders in St. Louis Hawks later on, but I'm glad they mentioned that because something I'm going to bring up later. Okay, so week three here, defenders at Arlington, one o'clock on ESPN on Saturday. I guess the other thing just to point out, I think all weekend games, we don't have any of these weird Seattle 10 o'clock Easter and Thursday night game and I don't even care for my own go. I live 10 minutes from the stadium. I'm happy to go hang out anytime at Lumen or T-Mobile or any of that stuff, our fields. But Seattle fans got such a raw deal with all of this and just the way everything was scheduled and the weekday games and the late Sunday game, and then obviously losing the team. But if I was a Seattle fan, I would be pretty disappointed with any of that stuff. But yeah, DC Defender here, Arlington one o'clock Showboats taking on the stallions. Now we're getting into these X-F-L-U-S-F-L in conference seven o'clock on Fox. Again, these are good. I dunno how sexy of a lineup. This will be showboats at stallions, but that's good time zones, right? So Sunday noon on a B, C, and then at three o'clock on the A, B, C. This looks like, well these are both on a, B, C, but looks like Fox kind of programming schedule, at least with the US FL in 2022. We got kind of these two not too early, not too late games. 9:00 AM West Coast. If we're allowed to watch games, I might be able to check out a game at nine o'clock here on Sunday. I think that's great. I love morning football. It's one of my favorite things about living on the west coast. I know for East Coast fans, obviously that's a foreign concept, but there's nothing better than like 9:00 AM 10:00 AM football. I love that slate. Again, I think it's cool that you have some of these matchups. The biggest thing that kind of stands out to me is these rivalries that you really have kind of more built into the XL than the USFL. Just from my standpoint for the Stalins, I think it's a shame that they don't have, for example, the New Orleans breakers to play. I thought there was something that was starting to form there and now they're not around, but DC against Arlington, obviously that's a championship game. Rematch DC is probably pissed about what happened in the Almo Dome. Obviously we had a lot of voracious DC fans that were there and left. Very disappointed. I think that's a fantastic rematch and that's in week three. That's awesome. I also feel that way a little bit. The bow hawks at the San Antonio bras, that was the first game of the XFL season in San Antonio and for St. Louis, and they had that game where AJ McCarran came back in the last two minutes. They showcased the three point play and they showcased the onsite kick rule or the onsite play. It was a real just kind of a great display of the rules that were in the XFL at that moment. So I think that's cool that you have that rematch there. Obviously I don't think Adrian McCarran is going to be part of that this time, but it's still kind of cool to get that little rematch as well. Again, stallions and panthers. I hope Panthers can continue that momentum and keep that enthusiasm for Michigan football and Birmingham Saturday primetime. So they had a couple of those last year. Again, I'm curious to see if the Birmingham fans can start to really showcase why they're Birmingham fans or why they have so much enthusiasm. Because there's a lot of Birmingham fans I think I have interacted with and you have interacted with online, but sometimes I don't see that so much in the stadium, but no doubt they win when they play at home, they win. So I think that the fans should hopefully get more into that and get to the idea of playing these different teams and obviously not having the hub and not having so many games I think will help at least people to kind of diversify their schedule a little bit. So we'll see you about Birmingham The challenging thing here, and we almost have a hundred people watching the stream right now. Thank you. Just give it a thumbs up, subscribe if you're not, please appreciate that. Like I said, you become a channel member as well and help support. I think it's 99 cents a month, but it looks good on my analytics when I look at my YouTube channel. The thing, and it's challenging when we talk about some of these markets and we talked about this merging the things and what markets are we losing and what's the US L bringing in just sheer of it. Birmingham is not the largest market in the world, and when you're trying to attract fans, San Antonio, bigger Houston, you have these bigger cities, Memphis, some of these ones that the USL are bringing in, like you said, I don't know, you see a lot of the USFL online and I see a ton even on our channel. I a ton of stallions fans and Gregory and all of 'em, and they're always buckham or whatever the thing, but then it doesn't necessarily translate in where, I don't know if I just don't live in a lot of, I'm in the Brahmas Twitter space now a little bit. I just don't know if I see as much. I don't know to me, but we get more of the fans in there. I think San Antonio for what it was, I think they mobilized really hard locally. It just seems like you said, I'll be curious to see what this looks like this year. I do think it's interesting with Birmingham and Memphis, we are reconfiguring the seating chart, at least I know Birmingham is, I dunno if Memphis allowed the full stadium seating before, but Birmingham is your sitting in these sections. We are moving stuff to the side. We want it to look good. Maybe they'll open that if Corey works his butt off and gets that. But I'm surprised that they're kind of adapting with that of like, Hey, maybe we can kind of learn here as we go along. I think that's interesting. Yeah, I still have mixed feelings about the one side stadium thing. I felt that way about Orlando. I felt that way about Memphis did do it last year and I mean it's fine if you're trying to get optics on television, but it's just so weird as a fan experience to look across and be like, there's nobody over there. And if you happen to show one to TV angle, there's nobody there by accident. It's weird for the visiting team. I mean, that's the thing, having a visiting team and getting heckled is part of the experience, right? You're going to another stadium and you're like, there's these people behind me that just won't shut up and that's part of the experience. And for them to not have that as a shame, because again, I think that gives distinct advantage to some of these other teams that clearly are going to have people on both sides of the aisle and that I think will show in how the other team responds and how they play in the stadium. So that's something I'll get into more with the home field advantage marks. But yeah, look, I commend Corey. He put us in so much work. He works his butt off. I'm glad that he has another job in this league to be able to put this together and sell tickets, but hopefully there'll be enough demand that people will be able to sit on both sides and they'll be able to really have a nice filled out, maybe lower bowl area. That would be really ideal Unless you, yeah, talk about the hometown or the away rivalry. When I go to the Audi field and I can't even sit in the supporter section from my own safety read. You got to get out of here Patrick Pat for field check in here. Val Hawks are Owen three against the defenders, not really the rivalry we think, and Pat's the St. Louis Homer here, so that that's Something he's right though. I mean that's the thing. St. Louis is Owen two on the road and they lost in the bome and a critical game last year that basically decided they weren't going to the playoffs last year. So no, he's right as much tooting and as much tooting of their own horns and as much as they want to be so involved in their own community and say how great they are, bow HOKs fans haven't really had anything that really celebrates over and especially over dc. DC has just completely dismantled them every time they played them in 2020 and in 2023. So I think that for Battle Hawk fans, it would be catharsis for them to go and beat DC and sweep 'em this year. But I mean the defenders are, I mean you got to call 'em a marquee franchise. They really are. They've been to a championship game, they've been over 500 also DC has never lost at home. Keep that in mind. They've never lost a home game in both years. So that streak is continuing that people don't talk about that enough. I think we always talk about the beer snake and we focus on their success overall, but they've never lost at home. So Audi Field has a ton of pride. I will never forget Paul and I going out FL 2020, we went because the game was at noon, so we had to go to brunch so early and getting bottomless mimosas for two hours and then going to Audi Field and literally weeping of the FL kickoff was happening. Really fun, really fun, really fun experience there. We have Evan Williams, AKA Evan Willmore checking in here. What really matters is finding a date for our Riverwalk Almo trip. I know again, I booked my flight back from, because I was doing miles from Dallas for that, but we'll have to figure that. I will just say, because reading through some of, just while this is on the thing, I'm reading through some of these Twitter comments because everyone's tweeting out like I'm watching the UFL, I'm watching the USFL. We need to remedy this U-F-L-W-T-F, Right? I don't know. I understand that probably certain things are taken at this point, I don't know if it could, is ATX 23, we have the UFL logo, but then it's UFL. Is that so that Twitter is like, well, you can't change or you can only change the name. Maybe they're transitioning because Twitter has all of that now where if you change your name, you get suspended for a day or whatever, but UFL, parentheses XFL, if anything, it should be the XFL division of the UFL or I just don't even understand, I dunno. Very weird. It feels very weird, especially because I think the USFL one's still the same. Do you have any thoughts on that? It kills me that we're a month from kickoff. Now we're a month and a half. We're still figuring this out. Yeah, part the parentheses part is weird because again, it's a combined league, but it's as if it almost gives off the ion to the casual viewer. Does the XFL own this? Did they just create another identity as the USL even involved? Are they still around and I mean obviously they have their teams involved, but it seems, yeah, it's like, again, you have to be careful about brand identification and here it's still sort of this nebulous. I'm not sure who really owns what or who has what. We obviously know we have the details, but again, for somebody who's on the outside looking in, it's a little bit, I still want to go with the idea of having these accounts. For example, maybe the network accounts saying like, oh, UFL on Fox, UFL on SPN. Why don't they have that? Just have the separate Twitter identifications of like, Hey, this is our game coming up, or you should watch this, check this out. That's fine. You don't have to have the parentheses of like if it's USS FL or XFL, you really don't want to focus on that. That's fine, and you have the divisions, that's fine. But this part is still a little bit confusing because you're looking up there and you're saying, well wait, that looks like Fox is locally up on the UFL, but then it's like, but the XFL is next to it. It's XFL 2023, which was last year. There's three parts there that contradict each other. So I think you have to have more diversify and try to put and allocate all of your resources into different accounts, but also just having less confusion about what's what and who's who. That's I think what maybe confuses a lot of people, and I understand, again, I had a lot of people the last two years being like just had no idea which league was from what and what separated both of them. I understand this FOX or the XFL one, 380,000 whatever. I mean the USFL one is the gold I understand is the third of the followers at this point, but can you not? That's a pay. You have got the gold check. Can you not call up gives. I think when you get the gold check, you get a direct line to Elon's office like, Hey, we need support with this. Can you get one of the four people to work on Twitter to kind of help with this stuff? Anyway, weird to me, but I don't want to get too derailed here, but I was just a little like, okay, what is happening here? Alright, week four, battle Hawks hosting again, 1230 A B, C. I think these mid Saturday games do really well as well. I know the first, when they filled the dome the first time, it was kind of that mid afternoon, a good time zone here, DC I think this will be hot DC travel into the Stallions Fox. So now this has asterisk. Do we know what the asterisk is? I got to look. Oh, I know what that is. Yeah, that's the regional time broadcast because there's games that are on at the same time and they're talking about regional broadcasting. Okay. We were week four. Oh, and someone commented in the thing that TV everywhere is an app. So I guess when I was laughing about a mainstream via TV everywhere news to me. So anyway, so what does that mean here where it's Fox, so I might not, again, if I'm allowed to watch the games, is that on in Seattle or is that only Fox on the east coast? I don't understand how that Do we know yet? It seems to me like it's a regional pick as in maybe even if we now as a West Coast audience obviously doesn't really matter because there's not really teams that are allocated to the West Coast. But in terms of this, it clearly is saying that there's going to be regional markets that are watching different games like they do in the NFL obviously. Well, because they're overlapping, right? Okay, I get you. They're Overlapping At the same stallions. Well, this is a terrible decision, Right? Which begs the question why? Because now you have games going on at the same time and also isn't the whole point of your league to expose as many games as possible to as many people as possible. Why are we splitting the difference here? Why are there two games on at the same time and the same time slot? Are you assuming that there's regional biases baked in newsflash there? I mean there's people in your own region that don't even know that these teams exist. I don't think this is a model personally. That makes a lot of sense because also if you're going to do this to us, if you're going to do this to the West Coast audience, why does it matter inherently? Why would I care whether I'm watching the Stallions Defenders or the Brams Panthers now on paper, I'm sure the Defenders game, I'd much rather watch at the stallions. What if I get the Brams game and instead I don't want to watch them? Why are we making those kinds of conscious choices? And also, are you going to offer up a way to be able to watch these games if you don't want to watch them on tv? If what you're getting on broadcast, can you watch it a different way Everywhere? That could be the big selling point for TV Everywhere. Okay, so maybe then it's an app, which again, I don't know if you can sell that right now because you're still trying to get your league out there. That level of exclusivity is something that really bothers me in today's media. I'm not talking about just UFL, I'm talking about in general people saying like, oh, it's really exclusive. It's like why should I care about your product yet? You haven't sold me on it yet. I don't understand why there's this exclusivity that's already baked in here. Again, the NFL can do that because guess what? It's the NFL. They have all these people. They will be like, Hey look Taylor Swift and the Chiefs are going to be playing the Dolphins on Peacock. You really want to be involved in this media storm. You buy this subscription, that's fine. And okay, you can piss you off. But they can do it. They know they can get away with it. I don't think they know how much they can get away with here and that's why it still bothers me. This part was the part of the schedule I looked at and almost double take that. Why no one's done this Spring Owl does not do this. Well, this is what happens. And I have a question for you here. We got the Sophie's choice here, but this if you haven't been a part of spring football, this is exactly, this is the midseason of the spring football start out week one, like us, it felt like simulcast Fox, Fox in NBC and Time and we're doing all these everything and then this is the week fives, seven o'clock Easter or it would be 10 o'clock eastern the FX game, right? This is once you get to the middle of the season, now we start, we only have so many good chips, right? Okay, let's give these, we got to front load the season and then we'll kind of back load towards the playoffs. This is kind of the middle and the NFL doesn't really, I mean obviously every season of everything kind of has that midseason drop, but this is kind of when we're involved in that. Here's my question, would you rather have two simultaneous Fox games or one on Fox and one on Fs, one or one on Fox and one on ES pn two an hour or two different, at least here. They're both on Fox. Just depends which game you get. Well, okay, and again, I have to ask what the ratings are going to be in those regional markets. So maybe it's a test. Maybe it's a test to see, okay, how much does this region really care about this league in this market? Maybe that's a way of them testing it, but I would rather they just split the difference or they just have it in different networks and they put it on ESPN or FS one, like a slightly different time slot maybe like an hour later. That's fine, I can deal with that. I can channel flip, but this doesn't really make a lot of sense if you're trying to bring in ratings and you're trying to bring in as many people as possible unless you're just trying to do it as an experiment or I don't know, at least subject to change. I mean obviously they've already set the time. I'm going to assume no, because if you want people to buy tickets, you don't want them to suddenly buy the tickets and then shift the schedule and move it all around. You're not going to flex games like you do in the NFL. So I don't really care too much for this idea of this model. Okay, Jenny here. Gosh, I can't even watch all the games. This doesn't bother me as much because I still think half a Fox audience or a regionalized Fox audience is going to be better than where you're going to get on one of these lesser channels. That's just when you watch these, when they show the coverage of, okay, who's getting the game of the week for the NFL and it's like half is getting Kansas and half is getting the chargers or whatever, however they delineate that, but it doesn't bother me as much. I think that's going to be okay here week four, this is when you get the articles of ratings decline across the UFL because we got these, the simulcast games on Fox and then this is your solo 2:00 PM FS one game, the renegades at the roughnecks. This will be the decline. The Mike Florio's of the world will be tweeting like this is the downfall of the UFL, right? But I mean this is the first big challenge here, right? Because everything's been pretty peachy here. A, B, C and Fox and ESPN. Week four is when you're going to be hitting a roadblock here And also you have three games on Saturday. Keep that in mind as well. You have three games on Saturday, just the one on Sunday, so people are going to be kind of rolling on into Sunday and seeing that there's not a game on Fox or a BC and then having to go to FS one to go find it. And also just from my standpoint, this really depends on how the Houston market looks on tv. We haven't gotten into that, but I'm very curious to see how Rice Stadium looks and this is a standalone game. Is this going to have as much importance? Obviously it's a Texas matchup, so the Texas Showdown is really important, but how, yeah, do We brand this? Do we brand this? The Battle of Texas, the Texas Throwdown? I still like the Texas Throwdown. I wish they rebranded because I like that a lot in 2020. That was to me one of the best parts of the league and I mean I know there's another team, but these are the two original teams that you had in Texas and I think that rival, again, that's a rivalry that it really exists and I do believe that there's still a little bit of heat between those two entities. I will just say the other thing with, oh, the FS one, again, this was supposed to be kind of the big drawing card of a lot of this. We were going to kind of build up some of these games. I don't know. I mean the FS one market, I dunno how well that did. And we will be curious to see the Colin Cowards of the world, how much do they lean into this and skip and everything kind of promoting this. Now obviously it's Fox, but I dunno, I'll just be curious to what the marketing is coming out of the Fox side. I will say I've gotten into, I've in DVR and Colin Coward every day and I don't watch the full two hours or however long, but I do watch the first 10 minutes. I usually find myself nodding along. You're making some good points here especially. All right, week five here, Rams at Renegades Fox. Again, back prime time, seven o'clock stallions. Susie, this is another one of these overlapping games and they said this doesn't have the asterisk with it. This isn't the, maybe they just forgot the asterisk there. And then Sunday, ESPN at noon and then Fox at three. Again, another one of these overlapping games. Oh, here's the question, sorry, real quick. When they count, someone tell me, because it's hard to do math now when they're counting these games, does this each count as a Fox game, right, when they're touting the numbers? We have 20 Fox games. I mean it's two. You're getting that, but you really, it's like half the baby here. It looks to me like Fox has a bigger market share overall, at least in terms of if they're going to get ratings. I think you bigger, you have more network games on Fox, so obviously that I guess that would go notched on their belts and that would Be, but see, when they're tug this 72% of games, 21 on Fox, but we've already seen four of those games of simultaneous, so it's really like it's only 17 games. Well, 72% on Fox or a B, C, But this year when they're talking 21 games on Fox, but we've looked in four of those games have overlapped so far. So that's really only two games. You get what I'm saying? Because you're competing against yourself there. Yeah. Then that's like notching a few down. So that's not really, that's a weird accuracy issue. I don't know what that means. Again, because we don't have the standalone game, like you said. I don't know how they're really going to configure this. Also, going back to the regional market share aspect of this, you're playing in Arlington and Houston at the same time, so are we dividing parts of Texas now for watching this game? Is that how it works or are you just like you said, is it going to be America's the America's game of the week thing like Fox usually does where they pick one team or one mashup. Are they going to do the same thing here, both in the same state? So I assume you can't just cut one side and say, okay, well Arlington, you go watch your games in Houston, you go watch your games. That would be really weird to be splitting up Texas. So I wonder if that's another part of it or if they're just going to have one game that they designated and say, no, this is the more important matchup. The other one gets relegated to some streaming app, like you said, TV everywhere or whatever it's called. Well, I dunno. I look at that because again, I'm trying to adjust my camera. I complimented them in the beginning and I said, look, this is really, you're really making an effort here, but if two, at least so far in the time zones, and I'm going through all this live, I like going through all this live as we kind of react to this. I can't do a bunch of that stuff ahead of time. Two of the games so far, cross call, cross whatever against each other. I just think that's interesting. We talking about ESPN 12 o'clock and the Michigan Panthers going on at Fox. Anything else? Week five we got David says, preach professor. Well, week five obviously you have St. Louis at dc. That's one of your first big, big matchups here and this is St. Louis' opportunity to get revenge. They're oh three against DC all time. This is their chance to get revenge. This is going to be an Audi field, which again, we'll see how the defenders do this year, but so far they're undefeated. They've never lost in that stadium. Let's see if they can continue doing that here. It's an early morning matchup on Sunday. I just love this matchup overall. I know Anthony Becks and crew just would love nothing more than just finally drive the stake into the hearts of the DC fans, but that to me is one of the premier mashups of the entire season right there. I have yet to have the opportunity, well, I guess I talked with Beck at pre-season. I guess we talked with Coach Beck at the, I think he was at the Arizona showcase, but I've yet to talk with him after the season. Their pre, we had kind of scheduled stuff and then obviously all this merger stuff went down. But I will say if I ever had the opportunity to interview Coach Beck or speak with him, I'll call him a crybaby for his, the way he handled losing to the Sea Dragons and the missing the playoffs and all of that. Yeah, like you said, they can kind of redeem all this now, but he was a crybaby. Win the game. Win the game. You're in the playoffs now we're changing the standings and we're changing the playoffs seating. So then the Battle hawks can be win the game, win the game, go play, don't win the game, go home. You're an athlete. You know how this works. Well, what happens if they end up finishing second of the division and then the reverse happens to them, whether there's a team from another division that gets a better record than what happens. No, Exactly. That's why you don't complain. You win the game. Hey, how'd the overtime playoff, whatever workout, we changed the rules for Buffalo and then they still lost. Well, I mean they never got into the playoffs or into the overtime, so we never got to see that come to fruition. What was more interesting is that the Chiefs argued for that rule. There was an article that came out when they argued for that rule to start when they played the Patriots in the 2018 championship game because the pass took the ball and just went down the field and scored and won. Chiefs did the same thing in 2022, and all of a sudden now Buffalo argues for it and they get that rule change. So it's kind of funny. That almost happened in another universe that almost happened to the Chiefs, but they just didn't make as big a stink about it. Food is follow up question here. Every game was on ESPN plus last year, but pretty unlikely that Fox game. Yes, the S-P-N-A-B-C games will be on ESPN plus the Fox Games will be on Fox Sports, which I think is fine, right? I mean we're ideally, yes, ideally there's one app to rule them all and whatever, but I think that yes, king Mars is question and we can go back, we have the press release games will be broadcast, all SPN ABC games will be streamed on Fox. Fox Games will stream on Fox boards and then all games will say yes. So TV everywhere is an app. So I guess if you want, I'm going to look that up. What is the TV Everywhere app? Because that might be the watch TV everywhere. TV everywhere is a type I'm not getting, I guess it's this Share this tab. Welcome to watch TV everywhere. So no, you still have to log in with a cable provider. Yeah, I'm getting the Spectrum TV app on mine when I type it into Google Place. So that's again, I don't know what that means in terms of being able to stream it from another market. Can I? Or is it going to be region locked? Yeah, no, I think your best bet get on honestly guys with all this ESPN plus is so worth it if you can get it bundled. I have it right now with the Disney Hulu bundle, but you can get it on its own. You can get all, well, I guess I was going to say now you can't guess to the CFL games. I was going to make them the further pitch to get the CFL games, but at least getting the FL games totally worthwhile. And then the Fox Sports, I think you can pay or log in with your table. I don't know how the Fox Sports app works. I've never used it personally, but I mean if you haven't then you can use it for your cable provider. But for me, I have YouTube tv, so that's why it's a little bit different. Yeah, fuo is a good one too. Fuo gets you into all that stuff. You can pull it up on your phone and you could even, when we're talking about, well it depends how they do these simulcast games, but I dunno, maybe you could VPN through and get one if you really were kind of curious that way. So anyway, all right. Yeah, week six STA at showboats, another early A BC game. They really liked these noon. I think that's a good, what else are you putting on Saturday at noon on the A, B, C rough Next at Battle Hawks at Fox, so early games that day. Sunday, one o'clock and four. ABRA is going to defenders, but see now we're kind of back to normal one A b, C game and three Fox and these are all standalone games, so that'll be good. Yeah, so it seems like week four and week five are experimentation for the region markets. We'll see, like you said, all the ratings articles will come out after all of those games. Just be ready because people PPO on us and we talking like, oh, you hate the USFL. You're talking like the numbers. Those are the people to yell at. Those are the people that check in once and then tune in week five. They're like, oh my god, why did the ratings fall 80%? It's like, well, there was two games on the one. Yes. Yeah. So we'll see how that all pans out. But again, used to go into St. Louis. I mean that's a huge matchup already. Again, I know it's called the battled. Do I like to keep calling it the Thunderdome, but I think that's going to be big matchup again for Houston and for St. Louis, but every game in St. Louis is going to feel like it's the end of the world for any team that walks in there. And the question too, you were talking about the Rice stadium of it, and I should have asked you this question back when we were talking about the Houston home games, but how Rice Stadium will look, is that because it's a new stadium or because the league stole the Houston Markets team rebranded the team and they gave them a team that wasn't and now they're the roughnecks. Why the hesitation? I think the thing about it again is that, okay, so first of all it's not your team that you had last year. The staff is different. The players are different. As we like to joke, it's the gamble necks, it's the gamblers, Ashley being on the Houston Roughnecks team and roster. So that's a little bizarre. But second of all, you're moving venues now. So you were pretty situated at the University of Houston and now you're moving over to Rice. So does your audience understand that? Are they going to look for that? Are they going to be able to go to Rice instead? I know Houston is a very sprawling area. I've actually been on the Rice campus, so I mean there's plenty of people around, but again, you're talking about your core audience are they're going to be able to follow you along. So there's that aspect of as well, and also just the general confusion as to who's actually on the team and who's not and who's coaching. So it's not going to feel the same. So I just wonder what the response is going to be or look, maybe people don't care. I don't know. But again, there's not really a familiarity with the gamblers brand or any of those players or any of those coaches, but they're being transferred into the roughnecks and the Roughnecks brand is still around. I just wonder about people's general reaction about like, okay, where are they playing and who's this person? Where did they come from? Wait, why is my coaching staff over in San Antonio? People are going to have to start piecing that together and we'll see how Rice Stadium looks. I am curious, but the numbers, there are something that I just wonder if Houston's really going to have much of an advantage overall with that setup. I think it's a mistake. I may have said this. I think it's a mistake to, if that was my team, I would have difficulty cheering for a brand that's existed for three years that played, was it 10 11 played 16 games? I don't know. I would've trouble with that. I would keep the players and all of that stuff. Darren, have they thought about giving rice students discounted tickets to fill the stadium? That is an excellent idea. Darren. We should email Jeff here. You got the email. If you go the ufl.com, you got the email on there. I think that's a good idea. Sorry Annie. What I absolutely agree honestly with what Darren's saying, I wish that a lot of these teams did that and any local university that they were able to give promotions and saying, Hey, you should come on in and bring all of the student energy in if you want to bring in, you want to make this league different. I think it's not only just appealing to people who follow professional football, but what about people who follow, for example, college football and say like, Hey, there's all these semi-professional athletes. You're pretty used to watching college football, which is in a sense, it's the own level of amateurism. I think you absolutely should appeal to those markets. That's something that I really wish these teams did more of and I think that'd be awesome if you could do that. Look at Birmingham, the Birmingham stallions. I would say they should go down the UAB, university of Alabama Birmingham and say, Hey, look, I know this is your stadium and the college football's not going on, but hey, we still got football going on. We'll give you some great student discounts and you should come on in and watch some more football if you're really into that, and this is another great atmosphere to be part of. There's something I wish, again, the promotion of all these leagues is what we talk about so much, and that's just another aspect of it that I think is really untapped and is really would help the numbers overall. And just bringing the energy enthusiasm that you're searching for into these leagues, not just solidarity in one market of like, oh, this is a professional football, we'll just carry it to the people who can afford these tickets. To me, I think that is a bit of a mistake. Philip here says it's the roughnecks. That's my team. Philip, if I passed tomorrow from this world and Andy took over, the mark has, but it's still been a mark has or would it be? I wish there was a little loyalty here, Philip. I just appreciate that. The other thing Darien's asked me, Wendell rosters be finalized. We did the supplemental draft. That stream was like, what, two weeks? Was it Monday, right? Two Mondays ago. And then people reported the training camp February 24th. So then they'll do that and then they'll do Cutdowns before the season. Am I missing anything there? Yeah, There's a cutdown in March. I can't remember the exact dates, but obviously that'll be a week or so before the season actually starts. So I mean the numbers will start to come in two weeks, but the final cutdown on the rosters won't happen going into March. Obviously they have about, I want to say six weeks until they actually start the season, so there'll be time to allocate and go through all that. I wonder maybe if it's the same as the NFL schedule where it's like training camp. You have that month and a half and then the backend, the last three weeks is when you start to do all the cut down on the rostering. So I would imagine that's part of a similar setup. I have to double check those numbers. One more comment, we'll get to the next, Andy, I'll have to hop off here for a second. You've got people coming to the house and we'll work through this. We'll get out of here a timely manner. Alright, hustle. I do asking how the U USS L teams will deal with road atmosphere. I do like that running narrative is a joke of all the XFL teams have an advantage because they'll have fans in the stands and the US FL teams will go, what is this? I just think that that's funny, but I mean, well, it's two specific teams that I could think of. But again, Orlando had the same thing. The Orlando guardians had the same disadvantage where it was like one side of the stadium. There's all these fans, but there's nobody on the other side. Vegas. Vegas was just a quagmire for anybody. So it really didn't matter who played. I think it was just not fun for either team. I think it was a home field disadvantage for a lot of people. Seattle, I mean, I know you guys, there was maybe less numbers overall, but I mean I think the Seattle fans were very enthusiastic. So you lose that market. But again, here's my other thing and I really want this league to be transparent about this. Please, with the love of God, please give us the attendance numbers, especially from these USFL teams. Don't treat them like the nuclear codes. I do not want this second guessing. Trying to battle with people about what numbers were actually there is insane. I don't want this anymore because people can eyeball anything and say, well, I think it's this or I think it's that. It's asinine. Just please report the attendance numbers because then you have a better idea of who's there and who's not. Okay, the FEL did it. FEL did not. I don't want people to giving some presumption of how many people were actually in the stands. I want solid numbers. A couple comments here, questions then we'll get back to this. Sorry. Do you know if the UFSL team still owned the rights to the college USL draftees? I would imagine so. I mean, again, it's like they would have to be, it's like the negotiations list in Canada, right? If you come to play in the CFL, we have kind of first dibs on you. I imagine it's the same with the people. The XFL took in their, what was that? The rookie draft that they did because they each did one last the USFL did one in February and then the XFL did one. The other question here, this is a new commenter I haven't seen Jack and Jamie, I'm new to spring football. Did they have training camp live coverage with the XFL stuff? Well with both. Now with UFL, everything will be in Arlington. So it's not like a traditional where you would have all eight teams doing training camp in their home markets. We do a pretty good job of getting XFL people on. I know we had Jonathan Heinbach and some of the coaches on last year from Arlington talking to all that. I know Anthony Miller who writes for this, where it's illustrated now with Mike Mitchell. He lives in the area. I imagine Anthony's going to get some access that way just because he's in market and he will certainly come on and talk and we can talk with other, we'll get player interviews and all that stuff. So it's not in their traditional sense. But when we get back to our regular Friday episodes, we'll get some prerecorded interviews that way. I think you're going to have prerecorded material. I don't know about live coverage. Somebody going to be on the sideline with the camera. The league might put somebody out there with a camera and just interview, oh, here's Danny and here's the Rock and here's Darryl Johnston and just talk to the execs and not actually cover any of the football that's going on in the background. So if that's what you're talking about, I think it's going to be more that's really what it's going to happen. Maybe there'll be a YouTube livestream, but as far as actual coverage of what's going on behind you, go to your beat reporters. I mean, that's going to be really where you get it. And like you said, Anthony Miller will be there onsite and getting access to that. So that's where you're more going to get it than anything else. And speaking of Anthony and Mike Miller here, excuse me, speaking of Anthony and Mike Mitchell and their endeavors, it could have a big announcement here coming up maybe even today on Twitter involving the future of the Mark House as well. So that could be exciting. Let's go back in week seven one o'clock ES, ESP N. We're going back to this R Renegades hosting again, four o'clock on Fox and then the ESPN games on Sunday 12 and three. So again, kind middle of the road here. Bra is traveling to Houston. Philip, I'll star your question we'll get to in a minute. This will be a good one. The thing. Battle hawks at stallions hosting. Hopefully the Stallions fans show up for that. Kind of any takeaway, sir? That's fun. That's a matchup that a lot of people wanted to see. I think for the most part you'd really love to see the stallions go to the Battle hawks arena, but having the Battle hawks travel to Birmingham is a really fun idea. That's one of the first matchups you think of when you are conceptualizing the idea of these leagues combining. Again, showboats, every time I see the Showboats in the schedule, I just look at them and go, I don't know how good you're going to be. I'm just not sure. I hope they're at least decent. But that's an okay matchup as a pallet starter on Saturday. But that Saturday, 1:00 PM Stallions Ball Hawks game, that's a marquee matchup. You get the defenders on Sunday. Once again, it's a morning time slot for West Coast Central Time. Mountain time people. Bra is at roughnecks, another Texas matchup. So there's some decent matchups here. I mean, again, the biggest thing is the importance of all these matchups will shift as we go along once we finally get to know players and all that. But as far as just looking at in terms of who has advantages and where, that's really the biggest thing. I am really excited for some of these former USFL teams to go to places like St. Louis and DC and run into things like the beer snake and sort of become part of these traditions that were here before. That to me is the most fun part of this and seeing how they react and how fans react to this because obviously that level of camaraderie was not around in the SFL very much so I like the idea of that. But now there's some decent matchups here in week seven as well. What did we say here? Abdul? Professor Dowding. Chef Cookes. Wow. Chef Cookes. Look, they got to fix their offensive line. I have had a lot of problems with their offensive line. The Star's offensive line has been awful for two straight years and it's gotten a lot of their quarterbacks killed. That happened to Brian Scott. That happened to Case cookies. That's happened to a lot of guys who have been behind center for them. I want Case Cook to play well, but I need to see that he has actual protection. He needs it when he has time to throw, he makes some damn good throws. I just need to see consistency upfront and the offensive line, but I want case to play well when he was behind that star's offensive line, it just wasn't fun. We have fun chats going here in the comments in the chat. Week eight here, showboats going again. Michigan hosting later o'clock, four o'clock Fox. This is, so now we have another one. So this is the sole ES ESPN two game, eight o'clock Houston Rev next at Stallions. Again, I look at the stallions logo. That to me says more of a sexy matchup. I know it's the pedigree of the stallions versus if I'm looking at the showboats, it's not really necessarily as interested that way. And DC Defenders here going to St. Louis. That'll be a good one. Sunday noon and then Arlington Renegades going to the Brams at Fox on one o'clock. Once again, you are deciding divisional hatred and also in terms of playoff matchups here, DC going to St. Louis. Look, this is your second crack at St. Louis. If you really are serious about taking down dc, you do it this time. This might be the biggest matchup of the entire season when it is all said and done because DC has already proven themselves and already ran over St. Louis last time Abram Smith was a wild man running down the field against St. Louis, the Battle Hawks. We'll see if they can have their hope field advantage here. I mean that fan base is going to be so ready to jump on dc, but this is probably the biggest matchup of the entire season. I really am excited for this nice Sunday morning matchup. Kind of wish it was a little bit later in the day, but I mean as far as it being a standalone game, this is fantastic. Arlington going down to San Antonio again, I hope San Antonio is able to support their team. I like the Elmo Dome a lot. I'm glad we had that experience there. I hope the fans are able to get behind it and really support maybe again, getting this Texas audience more involved. I'm glad it's not like a late Sunday nights. I mean it's 6:00 PM their time. No, sorry, 3:00 PM excuse me, 3:00 PM their time. So it's not like some of the matchups we had in the problem with the XFL sometimes last year was we had these late Sunday night games that really just crushed people in trying to get them to come to the stadium. So having them closer to midday matchup is good I think, and not having it be like, Hey, it's 7:00 PM Sunday night, you guys should come out to the game and it's like, ah, I got work tomorrow. That Was a big complaint. The braas, I do remember that They were really trying to do the family focus thing too, right? I think they had family tickets as well and yeah, I do remember that being a common, yeah, I can't go to the game here and especially the Alamo Dome while convenient for tourists staying in the Riverwalk or doing the things that we were going to do. I do think it's maybe challenging for families to get in there as well. Yeah, absolutely. I think this is overall better allocated. You can do it Saturday night, that's fine, but Sunday night, no, that's really going to hurt people Admission downtown. Well, DC fans travel and bring the beer snake to St. Louis. Wasn't that the Alamo Dome? They wouldn't allow it, right? Wasn't that the deal? Yeah, they wouldn't allow it. I don't think St. Louis is going to allow them either. Yeah, it's one of those things like Audi Field, I think being the soccer stadium and outdoors, I don't know if that has anything to do with the different policies and just kind of the backlash they had with kind of the throwing lemons and all of that stuff. But yeah, it could be another fun news story that way. Oh, lemon Gate was fantastic, but I don't think you're going to have that again. I mean, that was such a disconnect. That was the whole thing about the new iteration of the league didn't understand the traditions that were baked into the DC franchise and then what's A beer snake? Yeah, they're like, what? Beer snake. It's like that's all anybody ever has talked about this entire time. What do you mean? What's a beer snake? And the fans let it be known real quick. Just so vividly in my head, remembered fans chanting the words beer snake, beer snake in the second or third quarter because they weren't able to construct it. That's how adamant they were about getting their way. That was bizarre. I want to make sure we touch on this Mr. Downtown. What's up with the inconsistencies of start times? Why couldn't we have 1:00 PM across the board? 7:00 PM Totally agree, at least for this step. We just need to be happy they're on the networks they're on, right? I mean that's going to come and when you're the NFL or I mean even hockey deals with having to kind of work around and basketball when you're the NFL, okay, these are the slots. This is what we're doing. We just need to be happy that they're on the channels they're on. I agree with that, but at least they're on, if I am someone that's not in tuned with getting on ES ESPN plus or whatever, I can go to my channels and go to a B, C or Fox and find this game if it's on at noon or one or whatever. I think that's a great idea. But again, they don't have priority yet. They haven't proven themselves yet. Once they do, then they can start to argue for those time slots and say, Hey, these are the ratings we bring to the table. Here's why we should deserve this time slot. Then you can start to argue for that, but for now they don't have that prioritization. But again, you're on Saturday and Sunday, you're not relegated the Thursday or Friday or Monday. You have consistent days that you're on. Think that's the first big step. Max here had a comment. I think the reason for the regional games is definitely to test how much of a boost they can get on a rating slot by having four fan bases watching at once. So again, we're testing some things like you said, working around some of the time slots and then working around some of the networks, but that could be another way too. Let's see how that works. But I do think that that's disingenuous to talk about some of the Fox game numbers and then having them be simulcast And that's the thing, what are the numbers going to be in the regional based broadcast? So that is a bit misleading, but it was the same thing they had with the, what was it? That graphic last year they had about the 4% increase of opening week gains and over end or something like that. There was some weird graphic, they skewed the numbers. It was really backwards. I didn't like how they skewed that last year. Look, I know there's a lot of readings, gymnastics and I know people talk about it and you want to boost it as much as you can. I get that because there are going to be the negative articles that there's going to be negative backlash when there are inevitably dips in ratings. But that to me was kind of a bit disingenuous. Well, what they did was they took the year the entire year of the USFL ratings and averaged it against the week one of the US FL season two and they said that there was an increase on that One week, one week. Here's a good question, Abdul, could we see Friday night games next year in Fox because they want to have SmackDown? I don't mind that because Fox has built that into a good time slot, but that is also very wrestling dependent on that. I don't know if I would stick with the Saturday Sunday games, at least right now I think. Well, that's the thing. I think it's a wrestling idea, right? Look, the CFL for example knows that they have games on Thursday and Friday, right? They're like Friday night, not Friday, on the Friday There. Yeah, that's their thing. They love that. They love the Thursday night matchup. It's like, okay, fine. That's their way of dealing with the market. But UFL does not have that yet. They do not have that idea. I think it's a cool concept, but again, I don't think you have people that are going to go out of their way to watch on Thursday and Friday night. I just don't. Saturday and Sunday, I always thought that Saturday and Sunday was always seen as alternative programming anyways for people who didn't want to watch college football or NFL. So I think that that's again why Saturday and Sunday make more sense. Yeah, I think at least right now we're really, they know if you're on this stream right now, you're going to find the game, but they're trying to get to the people that are in the more casual that way. Week nine here, battle Hawks going to the renegades 12 o'clock A BC stallions at brass, a couple of a b, C games here at 12 and three. And then again, to me at least these are nice and clean. No, we had some of the weirdest time slots and then now we have, as soon as I say that, another simulcast here, the Fox. So we have three Simulcasted games here, DC Defenders at Showboats and then the Panthers at the roughneck. So that's another one of these delineations. Yeah, you're starting to get a lot of Texas based mashups here, right? Or excuse me. Yeah, it's starting to get a lot into the deeper parts of the year. Now you're starting to get into Texas and late May, it's going to start being a little bit hotter. Notably, there are three domed teams in this league, so you can be able to control temperature settings there, which is good. Obviously you can't do that in Arlington. You can't do that in Houston, but you can do that in San Antonio and you're going to be in Memphis, so you're going to be in the deep south here and it's going to be probably a bit toasty, but again, maybe not as bad as if you were playing deep into June or that beginning of that July 4th matchup in Ohio obviously. So that's just something to keep an eye on because the Expel has not had that yet. They've had mostly temperate conditions to deal with. But yeah, really focusing on this Texas market here. Again, really just consolidating everything and being able to have all these fans be around for the Texas matchups. I making it a funny thing here. There has been a gentlemen, I assume gentlemen, bill Alexander here in the chat has been a really, we're terrible and we don't know anything and you're wrong. And people about Bill commented here, these dudes don't even know how loaded the boats are. Bill, this is you right now. This is you at the party by yourself in the corner. We're having fun, so appreciate it. We got a hundred people watching right now. Really appreciate everyone and subscribe it. Bill, welcome you be a part of it. Happy to have you on the stream, but we're having fun here so if you're going to be pissy pants, so you can do that. But just finally, it is been going on for about 20 minutes. I want to dissuade you and your education to other professor. That's fine. We'll see when the games are played. Anyway, so back to the schedule here. Yeah, so we'll see. But another one of these simulcasts, so was that week four, five and nine I think at this point. So we'll see. I'll be curious to see. This is a good test I think moving forward. I think so too and that's a really important aspect here. So we'll see proof of concept, how this works. Alright Andy, go take care of your Palmer. Hop back on here. I'll do some questions here. Andy will be back in a second and then we'll get to week 10 here. If you guys have any other questions about the schedule, we'll get to all of that. Yeah, people enjoying and thanks it all of that stuff. So that's good. Andy's got a plumber, he's got to let in here and then we'll get to week 10. But if anyone else has any questions here in the meantime, we had a question, talking Andy here, whether Friday night would work, maybe with an expansion. I'm not opposed to it again, I think right now we just need to get to Saturday, Sunday, whether it's noon or one or two. Kind of get all that going. I think we need to just any casual fancy we can get to on this I think is the goal here. If they keep a late March start leads itself to expansion. I know that that's the buzzword. I know that that's how we get a lot of YouTube stuff right now. I got clicks on that. We got to get one season with a million plus under the belt here and we'll go forward with that. Shark's talking about which team has the hardest schedule. We'll get to that. We'll get to that here at the end when we get through the late games. Jan talking love the Saturday, Sunday games only. I would agree with that. I think again, normalizing here. The Thursday games were really tough going through all of that stuff back last year, Mr. Downtown, when we come to the bullpen in San Antonio, I need to get down there again. I wish I had gotten the full schedule before working through the kickoff, going down Saturday, doing we'll do our live show, everything. We did that back at Choctaw back last year. Should have lots of fun guests, I'm sure Greg Parks of the world and Pat and Andy and everybody will be on that. So it should be a fun time. But yeah, would love to do that Sunday game in San Antonio, but that might be a little too much to swing here. Going back through the comments here via people enjoying my if people enjoying my meme. That was funny. I did like that question here. Doesn't Fox have ownership in the UFL? I guess our biggest competition would be baseball for the afternoon and NASCAR Fox has to right to that. Yes. So there think again, there's always scheduling gymnastics that way. And again, the whole reason Fox got into this back with the success the XFL had in 2020 was having the programming that they own, that they air midweek or midday on Saturday, Sunday. That's easier than, I don't know, airing old movie recaps or anything like that, a repeat. So we'll see. I mean they can schedule around, but ultimately, I mean I think the NASCAR rights to go with that and obviously baseball, even the viewership is regionally based. I think you're going to get them prioritizing a lot of that stuff. Matthew Battle Hawks are going to whoop the Panthers kaka. Excited to see. I think the Battle hawks, I don't always love the cause, the law and all that. I get a little tired in the St. Louis, the podcast and I love Jason and all of them with the X Fan show, but a lot of shilling for that. But it's exciting there. And then we'll get Andy back on here, Sam, all five renegades Home games are Saturday. Yeah, I did see DC complaining complaints about that. Sorry, they sounded kind of the games that were going on with that. Andy is back. The plumber has been let in. We've gone through comments, we need to talk and this is kind of hard right now. We don't know rosters. We're talking difficulty, strength of schedule. I don't know if we're at a point right now where we can talk about that, but let's get here to week 10. Rounding out the season Panthers at stallions on ESPN, noon Fox, the San Antonio Broma, St. Louis Battle Hawks. Renegades on A, B, C, and then we're closing out with the 7:00 PM Fox roughnecks at the Showboats. Yeah, again, you get the closeout here with dc that's fantastic. That last second to last game on Sunday. So Homefield advantage for them, maybe they'll be able to use that and allocate that into possibly having a home playoff game. The showboats again, hosting the roughnecks, battle Hawks and stallions, I mean some really strong home markets here the last week. This is really a great last showcase for some of the strongest markets in the league and you'll be able to have that with especially the Powell Hawks and the Defenders and the stallions. So again, we'll see with the Showboats. I think they had a good turnout last year. We'll see if they're going to be able to get more people involved in the market. And again, maybe you'd be able to surround the stadium a little bit more. So if you're talking about some of the potentially strongest markets in the league, this is the nice way to round it out here at the end of the season. I will say I thought the Showboats did a good job in building that new market and I'm glad that they survived into this. I think that there was a lot of work put in and I know people weird and criticizing and the hubs and the home markets and all that stuff. I think the Showboats showed that if you got into something like that and put in the time that you could make that work. And so I'm glad that they did that. We're now in some more established markets already with the XFL here, bringing those into the fold. But I'm glad the showboat survived and they all have the new coach and all that stuff working there. But that should be a good situation I think for Memphis. Even with those comments aside, I do think Showboats say, I think that would be interesting to watch. Like I said, we play the games and once they play and if they show the case themselves to be a proficient team in this league, that'll give 'em all the credit that they need. That's all I'm going to say. But yeah, they had a solid, I agree with Abdul. They did have a solid attendance, but again, I want the numbers. I like to see it on tv. I want the numbers. That's all I'm asking. Then obviously we're going to have the, so this will be weird, the conference championship games, A, B, C and Fox, TBD on all of that. My question is the conference championships and we had, I guess it was Beck that was on Coach Beck talking that it's going to be the number one seat of both conference and then the winning, the most winning, but we're still going to be conference based with all that. Am I understanding that correctly? Well, I mean, I don't know if you can be conference based because there's got to be crossover. If there's going to be a team that comes over from one of the other conferences that has a higher winning percentage, then they would cross over to the other league. If you have three USFL teams and one XL team that has, there's only one that has the winning division, that's one the division and then you have two USFL wild card teams I guess you would call them. And I would presume one of them would then cross over to the other league. So I guess it'd still be a conference championship. I guess it'd be weird because then you potentially could end up with say two USFL teams or two XL teams in the championship games. So I'm not sure how that works really. It's a bit weird, but I mean if that's how it is, I mean theoretically that could also happen in, for example, in the Gray Cup, you could have a team crossover. I know it's not really ever happened very much, but you could have that theoretically happen and they're not going to be like, oh we have Western Conference and Industry Conference Champion. It's kind of, I mean you could, but then it becomes weird because another team takes over. So that's really the only the best way to look at It's just win your division, just win the division. But no, but it is, I think because again, coach Becton, I don't know if that was formally put out. We're still waiting on the rule books and all that stuff, but I think we're calling them the conference championship. But I think you could have, if the defenders won the division and then the Renegades were the second best team and two of the teams in the US FL conference, if the stallions won, but then the other two teams, if they had the better record, I think the renegades would go, how would you not be in the playoffs if you had the second best record in your division already? I dunno, to me that's confusing. But we're calling it the conference championship. I would just like a little bit more clarification on that. I mean it's two things. One, it's a wild card and two, it's a crossover. That's basically what it is. And the divisions aren't big enough to be able to allocate that. You don't have enough teams to be able to move those kinds of things around in a normal wild card setup. And two, it's going to be crossing over because you want teams with the best records to be in. So it says each team will play the conference manager amateur will pick the top two teams with the best records and their respective conferences against each other. So what is Beck talking about when it's the best, But we've gotten different reporting and different match different, I feel like we've had other information that said that that wouldn't be the case. It was going to be someone with the best record that would be crossing over. I don't Know. This is from, I mean I would trust this. Then the conference championship will pit the top two teams with the best records in their respective conferences against each other, which would obviously put you in the second place in that division. Right. Well then somebody's going to lose out and there's going to be a really pissed off their team if they have a better record. We're going to be in the same boat we were last year. Yeah, sharks here says maybe they changed it back. I mean this is the press release today. So whatever Beck heard and that's why I did not, sometimes I might talk about something on a show if I've heard something, but I'm not necessarily putting that out in the ether on Twitter. And I saw the Beck interview and I saw that, but I wasn't retweeting that. This is from this. So that will be the top two in each. That way you guarantee yourself an XL versus USFL? Yes. Yeah. Okay. Well, like I said, we might be back to the same controversial point, which means Beck and his Battle Hawks, they better win the division or he get the top two and not have the same problem happen again. If two teams finish seven and three as wild card teams behind the defenders or something like that again, and you're the last of the seven of three teams, then tough luck. You got to make sure you beat the teams that you beat and that's the thing, I would've said that to the Battle Hawks fans last year. I was like, sorry, lost the wrong games. You lost the wrong game to the Sea Dragons. You lost the wrong games to the DC Defenders. Sorry, that sucks. But you go one and three against the biggest teams in division in your setup, that sucks, but you lost the wrong games. So let's talk here, champ. We champ, we'll get some comments and we'll get out of here. I think I want to keep this under two and I know Andy's got to get to work and stuff like that. Obviously T-B-D-U-F-L championship RJ Young putting out in his article on Fox and we've seen that before. Remember they have the incorrect Fox numbers from the Michigan Panthers game and then they changed that, but at least I checked and I had the screenshot that he is saying the game is going to be in St. Louis. Let me see if I can pull that up on, can I drag that into my browser? Here we go. Look at that. Look at this technology. The championship game will be in St. Louis. UFL recognizes how strong string football has been in St. Louis, the be HOKs and drive, whatever they'll be playing there. They were talking about the last two. I know Mike reached out to Xve Brass. They have not officially announced that yet. I don't know if they're happy with RJ Young or not. At least I'm not blocked on Twitter anymore by him, but thoughts on that? It makes sense. I know Pat's kind of down on it. He thinks safety concerns around the dome, but it makes sense If it ends up transpiring in that way. Sure. I mean that's great. Awesome for them. I hope that the same information is being fed to RJ that's being fed to the XFL. I don't want to have miscommunication here, but that's something that's important to keep in mind here. Who's being in the loop, but if it is indeed in St. Louis, yes, that's great. That's a fantastic place to play a championship game and we've seen the potential for how voracious the crowd could be. Obviously if you're the league, you would really love for St. Louis to be in that game because then oh my God, that is an insane home field advantage. But if they're not, then I think you'll still draw decent numbers. The Alamo Dom, I think did a decent job of hosting last year, the XL championship game. It had decent numbers. I think St. Louis could do the same if not better, so I appreciate that. That's an idea. It's not official yet, but if that's the case, great, and if you're a St. Louis fan and that's the case, fantastic. Now you have a real goal to reach for and really hope to achieve. A couple questions here. Which network? Well, the championship game that's on Fox, so we just showed that on there and we'll go back to this. Oh, and Phillip had a question. Well, I have a conference championship. Just take the top four teams because you want to have XLL versus USL in the championship game. Philip up like keep up, keep up. This is why we're doing this. This is what we want because we want to have it in the opening game. Then we want to crown because then, and I'm sure nobody on any Twitter spheres will freak out when it's either the XFL or the US L champion. I don't care. I think the stallions are a great team. I have my USFL 2022 championship, but that is why we are doing that. So that is hope to make sense. Sure. Like I said, I hope whoever ends up winning or losing in the situation, somebody's going to complain about something, somebody's going to be on the outside looking in. That's just the fact of the matter. There's not enough teams involved here that you're going to be able to diversify and get everyone into the dance that you think should be in the dance, but I think this is what's going to happen. No, so again, so we have Andy here and we have spring football news bulletin talking. No, this is why when coaches go on and do interviews and then people take this as this is from their press release, the conference championship will put the top two teams with the best records in their conference against each other. Andy, it is not the conference top team plus three walk. This is the press release. Anything you have heard before today, this is from the UFL. It is the top two teams in each conference. It is the same issue we have before where you could be the second best team in the division and then you still don't make the playoffs because there's a whatever team in the other. This is how whatever it's going. I was just talking about the St. Louis home. Yeah, that illustrious St. Louis hometown or home field advantage where the sea dragons went in and won and then that's why the battle hawks weren't in the playoffs. So yes, that crazy home field advantage. Again, this is why I get a little bit irked at the fact that there's all this kind of lack of being on the same page with both If anybody, all these players, all these coaches and they're just saying, well, this is how it is. This is what I heard, and it's like, yeah, you might've heard that. Now that's probably going to change and you can say it as gospel, but it may not necessarily be the same thing. It's going to change as we go along and as it transpires, because guess what, the executives, they make their decisions, the owners, they make their decisions. They have all the power here. They could snap their fingers and be like, no, actually it's not like that anymore. We're doing this because they have all the power. So I appreciate the idea of getting some of this information out from people who are at least related to the league, but they don't always seem to know what's going on. I mean, that goes for both sides. I don't think there's always a same page methodology here where everybody has the same message or is able to give the same information. One person says one thing and everybody goes with it like it's gospel and that's clearly not the case. I mean it's It's the fact of the matter because there's all these different varying reports and there's all these different ideas. June Jones gets on a radio two years ago and he's just like, oh, here's where the league's going to go. This is what's going to happen. It's like June, you're not even coaching right now. What's going on? Why are you saying this? But everyone says, oh, June Jones said it. It's like, well, yes, but he's not in the league. If you're not one of the top top percentage of people who's actually running the league, all bets are off. I'm just going to say that right now. There's people that Mike talks to, there's people that you talk to. There's people that seem to know what's going on, but again, it's not gospel and information changes. That's why you have to be careful about putting it out. Well, and this is why I love Brandon, but this is why I don't go crazy posting videos. The second someone says something in an interview, I have respect and he works really hard and it's great and Brandon and I are friends, but you can't, again, this is from the press release today from the league. This is what it is now. They could come out later and say, well, okay, we're making an update and tiebreaker, this is what we know now. So this is why, Andy, you're still on this. I've shown you the text. I don't know what else you want me to show you. I am done talking about this at this point because it's getting to be redundant, but this is why I operate on this and this is why when we have even all the, it's going to be these teams and it's going to be the roughnecks or the gamblers. Well, what? It's the gamblers, but it was, this is why we kind of wait until all this stuff comes out sometimes to do this and first to market isn't always necessarily correct. Exactly, and that's why that information is so, it's fluid. It's not really set in stone all the time. Again, this is a press release that just came out today. There wasn't really a solidified indication that this was going to be the playoff format going forward because of what we had heard from other people, but it wasn't set in stone clearly. So I don't know. I know you want to take things as gospel. Again, you want to be able to just go with what somebody's saying and be like, okay, this is how it's going to be, but in this space that clearly is not the case. There's very few people who actually have information or inside sources on this, and this is why we wait. This is the same thing for me. I know we haven't gotten to this level yet, but this is why in the NFLI wait for information to come out. People can say rumors are this or this or this until I see Schefter Rapaport ro, when they start all tweeting the same time, the same thing that I'm like, okay, now we're in motion. This is really going to happen. Before that, I take everything with a grain of salt and that's how I have to take things here sometimes. Yeah, if you have any other questions, pop 'em in here. I have a couple and then we'll get out of here. Andy's got work and other things going on. I did this comment here is a rock's still going to need to open today? Heard? He's too busy stealing Cody Rhodes shine at WrestleMania 40, so I do like that, but in an ideal world, like I said, you have the rock on. I guess he'd be on SmackDown every week on Fox promoting and the Fox and the synergy in the us, but that's a good situation. He just, it's a really bad Andy. Really. People are really mad for this. I know you don't care, but people are big mad about this. No, I'm not saying people don't care. I do think people care. I just wonder if that's the audience they're going for if they're trying to appease to the wrestlers and look. Yeah, again, Rox had a couple of duds, some movies, some of his alternative ventures in recent years having gone the same way, but still a brand, still an identity still has a lot of cachet, so I don't know if it's necessarily going to be severely affected to the way that people think it is, but I mean, I'm sure some people would disagree with me and say they'd be an up in arms and be like, yeah, no, he's losing his cache and it's like, okay, fine. But I just don't think from a casual standpoint it really makes that much of an impact. Yeah. Jared here says, I think it's a solid schedule. Saturday, Sunday, the only decent start times good. Now that works. Now we just need the champ, two games to be called the United Bowl. Bring back the mega bowl. That was my favorite shark here said, do you think this is spring football's last? Oh yes. We need to do the Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. We need do a Homer. Yes. Sorry Anthony. Thank you. Do Spring Fall's Last dance for work is this is the final opportunity. Yes. This is for at least the time being. This is the last chance for all of this. Any thoughts on that? Andy? I thought about this question actually about a week or two ago and to be honest, from the standpoint of it being a entertainment and profitable venture. Yes. Now for now, I don't say last chance ever, and here's why. Again, there's so much football that's played in this country and there's so much potential to bring in these market numbers. I mean, the numbers just keep continuing to go up and up and up and up and up. I mean you just set a conference championship game record and the divisional playoff rating record in the NFL. Now I know a lot of that has to do with Taylor Swift, but it shows you that market growth is potential. It's there. I think people are still going to look at these numbers and be mesmerized by them and say, Hey, I have a way to get it that nobody else understands and I'll do it differently than all those other leagues do. Everyone's going to go through that same mistake. I think what will happen is if this doesn't work, you're still going to have people who are going to start leagues. That's never going to stop. People are still going to start leagues and say, Hey, I want to have a developmental league. I want to be able to give these players a chance. I think we should put something on tv. I think what would happen ultimately is I think you would see something more like the Spring League. I think the Fox Channel or somebody would just say, Hey, you know what? We're going to have a developmental league and just run it for really cheap and just have players get tape, not really pay anybody. And that'll be the end of the day. And I think that's ultimately what could happen if this doesn't work out. Now again, I don't know if that's going to stop anybody from wanting to go big or go home like we've seen with some of these leagues, but again, they're trying to thread the needle right now. I don't know if that's going to work, but I think that somebody somewhere is still going to get the bright idea that they can start a league. Everyone wants it because they all see that market share. When there's that big of a piece of the pie, everybody thinks that they can get in on the game and I don't think it's ever going to stop where somebody is going to completely eradicate the idea of spring football. It's going to continue because it's the biggest sport in this country and it's a lot of people who are involved with it. That's huge. Unless the market starts to decline, you're still going to get people who are going to try it. I don't know if they're going to try it on this scale again for quite some time unless someone has a new revolutionary idea of how to present it and immediately get people hooked in. But I do think something more akin to, like I said, the spring league would be around. I think that would still be a concept, a proof of concept that would still be around in some format. So no, I don't think spring football is going to die, but I do think the idea of presenting a full fledged league as an entertainment product probably would take a backseat for a while if this doesn't work out. Going to blast you some comments. And then I want to do Andy's home rank. Home field rank is before we get out, David, this is our last best hope Philip here. This league will work. Gary, our big friend, this is it for me. Time isn't on my side. Gary, don't say that David, until Brian words Roger his last breath, there will always be football stars, but this is the last chance of all that. If this fails, it will never be on networks again, ever like that. And then where is it? Oh, David's asking the rule book. We were supposed to get rules, so maybe we'll get 'em later this week. We'll figure that out. I thought I had one more funny comment, but oh yeah, Abdul wanted the championship game at Cashman Field, so that would've been exciting For that. Don't we all XFL for a hundred years. Alright, Andy, let's get to any other comments you have leave, but I want to get to Andy is, this is funny, the professor's home field advantage power rankings. Now that we have the eight teams here, Andy, I'll give you the floor. Okay, so I thought about this going into the scheduling matchup and I know I'm probably going to get a lot of feedback and criticism on this, but this is how I feel about our home field advantage rankings right now. So one St. Louis Battle Hawks, obviously biggest numbers, lattice arena, craziest fans in some capacity. They have the clear number one spot and they are going to be able to continue to build on those numbers. I wonder if the 400 level, if they're going to span out and start to put more sections in there, if they're going to let even more people into the battle do. I mean the biggest number we've seen so far is about 38,000. Are they going to be able to expand that even further? Remains to be seen. But that would be fantastic if they were able to do that. So yes, that is the clear number one marker on this DC defenders number two, look, we know about the beer snake, we know about the lemon tossing. Those people are crazy. They've never lost at home ever. That home field advantage is real because they truly have shown that they can hold it. It doesn't matter if it's the 2020 version or the 2023 version, they just are able to dismantle teams when they come into DC and Audi Field's. Great, fantastic atmosphere, great fan experience. I've talked to DC fans, they love it and I think now that they're playing more in the spring season, it won't have to be worried about inclement weather as much. So I think that's fantastic for them. Really great thing here for DC Birmingham. So again, I want to see this market really start to push forward and really put more fans into the stands. They've won a ton at home. Obviously they not really lost much, I believe maybe one or two games I have to double check, but they haven't really lost much at home in their two years there. Obviously they have two championships in the USFL, so they've shown to be pretty proficient at home and I just want to see more of the fans show up and really show that support because again, I see the online support, I just want to see more people in the stands and really give it that flavor. But Birmingham has been pretty good for their iteration, their two year stint, the Brahmas, I put 'em here because I still believe in the San Antonio market. We saw it with the commanders back in the a FI mean they were able to really put in some serious numbers there. The Brahmas fans, hopefully the schedule work out a little bit better for them. Maybe they can get the San Antonio market involved. I really like the idea of San Antonio. Maybe they can have a chance to jump the stallions if they're able to put more support behind them. But I like San Antonio as a market. I like the Alamo Dome. I think you can create a distinct advantage there. The Panthers, again, let's see where that enthusiasm goes for Michigan football. Let's see if you can really carry over all the Detroit fans, all the Lions fans, can you put some more of those people in the stadium and really start to reinvigorate that market? If you're able to do that, great, then you can utilize Ford Field. Ford Field was so loud during the playoffs that was such a great atmosphere. I hope they're able to get more people involved and be able to kind of revitalize it and bring it back into fruition. So the Panthers, again, the Braas I think have a chance to really jump up here in the rankings. Memphis, again, I like the Memphis market. I think they did a good job in their first year. I don't want to see them just sitting on one side of the stadium. I would like to see start to spread out a little bit, but I think Memphis and Tennessee in general, having a team I think is good. It's really close between them, the Panthers and maybe even the Brahmas. I think there's some leeway for them all to kind of work on themselves. The renegades, we've been to that stadium, it's a baseball stadium and it's kind of retrofitted. I'm not crazy about the setup. I think it's still funny that you can still see the Texas Rangers logos on the trash cans when you walk through the lower area. It's kind of funny. But as a stadium for football, I don't know if it's really my favorite and I don't really feel like they have an advantage. Arlington's kind, whichever team plays in there, it feels a little bit neutral. So I'm not huge on that. I mean yes I get they're defending champions, but Arlington itself is fine as a venue, but I want to be done with it. I kind of wish they played in a different stadium to be honest. And then finally the roughnecks and the reason I have them here is because they're moving to a different stadium. That seems different. The coaches are different. The players are different. Is that crowd that was at Houston and the University of Houston, are they going to be able to transfer over to Rice Stadium? This is the biggest question mark. Hopefully it's better than we expect, but I just don't know what to expect right now because we haven't seen the proof of concept. So that's why I put 'em right there at eight. But they have a chance to jump the renegades of course, and this is kind of where I'm at right now, but I think overall the reason I make these rankings is because I think this is still showing that there are still good markets here and I think these are really good proofs of concept as to some of the strongest markets that you had from the XFL and some of the strongest that you had from the USFL. Obviously the teams that actually played in their home markets. So for me it's still good overall it's a strong list. I hope that the work is being done to really make some of these teams stand out more than they have in the past. And even the teams that are at the top, like the defenders and the hawks, I still think you can even do it even more to really get people involved. So that's where I stand with my power rankings. I was looking at this, I got to market something that's on red, so get there. I don't disagree with this list. I was looking at this I think battle high again, there's this elusive home field advantage and then losing to the, I keep putting my hands up and then my camera wants to track my hands defenders there. I might put defenders above because I would say, let me disagree with that. Defenders like you said, undefeated battle hawks lost the pivotal win and get into the playoffs game with the big, now I know they have to show it, but I would put that defenders over battle hawks and then the battle Hawks stallions, I think you have to put, you can't have a top three without a US FL team in there. Panthers were kind of mixed mash. I would put them below the brass and then the roughnecks are kind of a question mark at this point. Renegades, I think their fan base is really good. And when we were at the kickoff game, you have a lot of them, but like you said, yeah, it's still in the stadium. It's kind of the leftover remnants of the Rangers game. It's field is next door now and it a weird, it works. It's funky but it's not perfect. Yeah, it's a bit of a weird setup. And again, I would rather they play in an MLS stadium. I think that's what everybody wants, but that seems to be a pipe dream. I think everybody's concept of wanting to play in an MLS stadium isn't necessarily there, so it's not really going to happen for the foreseeable future. And look again, the Panthers the thing that I just like I said I want to know, I want to know the numbers. I want to know the attendance numbers for the Panthers and for the Showboats and for the stallions. But we've seen what three of these in person? No, you've seen four of them in person. Sorry, you've been to Audi Field so you know what that's like. So we have a good concept of what these stadiums are. Hopefully I get out to more of them and I get to really see them. But again, I think the margin is the difference between a lot of these is actually pretty thin. That's what I'm saying. The defenders one. Yeah, I would put them number one. It just, it's the sheer numbers. It's like the pure numbers of the battle hawks. But you're right, the defenders have defended their territory. They've literally showcased home field advantage and it's never been proven wrong. So I understand why you put them at number one F Ball fan here. I love Arlington. Hopefully they don't section off those front seats like they did. I think they have to for the sight lines I think because it's baseball, but they need to put a tarp there. We need to call up the USFL tarping manufacturer and say, Hey, can we get some of these for the renegades? Yeah, it's a bad look. It just looks like no one's sitting there. But if you had tarps going there, you're like, oh, okay. Well then it was like when they did, it was like during Covid and they wouldn't have people that close to the field and they had some tarps in some of those places. So I think they should do that. I'm just looking here. Anyone else have anything? Rice Stadium is a rundown down. People will not want to go to games there. Isn't that where the spring league? Wasn't that their spring league where all that was gray? San Antonio is a wonderful place for football. Abdul Memphis is renovating their stadium, so I think the one side will be like that for the next year and maybe the year after that. Anything else, Andy? We're at two hours. Anything else we'll get out of here? Like I said, I'm glad, I'm just glad the schedule's out finally. So we'll see what this goes. But just a note for everybody, be careful about where this information comes from and who's putting it out there. Nice that we have people like coaches talking in the space, players talking in the space, but it's not always what's actually happening in the space. So just keep that in mind going forward. A lot of things are going to continue changing over the next two months. Same thing with players, player performances, players that are in training camp players that are actually on the rosters. That's all fluid and it's all going to change. So just keep that in mind going forward. But I am really excited about us getting the training camp and finally starting to kind of ramp up. I think everybody will really start to get into it once the Super Bowl's over and once that whole thing is finally transpired this Sunday, then we'll really be able to gear in and focus on this. Yeah, I appreciate everyone. Like I said, David says, thank you for the grace, I appreciate that. Again, my we're too late now in the show I may have made my frustrations at the top, but it just kills me where I want this to succeed and I want this to do as well as it can and we can all do well in this space if the league does well and the more people in Sports Illustrated and all the people covering this, but when Andy and I were talking yesterday and we were trying to figure out, hey, what time are we going live? And I'm like, whatever. It makes the least amount of sense for them to put all this information out is probably what they're going to do and that's what it was and we made the best of it. We still have almost a hundred people watching here, two hours in. So I appreciate that. I assume everyone here is subscribe if you're not, like I said, think about being a channel member buck a month. It looks good in the analytics. I get to track like, ooh, who's a new member here and you get fancy things when we put your comments and stuff up. I super appreciate, Andy is always taking a lot of time today for all of this. If we get rules this week, maybe we'll do something. But again, I think we're still kind out of the prerecorded, all of that stuff. I know, like I said, hussy and Evan and I will do a CFL free agency show I think next week after the Super Bowl, but there's going to be a lot of Super Bowl noise here leading up. So I don't know if we get anything else this week. Andy, anything else from you? Not for me. Thank you as always. Love to be on here. A lot of fun. We didn't realize it'd really been around since new Year, since the last time we did a stream, so I kind of forget how much time passes, but thank you again for having me on and we'll see what happens. Yeah, I know people hate the live shows, but this is a lot more fun. Get a lot more interaction that way. So we'll see. But it's either live show or nothing. Sometimes I would do the live show. So we'll see you guys next time. Take care and don't get into many arguments on Twitter about all this stuff. Just remember both of these leagues view you as just an audience member and it's not worth getting in fights about. Thanks guys.

UFL 2024 Super Draft Results + Analysis!

Well, there's nothing like getting a tweet here about half hour before all this. Hey, we're going to post this stuff. We're going to live tweet now. If anyone from XFL ever hears this today, tomorrow, five years from now, just let us know. Hey, we're going to start tweeting this stuff at 10. We can get prepared. We have people standing by. Luckily Greg Parks can hop on here. We've got Pats hopping on Coach Craig Sports as well here in a little bit. Greg, how are you doing today As the XFL Twitter feed just posted? I'm ready to roll. I'm feverishly scribbling on my notepad to try to keep track of picks and things like that as we're going on. So if it looks like I'm paying attention, I promise I am. I'm just also taking notes off here to the side. Yeah, so we're here, Greg. We did the dispersal draft. Today is a super draft. If you're following along, please like and subscribe. We split the conferences. We were able to draft protect and get all those players. Last time John Bogle and I did that John Vogel list snowed in today without internet. So that is why he is not hopping on here today. Today. Now you can draft outside of your conference, we'll be filling out the teams. Certain teams have more spots to fill, so we'll kind of figure out how long this will go today. And then I think free agency starts tomorrow. I believe Mike Mitchell said. So people get really excited about the draft, but it is cool. But then, I mean this will be a full bang deal here coming up after tomorrow. Do you like how everything's gone so far? That's a very broad question In terms of this draft process. How are we feeling about all this? It was very difficult, I think to figure out a fair system, a system that would be fair to the players, a system that would be fair to the teams. And when you take a step back and look at the process that is ongoing right now, it looks very convoluted. It's like how did they even come up with this? But I think in terms of trying the best to make it fair, I don't know what they could have done better or differently to make it a more fair system than the one they came up with. It is complicated. It is convoluted. I have people close to players reaching out to me saying, Hey is so-and-so eligible for this draft is so-and-so, so even the players don't seem to be really sure the eligibility for this. And that's a failure of communication more than anything else I think. Yeah, and it's hard. I know because John Vogel and I went live last week because see of course last time we did the thing on Friday and then we announced everything on Monday. So then today, and I was talking with XFL and they're like, well no, we're, we're going to post them Monday. I'm like, okay, well I was expecting a dump later today. We had people on our stream last Monday finding out, oh, I'm a protected player. I'm not. But here we are today, we're live tweeting, which I guess is a little better. I have it up on here. We have Cody Latimer chatting in here in the chat. Here we go. So that's exciting. Yeah, it's just, it's weird. Communication from the beginning of all of this hasn't been phenomenal. I understand we have a lot of moving pieces and it's a very shortened timeframe here to kind of get all this done. Is that how you feel just with all the moving pieces we're kind of getting by? Exactly. And you're right, the ramp up time is very short, which is why I was kind of hoping they would delay until 2025, play both seasons in 2024 and then delay until 2025. But I also understand Fox Sports and Redbird Capital not wanting to lose tens of millions more money in the process just to get to 2025. So I understand that from a financial point of view, but you have two leagues that are similar as they are very distinctly different in some ways, whether it's the contract structures, whether it's the team roster construction and things like that. And you kind of have to meld them into one, into a very short amount of time and I think that's why we've seen some of the issues crop up that we've seen. Yeah. I wonder if you're better off, we've talked about it. I know you were on and we've had many hypotheticals of Yeah. Do you each play this season knowing that hey, we're going to crown these champions and move forward from there? Because some of this, it feels a little tight. I mean fans are still excited, but here we got 117 people watching with about 20 minutes notice. I don't feel too bad about that, but I dunno, to me, I would like, this feels like a mix, right? We're live tweeting now, kind of like the USFL did. I don't know. It's kind of like we're trying to marry these two very oil and vinegar here. We're trying to marry these two philosophies together and it seems like you're getting a little bit of a overlap. It doesn't always feel right. And again, I think the people in the football operations department are doing the best they can because as we talked about, there is a little bit of oil and water to this where it's not just an easy mix. And so again, I think that's why we're seeing some of the issues that we're seeing. I was going to ask, so I have said, and I've actually, I've said it many times that I'm still asked on here. I could read who's your team now and the Sea Dragons, and I'm famously a Washington Commanders fan, so people are like, oh, clearly you're going to be a DC Defenders sandwich. I could never be. With all the long lineage of rivalry that we've had with the Sea Dragons and the DC Defenders, I've opted to go with the Brams, follow my boy AJ Smith over there with Wade Phillips and God willing to Brandon Silvers of the world, who I know is tracking some of our work. Have you picked a new team now that the Orlando guardians are gone? Well, I wouldn't say that the Orlando guardians were my team locally. I was closest to them geographically, but I didn't really have a rooting interest in them. I guess I'm taking this more of a 50,000 foot view where I'm not cheering for any team in particular. I'm just kind of covering the league as a whole and it's, trust me, it's a lot better that way. You don't have your heart set on anything and you don't allow your heart to break just like the Jaguars did for me in the NFL. And so I'm certainly rooting for the league to succeed, to be a place where players can come and play and put their work on tape and advance to the NFL and short of that, be able to make a living playing football at this level. So I'm rooting for the league to succeed, but I don't say I have a rooting interest in any particular team And I've got the thing I'm refreshing in the background. So I will tell you guys when we have everything coming in here. I know Coach Craig is hopping on in a minute and then Pat as well. Are you feeling more or less bullish than maybe you did a month or two ago with how everything is laid out now that we've gotten? Obviously we've done deep dives in the cities and all of that, but how are you feeling just overall here, welfare check? Not that much different, to be honest with you. I think the main complaint I had about XFL 2023 is that they didn't do enough work in the cities. They didn't do enough work locally. We saw that reflected in the attendance. We saw that reflected somewhat in the TV ratings, but this was their opportunity to fix that and because everything was on hold with the merger talks, and granted there were some events held in the cities, but I didn't think they could go as gung-ho in the cities advertising as they might have had they not been working so hard on getting this merger together and getting the plan together. So I think if I had a disappointment and if I had some reservations about the upcoming season, it's that I don't think they've still done enough work in these cities to really establish the brand as something that people should want to come out and support. Yeah. How are you liking the messaging here of We've had the commercial, a lot of airplay yesterday I had my tweet I was very proud of. They were playing a lot of UFL commercials during the Dallas Cowboys game. I said, that's good. So the Dallas Cowboys fans will know how to find Dak Prescott playing next year. They'll be able to track him down. What do you make, because what we're seeing a, again, that feels like USFL, right? We've got our, Hey, this ain't your Hollywood Football League and all that stuff. How are you feeling with the messaging coming out of two leagues coming into one and this will be the best thing ever? I'm fine with it so far. I think that it certainly beats the alternative, which is not having a lot of advertising. I'd rather them saturate the market with advertising than do the opposite. It remains to be seen how effective it is. I think getting out there that this is a combination of the XFL and the USFL is important. Having those talking heads talk about how important Spring league is and how good these leagues are. There are millions of people who tune in to watch the Colin Cowards of the world that don't tune in to see the XFL or USFL. So I think using them as an authority on these leagues might reach some fans who might otherwise not either hear about this league or sample the league at all. Yeah, I'll know this. We will do, and obviously John Vogel has been great coming on and doing the stream and we're doing this today, but I'll know this, we will pop off another five or 10 subscribers over the weekend if people, and I don't know, are they rolling ads? Are people like, Hey, okay, let's check that stuff out. Like I said, make sure you're subscribed on here. Greg comes on a lot and we do a lot of this kind of stuff. I was going to do it later today, but obviously this is fun now. Still refreshing on here, people checking in bed scope, battle hawks. I don't know. Any other general thoughts before we get into all this? Anything? I mean I haven't had you on in a couple of weeks. Yeah, it's been a while and there's been a lot of work done. I think that a lot of the graphics we've seen used on social media and things like that have been on upgrade from an XFL standpoint. I do see a lot of Fox. I do see a lot of U-S-L-F-L influence on that, which I think is a plus. So they're doing things as best they can right now. I don't want to give 'em too high of a passing grade for this just because it's kind all coming together at the same time and we're expecting schedule a release hopefully soon. I'll knock on wood for that. They did say middle of January was the target date I think Russ, Brandon mentioned. So hopefully that comes sooner rather than later. They can get started selling individual game tickets. They can get started selling season tickets in Houston. They haven't even announced as the stadium. I think Rice Stadium is rumored to be aware that roughnecks are going to play, but nothing officially has been announced. So they can't sell even they can sell season ticket deposits, but they can't sell actual season tickets until they announce the stadium, which they haven't done yet. So every day that goes by that they don't do that is another missed opportunity another day. And this is the same conversation Reed we had with the XFL last year with the Vegas stadium situation being the hole up. So hopefully it doesn't drag on the same way that Vegas did last year. Yeah, I know you said, yeah, rests. Brandon had talked schedule coming out. I think we're going to get the rules this week as well. Feels like this is kind of the first week of a lot of things coming out. We've gone through New Year's and the holidays and all that. That's kind of why I laughed when the initial like, oh, we're doing all these drafts end of December, and I'm like, we're not doing the supplemental draft the Thursday before Christmas or whatever. Kind of those rumors were like, this makes more sense, let's get You. And it was hard to do the draft without even announcing the league. I mean, that would've been kind of strange too. That's what I'm saying. Have you gotten feedback from people in terms of this new, I don't know if people were knew that I followed the EX F Fellow or whatever, talking about, oh, is Seattle not in? But it hasn't really spurred a lot of conversations if you had a lot of conversations with people as this cultivated new ideas that people want to talk to you about in terms of all the casual terms, watcher Terms, not really. I don't think it's broken through yet. I think as we go on with the NFL postseason and the commercials hit more and more, I think there may be more of a conversation about that, but it really hasn't sunk in yet. The one thing about the ads and the time of the season that the league is going to kick off, it's a new development for XFL fans who in all three iterations, the league kicked off the week after the Super Bowl. And I do wonder what effect this avalanche of television ads is going to have when yes, you're advertising, but now you're going to wait until March. It's not all this advertising. And then boom, the league starts right after the Super Bowl. It's having all this advertising in January, and then what kind of lull, if any, will there be until March 30th? Are we going to see a continuation of these ads throughout Fox, throughout ESPN programming or are they going to kind of pull back? And so I am interested to see what the advertising looks like outside of the NFL. And once the season ends in February and we have a month and a half until the UFL season begins, what is that advertising going to look like? Are they going to continue with this or will they pull back a little bit more? Well, oh, sorry, we have all of our friends joining in. I didn't. I was too busy. Sorry guys. I was too busy. Pats here and too busy going back and forth here trying to make sure we have everything up to date. My last thought and then we'll touch to Craig and Pat here, Greg, because we talked about that yesterday where they were airing the ad during the Dallas Cowboys game and Anthony Miller, we were talking in the chat and he goes, oh, it is great seeing all these ads. Yeah, but like you said, it's such the USFL thing. We're going to air the Super Bowl ad and hey, we'll see you in two and a half months. I mean, I know even NBC has gotten a lot of grief for airing their Olympics commercials and it's like, okay, I understand you're doing the Olympics in July, but I don't know how much that resonates through everything. Pat, how are you doing here today, Hanks for hopping on here, pat, how has everything been treating you with how all this has rolled out? I mean, I'm just kind of riding the wave everyone else. There's always been a belligerent amount of speculation with this whole process. And Reed, I know you called me out on it and I think you're absolutely right. What did I do? Yeah, I, and I appreciate that sometimes you got to be a little bit humble in this process, but there's been so much speculation that at this point, man, I hate to sound edgy, but I'm kind of just along for the ride. I don't really care. I've had players talk to me, coaches talk to me asking what I know, me asking what they know, and eventually everyone gets on the same playing ground level ground at some point. And right now, just January 15th, we got, and I was doing the math real quick, about 138 players about to find employment and sidebar on this, a lot of these coaches on these other teams are starting to find employment as well. With the most recent one, Chris Dishman going to Texas Southern with the Vegas Piper. So very curious about that. I'm more excited in my opinion, by the way, they're kind of a sidebar what's happening with some coaching staffs because there was a lot of double dipping by some of these coaches. I'm curious to see if they're going to allow that now that jobs are being a little bit more stringent. So I'm very curious to see what the panel has to hear about or has to say about that. Yeah. Kirk, what do you make of all this in terms of just you did our part, whatever the heck they called it, the college draft or the rookie draft, USFL did the college, I mean the XFL did the rookie draft. How'd you on back then? What have you made of all this and what does the resignation of Emerge UFL league for you? So it's been really interesting to see the process so far. And the biggest frustration I think for a lot of us too is the lack of updates to the average person. Even today like, oh, we're going to be tweeting this all of a sudden and you find out the day of, it's like, well, even if you just told us last Friday, that would've been at least a little bit nicer. You might've gained a little bit more interest from the average person, even the casual fan at that point in time. But there's just so much that hasn't been shared, and I know they're working on, they're trying to make this happen this year. They're working on a lot of deadlines, but you could have had a little bit better structure to some of it, I feel like too at the same time. But I think it's going to be very interesting to see what happens from the last draft from this draft today. And then I believe they said free agency is going to start tomorrow too. And you're going to see a lot of turnover on these rosters too. I think when I was looking through some of the rosters, I'm like, some of these teams got five, six good running backs. I'm like, a lot of these guys aren't going to be in the same place come March really easily. Greg, what do you think about the consolidation that we've talked with the Russ Brandons of the world here and everyone joining Daryl Johnson, everything up above, but some of these teams, I mean you're really being able to cherry pick some of the highest talent from, and now we're getting to where we can go outside our own league. I mean, do you expect the quality of play here to increase going into the season? I would hope so. If not, something terrible happened. Yeah, I certainly would expect that it is, if you want to look at it sort of like an all-star team of XFL and USFL players is what we're putting together here. And so the quality of play should be high. Remember there was a lot of, especially with the XFL in terms of kickoffs, in terms of some of the other rule changes, there was a lot of getting used to those new rules. There was a process and I think that sort of drag down the quality of play early on. Remember that they didn't have any preseason games because the weather in Texas struck at the time that they were supposed to hold preseason games last training camp. So they didn't even really get to have any kind of full dress rehearsal for these games. So I think by now, whatever rules they go with, whether it's a combination of USFL, an XFL or whatever the case may be, I think the players are going to be a lot more used to these rules and I think that's going to help the quality of play as well. Yeah. Pat, we were talking expecting rules coming out potentially this week. I mean to me there's not that many big rules. I mean, I know if you want to be a homer for one of these, what do you think they do for the rules? I mean, if you're going truly be the league of opportunity and intersections and everything, I think you make the NFL rules as we can. I know we can debate on whether player safety and all that stuff, but if you're trying to pitch the kavante turpen, the Brendan Aubrey, all that goofy stuff, you have to keep it, in my opinion, as close to the NFL as possible. And I tweeted something out recently about kickoffs and a couple players made their own posts about it and whatnot. But you take out the NFL style kickoff, a lot of these guys aren't Frank NDA who's been tearing up the USFL for the last two seasons. And I make this comment about the running backs and receivers, and it's part of the reason why Cam Phillips from 2020 is not in the NFL is I don't need these guys to be my linebacker one or my linebacker two, I need them to cover punts. I need them to run down the field on kickoff. I need those metrics. So if they want to go to the XFL style kickoff, that's fine and dandy and everything like that, but you're negating a lot of these looks to now to the U dfas and maybe a Canadian football player versus the XFL guy because now I'm like, I don't need my linebacker one, I need my linebacker two, I need a guy who can run down the field, make plays. Now flip that, if we do go to an XFL style kickoff in the NFL, then yeah, that's the metric I think you have to go by, in my opinion. I do think to jump in there, I think Pat makes some good points. I do think there is sort of this push pull, right? Because you want to give NFL teams as much of an NFL look to these players as you can because your goal as a league is to get these players into the NFL. And as Pat said, if you're going to do the XFL kickoff, that is very different from the NFL kickoff. And if you're an NFL special teams coach trying to find those guys that are going to run down kicks and run down punts, you don't really get a great sense of how they might do based on the XFL kickoff. But I also think that you have a very finite number of people who are willing to tune in to watch players who are not as good as NFL players play the exact same style game. So you have to offer something different, whether that's from the broadcast point of view, whether it's talking to coaches at half, which even now NFL teams do talk to coaches in between the quarters, right? Or talking to players on the sideline during the game or being able to hear the coach to quarterback communication or whatever broadcast innovation they can come up with. But that also is the rules. And I think the XFL kickoff, it doesn't sound like it's going to carry over to the UFL, which I'm disappointed in because if you have something, a rule in particular that is so well regarded that people who don't even watch the UFL are commenting on and how effective it is and you're losing that, I think you're losing some of the intrigue that you want to use to draw fans who might not otherwise watch this alternatively football. But if you offer them different rules, if you offer them something different from the NFL that still makes sense. It still looks football and it's still intriguing. I think you may pick up some viewers who say, I'm hearing about this new rule. It's kind of interesting to me. Let me check it out. Craig, thoughts on that? And then I have a couple of comments we'll get to. Yeah, I think the point that Pat makes a lot of sense too, because a lot of these guys, if you're trying to get on the back end of the roster, you have to be able to do multiple things at the same time. So I think even if you just keep the kickoff like the same as the NFL, you can still do your point after conversions, do the one two and keep it interesting there and have that be your differentiation point too, because you're really not from the extra point to that for opportunity. I think that'd be maybe that's kind of the give and the take of this situation. Go for it. Two things. We have our first selection, Jared, I don't see it. Where is that? At The Showboats Twitter. Oh, well of course. So we don't put it on the XFL Twitter. They said it's On, it's actually Quentin Dormy was the first pick by San Antonio. San Antonio had the first pick. Memphis had the second. Quentin Dormy went to San Antonio number one, But it's not on the XFL Twitter, Right? Right. It's on the team Twitter accounts. This is lovely. Thank you guys so much. All right, let me do this. Here we go. All right, and keep us posted in the chat as well. I'm trying to frantically kind of research all this, so here we go. Good for Quentin. I think paired up with AJ Smith, he'll be very serviceable. They're probably going to get rid of Matthew McKay, who was their QB three and possibly Kurt Ben, Kurt as well. But going back to the rules and everything like that, do we know what position group has been the most successful outside of specialists in these leagues? Like transitioning to the NFL? It has to be a specialist. I mean without a doubt. It's defensive lineman, it's lab, LeBron, Ray, mha, London, Austin. I'm sounding like breaking. I said Khalil Davis, la, LeBron Ray, Jeremiah Farms last year. Dominique Davis, it's mostly defensive linemen that are transitioning the best to the NFL outside of the specialists. Specialists are in their own group. A lot of these guys are all on the same clique. They all train together as the kickers, the puns and everything like that. But I think that might say something as well going and just final point, I'm sorry. Oh, You're good, you're great. But Reed, I think we talked about this during the regular draft, the XFL Twitter account during 80,000 followers or something like that. I talked to Larsson offline, I was like, this kid got a million 0.5 impressions, a million 0.5, he's got 3000 followers, 380,000 followers from the XFL main account. The amount of lost opportunity that these guys lost with these non picks to just get this reach out to get it retweeted like Central Michigan could retweet the Quinn Dormy thing and all that stuff. I feel like they lost figuratively and the way Twitter's financial stuff works. Granted they don't have the blue check mark, they lost figuratively a lot of money by not doing that. I want to talk more quarterbacks later. We do have our second pick, like we said, the showboats. I think we'll get this all on here. I think they got to figure this out. We're getting this all together on here. It is interesting just as Pat points, this is on XFL 2023, the Twitter account on there, it's not on the, it's not co-sponsored with the USFL one. I think it's also weird. Oh, we still don't have a UFL Twitter account. Greg Memphis Showboats taking Jared Thomas here. Thoughts on that? Yeah, it's funny because the XFL doesn't exist anymore. Neither does 2023 and yet it's being retweeted by the XFL 2023 Twitter account. So I think that's a good microcosm of the league at this point. When I looked at the Memphis Showboats roster and I kind of analyzed their dispersal draft, I had offensive line as one of their big remaining needs and they addressed it pretty handily with Jared Thomas from the New Orleans Breakers. He's a center, so that's a really important position along the offensive line. So yeah, good pick. I think In terms of Pat, any thoughts on this? I want to go back to the quarterback conversation here, the minute bit. Any thoughts on Jared? I mean they only had, and Greg, please correct me if I'm wrong, they only had Jordan McCray, who he's a long time spring league arena league guy. A couple stints in the NFL got hurt last year. Obviously the flip connection of the Showboats, the Breakers pick makes sense Shore up that offensive line like case cook is, for lack of a better word, cook. And let's I think, man, when you cut down all the talent from all these leagues and take 'em from 16 to eight, I'm hoping this is going to be an ultra competitive league. But I mean sometimes it's not about the Xs and nos, it's about the Jimmys and the Joes once they hit the field. So Am OC here, should that just be right? Is that correct? Offensive center. Offensive center, okay. You normally just have C on there. Yeah, well I don't like CI usually put, if I'm doing my abbreviations and my breakdowns, I'll do og, but then I'll always write out center. But who am I? I'm just atmo. I mean, I had a question here and I want to circle back to the Dormy thing from listener Max talking to you. How concerned are you all about the league reportedly considering paying the quarterbacks for statements? The other players were that some of the quarterbacks, obviously we saw Quentin, so he's not concerned about that. But Greg, we had the DI vipers and all that paying for some of those quarterbacks. I think part of it was more like games played versus whatever, but thoughts on less money going to the quarterback share this year and getting that talent. Yeah, I think that's, it hasn't necessarily borne itself out yet. Now if Jordan Temu re-up with the defenders because he doesn't like the contract structure, then we have an example to point to as to someone who said no to the league because of that. Right now it's all kind of speculation and we're seeing some pretty good quarterback stick around with the league, so I'm not really in panic mode yet. But I do think that's another thing that's sort of a push pull for this league. They want to have the best players, they need the best quality of play to attract fans and yet they may not be as willing to pay more for quarterbacks or for key players. We saw the XFL do that in 2023 with quarterbacks. We saw the XFL do that in 2020. They were willing to go above and beyond the normal pay rate for some of the star players to bring in. And the same thing with assistant coaches don't know what effect it has because we haven't seen the coaching staffs released yet. But one of the ways that you can get these players into the NFL is not only to put game tape on film for NFL teams to look at, but it's also to have good coaching or the best coaching outside the NFL that you can get. And if you're only making these coaches sort of seasonal employees, there is a risk that you're not going to attract some of the best coaches. Some of the better coaches are just going to say no to that, whether it's the lower pay and we saw Heinz Ward walk away from a lower pay for a second year. And so I think that's the tough part is yes, you want the best coaches and yes, you want the best players, but you're also not going to go above and beyond for pay for players. You're going to limit the work for coaches to seasonal, which probably limits their pay in some ways. So I understand the financial realities of the Spring League and the reason that these two leagues combined was because of those financial realities, but they're going to have to accept the limitations of it with the players and coaches if it comes to that because of the pay Pat. Were you surprised that Heinz War didn't come back? I didn't get your thoughts on that because to me it was a pretty focal point of kind of the selling of XFL last year, right? Of, Hey, look at these. We're giving these opportunities for all these coaches and what did you make of him not coming back? I mean it just not to be edgy, but it depends on what this Hines Ward really want. Does he want to be? And Greg, Greg and Greg, please correct me if I'm wrong, I know he had ties to the a FI know he had ties to another league that ended, I don't know if it was the Ricky Williams league, the Freedom League that Ricky Williams make a thing and whatnot. So he has ties to spring football, but alternative league football, but he also has ties to FAU was an assistant receiving coach to the Jets. To me, I don't know, I'd have to sit down and talk with him and I know that's kind of a cop out thing to say, but it's like, what do you want, man? Do you want to be this type of dude who's in it for the bag? Because I looked up how much money he made and he made 38 million in the NFL stopped playing in 2012 and whatnot, which yes, it is a lot of money for most people and whatnot, but when you're living a certain expenses and taxes and paying out agents and whatnot, that air quote bag goes away a little bit quicker. So if Hines is for the brand and for development and whatnot, I don't see why he doesn't take the $600,000 dollars salary because I'm sure he's doing other stuff. But I kind of thought Hines is going to be this Anthony Beck type guy where he does his media stuff. He's for the development and while it's obviously a full-time job, it really isn't, you really only have to care about seven months out of the year. And as long as I know wins and losses matter, but as long as you're a good team guy, I feel like they'll keep you around in these leagues, be off task. But if you're fun to be around, I don't see them getting rid of you unless you're a complete lack of a better word. Douche nozzle, We have our next pick here. We'll go to Craig on this. Ezra Gray going to the roughnecks running back on there from Alabama. Any thoughts on that? He's a guy that's bounced around a little bit now, so he had some flashes last year with Memphis. It's kind of an interesting pick, I think this early too, because when you think of this Houston team, you think that they got some decent depth that running back already. You got Mark Thompson there. I think Pledger is back. Somebody else I'm forgetting off the top of my head, but I'm like that's probably not the biggest area need for their team and taking a little bit early in my opinion. But Yeah, I was pulling up and I probably should have done this before because I was trying to remember with the Dormy stuff like okay, because I got, that's kind of my quarterback now, right? Or Jack Cohen and we had Ben Curt on there. But yeah, with the roughnecks that we have, everyone's favorite Mark Thompson. I got the roster up on here, but yeah, certainly and in this early, oh yeah, tie On Heavens is the other one. Pat, thoughts on that? Pat on as coming on Mean? He did come on a little bit. There were some injuries between Alex Collins and Jwan Washington I believe got hurt as well. And then they also had Justin Stockton there. So he did really come on at the end of the season last year. I mean when you have Mark Thompson there, despite his antics on the social media, he still has proven to be an extremely effective running back. So running back to me isn't the need, but I mean it's kind of a gluttony of riches. You might be able to pick this guy up, hold him and then trade him to another team and just kind of manipulate that. Maybe that might be going too deep into it, but that's how I feel about certain picks. Greg, your thoughts on this and then I'll pop up and then we have our next draft pick coming on, but thoughts on the running back and then we can talk about Dray Vaughn as well. Yeah, I agree. I was surprised they went running back there with Ezra Gray actually the first pick of a team that did not protect a player. So Houston picking Ezra Gray from the Memphis Showboat. So the first two picks were from teams that no longer exist. The roughnecks taking the first player from a team that is still in existence but who did not protect that player in last week's draft. Gotcha. And then we have a couple more picks here. See Navi, it's kind of the slow and then kind of the avalanche here comes on here. St. Louis BA Hawk's taking the safety here, let me get that tab pulled up here. Jevon Askew, Henry from West Virginia. Anyone? Pat, do you want to chat on your battle hawk, sir? Yeah, so St Louis completely revamped their whole secondary, not only did they lose Tte Hill, Nate Meters who just got released from the practice squad. Elijah Hamilton went to the NFL. They didn't retain him, they completely got rid of Chris Cooper. I think Mike Hampton's gone as well, so a lot of turnover here. West Virginia guy. So who went to West? We got two more picks here just to keep in mind, but this is good. I'm surprised they're coming in so quick now. West Virginia guy, Anthony Beck type, Anthony Beck played with the New York Guardians and also was with, I think he was with the Jets or the Giants at one point as well, two years in the USFL with the Generals Fringe all USFL type guy. Very positive in my opinion. And once again, gluttony of riches right now We have here the first one, then we have a big name, so the Panthers are picking up Nate Brooks here coming in. And then we also have Jalen McClendon going to the DC defenders on here. So we'll get Craig's thoughts first on the other one of those and then we can go back to Greg on that. Yeah, so I think with ask you Henry, that's a good get just for battle hacks because like Pat said, they're revamping a lot of your secondary, they lost Luca Dennis too last year who's been on the Falcons practice squad for a little bit too. So they just need some depth on the backend at the very least. And I think good guy to add early on, I think Jalen McClendon makes a lot of sense for DC because they don't really know if TEUs is coming back. Dear King may or may not come back at this point in time. So he's a guy that will at least fit their scheme pretty well and he's a guy that's had some experience in these spring leagues too, so he's going to be an interesting piece especially they really don't have that much of the quarterback room right now. And then who's the other one again? Oh, here, let me get, we have Nate Brooks Jr. I know I got too many tabs going because now it's doubling back on Nate Brooks going to the Panthers and then Jalen McClendon obviously. Yeah, and Brooks is obviously a guy that's played a little bit around now and Panthers could use a little bit of the secondary help too. They had Josh Butler last year, he's been on the Cowboys practice squad all year. So anytime you're at, at least early on for me, anytime you're adding to either your secondary, your offensive line, your defensive line, those would be kind of the areas that I'd focus on the most, just depending based on the team though obviously some teams have different needs, but those would be the three areas that I would try to get the most depth in, at least early on in these drafts. So popping up on here, we'll get Greg's thoughts, see now they're all coming in. We sit here forever so right, so talking you got McClendon here and then Jared Scott go to the Renegades, right? That wasn't a repeat from before and I'm just trying to keep track and then Lar ne Coleman going to the stallions on here. Greg, any thoughts on those three? Arlington did not protect any tight ends and they didn't draft any in the first dispersal draft, so they came into this with zero tight ends and we know how important role tight ends play in the offense that they ran last year. Sale Canelo was a big part of it. He was released in the off season to sign with the Minnesota Vikings, so tight end was going to be high on their list of needs here they take Jared Scott number one, so he's probably going to play a big role for them. And then the McClendon pick in between the first dispersal draft and today there's been a lot of buzz connecting McClendon to the defenders. A lot of people kind of putting two and two together when they look at the specific system run by Fred Keis in dc what quarterbacks are out there who could fit into that system? Certainly Deandre Francois who's the only quarterback on their roster coming into today seemed like more of a replacement for Derek King then for Temu. So they were still kind of looking for a starting quarterback. Jalen McClendon. I guess the question is did he show enough in the limited games he had with Vegas last year to be a replacement for Jordan Temu? If it comes to that, certainly taking a quarterback first overall in this draft, first round rather in this draft certainly makes you think they're hedging against the idea of Temu coming back. So yeah, it's going to be interesting the competition and to see if this is really it as far as top level quarterbacks DC ads or if they look to add somebody else in free agency or somewhere else in this draft. Yeah, pat, that's a good question for you. Was there enough with some of these guys to pick up or would you look outside the box and obviously the free agency's going to begin tomorrow so they could we just get this and kind of do whatever anyway. But thoughts on someone like McClendon that maybe didn't have as much playtime during the season? Well if you look, McClendon got better and better as a team goes. This is a guy with limited starts in his collegiate experience. I think he had only three pass attempts with the Wildcats in 2020. So I personally don't know if Jalen McClendon could be or is that guy for lack of a better term, but I do know that he deserves an opportunity based off his sample size. Last year, rod Woodson spoke extremely high of him in a limited role granted behind Brett Hunley behind Luis Perez and finally getting his ability to play the most football. He's actually played since high school. So a guy like that deserves a shot. Fred Keis is going to take care of this young man and put him in a system really hoping to get rid of Deandre Francois. I'm about over the Francois experiment, didn't like him in the Spring League fan control football is its own thing. And then all the rumors about what he did to Quinn Normandy, I'd like to see maybe they bring back another guy to fill out that QB room. But yeah, very similar skillset and a lot of upside for McClendon in dc. Craig, I'll let you take your pick. You can either talk about Nell here or anything with Francois. Are you over Francois? Wherever you want to go. I think I've been over Francois since he left Florida State, but that's a whole nother story for a different day. And even with the McLennan thing too, it's like you're kind of hedging that one of King or Tmu comes back and then at the very least he's a solid backup that's played a little bit in the style of Lee. Yeah, I mean I really think McClendon would be the perfect backup for the defenders. I'm not ready to say he's going to start, I'm not there yet from what I saw last year with him in Vegas. I do agree with Pat. I think he did improve. There were still times at the end of the year where he was just throwing passes way over. Guys' heads the passes were not close. So that consistency and maybe that comes with playing time, but that consistency needs to be refined a lot. And maybe if they work with him in training camp, because I do think he is a good fit for what DC does on offense, but if this is really all they do in this part of the off season, they add Francoise, they add McClendon, maybe they add a camp arm or a third quarterback somewhere. I'm not really sold on their chances then Yeah, pat thoughts on tmu when all of that return or not return. And I know Max was talking in the Chad about the dear kingdom and there's just a lot of questions with DC I think than any of the other quarterback rooms right now To touch on King, when he got that full-time offensive assistant QB coach position, this man was not coming back. I coach at the NAIA level, I am a part-time restricted earning coach. I do a lot of work. I can only imagine being in a group of five, a group of five team. So while it's edgy and cute, if you actually understand what it takes to be a football coach, that man was not coming back and it's awesome. He's got a paycheck from the XFL, he's got a paycheck from the NFL doing his Lamar Jackson impression, all that goofy stuff. But that man was not coming back. There's two trains of thoughts on Temu. I've heard some things that it's not my opinion to say about and it has nothing to do with character, nothing to do with attitude. I've heard some things about Temu, the reason why he's not on an NFL practice squad right now, but at the same time going back to him, is he kind of hitting that glass ceiling of like, this is not working out. I need to go figure out something else in my life. Because while it's awesome to go get hit by fringe NFL players for $70,000 a year that might get old after a while. So that's something he might be thinking about and what his opinions are on that. I'd love to see him on a selfish aspect because I think it's awesome and he is thrown for almost 5,000 yards and all those silly statistics I always keep track of that. Nobody cares about They care, they care. Certain people care a lot starts with D ends with N. But yeah, in the end I think that's the conversation he's having. Maybe we get a Kurt Ben cameo from Tama. It's like three weeks in. Okay, I'm missing this one last rodeo. Let's go bro. Yeah, Greg, do you expect Ben Kirk back? I know he was kind of on the list, but now we're getting all with the San Antonio. That was always a weird fit and how he was on and then he wanted to leave and then they brought him in and obviously he got hurt, but a lot of issue there. Is that juice worth the squeeze? Getting Ben hurt back on? I mean I was certainly surprised that he was drafted, which seems to indicate that he signed a letter of intent, which again was surprising for someone who last year by the sounds of it, one of the main reasons he didn't report to Houston was he didn't want to live in Arlington for a month and a half and go through training camp there. And so once the season started and he got an opportunity, he felt more comfortable coming to play. So I mean if he's signing the letter of intent now that's the same situation he's going to find himself in this year. And for a guy who is as active on social media as any player in the XFL or USFL, I don't believe, unless I've missed it, that he's said anything about being drafted or whether or not he's coming back, which is why we're having this conversation right now. So it is kind of strange that he's gone silent on that. He certainly hasn't refuted the idea that he's coming back by virtue of being drafted. So unless we hear otherwise, I would assume he signed the letter of intent and he's coming to camp. Maybe he doesn't know. I mean some of the players are coming on last week and like, oh, I'm protected. Maybe he doesn't. Yeah, For as much as he's on social media, I would find that hard to believe. Hey, but just here we have Robert Quint and Banertt said he's retired on Twitter, so I just hated how he handled all of that last year where it was like they've claimed that I'm a part of this league. It's like, well, okay, you're part of, but we'll see a lot. I am proud though, I'm happy for Ben Cur and the Green Bay Packers. That was quite the thrill of my life watching the Dallas Cowboys get routed last night. So as Washington commanders stand, I can be happy about that. Craig, any thoughts on any of this? We might be done with the first round of this. We're kind of circling back through here. It might be dead time for a few minutes. Any thoughts on any of the picks so far? Can you bring 'em back up a little bit? Yeah, I will. Let me get this on here. We got, the last one we had was Larne Coleman going to the stall. Yeah, we've Got no second round picks coming in. Now Coleman's the guy I think is the type of guy you want to draft early in these. You're getting that offensive line depth. He's a guy that does have some projectable upside. I think he was an undrafted free agent initially by the Dolphins spending a little bit of time of practice squad. So he's a guy that this league's going to be good for and he could develop into one of the better tackles in this league overall too, at the same time. Greg, where are you seeing these picks? Is it going by the teams again? Yep, it's going through the team. Lovely. We're six picks into the second round far as I can tell. Well, What am I looking at here? They told me to fall XFL 2023. What team should I, what's an exciting pick I should pull up? Well, we got our first specialist taken punter, Matthew White who played with the Breakers last year is going to Memphis. So that's where my attention is drawn. Okay, let me see out here. Max says I can search UFL draft and get, okay, latest. Here we go. All right, share this. Michigan Panthers second round. We've got Will Adams here, safety going to the Panthers. Chris Rowland going to the DC Defenders from the Stars. We'll circle back through here. Oh, here's Mark. I'm following down the bull side. This is what I get on this. Why can't we just put 'em on the XFL account? Greg, thoughts on this and oh, here we go. Matthew White. Let's get some thoughts here, Greg. I'll get this figured out here. Well, Matthew White finished middle of the pack and punting with the USFL last year with the Breakers. He comes over with everybody else coming over from New Orleans to Memphis, so they've got that going for them. A couple of other interesting picks here. We had Trey bots going in the first pick of the second round of the Brahmas from the Philadelphia Stars. So that's going to build up the interior. They're missing a couple interior defensive lineman, Matthew Goel signed a contract futures contract with the Seattle Seahawks, so they're going to need some bodies in the middle of that defense. The roughnecks took Glenn Logan, who was a roughneck last year. Now he's a gambler slash roughneck, so he's going to be wearing the same jersey this year. Same team nickname, but he comes over from Houston to Houston. So that's a complicated situation. Chris Garrett, who I believe was a former draft pick of the Los Angeles Rams is a St. Louis Battle hawk. So again, the battle hawks have one of the strongest rosters on paper, certainly adding to it by picking a former NFL draft pick. Will Adams, who played a big role for the Vegas Vipers on their defense last year, now a Michigan Panther and you mentioned Chris Rowland. So I think as far as I can tell, we're as caught up in the second round as we can to fix to go Again, if there's anyone from any, you can't say to follow along on the XFL account and then post them all out on the team one. I think the XFL account is retweeting them or posting them, but they're behind. So you're seeing them first on the team accounts and then later on the XFL account, which is a little Confusing. Yeah. Anyway, so we're doing the best we can then here. Pat, thoughts on any of these? Not on any of these guys, but Deandre. Tori just opted to sign with the Toronto Argonauts of the CFL. So I think he becomes the sixth dude I've seen over the past two weeks to opt the sign with the CFL and that does include MBT, obviously. But yeah, I've talked about it. I think I wrote an article about it not too long ago, guys kind of looking at the writing on the wall saying, Hey man, get ready to learn French, dude. Craig, thoughts on any of these? I'm getting another stream up here so we can pull up some of these. I can scrub by down here. Elijah Holder here going to the Senate. Any of these you want to comment on? Calvin Jackson, Washington State going to the renegades here. These are really throwing me off. It's like the team graphics, but the players team. I'm having a real hard time with this. What do you think Craig? Chris Roland, glad to see him. I think, man, the stars were weird because they had so many injuries. I can't even call this guy their wide receiver two or wide receiver five. But Chris Roland's definitely a guy who deserves to be still in the rotation in this league. And I don't know what the gluttony of riches that all these teams have granted, correct me if I'm wrong, once again, lucky Jackson and Chris Blair are both gone from their receiving rooms. His life a little bit easier. But Chris Roland's definitely not a scrub whatsoever and he's got a brother in the draft pool as well, so it'd be interesting to see if they do a homey hookup with one of the backend roster. Craig, what do you think here? I think Roland's a good pick for them too because if you looked at the wide receivers they have, they're like those bigger body ones, so they kind of need somebody to operate just down kind of in the slot too. This year I was trying to, God, who was the one, who is it that they added added Preston Williams, I think it was that used to play with the Dolphins, but he's had a whole bunch off the field issues over his years so they got him, they got Brandon Smith, they brought back, they got a lot of bigger bodies so kind of getting a guy in the slot makes some sense. I was trying to look up Kevin Jackson too. I remember him in Washington state, but I was like, was he the guy that was on the last chance U2 in college? He was, yeah, he was an LOI guy. Didn't play in the league. I don't remember what team he signed with, but he was an LOI guy and obviously anytime you're a last chance you guy, you got a little bit of a following and whatnot so I mean it's cool. Yeah, let me see. I'm trying to remember his story, but he's a guy that does have a little bit of speed though, so he could be a deep threat for your team. He was tearing it up on last chance you and I mean Jay Hawk football man, don't sleep on it. Alright, so we got the third round now on here Greg, I'm following Greg's lead here, Christian McFarland here, going to the Memphis Showboats here coming from, is that the, what the heck is Greg? What did we make up this? We're getting more least Aguilar coming in here fast and furious Now what did we make here, Greg? Yeah, I just want to go back to Kelvin Jackson. He was an LOI signing of the Sea Dragons. Sorry, Reed. Sorry, there's my guy. Literally sorry to cut you off Greg. I'm literally going to Vegas for work last week. Who do I see in the airport? BJ Wilson. Yo, where are you going? He's like, I'm going to Edmonton. I go, no shit. He goes, no, no, no, no, I'm not signing up. I'm like, the boys' got to stay home. So Mark Lile bridge hooking up. St. Louis Guy. That's my guy. All right, Greg, go for it. Yeah, just trying to catch up the roughnecks. They needed a kicker. They bring in Louis Aguilar, so we're seeing specialists go more highly than they normally would just because teams are sort of filling those spots. A lot of teams did not protect or did not draft specialists last week, so they're sort of in the mode of looking for specialists here. Perhaps adding some in free agency. So even though it seems like high draft picks for these specialists, not too surprised when there are some good ones still out there. We will go back. Pat, any other thoughts on all this? Pat? Sorry, I had to let my girlfriend DJ B got signed because she calls So BJ's a D two product was the first player in Quincy University history to get signed an NFL contract or a professional contract whatsoever. LOI guy by the roughnecks did an interview with him. Awesome guy. One awesome family two rolled in the same circle, so it's also cool to see because rumored obviously Mark Lova Bridge is with the bras now taking care of some of his guys, so we'll see. And personal note, my girlfriend's a big Wade Phillips guy, not because of anything he's done on the field but because she says he looks adorable and she calls him Dan and anytime they show his wife on the field she gets a little bit emotional and she's always like doing Farmer Dan impressions. Well whale boys, we didn't get that victory today, but go home and hug your loved ones and let 'em know that it's just a game and we're going to come out on top on this. Okay, We've lost Pat. We've officially lost that. Greg, how are things holding up here? Thoughts on this as I keep, I am trying to refresh on another stream to not get it too, but this is just so weird here. Anyway, thoughts on any of these latest guys coming in? We have a new one Defenders here. I'll probably pull you talk. Yeah, we have TJ Barnes who goes in the third round of the defenders. He's an interesting, interesting situation because a lot was made of his retirement after the Renegades won the championship. I think there's a story on xfl.com about TJ Barnes going out on top as a champion. We heard a lot during the broadcast about the lengths that he went to get in shape to come in to be a force in the middle of that Arlington defense. So I don't think anyone was surprised then when Arlington did not protect him as part of their 42 last week. And then TJ Barnes goes on social media and is like, okay, which team's going to get me? And we're like, wait, what? I thought you were retired man. So you figured that if he was available and that if he was going to go full bore toward 2024 that some team was going to pick him and some team was going to pick him with a high draft pick and the, sorry the defenders end up coming in a third round and taking him. I did have defensive line as a key need for the defenders. They lost a few defensive tackles to retirement this off season, so that was a position that they needed to fill and they got a good one in TJ Barnes. We got some more picks here. I'll scroll through then we have coming the year Eric Abuja going to the Michigan Panthers and then bots going to the San Antonio Bras Pal toss to you Don't know much about bots, css, C State, Pueblo D two product going down to Jeba. He I believe was a signing by Michigan at one point during the off season. So they bring him back. Complete revamp in my opinion for the Panthers on the offensive line, which is for the last two years, something that I felt like they needed to supplement. So continuing to get the rich get richer type thing. A former group of five guy and whatnot coming out of Wyoming. Pretty curious to see what he's got going on, but I mean they picked up a lot of these smart, I think. No, they didn't pick up Gilmore, they picked up Drew Helman who completely changed that offensive line in Philly when he joins. So curious to see where he goes, especially because I believe they have Josh Dunlap at the other tackle Pennsylvania right now. And then we have here some more coming in here and the sheer Greer going to, and if I say any of these wrong, just slap me in the head. Arlington Renegades and then Jalen Morton going to the Birmingham stallions. We'll toss back to Craig here and then obviously Matt White. Now we're getting the XFL ones retweeted into all this stuff. So Craig, any thoughts on this? Yeah, I was going to say the other one I've seen from St. Louis now is they picked up Cameron Kelly, the defensive back from San Antonio, so that's a pretty good guy to get in. Helps out build out some of the secondary death too. I'm trying to pull that up on here. Keep going here though. I was just seeing Morton is you said he went back to Birmingham? Yeah, Was their QB two when Slow got there. So he rounds out their room with Smith Martinez and now I think Morden played a couple snaps. I don't think he threw a pass originally. He was signed by the gamblers and then traded for Monte Cozart who's had CFL and whatnot. So I mean familiar with the system de pick if Jaylen Moore playing, there's some bigger issues there in my opinion. I think he ran the ball once last year for six yards or something like that. He had a couple snaps when mcg got knocked out of the game for a couple seconds, but that was about it. Yeah. Did we get Glenn Logan already here with the roughnecks? That was in the second round. Now we're circling back through on you. Okay Pat, we'll toss back to you here Pat, any Pat send any of these coming down? Once again with the Battle hawks with their secondary, like I said, they completely revamped and whatnot, revamped and whatnot. Sorry a lot of these picks are coming at. So I have notes and all jacked up. Glenn Rogan, Stan in Houston with the gamblers. I mean Houston picks when you pick up Chris Oin who could run the three technique and play the edge plus a couple other guys down there. I mean we're going to say this term a lot richer, getting richer. That's really what's happening. Greg, thoughts on any of this stuff? Certainly I share what Pat was saying about some of these themes that bulking up here. Yeah, third round is when we're seeing some teams pick some of their own players who they did not protect among the 42 we saw Michigan with Eric Ebo, Ja, we saw Arlington with Nassir Greer who was an off season signing by them and the stallions with Jalen Morton. So none in the first two rounds doesn't look like, but the third round we start seeing teams picking from their own list of unprotected players among the non 42. So that's just interesting to see the timing of that comes down. Yeah, it's interesting how, I don't know the roster aerobics that go into that of like, well what ones do we need to protect now, which ones do we need to pull? Greg, any surprise signings here or anything as we're kind of getting into the weeds off a general question. None that jump off the page to me I don't think. I thought maybe there'd be more offensive linemen. One of the things that we saw in the XFL supplemental draft last year was a lot of teams when these USFL players became available XFL teams started really stocking up on offensive linemen because as we know, offensive linemen are very hard to find. Talented offensive linemen for these spring leagues are very hard to find yet they play such an important role in the games, keeping the quarterbacks upright, opening running lanes for the running backs. So I did think maybe we'd see a little bit more movement along the offensive line with pick so far. But again, when you're combining the best of the best, maybe you're not reaching as much for offensive linemen as you would otherwise. Yeah, even here, let's see, I'm hook on here. I'm trying to figure out, okay, so why this is just my life right now. I'm sure UFOs, well why didn't this because they have this because they tweeted UF drafts. So now we have, we're trying to track, we're trying to track the players through and they're not even using the proper hashtags. So really appreciate that XL social for making that worthwhile. Pat, we'll circle back to you. It's really it wanted to point out with Chris Garrett that you have him on the screen, D two product getting drafted, won a Super Bowl and has appeared in an NFL game. So very stoked. I mean St. Louis has a lot of key pieces returning on front seven. So if Chris Clayborne comes back along with Donnie Abraham running the show, very curious to see how he kind of fits into that because they did have a lot of pieces like Carson Wells who is very versatile, Travis Feeney and also now they brought back or they signed Petera to pin who was the defense player of the year last year. So I'm going to sound like this broken record, but the rich are getting richer. Anytime you got a guy who got a cup of coffee in the NFL and won the Super Bowl ring, he had to been doing something right at the time. Right? Yeah. So Craig, so we touched on some of these. Chris Garrett here going to the Battle Hawks, I'm just making sure we've touched Norman Price here. Going to the roughnecks. Anyone you want to comment on? Max Robert? A couple two here. So I see Max Roberts going to Memphis now. He played with Vegas last year. He's a guy I liked a lot coming out of Boston College, but never really got his chance in the NFL honestly, but he's been a decent pass rusher. He's going to be at least a good rotational player for them. And then I saw the Brahma's got Chris Steele, who's cornerback out of USC, so he's at least played a high level in college, bounced around a couple practice squads here and there, so could definitely help out their depth as well. Greg, going into the draft today, were there teams that you were more worried about than others? And then we've talked about the quarterback issues with DC but was there anyone that you were maybe a little bit more worried about? From a quarterback standpoint or just Overall? Oh, just from a team building, from an overall roster, Not really. I think again, when you're taking, you're really getting the best of the best. So even if I do have some concerns maybe about positionally from team to team, there are other positions on that team that may be kind of strong. So it's really too early to say about any concerns. I think after today we'll get a better picture of what those rosters look like and certainly in the coming weeks after free agency and free agency is kind of a mystery. It was one of those things buried in the press release when they were talking about this upcoming draft, the super dispersal draft, and they said it was almost like, oh by the way, free agency also starts on Tuesday and it's like, okay, what form is that going to take? It sounds like the players who were not drafted here as well as anyone who did not play for the USFL or XFL in 2023 will be eligible for that free agency period. So you're talking about players who did not sign futures contracts on practice squads at the end of the year. Anthony Beck was begging them on social media to not sign futures contracts and instead come to the UFL. So those players would be available in free agency. So we don't know how the announcements are going to go, whether teams are going to announce them as they happen or if it's just going to be a press release like the XFL would do in terms of signings or how active these teams are going to be. It's all going to depend or a lot of it's going to depend on how many picks they make today. There were some teams who could pick as many as 20, 22 players in this draft. Some only 13. So how many picks are they going to use on this draft? How many open roster spots are they going to have after today to add free agents for training camp while not having to release anyone from their drafted list. So that's going to be something interesting to track too. Yeah, if anything they'll probably post those on the USFL account. You'll probably, that'll be where he can find all those ones. All the free agency stuff. Pat, we have some more signings here coming in now. Of course. Now the XL Cole Murphy here going to the Panthers. I know that's a team you followed here, Chi God help me here. Pat, comment on this. Will Adams here going to the Panthers. Panthers really stocking that beer. Yeah, Cole Adams returns, he spent the last two seasons there was signed in the middle of the season of 2022, won two all defensive player of the week award or special teams player of the week awards with him. I'm a pretty big fan of him. That's a move. That's a move to me where they kind of just did a little bit of roster manipulation like hey man, we're going to bring you back type thing. So consistent player, played at Syracuse, had a stint in the a f for about five minutes and then lost his job to Donnie Haman who has not been protected either Virginia, the defense back, they picked up Virginia State guy, HBCU guy was a guy that you kind of want to circle to see if maybe Reggie Barlow was going to pick up, but obviously they didn't. And then a lot of people love Cheaty. He got picked up by the San Antonio guy. I think San Antonio had some of the worst offensive line play that really halted the offenders, excuse me, the development of Jack Coone, which I didn't think Jack Coone was a world beater, but that offensive line didn't do him any favors. They had guys like Kai Abhi pretty much coming out of retirement that manned the fort. A lot of inconsistencies on the tackle there. So definitely a guy with some experience, some debt play and he's got a good social media presence. He's written some books and whatnot as well. So keeps his brand alive, keeps a couple more retweets and follows for the kids. So good for him. Like Greg said, I feel that the most turnover we're going to have is always going to be on the offensive lion these leagues because if the NFL can't get 'em right, what makes 'em think the UFL is going to get it right. Greg, we have a couple more here coming in. I'll circle back up here. We got all this there. BJ Bello here going to the Arlington Renegades and then bonds here from the Mahler here going to the stallions. Always weird to see these kind of the stallions. We got the Mahler's colors. Kind of weird on here. Any other thoughts on any of these guys coming down? Yeah, I mean you look at San Antonio's first four picks, they've picked two from Houston, which would be expected. Wade Phillips bringing over BJ Wilson and Chris Steele who were two off season signings, LOI signings. So they're coming over with the coaching staff and with the DPP Mark Little Bridge to San Antonio, Michigan has kept two of its own players in the last two picks. Eric Oja and Cole Murphy and a couple as bad as I agree, San Antonio's offensive line was in rough shape. A lot of it due to injuries, but two San Antonio offensive linemen being taken in this round in Norman Price for the roughnecks and Tio o kike for the defenders. So just an interesting note there. And another San Antonio bra, Terrell bonds going to Birmingham And Bonds had a cup of tea in the NFL. His spring football experience goes all the way back to the a FI believe he was with the Express, so he's had a cup of tea in the NFL. I don't know if he's still that type of player, but definitely not a bad guy to keep in your depth. Pat a couple others here just so we have you Lee Morris here going to the Showboats. I'm kind of looking here past my screen here and then Elijah Holder with the stallions and then Deru and Parker here at San Antonio Bramos as we're talking here, more reinforcements for the Oline here, even in the social media. Yeah, I mean the offensive line, we can hammer that. That could be another talking point. We talk in circles, we got to get better. So you bring in my man bj. BJ Fringe NFL guy would be in the NFL right now play. If he did not get hurt when he was with Carolina, probably would've got drafted but didn't participate in a lot of workouts. BJ could probably, this guy is massive, he's more athletic. He could dunk a basketball scenes it so we could see that Lee Morris, once again you have that Showboats breakers connection. They're going to bring in a guy who they're comfortable with that flip noses could do the offense with. And Morris kind of came on as a third option when Sage Ciroc kind of cooled down as well, pushing up to Elijah Holder, another spring league guy, played with the gamblers and then I believe he played with the gamblers and I feel he played in the XFL last year as well. Had a cup of tea in the NFL at one point. All guys with NFL experience, all guys with spring league experience and let's see what happens with them. Battle hawks also picked up John DACA as well Here. Lemme see if I can get that pulled up on here. Any thoughts on that if I can? Oh here the last one I guess I have is the slogan Kliman. That's the last one that shows up on the UFL one. Long snapper. I mean I hate to be that guy but's so many long snappers with the NFL. They'll cut this dude a couple snaps and they'll find someone who just got cut from a practice squad or from last year. These specialist coaches have a lot of these contacts in the phone ready to go. There's only 32 in the NFL and now there's only 40 in the United States. So get good or get busy living or get busy snapping or get busy selling car insurance. My dude, We'll go back to Craig, last one here. Donis Boone here going offensive tackle to the DC defenders. Any comments on any of you guys to come down? Yeah, so I think once again we're kind of getting back into that offensive line run where we're just getting, because at the end of the day you want as much depth that offensive line as you can get and you want to get your best group of five guys. You want to get your best group of backups there too. I don't know if they have, they actually announced how big the roster sizes are going to be this year. 75? Yeah, 75 and then drop down here going into the actual season, right? No, I was more considered after. Once we get in season, are they going to add a couple spots just because you're cutting down the two leagues into one, so you give a couple extra guys the opportunity two, Was it 42 and eight Pat? Is that the final numbers on that? It was 42 and it was 43 or 42 with the QB three but 50 On the roster. 50 on the active roster. Yeah, 51, 51 for the expo. I like to see them get a couple spots up if they could, but that might be just a little bit nitpicking at this point in time, but the more chances you get and the more opportunities you can have for you guys, but at the end of the day you're going to bring in 75 guys, you're going to cycle through probably the last 30 of them at some point in time too. So just getting all these guys in there, seeing who can do what, especially you got some of these veterans in, you don't know what shape they're in by the time you get to the season. We like to think everybody's working out in the best shape of their life too, but some of these guys are older, so bringing them in and at least if they go into camp, they go into camp with some old guys, some young guys let the best guy one out and at the very least, even if you've got some old guys there and they just don't have it anymore and they're working with some of the younger guys, they might be able to teach 'em some at the same time too. Well it's frustrating, like you said, it's even with these rosters and stuff and oh yeah, it'd be nice for 'em to expand all this. We had talked about salaries and not being increased where there's no, I mean Greg knows this and Vince McMahon and when the a f went away and it's like, well I don't need to pay the XFL players anymore. There's no competition here. So you would like to see them bring in more numbers for all this, but I don't see that. Greg, what do you make of OST sizes and the reworkings here going into the season? I think it's fine. NFL has 53 man rosters. They've got 16 man practice squads. I certainly wouldn't have a roster size bigger than that of the NFL. And again, everything that we talk about in terms of rules, in terms of roster structure, in terms of coaches, all has to be looked at through the lens of financials because that is what we're doing here. That is what these team, that's why these two leagues have come together. So I think there's an argument to have more players just because you need more depth for these leagues. You can't be bringing someone off the street who hasn't played in a while in mid-season and expect them to perform at a high level. It's why XFL 2020 had the, I forget what they called it there, but team nine they had that where they were able to keep basically almost a full roster of players in shape in training so that if someone went down for the Arlington Renegades they could sign one of those players who was already in shape and they didn't have to choose from someone who had not been training or was not in shape. So there is that argument as well. I'm not sure if that is worth the financial burden that it would put on the league, but I think the roster size I'm pretty okay with. We'll look to see how it plays out this year to see whether they need to fix that for year two. Pat for you here, we have a question talking and I'll keep an eye on the picture as they come in. Battle Hawks not selecting the QB makes me think they're confident in getting an AJ back or at least they have someone in free agency in mind. What do you think that the Battle hawks are going to do here quarterback wise? Right, AJ's with the Bengals, right With the Bengals, I'm not sure on this contract situation he was promoted to the active roster. He'll be a free agent when in March when free agency starts. Yeah, so he'll be an unrestricted free agent. I'm not a hundred percent sure on how the NFL and XFL just signed with a team now because he wasn't signed to a futures deal. Obviously he's not a practice squad player, but in my opinion this comes down to what AJ McCarran wants to do. I've been very vocal about this. He made over $600,000 this year. He got to play a little bit so he scratched that NFL itch did halfway decent and I believe he had a touchdown get called back in his first game with three or four in his last game for like 1919 yards or something like that. So I'm very curious to see. It's going to come down to him. The door is open. Coach Beck has been very high on Tiano, did okay when he came in. He's a lot more athletic, decent arm strength, a UT Martin guy with some CFL experience as well as someone who covers the battle hawks and is going to drive 45 minutes of these games to cover the team. There's a lot of good quarterbacks out there that aren't in this draft pool, so I'd like to see maybe a similar type AJ McCarran type signing on the flip side, AJ's doing bar rescue or the Bar Olympics right now in Vegas. I didn't see him out there last week, but I'd love to see AJ come back. I mean it's good for our city, it's good for the league, but at the same time, what does he have to prove? What does he want to do? Remember the big thing with AJ is in 2022 he didn't do anything in 2022 he was recovering from his ACL L tear and then comes and plays football. So he's got a little bit of that motivation to get back. He came in, he became good team guy. Jake Browning was also a practice squad guy that got elevated, no extension there, so he's an unrestricted free agent. Browning played pretty well. Does he get a lot more money to go do a Jared Sim thing in Vegas or something like that or another team? I don't know. All of a sudden you don't have Jake Browning who's your QB two? Do you go back and go get Brandon Allen? Well I know that AJ's better than Brandon. I'd rather keep aj. Here's a two year $4 million deal. My dude, go hang out with Joe Burrow Again somewhere with Pix in here. Greg, any thoughts on AJ and then we can roll through some of these picks. Yeah, I mean if the best case scenario for the Battle Hawks is AJ McCarran decides that he wants to return to the UFL and the Battle hawks and he has no interest in signing a contract with an NFL team for 2024. But you have to remember that's going to be March 15th ish, so you're talking two weeks away from the XFL season or the UFL season beginning. So that's a really tight window for him to come in and I mean it's probably going to be the same playbook because I think Anthony Beck said that Bruce Gradkowski is returning his offensive coordinator. So it may be best case scenario, but it's still going to be two weeks and you're still going to be coming in toward the end of camp when you've had other quarterbacks there working with these players. A lot of new players by the way, because of the merge of the USFL and XFL battle hawks adding a lot of offensive players who maybe weren't there last year. So even in the best case scenario, it's going to be a tight squeeze to get in on time and to earn that starting spot. And as we end round five Juwan Mingo going to the renegades, I believe he was an off-season signing of them. I want to point out that the last two picks by the Panthers were specialists and they protected a kicker in Jake Bates from Arkansas. They drafted Brock Miller, a punter from New Jersey. They now have two kickers and two punters on their roster. So Reid, earlier in the show you asked me who's going to be my favorite team Now it might be the Panthers stocking up on specialists. Well then I think, I mean might as well and then you kind of get your pick of the litter here, especially guys that have been part of it before. Pat, any thoughts on that stocking up here on the special teams? Not really. I mean I wouldn't have done it, but Mike Nolan's coached way more games in the NFL than I have. Big thing to note is Jake Bates has never kicked the field goal at the collegiate level. He's been a kickoff specialist for years. I don't know if Brock Miller can do kickoffs. I assume he can. He's got a hell of a leg. They just pick up Kyle Kramer who was with them as well from 2020 after they released Michael Zoso. So very curious to see on that battle Hawks pick up a guard. By the way, Abdul Beachum some USFL experience there. He was with Orlando. I mean I think he's a mid-tier guard. He is pretty active on social media so he might come at me about it, but there's my man bj, but that's a lot of goofy stuff going on in my opinion. I think the problem is is they're getting shotgun to us in all different types of waves, so I'm having a hard time keeping up Just with everyone coming down. Yeah, coach Greg, any thoughts on any of this stuff here coming in? I think KD is the latest here and then we're kind of rolling up. Yeah, I saw the K Canon one. It's just like he just keeps floating around for forever it seems like. I believe it was the first iteration or the XFL 2020. He was supposed to play in that and then just never showed up and he just kind of bounced around for a while. He's one of those guys. I'm like, I'm just kind sick of this guy this point in time. He had a couple decent games last year for Orlando over where he got deep on a couple touchdowns and whatnot, but nothing against the guy personally. It's just like eh, I'm kind of sick of talking about him at this point. Anything here Showboats? Anyone else as I kind of roll back up here, SIE here. We got BJ before I hear Gene Coleman here going to the roughnecks wide, the receiver, Not really anything on that. I mean in the gambler's offense, I felt that pca, let's talk about him. Puca Williams. There you go. PCA Williams was with the Battle Hawks for about 38 minutes. Originally drafted by DC last year. Big thing about Puca, there was a legal issue that came up recently as well. A guy that really everyone thought was going to pop if you're really in step with these leagues and didn't, didn't really get the opportunity to, whether it be his own but fringe NFL guy at one point. Versatile return man, all that goofy stuff. So let's see what happens with Puka. A couple others on here coming down here, Ventrell going to the Panthers and then Madre Harper here going to the stallions as I kind of get up to date here, Van Trell was part of their defensive line rotation last year with Michigan. UT Chattanooga guy played some snaps in the CFL. There's a lot of key pieces. Anytime you have Breland speaks there, that secondary defensive end spot for them is going to be a big what if as far as who's going to be the guy you saw speak get that extra attention. Last year they signed Levi Bell who Bell had four and a half, five sacks in about six games or something like that. And when you bring in Levi Bell, who's a muscle hamster, plays very similar to Patrick Rashard. It was really great to see that Bell get more exposure and then it opened up. Plin speaks having a lot more success on the backend because now there was another dominant pass rusher there. If you can have that just have a average and you use that, an average defensive end on the other side of Breland speaks, it's going to be a good time. It's kind of like Sam Hubbard is a lot better than we think because of Trey Hendrickson for the Bengals. Greg, I've had a lot of questions in the chat here. Even another one here talking about why hasn't anyone picked up Jeff Bette? It was about 5, 6, 7 here. Are you surprised? No Bette signing yet? I am a little bit. He's another one that's been campaigning on social media about being picked. We know he's in the draft pool, but yeah, you look at some of these wide receivers that are picked like a KD cannon who yes, he's speedy lacks a little bit of size, but that may have over him. So he was in a rough offense last year with Vegas. Even with Arlington or Dallas in 2020, he didn't really shine. I think he only averaged seven or eight yards per catch, so he wasn't really used to stretch the field as his speed would indicate. So there might be some questions about that with him. But yeah, I would expect him to be selected by the end of the draft. Maybe someone takes a late flyer on him as a wide receiver, but it's certainly a little surprised that he isn't gone by now. Pat, for you, as we talk about Cameron Kelly here getting pulled up. Andrew has a question in the chat. Where do you think the Battle hawks need to improve and obviously here we're drafted with the safety and then we have a couple more picks, but what do you make of Andrew's question? I mean I'm pretty good right now. I'd like to see them get, and this is kind of a generic statement, I like to see them get a straight dog in the secondary. I think the guys they have right now are good, but there's no one that I'm looking at that I'm like, oh, okay, no fly zone type thing. Their line backing core, I'm pretty okay with Hakeem. They addressed receiver because they don't have Marcel Aman or Darius Shepherd right now coming back. Blake Jackson and Jor Pearson, maybe a tight end to really stretch that field. Obviously we're all holding our breath at quarterback and that's the easy thing to say, but I would love to see a tight end to kind of that field really work the seams and everything like that because right now they have Kamari ever and another gentleman who was the backup, the Kyle Pitts at Florida before he went to UCF and then there's big Jake Sutherland who's more your fullback type. So I think they're pretty stacked outside the quarterback, but we could see a quarterback pop out of nowhere tomorrow once free agency comes up because of all these guys who aren't being signed The Future Seal. Craig, we have a couple more signings coming in here, will likely go into the Showboats and then talking about Eric here with the Panthers and Nadir Rus going to the defenders, keeping him back with the defenders. I think that's got up to date here. Any other thoughts on these picks? Yeah, obviously Will Likely's been a guy that's been around for a little while now, so he's been a pretty good player out there when he's been out there and healthy. I saw Landon Acres was another one there too that popped up him st staying with San Antonio essentially. Obviously he did enough. He was a guy that came on pretty good at the beginning of the year, then he got hurt. I believe it was an ankle injury. He missed what was six weeks or something. That kind of slowed down after that too. Although San Antonio had all their other issues. It'll be very interesting to see what that team looks like in total by the time the whole new coaching staff, AJ Smith, what his impact on this offense looks like overall too because they have a lot of interesting pieces here, but how they kind of put all those offensive players together is going to be very interesting I think. Go for it. Pat Acres was traded to the roughnecks in the off season and I look the stallions picking back up Bo Scarborough, so I don't think that was a surprise personally. Yeah, Bo coming back here on that. Greg, toss back to you. Any updated thoughts? Yeah, a couple things that stand out to me. It looks like Arlington did not make a sixth round pick, so they may be done if they passed on that they may be done for the day and if so it looks like that would give them 61 players on their roster so there's plenty of room for them to add over. Free agency kil Mackenzie just going to the Battle Hawks in round seven. He was a starter at Center for the Vipers, got hurt last year. Donovan West, who actually I believe was also picked by the Battle Hawks in the previous draft, he came in and replaced Mackenzie at center. So McKenzie is a guy son of Reggie McKenzie, former NFL player. Khalil comes in, he's got some NFL experience as well on practice squads. I think that's a really good pick for the seventh round. Pat, we have a question here. Why did they draft a running back when they have Mark Thompson here talking about the thoughts on that? The gamble necks, Why did they drop? Oh yeah, well you got to have depth there, right? Yeah, I mean You have TJ pleasure who played a decent amount when Mark was hurt earlier in the year. Let me pull up their roster real quick, but in the end it's going to come down to a lot of, it might not just be about running the ball and I know that's a crazy thing to say, right? It comes down to like, okay, we're going to pick up this guy. What's this film? So okay, we see all this goofy stuff. He could play our kickoff, he could play our special teams, he could be our third down pass. Catching back pleasure didn't really do that much. They picked up Shamar Jones as well I think in the off season. But you want a guy who's going to be your ability to fill out more roster spots in that special teams. But not only that, when you're going into camp, if you're going into camp with only three running backs, you're going to have your running back three running those scout team reps. Well, depending on the game plan, you might want to have that running back with your first team while your scout team's doing their thing. I don't know, because of the roster sizes, how they break up their practices. Normally if your team's big enough, you have your scout O going against your team 1D and your scout D going against your team one O with 51 players on this roster. I don't think they really have that privilege. So you really want these running backs to come in, especially in camp, which is going to be the majority of your install to be really taking away those reps. I think we'll all be hoo and hollering if Mark Thompson gets hurt against during scout team reps because Shamari Jones couldn't go because he's got a tweaked ankle and TJ Pledger isn't feeling his best self either. Craig, any thoughts on any of this stuff and then I have a couple questions here in the chat. We have a new also as well as San Antonio, AJ Hendy here going from the roughnecks. Yeah, I don't think I got too much else to add really there. I mean I talked a little bit about Gray when he got drafted, but maybe it's the past catching aspect because you look at the guys that they got with Mark Thompson, TJ Pledger, Ty on Evans, you don't really think about them as being pass catchers as much, but anybody that can play a little bit of a versatile role is going to be important in these types of leagues just in general. Couple of questions here. We have a question from Robert. A question from Vinny. This is more I think of a philosophical question a little bit talking free agency Greg. Robert wants to know how does free agency even work if the leagues run the teams and everyone makes the same salaries? I know the USFL had a little bit more of it felt like the free agency signings and during the summer and stuff, but how are you expecting this with the eight teams now? And it's so weird, we don't know how many spots in every team, but philosophically, how do you think this is going to work here moving forward? One of the big questions, right? I would assume teams go out and recruit players and try to bring them in and ultimately if San Antonio and Memphis are both recruiting the same player, the player decides where to go and they sign a league-wide contract and for that team. So my understanding is it used to be for the XFL back in 2020, they would sign with the league, they would go into a pool and teams would claim them from there. But I get the sense that there's a lot more networking going on amongst DPPs among coaches where they're reaching out to players trying to bring them in. Or maybe players are reaching out and saying, Hey, I'm willing to play in this league but I want to play for this team. So it may be a player's market here if that's the way it goes, but obviously we don't have all that information. So that's kind of informed speculation for me. Pat, I got same question for you and then we have a follow up here. Vinny has a question as well here we'll get to. I mean not to be edgy, Robert, but it comes down to opportunity, right? If I am a free agent quarterback and I can make the same amount of money, but I have to go against, give a quarterback for example, Ben Ucci from last year, right? Let's say he doesn't play with Sea Dragons. He's in the same situation where he's like, I need to go play in the Spring League to do X, Y and Z. Do I want to go play for X team with this quarterback who's established the showboats? Or do I feel like I can go beat out Quinn Normandy or I can beat out Jalen McClendon for DC or San Antonio? So it comes down to that. These guys, very few of them I would have to say, want to make their career playing in the UFL. I believe that everyone who goes to the UFL has the dream of going to the NFL crazy, right? So at this point these guys are going to be looking at it saying, what scheme do I fit the best? Where am I going to get on the field and what can I do to showcase my talents in an effort to reach my goals? We have a couple more picks here coming in. Jamir, Ross Johnson here, going back to the stallions here, stack back to back. CJ Johnson going to the defenders. Craig for you. Vinny has a question. Just guy here, who'd you guys have said having the best draft offensively, who have you been impressed by any of these teams? It's kind of tough because without looking at it in totality too, I'll say what I said, what's your gut feeling? It's tough right now. I like what St. Louis has done so far, like addressing some of their secondaries and the players they brought in. I'll say even like CJ Johnson there though too, that's another DC defender. They're going after these big body wide receivers still besides Chris Roland, but he's a guy at Eastern Carolina. He was a very, very good player. He had a lot of off the field issues. He got invited to the NFL combine still last year, did all right there, got a cup of coffee in training camp. But he's a guy that could be very good in this league if he has his head on straight. Greg, same question. Who are you feeling like is having the best draft defensively, Offensively? I look at, again, DC they pick a quarterback, they needed another one. I'm not really sold on Jalen McClendon me the answer, but they addressed it with a high draft pick. Adding to receiver CJ Johnson. When I wrote my column on UFL board Johnson was my surprise, unprotected from the defenders. I was surprised that they left him unprotected. So to come back in the super dispersal draft and get him in round eight I think is a pretty good bargain. You look at, it looks like a lot of teams really helped themselves on defense. St. Louis adding three guards. Their draft is done, but they added Khalil McKenzie, who I already raved about Abdul Beam from Orlando, Christian Olmsted backup types. But as we've seen with these leagues, you need good backups. I mean, if you can go too deep at every position on the offensive line, you're going to be in pretty good shape. The Brahmas did some interesting stuff adding BJ Wilson, they added Landon Acres coming back over KD cannon. So we know in that offense wide receivers are going to be important. They're going to play a role. So kind like some of those pickups and Memphis with their last pick at the eighth round, Damien Willis out of Seattle, so he was pretty far down the receiver depth chart I think in Seattle, but still playing in a June Jones offense is going to get you noticed. So I think he did pretty well there and has a pretty good pickup for round eight. We had a question asking about the renegades drafting. It looks like their last pick was Jawan Mango here coming in about 17 minutes ago. So just again, I had had on there battle hawks announcing they're done to kind of a different varying numbers and all of that stuff. Anyway, from Mike's question, pat, who do you feel like is having the best draft defensively? I think you said defensively or overall? Well, however you want to take it at this point. Overall, I think it was San Antonio. I mean, I think you automatically upgrade when you pick up Quinton Normandy dealing with all the stuff that he did showed a lot of bouts. You throw him in that AJ Smith offense. I think it could get real goofy in a good way. You picked up BJ Wilson. Sure, up to the offensive tackle spot you bring back Landon Acres, someone that they obviously had their eye on for the trade. I think going at that front, they're a much improved team. Key pieces all around St. Louis really de heavy. No one really blows me away as far as who they picked up. I do like Khalil McKenzie, XFL 2020 guy, some NFL experience and also played, I think all 10 games last year able to be versatile. So there are definitely some improvements on that offense, offense line. They also brought back Christian Olmsted who was their seventh or eighth offensive lineman that played on field goal, but inactive a decent amount. So a lot of safe picks, a lot of picks that could easily improve the team. But we leave this draft without a quarterback and that is something that fans of the league will be tweeting about and blowing up dms about and all that goofy stuff. Greg, how are we doing in terms of where we're at in the draft? I know that St. Louis is done, you said, are we kind of winding down here? I'm trying to check. Some of the teams. Looks like Arlington, Michigan, Houston are done. They didn't make round eight picks. St. Louis announced that Olmsted was their last pick. So we're looking at Memphis, DC and Birmingham potentially with round nine picks, although we're not sure. I haven't seen any other picks come in for the ninth round, but I think Pat is right in terms of the bras. If you can come into a draft like this and get potentially a starting quarterback in Quentin dormant, and I think maybe a little unfair to Judge Jack Cohen by last year because of the offensive line issues, because of the injuries elsewhere on the offense, not just the offensive line by the way. They had some running back issues as well with Kalin. Bala may be tough to judge, but certainly Quentin Dormy showed at the end of last season that he could be a starting quarterback caliber player in a league like this. So if you're able to get a starter at that position in this type of draft, I think that vaults you to the top of the list in terms of who won this draft. Craig, any thoughts on rounding out any of these rosters? Anything else on Pat or what Greg said? I don't really have too much else to add. I think San Antonio did a good job with what they've done. I like what St. Louis did. I think at the end of the day, it's hard to get to screw up this type of draft honestly, because you're picking players that you already didn't have, making your roster a little bit better. So every team should be getting better in this too. I think obviously the special teams, when we were talking about Michigan earlier, was kind of interested in having two kickers and two punters, but teach their own in that regard. Pat, do you think Dormy, that was the biggest name today in the draft? Yeah, maybe not first play, but because of all the baggage, and I use the word baggage lightly, all the stuff the year before. So I mean, I think his play was a lot better than a lot of people probably gave it credit for and whatnot. But overall, I'm excited to see a guy like that still continue to have an opportunity, especially with all these, the cutting down of the workforce and whatnot. Very interesting to see though the amount of air quote free agency spots. I've had a couple of guys tell me that who were signed that didn't sign their lois, that they do plan on coming back as well. So St. Louis only picking what, eight guys, seven guys that brings their roster up to 61 or 62. They had 21 spots open coming into this DC 22, Arlington 20, Birmingham 22. So we're very curious to see what's going to happen as well. Greg names you're surprised to see not pop up here to then that we were talking bead and the silvers and all that. I mean, just any kind of red flags are there. You're seeing players that didn't get picked up. Well, it's hard to say because we don't really know, especially for the holdovers from last year, who signed their lois and who didn't, right? So we know the ones who are new to the league, especially for the XFL, where they were putting out press releases of, hey, these guys are new to the league. They've signed lois, or they've returned from the NFL and they've signed lois. So it's really hard from that perspective to know who is in the pool. Very hard to find USFL roster information, updated roster information. Quite frankly, in preparing my review of the dispersal draft and certainly as we get to preparing my review of the super dispersal draft. So really hard to say who was in the dispersal draft other than those who made it clear on social media. A couple more picks here. I just want to point out Boogie Roberts by the defender. Oh, Did Boogie get picked? He did. So he Was in the USFL signed an LOI with the XFL, I think with the Brahmas was not protected among the 42. So now he goes to the defenders. We had John Yarborough go to the Brahmas with the first pick of the ninth round. He was with Houston at the XFL last year. So another roughneck being brought over by the Brahmas coaching staff who coached the roughnecks last year long. Snapper Turner. Bernard goes to the Showboats and quandary white staying with Birmingham. So I think Birmingham, their last five picks have all been players who played with Birmingham last year. So when you talk about deep teams, right? If you're Birmingham, you may look at that 42 protection list and say, wow, I can only protect 42. While there's some players, some teams that might be really scrounging to find 42 players on their roster worth protecting. So you're seeing that Birmingham had such a deep roster that they protected their 42 and then they're picking up more of their own players to add to their roster this off season. What I want to get into, we can do a little bit of talk here before we get out at some point about the kickoff game. I do think that that's going to be very interesting of all of that. Yeah. Pat, what do you think? Boogie here? I know there have been questions about that. Good to see him sticking around with the defenders. Any of these last aspects? This has to be near the end here, right? In terms of the names coming out, I mean, John Yarborough has been around these leagues. TSL guy, Canadian guy, I think he played with the Browns in camp for five minutes, played with the gamblers last year in 2022, kicks over to the XFL with the roughnecks. They obviously transition staff. John Yerbo, versatile, can play guard and tackle. I don't think he's amazing at any spot, but he's definitely a value piece that has a lot of starting experience in these leagues. So definitely not a bad guy to have on your roster especially you got to keep these guys around for the micro because you still might have some of these power five guys and group of five guys who still think they're going to be in the NFL. So in my opinion, you might see guys who you're like, oh man, that's kind of crazy. He's sticking around in the cycle until these leagues start becoming a legitimate, this league isn't going anywhere in 10 years and with spring football every five minutes, we're not really sure what's going to happen. Boogie the interior right there. I believe they had a gentleman named Robert Windsor that they signed that they didn't protect. So him and TJ Barnes are really going to clog up that middle. So Qure White came on a little bit in the end of the year, a little bit more playing time splitting carries with CJ Maribel and Ricky Pearson. So another debt piece, like Greg said, you had teams that were like, oh man, who are we going to protect? 42? And then you had teams that were like, okay man, as soon as you come up in our draft board, you are coming back. So granted, I'm sure he doesn't live in Birmingham, but don't unpack for too long. Well, but also Greg, like you said, you have, I mean some of these teams are just a lot better and then you have some of these coaches, right, with the bras, that's just weird dynamic where we're wanting to take a lot of the roughnecks players to the bras. Maybe Wade doesn't want. And the same with DeFilippo, which who followed me on Twitter the other day, still don't know if it's a fake account or not. If it's someone trying to potentially, that could be my USS L conference team. But yeah, Greg, just the roster gymnastics of all of that where you have two of those weird dynamics with those teams. And then like you said, yeah, if I'm the stallions, I want to save everyone. I don't need any mallers on my team or whatever. And that's the whole point of these dispersal drafts is to get the teams more on even footing where Birmingham is far and away. I would say the best roster of the USFL DC and St. Louis, certainly two of the best rosters in the XFL. And then you have a team like the Brahmas who finished three and seven last year, really struggled with their roster construction with injuries and things like that. So by being able to draft players that Birmingham didn't protect, so these players that Birmingham is selecting back to their roster, were eligible today to be selected by a team like San Antonio so that they could make themselves better. They chose to go in different directions. They chose to load up again, not surprisingly on the roughnecks of last year. So I guess the big point of this is to, we don't want one in nine teams, okay? We don't want a team like the guardians being one in nine. Competitive football is the goal here. And to that end, how do you combine two different leagues where you're eliminating eight teams and you still have all of these players who have either signed letters of intent or who are under contract. And this goes back to our conversation at the beginning of the show where this was not a perfect system by any stretch, but I certainly couldn't think of anything better because you have so many complicated factors going into combining these teams wanting to do it equally, but also wanting to do it fairly and wanting to make sure you're fair about the dispersal, but also making sure that teams can be as equal as possible because you want that competition once the season kicks off. You don't want 40 to zero snoozers, that's not going to attract the audience you need to keep these leagues going. We'll get Pat and then we'll go to Craig on this. This was just interesting came up. Matt Lyons just posted this in our group chat here. Jeff Bette tweeting out because they said, oh, Cody Ladi, how are we just going to leave Jeff Bette on the board to whoever. I read the wrong way, I apologize. All I ever cared about was getting 1% better every day and helping my team win. By all means. I know we've talked about that. We had a lot of comments in that. That to me is a little bit weird on that path. Initial thoughts. So we do know that Jeff May have rubbed the staff in Michigan in 2022, a little bit a certain way. So maybe that kind of negates his standing with one team. You do have Jeff with his time in his 2020 team. Oh golly, help me guys. 2020 was the Renegades. So He was, yeah, he was a Bob Stoops fan. 2017 he was with Oklahoma, so Stoops stopped coaching at OU in 16. But you have to think college football was a little bit different back then that Stoops had a hand in him coming to OU in 17 and with Lincoln Riley being there and everything like that, people know who Jeff Bette is. I mean, I think he still has the capability to play in this league, but you're also asking a 29-year-old receiver to be a part of this whose name isn't Josh Gordon or Marvis Bryant. Jeff has a couple of receptions in the regular season game under his belt. It becomes a little bit more, I think Jeff should be a part of this league, but at the same time, it's like you take a guy like Landon Akers who's a couple years younger, a lot of these guys a couple years younger. I mean I hate to be edgy, but life's not fair man. But you're also looking at, and we just kind of went through the numbers real quick, there's still about 60 to 70 roster spots open and how many of these guys are going to get drafted and just be like, nah, fa, I'm good. Yeah, I don't know. I mean to me, and I love Jeff and he's been on the show and I think he follows the accounts and everything. People got really restless with all this pre-draft stuff and I'm tweeting out the private emails from everything and then I'm going to delete it later. And it's like, I don't know, maybe that pissed people off and they're like, we don't want to, I don't know. It's easy for me to tweet and say things. It doesn't really affect me if I'm not going to get fired from the XFL or whatever, but I just thought there was, it kind of got involved in that. Are we surprised Craig here? No. Jeff Bette today kind of now that we've found rounded this out? Yeah, I mean it's interesting for sure, but he is been a guy that's been around a lot of these leagues for a long time. He's had a lot of soft tissue injuries too that's kept him off the field for most of the time besides last season. So there's that factor. He is getting older. Obviously you have some of the, I don't even know what you want to call it, the conflict between the two leagues when they were kind of merging and he was talking about being a part of the players union on the one side and he's trying to say all this stuff and they come out and they're like, oh well everything you just says not true one every two. How much does that actually play a role into everything too? There's just so many At the end of the day, he's probably going to end up, if he doesn't get drafted, he'll sign with some team. We'll see if he makes roster or not. It is just going to take the situation. I think Greg, I think this is the last picks coming in here. Certain four minutes to go bras with Codyre, Anthony Hines here going into the defenders. Bobby Hawley, not the wrestler, right with the stallions. And then Ty Smith here with Max was commenting big pick for the Showboats and Ty Smith, one of the few defensive standout players from the Guardians last season. Greg, any thoughts on fellow guardians, Ty Smith or anyone else here? Yeah, Ty Smith sort of on the back end of the Orlando defense did okay last year. Cody Crest for San Antonio was another LOI signing by Houston in the off season. He had spent some time in NFL training camp this year. Anthony Hines a really good backup who can spot start with DC good special teams player, so that's a really good pick. He was in DC last year. DC has been picking up just like Birmingham did. DC has been picking up the last five, aside from Boogie Roberts, I think five of the last six picks have all been DC players from last year that they're bringing back. So Heinz is a good depth piece. Bobby Holly for Birmingham, the fullback is not dead yet and Holly is, I think he can play some tight end as well. So good for Birmingham bringing another name for Birmingham being brought back. So yeah, I mean even here in the 10th round quality players being taken, I would assume San Antonio might be one of the last teams to be drafting because they're going to want to pull as many roughnecks from 2023 or LOI signings of the roughnecks over, so they may go a little deeper than a lot of other teams for that sake to really add those players who fit their offense and fit their defensive schemes. Pat, any thoughts on these last names coming in? I mean Bobby Holly's a guy With Skip Holt's ties not only from the last two years but also time at Louisiana Tech. Like Greg said, extremely versatile guy. I believe Birmingham, well I know they have Jay Sternberger. I don't know if they kept Thad Moss Pac, but with the rosters being as versatile as you need to do, you'll have a guy like Holly who will play your own special teams and whatnot. Ty Smith, he's an older guy. I know he played, he's played a bunch of NFL games. I think I saw last year he had 70 total tackles in his NFL career, so you bring in a veteran presence down to Memphis and whatnot. Anthony Hines, once again, a guy in the room in the team can kind of fill in with Francis Bernard and whatnot if Bernard goes out. So nothing really to lose my mind about going on my list real quick. San Antonio had 14 spots open, so we'll see what happens. And then Cody Cress, I think he's kind of land in Acres clone, but obviously when you sign 'em and you have the open spot, why not bring 'em back? Right. Craig, any thoughts? Any of these found the picks coming in? Yeah, I mean keeping Bobby Holly is going to be important for them. He's a good special teamer, good fullback at the least. He had that one long touchdown I believe. Was that last year before he got hurt? Yeah, it was on. So obviously he's been around, he knows the system too. And then I like Cody Crest. I think that's a good pickup, but it's going to be really interesting to see what that San Antonio offense looks like. Once again, when you get all these pieces in there, figuring out who actually makes the team is going to be like another thing too, just because they have so many wide receivers there now it's like, okay, so who are we keeping for our seven or eight guys that they go with and who ends up on the field the most? There's a lot of interesting pieces there because there's a lot of names. They got some of the guys that are holdovers, they got the guys they brought over from the roughnecks who there's some guys a G Smith particularly likes one way or another. So it'll just be interested to see how those pieces all play out too. And I'm trying to remember the name, but they had the running back too from Hawaii from two years ago. He got hurt most of last year, but he actually played initially D two. Yeah, Kelvin Turner Jr. But he initially played D two quarterback at state transfers to Hawaii to play running back and then he was working out for FL teams as a running back slash wide receiver. So I think Pete, they just lotted In terms of, we have a little couple questions around that Greg, people asking about Cole McDonald's seemed like he was pretty athletic last year. No side of Cole McDonald's, they're obviously Brandon Silvers, but Cole McDonald's seemed like someone was pretty a focal point of the XFL marketing last year In terms of the player 54. Yes. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, It's hard to market a backup quarterback beyond that because that was his role. Backup quarterback, short yardage specialist, that sort of thing. We used his very much a gadget player last year for the roughnecks. I'm not sure really if there's a ton of room for that on a roster this year, especially in this draft. And again, he's one of those guys that we don't know if we signed an LOI to return or not. Same thing with Brandon Silvers. If you were on a team last year and you made it through the end of the season, the XFL didn't really publicize whether or not you signed an LOI. It was only the guys who were new to the league or who had been released to sign with an NFL team and returned to the league. So that's why I said it's so hard to know who was even in this pool to really critique picks or non picks. I will say, and I guess it's probably the statute of limitation is pasture. We're just talking about the roughnecks to renegades and all that stuff with the player 54. I remember when I was in DC for the Sea Dragons game the night before, I'm watching the game, the renegades and roughnecks at the bar with a lot of the player 54 guys and when the Renegades, it was like all the producers and stuff and they're like, oh my god, we can't believe the renegades. We haven't been tracking them on the show. We don't have any footage of them. They're going to go to the championship game. And I remember because I was just excited in Perez and everything, but it was like, oh gosh, we really need to have a production meeting right now and figure out how are we going to market this team. I Think that's kind of weird because Bob Stoops is their head coach and he was probably along with Wade Phillips the most, well-known head coach, so you'd think they'd at least have be filming him and things like that. So that was kind of weird to me. And Luis Perez, that friend of the show filled in when Brian Scott and all that stuff with the vibrate, Luis is a nice guy but not exactly the most verbose of orator when you're getting down to do interviews and stuff. Pat, we have a question here, Madre, is Madre London still around? Did he make it on the roster? Madre London was with the Mallers but I don't remember if he resigned it. No. Yeah, I don't see him on the rosters right now. He did not get picked up today from so far last week as well. A lot of people love Madre London because of all the great stuff he did in the European League of Football and he's a spring league guy. I mean I thought he was kind of, I mean you had Garrett Gro there, I thought he was a little bit faster version of Garrick ek. He didn't really lack that explosive speed and everyone was like, but he had over 2000 yards rushing it, the European League of Football. And I'm like, yeah, I mean that's cool but a lot of those guys haven't been playing football for more than three hours. It was a story that didn't really get as much traction. I think more fame for Madre came because he was the Davion Smith replacement because of the Pizzagate nonsense. But I mean I think he's like 26, I looked it up the other day. He's like 26 years old. Plenty of roster spots. Guy gets hurt. I mean if you want to talk about guy in the Mallers who should have got signed, Troy Williams. But that remains to be seen Timing wise here. Are we about rounding down here? I've been trying to track Greg, you maybe have a better pulse on just, I mean I assume we'll get a press release at some point. Are there any other teams? I just don't want to keep people all day. I kind of want to be judicious about this, you guys. It looks like round 10 is the end. I haven't seen any picks being released before that. The XFL main Twitter account is now tweeting out round by round picks on tweet. So if you're interested you can kind of see 'em and track 'em from there, but it looks like we're done. And I look at the teams like the Brahmas, they added 10 players today on top of the several that they picked and protected. So you have teams like the Brahmas who have three to four players, three to four openings on their roster. Same with Memphis. They picked 10, they had 13 openings coming in. So there are teams with single digit openings less than five. You have some teams for example, I think the roughnecks picked six so they could have picked 13. They've got seven openings. Arlington had 20 openings on the roster. They only picked five so they got 15 openings on their roster for free agency tomorrow. So you can kind of see how every team is treating this draft a little bit differently. They're keeping different numbers of roster spots open for free agency tomorrow. Some of 'em may have an idea of some players they want to sign already tomorrow who are not in the USFL or XFL, maybe they've been talking to players already who are free agents. So it's going to be interesting to see how that plays out. And again, it's going to be interesting to see how that's covered by the UFL, how those signings are made and when those signings are announced. Yeah, I will say Justin while flash this up on here and of course we do rounds five through nine and then we did a tweet for round 10 and then at some point I would think we would just tweet them all in one consecutive list. But that would be outside in terms of the free agency stuff, obviously won't we doing a live show on that but in subscribe if we get the rules and stuff this week or the schedule, we'll definitely do depending on how they do the schedule, but at least look for an episode Friday if we do get some of the stuff this week and maybe we can get Pat back on or someone, Greg, whoever wants it. But kind of talking about any of the big free agency signings and all that stuff. Pat, now that we have the list here, anything else standing out from you and I'm trying to get if we could, God forbid, get rounds one through 10 and one the consecutive list. No, not really. We talked about the monetary values, these tweets and whatnot. Something I would've liked to see, and this is me really, really nitpicking is you have the guy and then you have his Twitter handle. Oh that's a lot of work. We can't even get one to 10 in the order. I don't think we're getting the player to it. Pay the $11 for Twitter blue. You would've got a pretty decent amount of impressions today And then with them only paying these guys $60,000 and whatnot, every dollar counts. You know what I mean? So these guys don't have to work side jobs and everything. They could focus on building their brands and whatnot and I know that might be a real nitpicky thing, but that stuff counts, man, that stuff really does count and it's $11 for a blue check and their ROI could we all agree would be a pretty decent chunk of change, especially if they did it last week with like I said, James 3000 followers, almost 2 million impressions. The XL 3 83. Yeah, we can't even get it. It's great. Yeah, they still don't have anything passed around five on your Craig, any other thoughts on any of this kind of stuff here? We'll start getting this down. Food didn't like the video subscribe. We added 26 subscribers I think so that's exciting. We had like 200 people watching so thanks everyone for checking it out. You Were at two because I have it on my laptop so I'm cheating. I'm getting that extra view pad. I appreciate that. I think Dorothy's downstairs on their phone as well watching. We have the numbers But yeah, we had like 280 at one point or two 60 at one point. It wasn't on Twitter so it was all YouTube. So mean people are going to type this in and see this and hopefully they think we're semi competent and they continue to watch and let's see what happens. But thank you for everyone for listening us talk for almost two hours. Let me just say and I keep wanting to go to Craig again, but we keep cutting 'em off. That's okay. Sorry. I will say tweeting not 10 minutes before, Hey we're doing this today. Even if they had just put out Friday, we're doing this and then we said today they're not all on the XFL count, they're on the teams. There's such little things like if you're going to do it, it's just not hard at all to do this. And like I said, I think we probably could have gotten another 30 40% of viewership on here if it wasn't, hey we're doing, we were going to do it this afternoon, we're doing it now. I appreciate obviously Greg stepping up and blocking time and Pat and Craig. So Craig, any other thoughts on any of these names? Any other thoughts on anything? Yeah, I think it's just been an interesting experience overall. Obviously we've had these two different drafts and even going back to some of what Greg said, we don't know some of these guys that signed the letter intent. So maybe that's playing a big factor in these quarterbacks not getting drafted because we don't even know if they signed the LOI for the league. And at the same time maybe some of these quarterbacks are debating between coming back to the league or going to the CFL and trying to explore out there too because you have slightly less options but you still have options at the end of the day. So even when we were talking about a guy like Cole McDonald, maybe he goes to the CFL now because his game could fit pretty well up there round the goal line running around and everything else like that, even if it's just your short yarders quarterback. So there's a lot of different factors here. I think it's going to be very interesting to see what happens with this free agency. And even going back to what someone Greg brought up, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of these teams kind of had backdoor deals with some of these guys to sign as free agents and that's why they left some of their roster spots open because you're probably not going to go after teams for, there's no real tampering in this league I guess. Yeah, I mean we will see what happens. I mean there was a little bit of tampering in the US at L, right with the generals at one point. Well they assigned too many, right? They assigned too many over the summer and then they got halted a draft pick in the college draft or whatever it was. If that was wild times here. Greg, any other thoughts on this? Like I said, I just don't want to keep everyone all day. Yeah, like what Craig was saying, it reminds me of the NFL draft where you have teams start negotiating with potential undrafted free agents in round six and round seven. So there could be a little bit of that going on. If Arlington knows they're going to sign two or three really good players in free agency, they may say okay those guys are going to be better than anyone who's left in the draft pool. So we're going to stop drafting right there knowing we're going to bring these guys onto the roster. And if you're a Brandon Silvers and you know can sign your letter of intent at any time, and I'm assuming these guys are going to sign their contracts officially when they get to training camp, maybe not, who knows, but if you're Brandon Silvers, is there an advantage to signing your LOI to be in the draft pool where you are kind of limited in your own power, you're going to be drafted by a team and that's the team that has your rights or you sign your LOI after the draft, you go into the free agency where you can kind of choose maybe what team you want to be a part of. So there could be a little bit of that going on as well, A little gamesmanship from the player's point of view in terms of those lois or those contracts, just throwing that out there as a possibility. I don't know that to be a fact, but it wouldn't surprise me if agents are kind of leading their players down that direction. Well yeah, if you're Brandon Silvers, a GL will bring you back regardless, right? I mean I think that there's certainly an open door there. I remember we had Brandon Silvers on the show and he is sitting in on his pickup truck and I'm like, oh, what are you doing? I'm just like fishing when I'm not playing. I'm, I don't know if Brandon silver's his game in the system, but I certainly wouldn't put it past him. If he wants to go play with AJ Smith, I'll tell you, get him back on the brass. I think that would be good. Pat, anything else? We still can't get this list in order. The XL is tweeting out. We have round Five. Well I think what they did read is they tweeted, they made individual tweets for every one in the first five rounds and then instead of doing that for rounds five through 10, they just put them all in one list. So if you're looking for one through four as a list, I think they did each individual tweet and then five through 10. I don't see that I'm on here. I don't see that. I don't want to get in the weeds here, but I'm on here. We have round five thread through two 11. I don't see rounds one to four anywhere. No, I don't think they did rounds one through four the same way. I think they did each individual pick getting its own post or retweeting or retweeting. The team accounts for those posts and then they stopped and for five through 11 they just did the or five through 10. Oh, they did have a round 11. Look at that. That was, that's new to me. Okay, Matthew Kaufman not here. Yes. Yeah, texted Pete here. Why the heck did they tweet to tune in live anyway? Follow on Twitter or the mark has all tweet out. I'm sure we'll get a press release here when it's all said and done, but you either got to do it or you're not. Even the fricking XFL. The draft thing last year was great where you would just refresh it and it would pop in the grid and all that. I mean there's ways to do it that aren't like we need to make all these graphics and everything. Pat, anything else here? Not really final picks. Myron Rich Mitchell stallions guy from last year reserved. Dude. Cochlan a breakers guy, they keep the same specialist. Core Taylor don't really know much about him. I apologize to him and his family, but in the end I think we're winding down here, man. It's been two hours. I mean it just seems like maybe these last final picks are just kind of like, Hey, by the way, you want to come play for us real quick. They're hoping that maybe some of these NFL practice squad guys don't sign their futures deals and whatnot, but that's a whole nother discussion for another day. Once again, appreciate you having me. Come on Pat Remo, I'll be streaming my thoughts and tomorrow and everything like that before I go to Memphis and I have to go to Memphis to shore up that the spring football is happening in Memphis by the way. And that's why I was in Vegas to try to get the Vipers back, but they told me to leave Cash Shield. They were like, What did they do, pat? What Cash revealed? They were very confused on why I was there. Did you get some photos? I would've liked to see some photos from this. So side Quest here. So I was just there for work obviously, and I'm walking up and down the strip just kind of exploring and seeing stuff and then I find my way by a football field and I'm like, oh, what's this? And then I didn't realize UNLV was literally right off the strip and I'm like, college children go here. This is a terrible idea. And then I ended up walking onto the UNLV practice facility driving around and whatnot. I was just like, dude, why are they letting me do this? I am just a random guy in a minivan, mind you. And then I love T-Mobile. I don't really like to party. Especially my girlfriend wasn't there, so it's like I don't want to do stuff without her. So it's like, it was kind of funny. Seven 30 in the morning, you see guys yelling, Vegas, Vegas, Vegas. And I was just kind of like, all right bro. Yeah. Alright. Oh, where? Oh, Craig dropped out. Where did he go? I've been doing the draft stuff. He must've had to go. Has that been a long time? I was trying to get the XFL thing up here. XFL fans Here. Now we have round 12, so this has to be it. We're down to two teams picking. So Showboats, Antonio, Brooks, defenders, Enrique, Yoni Romero. Any thoughts on any of that? Oh man. I think Y Romeo was one of the kickers or something like that. I mean I might be tight casting there, but yeah, He was a kicker. Sign this off season. Yeah. Greg, any other comments on any of that stuff? No, I mean kicker at this point is interesting. They still have Matthew McCrae as well. He was one of the guys, they protected really good kicker from XFL 2020 and 2023. So creating a little competition I guess in training camp at that position. If McCain goes up, we don't know if these dudes are going to show up. They might just, well McCain was protected so I assume he had signed a letter of intent at that point. Now that could obviously change and he could decide not to show up, but I'm assuming if you sign a letter of intent, you're pretty solid on going to camp at least. Yeah, I'm going to pull up Yani to see if he's done any punting or anything like that, but he is a Canadian LFA guy kind of upset. The LFA doesn't have a team in Cancun. I'm trying to move the Cancun low key. Again, I'm not trying to keep everyone on here, but I mean we just had around 12, so I guess I give it just another second here. I really thought we were done on here, Greg. I guess anything else we did really just kind winding down the ship here. No, I think that's about it from me. We might get a few more picks here from DC and DC and Memphis are the last two remaining. Birmingham has exhausted their picks, so I guess it's up to them to see if we continue on. Go Pat. Sorry. And Dave Boer and Anthony back want to go home? They want to go play some golf. Yeah, max says Romero was playing in the Mexican league before this, so there you go Greg. Obviously we'll be doing deep dives here for a UFL board now. How was that? How was the rebrand from XFL board, the UFL board, but you've been doing big deep dives with all these team rosters. Yeah, I mean it doesn't really affect me all that much, just making sure I type the right address in and things like that. But I'm sure for Mark Nelson it's a little tougher. So no, it's interesting because I'm someone who I'll admit I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to USFL. I didn't dive into it very surface level and I admit that every time I come on here. But it's been a learning experience for me looking into the rosters, looking into how the teams performed last year and doing my deep dive into the previous draft. And so that'll continue with this and hope that as the off season progresses I'll get a little more and more comfortable with the USFL teams, the coaching staffs, the rosters, and so that's kind of my hope as the off season goes on. Yeah, we have here, this has to be the final 13th round, the showboats Michael Stevens on there. So Pat, I want the whole dissertation on Michael Stevens before we get out of here And Michael Stevens. Well when I saw that I thought his name was Michael Stivers, which Michael Stivers is a freshman at Illinois College who I know he's a defensive back was with New Orleans last year. Same thing with the NC State from what I remember. I mean kind of just a reserved defensive back. I think in 2022 he had a little bit more oomph to him as far as playing time because I remember looking him up at one point. But I mean if you're a breaker and you're kind of curious about where you're going to go, daddy flipped going to make it happen. So I think he started started a little bit this year, but I mean that defense was kind of overshadowed or guys were overshadowed with Gerard Fernandez and Vte Diggs whatnot. So you really don't pizazz the rest of the guys and whatnot, especially when you have MBT on the offensive side of the ball and whatnot. So depth pick, in my opinion, quality defensive back at the league. We'll see what happens on that front, but there is a reason why it took a minute to get to whatchamacallit. It took a minute for him to get back, but it could also be one of those things where it's like, hey man, we're going to come get you. Don't worry about it, man. There were a couple guys who were on the showboats before the Haley regime that were getting text message that they were safe and then all of a sudden they were like, oh my god, flip is the coach. What's going on? Oh, That's awkward. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I get that it's not anyone's fault per se, but at the same time I don't run this league, so who am I? Who am I to make these decisions and all that stuff? So I also don't want to say anything to upset the ebb and flow of everything. But yeah man, there was some guys who got text messages from existing staff, like I told you, there was two or three guys who I talked to that didn't even know they were safe last week. And I mean God willing next year this is a little bit more streamlined. Yeah, I will say they had a question here I'll get to in a minute. Yeah, I don't know. We didn't do the one last week. We didn't want people's feelings hurt because they did or didn't find out, but now we're doing this one. I don't really get the rhyme or reason of any of that stuff. Greg, anything else here as we wait down? This has to be at the round 13 I would expect. So round 12 was listed as Antonio Brooks by the way, but it's actually Antoine Brooks Safety out of Seattle Sea Dragon. So I think that's a pretty quality pickup for Memphis this late in the draft. But yeah, I would assume that Memphis is, it's down to just Memphis now. So either they're going to continue picking against nobody or they're done with round 13. Lucky number 13. We had a question here talking about fantasy sites for UFL Pat, I assume Mark's doing something again, right? I mean that kind of seems like it's his thing. Yeah, so Mark will be doing it on UFL. I don't know the specifics of it. I know he's done it for the last couple years. There's also another kid, I'll pull up his Twitter draft, I forget what the hell is his name, but it's draft fantasy I did last year. Let me just get his Twitter pulled up real quick on my computer, but he did it. It was alt fantasy or something like that. Yeah, Alt fantasy draft or something like that. Yeah, His handle is alt fantasy sports. I did it through him last year. Pretty solid guy. I think his name is like Jeff or something like that, but I did it through his league. I think Mike Mitchell was in that league as well and I didn't really have any complaints. It's going to take a minute until I think they get it streamlined. I know Mark's stuff has been pretty good throughout the time from what I've heard from people. So I mean either one of those two options I recommend and both those guys are pretty responsive in the dms. If you do mention UFL message UFL Newshub and you don't get a response back, feel free to reach out to me and I'll go direct with Mark to just kind of push the things and push it forward. I know he's on the beach right now or at the pool, but we do have what, 75 days until this bad voice starts, so I'm sure he'll start up prior to that. Yeah, and then 2 1 2, we're getting out of here soon, Greg. Greg's like I think that if Memphis only had 13 spots open on their roster coming into today and they've made 13 picks, so I would assume that's the end. Okay, that's the end. All right. I just am hoping for final and then 2 1 2, how they comment here. Do you guys have any suggestions for Instagram accounts if he changed his name? The XFL analyst, UFL analyst is I think the best account to have on there to follow all the breaking news. Did he update his handle? I haven't been on Instagram a lot lately because of Facebook stuff. So UFL analyst on Instagram, that's kind of the way to go. He does get a lot of these players DMing him as well and he doesn't really do much on YouTube or anything like that. He's also on Twitter. I think he's still XFL analyst on Twitter, but once again, if you can't find it, send me a DMM and I'll shoot you the link or whatever. But it's UFL analyst on Twitter now. It might still be XFL analyst on Instagram. But yeah, he's a good resource and he is a young kid and whatnot, but still he's been doing it since the a f so he's not a bad resource at all. He doesn't do YouTube or anything, which I've told him. I was like, dude, how are you? Not if you got all these players in your dms but maybe later, maybe another, Maybe later will round that here. Greg, anything else from you? Nope, I think that's good. I'll have something later in the week on this draft and breaking things down a little bit more. So look on UFL board.com for that coming up And that Greg on parks on Twitter and Pat on there by Pat Rapino. Appreciate everyone, like I said, we'll put this to bed, follow Twitter, we'll put out the final release at the end, but it could be two seconds from now. It could be two hours from now. So appreciate it. Like it subscribe, thumbs up, all that stuff. And like I said, Craig, I DMed him. He said his internet ran out and then John Vogel who was going to come on but just snowed in without proper internet. So really appreciate it. Everyone making time today. Like I said, look for Friday episode if we get enough stuff this week. So that should be good. So we'll see you guys next time. Thanks again.

United Football League 2024 Dispersal Draft Results + Analysis!

Well, happy Monday morning here. Happy black Monday. Great day to probably do all this UFL dispersal draft stuff, but hail to the commanders here. Big day. I can tell we are, there might not be any West coast teams in this new UFL, but that's certainly not stopping us from prioritizing the time zones for, oh wait, no, 7:00 AM here. We're live. We have John Vogel here doing lots of busy things taking time out, which I really appreciate during draft season and all of that. I was getting John's thought. Yeah, who should the commanders take here? Number two, we got lots of big hires today. John, how are you doing? I'm great dude, and thank you for inviting me. Thank you for having me on as always. I appreciate obviously the platform that you built, Reed. You've done a great job with it and it's going to be fun, I think look at some of these results. It'll be good. It was almost better last week. I've been battling this illness now. I think I got a cold at the Winter Classic and was just dripping everything for a week, so this is good. Here on all of this, we have all the rosters picked. I'll get on this, pull it up here so we can screen share what have you thought, how this process goes. We really haven't gotten anything like this before. We have 16 teams, we're moving to eight, we're trying to protect players and all of this. Do you enjoy how all of this has gone? I think to an extent as a fan of roster building, yes, because half these leagues became available where you kind of condense the talent down a little bit, so it's going to help the product on the field, right? That's going to be the first thing that's going to be good. What I don't like about it is it's just the fact that there wasn't a lot of clarity about this throughout the process. I mean, I think when I reported back on November 30th what those teams were going to be with the merger, there were players that had no idea about it, that were upset and angry with me going, how do you know this? If I don't know anything about it? The PAs didn't know anything about it. So from that standpoint, I think I was disappointed about because there's a lot of players that are going to be losing opportunities, but in the grand scheme of things, in terms of a television product, in terms of the game and how much better it's going to look, it's going to be a big improvement I think. Yeah, and to me it really, we've talked with all the combining of all this football talent from both of these leagues and everything, and you can talk to Fox and we've done a lot of business stuff on here. This will be exciting to talk football today. Consolidating all this talent here in the eight teams is really going to be remarkable kind of how to see what these scenes end up doing, right? You're not fighting for talent now between two different leagues. You got 16 going down to eight. I'm hearing your audio is a little low, John, we try to work with that through before, but maybe we can turn that up. So why don't we get in here? Do you want to go team by team? Do you have any other general thoughts before we get in? Well, first off, I like some of the different things that we're doing, at least the fact that first off, with the XFL, everything was really tight and condensed. It was really hard to get information from them. They didn't like anything leaking and so I think when we started getting picks from Mike Mitchell, James Larsson, and those guys, they started leaking back on Friday. I was very surprised because that's been very much against what has normally been the routine, at least with the XFL. The leaks were terrible and all this and that. So it looks like they've loosened up a little bit. That's good. That's going to help push I think engagement because insider information is really what drives sports at this point. All the top reporters are insiders, Adam Schefter, Ian Rappaport, Tom Pul, all these guys. That's what they do is their insiders. They get all this insider information and that's what really drives the interest in the league is because, oh, well I'm hearing it first from these guys, blah, blah, blah, blah. So to kind of open up the doors a little bit and let this information start coming out that's going to help their fan involvement, I think. So that was a good step. I liked that last. The other thing I wanted to also make a note about is Despite all the confusion about whether this was going to be Friday or Monday and then we had all that going back and forth with it over the week, it's going to be good to see what kind of opportunities are going to be opened up for these guys because We're going to be filling up these rosters and condensed, like we said, condensing the talent and putting together really good teams. And so what I think is going to help do is it's going to help even the playing field across the board where we have the opportunity to sit here and look at these rosters and see, okay, well this guy, he was a big hit in the league and he played really well at Vegas or he played really well at Seattle or whatever that team was and seeing him get an opportunity to join this team, it's going to help complete it. That's going to be the fun side of this in the grand scheme of things, Just in terms of how this was all rolled out and no one really cares to think what I have to say about any of this stuff, but it was to me that, oh, we didn't want it done and I understand we got a lot of moving pieces and all of this stuff. Well, we didn't want people's feelings to get hurt if they weren't in the thing or we didn't want things to get leaked out. Like you said, it was leaked out Anyway. John and I are here now with a press release and the Zoom link, so it's not hard to put things together like this and get information going out. So that's all I would say. Let's get into this so I can share, and I posted the link in the chat if anyone wants to follow along, but UFL team rosters here first and foremost, so we know all this, the conferences and all that stuff. Arlington renegades here and we can keep deep dive or not as much as you want here. Obviously we're not going to touch on everything, things that are standing out here for you. We're seeing some previous holdovers and the protected list and there's a lot of information to go through here. What do you think? Yeah, so these are complete rosters that they're listing, aren't they? They're listing, so it'll be like protected players from 2023 and then the people that they picked up from the other teams here in the Dispersal. So first off, Vic Beasley is still staying in the league. I think that's jumping off the page of me right now because Beasley, if you remember back in the NFL back when the Falcons made that Super Bowl run, blew the 28 to three lead the Super Bowl. That one, he was a 14 and a half sack guide that year. He came into the XFL, he played with like it says there, he played the previous team Vegas last year, did some decently good things. Looks like this is probably the right level for him at this point of his career. I am surprised that with all the injuries in the NFL that he's still available because the NFL, there's been a lot of injuries, especially on the outside with Edge rushers. TJ Watt just went down this weekend. Miami lost a couple over the last couple of weeks. I'm surprised to see that he's still available and that he's on this list that's popping off. Adrian Ely I think is a good tackle and played decently well for Seattle. When Randy Bueller was running that Seattle organization last year, I thought he did a really good job with the whole situation. I thought he did a really good job getting offensive linemen in there. I know that that was one thing he was worried about before the season started having enough offensive linemen, but I thought he did a good enough job. And there's another one that's on that list too that's playing there, Chris Owens. Both of these guys are from big schools, Oklahoma, Alabama play decently well down there at that level. They're big guys that are maybe not athletic enough for the NFL and that's why they're here, but they're good for this level. So that's going to help Arlington with the offensive line and we're talking about a team that what six and six last year if you count the two playoff wins. So one of the things that they really had issues with was protecting their quarterback and that's why they went through the quarterbacks that they did. So that's why you see that the offensive lineman, Marcus Minor is a guy that he's young. I actually remember when he went through the CGS when I was with the Brawl Network. We were the partners with the College Gridiron Showcase that year and he was on my top 50 list of prospects that were going through there. Now that was 2021 and it was kind of funny because a bunch of those all-star games got canceled due to covid that year. So the N-F-L-P-A Bolden wasn't played, the Shrine Bowl wasn't played. So a lot of those guys that normally play in those games ended up at the College Gridiron Showcase and he was one of them. Lindsey Scott is a huge addition right here because if you look at their quarterback situation, Luis Perez, Holton Aler, not exactly guys that distill a lot of confidence in you as a team, right, as your quarterback. We've seen Perez, Perez has bounced around spring leagues now since the a f, right? He's been doing it for a long time, but we saw the limitations last year, especially when he got to Arlington. He doesn't have a real strong arm and he's not very mobile and those are the two things across football right now that are dying. If you're a quarterback, it's very difficult for you to be able to make things happen. It doesn't matter how well you can process or how accurate you are, if you can't move in the pocket and get outside of the pocket and then also have the arm strike to drive the ball more than 20 yards effectively, you're going to struggle. And that's kind of been perez's issues. Aler is basically like poor man's Tim Tebow, so that'd be the best way to describe him. So you bring in a guy like Lindsey Scott who played it, incarnate Word, who went through the NFL draft process. I don't believe he played in these leagues last year. I know that they were holding rights, both leagues drafted him in their rookie drafts and we're reserving rights to him. So that's a huge addition here because if he decides to come down to this level, he hasn't played in the NFL this year, I don't believe. He's on a roster. He comes down this year, he's going to be one of these star quarterbacks in this league because Luis, I mean Lindsey Scott, he's a baller dude. He's got an arm, he can get outside the pocket. The one thing that's kind of holding them back at this point is the medicals. His medicals were really bad and then he also injured himself when he was playing in the N-F-L-P-A bowl pretty good last year. So Lindsay Scotts is popping off the screen at me. And then the last one I'm going to point out is Laron Stokes who had a really good year with Vegas last year, really good defensive tackle. I knew him coming into the NFL draft in 2022. Really smart guy, high high IQ guy. And ironic, here's a crazy stat or fact about him. He was homeschooled so he wasn't around football for very long before he went to college and ended up going to Oklahoma, played five years there and then entered the NFL draft and I don't think he got drafted. He was in a camp, ends up in Vegas, had a really good year with Vegas, had some NFL interest over the year. Ultimately he's still here, but that's a guy that potentially I think you're going to see continue to get those reps. He didn't have a lot of reps late in his career at Oklahoma. I think that's why he's here. But yeah, no, we on Stokes is going to be a big pickup for Arlington here too. Yeah, I'll be curious and I've seen, and I know Anthony Miller covers the Renegades did here through the XFL and now obviously through the UFL and he's commenting in our group chat Vic Beasley over there and especially like you said with the quarterbacks as well, seems like there's a lot of moving pieces. There're not sure where they're going to go yet and it should be quite the quarterback battle there and I don't know, I mean we love Perez, but he is getting elder in age and has been around a long time. And like you said, when Lindsey Scott, I think it was when he got picked up in the college draft or whatever, his rights over the summer, I remember big excitement about that that we had Coach Craig Sports and you and everyone on talking. So seems like kind of a wealth of resources there I guess. Yeah, and I'm going to go ahead and pull up my report from him last year just to make sure that I'm on the right page here because that's the thing, man. I look at so many guys. I actually had him graded out as he'd be a high priority for the agent if I was looking at him as an NFL prospect, which is really good when you're coming up from Incarnate Word. He played one year at Incarnate Word, he actually was a red shirt at LSU, went to junior college, played at East Mississippi, then went to Missouri, didn't play there. So he transfers to Nichols State, spends three years at Nichols State plays two because back then when he transferred you still had the transfer rule where you had to sit for a year and then goes his last year as a grad senior and goes to the Incarnate word. Absolutely lights up the stat sheets there. Now the interesting thing about Incarnate Word, if you know anything about college football, which I'm a college football nerd, I think that you like it a little bit, right Reed? Well more on the wife side. I got enough football stuff I got to track Here. Yeah, there you go. So basically GJ Kenny, does that name ring a bell to you? No, GJ Kenny was like a third string quarterback in the NFL for five, six years and if these spring leagues have been around, he'd probably have played in them, but he ended up going into coaching. He was at Incarnate Word his first year last year. Brings in Lindsey Scott. They go have this crazy awesome year, make a huge run. He gets the head coaching job after a year at Incarnate Word goes straight up to Texas State, flips a one in 11 team into a bowl team where they won their bowl game. So Lindsey Scott was a product of GJ Kinney who played quarterback in the NFL for a long time. So there's good bloodlines there too. But Scott, yeah, very athletic moves outside of the pocket, good arm. He's got the potential to be a star in the UFL. He really does. And I guess we haven't gotten, we'll do more of the roster stuff here in terms of are you bullish on this idea here? Spring football just got better, let's ball out maybe all the commercials we've seen over the last weekend. Do you think that this is a good spot now for all this talent to make it? I mean you've lived through here through the three seasons I have, Yeah. So I've seen the people that have concerns about how the league's going to work and I understand those concerns because I think when you have two sides that are merging, there's two reasons. It's one of two reasons. One, because you need to get your resources together before you both die or two because you're just going to be better together. I think that's really the only two reasons that you're going to merge is from a business standpoint. In this case it felt like they were both on the verge of dying and so merging together, bringing all the resources together, that's going to help. Now the concerning part is the fact that they went from 16 to eight teams, which tells you that they're still worried about resources, they're still worried about all these different things that are going to impact the league directly. So I think it works. These leagues have gotten through pull seasons, they've gotten to their championship game. So the US fell's done it twice, the X fell's done it once. Now you don't have them competing against each other. And like I said, I think the product on the field is going to be better because we're condensing this talent. It's all coming down. So the teams are going to be a little bit better. Think about the top four quarterbacks in the USFL over the last few years. I think that in terms of performances, from what we've seen, we could say Case cus we could say Brian Scott, we can say, man, I know that there's a couple others, I can't think of them off the top of my head right now. Those are the two that popped to my head. Oh yeah, obviously Birmingham, those two guys. And then you look at the XFL and you think about those guys, the top guys that were over there, aj, McCarran, dcs, Jordan Temu, all these guys are going to be in the same league now. They're not going to be in separate leagues. And so anytime you see a step up in the quarterback play overall, when we're not looking at a team going, man, they don't really have a quarterback and you're looking and it's half the league, right? You're sitting there going, this could go either way. I don't know what you do with that kind of offense. Anytime you can have six or eight teams, 75% of your league has a quarterback that's capable, it's going to help the product on the field. In terms of Arlington here, and we'll get back to the roster stuff. I'm interested, we've talked a lot about this inner conference and the opening day kickoff game, which I announced we'll be at that we have our flights and everything booked for that. So we'll be in Arlington for the renegades hosting the stallions, but getting this continuity over year one to year two for some of these XFL teams and now going into year three for the USFL teams, I think it's going to be really interesting. I mean I'm very scared of this if you're an XFL person, this Birmingham stall renegades game, but do you think they've done enough here? We can start going down through more of the teams. Do you think they've done enough at least. So if my understanding is this is step one, then they'll be kind of an open draft now happening on the 15th I think, and then they'll really set results for that afterward, kind of the full rosters. But thus far, how are you feeling about the renegades? Well, I think that there's some good things here. Like I said, the offensive line's gotten better, the defensive line's gotten better. So ultimately you need to win in the trenches and I think if Arlington is going to play Birmingham week one, which we know I think is the opening game now, they're going to have to win in the trenches. So they've got some tools, they've got some weapons to do all this stuff. Now the other thing that's kind of confusing about the list is I don't know how many of these guys are going to play, right? Because I look at a Noah Taylor, Noah Taylor just came out last year into the NFL draft out of North Carolina. He just a transfer from Virginia and that's a name that kind of pops off a little bit there where it's like, I don't know if he's going to be there next year. He very well may signing a futures contract and sitting on an NFL roster because he's a talented guy, he's like six seven and he's long and freaky athletic. So while he is not a refined guy, that's hard to say, it's hard for me to expect him to be in the lake. So there's names that are across the board that are like this on this roster. So I don't know how many of these guys are going to be there, but I think that just looking at the guys that they took out of these other leagues, even Roderick Perry is a good pickup from Houston. That's another defensive tackle. If Jalen Redmond comes and plays now you've got Redmond playing with Stokes. They played together at Oklahoma. They played really well together. Actually there's a lot of good talent here to help them in the trenches. I think they did get better, but Birmingham's getting better too. That's going to be the thing. Yeah, we'll get to that here. It's funny at Pat was texting in the group, I don't want to throw out, excuse me, one of the players here just found out they were protected from the live stream. So just talking about how all the results of everything coming out here. So I don't know if this is like when you try it for the school play and then you come back and you check that list on Monday morning like, okay, what did I get signed up for? But anyway, congratulations to all that and obviously lots of other steps to come here if you weren't in this initial one. Stallions, we talked powerhouse team, obviously back-to-back champions and all of that. To me, kind of the pinnacle of spring football, just leadership and coaching and kind of team building and all that stuff. I think even though the director of player blocks me on Twitter, I still have tremendous things to say about the stallions. Interesting moves here. What do you make? And we can start kind of scrolling the list. A couple names popping off here to start. Calvin Ashley. So going right back to the trenches, right? Calvin Ashley was probably one of the better offensive linemen in the entire league. I know that he was selected early in the selection draft when the league started. New Jersey wanted him bad and they got him, now he's here. And New Jersey was one of those teams that ran the ball really well both years, right? They had the Darius Victor, they had the running quarterback threats and they were able to do good things on that side of the ball. But it all started because the offensive line, Darius Victor is a good running back, but I mean he's like five five. So he's not a guy that's going to consistently run with power the way that you can if you don't have an offensive line. And so they're getting better on the offensive line. That's a huge spot. Chris blew it might help their special teams a little bit too. He's a decent kicker. Looking at the rest, I really like that they picked up Andre St more from the Breakers. That's going to be a huge pickup for them right there because New Orleans, if you remember the first year, the USFL had an absolutely explosive edge rushing group and we're able to rotate four guys and consistently bring pressure to the quarterback and RI was part of that group. So I think him added here is going to be a huge help. Good to see Jamar Smith still on the list. Adrian Martinez. It's interesting if he comes over as, they're obviously trying to replace quarterbacks. Alex Magoos in Green Bay. Green Bay likes him up there a lot. He'll stick around. I don't think they're going to let him go, but Adrian Martinez is there, so he's interesting. He was at, I believe it was Nebraska. So when Nebraska hired Scott Frost, Adrian Martinez was the first four-star guy that Frost decided he needed to have on the team. Went out there, got him, played a few years there at Nebraska, ends up transferring to Kansas State as last year and he's got a decent arm. He's a decent athlete and kind of fits that I would say Poor man McSorley. So there's good tools there, but Jamar Smith coming back is good, at least on the list. We'll see how he looks after the injury. I guess if you get down to the bottom of the list, well Eli Walker is decent from Pitt. James Wiggins is decent from the Breakers as well. So a couple pieces to help the secondary, that's probably to fill in the pieces that they lost to the NFL this year. Yeah, there's some good stuff here. Yeah, it's interesting and obviously pointing out here, so you've got, Oh, Channing St. Stribling. I'm sorry, I missed that. Yeah, from the I did see that Someone here that what's interesting just to point out, so obviously the XFL team's drafting from the XFL, right? And then the USFL, so then the next step will be open. So just in case you're following along and it, it's harder. I even saw people when we were posting last night like, hey, we're going to go live and all this stuff. People still trying to figure out how this process is going, but obviously all of these are kind of inter USFL signings right now and then it will be opened up to the future at that point. Obviously a lot of your names, you expect your Scooby rights, your GI of the world there to stick around and Willie Yarborough and all that. Channing St. Stribling is excited. The Hercules right from the generals, that's a big move. I do know that. Yeah, obviously Channing St. Stribling on here, so good to see that way, right? It's still this kind of mixed mash of okay, we can only do so many, we can only do it from so many teams, but I don't think the stallions had needed a lot of improvements across the board, but certainly bolstering here at this point with everything else going on. Absolutely. Yeah, and they picked up some good pieces, right? Channing St. Stribling I think has been the interception leader in the USFL over the last couple years over overall. Actually Daniel Esam is a good ad too at safety. I missed that one initially as well. So that's kind the thing too is when you look at the draft, at least from the guys that they picked up drafting in this rotation, the rest from the defunct teams, they're going to go target the best guys, right? Obviously, I know I'm kind of saying the obvious here, but the fact that Birmingham has got this many just from initial even Chris Orr, that's another good one. Chris Orr was a tackle leader for the generals. Thinking about, you start to kind of think about, okay, well Chris next to Scooby Wright, that's going to be tough to deal with. And then you got your edge rushers, you start putting together the secondary and yeah, they're going to be good. Again, skip Holts is doing a great job down there, obviously two championship wins, they've been dominant. Yeah, they're going to be good again. Well, and I would say it is just at least if you have your money lines going here on the opening day, kickoff game Minus two 50, Well I mean the Stallions had a slightly more dominant kind of championship run here than the Renegades did. And obviously we had all of that and with the losing records going into the playoffs, all that stuff, I mean Renegades when they needed to be done and they won and everything, but Stallion Town a little bit more ago, still going into that championship game than the other did. So anything else on that? We want to move down defenders here. We can move to defenders. Let's do it. Alright, so let's see here. You can see again, I'm picking up some from Houston, Seattle, all of that. Initial thoughts kind of names to glancing down on here. Jordan Evans, that's a nice pickup from Seattle that's going to help DC a lot. I like Elijah Blades as well out of Houston. He watched him when he was at Buffalo. He was an SEC guy that transferred to the Mack. George Moore is going to be his really nice pickup. That's another Seattle offensive lineman. Trent Harris. He had a good year with Houston last year. I think that that's going to be helpful for them. Let's see. Oh, Deandre Francois got picked up. That's interesting. So DC looks like looking for a backup quarterback goes with Branwell. I'm assuming that tmu is on this list as well. I thought it was the whole deal with tmu where he's still under futures, right? Or something with the NFL. He might be. I don't know. I think Mike Mitchell had that out that he wasn't, he still working around before coming back. Interesting. Okay, So Fran, oh boy. Francois might be, I don't see, is there another quarterback on this list? I'd have to see here. Let me, I'm trying to, I'm searching on another one so I don't get it. Yeah, no, that's currently the only one. Now obviously this will be opened up to the others, but yeah, FTO football is Deandre Francois, right? I mean, you're a DC guy, aren't you? Aren't you a commanders Guy? No, I'm a command, no, I'm a commander's guy. Well, I know you're commander's guy, but Seattle's gone man. So you got to pick one, right? We're all in with the promise. I've said that publicly. Oh, promise. Okay. AJ Smith has my full support. AJ Smith and Wade Phillips and all of that. So I got the fallback from Wade Phillips on Twitter. So yeah, we're all in with the bras Riverwalk tours, we'll be doing the whole thing. But yeah, no, and Pat's stand on here as well. Yeah, so Francois Ride now the only one that's interesting. Yeah, that is. I liked Aquarius. Tisdale that's on that list. He's a linebacker, kind of an edge rusher. I liked him a lot when he came out as well Out of Ole Miss. This is kind of, I want to say this nicely, this is probably one of the more underwhelming rosters that we've seen so far. When you look at those first couple teams and the pickups that they brought in. Donovan Jeter's going to help a little bit defensive tackle out of Michigan, played with Houston last year. That's going to help a little bit. But overall, this one to me is a little bit underwhelming, especially with the quarterback situation. They're going to have to figure that out throughout the process. Abram Smith coming back is going to be helpful for the run game. I do like Sunoco on there out of the linebacker of Louisville. That was a guy I really liked out of college as well. I could kind of see it. Tim Ward had a good year with Houston. He had a couple good games, but had a couple games where he was also kind of gone and missing. It's tough, man. It's tough when you got a quarterback question hanging over your head. Oh man. And especially this would be the time to at least get one in to kind of protect and obviously you can bring in to kind do whatever. I'm seeing if Mike or anyone has anything saying in the group chat about all this stuff. Yeah, Francois right now leading the DC defenders is a little scary. I think If you be Vaughn Hutchins is their director of player personnel. Vaughn's going to do a good job. I have no doubt about that. It's just, man, I don't know. I don't know, man. Yeah, and Mike's saying there's clarifying here. There's all these steps where you had to be on the team or how to sign the letter of intent and all this stuff to get into this. So this isn't a final list of all these names, but just our first blush. This is a bulk of, I think the roster building at this point. So it is a little bit disconcerting at that point, but like you said, Von Hutchins a lot of faith and belief in there, but certainly interesting thus far. Yeah, no, I Obvious see the rest of the rosters. We'll see the rest and we'll, I know Coach Craig Sports was interested in this. We'll do a big round table kind once this is all alive and finalized year after the 15th, and obviously there'll still be supplemental drafts and all that. We'll kind of figure out a time to do a big round table with all of that. Now we have the roughnecks, which is actually the gamblers, which was interesting and I know Mike had put out and the league had told him and then it ended up which conference were they drafting from. But here we have the roughnecks pulling out of the former USFL teams, gamblers, not maybe the prettiest team in the world. And I know Anthony Miller spent many weekends covering them. Any thoughts on this thus far? Kenji Bahar still sticking around. I see some of these names on here. What do you make of this? So the first thing is look at all of, at least in this top section of the roster, look at all of the players that they picked up. This feels like they drafted a few extra and it may be because they just didn't have a lot of guys and it looks like they were trying to get everybody to a certain number of players so they got a few extra picks and so you could see that already first. I see a lot of pit defenders, New Jersey defenders, New Jersey offense as well. Let's see, Reuben Foster, that's your defensive star of your league, had a really great year of pit last year for a former first round NFL draft pick. Huge for them that's going to help them at least shore up the middle of their defense. He had a really good year with Pitt last year. Adam Rodriguez from Philadelphia's there. That's going to be a good pickup. Yeah, SGA Polo. He's there. That's a good one. We have the Project Westbrooks, the illustrious Mark Thompson. I always got to make sure when you can't talk, you can't talk UFL without talking about Mark Thompson. Mark is constantly involved on social media. Absolutely Log, go walk the dog. Ethan Westbrooks is going to be fun because he had a really good year, a couple good years with the generals on the interior of that defensive line and putting him with Reggie Walker on the outside and some of these other guys that are going to be there. That's going to be fun. Isaiah Chambers is back. That's going to be a good help as well. That's a developmental prospect. He's still got a chance to play in the NFL. But yeah, it's interesting because again, going back to the quarterback deal, right, that was what I was talking about is Kenji Bahar had a decent year. They figured out a good way to use him and to get stuff. I think they didn't, wasn't Houston the team that played Pittsburgh in the playoffs? Is that right? It is a fever dream at this point. Maybe it wasn't Pittsburgh. It wasn't Pittsburgh, but I played, I think they played Birmingham in the playoffs. I could be wrong about that. But Bahar, he's, he's an athlete and so it's interesting to see Jared ano on this list. He spent four years at the University of Tennessee, transferred to Washington State as a grad transfer. And he's interesting because as a Tennessee fan, I'm sitting here wearing Tennessee hat, got the Tennessee shit behind me. We didn't like Jart put it that way. He is got some big consistency, but he's a better ball thrower than Bahar is and maybe not as good of an athlete. So that's an interesting situation to see the running backs on this team look awesome. Teon Evans is a really great running back. That's another former Tennessee guy transferred to Louisville, was at the NFL combine last year. So Teon Evans is a good one to see on the list. Shamari Jones had a good career at Coastal Carolina. Mark Thompson's back, I don't know how involved he'll be next year, but we'll see. And then you see them loading up with their big personnel. There's three tight ends that they picked here. Braden Bowman, Woody Brandham, both played extensive time at New Jersey. Ryan Izzo, they added from Philadelphia. They're loading up for big personnel. So it looks like quarterback for them is not a huge deal because they're loading up with run. They're going to run the football and they've got some good personnel now to do that. So especially adding Robert Myers too. Robert Meyers a good pickup from the Generals as well. Yeah, they're going to be able to run the ball. I don't know how well they're going to be able to throw it, Run the ball, throw the, what did you make of non-football aside, what did you make of the Houston adopting the Roughnecks branding? Because to me I am a big fan of the weird helmet and everything. To me that was some of the cleanest branding last year. What did you think of that we're adopting the roughnecks branding here? I think that was the holdup with the merger, right? Yeah, because the X, I think the XFL had to feel like they were on top. When you have those kind of investors, you've got the Rock, you've got Danny Garcia, you've got Redbird Capital. They got to feel like that they're coming out on top. And this seemed to be the thing that got them there where, okay, well we're going to retain five of our franchises even if we don't keep the team together. I think the roughnecks also did better in terms of fan attendance and different stuff. Probably had something to do with Houston not playing in Houston. So at least you've got a team that's already, the people are familiar with and they've been watching for the last couple of years. The roughnecks were obviously in the first XFL edition came back the second time. So there's good stuff there. Overall. It is interesting that they decided to take the gamblers team and put it under and renamed them the roughnecks. Especially when you had the roughnecks last year that weren't terrible. It's interesting. It is interesting. Not sure, I don't think it's a bad thing. I've had a lot Of, it seemed like that was a thing to get it done, to get the merger done. Yeah, I've had a lot of people like, oh, it doesn't matter again, we have a lot of college football fans like, oh it doesn't matter and all that. This guy right here, I'm a Brandon Silvers man and if I bought season tickets, I'm going to go see Brandon Silvers now. Kenji Bahar, that's my quarterback. I mean, I'm just saying it's not old Iron Side there. And this is a different world we live in. So gamblers are weird. I think Anthony Miller had said if they're season one offense with their season two defense or if they kind of flip the two kind of whatever together, maybe they'll finally get it figured out this season. But right now, like you said, pretty run heavy and nothing else really standing out from that. And I think they're going to be able to play defense too. It looks like they just drafted a lot of people. So that's the most interesting thing to me is how many they were able to pick up and that's going to help them I think overall, the long grand scheme of things. So the Showboats here, right, flip flips here. Is the head coach now on here? A little bit moving and shaking there, but I thought the Showboats did good last year. I liked the branding and the rolling that out and it looked good. I thought on the initial they were peaking there the end of the season, right? They did. All right, Well here's going to the quarterback situation, case Cookes. So what does that tell you about how they felt about Cole Kelly? Yep. Which I don't blame him. Cole Kelly's still on the list, which is good. And then you got Ryan Willis who's there as well, but they went and they got Case Cookes and they've got another quarterback, a guy Myers out of Charleston, West Virginia. Interesting. But yeah, no case Cookes is there. So that's your star quarterback, right? Case did a really good job playing with Philadelphia over the last couple of years. Playoff appearance, the championship appearance. Lost to Birmingham year one. Philadelphia got beat up last year pretty good. I think That was, yeah, case got his ass beat. Yeah. Yeah. No protection whatsoever. So I think that's going to be a welcome sign for Case. I think he's going to feel a lot better about the offensive line he's about to be playing for here. If you look at who they drafted, it looks like they feel really good about their offensive line too, which is interesting because look at the draft. Do you see any, there's one guy in this upper part of the roster where they drafted, it's a guard, Kurt Kelly from New Orleans. Everybody else that they're picking defense, defense, defense, defense running back Kennedy Brooks, there's a tackle. Terry Poole from Pitt, but there's a tackle. Sidney Wells from New Orleans but nothing, no real big players here in terms of the offensive line. No big names, no names that stand out from last year. Darius Victor, that's going to be a nice little pickup there from the generals. You add that the case cus that's going to be fun. Vinny Papa had a really good year with cus Overton really good year with cus so you're bringing in a lot of familiarity and it looks like you're feeling really good about your offensive line that you already have and now you're just adding the complimentary pieces to it. So whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, I guess we'll find out. Yeah, Sage rad on heres as well. Another, it's good. Yeah, I dunno. I mean Memphis to me was kind of hard to gauge last year and the US L season, what it was. It was just tricky. We're getting through the XFL and God bless Pat and doing the shows every week with me and we're trying to, it was a little bit of a trudge through the end of the season getting through all that. So I am excited to see have these roles interact. It's like not having separate TV shows you got to keep track of here. I am looking forward to what obviously we wish more than eight, but exciting to kind of see all these worlds collide on here. Yeah, so flip coming over here. Obviously Todd Haley moving on. So we'll see how that goes with him inheriting this. But certainly picking up some pieces like he said, case cookies had a down year, I would say last year just from getting beat up so much. But certainly looking to bounce back. I don't know other options he has at this point And they're bringing familiarity to 'em too. That's the other thing. And that's more important than most people realize, right? Because to be familiar with the guys that you're throwing to a lot of your concepts and different things that you run, especially in a wade type offense, Wade Phillips, what he's going to bring in, what he wants to install. It's a lot of timing concepts that takes time to build because you got to understand how my guy moves, how he runs his route, how quick he is because the whole point of a timing route is getting the ball to a certain place because you know your player's going to be there when you throw that ball. So Case is really good with the timing routes, that's his strength. He's got a really decent army. He can push the ball down the field no doubt, but timing and hitting those throws and rhythm, that's what he does really well. So to bring in familiarity, guys that he's worked with, guys that he's had success with, guys that he's thrown the ball to really well is absolutely key to his success and that's what they're trying to set up here. And then Sage Ra, again, tight end to move from. Wide receiver, didn't play much the first year. Came in, played a lot more with New Orleans last year, had a good year. That's going to be a nice pickup for them and they're trying to bolster their run game. You bring in Victor, that's a huge help you bring in Kennedy, Brooks, that's an opposite player of Victor. That's a big bruising running back. So yeah, there's some good stuff that they're doing here. Absolutely. Just to clarify, so we're kind of in our group chat here. Mike was talking about, we have questions about Temu with the defenders and he's apparently going to be a free agent, I guess hadn't signed the LOI to return in 2024, so wasn't protected by DC so he could still certainly sign back with DC but it seems like he could be a little bit more of a free agent. So just kind of keeping track of notes on here as we go through Panthers on here. Decent season one, right? What was it? They finally won at home. I'm trying to remember all the storylines from the season didn't do well. We had the Tony Scotts of the world and everyone following the, the Panthers kind of returned to Detroit. Mike Nolan, right? Helming that. What do we think here? Coming down the pike. Excuse me, I got to go cough. It's interesting you got Danny Etling and Brian Luki that was on the roster. Now you're adding Davis cheek quarterback from Elon who was with the Breakers last year, didn't play much. That's interesting. I like the addition of Wes Hills who was the Breakers running back last year, had a really good start to the year before they slowed him down a little bit. That's a nice Mike Matthew Colburn as well. So it looks like that Michigan is trying to load up for a run. Donis Alexander, that's another good addition. He's had two really good years with the Breakers as Safety. Good to see Brock Miller on here coming from the generalist. Always happy to see a friend of the show there. Brock Miller on, Yep, yep, yep. It's good to see him this year. Player that's going to, that's a nice pickup. He was probably the best edge rusher pit had last year. Ryan Pope is probably was the best offensive lineman on the Philadelphia team. That's not saying too much, but still. Yep. Jordan Sewell. That's going to help. That's going to help a little bit there. Terry Wright is interesting. They're wider receiver route of Purdue. Yeah, It sounds like They're, they're load up a run man. That's what they're doing here. It's just funny going through this. I get a lot of X-F-L-F-I recognize for whatever, because you're the football guy and Pat sent over a really, I was going to say this too off the top. Pat Rafino was on Reddit the other day and there was people talking about all the different podcasts ride and what Mark's doing, what Brandon's doing and that Mark has and they go, I really like the Mark has because of the analysis that they do, which obviously is a credit to the people that come on you and everyone like Pat and everyone for sharing that. But I appreciated that because I'm not the football guy, but when I can sit here and I can kind of pinpoint these names on here, I feel better about that. Or at least like, hey, I'm doing my part covering the UFL here. Yeah, yeah. No, and we've been watching these pretty obsessively the last couple of years. So some of these names that you certainly hope start to fill in. The last one that popped, I've missed it initially is Corey Coleman. So I know that they're adding guys that had some decent production at the wide receiver position, but they're loading up a run these offensive linemen that they're Drew Himmelman that they picked up. He's a run blocker, right? Tackle run blocker. They already got Jared Horst run blocker, Noah Johnson, Kansas State run blocker. I mean they're loading up for run Michigan's probably like, you know what, we've had issues with our quarterbacks the last couple years. Let's run the ball. Let's run the damn ball. Yeah. So like you said with cheek on here and then Leki kind of figuring out what to do with quarterback, right? Leury, was he with the spring league? Right. And then I think he had a cup coffee with The Patriots. Yeah, I knew he was on with that. So are you feeling decent about that or do you think they stopped here or were you still making moves for the No, they're going to figure out somebody else. Okay, so none. But all three of these guys have athletic ability that they can run the ball. So I think that you might see a switch here. They were running more of a traditional power offense, trying to throw in a few wrinkles with Joe Walker and trying to use the athletic ability, try to get 'em to space. The big thing that they're looking at right here though is it looks like they're going to switch to a heavy RPO look run pass option. So because Dave is cheek, Danny etling and Brian Leki are all guys that run the ball. They're not great, but they can do it. So if you run an RPO system, what's going to open up your shots here for the wide receivers that they've added? Slants bubbles, different stuff like that. A go ball every once in a while. That's why you bring in a Corey Coleman. It looks like that's what they're gearing up for. Is it going to be more heavy RPO? Well there you go. Let's slide on down here. The Brahmas on here. Your team, Jack Cohen making it back on here. Matthew McKay Too. I know, I was trying to figure out who on the list here. This is fun. I getting to go through this. No prep real time. So just keep that in mind. John's breaking. God forbid you get this ahead of time and do a little research, but it's good. I think John's obviously a phenomenal job, a real time. Yeah, Ben, Kurt coming back. Interesting. And then got hurt and I did not like how Kurt handled everything in this time with the XFL last year, but glad to see him not hurt. And I obviously think he's a polarizing figure, kind of lightning spark, if that makes sense. Yeah, no, and again goes back to social media, right? Social media is really good at making you a polarizing person, especially when you talk a lot. Devonte Beckett, that's a fun one to add right there from Houston. He's a good linebacker. I don't know if he played as much with Houston last year, but I watched him a lot at Marshall when he came out. He was a guy that I really liked him. He was an undersized linebacker. That's why he didn't really make the NFL and other additions. Kelly Latimer sitting around here. I don't think that's a surprise. Yeah, it might help. They got him listed as a tight end too, which is interesting. Mosley, Jaylen Samuels, that could be a nice little piece from Houston. I don't remember him playing with Houston that much either, but he played a couple years in the NFL of these picks are from Houston. Holy cow. Look at 'em all. Well, because you figure, right, if you're Wade Phillips coming in, if you're coming into the brass, you're bringing in a lot of your, you want to bring over as many as you can, but obviously Kurt was with the Brahmas, the Heinz War brass. So we get the Kurt, we get some of this from the Heinz War bras and then we get some of the Wade Phillips coming in. So yeah, kind a mixed moshing of all of that. Are you sad to see Heinz go are with Philip and AJ Smith coming in? Are you sad to see Heinz Ward out of the XFL? I think Heinz is a really good guy. Yep. I think he learned a lot as a coach last year, but when you're condensing this league down to eight teams, he just didn't make the cut. He might be able to someday. I don't believe he had a lot of coaching experience anyways, even as a coordinator. I don't think he really had any. So it was kind of surprising to see him when he got that spot. That was kind of one of those hires where he felt like that might be more for the name brand and the connections that he brings, which he did. He did a good job bringing in people. But San Antonio was, I was saying that I think before we even got started, I was looking at the roster going, how are they this bad when you look at the talent that they have, they got some pieces And when you had the Elizondo, we demoted him during the season and we were dealing with kind of all that stuff. I think there was a lot of moving pieces there. Foosball fan here in the chat said, I'll trust whoever AJ wants in San Antonio. I mean you made Brandon Silvers look like the greatest quarterback in the league last year for at least a few weeks. Yeah, no, and that was surprising. Austin Edwards will be a nice little pickup from, again from Houston, but fair state. He had a decent year with Houston last year. I think when you get down to toward the bottom of the roster on the alphabetical list here, there are a couple that were also starting to pop out a little bit. So Tease Tabor, that was a higher draft pick when he came out of Florida a couple of years ago. People liked him a lot. It's interesting to see him down here at this level. Kevin Toliver had a pretty good year last year. Teron Vincent, interesting because that's actually the former head of the NFL PA's sign. He played defensive tackle for Ohio State. Cade Warner is another interesting one. That's Kurt Warner's son as in the former Super Bowl winning quarterback. So he's there. These are guys, both of those. So Terron and Cade both came out and tried to enter the NFL last year. And so here they are going into this league. That's interesting. CJ Windham is a very interesting prospect out of Middle Tennessee state. He might be a sleeper here and I know that he's already on the roster. He is not coming in from anywhere. He might be a sleeper here, he might be a guy to keep an eye on. And then Quincy Wilson from Florida, another DB from Florida. Quincy Wilson's pretty good for this level. They got him listed as a db. He's probably going to play like nickel and a little bit of safety, but that'll be, that's a good pickup for them. So there's some stuff to work with here. And obviously Wade defensive guy loves his defense. He's got some really good defensive pieces to play with as people would like to joke. He's got some toys in the closet. It's going to be fun. They might be pretty decent actually and pretty competitive as long as the quarterback situation is figured out. What was I going to say here? You got Nick Hawley as well, sticking around some of the twins there. I will say, yeah, greatest. The great irony would be if Kurt Ben Kirk was my quarterback because before he got hurt, we were very, in our group chat, I renamed it this as an anti Kirk Bent group chat and then he got hurt and obviously we were pro all that. So the great irony would be if he comes back with the brass and that's my quarterback, we'll have to rather die. Hey, I've had worse. Yeah, Jack Cohn, if he's the competition, I think with the quarterbacks too, there's going to be some names that are going to come available and they're going to add them. And so I think that the quarterbacks are still being figured out right now. The other interesting thing, just while I'm thinking about it, because obviously Kurt being on here is protected, but that doesn't necessarily mean he's playing or whatever. I'll be curious, knowing that the XFL was paying the quarterbacks a lot more last season than the USFL, are you still attracting those big names if you're the UFL now, if you're only getting paid 55,000 versus Brett Huntley was getting two or 300,000 and I think that was self-reported or I think Brian Scott was the one that put that out. But I'll just be curious. Are we getting current? It was a paid by game and I don't think he played a lot of games at the end, so I don't think he ended up seeing that money, but it was a situation where if he played, he got paid and it was a good game check. Okay. So it would just be interesting. I'm just saying even if some of these names are on here, I don't know if Kerr or whatever is going to be back for that for the amount of money now that the UL is going to pay versus whatever. We're going to find it out. Just speaking of, and we'll get to the next list here, we'll get out. Pat just shared this in the thing. Toby Johnson, I just woke up to a hundred text messages about being drafted to Houston. I promise I haven't spoken to anyone from that organization. I find it weird than no one reach out to me and for each team in December not to draft me. Well that's beside the point. But again, finding out we didn't want to do it. We didn't want to do the big thing Friday. We didn't want people, there are different ways to handle this and I tweeted out on Friday, I hear a lot, we just need to get through this. Let us just sit through this draft and then we're doing that. I'm like, I just dunno how many times there's only one dispersal draft unless you guys are merging again here in 15 years. I just don't understand. Anyway, that's the end of my rant with that. But we're still having players find out right now and via our stream and others like, oh wow, I was drafted on here. Yeah, that's a fun way to find out. Right. Oh hey Mark Cast. Oh, there's my name St. Louis here. I think Coach Beck here big talking. I saw a lot of cryptic tweets on Friday from him. You got a lot to live up to here. I didn't quite have the playoff run maybe that they wanted and I know that he I think came out that they've changed the playoff rulings now where it's going to be the top seats from each conference and then the top two records after that I think trying to remedy kind of his pissy pants party he had before tweeting. Well I'm on the couch, I'm not in the playoffs. And I tweeted out like, well I'm in Outie field right now watching the Sea Dragons playoffs because battle hawks are really good here. So what do we make of this? I got to kind of figure out this lister. Well, so the first thing is they got ahold of some guys before this happened, so that's one of the keys they added. Max Boor bogie from Houston who played down there and he's kind of a poor man's Christian McCaffrey, right? Like UFL version of Christian McCaffrey. That's really what he is. And then I think there was a defender that they added as well. That was really good last year. Do you remind me, do you remember who it was For? Sorry, what's your question? I was reading the shot. They added a defender as well. That was a big name from the XFL last year. They got ahold of him before this draft. Oh, I don't know. I'm sorry. Yeah, there were two guys that they got ahold of. I know Bogie was one. I can't remember who the other one was. But anyways, so interesting thing here. Look at how few picks there are compared to some of these other teams And I mean they must've been pretty bolster going in and not as many spots to fill because I think they could go up to 20. I think it was up to 20 picks. So Quin Cole, that's a good addition for them. He'll be playing some safety, might be able to play corner. We'll see. Good pickup from Seattle. Antoine Jackson is a good pickup as well. I liked him a lot. Jor Pearson. There you go. Wide receiver slot wide receiver Going some Seattle. Yep. Yep. Had a really good year last year with Seattle. And actually didn't he get the opportunity because he was doing those YouTube, he won this YouTube competition with that guy that goes around and does the wide receiver versus DB competitions. I can't think of his name, but he was like, they had him on the XFL broadcast that one day It was destroying. Are you Destroying him? Yeah. Didn't Pearson literally get the opportunity because he did one of those videos? Possibly. I don't know. I tried to avoid all things destroying in my life, so I think that was part of it. But he also ran a 4 2 40 and at one of the XFL Pro days. So absolute blazer. I was looking because I was trying to figure out why is this guy not in the NFL? He ran a four five on his pro day, so he came into the XFL and ran a four two and they were like, yeah, we're keeping him. But yeah, that's going to be a nice addition here. The big question I think that's going to be is who's going to end up playing quarterback because AJ McCarran is with the Bengals right now. So Nick Tiana's on the list and Manny Wilkins on the list, that's going to be interesting to see. Do they get him back? McCarran from Cincinnati to Cincinnati, let him go at the end of the year. Donovan West is a good pickup center from Arizona State. Really liked him coming out. Michael Wright is a good corner edition. He's sort of a match four corner. Jack Snyder's a good pickup. There's some good pickups here. But again, this is a team that was really good. They kept a lot of their talent considering all things from NFL picking and picking them apart. And I'm not a betting man in these lower leagues because it's just too volatile. It's Too much. But I might go with, if I see a plus 600 odds for St. Louis to win the championship, I might take that. I will tell you the Battle Hawks versus the stallions kind of in the one ring to rule them all would be pretty exciting here you have that on there. I understand the Renegades is a defending champions is sexy for the kickoff, but Battle Hawks have the more fervent fan base and no disrespect to the Arlington renegades out there. That would've been interesting for sure. But here we are. Yeah, foosball fan has a comment and we will get out of here if you have any questions for John, we'll do just over overarching here before we get out. And then if you have any specific questions, let me know for John and we can do those before we get out. But I don't want this to be eight hours. I think this is good. Get in and out. The people are trying to get all the results on here. Food, baseball fans, something weird is going on with the QBs. Yeah, I think there's a lot of moving parts there where you have guys still on NFL rosters or maybe you have guys that hadn't committed yet or like I said, just game check wise, if you're not getting paid the same that you were, maybe tam, who doesn't want to come back if it's only for kind of that standard rate. That is the one thing now with merging these leagues and having to deal with that. And those are the questions we don't have answers to yet is how much they're being paid. So that's going to be a huge part of Quarterbacks. Quarterbacks always get more money. They just about always get more money. They're separate because of the, I guess you could say the importance of the position overall. Any level that you look at, quarterbacks always get more money. I mean college football NIL right now, quarterbacks get more money. NFL quarterbacks are the highest paid position, so you're always going to get more money as a quarterback because the importance that you have to the offense. Yeah, the quarterback situations for these teams are not final. I think that's very clear, right? You got one roster on there that's got one quarterback right now and they drafted him, right? That's not going to stay that way. So there's going to be a lot of talking behind the scenes trying to gauge interest, see what's going on. We know Bethel Thompson's going back to mc, he's going back to the Canada, so he's going to the Elks. It's Crazy. Crazy. 500 Canada, go back. Think that is biggest. I think that's the big mistake if I'm the Edmonton Elks, and not that I'm not the director of a GM up there, but I will say you have, They're kind of desperate right now I think, right? Because they just had a really bad year and they need all the help they can get. Bringing a veteran quarterback at the very worst you're going to have a guy that can mentor the young quarterbacks that you bring in. Very worst. So I, I don't know if it's worth $500,000 with the way that the Canadian League salary operates, but it's worth bringing in that guy for that, especially if you think he can play a full year and he's had success up there. So we'll see. It'd be interesting. He had success with the USFL. Oh, he was good. I mean they were undefeated until he came on my podcast and then they couldn't win again. But it is interesting you Screwed him over Reid. Golly, It's all your fault. But again, the idea McLeod purposely, he willingly took that pay decrease to go to the USFL, right? They paid him the standard salary that everyone else got there. And so that is something where now if you have, like I said before, you have some of these quarterbacks coming in, so you're high on battle hawks, you're high on the stallions. Any the other teams you're high on here as we kind of round this Up. I do like San Antonio, I'll be honest with you. I like San Antonio. I think that they look like they have the pieces to really put to run together and then kind of like Michigan, I think they got to get their quarterback situation figured out. But I kind of like Michigan. They've been quietly the last couple of years stacking some talent together and we saw a big step up in their play from the season one to season two. It's difficult because I don't know if I'm supposed to tell this story, I'm going to tell this story anyways, Reid, When The initial quarterback draft of the USFL, they wanted to take, they had the number one overall pick. Remember Michigan? They wanted to take shoot, who was in that draft? They want to take one of the other quarterbacks. Well Shay went number one, but yeah, Scott was in there, went two. Do you remember? Was Tom? Yeah, yeah, Yeah. So I think they wanted TUM and they said, no, no, no, he's going to Tampa with Hailey. And they're like, all right, well then we want Brian Scott. And they said, no, no, he's going number three to Philadelphia. And they're like, do we have the number one pick? What are we supposed to do? So that was sort of a weird setup when the USFL set all that up. Yeah, so it was to that they wanted and then they wanted Brian Scott and then they sold, they were told they couldn't have him. That was what it was. That's awesome. They were told they have the number one pick, but they can't have these two guys. They were very confused about that. So that's the thing is they've had quarterback issues the last couple of years and they took a chance last year bringing in Carson Strong, who was a pretty good prospect at the NFL level. He just had terrible medicals. His knees were so messed up. The NFL was afraid to touch him. And what happened comes to the US ball, messed his knees up even more. Now he's not playing, he's not ever going to play again. So they've had issues with the quarterback position, they've had talent on the team. I think it was actually it was Michigan. It was Michigan that played Pittsburgh in the playoff game. So this past year. So they went from being the worst team in the league to playing in the playoff and it was a relatively competitive game against Pittsburgh. It came down to the end, I remember now. So that's a step up. If they could get their quarterback situation figured out this year, they could coax somebody, Hey, come on over, let's play. Let's work this stuff out, dah, dah, dah. Michigan's going to be really good because they've had the talent, they've had the defense, they have the receivers to work with, they got an offensive line, they've just had subpar quarterback play. And when they took Shay Patterson, that was a shock. Being an analyst not knowing what was going on behind the scenes at the time, that was a shock because it was like, I'll watch this motherfucker over there at The senior. You can't say that. You can't say that. Oh my bad, sorry, my bad, sorry. I watched this dude at the Senior Bowl and he couldn't hit the broad side of a barn. It was terrible. It was one of the worst quarterback performances I'd ever seen in my life. And I was like, I don't know how that's going to work. So Yeah, it is interesting. I don't know a lot of politicians, I'll be curious if the allure of plane in all the markets outweighs kind of the contract issues here with the US L teams going in this year. I think, Hey, come play in the hub or go do or be in camp and do you feel like you get more benefit now, get more exposure? Kind of that playing in the home markets and on the stocks and ABC and everything versus like, okay, well I'm not getting paid as much, but at least I feel like this is a bigger platform. At least they're telling me it's a bigger platform than the commercials I'm watching. So the 80 I think between the two leagues this year we've had 80 to 90 guys get called up, right? That's going to be condensed now, right? So the numbers are going to look better and that's going to help your recruiting and be like, Hey, we put next year, assuming you get through this year and you get to the end of it, Hey, we put 80, 90 guys in the NFL. We gave all these guys different opportunities, the calendar still works. They're going to start the end of March, which means they're going to play through to about June. So you're still going to be able to join in time for training camp. That's going to help too, right? Because we talked about the calendar a lot last year and the difference between the two and how the XFL set it up really well, their season was ending as you were going into rookie mini camps. So in theory you could sign with team and go into rookie mini camp, which is a huge, huge benefit, right? Because there's a lot of installs and a lot of different things that are run in rookie mini camp. So basic stuff, it's nice to have that base knowledge going into training camp that helps you in terms of understanding what the scheme is, what you're going to be asked to do. So that's a huge plus I think. Well, you're not going to be in time for rookie, you're not be in time for rookie mini camp with this calendar. You're going to be in time for training camp. So that's going to help. Whereas you had the USFL pushing people in the middle of training camp, which is not helpful unless there's an injury. And so you're basically playing for an injury, which is not what you want to be doing. So this is going to give guys better opportunities. So that's going to be good. And then you're going to have the 80, 90 guys that are condensed into this league that are going to go to the next level. And then I think it's going to help Canada a little bit too because been really worried about pulling talent and all those general managers have been trying to figure out ways to attract American talent to Canada. And so there's been a lot of conversations that have been had about how do we get that, how do we accomplish that, what do we do? What do we have to do that's different? This condensing from 16 to eight teams is going to help them because now you have more talent, there's less positions available down here. People are going to be more inclined to go to Canada. So I think that helps them too. And the calendar works out for them as well. So you got a guy that was a backup in this league all year, he wants to go play in Canada, he might be able to and get up there in time to start the season. I wish they didn't make it so hard for that transition up there. It's so funny and I've had on the CFO guys who's like, it takes you four years to figure out our game. It's like, well, okay, you could help facilitate that a little bit, maybe don't make it such the fraternity of breaking into this and going through the onboarding. I think they could do a better job. Yes, I think it was at the Calgary ST champion. Dave Dickinson I think had the quote that was talking about like, oh, it certainly helps us now having only eight teams in the states versus 16 I think came out this week. And that's the funny thing too about the CFL is it is a different game, right? Because you've got a bigger field, you've got bigger end zones, you've got 12 men on the field, you've got running starts as wide receivers. There's some crazy stuff when you compare it to American football, it looks very different. So the one thing that when I was talking with CFL scouts and stuff, went to the tropical Bowl last year, met up with a lot of the guys from Montreal, congrats to Montreal by the way. So excited. I was so excited when I saw it, they pulled that off. That was amazing. It was an amazing run at the end of the year. Montreal, these guys, they have a really great scouting staff and so being able to chat with them and talk with them, we were talking about the differences between American football and Canadian football and speed is king, right? Speed is king because the field's bigger and the faster you can get to a spot the better. And so having eight less teams is going to help push some of that speed up there. It really is. Not everybody's speed is a good thing. And obviously at our level here at America, I mean if you watch the Miami Dolphins play the Buffalo Bills last night, you can see why speed is threatening, right? Because Miami is the fastest team in the NFL in terms of the amount of players that they have that can run sub four forties. They're absolutely insane with how many guys they have that can do that. And they were missing a couple of guys last night, Jaylen Waddle and Raheem Moer and those guys both run sub four forties. We don't know officially with Waddle because he was hurt when he came out. But Moer ran a 4, 3, 5 tyreek's, like a four two guy chain is a four three guy. You see what speed does. You can see how that's a threat to a defense and how difficult it is to contain it. So in Canada it's an even bigger deal to have speed, it's going to help them too. So I think everybody in the long run is happy about it except for the players that were on those teams that don't make the cut. Well, I think we'll kind of round out here. It'll be exciting the next, I think the 15th is the next step here and they'll kind of be open season now if you want to draft from whatever kind, fill out the rosters and then God knows because there was all these plans of the supplemental and all this, but now I think there's this, everything changed. I remember we had Rush Gilio on back during the summer. It's like, well, we're going to do this and we're going to do this, and then you're like a spoiler alert. This is all happening crazy. But I appreciate it. Like I said, a lot of information today to go on. I think we have a hundred people watching here at seven in the morning, which is always cool. So I appreciate that obviously and subscribe on all of this stuff and all of John's stuff and the sick podcast and everything. With that, give a thumbs up on this video. We still have 70 something people, so thumbs up and make sure this gets shared kind of throughout the day. I'll keep posting that, but good little stop out here to get all that stuff out. We will be, like I said, John, hopefully God willing will be back. We'll do some sort of round table panel something Coach Craig and if Evan wants to be on their pat or anyone else, but John was obviously very willing to hop on today and do all this stuff. We'll be at the kickoff game like and subscribe. If we hit 3,500 by the time we make it there, win your free tickets. Otherwise we'll figure that for the championship. But you'll like and subscribe. A lot of work goes in and I appreciate John coming then John, anything you want to plug? Anything else from you? Yeah, so Sik podcast draft Vogel. We've been having a blast with it. Dude, we got a really nice lineup this week. So last week we hit on Cam Ward. That situation we hit on. We had trivia night actually where we talked about the NFL draft has a NFL draft trivia. Pick your brain, see how much you know about the draft. And then today we've got an episode drop in where we're talking more about some really deep level base analytics. I guess you could say Mark Jarvis, we added on the show. If you're familiar with Mark Jarvis at Jarvis scouting, he is really into process and the different ways that you can look at building a team and eliminating biases and different stuff. He's been a great addition to our show. We added him a couple months ago and this week we're going to have Austin Reed, the Western Kentucky quarterback come on. We're going to have Cole Godbout on next week with us. If the defensive tackle from Wyoming, we're going to look at the senior bowl tomorrow, is going to drop their underclassmen. This is the first year in all-star games where underclassmen, true juniors can play in all-star games or at least the certain ones that were specified by the NFL. Senior bowl's going to drop the 20 guys, the 20 underclassmen that are going to play tomorrow. So we're going to do a breakdown on that as well. And it's going to be fun, man. And so if you guys could subscribe and over there, that'd be awesome. We really put a lot of work into that. Well, I'll tell you this. One thing I know is John is a smart guy and can say very smart things about football. So that's why I appreciate you coming on, but I appreciate that and I remember the first time I think John's been part of every single one of these supplemental drafts or dispersal or quarterback and any of that stuff. I remember the first time I had Jonna, I'm like, he's just so smart. I'm so glad. I just provide the platform and I'm glad we bring on everyone to do the analysis. I will just say this before we get out. It's so weird. It's seeing the XFL here, retweeting Michigan Panthers content I'll never get up for, I know we're getting, excuse my cough here. I know we're getting the socialists figured out with the UFL, but I will never get over just a wild world we live in. Who would've thought here? XFL retweet and Michigan Panthers post of case cookies highlights. So this is kind of the exception of the world. Hey, hey, it is Corey Coleman and he's going to have a good year. I think that's going to, it's going to be fun. Well, thanks everyone. Like I said, stick around. News comes out. We'll go live. Otherwise we'll probably sit tight for the supplemental draft. And then I know Jason Hussey, we're figuring out a CFL free agency show we're going to work on at some point as well. So not forgetting about all the CFL but have enjoyed not having the two and a half hour pret tapes every Friday here. It's been nice. It's kind of hopping on doing the lives. John, best of luck. Exciting times that Ron River firing day today and everything else. Yes. So excited to hear all the things that you think all the smart people with you commanders. Now we going to do with, I'm making you a prediction, okay? I'll make you a prediction. I think your next head coach is Eric. Oh, I don't like that. I don't like that John. Just that's my pick. That's what I think. I think I called it the beginning of the year actually, when the enemy got hired. I called it My hearts. Excuse me. I like not having a defensive person. I think I saw a lot of names floating out from the ravens and things. I think we need to bring in an offensive Back. I'm not trying to scare you with this read, but I called Ron Rivera getting hired by Washington when he got fired by the Panthers. I have the tweet to prove it too. You're scaring me, John. Well, I think we have a lot of smart people. If he can run, you get Caleb in there, get Drake May on the run circles. But yeah, appreciate everyone, like I said, like and subscribe. Get on John's stuff. We'll, appreciate everyone. We'll see you next time. Thanks.

Who’s Playing in the 2024 United Football League? Teams/Cities/Coaches/Kickoff Announced!

Hey guys, welcome to the Markcast Reid here off schedule here. Tuesday night talking, everything came down yesterday we had the Winter classic for the Kraken and Golden Knights in town. Right as I'm walking out the door, it's like I got up at seven all day and they're like, Danny and the Rock are coming on and they're coming on and I'm sitting there waiting and literally walking down the door and they get an Uber. So I did my little shorts Evan's here today. Andy was promised. I think Andy is still Professoring, so Pat might hop on. We'll see. Always a good sign when we have lots of comments when I pull up the Streamy yard before we get on. So we're going to talk through everything today, all the coaches and teams and cities. Evan's got lots of thoughts. I know. First off Evan, how are you? And then I want to do just a little shout out to the Kraken, but how are you doing sir? Yeah, I'm doing well. Lots happened in the past couple days. Everything kind of came out at once. Sadly, I'm not the professor, but I'll do my best to replace him and his great words. But yeah man, I'm doing well. Glad that things are finally official. Think it's going to be not only better for everybody who works on this stuff continuously, but everybody's mental health too, right? It's been a long couple months, so just glad that we've kind of got past that bit and now the ball really gets rolling as I put out on Twitter And it's good Jenna's checking in here, Zach, for everybody involved in the player coaching staff, all that. I'm very relieved. Obviously we're kind of in the fan side, a lot of it and my world is not revolving around this, so I'm very glad that the people that actually need to know and need to work on all of this stuff that they can figure out what they need to do. Now I do think that there was a lot of up in the air about all that. So good to see. Like I said, just shout out, I said on the stream, but our New Year's Eve, I guess day stream, kind of get ready for the UFL. Say a prayer for the Kraken. Evan, we won three zero against the rating to Stanley Cup Champions. Shut out Joey Decor. I mean this was the greatest win in the history of the Kraken. Can you so just are you excited for me that literally the greatest win in the three-year lifespan of the Kraken franchise and I was there, so very excited. That's good. So shout out there. We're having a lot of debate here, so I guess let's get into the news first and then we'll kind of get everyone's comments and all that stuff. Like I said, coming out yesterday, first off here, Danny on the Rock on game day, did you like that decision? Did you like the Pat McAfee's of it all? I went back and watched the segment later, but didn't feel like they had a lot new to say. I mean we got the cities and teams, but I was hoping we would get maybe a different branding messaging about all this stuff. It felt very status quo. What did you make? Yeah, I mean I thought the rollout was pretty good. The idea is to get it in front of a bigger and broader audience. So tying in Fox and sort of the NFL aspect, I mean they're really trying to again, just reach that target audience. I mean that's more important than anything. Clearly the growth of these leagues is, well I guess one league now I got to get used to saying that, but the growth of the new league is important. I mean, they had to take a bunch of teams out, people who know how this works know that there's a lot of inconsistency, a lot of shifting things around. So I think it's really important that they just try and make this more stable. And that's how it came across. Yes, it's another new thing. Yes, the XFL only lasted one year. USFL only lasted two, but this seems to be a bit more concrete now that they've taken the time to review finances and review the entire product as a whole. So yeah, ultimately I like the rollout, having the first official announcement there on whatever it was, the pregame show on Fox before the NFL Sunday slate, and then obviously the day after on New Year's Day, having the announcement there at college game day. I think that was good. Again, you're reaching that sort of target general football audience at both the professional level being the NFL and then the college level being the college football playoff in the last year of its 14 format. So all around. Yeah, I mean I think they did a good job. Yeah, it's interesting to me, and I have the tweet up here, the press release and congrats first and foremost, I guess Mike Mitchell and Anthony both announcing today they're moving over to Sports Illustrated and all that covering the UFL and I still have to get used. You were saying the two leagues. I was updating the website and then I went back and realized I had typed U-S-F-L-A bunch and all that stuff. I'm like, I still got to get used to this UFL, but Mike had put out the tweet a couple of weeks ago. He was hearing four and four, five and three. Houston was kind of undecided. Mike gets a lot of grief. I think there's a lot of, not justifiably grief, but I think there's a lot of people that want to one up or be whatever Mike was. Right, that's what I was hearing. We got all this stuff out interesting where you're talking about getting new because to me, yes, we're expanding the college game day fan base. We're doing all this stuff, but it's still the same message that the rock's been saying for the last year and it killed me when they have them on there and here's your first chance, it's like, well, I was player 54. I'm like, I don't know if there's anybody in the world that hasn't heard that messaging yet. Now obviously the Rock came out on RAW last night, could be in the big feud here with Roman Rains, so maybe we get some more promotion that way, but I would've thought maybe we tweak the philosophy a little bit here leading into all of that. But regardless, we got them out. As Mike had tweeted, we have the USFL and the XFL conference. We had the big debate. I didn't realize that that was so controversial. But we do have that with the stallions, showboats Panthers, and then the roughnecks, which I don't know if I will ever fully be okay with that. And then the Renegades, defenders Abrams and Battle Hawks. Evan, I know there was a back and forth, are you happy with these two conferences? I was corresponding with former XFL employees. Glad that they were moving on from the ip, not so quick. We had paid money for all this stuff. Were you surprised with the conferences how this all rolled out? A bit. I mean, again, that was the word that had been floated around prior. It does seem a bit silly in a way, but again, to have some brand continuity, it's nice to see that at least the XFL name and the USFL name survive to some degree because a separate debate was, well, what's the new name of the league going to be? Are you going to keep one or the other or have some sort of mixture of the two? And I guess that's what they were trying to put together with the United Football League. But I will say aside from the conferences themselves, I want to get into Houston and all that stuff specifically. But I think the one thing that was really interesting, well maybe not interesting, but you already pointed out when the Rock went up there on Fox and did his bit with Danny on the first day when they rolled out just the league as a whole before he got to markets or anything, and you were mentioning about the typical player 54 speech that we've heard over and over again now. I mean I think that is a sign that it really is. The XFL shows a bit more here. And I know I sound biased, I was more lenient towards the XFL before, but I just really got a more XFL vibe, at least from the branding and the way that it came off. There are obviously USFL elements there and there's USFL people there. It's really nice to see that, at least at the football operations level, they've brought together I'd say a very fair group from both sides that would work well together. But yeah, you can definitely tell that the XFL brand is more prevalent here, I think, than the USFL brand. So that's just something I wanted to throw out there as well. And again, that goes along with everything else that we've heard in terms of, again, just the way that the league is run, this is still the Rock and Danny's project and for a while we weren't sure where they were going to be with this and maybe they were going to go do something else, but they're still here and clearly still passionate about it even if some of the stuff sounds repetitive to people who have followed this for a long time. Yeah, good to get all this out. I wanted know Phillip checking in here a long time. Rough next fan. Excited for the inaugural game of the Houston. Yeah, I want to know if you're a rough next fan. Are you okay with this? And I know what you're saying this feels and we'll talk. We have Mike's info here about Jim Pop still being involved and we got the info with Daryl Johnson still being in there with Russ Brandon and all that stuff in the up top. It does feel like, okay, we're kind of merging both of these philosophies like Darryll Johnson and we have the Russ Brandon interview today that we'll talk about and that being involved kind of on the football ops and we're still going to have Dean Blandino, we're still going to have Mike prayer, but yeah, I mean you're insane if you're thinking that the gamblers are a stronger franchise no matter how historically significant they are than the roughnecks currently in the land that we're in, you can't have a five three split, which I mean it is right, but you can't have a five division versus three. This isn't the CFL, so as kind of unappealing as I think this is, I don't know if they had a better option than the rebranding of that. Evan, I know you're somewhat very close with the roughneck staff and obviously a lot of them are going to be moving over to the Brahmas, Mike Mitchell reporting with Heinz Ward and AJ Smith and all of that, and we can talk about why that's going to be at least my new team of the Mark cast. But what are your thoughts on this? I know you've covered a controversial subject. Yeah, well, again, this was the, I guess hot topic for a while was what's going to happen with Houston, right? Because they were the only team that had sort of overlapping markets between the XFL and the USFL, and that made it a very unique situation. This wasn't the way that I thought they'd go about it though. I think it's very interesting. I put it out there publicly. I said, I'm glad they kept the rough next name. I thought that brand was way stronger, has that continuity that you want when you're starting a new league for, we've had so many leagues now, it's too hard to keep count, but you want to have some continuity in the roughnecks. I think having been there in both 2020 in Vince's League and then 2023 and the Redbird Rock Danny League, again, just that continuity, so they kept that. But yeah, just very strange. I mean, the fact that the roughnecks are in the USFL conference is all you really need to know that this is a rebrand of the gamblers, and I want to come on here and I want to make it very clear that while the Houston Roughnecks name has been kept, there's still been a lot of confusion about what the team actually is because I had a lot of people texting me yesterday who watched the announcement and who obviously aren't as close to the situation as we are. They're like, well, congrats man. The roughneck survived. I knew that you were pretty nervous about that. You didn't think that was going to happen. And I said, well, they didn't quite survive because technically the roughnecks are now a, I guess USFL team. I mean, as Philip said there in the chat, gamble necks, ruffler, whatever you want to call it. I mean, it really is just a, it's the gamblers with new colors. That's the way I look at it. I still look at that team as the Houston gamblers. It is no longer the roughnecks. The staff have moved on. I believe a lot of the players will be moving on, so it's a very strange turn of events. I did not expect things to play out this way. I'll touch on the San Antonio stuff later because a whole separate discussion that doesn't, I mean it obviously has to do with the team people involved there, but with the brand specifically, I was not expecting this. I think I said out of all the scenarios that played out in my head as to how they could have handled this, still wasn't one of the scenarios where they would just take the rough next name and keep everybody from the gamblers. Now look, I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I think Curtis Johnson is a good coach. They have a lot of good players on that team, but I mean the roughnecks, it's going to be almost unrecognizable from last year compared to this year. They'll be playing at a different stadium at Rice, the staff's going to be completely different. You've got the roster turnover. So I don't know. Yeah, I agree with the idea that while the team is still called the roughnecks, it's really not the same. And we all know that this is just the gamblers with different jerseys and different logos and all that business, so kind of hard to accept. I understand why they did it that way. I don't disagree with the four and four split again, that the terminology that was used at the beginning of this process was equal merger. So you do have to keep that in mind. I'm really glad, and I put this out publicly too already, I'm really glad that Houston still has a team that will play in Houston. I really think that that market is important for this new league, even though they still have three Texas teams, being Houston, San Antonio, and then Arlington, which is obviously the big one in all this being the sort of, I guess headquarters, the center point for the entire league itself. So yeah, I don't know. There's a lot of thoughts around it. I'm still wrapping my head around this idea. There's a lot to get used to, not just with Houston obviously, but with all the markets. And I'm just really interested to see where it goes. I think I'm going to go out there this season and just see how things have changed, whether it's for better or worse. We obviously can't say yet because the UFL hasn't played a single snap of football, and there's a lot that's going to change even if there is some carryover from both sides. But yeah, very interesting situation. Hard to say if I like it or not, as I've already pointed out, but it is what it is and life goes on. And again, I'm really happy. I won't touch on this now, I'll pass it back to you, but I'm really glad that at least the Houston staff still gets an opportunity to be in this league and to work somewhere else because I know how important they were to this league's success and having a guy like Wade Phillips, he's still, I'd say the most outstanding coach of the bunch in this new league. Yeah, I'll scroll down. We'll get to the coaches in a second and if you have questions, I know Zach had a question about ticket deposits and stuff, I'll star 'em, put 'em in here, and then we will get to it here in a little bit. Christina chiming in here. She's a new member. Thank you so much for coming up with the updates. I like the announcement two parts of the NFL and college fans were told during the news about when the schedule will be put out. We'll get more into that. Christina, thanks for being a member. Just a reminder, you can actually become a member now the channel, it's like a dollar a month, a good little way of support. I think we have eight members now. Staff YouTube was running an incentive to get people excited about that, but Russ, Brandon saying middle of the month, that'll be good. I can't remember the timeline in which we got them certainly late last year with all the Vegas debacle and all of that. But yeah, with the roughnecks thing, I don't want to be like, yeah, fire all the gambler staff and move the roughnecks and I don't want anyone to lose their job, but I am just not a fan. And I put up Philip's comment like, well, everyone roots for the uniform. That's why I have a hard time with college football just because of the turnover. And for these leagues that have not been around for the decades and decades of these college programs, it is harder to kind of build that legacy with that. I will say for people, and I'm sure we have CFL fans that are like, well, who caress if it's Roughnecks or the gambler? They've only been around. I mean the roughnecks were the premier brand of the 2020. PJ Walker was the standout of that. And then obviously that rolling into last year and the success they had and obviously not making it all the way to the championship game, but they were still kind of the pinnacle of what that league stood for in terms of the teams just themselves. And I want to just make sure I comment on this, interesting that UFL kind of putting out this map now, like logos marked the spots, where are you going to be cheering from? We've talked about the Texas thing. We talked about this on the stream before and people were okay with the three Texas teams because you had Seattle, because you had Vegas. When you're chopping out half the country here, kind of showing where your teams are, I think that says all you need to say about the geographical divide here. I think it's really hard cutting it out the entire west coast. I know there was no better way about it, and I don't care if it's Seattle or LA or Vegas or San Diego or something. I would've loved to see San Diego get in this. I know that's a lot of the moving parts for the season, but Evan, do you get what I'm saying here? Here's the third of the country in which these sea reside. Yeah, well, I, and that was the big thing with the USFL too was it was very east coast centric. The XFL made a point at least having some West coast expansion or opportunities on the west coast for people in the Pacific time zone. But those have obviously since gone away. I think part of that decision comes because if you're going to be based in Arlington and you're going to have the players there and you're flying 'em out for all these home games, it's a bit easier to just focus on one part of the country. And that does put a lot of fans at a disadvantage. It's hard to grow the game and the league when you're cutting off. I mean, literally you look at that map. I mean there's no West Coast representation whatsoever, but I think logistically it's shorter flights. The players don't have to travel as much, and that's something you have to keep in consideration as well because for a lot of guys traveling to a home game is a new concept. And I remember last year in the XFL when they had all the guys in Arlington, and that's the format that they're following now in the UFL, there were a lot of players that were upset about that. They said, well, what's the point of playing at home if we still have to travel? And I remember it was like whenever guys had to go from Arlington to say, I mean Vegas and DC or Seattle, those were the ones that people were saying, well, that's a pretty long flight. And Seattle in particular, I know you guys are kind of out of the way up there, but it's a couple different things. I mean, I think with Seattle specifically, distance plays a role. It's so far removed from all the other markets with Vegas, I think it was just more of the actual mean logistics play a role there too. But I think the fact that they were already out of that stadium and they had the lowest attendance that was, I mean, I hate to say it, but it was kind of an easy team to just say, well, we don't need this anymore because people were already saying during the XFL season last year, this isn't going to work out. They need to get out of here as quickly as possible. So I don't know if anybody's too sad about that loss. I mean, it was a cool idea to have another outdoor football team in Vegas, and obviously that's a market that means a lot to me now with me working there to some capacity. But yeah, I mean just a lot of things. Guardians obviously being gone, they're a team that didn't really have the logistical problem in terms of geography. They were right down there in Florida. So there's a lot of sacrifices that have been made here. I did take a minute to kind of thank all the coaches and the players of the teams who didn't make it right, because everybody's going to be focused on the teams that do last and that do exist, and we have that now, but it's pretty easy to forget some of the teams that didn't make it in the league. I mean on the XFL side, Vegas and Orlando weren't particularly successful on the field, but Seattle was a playoff team last year. And again, that's pretty significant when you're cutting a team of that caliber. And I know June Jones and a couple of those guys were already out. They lost a NCI to the Broncos, wasn't going to be the same way or wasn't going to be the same team rather either way if they came back in 2024. But again, tough decisions to be made. And on the USFL side as well, I won't touch on that too much for time's sake, and I was closer to the XFL than I was the USFL, but they lost a lot too. I mean, if you think about it, the USFL almost lost more because while the gamblers were retained, their brand was not. So in a way, it's almost five teams there that didn't make it really just the showboats, the stallions, and then the Panthers that survived. And the showboats too. They were rebranded this season from the Bandits. So going back to 2022, it's just the stallions and the panthers that remain, which when you kind of do the math and divide it down like that, that's pretty surreal that in two years, only two of eight original brands are around. Well, and I think that speaks to the importance of even if it was the Arlington hub, which I guess Russ Brandon reconfirmed today, I thought we knew that already, but that was part of Mark had the writeup on it, but we will touch on that with the schedule and everything. But the flying out and all of that I thought was confirmed, but people were seeing that today, this is confirmed and all of that. I think that did a lot for building some of these fan bases. Obviously you had the carryover of DC and all of that exciting when we're talking about the loss of Orlando, thrilled that Corey, their season ticket guy, is now going to be working in the Birmingham market. I think that that's awesome. I'm so glad that someone that kind of embodies what I think of these leagues need as self-starters coming in and trying to do what they can with the limited resources they have. I'm really excited to see Corey get that opportunity. This was a question from big ugly skeleton. I wonder if Seattle won the championship, but yeah, if Seattle wins the championship, because like you said, there was a lot of logistical things with June Jones and everything, and even besides the fact that Seattle and Lumen Field is expensive to run, that would've been interesting. Do you rebrand the Seattle team or what do you do? Obviously they did not want them as part of this original eight for this 2024 run. Yeah, well mean you're seeing certain teams that were more successful. I mean I go back to the roughnecks, right? Even though the roughnecks technically didn't survive, the gamblers were just rebranded to the roughnecks and it's still really A-U-S-F-L team. They knew that Wade Phillips and his guys, they did good things last year. They were a playoff team and they wanted to keep those guys around. So they held I think more weight in that process. Once Heinz board left, you're looking at the candidates, it's like, well, if we know that the gamblers staff and players are just going to come in under the Roughneck brand, why not just bring Wade in? And it kind of completes the circle. I mean, there were people that were saying, why don't you just take gamblers staff and players and put 'em in San Antonio and just leave the roughnecks alone if you're going to keep 'em. But again, it doesn't work like that because the roughnecks are now, I mean it's hard to explain. It's not that they're now A-U-S-F-L team, but they essentially said that that team pretty much has A-U-S-F-L background based on who's there and not an XFL background because all those guys are moving on. Again, really complicated to explain this stuff. I've had a lot of texts sent over the past 48 hours. I'm like, no, it's not this. You just got to bear with me. These people went here and this is what we're doing now and this is who I support. So it's been a lot. But again, certain, to go back to that point specifically, yeah, I mean I think if you have more success, it's fair that you have have a better chance of maybe not necessarily sticking around, but again, your people will get an opportunity. And the same goes for the players. I don't think we've talked about that as much. We've been focused a lot on coaches and markets here, but with the players, right? We've got a dispersal draft coming up at some point, and the best players, those guys will be back. They'll just be wearing different jerseys, is the reality. Yes, there's still going to be jobs lost, there's still going to be guys who won't play. There's a lot of opportunities that have already been lost, which is very sad and we can't forget about that. That's been a very, I guess one of the points that I've been very focused on here over the past couple months since we got the initial merger announcement, which was however long ago back in September. But yeah, there's just going to be a lot of shifting around. And another coach that we haven't talked about is John DeFilippo, who I was having lunch with in Florida a couple weeks ago is now taking over the showboats. So pretty cool how that's panned out. Really happy for John. I mean, we had a chat and obviously he didn't hint anything at that, but he did say he was worried about it, right? And you don't know what your future's going to look like. And by that point it was pretty clear, at least to me and probably to him as well, that the breakers weren't making it. So I'm really glad that he gets another shot. I think they knew that with his NFL pedigree and his experience, he's also very young that he could come in and coach and be a face of a franchise here. The other guy, well, I want to talk about briefly, well obviously there's a lot of coaches that have been, well, Let's roll. We'll roll to the coaches here, let me get this cleaned up here and then we'll roll down there. Shout out, act my age here, became a new member. Appreciate that on here. I always like that. Yeah, let's get to the coaches. We had the whole thing of Mike coming out, the Heinz War and all of that. Is it Anthony Blevins? Right? Being brought in, going to be the Vegas guy. He seems to be left out here. You're going to have Skip Holtz with the stallions. Chris Johnson, like we talked about with the roughnecks, John Felipo, which I think one of the Breakers guys had that news a couple of weeks ago. I know we talked about that. Then Mike Nolan retaining with the Panthers, students with the renegades, borrow it back with the defenders, and then Phillips moving to the Brahmas and then Anthony Beck on there with the Battle Hawks in terms of that I had heard was upset being out. Obviously we have the Heinz Ward where he didn't want to Mike Mitchell reporting he didn't want to take the pay cut going into the next season being off of his original deal. Any other surprises here? Any other thoughts? I mean, what I was going to talk about in regards to the coaches, not the ones that have survived, I'll get to those in a minute, but the one guy that really that I feel for is Anthony Blevins, and that's because he left the job in the NFL with the New York Giants to go coach the Vipers. And it became pretty clear pretty quickly, at least to me, that they weren't going to be around because again, you have to remember that they announced that the Vipers would not be returning to Cashman before the merger news came out. So that was officially announced by the XFL really before they said anything about cutting more teams and merging with the USFL, all that stuff. So I really feel for blevins because a lot of these other coaches, no disrespect to them of course, but they've bounced around a bit, right? When they're assigned, they're probably not leaving a job that means that much to them. I mean, if you're leaving a job with an NFL team, and it doesn't really matter what the title is, I think Blevins was doing special teams, but leaving an NFL job for something like that, that's a big deal because again, we've seen the instability of these leagues and guys get shifted around and moved. Like Wades in San Antonio, John's over in Memphis, a lot of guys just aren't going to be coaching. So you're taking a big risk there. And unfortunately for Blevins, it hasn't panned out. And in the back of my mind, I didn't think it was going to happen, but I was just kind of hoping for some miracle that maybe Blevins would get to take over one of these jobs. Kind of like how Wade Phillips did in San Antonio where Heinz Ward, the existing coach there says, Hey, I don't think I'm going to do this anymore. I don't agree to terms. He steps out with his staff and then somebody like Blevins could come in. Obviously I'm very happy for Wade. Maybe that's a good transition here to start talking about that. Really excited to see those guys over there. I think San Antonio is a great market. They had the championship game there. I think again, it's strange to take Wade out of Houston when he had so many specific ties to that area and I think that was a big draw for him. But I think it's going to be pretty cool to see that staff move to San Antonio and still mesh. And there will definitely be a couple players making their way over there as well. As I pointed out AJ Smith with his Mike Leach system, there's guys there, Brandon Silvers and guys like that, that fit really well in that system. It's a very specific structure. So specifically on offense, I would expect a lot of guys to come over and make that transition. Like I've said, it's the Brahma neck now. We've got all these names, gamble necks, Brahma Neck, I don't know, but I'm cheering for San Antonio, I'll put it that way. Look, I still care about Houston. That's the team where I have a lot of memories. And then I really made my mark with that was kind of my rise I guess you could say in some ways. But I care about the people here in this industry, Wade Phillips, and again, that staff, those were the guys that I bonded with and that I meshed with. And it's no shade, no disrespect against the gamblers and Curtis Johnson and his guys. I hope that they succeed and that we have a great game when we play 'em. But I really care about the people aspect here and I enjoyed spending time with again, Wade's staff when I was covering Houston, and hopefully we will reconnect down there in San Antonio. Over a hundred people watching right now. Really appreciate that. Make sure you like and subscribe. You can become a member of the channel now. That's always exciting. Do that. Give a little dollar a month support. I will say, and it was interesting when all the Heinz War stuff came out this week with Mike Mitchell, like I said, reporting the whole contract issue where Wade Phillips were the roughnecks to go and all of that and had the spot not opened up in San Antonio, you're paying Wade to sit at home basically for another year being on this contract. And I know and we'll get to the season ticket holder aspect of it. I got an email from Seattle and I know they've been pushing out some more comms today, people wanting to get updates on all that stuff. But yo, you got to be careful with this merger. We can't pay all these coaches to sit at home and then we can't pay yo this blevins is he on? I'd be curious what deal that was on here. Did he get any sort of recompense here where he's not to leave that job and do all of that I think is interesting, but where they're refunding the season tickets, we're losing the Cashman field money we have all these kind of expenses we're trying to limit here. Makes sense. Keeping some of those coaches that they can't. And I know you talked about the people aspect of it and I've seen a lot of comments know they should be ready for this. They know how volatile this market is. It's still people's jobs. I mean it's still people's like I don't buy into that at all. Oh, you took time to invest in a startup. Yeah, I mean it might go out, but that doesn't mean that it's still not a travesty and a loss of opportunity for all these people. So I always wanted to keep that in mind. Any of the other coaches I know we're excited for Flip being there and Mike Nolan with the Panthers did a good job, stoops and all that makes sense. Are you surprised any of the other, right, Haslet being out and then we already had the Vegas thing and then Orlando, Trell Buckley, right. So I guess is he taking the paycheck sitting at home? Well, I mean I'm honestly just glad that for a majority of the teams that stuck around besides the shift in Houston, guys going to San Antonio, whatever, all that stuff we've already talked about, I'm just glad that they retained the coaches that were there and that did a good job. I mean the Bob Stoops, Reggie Barlows, Anthony Becks of the world, I'm glad that they didn't just blow the whole thing up and they were like, all right guys, we're keeping your team, but we're just going to start fresh and new coach, new gm, new players, all that. They didn't do that. They really kept those guys around and rightfully so. They all did good things with their teams. And again, it's about that continuity. I think that's so important here. There's been so much change and there's been so many unexpected things and honestly a lot of losses here is the sad part. But if you at least keep some continuity for the people that do stick around and that are here for the long run, it's just going to be a lot easier on those people to follow the league. And again, the more things you change, people just start complaining. They're like, well, why do you have to do this? And we've already been through this. Just keep it the way it is. So yeah, I think ultimately that's where the coaches come in and it's like, well, these are the guys that are going to lead the teams obviously. And that's important In terms of any of the other stuff with that. I know we had obviously the announcement, which I'm very excited about, the Arlington Renegades taking on the Birmingham stallions kind of in the kickoff game. I know that there had been some debate the Rangers are playing that day because March 30th is the kickoff the Rangers are playing. That's across the street. I think Pat Rapino was saying they're not playing until six, so you could do noon or whatever time you want to do afternoon game over at Choctaw. That's exciting. The mayor had tweeted out of Arlington that they're hosting the kickoff game. There was some debate if it was going to be in Birmingham or if it was going to be in Arlington. If it's in Arlington, I'll definitely try to make it in Birmingham is a much more challenging stretch to get to from Seattle. I can get a pretty easy direct flight to that. The other thing I guess I wanted to say before we move off the coaches, you're saying talking about supporting the Brams, I had tweeted that out. We had a bunch of comments, who's your team going be now? I've said that definitely going to be the Brahmas. Wade Phillips followed me back on Twitter yesterday. So that always kind helps incentivize that when you got the head coach on your staff. So Evan, are we in lockstep here? Riverwalk tours and the bras? Is that going to be your team? River Walk's on baby? Let's do it. Yeah, Jenny questioning. We have comments here. Yeah, they went from 16 teams to eight. Again, neither of these leagues wanted to get to this point. I think this is a merger by survival here. Chris talking about over a hundred watching. Do you have any other comments on either the kickoff game or any of that kind of stuff? We can start moving to some other things. Yeah, I mean I think it's really, really good that renegades and stallions are playing each other in the opener. I almost thought that would get lost with all the other information that came out that people wouldn't really be focused on the opener. But I mean if you're going to have A-U-S-F-L and XFL conference, it only makes sense to have the two champions from the previous season. And really when you think about it, yes, there's been two USFL seasons and only one XFL season, but the USFL still hasn't had another champion other than the stallions. They went back to back and I really liked their chances here in this new league. I'll throw that out there as well. That team, I really do believe, even if it's hard for me to admit because I don't outright support them, but they've done a great job and I think that there's still going to be a threat this year, even with a different landscape and other things going on. All the noise, it's a new league that's one of the best. I think that is the single-handed best Spring football team I've seen. It's up there with the 2020 roughnecks. For me it's like neck and neck, no pun intended, but I'm excited to see it. And the renegades too. If the games in Arlington, I think that's going to be a fantastic atmosphere. And again, that's where all the teams are supposedly going to be based. I don't think that's confirmed yet. Just putting that out there too. I know there's been rumblings. I haven't seen that. Yeah, I think Russ basically confirmed that today. I mean it makes sense following if we're following the XFL format here, and as I pointed out at the top of the show, this whole operation is very XFL esque for lack of a better term, then yeah, it would make sense to have the game in Arlington. A couple of comments here and then I wanted to get to some other, yeah, so just to make point out to everyone, if you're one of the season ticket holders, I got this email coming out. I thought that it was nice that they immediately addressed that. I mean, I got this yesterday, whatever. I mean I tweeted this right when it came out, 10:50 AM I think the announcement was two hours prior. So I thought that was really nice letting me know season ticket money would be refunded to your payment purchase because obviously with the ffl back in the bankruptcy, that was obviously chaotic back in 2020 with everything with covid. But I saw a lot of comments. That's the way you handle it. If you have to do this, make sure you get their people's money back as quickly as possible and obviously address all that. And then the XFL comms, just if you guys hadn't seen on X or Twitter, whatever, if you need any more information about the UFL, they want you to go sign up. They have an email list here, the ufl.com. So I think that when you're trying to merge these email databases and everything, if you're not getting lead communications, I would kind of recommend those steps. But obviously they were tweeting that out, but make sure you get on that. Any takeaways from any of that stuff, Evan? I mean, I'm glad that they're refunding the season tickets. I think that's just the right and ethical thing to do. You don't really question that. I'll be interested to see what the numbers for season tickets are like this year with the remaining teams and really down to the conferences. Specifically Houston too, right? With the gamblers there are people going to not want to be season ticket members with that much change. And same with San Antonio. Do their numbers go up because they're bringing in a staff that had more success in the XFL last season? I don't know, but we'll find out. David here has a comment. Renegade stallions opening match should be great. I agree. I think if you market this right, I think it can be really good. Obviously to me this feels like when John Cena and Randy Orton unified the WWE and World Heavyweight Championship belt, it helps if you have a couple of years to build up into this. But I still think it's going to be cool. I think it's going to be really cool for the kickoff and we've gotten a lot of the five versus three or whatever with the teams. Yeah, the stallions come out and whip the renegade's ass be, I think there will be a lot on the line here in terms of bragging rights if you're worried about XFL and US belt. Any early thoughts on that, Evan? I mean I know we still need to figure out what the Renegades and the Luis Perez's of the world and all of that, but Birmingham, that's a strong team to be coming in. Well, I think it's going to be real chippy. I think you're still going to see a lot of the XFL and USFL kind of fan clash, even though it's really one league now. Again, the fact that they're going off the SFL and XFL conferences, that only should elevate the level of intensity I'd say. So yeah, I'm looking forward to it. On paper, we will see where these teams are through training camp and we still got to get through all that. There's very few things still finalized besides the coaches and the markets and things like that. So we will see. But yeah, it'll be really interesting. What I'm really interested to see more than anything, not just with this opening game between Birmingham and Arlington, but everything as a whole is just, I wonder if, and we'll see what the rules are like here in the UFL, but I wonder if these small differences or kinks maybe in play style between the USFL and XFL will have an effect on the players when they play each other in a game. Those out of conference games, right? When it's not XFL conference on XFL conference, I'm talking when the stallions play the renegades, are you going to see that difference based on the way that they play? And there's not too many things that are different. At the end of the day, it's still football. It's not like the CFL where there's different field sizes. But that's something I was thinking about today just randomly, I was like, well these players, depending on which league you've been in, especially the USFL, because some guys have played there for two years, kind of get used to the flow of those games. And again, some of the slight rule changes, and again, right down to venues, I mean the USFL players, some of those guys haven't had the opportunity to play in a home market. Some of the players that they bring in these dispersal drafts will go to a team and they might be playing a pro football game in front of however many people for the first time. So there's that too. I mean I know obviously that's probably a small number because USFL teams traveled around more last season and those players got to see a couple more different markets, but it wasn't like the XFL where they had everybody in their home stadiums. And I mean, again, that's a really big deal. I'm so glad that they didn't keep the traditional hub system, I guess you'd say. Like yeah, they're still operating out of Arlington or whatever. But just getting everybody in their home markets I think is really, really key. And again, most of those, the teams that survived, most of them were again on the USFL side. More importantly XFL. Those were already figured out. The only team that's really playing at home for the first time is, well the roughnecks because it's essentially the gamblers. But need I say more about that. So I'll leave it at that. Yeah, leave here. A Elaine here. Having new year leave your game. What's your prediction for the opening game here? I already showed you that in here where we got CHO toss, chop got sauce, 33 17 signs. I will say I think the continuity of the two years with the US develop teams remain. I do think that is going to be key in that. Just pointing out here as well, I do have, if you didn't know I had this in my closet, I have a SL 2022 championship. So if you have that on your bingo car, the re wearing that today, na, see you're talking. Would like to see them keep the SFL trophy. Probably going to have to rebrand that, but I do, I'm on record. I think the US FL trophy was a substantial upgrade over the XFL, even though you could drink out of the XFL one upside down. I had a funny comment from Tim here. You could just put your season Sea Dragons money towards the BBC Alliance multi game Flex Pass. Tim is you underestimate the distance and time it takes to get from here to BC even though it feels very close to get to downtown Vancouver. And then Jacob was already asking about the kickoffs they had. The Russ Brandon was on 1 0 1 7 ESPN today. Mark here I can show Mark had this whole writeup about it on, but basically with Blandino and Prera both going to be involved and I want to talk about Jim Pop and all that before we get out. It feels like it's going to be a mix of the two if you're going to have both of the rules guys in there. That's kind of what I presume. And if we're doing this merger of equals, besides the kickoff, I mean is there anything that you're dying on to keep one or the other? I mean, I don't know. For me that's just, see some people get really uptight about that and they're like, well, we need this one and this one's wrong. I'm just like, look, both of them present interesting scenarios and I hope that these differences continue to develop, right? That the game can still be unique, that players are safer. So I don't really mind which one it is. I mean, if we're going to be arguing over rule changes, I think that still shows that we have a lot of tension between these, again, these two different sides. We're supposed to be one league, it's United UFL, but that preexisting USFL and XFL, I mean we went through all that stuff this year when the teams overlapped or the leagues rather overlapped for the first time and what will be the last time. So yeah, it's fun to follow along with that stuff and people's opinions. But me personally, I'm like whatever, as long as the rules are fair and they make the game interesting, and again, they're carried out probably, right? We have all these debates about officiating in the NFL that never seem to end. So as long as everything's handled in a respectful and fair manner, then yeah, we should be fine. And especially considering that many of the USFL rules were carried over from the XFL back in 2020. And if you are curious about any of that with Sam Schwartzstein, he's been on the podcast and you can talk through all of his stuff. He's with Amazon now, but interesting kind of that to me was fascinating. I think Sam was on twice talking about the work that went into, figured out those rules and then he was kind of why did the US develop choose some and not the other. YG prefers the US develop extra point. I prefer making them go for it because incentivizing with kicking that, the kickoff to me is always like, we're just moving the ball back to get rid of the touchback and all of that. Never too exciting. Jenny here, USL and XL championships. This is what I said on the stream the other day. Give those titles to the we already, those like the north and South XFL ones were not very exciting trophies. Give 'em the XFL, give 'em the USFL and then you go in. I mean I said it before on the thing. I like the conferences. I think all that works. So to me that builds, you're always going to have this animosity. So I think you might as well play into that with the two conferences on all that. Yeah, I mean it's a lot more interesting than East and West. I mean, I never thought that we'd be talking so much about conferences because really in many sports they don't matter. East, west, north, south you get it over with. It's all geographical, but here they're at least keeping that lineage. And I'm really glad to see that because I was a bit concerned that they would just try and eliminate any trace of USFL and XFL branding because we're all supposed to be one now, right? It's the United Football League UFL. But they still kept some of that around and that's good, right? Because to me at least this is all recent history. Like yeah, USFL was in the eighties, XFL was in 2001. But I feel like a lot of the stuff that's been developing and changing just has been over the past two years because we haven't had this much consistent spring pro football ever, right? We're going on 2024 now having at a minimum eight teams playing to some degree in some place. And last year in 2023 it was 16 because you had two leagues competing against each other for the first time. And I'll say now, just while I'm thinking about it, that really is an incredible accomplishment and it's probably not one that we're going to see again, but the fact that we had 16 alternative pro football teams playing at one point at the same time overlapping here in the United States, 16 teams, you think about how many opportunities that is for players. The fact that we even had that at all is a phenomenal accomplishment. That's half of what the NFL has. Of course, we're back down to eight now, so that's a bit sombering. But again, the whole idea here is that you're continuing, I guess not just the legacy, but you're making sure that things are more stable so that this can last for longer. And that's what's been proposed by a lot of people that I'm close to in this industry, people that work in the league, it's all about just making sure that this does exist. Because it was pretty clear when these leagues announced the intent to merge, again, not the actual merger itself, but the intent, which is a different thing, but people get confused by that too. The first thought that I had then was like, well, clearly financially or whatever, there just wasn't enough to have another year of those 16 teams overlapping. And I think the most important thing for me, yes, obviously finances are important here. We all know that that plays a critical role in the football space at any level. But I think the level of interest, I think there's probably, and it's tough for me to admit this to somebody who's very passionate about this, but there's probably just not enough interest to have 16 fan bases. And again, we didn't even get to, I said that the 16 teams was a phenomenal accomplishment and it was, but we still didn't get 16 markets. We had what? 12? Because four not, yeah, I know half, I guess Canton, they had the two. I'm not going to do that math. Yeah, I get it. You didn't get the 16 full markets is what I'm getting at here. So that's a bit tough. And that's maybe the one thing where it's like you could argue that had they gotten that done earlier, and that was my biggest gripe about the USFL was you need to get in those home markets, even if this thing doesn't last to at least again, establish yourself in a more concrete area. Maybe if you had that. Some of this is different, but I don't know that's getting into these hypotheticals and we've had far too many of those in regards to these merger talks. So I'll just say it's been really, really fun watching this. And it's tough sometimes, right? And it's frustrating. And we're used to change now though, I guess is what I'm ultimately getting at. So even if there is that frustration and that anger and that confusion, here we are in 2024, we still have an alternative alternate, excuse me, pro league here in the United States that we can root for and buy into and support. And even if things for me change, my support for whatever's going on there is not going to change. Yeah. So let's get here. Still about a hundred people watching here. So like I said, make sure you're subscribed on here, lots of stuff and we'll get back to all the prerecorded. I know we've done a lot of these lives lately and there's always mixed opinions about all that, but right now to me this just works the best to kind of like, well come on, we can do the kind of debate and all this stuff. You kind of give the comments all that, but make sure you're subscribed, become a channel member if you want for all that. My last news, and then we'll probably get out of here at the hour, I know Evan's good till seven. We'll get to comment here. The last news I wanted to talk about Mike putting out Jim Pops still going to be involved. People are asking Mike today questions. He was going through all the Sports Illustrated stuff, but you're going to have Jim in there alongside Darryl Johnson. Whaleys still involved. Russ Julio, who's been on the show as well. Doug West and Dave Dykeman. Really good interview with Russ Julio. We did back pre, it was after the season. It was like pre showcases if you're curious about all the league building of all that stuff. But to me this is really the Avengers of we're really, if Fox hadn't tried to get ahead of the XFL and do this and then we went back and forth and we flew too close to the sun and now we got to emerge. This the greatest kind of heads of conglomeration of spring football that we've had in some time and they all have past experience with that. Evan just talk about, and obviously Jim and his past experience with the CFL as well, but this is a monumental group of people that are going to be involved in this. Well, absolutely, and this is one of the, excuse me, major benefits about sort of combining these two leagues is you're not only combining teams and markets and whatever, and again, yeah, you're getting rid of some, but if we're just looking at the positives here, you're bringing together these great football minds because it took a lot of time and patience and just thought really to put together both the USFL and XFL because what people tend to forget is even though these leagues have come together, they were somewhat different ventures in terms of the way that they were operated. But regardless, I've had respect on both sides for all of the football ops people and now that those guys get to come together, honestly, this might be the greatest benefit I think of the merged league because I've been saying a lot of, I don't want to say that I've been negative about the whole thing, but I've certainly spoke my mind about it and it's been something that I think about frequently. But this right here, when you're talking about these executives guys with however much experience that they've had in different leagues, different countries, different teams, different eras of the game, even when you're bringing those guys together, this is what should make the product more concrete. When you bring in, again, these top executives, the people with the most experience, that's what you're kind of gambling on, no pun intended there either. It's kind of what you're gambling on to make this, again, just a longer lasting thing because there's so many people that doubt that even this merge league, the UFL will last. But I still have hope even though that we've been through all these changes again because of the people who are there and who are leading the way. So yeah, I think Jim Pop and just combining the rest of those guys, Daryl Johnston, it's all fantastic And to me, and honestly a lot of it in my opinion was brought on by the US FLI never really liked this measuring contest and real football and running all these. I think let's get the Hollywood Leagues and all that. Let's get all that silliness out of the way here and let's realize there's a lot of money and time and energy involved in this and players putting their lives on hold and coaches and all that stuff. So I think, yeah, let's come together on here. Very, very impressive kind of list of all that stuff. So it's certainly exciting. I'll go through just any other questions we have on here and then Evan, if you have anything else, I don't want to hold you up too much, Greg, you're asking going to be the Arlington game. That's the plan. We'll see. I mean I'm free that weekend so that, like I said, that's certainly easier than getting to Birmingham. Chris talking about we get the rock back involved here with he and Danny did the opening games and all of that back in last season. So that will be exciting. And then Evan, we know the roughnecks that's going to be at Rice, right? Is that basically confirmed or how are we operating with that with the roughnecks venue? Yeah, I honestly don't know if that's confirmed or not, but that's what I've been told multiple times. It was floated around. It seems like the most obvious option and it's a very similar venue to where they were playing at at T-D-E-C-U. It's a group of five college football stadium and size-wise. That's very good for the market and for the audience that you're trying to bring in. The whole reason that the roughnecks can't play at T-D-E-C-U this year is because they're renovating that stadium as Houston again makes that transition to the power five level. They need to make some upgrades to get up to standard. So yeah, I think Rice is a good fit. I mean whether it's confirmed or not, again, don't quote me on that, but it sure sounds like that that's where it's going to be. So I would not that I gamble again, no pun intended, not that I gamble anything in the sports world, but I'd maybe put money on that. Them playing at Rice, I guess lead the way in outreach, mid-June, championship game's going to be whatever, 10 weeks plus a playoff going in, so whatever. Do the math on that. Is that mid-June if they kick it off March 30th. So do the math on that. Like I said, before we get out, Mike said, I guess tentatively the supplemental draft is going to be on Friday. I could see us trying to do something with that. I don't know if they're going to put out anything of time. I think it's generally going to be that we get a press release at some point in the day with the players that have been assigned. Like I said, be subscribed on here, follow on Twitter, I'll post about that kind of stuff. But yeah, Mike says here June 15th, but we like to do that. So if Evan, whoever wants to get involved, maybe I'll hit up John Vogel who's probably licking his wounds a little bit after his tweet talking about the foreign four market, Busy time for Vogel man. I mean you're coming up on all the all-star games and the draft, Maybe that would be a lot of players Stuff. Well maybe that wouldn't be. We'll see. Yeah, I'm always like, oh yeah, there's real things going on here. People are working through this. So we'll get through all that if anyone else has any questions before we get out, but I think we did a good job. I think we talked the pops and everything, gym pop. I wanted to make sure we talked about the rest brand and all of that. Any other comments from you, Evan? We'll put this to bed here at the top of the hour. Yeah, I'll just finish this off talking about the draft quickly and I was going to put a tweet up about it, but I may as well just say it here. I've had some players reach out and these are free agent players, not guys that have been in the league before. Some of them that were in NFL camps this past year asking me about this UFL draft. It should be pretty clear that this draft, whenever it happens, I don't think we've been through so many dates and I'm not really worried about that. I'll see it when it happens, but with this draft, I just want to put it out there, make it clear it's a dispersal draft, so unless you are under contract with one of these teams on either the USFL or the XFL side that did not survive the merger, then that's who the draft is for. It's not just a typical one of these drafts that we've had, the XFL has had several different drafts. They had the big one, November of 2022, the first one, and then the supplemental, and then they had all the rookie drafts over the summer, which weren't announced. Like Reed you pointed out, probably just get a press release and it's like, well these guys with these teams now. And I'm sure even the term draft, it might not really be a typical draft, it might just be, I don't know how they're going to structure that. That's kind of above my pay grade, but they have some different approaches when it comes to this stuff and this is not really something that's been done before. So we'll be interested to see where guys end up. I'm sure I'll be back on here talking about that and talking with other people as I normally do about this stuff because I love it. But yeah, just wanted to point that out. Put that there before we get out. Yeah. Philip asking how do you become a channel member? You hit the join button there. That's fine. It's cool. I had tracks and feel. That makes me feel warm to get that. I will say whatever you want, this dispersal, draft, whatever you want, these supplemental drafts, whatever you are envisioning, it'll be the least sexy version of any of that kind of stuff and they'll send it out and then we'll come on. But it was fun. We've done that before and we can get Coach Craig Sports on if whoever's we will get together conglomeration. But stay tuned for all of that. Like I said, I appreciate Evan coming on here and everyone else for taking part. We'll see all, yeah, if something's going to be on Friday, stay tuned for that and we'll do all that stuff. But otherwise, thanks Evan and we'll see you next time.

The United Football League Is Here! What You Need to Know About the XFL-USFL Merged Football League!

Well here we are. It's official. A long day here coming. My mother's texting me. Did you know all that was coming? Yeah, mom, I did a big day here. The United Football League. We got Max here. We'll get other people in. We're kind of finished finalizing this, getting the links and everything out. Everything just came down. The website is live. We'll get into all of that. Max, how are you feeling here? Let me get this going and let's get your reaction. So United Football League is live. My head's spinning. I mean not the majority part of me, but a small part of me thought they were just going to crumble it like they've failed through the C Ffl merger because that's just the way these league operate. But you know what? They followed through and now we have to wait for everything else because there's still so much left uncertainty even after whatever gets handled tomorrow. Yeah, so just where we're at right now, Danny and The Rock, we're both on the NFL on Fox here, a preview show talking and then we're going to get more announcements tomorrow. We're going to get the cities we're going to get. They did announce though that the Birmingham stallions will be facing off against the Renegades for the kickoff match here on March 30th. Tremendously exciting match. Were you surprised, and I'm going to get everyone else in. We have some other contributors joining in. Are you surprised? No. I mean obviously we're on Fox, but presumably Mike Mitchell had talked about potentially Eric Shanks being involved or are you surprised that just Danny and the Rock kind of face loading this? Well, I mean I don't think Eric Shanks is all that interesting in front of a camera, so I'm not surprised to see Danny and Dwayne doing most of the talking, but I'd imagine Shanks will be quite involved in the actual operations. So Well, let me get this here and then I know Mark's reporting some stuff as well. I got to get, like I said, kind of getting all this going. Max, like I said, surprised that this didn't come crumbling down. We're finally here. Are you happy with the UFL league? Let me get the page up here so we can show official logo leaked yesterday coming up here. It feels a little fox brandy here. I don't know, what do you think about This? It feels bland in terms of branding, but whatever. That's my opinion. I'm glad to see. I don't see an ESPN two logo or FS two logo here, by the way. So as you all knew, no NBC, good to see the kickoff is what it was supposed to be. And other than that, I mean there's not a whole lot you can really take away until we hear the teams tomorrow, but I mean I think we all know what it's going to be other than whatever the Houston team will be called and that's not that much of a mystery. It's going to be one or the other and then everything else is already settled so we we'll just wait it out. Yeah, so let's recap here. We do this, we've been covering it, X-F-L-U-S-F-L-C-F-L, everything. If you're new comment on here you like and subscribe please. Lots of exciting news coming out. This has been long promise here. The United Football League, we've kind of tracked the trademark applications and all of that. Mike Mitchell reporting, right? Eight cities coming. I think we can kind of confirm that. Been some shuffling. We have reports this week. Hines Ward is out for the XFL San Antonio franchise. It seems like some of the roughneck player staff at least will be migrating over there with Wade Phillips and AJ Smith and then kind of the Houston gamblers who I tweeted last night. I will never call them the Houston Tics kind of acquiring that name. How do you sit with that? I know Andy and I kind of prognosticate over that on our last stream, but now that it does kind of feel like that's going to be how it is, we'll have four and four. We're going to keep the Houston gamblers of the USFL, but call them the roughnecks. I don't want to be this guy, but the USFL has done something like this before. So the old USFL, so this is just the business of spring football. You got to sue certain egos, you got to hold on to certain contracts, whatever, and other people are going to want out and they come up to someone with a compromise where they can keep Lindsey Scott with Wade Phillips with AJ Smith, but not in Houston because even though they might keep the Brahmas roster, I guarantee you with whatever dispersal draft comes up, they're going to find a way to let San Antonio get Lindsey Scott back, especially since Pittsburgh, the team that got his rights in the USFL no longer exists. So I also do wonder how they're going to handle any disputes between players that might have rights between two existing teams. I don't know how that's going to get handled. I'm very curious to see that. Well and also there's been all this back and forth where lead contracts are up today if you're an XFL contract. I know we had the message got sent out, I think Mike was the one that posted in the chat about that. So I feel like even if the contracts are null and void here, when you're coming back in the new year, it's like, hey, we're going to kind of remedy this. It feels like maybe, I dunno, do you get a little strong arm there? Do you say like, Hey, you're going to be back with this team or that team? It's definitely a tricky situation, but it's hard to say exactly what because we still don't know a lot, so we're just going to have to wait it out and see what happens. But we've already talked about how we feel about what we think is going to happen and how we don't really like it, but we have to wait and see what actually happens. So let's see here. Let's get this in. I know Pat's getting on here as well. So this is the official press release just in that, the ufl.com. I think I have it. We'll get to some comments here. I think I have a back order to that, but I guess they got to that first United Football League UFL set to launch as the premier spring football league. Well that's good. I think we call ourselves the Premier America's Premier XFL or CFL podcast, like you said, the A-B-C-E-S-P-N, Fox FSS one logo, like you said. Good not to see SPN two. Good not to see Fs. Too good not to see. I mean, not that we'd get peacock or any of that stuff. Good to see. We had talked about NBC kind of being off of all of this and so them not involved here moving forward. Russ Brandon to be president and CEO Daryl Johnston will lead football operations. I know there had been some questions about that. Kind of what Darryl Johnson's role would be. UFL season kicks off Saturday, March 30th with the battle and this to me is tremendously exciting. Arlington renegades versus the Birmingham status. Max reactions to that is kind of the kickoff game. We'll get Pat in here. Well, it's the only obvious one. You're right. Champion verse champion. You always want to start the season that way, so I'm just glad to see they've made it the simple choice. And we got Andy here, the professor hopping in. Andy, I think we'll do spoiler alert, winter classic New Year's Day tomorrow. Not the greatest time for the Mark cast here to be doing. I'll be up at, I'll be probably you won't want me on a live stream here by the time that they announce this on game day, Andy and I are going to do a live recap sometime Tuesday depending on the professor's schedule, kind of recapping all of this once we get to that point. Andy, how are you reacting? Then we'll get Pat's thoughts. Well, first of all, I wanted to say gentlemen, happy to hear to all of you. I'm glad to have you all here again. One more time around the sun and listen, I wanted to say a couple things. First of all, I don't have it on me, but I would like to have in future streams to have a bottle of Mont of tequila, the poor one out for those poor souls who really thought that Danny and the Rock were not going to be involved with this operation. Sorry guys. If you need someone to talk to, I'm here for you. But yeah, look, I mean it's finally something. It's something finally, there's something concrete that finally happens after months and months and months of back channeling and talking. So at least it's here. Finally, I think that the decision to keep on the ownership makes sense. The decision to have Daryl Johnson on as football operations makes sense, especially with all of his work with Fox, of course, if he's still willing to do so in conjunction with all of his other duties. That makes sense. Keeping Ru Brandon I think is important as well. His connections, obviously within the NFL and all of his other connections as well. I think that makes a lot of sense. So I mean it is just more of just the overlay of all the people. I was a little surprised. I guess the only thing that I think was probably not, I didn't know if I could expect it, but I think it was nice, was the fact that they announced who was playing the first game. Obviously the Renegades and the stallions first thing, whether it's in Birmingham or whether it's in Arlington, that remains to be seen, but the fact that you have your two champions from both leagues playing each other, that's a fantastic way to roll out the league and to tell people already two of the teams that are in the league. So on that note, I mean at least it's just something, right? That's all I'm saying. At least it's just here. It's concrete, it's real Pat. Yeah, I guess again, if you're joining this stream now we know the team, we kind of know all this stuff, but Pat, what do you think here? I know you were going on before live and then hopping over here. I appreciate that. I mean, we have stuff here And that's what we have. We have stuff, we have validation of information, but this information isn't really for us. We keep tabs on this every day. We care about it way more than the average bear. This is for John Q and Susie Q Taxpayer that we're watching Fox and their pregame and they're like, oh, this is cool. I'm going to watch this now. And I think they did a good job putting it on Fox because obviously everyone's watching pregame and if they had a deal with CCBs, they'd probably do the same thing too. And now that we're getting the conglomerate of the ESPNs and now Fox together, I think we're God willing in a better position than we were 24 hours ago to actually have sustainability. And that's pretty much what he said was we're trying to do this and then he went on his player 54 thing, which is always cute because if you know, you know that he was player 154, but in the end we have concrete evidence, we have a lot of validating concerns are now put to bed. They came out, they said something, and there have been these leaks the last couple of days and weeks that have really, I think committed more harm than good because of a lack of transparency. But in the end, beggars can't be choosers at this point, and at least they had the ability to give us officially two teams. Even though like you said, everyone knows the teams, but I think it kind of gets us over the Christmas hump and it was a good thing to do it during an NFL pregame, so maybe they stole a couple hundred viewers from that. Yeah, I kind of have my qualms and I think for my, even though I'm watching the commanders here, hopefully draft picks will get won by the 49 ERs. Would've been cool to have that go on here, Andy. Andy, give your point and then we have some comments I want to get through and if you have something you want to comment, I opened this up and there was already like a thousand comments, so if you have anything, post it here at the bottom, we'll do it. Teams will be announced tomorrow on game day. The Rock said that I imagine the Rock could be a part of that. I mean he did that with the whole Pat McCafe, McAfee crew and all that. Andy, what's your point? Well, I just wanted to say real quick, the timing for the Rock was actually dead on perfect and the reasoning being is because this celebration for Jimmy Johnson that was happening at the beginning of the show, obviously getting inducted into the Cowboys Ring of Honor, which happened just last night on the Saturday night game and then him coming back to the studio and being a part of the camaraderie and being able to celebrate that with him was really, really special. I think for Dwayne Johnson that was perfect. He walked up to Jimmy Johnson and gave him his original letter of intent when he wanted to go to the University of Miami. Obviously Jimmy Johnson moved on and did his thing in the NFL, but obviously they're connected in that way with their Miami relationship. So from a transition standpoint, it was perfect because he walks in, he gets to celebrate Jimmy and then say, Hey, by the way, I'm doing this. That timing is perfect. That could not have been timed out any better. That made for really good tv. Just wanted to say that. Yeah, Jacob says here, at least he didn't have coward. I know it was somebody, I was my fubu sometimes when I pull it up and it was like it had started the stream the hour earlier. So I'm sitting watching, I'm like, what is going on here? Luckily I was like, okay, I linked to yours and mine three times. I was like, Hey, I'm not trying to granted your audience way bigger than mine, but I'm like, but as soon as 1115 hits we're going over here and then at 1130 we're going over here and now 40 we're going over here. So I think I put yours in the comments four times. Like, hey, let's not cannibalize, let's all eat on this. No, it's good. I appreciate you. We got like 170 people watching. I could subscribe on here, get over on Path, analyze and educate. Pat comes on here a lot and does all that. Max is moving on to big boy things here, so we're kind of getting him here. Max is going to be busy and then like I said, Andy will be around going back through the comments here, exciting people, seeing the rock and all that stuff. To me this we've talked the best chance, right? We got Fox, we got the Rock, we got all this Synergy Max, did you like that? Yeah, I know there was all this debating, are they still going to be involved and they're out and this feels like what was supposed to be maybe two years later, Fox hadn't rushed and done all this SFL stuff and tried to one up and if we had just done this from the beginning, It really feels like I still to this day do not understand why Fox decided let's launch a whole other league whenever you could have Dwayne and the Rock and a sports private equity group and yourself all running a league together and you could just come up with some compromise. But you know what, at the end of the day, this was probably the only possible path from an exposure perspective to actually get the league to homes as quickly as, and any other way to build up a league would've been a much slower grind. So it's unfortunate that we've lost all these teams. These players have lost jobs, these coaches have lost jobs, employees, all these people have lost jobs and we can never lose sight of that. But for a long term spring football league, this is probably the best shot these two groups of people could have come up with. Yeah, Andy, similar thoughts on that. Like I said, it feels like we went a long way to get to this point. We did, and I mentioned this also on the show last week. Obviously the thing is this was just such a parallel universe kind of moment because I mean the transition periods, the thing is we almost had this happen in 2020. If the a f had actually known how to manage their finances and actually do the right thing, we would've run into the same problem with the Exel and the a f in 2020 that didn't come to pass because a F was more akin to the older style of how leagues were run, where it was very much a lot of hope but not a lot of production. 2020 XFL was a lot of production, but then a very unfortunate thing happened in the world that prevented it from going forward. And I feel like had that not happened, I mean I don't know if this happens earlier or if Fox decides that they don't need to have the necessity to create their own league. I don't think they do. If that doesn't happen, if 2020 doesn't happen, then Fox never goes through the whole USFL thing. That just doesn't happen at all. There's not even a forethought of that idea coming through. What I'm just curious about is did they find that what amount of, I know we use this word a lot, but what amount of ego was there in the room for both sides? I mean, did they not feel like they could approach a group like Danny and the Rock or did they feel like they just could run their own league? And I know it was a lot of cost cutting measures. Obviously they wanted to save money, they wanted to run their own operation. Obviously the Spring League was around, that was a whole operation with Brian Woods who's not even around for this time around. I mean there's so many different factors here. Obviously talking to the CFL and which was in dire straits for a while there and not playing its 2020 season. I mean just the landscape I think was just shifting so much simultaneously that I don't think anybody really had an idea of where they were going to go forward if the world wasn't the way that it was in 2020. I don't think this happens. And I think a lot clearer perspective kind of comes through and people are able to be able to schedule out what's going to happen in the next five years. But I don't think people were thinking like that. I think people were thinking now thinking, can we get a lead? Can we just get something on tv? Can we get something there? And now you don't have to think that way anymore, but I agree that it really made this whole thing really, I don't want to say unnecessary. We a lot of great football, a lot of great moments, a lot of great people. I've made a lot of great connections to this whole thing. I'm sure all of you have, but for the sake of all the headaches, it just feels like there could have been a lot more avoided. But I also understand that the world was just different three years ago too, and people were just not thinking the same way And running through. Philip had a question here talking. You're right. So we know Birmingham when they announced, when they announce the cities tomorrow. I assume the teams are with that, but also I would, you're very good educated guests to be like, we're keeping the same teams, even if you're a casual fan here, we're not rebranding the San Antonio kind of all of that stuff in terms of the eight teams that we know, and then we'll get to Pat's thoughts because there was a question here, does Seattle sneak in? I'm telling you Seattle is not making it for a variety of reasons. You're feel pretty strongly about that, but the three Texas teams and then obviously the one Houston back and forth, so Houston will be the USS L franchise and then DC St. Louis and then Birmingham, Detroit. Pat, a question for you. Dorothy and I were talking about this last night. I still we're merging these and we're kind of taking what worked at both of these leagues, but I don't want to be the FL homer here, but when you look at Birmingham, Memphis, Detroit, and then a non Houston plain franchise, it feels like Fox is bringing the TV partnership and not necessarily here are our strong franchises outside of potentially Birmingham, but in terms of market size, not so much. Yeah, I mean I think Memphis is, I think Memphis in my opinion, and guys interject if I'm off base here, I think Memphis is kind of wild. Sorry about that. That's it's book card in this. Personally I feel that Memphis, along with Michigan has the potential to really boom to boom at one point. And when I say boom, I don't mean 70,000 people at a game. I mean between your 20 and 30,000 thousand people, the biggest thing I always come back to with these markets is what are we doing with all these refunds and season tickets and whatnot? Because the USFL, these games are so cheap and they were giving tickets away in 2022, I don't know if they did it in 2023, but you were able to go grab five, six tickets for $60 and have decent seats and whatnot. And even during, when Memphis and Birmingham were having decent crowds at these games, you could still get a good seat for multiple seats for 60 bucks and whatnot. So I'm very curious to see on the ticket aspect what's going to happen. I do think there's potential in Memphis. I do think there's potential in Michigan, especially with how good the lions are, and I think that fan base up in Detroit because of even the Tigers being so bad, do you really want to go to Comerica or whatever it's called up there and see Detroit or would you rather go to see a competitive football game, especially if you're such a pro football guy, maybe you could factor in how Michigan's doing to keep people so hungry with the Lions, the Wolverines, and now the Panthers, if they're competitive. I think that could really be viewed as potential and whatnot. Memphis, to me, I mean I think it's a boom or bust place. I think if they had 20,000 people at every game wouldn't surprise me if they had 10 people at every game wouldn't surprise me. And I don't know if that's an easy cop out answer, but I think it's the reality of the situation Birmingham to me. Do they feel a little scorned that they're leaving but not leaving, if that makes sense. I think there was a lot of community engagement that they've done over the last two years. I don't know what that parade looked like. It looked like there were people there. I know the people who care care about it and I know that's kind of a, once again a very vague answer, but people were used to having Memphis or the stallions there over the last two years. Are we taking a step back for the survivability for that market? Do we see a dropoff? But the biggest factor is we don't know what numbers are for the US of L teams, so we can look and do a visual and be like, okay, week one when the generals were there in 2022, you guys were there. It was a good crowd in 2023 it looked pretty good, but the biggest thing I always knocked on the Birmingham market was, especially in year one, you asked people to go to 40 games for 10 weeks in a row. That's not reasonable. And even if you love the stallions, if the chiefs played 10 minutes away and played all 16 games in Birmingham, or excuse me, 10 minutes away from me, no matter how much you love the chiefs, you're going to want to do something else. Man, I want to get, and I know Max, we were getting the stream set up. I want to get Andy's thoughts. This is kind of what we expected in terms of the announcement, Hey, stronger together, more football, more opportunities. Was there anything about the actual branding messaging today that if you had not heard about the XFL or the US L that's going to incentivize you to watch this league if you're a casual football fan? Because this is what we were trying to attract today. I mean to me it spells is just another league. If you're a casual person, it's just another league. But I mean for the Fox, I like that they put up the graphic with the players that had played in both the XFL and the USFL. I think that's important. You need to continue to showing that connection. And I know we joke a lot about throwing out the moniker. Oh, spring football works. I mean I know a lot of people like to go to that. Well a lot and it's true. It does work in a lot of ways. It gives opportunity to a lot of guys. Brandon Aubrey is having an amazing season for Dallas. He's doing an unbelievable for that specialty. I know, I know, I know. But really to kick that many field goals and not miss one is insane. 35 for 35 Except that first extra point, except that first section point Except for the extra point. And then Kante Turpen is still hanging around, but it's more just, it's giving people the opportunity to even be on rosters. I know it's not as sexy if guys aren't doing as much in the next league, if they're just even just on a roster spot, but that's what we care about obviously. But for the casual fan, I mean it's just a matter of, well, it's another thing to do or another thing to watch and the inherent skepticism as it always is, how long is this going to last? Okay, and that's fair. That's completely fair. How long is it going to be alive? It could be gone next year. Did any of us in this room have any idea, first of all, if the XL was going to get its legs off the ground at the beginning of this year and second of all that, did we think both of these league were going to disappear by the next season? We had no idea. Zero. I mean, this is as fluid for us as it is for anybody else. So I don't blame people for having a healthy level of skepticism with this entire, I mean this entire genre of sports, right? It's its own unique identity and it's cool because it's very innovative and it's very exciting, but it's very fluid in terms of its existence. So how do you keep people around besides just the initial boom of ratings when the first game kicks off? How do you keep these people around? More importantly, like you said, how do you keep these communities involved? You need to keep these individual communities, like Pat said, can Memphis buy in? Can Birmingham buy in? The one thing that I thought of too that teams don't have is they don't have traveling fans. That's the thing. You don't get those people from out of markets traveling to your games. Even in the NFL Carolina, Carolina Panthers are terrible. They're awful. I would not even buy, I would not even buy a 50 cent seat, not $50, 50 cents seat to go into a game there, but you know who filled up that stadium last week? Packer fans because Packer fans travel, they have an identity and they have the tradition and they travel. These smaller leagues don't have that. You can't just feel even in Birmingham, I don't even know if I could sit there and confidently say, well, a bunch of Battle Hawks fans will show up if they play here, will they? I don't know. I hope so, but I can't guarantee that they're not going to travel on their dime just for that. So I think that's the biggest thing. Can you, you really have to dig in and see who you have at the local level and support you in the games that you play. We're having the debate here in the XL versus USL rules. Feel free to add into that. Curious everyone's thoughts. SL 2022 rules were kind of the XL rules that they wanted to take, which I always thought was interesting. Max, I want to get to you. So I'm looking here, we get a lot of questions. Are we rebranding teams? Were we doing any of this stuff this year? Is like we're just getting through this, right? Even if you look, and I've kind of been peeking around here on this website, so we have the press release and I want to go back to the quotes just to see if there's anything on there, but we have the UFL people saying it kind of looks like the UFC font family here, but even this down here, we have a link to the USFL shop. Then we have a link to the XFL shop. But I did think this was interesting. We got the XFL. Oh, you can't see it. There we go. Copyright XFL. If I get rid of the banner here, XFL properties, LLC, I think that's interesting. Max, what are you making? It really just feels like we're gluing two things together and we're trying to make a car go down the road at least this season. Yeah, I mean this is not going to be completely put together, is it? Even if I'm just hoping that the insurance is taken care of. The players get paid. The players find a way to have a union. The TV product looks fine. They do their best to market locally and they handle whatever legal stuff they have to with getting this together and hopefully it looks completely better for season two and we have a season two most importantly. Yeah, it was interesting talking with Mike the other day about just this marriage of necessity that both of these leagues needed to do. And it was interesting because we've lived through all this and the jockeying kind of power of the XFL people and oh, they're saving and I, I just had a text here from our friend Farhan. He's like, wasn't this supposed to be the US L in charge? And the rock was just trying to save face, but then you talk with other people, I know it's going to be the XFL coming in to save the US L really feels like, as Mike was kind of relayed to me yesterday, how kind of paramount this was that this going happen right now, but in terms of just redesigns, any of that stuff, yeah, I think we get through this year and kind of move forward from that. Pat, are you liking, we recapped all the USFL games here over the course of the last year. It feels a little fox light. Does this inspire? Is there anything, I know I asked this question before the Andy, is there anything about this league that's going to make you jump off the seat now that we didn't six minutes ago before this announcement started? I'm not the person to ask because we were going to watch this no matter whether to watch the Titanic sink or to see just everything else a part of it because of the players that we've gotten to know that talk with us, the coaches and whatnot, and baseball's kind of in my opinion, died in my eyes a little bit. Not that it matters. I'm a Mets fan, so You were trying. Yeah, I mean take that for what it's worth, but in the reality of it, baseball, I'm not the person to ask and for me to give an opinion is not fair. Especially doing the coaching thing and whatnot. Because when I watch these games, I watch it from a passionate level of, okay, these players and whatnot, but I also watched the new up and coming coordinators, the older coaches to see what schemes they do as even being on the media side with the FL, how involved they allow you to be was allowed me to get really invested in it being on the Zooms every weekend and whatnot. So for me, I don't know if my support of this league will always be around because so many of these guys that are just grinding and doing so many different things and coming from these smaller schools and the way college football and I talked about this on my stream a little bit, the way college football has changed, recruiting so much I think allows this league to be so important moving forward because guys aren't even one of the leagues I cover the GLVC, it's a division two league. Everyone knows who Cody Schrader is, right? Cody Schrader came from D two GLVC, Ben Stratman, TJ Edwards. These are guys that are getting poached and not just at that conference but all over. So it's like this is the best shot for a lot of these guys to have a professional career at the D two NAIA, even D three FCS group of five level because if you're good enough to go to the NFL or even if you're not good enough to go to the NFL, if you're good enough to go to a Power five school, you're going to ride that out because your boys getting paid 70 grand at a minimum at some of these schools and not even be a starter. So I'll always support this man. I know that's a little bit of a roundabout tangent, but hopefully like I said, having this on Fox adds a couple of viewers and a couple of ticks in the right direction to where they need to, in my opinion, be 1.5 every game. If we hit 1.5 every game in the spring, then I'd like to believe a lot more people are bought in, including the investors. I don't know. That's a reach. Yeah, I don't want to be know. To me, Andy, this feels like, again, as Pat said, we're not the target demo for, is this hitting? I just don't know. I don't know. It felt flash. I go back and forth, I hate it. And people, oh, you're the bit negative Max and I come on here and people are like, oh, you guys are too negative. But were you expecting more? I mean not in terms of information. I know we're going to get more of that, but just more of like this is what this stands out more than the rocks kind of repeating the player 54 for the 8700th time. No, I mean I didn't expect that because quite frankly what information we have is what we got and that's what we know. So I don't think it's anything to expect as far as any spectacular grand stage of being surpassed of what I already expect. I think again, the bar was set by something like the XFL in 2020. That was the bar. But to be fair, for me personally, I'll speak from my experience, that was me getting into the idea of spring football because I did not have as extensive a history of someone like Mike Mitchell for example. He's been around forever. He knows what's going on through years and years and years of that. And then to be fair, I watched things like NFL Europe and I watched other little leagues, like a little bit of the original UFL, which again, I want to see if people start digging that up, which will be really funny if people actually end up, yeah, pat Pat knows what I'm talking about. He is got the helmet. I was going to say, where's Pat's helmet? I love it. But things like that, I mean, it's a geek thing. It's things that we geek out about and we love to talk about because it is a chance for players like Pat was talking about. I think one of the things that if you like to follow individual people and their chances and what they get, if you're a story kind of person, I think this is great. I don't know if you're going to see guys like Kenny Robinson anymore who, if you remember Kenny Robinson had to leave West Virginia University because of academic ineligibility, but he ended up playing in the XFL and then he got drafted. That's not going to happen anymore. Now with the NIL coming in the landscape of college football, the economics, college football, I don't think that's going to happen. I think what you're going to see more of is these players who come in and maybe have not played football or don't have as much experience or a D two level and those are the guys that are going to get their opportunities. I mean, my favorite story this year is Quantas stickers, the guy who never played high school football and then he plays in the FCF, which is very small arena football stage, and then he goes to the CFL. I mean he picked off bold Levi Mitchell in his first ever game of the CFL. That's insane. That's a hall of famer and you pick him off in your first game. He had a great season and now people are talking about him giving an NFL opportunity. That's nuts. But there's people like that who are going to get that kind of opportunity now because of these leagues, if they stick around, I mean, it's just reps, right? It's just getting game tape and reps, which guys don't always have the chance to do. And in a day and age when guys are opting out of bowl games to get better prospects of not being hurt before the draft process, which may or may not pay off at the end of the day, we still need leagues like this to exist because there's just not enough time or practice time for guys to develop and really get there. And there's some people who just get to the NFL who are too young or just aren't quite there yet and need a little bit more time to really build on some of their fundamental skills, and this is why you need leads like this. But for the casual fan, again, they have to work on their messaging and their marketing if they're going to keep those people around. A couple comments here, and I want to get to Max Phillip asking, we're talking about the old EV l. Did they acquire the old UFL names? Again, there's no equity at all in this pass fail and then there was that scam league and all that stuff. This is totally, totally fresh. Now this is alphabet soup and they make fun of this in Canada a lot. What can we use? We had talked about the NSFL on here. The other thing that was interesting, and I know Andy and I did the deep dive that Jeff Bette's emails and all of that and yeah, how did that December 27th draft workout? I try to help out here, but in terms of the conferences, I mean I think that that's basically confirmed right where they're saying on there, we're going to have the Arlington Renegades team taking on the Birmingham Stallions team kind of in the kickoff Max. Thoughts on that? And then I want to get your thoughts on both Brandon and Daryl Johnson still being involved on here, but thoughts on that getting at least somewhat confirmation about these two conferences. I mean we don't, for all we know it's a rotating schedule with all eighteens. We don't necessarily know anything about leak schedule structure. All we know is who's playing the kickoff game. And even if they are in different, it could be just easily south north with the Texas teams and Birmingham and then or west with Texas teams and St. Louis and then east. So we don't really know really, You don't think they're going to do that? You don't think it just makes the most sense to call it the UFL and have an FL conference in the USFL conference? No, I think the longer you hang onto the old league, the harder it is to make an identity for the new league. And also it's going to confuse the living. You know what, out of everyone who is a casual watching this being like, I'm sorry, the US conference, what? No, and also the branding wouldn't gel. What'd you call it? The X conference? No, You call it the XML conference in the US United. It sounds like that sounds like A-M-M-A-X-F-C. No, this is terrible. No, no. I'm pretty sure it is going to be geographic divisions or no divisions at all. Maybe west, east, maybe north, south, I don't know. But either way, not a fan of the idea of having a conference based on past league affiliation because you need to build an identity for the league. You have not for whatever these teams came from. This isn't the same thing as the N-F-L-A-F-L where the whole reason to do it was because they were adding eight, or was it eight teams? I can't remember how many they added, but they added so many teams that there was no point in not distinguishing who was in what conference because you had to split it down the middle somehow. And also it was easier for them to do divisions that way. I mean, put it in the chat here. Am I crazy because we'll go, I guess I didn't realize this was so divisive. I still want to talk Brandon and Darryl Johnson here, but Pat, you were shaking your head. Is this that divisive? I thought this makes, I think it's us just being edgy personally, but I mean, I agree with Max just A Stop all around hustle, But I Think got to move on, man, geographically, okay, let's say if expansion comes up and you do get to the 16 team leagues geographically, that does not make as much sense. Or if they do go to the dormant USFL franchises and they're like, oh, okay, we're going to have the Tampa Bay Bandits and then the LA Express and God willing and they bring back the Wildcats, it's like, dude, are we really going to do X-F-L-U-S-O type mold on that front? I don't know. I think you've just, you got to move past it, honor the past, but I'm a traditionalist in some senses, but negative connotation, this would be the third time the XFL couldn't do it. This is the second time the USFL couldn't do it. Yeah. Is there rivalries and stuff like that? You could take advantage of that, but what do you mean the rivalries are between the players? They're not between the actual franchises and whatnot. I don't know. It's not really united if you're keeping them separate in a weird way, right? It's like the NFL you. I don't dunno. Just to me it's like we're getting around to the Super Bowl era, but in the span of a year and a half versus, I really had no idea. This is so divisive. This comm did make me laugh and I want to get Andy's thoughts. I feel bad for the Bandits fans. They're totally, because at least we might be putting the Sea Dragons to bed for a little bit. I mean, the bandits like you're off life support now anyway, Andy, what do you make of this conference? I had no idea. This was so divisive. We have our boy royal retros coming in here. I had no idea this was so divisive. I mean, I understand the sentiment since I covered the bandits for a year and they disappeared. So I know what it's like to It's covered dying entities. I get it. Look, the whole A-F-L-N-F-L thing, I went back and I read, I actually went and decided to read into it further. I have a lot of extensive NFL historical knowledge. That's kind of how I got into football for the A FL. To answer your point max, there were eight teams originally in the first five years of the A FL, and then they added a ninth and then the added a 10th before the merger happened. But here's the biggest difference, guys. The thing is about all this is those teams were individually owned. There's no individual ownership in spring football. That's the difference here. Those owners went and bought those properties or created those properties because the NFL, there was not enough space in the NFL to have those. Clark Hunt obviously was one of the most famous examples and trying to start a team in Dallas and then getting jettison to Kansas City. Famously, there are examples of this in history of merging entities, but that is such a, first of all, the economics of football were drastically different. And there wasn't ad war. I mean there was a bidding war for players. There's no bidding war here because there's a better, more profitable league that exists that allows players to go on if they want to make their money. So that doesn't exist as far as the conference talk thing. I mean it's queued, but at the same time it would be very tribalistic. And as we've experienced personally, there's a lot of tribalism that goes on in this space. And I don't think it would be for, it just wouldn't be the same level of competitiveness that the NFL and the A FL had where both sides had quality talent. They both had fantastic talent, even though the NFL was a very high mighty superior entity in saying, well, we've been around longer, we know better and we're better than you. Which was proven very, very wrong by the third Super Bowl when Joe Namath decided to change history. But that's obviously very different extenuating circumstances. So would I want to have separate conferences? I mean, sure, as far as camaraderie, but then again nowadays, does anyone care about the a FFC and NFC rivalry? No. I mean it's just the Super Bowl, right? You care about your individual rivalries, your divisional rivalries, but you don't care about like, oh yeah, we've been in this conference this many times in a row or whatever. That doesn't really hold water anymore. I think that's gone away. So I mean, if you want to make something of it, sure, but I don't think it really doesn't have the same weight to it as it did before with a FL and FL. It's just very different. I'm just laughing here, going through the, I really had no idea this was, we'll give this one here. Tim Al Let Fly Decks podcast. When CFL expanded the us, there wasn't a USA division and the Canadian Division stick with Geographic. Maybe there should have been Tim and then we could have had, maybe that was the problem. Max hop back in on this and then I want to talk about other stuff here, but I had no idea this was essentially, Yeah, and also think about it. If they end up calling the Houston team the roughnecks and you're going to have five brands, even if it's not rosters five brands from the XFL and three from the USS FL. So then it'd be weird to have the Houston roughnecks in the SFL division or conference, the SSF conference. It doesn't make any sense. Listen, look, if you're going to build the UFL, you might as well embrace the UFL and stop trying to lean on everything that you did in past leagues that no longer exists. The only thing I want to see recognized from the past leagues is player stats records and who won championships maybe. And also they can reference old clips that happened maybe from games if they want for media use or whatever. I really, really don't want to see the continued embracing of a rivalry that only lasted for two years, but not really. And also for embracing two brands that are both kind of so far expired at this point by their own doing that, it just makes more sense to build up from what you have if you're going to go down the route of embracing a new league name. Now, if they picked one of the other, I'd feel differently because then you're naming it after one of them you're saying, okay, this is who we're going with. But they didn't do that. They picked a new league name. So just stop relying on it. Stop relying on your old league names and just build what you have. Is it stock speed's Acura? It's going to be the gamble. It still, I mean, Mike is saying it's still a TBD and here's the XFL Homer man. I call it the gamblers. Like I said, I tweeted last night, as long as I breathe and have a pulse in my body, I will never call the gamblers for roughnecks. I think that that is, and I've had a lot of comments about that, which I didn't think were necessarily, or I was kind of surprised. And they're like, well, it's still the rough, the players and the coaches, it's still the brand. I'm like, yeah, but when the brand's only been around for two seconds, it's kind the kind of hard pat thoughts on that. We haven't had you involved. I know Andy and I kind of deep dug that, but Fugazi gambler roughnecks, It's the historic gamblers brand, But it's not, unless you own the Go-kart and drive around a lake in Michigan, it doesn't affect you. But Jim Kelly and then I think there's Jim Kelly because anytime people talk about the historic brand of the gamblers and I'm like, okay, name someone. And then they say, Jim Kelly. And I say, okay. And they go, well, Jim Kelly. And I'm like, yeah. And then No M then no M then Yeah, half these people don't even know who Mouse Davis is. And it's like, yeah, I mean, it sounds cool on the surface, but I am willing to bet if, and read, I talked to you about this, if I went to Houston Reddit page and I said, Hey man, could you name three players from the Houston Roughnecks and can you name three players from the Houston gamblers? I would be willing to bet I would get more people talking about the roughnecks because of the recency bias and whatnot. Now, on that flip side, we talk about, oh, Houston's been there. They've been building this market, all this stuff. How many people actually care if it's the gamblers or the roughnecks? We're going to say on Twitter a lot, but I don't have that answer because I feel like it's going to be like 500 people who actually care. I think the NFL caress when it comes to copyright, that's for Sure. No, a comment here, Kate. Just like bunch of us are read the US L fanboy. I've never been accused of being a US L fanboy. That's a new one. I mean, we did this deep dive. We had the comment here, Jared, and if this is a Jared I know from Facebook, I vehemently disagreed, Jared. I mean this is why I a have a really hard time getting involved in college sports. I mean, I went to Gonzaga, so I don't have the football that everyone has and I've fallen out of basketball, but I always had a hard time with basketball recycling. We recycling it, but at least these brands and identities and traditions and everything have been around. I just can't imagine We're struggling so hard to get any sort of fan base and goodwill here. And then we're going to like, oh, screw you roughnecks. Here's here this other team. We're just going to give 'em the paint colors. I dunno. Andy, do you have any updated thoughts? I very strongly feel about this? I mean, again, I think it's just pulling the rug out from underneath them and look, will people forget about it in the coming years? Maybe, but for the time being as a season ticket holder, I'd be really miffed at the fact that they did that. And it's really something that, again, look, it's the idea of building trust. It's the idea of is this going to stick around for a while? And it's still undermining all of that. I don't care whether you think it doesn't matter or not. If there's players or coaches, what matters is now. And what matters is trying to build goodwill with people who actually are trying to buy into your league. That's what we're talking about it. You can argue about the logistics of who's on the staff and who's not. We're talking about building fundamental trust in the product. That's what we're talking about. And people who actually follow the roughnecks, which we know are going to be upset about it, they're going to be m by be like, Wade, where's, where's all the players from last year? Where's the staff? What the hell happened? People are going to be really confused by that, especially that's going to be questions they're going to start asking and then they'll find out afterwards and it's going to be really weird. And they're like, wait, my head coach is in San Antonio now what? Since when? So I mean that's still, I feel is the equivalent of polio Fast one on your buddy. So that to me still undermines it. But one other quick thing I wanted to say, moving on from that, I was thinking about in terms of rivalries. I mean guys, we really missed a really easy opportunity at a rivalry here. We didn't talk about the fact that we have the greatest rivalry of all time, which is Reed and the DC fans versus the security guards at Audi Field. I mean, that's the real rivalry that we have to look forward to. The Beer Snake Coalition versus the security staff. Audi Field is one of the most controversial rivalries of all time. Come on man. For my safety, I was, remember from my safety comment here and then let's talk a little football ops Shark's asking about the rules. We went through that. I dunno, I am an XFL proponent. I think the kickoffs and things makes it unique. I don't think the US FL incentivized a lot of the going for two or three points and all that stuff. I will just say, Mr. Downtown Brahma's biggest winners, we got Wade Phillips. I tweeted that the other day. But I do feel like if the team's come out as we've expected with the three Houston and DC and St. Louis and all of that, I'll be a San Antonio Braas fan. Makes sense. I guess I'm the rocks fanboy and all of that. But I got to support my boy, AJ Smith, got to support Wade Phillips and all of that. And then Andy and I, and we'll get Evan, we'll go down to the river walk. We'll do all that stuff again. See if I can keep Andy. Can't be Andy alive this time in terms of, and did I lose? No, here we go. In terms of this maxim, we'll kind of do the horn here. Keeping Russ involved, bringing Daryl in. Russ is the president, CEO Darryl Johnson, lead football ops makes sense to Q. We talked about, I think it was Ben Fisher's report that Russ, Brandon would be the head person in terms of corporate there. But what do you make of this structure If they keep Doug Whaley involved and they let Doug Whaley do the actual day-to-Day? Because if you recall, Mark Ross was never the day-to-Day guy. He was over the top guy who would handle interaction between football ops and the league and would handle a lot of the bigger stuff like the big picture stuff. But Doug Whaley always ran day-to-day. He was the guy who closer to making decisions on rules. I'd prefer that setup because quite frankly he has way more experience in that than Darl does, and also he has more experience doing the player personnel for a whole league than Darryl does. So I'd really prefer that. This hodgepodge makes it interesting because we're talking about weight taking Heinz spot for example, but theoretically they could still put the gambler staff in San Antonio. They've already fired their coach and then keep weight to Houston. So just because Heinz out weighed still in does not necessarily who knows how they're going to structure it. I actually think it would make a lot more sense to put the gambler staff in San Antonio. They've already lost their coach then that way you can keep the entire roughnecks identity in Houston and just let the Bram start over because I think actually most San Antonio people wouldn't be that opposed to that because not like the Brams were that great or anything that great defense, but anyway, this is all so up in the air. There's so much we don't know and the little things we do know might be good, might be bad, but I don't know what to think of it. I'm not a huge fan of Darrell, but if the people under him can still do the job and if Russ can be more forthcoming and more communicative to the public, then this can still work. Pat, let's get that someone a shark tweeted here. I guess we got a UFL ad on Fox, which I'm trying to see if I can go back on FUBU here. I don't know if I can get that pulled up. Pat, what do you think of, like I said, we covered, people may not know we covered every single episode of the US L here last season we did, right? Yeah. What do you make here at Daryl being involved in all this? I mean keeping it consistent. Darryl's been around every Spring league since 2019. There's always that rumor. He tried to poach Bob Stoops because I believe he was his DPP or GM with the Arlington Renegades, or excuse me, the Dallas Renegades in 2020. I'm good with keeping Daryl around. I'm a little biased. I've met Russ Brandon a couple times, so keeping him as the figurehead, I agree to what Max is saying about having Mark Ross around as well. Obviously Reed, the gentleman you interviewed, his name is escaping me. A Giglio. Yeah. Yeah, Bruce Gigo. I always felt that he was kind of a calming presence with that and I always felt a little bit more in step with, especially based off his interview that he did and I really was actually looking it up the other day. I think you tweeted something with his name in it or one of the documents had his name in it the other day. I think it's weird because none of these guys have been good at this and I don't want to come off as disrespectful. We haven't seen it actually successfully take off and take flight and everything like that. So I'm kind of just like, well, we have all these people who have had success in other avenues. No one's actually been successful in this since I guess the sixties. Maybe we don't know what works to keep a sustainable alternate football league. So it's like let's just keep figuring this out and hopefully we can get some money backing this and there is obviously a need from a player development standpoint and everything like that and the NFL isn't willing to shield that money out because they've proven they don't have to because everyone else is like, no, I can make spring football work and whatnot. So there's a couple of different avenues on my front about it in my headspace, but in the end, I don't want to go with the mantra of if it's not broke, don't fix it because if it wasn't broke, we wouldn't be having this merger. But on the same time it's like who else do we have that is capable of doing this? And it's not like these people are incapable. It's just figuring it out and hopefully there's enough money to allow that privilege of just kind of until we do figure out what actually works. Talk about fortuitous timing here. Hopefully I don't get a copyright check. I had just pulled up. I got the USL ad here if we want to watch it. Hopefully this work. Do you think I'll get flagged for that? I don't know. It's a commercial. Yeah, I mean I had mine up there and then I would take it down when I was doing my stream. I had it for 10 seconds would take it away. So how do, Let's see if this works there. Can you hear that? Yep. The XFL in the United States Football League have announced plans to merge A move that ensures spring football is here to stay. This is an iconic Moment, an excitement for fans all across the country. Let's ball out baby. This'll bring together two of the best spring leagues we've ever seen. It's a win for football and for fans. The United Football League has arrived. There's no doubt. Spring just got stronger. Here we go. There you go. What do you think, Andy? I'll give you the floor first because we're running down the horn. Well first of all, if Emmanuel Outtro is involved with this. No thank you. Noted Herbie Hater. Emmanuel Outtro can go watch something else. No, no. I mean it's cool. Again, it's the standard template of announcing your league and who's involved with it. Here's my thing about it and we talked about this with last time Colin Cowherd announcing the teams for the USFL, which was very cookie cutter in terms of all the announcements. If you're going to talk about the league, and this goes for all fans and everybody please watch the games for the love of all that is holy, please actually watch the games and don't just talk about it and have put people on TV that say they watch it and don't actually watch it and are just promoting it. I want to actually get an analyst and people who do this for a living and have people who watch this and if we're talking about content creation, I mean you have YouTube channels that are devoted to this. Get somebody involved and have somebody who actually is able to watch the games of breakdown and watch the film and understand why these players are doing what they're doing. So that's just my thing. My reaction is just based on who I saw in the commercial, but as far as the actual presentation, yeah, I mean it works. It kind of very, I'm a wedding videographer and they're very interesting editing here of everything that's happened over the last, none of that was from today. I mean that was all kind of hack together things that had said before. Max, you seem perplex here. What are your thoughts? I'm laughing because I'm looking at those tweets. I'm like, are those real tweets? I know I'm trying to get, yeah, I'm like, who are these people? I don't know. Maybe they are, but whatever. I think they use some chupy GPT software anyway. Other than that, it just feels very weird that you get an ad like this saying so much about all that and then they don't even mention some of the stuff happening tomorrow in the ad and it feels like that was a missed opportunity. And then also they don't clear up anything about being in stadiums or anything in any communication they've had publicly so far. All that as a whole has been a little disappointing, but in terms of the actual ad, it means fine. I think it'd be funny both if we had the brothers Acho representing Fox and ESPN because they used to work together and ES pn, then Emmanuel left, so now you'd have Sam and e Emmanuel and also if they're going to have it on game day tomorrow, imagine if we actually finally had some kind of XFL pre-game game day show at least for kickoff because it really feels like if they're going to bother to do it on game day, I mean you've already got your sample right there of what the reaction could look like if you just do the same thing but with actual XFL and U-F-L-U-S-F-L fans, spring football fans, I don't know. I don't want to get on that tangent, but I have hopes and then I know what's actually going to happen, so I'm not going to dwell on it. Pat, what are your thoughts on this? Yeah, Robert saying you have the ad scene that indirectly confirm some of the teams. Yeah, you get that. Maybe I'll scroll through it here on quiet mode here, but Pat, what do you make of this? I mean I'm pretty, I'm in Andy's corner about anti Emmanuel Acho. I kind of feel like he's one of those guys who just when you're told when you're growing up, just because you speak louder doesn't mean you're actually correct. Act like, I mean, yeah, let's hold that FB fanatic real quick and see if that's an actual Twitter at real FB followers. I always felt the same way. It's like some of these guys talking about this stuff, they don't actually care as much, but Josh Lewin was a guy that came up and talked to you personally I believe on your show and he was a pretty humble guy and he obviously, I don't want to say he knew his place, but he was like, I know that this is new for me and whatnot, but then there were guys on the XFL today show that were like, oh, this guy is really good, and you're like, okay, what makes him good and what do you mean? It's like what makes him good? Is it his ability to switch his hips? Well, and it's like he's from this school and it's like, yeah, he went to that school, but he played three downs. He actually went to another school and the thing is, dude is I'm going to get edgy here and people will be like, oh, pat a lot about this stuff. And it's like, yeah, but it's not that I'm going out on these far adventures. It's a Google search and then an all 22. It's putting in the effort man. And it kind of goes back to a conversation we had about some of these stat tweets that I put out during the season and it's like, oh, that's crazy. And it's like it's really not, man, it took me seven minutes to do it. I'm traveling right now. I'm watching a game on my phone. This guy, he's been playing on all these leagues. How many yards does he have? Oh, he's the only one that's actually ever broke a thousand yards through these three leaks. It's not a crazy ask for people to care about it, especially them getting paid a decent amount to do it. So I don't know. We'll see, but at the same time, more people putting eyes on this with bigger followings than us the better, right? Because then maybe some dude from Memphis or Birmingham is like, you know what? I really want a football team. Yeah, no, I know Shane, you're saying commercial sounds like No, and I think it's a tough sell. I mean Mike had said that to me when we were talking before, they're really trying to get how do we market? This is not a kind of a negative thing. Complaining, not they saying no. I mean no one's complaining. I mean we know spoiler, we know a and we know the team names. No, I don't think anyone was. I was just kind curious how they were approaching the marketing, how we're branding this. I mean I think it's cute. I think if you don't know the history of all this, I think they're trying to sell it. It seems cool. We got OCHO and kind of all that stuff on there and the Colin Cowards of the world. Andy, any other thoughts on that? Well, I want to comment really quick on Max's point about the expectation of wanting to have a pre-game show, which I know that hasn't happened yet, and to Pat bouncing off a pat's point, which is know you're stuck. At the end of the day, that's all we want. We just want people who care and actually put in the effort and actually want to be better about this and not just having some placate or some general template in terms of actually covering these leaks. Look, the reason I think we all come here and say all these things and that we raise our eyebrows at certain things is because we want it to get better. I want that. I want everybody to up their game. One of the guys that I think of that I really wish would stay around as far as the Fox side goes, I don't care for the talk shows. If you want to throw an ad on undisputed or call him cowherd, fine. I don't expect those guys to actually watch the games. I really don't. Sorry, but someone like in the broadcast booth, Joel Klatt I thought did an excellent job of actually trying his best and doing his research and actually working very hard on what he does for a living. And obviously he does a lot of that in college football, but he actually does his work in the USFL too, and I really appreciated that. Honestly, I think the XFL does not understand how well they had it three years ago when they had Kevin Burkhart and Greg Olsson as a duo. That's outstanding. They have that kind of talent in your booth is fantastic. They need to keep those guys around. You need to keep guys like Tom Loganville. You need to keep guys in the booth that actually care and want to put in the work to do this. You need to keep those people around. You got to find a way because it's easy to just have a general boiler template and just also, here's the other thing, are they going to start to do away with the, oh, this guy could be really good in the NFL. Can we avoid that topic as well? I know that was a big thing about ESPN and how they were trying to basically jettison guys off into the next league. Can they find a way to not have that be the default points or argument every single time that a player makes a good impression? They got to find a way around that. You just need to talk about who the player is, where they come from, what they're doing well and why it's working this week. You got to work on that. But all of that stuff, even when they do people getting all excited about this draft and there was questions earlier, remember there was going to be the 27th and it was going to be the 29th. Mike's saying it's going to be the fifth. It makes more sense than doing it before we get the official announcement. Like I said, I never really believed that. A couple comments than I know Max says something he wants to bring up. We had a question here. What is the bad part of the merger? Getting rid of eight teams and jobs and coaching and staff and all that stuff I would say would be a part of that. And Shane, who I appreciate from just CFL coverage to commented on that, Sam said the opening game in Arlington or Birmingham, to me it's Arlington just because of the logistics of it. That is the interesting aspect. The XFL before and we did the hub model and we're flying in and it's easy to get from Dallas to a lot of these places. Birmingham's tough to get to. Andy knows this. I know this. We were there. Pat obviously traveling up and down those parts. Max I was corresponding with one of our people before, but yes, no official league accounts yet. I know there's a Facebook page that's a long story. I've talked about it on here. I'm working to regain access to my Facebook account, but in terms of Twitter and all of that stuff, not on there. Max, what do you make of this? It just does not make it feel put together, does it? No. I mean now for all we know, maybe they just keep both accounts. Maybe they just keep both accounts they already have. They turn one into UFL, maybe they turn the XFL account into the UFL account and then you know how originally there was an XFL on FOX account for the 2020. Maybe they turned the USFL account into UFL on Fox or something because then the Fox can hang onto their account. Personally, I don't know. Either way it does not make me feel great. Whenever you see stuff like that, definitely agree with Andy about it was a really high quality and we had Lil Baby KK and the Greg na the broadcast and then now these days we get some tech Longhorn network doing our broadcast and you're like, what are we doing here? Or guys who can't talk about, they have no idea what the actual playoffs scenarios are and you just feel embarrassed for your entire league when you're Yeah, but anyway, there's a lot of holes they have to fill, a lot of things that need to be fixed just even from a TV product perspective and from a branding perspective, from a communications perspective that still all these things leave so much to be desired marketing, all that. So just so much left to do isn't there? So we have a comment here. See this is why I do doing these live stuff Elijah. I think it's going to be Birmingham. The Texas Rangers are opening the season versus the Chicago Cubs that week. We had talked about that before the March 30th baseball. So Andy get ready to speak Burmese buddy or Birmingham knees buddy. Hey, running back. Andy, what do you think? I don't really want to go to Birmingham Old stomping grounds. Well, okay, look, if they've at least cleaned up some of the construction around the stadium then great. Fantastic. But look, I don't mind the stadium. I like Protective Stadium. It's just the surrounding area was just weird to me. There just wasn't a lot of life around that. Here's the other thing, and I don't know if we've talked about this before, but I just wanted to point something out. To Pat's point, yes, me and Reid went to the most attended game in Birmingham stallion's history, at least the iteration, the new iteration of Birmingham stallions. It had to be, but here's the thing that really maybe caught us off guard is that the crowd was very slow trickling in. It wasn't at capacity when kickoff happened and it started to kind of crescendo towards the second quarter, but then in the second half we noticed that people started to kind of trickle back out. It was made to be an event. I know it was the first kickoff game, so maybe people were just there. Out of curiosity, here's the thing, and this is why I think it's important with ticketing too, is how invested can you get people to be in what they buy as far as the product and as far as are they buying tickets and are they going to stay at the games? Are they going to be able to stay in there and not just treat it, it's just kind of a throwaway item. Be like, okay, well I showed up for my 30 minutes, I'm out of here. You don't want that to happen. Obviously I know the whole point of the USFL was the low price ticketing and being able to get people into the stadiums and the cheap affordable way of doing that, which was great, but you also need to give incentive for people to stay around. And I think part of that is pricing. That's obviously a whole nother logistical argument, but look, if it's in Birmingham, fine, it's the matchup. It's more about the matchup that I'm interested in as far as those two teams playing. That's fantastic. Just as far as the traveling goes, I mean look, I went to DFW three separate times this year and it was very seamless for me flying out from where I was and it was for three separate occasions. So for me, going to Dallas is much easier. Going to Birmingham is a little bit more of a traxx and I think that's the case for a lot of people because as a smaller airport, so logistically it would make more sense to be in Arlington, but if it's in Birmingham, make peace with it. We'll run through the comments here. I think at the top of the hour we'll kind of get out of this that people can go about their days and everything else and I would like to watch the commanders try to tank her against the 49 ERs, but I really need the Patriots came out strong, really need the Patriots to get the Patriots upset of the bills would really make my day. Pat comments this Birmingham? Anything else, any of the other comments we've gone through? I'm running through the Twitter feeds and obviously Twitter is just one aspect of social media. So the XFL Twitter account has eight, excuse me, 380,000, 81,000 creeping up on almost 382,000 compared to the USFL, which is 128 Battle Hawks lead the way with almost 113,000. And the highest USFL count is the Panthers, which is stagnated about 41,000 roughnecks renegades and brass are at 17,000 with the roughnecks and renegades at over 65 each with the DC defenders at in the 70,000 mark. I know these things might be a little minute, but if you're trying to grow the league and everything like that, I'd like to believe that they might keep the XFL as the main one and then use the USFL one as the retweet one to kind of bump your impressions and whatnot. I mean I keep the other Twitter pages also active for the air quote dormant teams as free retweets and whatnot. Now you can kind of merge a couple of these. I don't know how many people follow the US FL Twitter page that don't follow the XFL Twitter page, but now that the Fox Twitter pagers are involved, maybe you can get the XFL one to 500,000 because they weren't retweeting XFL stuff for the last couple of years. I mean this might be a little bit me just diving down the rabbit hole on something that really doesn't matter, but just something to keep in the back of the heads. I think a lot of this stuff matters, especially when these pages tweet out the players' handles and whatnot. I always found that pretty cool because football is temporary. Granted the league, the leagues have seen almost 200 guys get signed since 2022 from both these leagues combined. But if one of these guys can go viral on a hurdle and then make some money on the backend, I think that stuff kind of matters because if you can't go to the NFL but you can get like, Hey, we saw you on the USFL thing or the XFL thing, now you have a couple more impressions for some of these guys who didn't take their academia seriously. Maybe they can carve out the podcast or something like that to do something. That stuff matters. I know we talked about it with the arena guys as well. Yeah, it's just, I dunno, I'm kind of looking through here and even this is why I'm glad we don't have this is the mark has, and Paul and I kind of got the away from the XFL Mark has back in the day, even Mark rebranding the XFL news set, Twitter to the UFL new we're doing this. I don't know, I get weary about all this F max thoughts and we'll go back to Andy. Yeah, it's clumsy. It's all a little clumsy. Isn't that, I mean the other thing I'm wondering about is do they pay for the gold check for the new UFL account? And because the XFL account doesn't have one the USFL account does, I'm thinking Fox can just get it arranged to get it probably because big enough to just make it happen. And so because see people making digs at the XFL for having less impressions or whatever, but a lot of it is because Twitter will inflate the presence of a page if it has a gold check. But you pay for that. Can't you get the branding paid now? I thought it's all paid pay to play now. Yeah, you can buy a gold check, but also if you're big enough, sometimes Twitter, if you're a Fox brand for example, Twitter might just toss you a gold check because I doubt for example, I doubt Nintendo is paying for a gold check. But yeah, I'm sure the XFL under their old ownership would've had to pay for the gold check and now maybe Fox can just get it for them. And so that should help boost the impressions of the larger following page and overall it should help the presence a little bit. But overall it's more on them to do better job marketing than anything. The reason why their relevance online has been not up to standard in anybody's opinion really for what it should be. Pat, go for it. I just got a text from a game day support person from the Battle Hawks and they still haven't been told anything right now. So In terms of Just, hey, it's official now, that's it. So I mean obviously where I live, this person is air quote safe, but it's just, hey, standby to standby. So I don't know if you can call 'em a league employee, a seasonal employee, whatever you want to call 'em, but that's just something that came up on my thing right now. Max shaking this that way that I have a question for Andy. Yeah, I'm just shaking my head. I'm like man, this is such a mess. I despise the communication failures. It's so bad all the time. Every time they can make an official announcement and still nobody actually knows anything. It's just so frustrating. And they're going to go on college game day tomorrow, kickoff in basically three months and people in St. Louis who are supposed to be operating on game day have no idea when they're supposed to be working or even that merger is happening according to the league themselves. Just a quick programming note on here, Mike, sharing this in, let me see if I can get this up. We talked about this, but just timing wise, life planning The rock will be announcing the UFL team cities for the 2024 UFL season during the 11:00 AM hour Eastern time of the college game day tomorrow. Like I said, as noted, I'll be route to the winter classic. So maybe if I can get a short out on my phone before we leave, but life gets in the way sometimes. Be Andy and I'll be back if Pat or whoever anyone is welcome to join, but we'll figure out a time on Tuesday for that. But life gets in the way. But if you're curious about that, at least we know the 11, I don't know how long that whole thing runs, but the 11:00 AM hour, but for all we know that could be 1155 like today doesn't just because they say nine, it doesn't go right at nine. Andy, thoughts on this or anything else here as we, well I think we're going to round down here pretty soon. Real nice of them. Make that announcement following New Year's, really good timing on that part. But look, I will be most likely watching that announcement. My Organ Ducks will be playing in the Fiesta Bowl that morning and hopefully Trouncing Liberty University at about 10:00 AM so that'll be following that announcement so I'll be up regardless because that's going to be going on tomorrow. So like you Reid, I have a big day for my boys tomorrow as well. So I mean look, I think you and you and I and all of us know who these teams are for the most part and what's going to happen. There's been a lot of speculation. Again, the announcement's going to be couched as opportunity even though as we mentioned there's a lot of teams and players and coaches that are going to be losing their jobs, but it's going to be what it is and I'm sure it'll just be the teams and nothing else. So it is what it is. But I'm sure Pat McAfee will be slapping the rock on the back and congratulating him as he always does. Is that his venture tomorrow? Powell will be on that as well, right? I mean Andy is that all that? I don't follow any of the college game day stuff. So Pat will be on there. Well I mean Pat. Yeah, pat McAfee's always on. He's always part of the game day stuff so they've, he's got that synergy going on This year anyway because he's quitting after this year. He said No, he said he is back. He said Herb Street. I didn't see that. He Keeps changing his mind. I don't know, I thought he said he was quitting. I don't know. Jay, I promise you there will be no schedule tomorrow. We're rolling this out. I think it's one step at a time, but I do not imagine here on New Year's Day we're going to get the schedule Max comments on that? Yeah, look, if you've been paying attention to the way these things are run, there is no way we're getting a schedule tomorrow with how this is being run. I mean no way. The game day staff in St. Louis has no idea when they're supposed to be working and they're just going to announce a schedule tomorrow morning. No way. So sorry. I mean it'd be nice. We lived through all this last year with the field of dreams and the Cashman fields of it all, but I don't what it time to be alive here. And then the other thing I guess last thing here because trailing, we'll get out of here trophies, pat, what do you want to see for the trophy? Do we want to keep X-F-L-U-S-F-L? Each division has its trophy and then we have a new one or does the US L because I think that says something or is it totally brand new and we got to say this, I think if we stay pat with the X-F-L-U-S-F-O division, I think we keep it. I don't think that's a crazy thing that to go on about. If it's going to be the XFL and USFL divisions, I mean keep it support that local business that you've been using that they use for the XFL because at least they know what to do and then I don't know, maybe you should just make the emoji with a giant U you of the shaking hands as the main trophy, but I would keep the same thing for that. I wonder who actually owns that trophy now, like the XFL division trophies for and whatnot. Is that just on the North and south? The little tiny ones not the main next one Showing that Bart Andre's house and he's just like, yeah, I have this. Yeah, Andy, you didn't seem so enthused. What new trophy? You don't like the X? Listen, I'm going to petition right now to make this trophy a giant poptart and if I'm going to riot, that's where I stand. But no, I mean if you want to keep the trophies, the same ones for the SL and XFL divisions fine. Make it part of that and rename. I don't know if they'll ever get around to renaming them. Obviously there's no camaraderie of Vince Lombardi trophy or anything like that, but if you're going to have the championship game between the two sides, then yeah, you're going to have to remake the trophy altogether and make something completely new. I don't know what on earth that would look like, but conceivably you would make a new trophy design. Where do we stand by the way on the two for the US VXL? Did we ever decide which one we'd like more? It seems like that always went back and forth. Well, oh in terms of the trophies, I think the USFL trophy looks a lot better. Am I in the minority there? No, but you can't drink out of it. Well the XFL when they had to flip it upside down and then they drank out of it. Yeah, I don't know. I like the USL one. That was one that I was happy to let the USFL guys take that WI Lost my ability to care about whose trophy is better so long ago. I do think for the sake of the identity of the leagues that they need new trophies but that has more to do with just building a brand and identity than me thinking one trophy is better than the other. I felt like Yeah, go for it Pat. The XFL trophy was too much of like we are trying to the league and we're doing new stuff and I'm just like, bro, it's a trophy. Make it look cool. Make it so you're championship on it. I don't need all this goofy stuff but I don't know, maybe we will get United by Player 54. Wow. Ken, I think we're talking this, the ads here, we didn't show a good picture of the ball. All of all the footage is all repurposed so anything you're seeing, I think we're going to get the same logo or the logos. I think we're going to get the same uniforms or we're going to get all that stuff. I don't think there's enough time in the world to kind do all that, but anything in that footage is all at max comments. But any of that is all carried over from some piece to you. I Really do hope they keep the Under Armour uniforms though. I would like to see the USFL teams brought in, get Under Armour uniforms and maybe get a little redesign because, and honestly I'd rather they just redesign all the uniforms and start over but They're not going to do that this year. Do you think there's possibly time to do that? Heck, if I know, but what I do know, what I do know is that if they keep it as it is and they have these different styles, it's going to look weird and clash. It's going to look unprofessional. No it's not. If you have the XFL division versus the USFL division and then you just, I really think, I think you just because people know it is the merged league. I think that and I don't know, am I that pat? Am I that crazy? I don't know. Rest in peace blob. That's all I got to say. Yeah, and Dave the wave. Yeah, I think Blob walked so that Pop-Tart man could run. So I don't really, I'm happy to lose the blob now. I think you Can use all these little hand singles now They can all be new whatchamacallit, new hand signals, the signal in plays. You go blob wave General. That would be what I would do and Stars. Stars Star would be a safety blitz. Wave would be Weakside, linebacker, blob blitzing the B gap. And then what's the other one? The general, I don't know, Maybe the league can hire for all the teams. Connor Stallions can be a consultant for the hub for all the team. Listen guys, I had my sendoff earlier this year with the PAC 12. I watched all those mascots wave goodbye to me. It felt like children graduating from kindergarten. It was like, hi guys. So whatever league I support apparently just dies. So Last thing here and then we'll get out. Interesting. They justed this the XFL but kind of this UFL. I mean I know this is just kind of mocked up right now, but I don't know. Looks all right. I like it. It's going to look good on the carpet at the dome, which won't have an opening day because motocross, Yeah, Andy thoughts. It really does look like the UFC logo. The more I look at it, it really does have that same type of font, but I actually do like the inverted. They kind of remind me of boomerangs. That's how I look at it. Yeah, it looks like two boomerangs on opposite sides of it. I actually kind of like that. Okay, maybe the F'S a little bit different but there's something unmistakable about it that just screams UFC to Me. Well it's a slanted, it's a bold italic. No, but I was told that they're not boomerangs. I was told that they were the exes of the XFL But you're okay, but now you're inverting the opportunity. Right? 'em outside down Opportunity. I'm 99% Opposite directions. Go Back. I'm 99% sure they took this from the Big 10 championship game logo that Fox has good call Because this is, I mean it's not the same but it is exactly the same style of logo. I guarantee you Fox made that because it's supposed to look like a football. They have full-time employees right Now. We like that. Yes, Yes. Yeah, exactly That. It's not original. I mean it's certainly not, I don't know, not I think it's fun, whatever. Are you buying the hat with that? At least with the weird XFL one. It was just kind of a clothing brand. It was just like, oh I got like what is XFL? Oh this is the new, I don't see anyone. I don't know. I don't want a shirt with that. I'm good. I'll go and get my couple, I'll get a Battle Hawk shirt for the new redesign for a couple gifts and I'll buy something from Royal Retros to support Dustin. But I'm weird about merch, you know what I mean? I run through some, the only thing I really want three quarter zip, you give me a three quarter zip. The under arm feeling, especially with the hoodie, especially when I'm coaching and whatnot. That's my thing. Give me a three quarter zip your boy's happy. It could pretty much say anything on it. So I'll rock it. Commanders are tied with the 49 ERs. What are we doing with our lives? This is the last thing. Ken's just asked this five times in the chat, so I want to just make sure we get to this before we get out. Not to hold everyone too long. Government agreement. Do you think in the government agreement the league had to have a plan to add teams to get to a certain number to make the government happy. It was my understanding that doing the hub format and having the local people working kind of supplemented that Max. Any other understanding of that? I mean you can say how you want. There's be, that's why the whole hinz ward thing of Mike Mitchell reporting Heinz didn't want to take 600,000 this year and then get a pay cut next year to be with the bras. And that's why Wade Phillips like take the money now. I mean there's no any of that. But I mean Max, they can have plans all they want, but I dunno, any other stuff on us, The government, there's no way the government is making them add teens because otherwise the whole reason this league even made it here was because they were allowed to cut down teams. I don't think the government is going to make the MAD teams otherwise the league would be dead. So no, I don't think there's any forcing of adding teams, adding roster size. Even not unless there's a union that makes some mad players. I'm hoping they'll keep XFL roster sizes and not USFL roster sizes. That's going to be a big deal because depth will be a problem if they keep the roster small. Well there were comments earlier about salaries and where you're not going to increase salaries because you'd have no competition. At least you could carry more players on there and like you said, to add depth to that. Pat, anything else? I'll give it Andy and then we'll do one more. We'll get out. I mean what we have to always remember about that salary comment was that was from someone who's no longer employed by the league, right? I don't think the U-S-F-L-L-M-L-M-P PA or whatever ever confirmed anything. So that was just kind of the Vegas Vipers president of team ops doing the Vegas team a solid. So while that information was obviously extremely important, it wasn't an official statement from the league. I think that was more of a hey, just giving you guys in the know type thing. And so while that was great content and great clickbait and all that goofy stuff, regardless it wasn't gospel and whatnot, I also kind of see the government not really caring that much. I could see this coming across John Feather's or Lindsey Graham's desk and him being like, what am I dealing or what bill do I have to what? Get over here intern. You know what I mean? You guys deal with this? Or it could have been one of those. When they package these bills into ridiculous, the bill will say something completely irrelevant and then they'll be like in the fine print oh X-F-L-U-S-F-L merger nonsense that it's coupled into funding Ukraine stuff or whatever. But yeah, I mean I don't think the government cares as much as I think it had to do with something, but I don't think it was our senators and top priority by any means. And I don't know, I think the government thing was important to bring up, but I don't think it was like, yep, you can't do this unless you keep 50% or whatever. I don't think they cared. Yeah. Andy thoughts and then I have a little breaking news here before we get out. This is exciting. I was just going to say I love that Pat brought up Lindsey Graham because that was the exact joke I made I think a month ago when they had that photo passing around of Danny the Rock and Russ sitting in that room with all the senators and me thinking, just thinking about the concept of them trying to explain to some of the senators about the concept behind a three point try and their kickoff style and they're just sitting there being like, sorry, what is this relevant? Why is the TV guy? Yeah, exactly. Like Lindsey Graham. Anyone got any questions? Lindsey Graham's like, so did you do your stunts for Jumanji or where Anthony Mackey's, like how many grams of protein do you eat? Lindsey? Graham's just asking like, no, can we get focused on the kickoff for player safety? And he's like, so when you were playing Clemson back in the day, what'd you see about this guy? And it's just like, oh yes, yes, yes. How did you suspended When you were doing the tooth fairy Real quick? Max, what is the X-F-L-U-S-L roster? And I have a little breaking news here, then we'll get out Breaking news. You Going to to remind me? But I think it was, wasn't it 45 active for the XFL and then 50 total. So five inactive. Yeah. And then One for XFL because of the quarter. They did the quarter both leagues did the quarterback inactive but dressed type thing. Yeah, but I thought that was included in the active roster. Not inactive anyway. I dunno. Anyway, Check this out. Check this out here before we get out. I keep trying to get it out of here. Tim just sent this over. Hey we got to look at the UFL ball here. Big game USA. I mean it's on the Fox set. Alright, Bold. Bold. We don't have the any Garcias signature on it here. Max initial thoughts will go around here. I'm glad that it's the NFL football but has the logo on it Very large. Just real quick, someone take the Sharpie. Yeah, we silver Sharpies. Yeah. Andy. Andy thoughts on this is bold. Yeah, figuratively and literally. Yeah. Yeah. Andy, what do you think? I want my ex's back. Dammit. I want my exes at the end of the football and give me them back. There was nothing wrong with those. I still want my individually team colored exes on the end of the footballs. Just give that back please. I want my chips. I want my chips. I want David Putney because I said so I want my lasers. There you go. This has gone on the rails here, like I said. So maybe we'll get a little shorts going tomorrow. Action Winter classic. If you're, I can subscribe if you're not, I know John Lewis joined as a channel member here at the beginning of the stream. I don't even think I can get back to that with all of that now, but I think it's like a bucket month support. So it makes me feel good. Yeah, I can't even get back to where that was. But you can join, join, become a new member. That's exciting here. Be a fan of that. I got that here. Where was it? Pops up the dang thing. But anyway, highlights your comments and all that stuff. It's fun. Here we go. So do that. Become a member and subscribe Andy. And I'll be here. We'll figure out Tuesday something with that. But God bless everyone. Stay safe new. Let's hope Commanders can figure this out here today. Get this loss going and then if you have any just prayer in your heart. Cracking big game tomorrow against Vegas Golden Knights eyes of the world on those winter classics. So I don't think we've ever, we're like oh six and one against Vegas. So just thoughts in your heart. But appreciate everyone and anything else before I get that? We're all good. I was laughing. I can't believe this one random dude on social media was trying to joke that the game was being played indoors with the roof closed at the stadium. And I thought that was horrible that people were trying to say that whenever, obviously they were just trying to protect it from any conditions before the game. They're just building the thing. But also it wasn't, they're like, oh, you're announcing, it was just the cracking, tweeting the photo out. They was like, hey, at three days it wasn't even like this is the official press photo of the thing. It was the cracking like, hey, this is coming up. So yeah, David, happy New year, pat. Everyone else, let's get out of here. And now I'm totally lost. We'll see you guys next time. Thanks.

Episode 171 - Is This the Darkest Timeline?

Hey guys, welcome to the Markcast Reid here getting on this today. Andrew Murray, the professor will be joining us shortly. He's on his way home from Professor Rain, but I always like to get the stream started. I got a lot stuff to talk about today, so we'll get into all of that. Appreciate it. It's always nice when I log on here. We've already got, we have a new member joining us. Christina, if you ever want to, I think it's a dollar a month. I set it up. You support the podcast that way. Always have a lot of excitement here, a lot of comments already. Excited to get into all this. Zach talking, show me Mike Mitchell. I spent about 40 minutes this morning talking with Mike, so I feel well apprised. I've been talking with a lot of coaching staffs and everything else. Today should be a lot to get into. Like I said, waiting Professor Andrew Mell, get on, we'll dig through everything. Crazy, crazy week. Really kind of debated doing the show this week. Just this was a really terrible week for the alt football community and I almost kind of wanted to name this episode like State of the Union or state of the League just because we have players, we're breaking news and we're sharing and we want out inside the insiders and we'll get into all of that. Most important thing for me as we start, shout out the Houston Roughnecks. Sounds like everyone's going to be gone. It sounds like we already had DPPs and everyone posting their goodbyes on Twitter. I know Mike Mitchell still reporting and I talked with him. Like I said this morning, supposedly that brand is going to remain. I want to get Andrew Murray's thoughts on that. Do we keep the roughneck name, bring in the gambler staff and players into that? I don't think that that is what all football seasoned ticket holders want. We'd be curious to see kind of the reception of that, but certainly sounds like potentially the roughneck brand still sticking around. I know Mike tweeted that out yesterday as well and so we'll see. But lots of staff obviously unfortunate here at timing before the holidays and all of that, so it's really unfortunate to hear. So first and foremost, wanted to make sure we got to all of that. We'll start getting the comments here. Like I said, waiting for Andrew. I will also just want to say I wanted to do this today, run through everything. We have leaked emails, we have leaked text messages, we have the USFL PA dueling press releases. We'll kind of get into all of that. There's a weird thing, and I think it was set up this week where December 21st and we were going to have announcements that date if you follow me, I never retweeted any of that, shared any of that. That's always probably a pretty good temperature check is talking about December 21st. I know I had a lot of comments on my channel. Are you doing the December 21st stuff that came and went, but I think that the heightened anticipation around that, and I think just people being offered the holidays led to a lot of angst here on Twitter this week. I know Scooby kind of steamrolled out the beginning posting to the UFL PA text to their members, which interesting to have texts coming out from the union that is also releasing statements saying that they're not involved in the negotiations with the league. So we'll dive into that, but I thought that was curious that we have Scooby's tweet or I guess it was his tweet of the text messages, but yet then the U-F-L-P-A comes out last night and that's really when Andy and I felt like we needed to do this episode, but U-F-L-P-A comes out last night and says, we are not negotiating any of this, so how do they know what's going on? Curious with that, we had Jeff Bette's tweets come out, he has since deleted them. I have screenshots of all of that. We'll get into that and what really kind of annoyed me was Mark Thompson who god bless him and stellar player and standout and he was a US LMVP and all that talking about we're out citing the insiders here and I'm coming for all these XFL reporters jobs generally the reason why a lot of leagues like the NFL have insiders is players are maybe more keen to not be releasing public information on their own Twitter accounts. Like I said, I noticed that Jeff had taken his down and I think there's this weird misconception of like, oh, you're all doing this for the clicks and you're doing this for the views and Mark, if you want the dollar 67, I'm probably going to make off the stream. If you want that to kind of out jobb me, send me a dmm, have someone reach out to Mark if he's so concerned about getting the jobs. Most of these guys, I can tell you Andy's waiting by here, streaming home from work to come on and do this show. Like I said, Mike Mitchell caring for his family talking to me for almost an hour this morning. This is not a, we're doing this for the money kind of thing. We're doing this, we support you guys, we support the leagues, we support the staff and everything, so I just wanted to make sure that was put out. I thought that was a very odd take one, we're outworking the people that are doing this for free and they're really just trying to spotlight you guys. So let's bring in Andy here. We'll get to some comments. I have Andy, we had probably 20 comments before we logged on here. Andy, are you done Professoring for the day? I dunno if I can hear you. Is my volume down? We'll get Andy's microphone. Oh, How about now? There we go. I've been talking to myself. I didn't know You could be an echo chamber, which seems to be a common thing these days, especially in this space. Andy, how are you doing here? I'll get these comments in a minute, but I need the welfare check. Like I said, I really wasn't even sure if we were going to do an episode this week. I've really gone back and forth and the Mark's post and stuff and the brand is posting stuff and the past post, but I felt like especially with the union stuff last night, there's so many questions people are talking, what does this all mean? I felt like we had to get on here, so how are you feeling here? I mean it's a whirlwind and honestly I'm just trying to keep pace as much as anyone else is, but at the same time there's almost a need to sort of step back and reserve myself from actually being a part of the entire discourse because it's coming from all angles and we've talked about this, we've chatted about this. This information is coming from multiple different places. I don't know if I want to use the word sources because sources is such a loose term these days and it's really gotten to a point where it's making the picture very muddy and convoluted. So for me, I mean it's just a matter of just keeping my head screwed on straight. I don't know how you're dealing with it, but for me, I feel that there are times where I have to sort of again step back and not really be so involved in the entire process because I don't know what the process is right now to be honest. Yeah, I can't imagine, and I've had a lot when we had the dueling UFL PA statements last night and I'm tweeting and we have a lot of Canadian viewers and they're like, I can't imagine being an outside viewer of any of this if you're a player not involved in either of these leagues right now. If you're a casual fan not currently following any of this, it just feels messy. Like I said, I know it's not the leagues, I'm not blaming the league for the vitriol this week where I think this was very self-induced of. We're pretending that this is coming this week. No one's given any indication anything's coming and then we're upset about that. I do not like how the league is handling some of these layoffs. I've been conversing with one of the roughnecks staff here throughout the course of the day and kind of feeling like maybe we were led on a little bit of, Hey, this is coming back or not. I know I was talking with one of the USFL coaches for weeks like, hey, maybe I could have pursued other jobs at this point. We were told, and we'll get to the news, obviously Scooby tweeting out that we've kind of known the eight teams. Mike Mitchell tweeting that out last week or two, whatever it was, time is nebulous, but we were told it was business as usual. If the merger wasn't going to happen, then the merger happens and spoiler alert, your team's done. So I think both sides, I can't imagine earnestly going forward if you're with either league here at this point as the player coach or staff, just kind of how all of this has been handled lately. Well, I mean that's really the bewildering thing is how much it seems like everybody's left in the dark. It's one thing for the media to be kind of shut out for people who, as you mentioned, people who spend their time actively looking through not only rosters, not only coaching staff, conversing with people and trying to figure out where everyone stands on the issue. It's one thing for the media to be shut out. It's another thing for the players and the personnel and the people who actually work in the leagues to be shut out. To me, the most bizarre part of this is that everyone is kind of being in their own realm of not, I don't want to say not reality, but in terms of knowing everybody has kind of their own knowledge or their own maybe idea of what's going to happen next and there's no solidified factual background to any of this that people can really look to and people are going about it and trying to create their own line, their own way of figuring out what's going to happen next to me. That's just a disservice for people who actually work in the leagues. Again, people who are actually involved, so they should be the ones that actually know or have at least a heads up of what's going on, but there doesn't even seem to be that. There doesn't even seem to be an indication or a hint as to what's the fate of your team? What's the fate of your roster placement next year? What's the fate of who is your training staff where you're going to get, obviously your payments, but even health insurance, the leak statement or the union statement being put out about, hey, maybe there needs to be players that use their health insurance benefits before it actually runs out at the end of the year. There's information out there about that, and again, this is coming from so many different angles, but it just seems to me that it's such a scramble to figure out who's going to have what in the matter of days. I mean this is the thing, it's the calendar returns. Now we're going to start getting into placements of contracts and who has what contract with what team and what's organization and we don't even know who's actually solidified who's actually going to be all of them. I know there's a lot of reports out there, but again, there's nothing set in stone and I think that's been a plague of a lot of spring leagues especially, but to see it happen here, it's really bewildering And what's weird to me is it's one thing when Mike tweets out, Hey, this is what I'm hearing subject to change, and you always get people like, well, that's how you keep your back pocket and then you can say, well, I would rather tweet that out and say subject to change and say this is finalized, here we go when it's not because I think then, and especially in this space, the narrative gets lost of where any of this stuff came from, right? Pro Football talk tweeted out, Hey, there's going to be eight teams. They don't have a source in their article. I feel like that is scooby's tweets that they sourced that and that's they ran with the story. Now maybe Pro Football Talk has someone else that reached out to them and said, Hey, this is what's going on, but it really feels like we take these tweets and again, probably going to be the case, but sitting there and saying, okay, this is a confirmed detail from the union that is also in the same week saying we're not involved in the negotiating table at all here is very weird to me. Is that I guess where we want to start here? Do we want to start with the Scooby stuff and we'll work chronologically through everything? Does that make sense? That's the only thing that's going to make sense at this point Reid, I think we're going to have to, So he tweets out here and I like Scooby, I've reached out, Hey, do you want to come on the podcast and maybe I'm Mr. anti-US FL here, but this came out again, a lot of this we're tired of the insiders and all of your, you guys still understand and it kills me now with this getting paid for Twitter and everything, the impressions you would need to generate on all football stuff to get paid even dollars on your Twitter is like I promise you it's not worth the time that you think it is people putting in, but this is Forester Jabon. As we're going through all this, we've been given the confirmation, Michigan, Houston, Memphis, Birmingham, this goes back, remember Mike had tweeted out the five and three saying that Houston was up in the air. I had heard at the time Houston was in the air now and I said, before you logged on, we have Houston Roughneck staff saying goodbye. I've been talking to Evan and I know he's talking because that was the team that he covered. Feels like at a minimum the Houston staff is gone, the Houston Roughneck staff and then whether they keep the roughnecks name, which seems very weird to me. I would like to get your thoughts on how do we sell, well Houston, it's still the roughnecks, but now you're going to have Curtis Johnson and whatever. That to me cries very foul. That to me makes absolutely no sense and it's the lack of identity that really kind of plagues the whole idea of transitioning the Houston team. Look, in fairness, I understand the idea of getting four USFL teams and four XL teams. If you're going to make this an 18 league, if you're going to downsize, you want to keep it fair even. But here's my thing. I think that there needs to be some sort of accountability for who's really pulling their weight here and the fact of the matter is the Houston roughnecks have pulled their weight twice in two different leagues in two different iterations of the XFL. The gamblers have not been there since the 1980s and they haven't had any home games in this new iteration of the USFL and they don't have any identity with the Houston team. I know people are going to come after me for that. I don't care. People have not had the time and energy to put into a team in Houston in the 21st century, So there's a tiny man driving the Go-kart around the lake that is very upset at you right Now. Be mad, don't care. Listen, I understand that people like the gamblers. I like the gamblers brand. I think it's cool. I think the uniforms are cool. I like the players, I like the coaches, I like the personnel that's on there, but to then take that staff and I'm not saying, look, I don't want anyone listening to their jobs. I don't want anybody losing their jobs. I don't want anybody getting displaced. But to then take that and displace a team like the roughnecks who has been there and who have not only players but also again an identity established with the actual city to just displace them and then basically paint over it and say, well, this is the new rough Next team and they've had a new rough next team from the last one, but that went out of bankruptcy 2020 to 2023. That's different. I've never heard of something like this where you just basically clean house and say, well, we're going to keep the name. Here's the whole different team. Can you imagine another league doing that? That's bizarre. That's really weird and if you want to have a dispersal draft, fine, but if you are trying to just paint over the same property and tell me it's the same thing, I don't get it. That to me makes no sense. I know they're trying to keep it fair and balanced. Again trying to keep it four and four, but why should the roughnecks personnel be punished in that case? What's the sense in that and to do that to someone like Wade Phillips who has been in the game for so long. I find that personally to be very disrespectful to him because I think he's put a lot of energy and time into something that he quite frankly doesn't need to. He is a legend. He has absolutely no reason that he has to even stay here and to do that to him I think would be a horrible disservice to him personally and his legacy and everything that he's given to Houston and his family has given to Houston, bum Phillips, his father putting in all that energy and effort into Houston. I just think it's really crooked in my opinion. Yeah, I got a comment here. If Jacob says are they going to bring back Wade Phillips? Like I said, I've heard as of today, Phillips is out. That was conversations we had had and I talked like I said with Evan and he had heard similar sentiments. I know that to me, we heard back in September a lot of the coaches and staffs were put on seasonal contracts and then Mike reported that and then now at least it feels like now the final layoffs kind of happened, and so I said I think that that's where a lot of these staff feel. Maybe they were let astray a little bit of like, well, we're going to bring you back, and then it's like, well spoiler, we're not now with all and potentially you could have went and got college jobs and kind of all of that stuff. We have a lot and where was YG on here and they never liked me too much, but the roughnecks or not us o team, the gamblers are, it's that simple. The Houston roughnecks have a non-zero number of season tickets already sold in Houston, whether it's at Rice Stadium or wherever it's going to be in Houston to play the gamblers have zero season tickets sold of any kind. It's also that simple and I think that they need to look into that when they're trying to, how can we alienate less fan bases? But like I said, to me, this isn't the answer of rebranding the gamblers as a roughnecks and getting rid of a lot of the people that made the roughnecks so exciting to watch right on the field and also the coaching staffs and Houston had an incredible with AJ Smith and with Wade and all that, I don't think you can get rid of that. It feels like a shell at that point. It's kind of very odd. Listen in my opinion. I think this just shows that, look, people don't understand that what happens is when you disillusion a franchise or disillusion your fans, especially the community, they take that personally. Okay, I know people look, I've lost my football team and they left. Everybody didn't like the ownership they left. I know what it's like to lose your team, but I also know what it's like when your team is being messed with and you mess with the fans and you mess with their expectations, you also mess with their capital that they've invested into the team. You can't again try to tell them and turn around and say, well, you're buying a ticket to the Houston Roughnecks. Look, maybe they don't care who's playing, but that seems to me disingenuous. I wouldn't want to buy a season ticket to a certain property, be told that it's different or be told that everybody's going to be gone the next season for seemingly no reason other than there needs to be a transition in this league that's reforming. Again, it's disingenuous and I think for people to say that it's that simple to just kind of plug and play and just place in another staff, it doesn't understand what it's like to actually have that happen to your team and also to have a team in your community be messed with just so blatantly, I don't really get what this is really going to accomplish other than are they just going to keep burning bridges? I mean that's the thing. They have to be so careful about this. You can't just go burning bridges or saying, Hey, well sorry we can't bring you back, but maybe next time, what next time? Who says there's going to be a next time? I mean unless the only thing that might give me pause is thinking about players is if they really are desperate and they want to stick around and come back and play, but you're going to lose somebody, you're going to lose some people in this transition. Your idea is can you either get them back or can you get other people into the fold after the fact? But again, this is built on trust and it's just kind of to me in a way of eroding that trust. Gregory here, Gregory is big stallions fan and we'll talk about the Birmingham, the Arlington hub versus the Birmingham hub and all of that, which I think have expected for a long time, but it still seemed like it made news this week. It has nothing to do with XL. Gregory wants to know what do I want? It has nothing to do with XL versus us L when you're already going to be giving up season tickets in Vegas, season tickets in Seattle, season tickets in Orlando, you need to keep markets where you have season tickets already sold and so to me it makes sense to placate everybody. We got to have the four and four, but we're talking such minute money amounts, but it means so much because of the league and how frugal they're going to be. I just can't imagine them refunding those 5,500 or whatever season tickets you're going to have there and then trying to resell 'em or transferring people over that. To me, I think you need to, knowing you're already going to be either breaking the Cashman lease, they paid that in cash ahead of time, that's kind of sunk costs. I think you need to keep the money where you have it and to me it just doesn't make sense. It doesn't matter what league it is, it matters what the tickets you have sold. I mean that's the thing, they better get refund. I know it's not a high possibility maybe. I don't know what their policy on that is going to be, but that seems again, such a disingenuous thing to do to people who've invested their time and money into something already that they already knew was probably a temporary property. I mean realistically, Reid, I don't know about you and your Seed Dragons fans or your fellow comrades, but I'm not sure what their mentality is when they're buying merchandise or tickets and thinking, oh yeah, this league's going to be around for so number of years. I don't know if that's how they think, but maybe it's just a in the moment kind of thing, but everybody goes through it, but at least you expect there to be some sort of continuation of it in some form, right? It's hope you're building off hope and if you're taking that away from people, then financially I think you have to recompensated people or just find a way to at least say you're sorry. I mean that's the thing. I think they're really struggling the leagues, both of them are really struggling with how to go about it. I think that's why we just haven really at the end of the day, I think that's why we haven't heard anything. I think they're really afraid to get backlash and eventually you're going to have to rip the bandaid off because newsflash, we are three months away from the new league starting. Well, yeah, we're less than a hundred days. What was it when they tweeted out when it was the XFL tweeted out the intent, whatever it was when they had turned off the comments on everything. Yeah, we're so afraid to backlash on Twitter that we're turning off the comments on all of this stuff. I think it was the merger announcement or one of the close to around one of the announce Announce where the teams put out and they have the comments turned off on all of that. I will Elizabeth here saying this is Seattle fan. I don't, to me my resentment and I tweeted out yesterday just because I was so frustrated with all of this and I tweeted out this is how the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a whimper and everyone like, oh, your butt heard about the sea dragons. That was fun. Like you said, we bought in, I mean originally we bought in 20 18, 20 19 because we thought this is going to be a car crash and we're going to watch this with Vince McMahon and that's kind of what we thought of. God, even if we get to go to one game, this is going to be awesome and then next thing you know you're bought into all this. I think I went to three Sea Dragons games this year because of the Kraken and all of that stuff. I'm certainly not tied into that part of it. It is more just how all of this has been handled. That's kind of upsetting me about all that. The other question we have for Jacob, and we'll start moving to some other news here. This is good. This is interesting talking about Texas and the Houston as well, when the Texans now are on the upswing. I'll be curious if this is another similar to like, Hey, Seattle was a really good market and then we got Kraken and the Seahawks all that. Then we go back again and it's not like if you do this with Houston where you pull the rug out with these teams and then now we can watch the Houstons and CJ Strouds the face of our community for the next decade. Do I need to buy into an alt football team now if I'm a Texan fan right now, I'm over the moon. Yeah, that's an interesting argument, especially considering where some of these markets were most successful, right? When DC started with the defenders, the idea was, well, a lot of people were very unhappy with Dan Snyder and the Washington football team Commanders are just formerly known as Redskins. All those things, all those iterations people were just upset with because they hated Dan Snyder and they're like, I don't want to spend money on this team fair, but now they're under new ownership. Does that narrative start to change a little bit? Although it seems like DC is doing well in terms of ticket sales. They're doing extremely well still, but does that narrative change going forward? St. Louis, you lost your team. You don't have a team. You're upset at Stan Kronke. You want to basically show it to 'em and tell 'em to stick it with a sun, don't shine, and that's what they basically have done. They've shown up at droves and they've supported that team really well. Houston, as you mentioned, the Texans were in turmoil. They were really just really down on their luck and not operating very efficiently or in some ways ethically for a while, and yet they were able to pull themselves out by their bootstraps and CJ Strouds now the second coming of sliced bread, so now it's suddenly this is a new thing for them. So these markets, are they able to survive independently? Whether or not the main football team or another product is doing really, really well, can they compete in that market? It really depends, honestly. Again, it's such a niche thing that you'd hope that they were able to do enough background work that they're able to, again, this is why I think we've talked about especially establishing yourself in the communities. You need to get grassroots in these communities. You may not always have the success, the team success or be the shiny new object because somebody else is going to come along and there's going to be a new team that suddenly everybody can support, but can you maintain your brand and your identity to the point where you're able to keep all those people within your circle and able to build upon that going forward? And that question has never been answered because these leagues haven't been around long enough to answer that question, and so we really are not sure DC and Houston might be the first perhaps examples of seeing, okay, does the narrative change if the other team across town is starting to finally pull their own weight? Let's get here. A couple more things on the Scooby. He was talking here a meeting. The final, and this is when I kind of knew we're not getting into the announcements this week, like coaching meeting. We're finalizing the Memphis staff. I'm like, they're not announcing any, if they're finalizing the staff, they're not, but one of the US football media accounts I think tweeted out Philippo is going to be Memphis head coach. They're reporting that, which tracks to me, I mean obviously losing the Breakers, and he seemed to be a very popular and successful coach in that and Coach Flip taking over for Memphis, right? They lost, right? Am I tracking that all correctly? Yeah, he is moving over and transitioning for Todd Haley and taking over Memphis and you're right, yeah, John d Felipo was really well regarded, especially for the healthy issues he dealt with and battling through that season especially to work through with that team. A lot of people seem to respect him a lot after his tenure and I did too, so I'm happy to see him get his shot. I just for the New Orleans fans, sorry, you're not going to get another team. You're not going to be able to get that additional piece. Now it's going to go back to Memphis, which again had a market, Who is it? Our Breakers friend that was like, I can't wait till we host. I can't wait till we Knew. Oh, Lou. Yeah. Yeah. I mean look guys, I get it. It's a pipe dream, but I mean that's the thing. There's so many breathe, there's so many takes, there's so many prediction models that I've seen over the last, not just the past couple weeks, I mean the last half year that just were so erroneous and just completely off base, but I mean, look, I get it. People want to have their fantasy, okay, you want to have your dream of what you're going to get out of this or what out of your team. I mean, look, I'm screaming from a mountaintop almost every other day being like, boy, I wish San Diego got a team and it's not going to happen. At least in the foreseeable future, I can pitch for it all I want, but the reality is people get chosen over other teams for different reasons. For a lot of players. I mean, again, people are losing their teams and that sucks and you're not going to have people in the markets that are going to support those teams. So I get it, but again, if you're going to feel that way, make sure you take time out of your day to reflect upon the coaches and the players and everybody who works in the organizations and see what happens to them too. Again, this is, I mean it's really just pouring water in the ant farm at the moment. Just to get onto this before we move on, off of Scooby stuff, so we had talked because we get the thing now, Hey, pro football talk is reporting that it's going to be, and again, not saying it's not going to be eight teams not saying all this stuff. I just like to always keep track of where these things come from. When are things official? Things have not been official. Four teams survive, they come there, four teams have survived, four have not. They combined, I can't get rid of this. There we go. Can't get rid of this video, combine whatever have associated, I haven't informed the UFL Players' Association form dismembered, so we saw Scooby's text. We're reporting this. Again, just remembering where all this came from and again, this is all probably going to come to fruition anyway, but I just think that's funny how these reports come out and no one takes the time to backtrack where did this actually come from? So to me, this is my Florio seeing scooby's tweets and then tweeting out, hey or posing the article like, Hey, this is happening. Well, again, I think that's why people feel emboldened to just say things because they can get away with it and they might get clout from somebody else piggybacking off of their information, which may not be entirely accurate. Now, maybe in the moment it might be, but again, we're doing projection models here and this is why Mike Mitchell does his reporting and it also is able to cover himself saying this is subject to change. There's things that might not come through because guess what? Listen, for everybody who wants to go ahead again and doubt Mike Mitchell, he communicates with us consistently and there are things that he shares with us sometimes that maybe indicate that certain people may know and some people may not. Again, there are people who are in the dark who are in their own sources or are in their own organizations that don't know what's going on, so how in the world are we going to be able to really confidently stand here and say, well, based on what this has said or what this person said, that this is where it's going to go. I mean, there's people six months ago saying, St. Louis is going to host the XFL championship game in 2024. How'd that work out? How'd that work out? I mean, that's the thing. There's all these, I cannot tell you the number of tweets that I have saved of people who have predicted and just outright said something that was going to happen and now has either been completely dismantled or is very much in doubt because of what's going on right now because again, everything is just so much routed in darkness. We had a couple comments here, bot Tanner praying for all the people loosened their jobs. Like I said, I started off the show. That to me is the most important paramount above anything else, Jenna, everyone's welcome to be a Renegades fan. Jenna's always something for That. The winner circle. I get it, Jenna, And then we have the comment here. Gregory wants to know, are the stallions going to be America's spring football team? That is to be determined. It could be the battle if we get to us because we will get to the conferences here if we get to US FL versus XFL, St. Louis versus Birmingham one winner, the rule of the mar that might be worth all of this. If we get to that, if June 7th or whatever the championship game is, if it's the battle hawks versus stallions one winner rules 'em all. I think that's pretty exciting. I think St. Louis is going to endear themselves to a lot of people and they still do because they lost their team. Again, that's the biggest thing. They're able to, and they just show up in droves. Those people really believe in the team and I think their personality is very, I don't know if you agree with this, but I feel like the battle hawks are the most WE team of any spring football team. These people are just mad men and there's always really crazy stuff going on around that team. The fan base is really passionate. They're very outgoing. I believe that franchise sells itself the best in a lot of ways, especially in this concept. It really does. I think that's the emblematic poster child of you want a spring football team, you want the idea to survive this, is it Birmingham, I think, from a success has done an excellent job. Obviously they run their organization very well now have they endeared themselves to the city of Birmingham? See, here's the thing, and I know there's a lot of people who will get mad at me for saying this, but I am not so sure that even their own community has completely sold on their existence yet, Gregory is I, I know Gregory is going to come after me and a lot of people are, but look, I just don't know if they've really collected enough people to be able to say that confidently. I know there's Birmingham fans out there. I know there are a lot of good stallion fans I talk to sometimes, but that city itself, I don't know, has really sold themselves on that property and if they're going to be America's team, I think they need to be Birmingham's team first. So that's just where I stand right now. I'm just going to put that out there. Comic binge, love this show. Love these. I appreciate that. Like I said, give a thumbs up on the video. We have a new member join today, which is exciting. YouTube is doing that. Hey, we'll pay you to start the membership drive. So we had Christina join, but I think it's a buck a month, but I think it ends up kind of boosting the channel up to kind of have that membership thing going. I want to get to this. YG is talking about this supplemental draft. We're in a very, and this is why we'll get to Jeff that I got all this ready to pull up. We are in a very precarious time right now because this is why I didn't think the 21st thing was going to happen. I work, I do weddings, and then I work in the corporate world, and to me this week is kind of almost a holiday week people are in the office, but I was getting a lot of emails like, Hey, we'd like to hire you to do this video. I'm like, oh, sure. Let me know when you want to connect. We'll get back to you in the new year. It's one of those we're going on vacation, which I don't know if you saw that Zoom, the TikTok where the guy thought the EOD meant end of December and not end of day. It was getting ready to get to work back in the new year. But anyway, they're talking about a draft next week. I don't see a whatever this draft is happening before an announcement, and I don't see an announcement happening on Monday Christmas day. I mean, unless they're putting something out there on the 26th, but then we'll get to all the gnet and that to me, this is a weird time Now. It's almost like you got to take a snooze break until the new year. Oh, yeah. Well, that's one, and also, here's the thing, if you're going to have a supplemental draft, well then you would be petitioning to advertise it, or at least you'll be trying to put it out there a little bit more. I don't know about that. Not if you're the exit failure, you're not. We'll send you an email when it's done. This is the, okay, so here's the other concern with this too, is the problem is if you're going to have these events, then are you going to be able to actually advertise them correctly? I mean, that's the thing. We talked about the dispersal draft. I mean, we have the concept of the dispersal draft. Do we even know? It Could be really cool though, but that could be so cool because it's like to me, sorry to cut you off. To me, the dispersal draft is even better than the supplemental stuff last year. These are all stars from the other teams. It's like survivor all star who's making the cut. That to me is almost a bigger deal. Who's going to get left out and who's going to get on these teams of all these superstars that just happened to be on the wrong side of Thanos to snap? Well, that's the thing. I think the idea is really cool. I just don't know if they're actually going to put it out there because the problem is you're still trying to piece together or find out how to communicate the message to your fans that, Hey, we're an A team league going forward and this is what's going to be, they're still afraid of even just announcing their existence, and so you can't even do that, that I don't expect you to put out any information about a dispersal draft. That's something that would be after the fact of, or just last moment it happening, and then suddenly they tell all the players, oh yeah, by the way, you're on this team. I just want to let you know, okay, now we'll put out the information, put out the roster list. They're not going to actually advertise it. And that to me is a huge disservice to the idea of the league if you're going to do it going forward, Reid, it just seems to me like they're not even confident to announce their existence because they're worried about what's going to happen when they do, and that to me is such an undercutting of the entire process of actually being a part of this new idea or being actually merged league because they're afraid of stepping on people's toes, which inevitably you're going to do. They've already done and you're going to upset people just accept that, but I feel like they almost can't. Yeah, they're paranoid about that. And a couple of thoughts on this and the one we're talking the draft timeline and we can pull up, this is all v Jake Russell via, of course, we're tracking the narrative here. V Jake Russell, who's been on the show, he's a DC guy via Jeff est tweet, which we're deleted, but I have them if you want the proof in the pudding here, but Mike's talked in our group chat and like I said, I talked with Mike for a long time this morning. This is going to be a rollout. This is going to be a rollout. We're going to have multiple days and all this stuff. This isn't going to be so just to me that in five days we're doing a preliminary draft, but we still, I think you got to get all this other stuff locked down. We've already seen what's going on with these players and tweeting and the ettes and Scooby rights of the world. I think you need to get this stuff locked down, and as you said, it's so weird to me this, we're so afraid to upset anybody at this point, and it's never been understood to me with everyone, with Danny and the Rock and all of this involved. I've watched wrestling most of my life and for years and years wrestling and Vince McMahon tried to, we got to get more casual fans. We got to get more. We got to advertise on nascar, we got to get Bob Barker on the show. We got to get Jeremy Pivot on the show. We got to get all this stuff we need. Meanwhile, neglecting the hardcore fans, right? Spoiler alert, it's your hardcore fans are going to be the ones to go, Hey, Andy, come over. Let's watch this thing tonight. I got this thing going on. It's not going to be, they're going to come out and go, it's the UFL and we're getting rid of these teams, but we're united and it's going to be the XFL versus the USFL and all that. I think you get a little bit of a casual bump for that, but what you're doing in the meantime is, and we've said this on the show and you and I and Max and everyone, you're eroding that hardcore fan base that you're going to need to rely on to kind of be your gorilla marketing. It just is never equated to me that they don't understand that. I don't get it either. I don't think they think that they can start big, they can start macro and then work their way down. That's not how it works. You have to start with a base and then move your way up, and I don't understand why they have never really been able to connect that idea either. It's perplexing, and again, it's a bit disrespectful. I know that's a strong word, but it is a bit disrespectful to the people who've been there and done their work and actually been involved with this entire process, and people have been so patient throughout all of this. I mean, God knows you and I both and our entire media chat have just been through the ringer trying to get parsed through all this information and trying to figure out what's going to happen next and going through all of it. I mean, there's no just kind of stepping away from it for a while and then coming back. I mean, this has just been day in and day out trying to figure out what's going to happen next. And it's so patience testing, and that's something that you don't really need to do or should do for your fan base or for the people that you want consuming your product. So I get the idea of trying to appeal to more casual viewers. I know all of them. I mean, they're all macro minded people, all of them. I mean the XFL and the SFL are both that way. Now I know the USFL does their own budgeting and their own way of approaching it from the hub model, but it's Fox, of course. Fox is looking at this and saying, why aren't we making money? Or Dwayne, Danny and Red Board Capital are looking at it and saying, why aren't we making money? Because guess what? They already do make money in a lot of other ways. So that's going to be a macro mindset, and to me that sort of is why maybe this isn't working. And just to stay really quick, I mean Vince McMahon for all of his faults, I think understood at a core level what it meant to have a core fan base to have people to start with and to be able to work off his home market. He, I think, knew how to grow it. Did he grow it into a huge property? Did he work with wrestling and make it a global phenomenon? Yes, but he had people to start with and at grassroots to start with, and that's where it ultimately comes from. A couple comments here, and then I want to get to some of the, and I think I need to go into the Jeff's tweet, Jeff Bette's things to get a little bit more on that. David's been asking a lot about the announcement. Again, this was kind of self-inflicted wounds on the XFL community. It was funny to me that a lot of people tweeted that like, oh yeah, but Scooby posted and Jeff posted, so it's okay. It's like, well, wasn't what No people said there was, Brandon said, sorry, sorry, Brandon made videos. They're just coming this week. Mark made videos. It's coming this week. I did not because it wasn't coming this week. So getting Jeff's tweets out, that doesn't mean that that was correct. I hate these false narratives of all that stuff. Andy talk and the mini drafts is so insignificant. I agree with that, but I think you need to get these player whatever figure out and under league contracts and NDAs and all that stuff before, I don't think we can do a dispersal draft next week, not have everything announced and then be like, now you got everyone running around. I've been cut from all these teams or this is gone. I just think you're going to get further, further out. This information is going out to all of these players. Pat's saying, do we not think it's done already? I feel like the DPPs, what makes you feel like this is figured out? There's not one ounce of anything in the last three months that has made me, I have dms from coaching staff that say, we've really jacked right now. This sucks. Nothing about this feels like it's going to be figured out that way, and then you can, if you want to have any of this tanner, hopefully they'll budget a little bit more for advertising. We're talking, I think it was Jeff's tweets or we're talking about the player pay very similar to the XFL, the 5,300 a week or whatever, and players up in arms we're not going to get paid more money. No, when you go from two leagues to one league, you're not going to get paid more money. When the a f went away, Vince McMahon didn't raise rates for the XFL players. He goes, well, now I can pay them less. Nowhere else to go. Any comments on any of that stuff, Andy? No. Sorry, that was a little bit of getting some reed rage. Reed rage. I expected that come earlier. Honestly, look, no, I mean that's the thing. The idea of it is that they're not going to downsize and then suddenly pay people more. That's not how it works. Usually when a merger happens or when anything like that happens, people are trying to cut costs and trying to figure out what they don't have to spend money on first, and that's the most efficient way for these leagues to operate if they realize they don't have to add more money and put more money into the resources they're trying to consolidate so that they can survive going forward. But paying higher payer salary for them isn't the most economic model of keeping that going forward. Now, is that unfortunate for the players? Yeah, of course. I mean, the unions would probably argue the same thing. It's saying, well, now you have more capital. Why don't you use it on your players? But that's not how the business is going to run. You can argue for that, and you could fight for them, of course, Do it, and they should and they should. I don't mean to be cursed about it, but that's just not how it works. Yeah, well, I just think it's going to be hard to dissuade them from thinking otherwise if their whole model here again is keeping it in-house and having everything be able to save money and cut corners at certain spots. I mean, that's how the USFL went, right? I mean there's that mental, again, what's the mentality inside of the building? That's the thing. What is it between both of these? We're still trying to figure out. I think that's also why we're not sure what's going on here because sometimes there's just this fusion of both ideals that were so different in how they approach things. Now, I know Danny Rock had ideas of maybe doing a hub themselves last year. They deviated from that and they wanted to have all eight cities, and maybe they went to the USFL table and told them, said, Hey, this is not going to happen. We're going to try and do it all eight teams. Although then we heard things, I mean this thing, we heard things a few months ago saying, well, there's going to be hubs now and there's going to be 12 or 10 teams and they're going to do this. It's like, okay, well, clearly they're going to have six hubs, and it's like, okay, and then that didn't happen Again. It didn't happen because that wasn't solidified. It might've been a conversation inside of the circle at that time, but it was not a decision that was set in stone. So no, I mean that's the thing. Do I think they're all going to try and save money? Yes, but do I think they're going to be able to mix all of their ideas together and make it work? I mean, again, it's this just weird fusion that's going on between both sides, so to be concerned about getting more money as a player, that should be your concern. I don't think that's a major concern for them because I think that's not factored into how they're going to try and run their business going forward. And this seems something I was talking with Mike today and about maybe the timelines and level of concern with both of these leagues and coming to this merger right now because talked, this certainly isn't a merger out of strength. This is a merger out of survival, and it's like you're in science class and you're paired with your least favorite person in the world and you're like, you need to figure out how to do this thing, and you're like, but way, none of us want to be in this situation together, but we need to do that. Let's get to Jeffrey's little emails here. This was interesting, so this was kind of the big kerfuffle yesterday, and Jeff deleted all this, which again, if you're a player in one of these leagues, this is why you don't do this. I can't imagine that this was probably about this, but this according to from Jeff, this was from the director of team operations for the Vegas Vipers to him, so take that for what it is. Yes, it's an official XFL email, but I don't know the insights of the director of team operations who's in charge of travel and lodging for a team that is not making the merger is going to be a part of this. So that's why I didn't tweet all this stuff out yesterday because if I'm going to talk about this and we're going to have this on the screen, I want to give the context to that because I think this could be, I don't think it's very challenging to be like, well, they're getting rid of eight, so they're probably going to have to do a draft with the other age, and they're probably going to have to protect your, I think it's easy to prognosticate all of that, but just this isn't like this was sent out from Rush brand and to team officials. This is what we have going on. I mean, for most players who are involved in these discussions or at least trying to be involved in these discussions, I mean, it goes without saying, you have to be careful about sending out information like this and just posting it for everybody to see, and again, it seems to me the thing is That's a good point. By David, I mean, could the email be fake? I mean, that's the thing, or going to Be something from a month ago that changed. It could have been, and now it's not anymore. Is it information that just, yeah, it's so fluid and it's something that's just going to continue changing. I mean, that's the thing. I think, again, it's all this fluid information and players can say they have their ear nailed to the floor and say, oh, we know what's going on. We have the beat on this. We know what's happening. Mark Thompson would like to tell us how much of a journalist he is, so I just don't get why the need to post out some of this information. Again, if it's something that was passed around a month ago and then suddenly got to your doorstep and you think that this is the final version of it, it may not be. That's the thing. So I can't take any of these dates solidly. Do they sound good to me? I mean, sure. The training camp date sounds solid. I mean, the calendar makes sense. Again, that's not set in stone, so why is that something that would necessarily be solidified here? I mean, the details and the money, all of this is not something that has, I don't think any of it has been solidified, so that's why I don't get what's the purpose of it being put out there by a player who thinks that they're doing the community of service when in fact it could just be old information. Yeah, It's clout YG here. Jeff Bede is in the players union and guess what? The players union put out a statement that they have not been involved in the negotiations with the league. I not trying to be rude here, this we are in all this kind of stuff. We're not involved in any of this and so yes, I understand that. I want to just, when you put out things, this is confirmed. These are confirmed. We have confirmation from the leak. Just I want to just take, this might all be correct but you got to take it one step at a time here. Mike Mitchell has said he has not heard that these are the divisions XFL versus USFL, like these conferences. I think that would be cool. I don't know if that is what it is. To me that makes sense and you call it the United Football League. Again, all of these things make sense. It's just contextualizing and kind of knowing where we're at. Reed. I don't think I've ever seen a union turf war. That is a new thing for me. Two Union. Well we'll get into that. To me that was bizarre. I've never seen something like that but I mean that's the thing. The union statement's being put out about what has been involved, who's been involved and why they've been involved, even that information seems to be superfluous and I again, yes, Jeff bet's part of the players union. Have they necessarily had those members being part of the negotiating table? Again, that seems to be very much up in the air, so again, I don't know how you can really take that as gospel at this point. Yeah, Scott has, and this is a good, it just seems like we're taking things out of assumption. A couple texts. There's no official statement again, and that's why I really struggled this whole week. I've been texting Andy, do we want to do some this week, do we not? How do you feel? I don't want to be, but I felt like there was so much stuff this week that we needed to just get down here and say this is at least where we're at and this may or may not be true, but just like this is the information we have and this is kind of how I'm processing it. The things we know for sure, roughneck players, roughneck, excuse me, roughneck staff publicly thanking the league and saying, my time is done in the XFL. That is something we can work with some of this other stuff. You just got to be a little scrutiny. I just wish there was some sort of, I don't know, state of the union address or something of that nature where there's just somebody from one of these leagues, I don't care who it is or the merged league or whatever, somebody comes out and has some sort of statement or is able to mention something in the nature of here's what's going on, here's what we can tell you. Here's things that if you want to ask us questions, we'll be happy to answer 'em, but we can't tell you everything that's going on right now. Just something like that or be able to get some sort of line of communication as opposed to rush Brandon blasting emails out to everybody and telling them that there's, I mean the business as usual moniker, I mean that was one of the most ominous things that we've seen in the last few months is people being told, well, we don't know if you're going to be around, but anyways, keep pretending that you're going to be around for the foreseeable future. Again, there's not even a forethought, forethought of what's going to happen when those people are now out of the job and you have no words or anything, no media or anything to really back up what you proclaimed was going to happen going forward. David, you're right on a hundred days, so congrats. This is the world I haven't had Jason, excuse me, David, too many comments on David, hope you're subscribed and all that stuff. Haven't seen David comment a lot, but yeah, this is kind of where we're at, but even this email, the new league may be creative by the beginning of January. Given this, I would highly recommend the doctor's appoint is supposed to be booked If you have paid medical, the new league maybe creative again the pay makes sense and Andy and I did mean it was a three hour episode, but we did like an hour and a half deep dive of all the pay structure and all that stuff back with the XFL and the USFL in 2020. What would that have been? Three, it's going to be a mixture there. I'll be curious what they do with the union and I want to get to that before we get out of here. We can do, I don't know how long anyone has time to spend on this today, but how do you unionize where you have four teams are in a union and four teams have voted not to be in the union with the XFL. I don't know what you do with a quarterback pay where the XFL famously paid up for the Brett Huntleys of the world and the US FL did not and McLeod Bethel Thompson got the same rate as everyone else. There's a lot of besides just is it the roughnecks or the gamblers? There's so many minute details in all of this. That's why some of these emails, this can't all be solidified right now. I just don't believe that. Well, I mean again, the ominous part of this, aside from the maybe created part, which is just to think of it as a 50 is a coin flick proposition is just wild, but also again, the word highly as you see in that sentence that says, given this, I would highly recommend that all doctor's appointments be booked as soon as possible by the end of the year to ensure we are covered. If you have medical paid for by the XFL, be able to actually be covered in your healthcare costs like I was mentioning at the top of the show. I mean just the idea of like, okay, the health insurance is going to run out in a week that's going to be gone just poof, it's over. I mean that seems like a very just ominous notion as well. Again, they've mentioned things here in this email about there being players that are being released and not being able to sign with A-U-S-F-L team, which again, there were reports yesterday about potentially or reports I should start putting in quotations ideas that there may be A-U-S-F-L and exalt division, which I thought was just a pipe dream and the thought, but there was no mention of that actually being going forward that those weren't going to be two separate divisions. I don't even know if that's true. When you say a team or players signing in this league, what moniker are you even referring to it as? Again, are you signing with a UFL team? Even that part is just completely up in the air again, with even the namings of these leagues or if they're separate or if they're divisions or what this is so all over the place. Well, and even where this feels like it's operating where they have here at the bottom players, if you're dissolved from the XFL or USFL team, you're not going to be able to resign with the other league. You got to wait and see if you're picked up by one or the other. I guess is that competitive advantage? I don't understand the mentality behind that. If you're cut and another team, okay, well you can only be reassigned the first draft by if it's another USFL team and then the super supplemental draft, you can be like there's just so much there where these rosters are already pretty full. Who the hell is even making if you're the stallions here, right? Are you bringing in another 30 guys of this supplemental? I don't know. And why is there a competitive clause there in the first place? Again, in terms of signing with these other teams, I thought these were supposed to be again, a merged entity. I thought they're all under the same umbrella. What are we arguing for here? This is supposed to be a collective effort of these players going back and forth. It still doesn't even seem like that's completely set in stone. There's a solidified notion that they are just going to be able to hop ship over to another team and like you said, I mean these rosters are very filled out. We cover a lot of players who have had their shots and their training camps and be able to get into the NFL or the CF, but I mean there wasn't a mass exodus of 500 players. I mean a lot of these people are still around. A lot of them are still under contract and they're still being placed on these rosters because they weren't able to make an NFL team or even go to another league. So I mean that's the thing. I don't understand where all that player movement is going to be. The dispersal draft is, again, going back to that is a cool idea in terms of reallocating some of these players, but there's only so many people that can go to their teams and the top end players will. But again, the mid-level and lower tier, I hate to say those words. I think everyone's has their own level of talent, but you know what I mean, the non star players are going to be put, I don't know where they're going to go. That's the thing, so well they're Talking here, so prior to 1220, and I don't know if you can see my cursor prior to 12 said the XFL teams will protect 42 players only on the rosters, the release, so that's what are they carrying right now? They have up to 90, but it's not like the number here over the summer. I don't see this happening in five days over Christmas and then coming into a supplemental drafter on the or else. That's a really terrible, terrible way to run a business here. Again, that's an email blast that's just laying people off via email and that again is very disingenuous. The fact that you even tell people that that's what's going to happen, I mean I can't imagine it being the week of Christmas. I mean that to me just does not seem, the shoe does not seem to fit and I don't understand why that's the idea and if that is the idea, that's awful. That can't be the way that they're going to announce this to everybody. They have to at least wait until after the new year. But again, I think because of the situation with all the contracts running up until the end of the year, I think that's why there may be this desperation to get something done, but that's kind of how the email words it. I don't know if that's necessarily, again, what's happening on their end, their side of the bargaining table and if that's really what's going to actually transpire here in the next week. Again, it's just such a mystery. Even going into yesterday was such a mystery. There was ideas of what could happen and then nothing really happened, but then there was a lot of people who were putting out their own reports or tweets. It's almost like people were just putting in their own, it was like madlibs, it was just choose your own adventure here, fill in the blank, see what you think is going to happen and this is what I want the outcome to be, not actually any solidified information. The other thing I'm just curious with getting into this stuff finalized just fiscally for next year, I don't know if there's any benefit to locking down some of these contracts and stuff of next year just in terms of getting all that stuff figured out. Just the end of this and then we'll get to the union stuff, then they're dissolved, they're not going to be able to be released prior we all that. Then there's going to be a super dispersal draft. You do not need to do anything. I don't know. I don't want to JE dad's like a friend of the show and I don't want, and again, this was probably accurate or at least whatever at some point it feels, I don't know. Any other thoughts on this before we get to the union union mess? Well, that's the first time I heard also the terminology super dispersal draft. I had heard that term. I had not heard that term before. I mean it makes it sound like a grand sale, but I had not heard that exact term. We'd heard dispersal draft but super dispersal draft was not in the lexicon in our discussions up to that point. I'm really curious about the unprotected players. Is this a free agency thing where it's restricted and unrestricted kind of deal with these players in terms of who they're being released to and where they're being released? Is that part of their contract negotiations in terms of their being in the merged entity? I don't know how that works. And again, the set number thing is really interesting. It says on this date the U-S-L-N-X-L teams will draft 23 players to compete the training camp roster. How big is the training camp roster? How big is that in comparison to the number of players they have right now? Like you said, is it going to be 45 players? Is it going to be more, how many are they going to be able to add on why that specific number at this exact iteration, how many people are they expecting to be gone at that point from the rosters that are already there? How do they know that number? That's the thing. Can they confidently say that? Well in all of this, even when it was just back with the XFL stuff where it was like, okay, we're doing the showcases and then we're going to do the rookie draft. The rookie, the college draft was the USFL, right? Was rookie. We're going to do the rookie draft and then we're going to do the showcases and then we're going to do an October draft and then we're going to do another draft after the NFL and then we're going to do one in January. And obviously that all kind of got pushed to the moon here with all this stuff, but I don't know how many, unless you're where the US L, they can just kind of sign and cut players whenever they want. It just always seemed weird to me that we have so many floodgates here of like, okay, now we're going to do this one, then we're going to, you're filling three spots or how many spots we're drafting 12 players, we're getting everyone together on a zoom call the draft. To me it always seemed a little too, I kind of okay, trust the process, you got a good product on the field, but it always felt a little interesting to me. Again, I argue what process, I mean I don't know what the process is and again, I don't think people who are involved here know what even is the process here. The process of communication even seems to be complete breakdown mode for all of these people involved. So I don't know, the numbers just seem so nebulous. I don't even know where to start with that, but the union information is really interesting and where it's coming from. Alright, so let's get to this then. This is kind of the last big and then we'll do comments and stuff again. I don't know. We have a birthday party tonight for someone that I really don't want to go to, so I'm kind of here for whatever. This came out last night, so this was the United Football Players Association, so this was separate than the UFL pa, so I got to put all this stuff together. So this is the Kenneth Pharaoh and Nick Temple kind of Ryan Cave and all that stuff. Oh it would help if I put it on the screen. We were on new inform you of important decision. Basically they are partying ways with the Steel Workers Union. They didn't feel like over the last few months F Football Players Association has been shut out from participating in the involvement with the USFL on XFL merger. We know right now is that these huge major companies resulted in the 50% cuts, almost 20 million cut from player salaries and there's been nothing added. We've talked about that not getting more money to mitigate all that stuff. We've engaged in extensive discussions, consultations, evaluations to ensure we'll make the best option. So that's kind of the first one. That's the kind that's ferro and it gets weird here. This is the the nonofficial. We went down to Birmingham and worked with a lot of this stuff back with the kickoff and kind of all that stuff First, what your reaction to this, first of all, the Ken Pharaoh kind of action? Well, I mean he's clearly saying that there's just no level of communication that's really been had as far as the negotiation part of it. And again, as far as the whole partnership with the steelworkers union, again, not being able to tie that into this whole thing that's really interesting to me. I thought mean, how long ago was that partnership formed? Over a year ago. It was right after. I mean because they were down there for the kickoff and Kenneth was shaking hands in Birmingham, the inaugural kickoff and then it came in later and then they voted enough in the summer then. So I guess in the interest of maybe it not being compatible with what they're trying to accomplish here, I'm not sure if that's really what Kenneth is sort of getting at. I guess and maybe there's just differences in terms of how the negotiate, I mean again, the Steel Workers Union is incredibly powerful and has been for quite some time. If you look into the history of it, it's one of the strongest unions in the United States, but I guess maybe the vision just wasn't really shared there as far as what they're accomplishing here. It seems to me, I think there just might be frustration on Kenneth Farrell's part about actually being able to have a seat at the table and being able to actually be participating in these negotiations. So that was a very interesting statement that was put out last night by him and kind of abrupt too. So then this is from the official, so this is from the UFL PA is been brought to our attention that a false statement has been spread by individuals who have never been at the bargaining table with our U-F-L-U-S-F-L Player negotiating committee. These individuals have not aided in the day-to-day operations with our union. Do they have any insights on the current bargaining between the players in the leagues to countless hours spent by our player representatives to secure player protections will not be overshadowed from this. This is Darta Jacobs a union president. So now we have the official UFL, PA SL PA arguing with the UFL. I'm kind of confused of what we're trying to accomplish here. Okay, well I mean this is very separate it. So this is part of the USFL labor negotiations and they're saying about how they're going to be adding on the XFL players in the future as part of this. Which again, I go back to like, okay, are we going to have separate divisions here again, and this is a separate unions that are involved here, but for them to just kind of come out and just basically say that whatever statement was put out by Kenneth Farrell or whoever, I mean it's almost written in a way that as if he didn't put out the statement, which is really strange, I'm sort of trying to piece that together as well, but just this sort of complete disregard for that announcement. I mean this was what minutes after that statement was put out, it was very close to each other in terms of time. I was following it on my timeline and then suddenly this came out maybe an hour later and suddenly it just almost this kind of overshadowed what the other one was talking about because it was just sort of saying, hey, disregard, whatever that was being said or whatever information that person doesn't almost like saying that person wasn't involved here or hasn't been involved in the process the entire time, which again, where do these two ideas and these two visions align here because I'm not sure what overlapping here, who's saying what in terms of who was involved and who wasn't. It seems to be as almost one side saying I wasn't involved. The other saying, saying, yeah, you weren't involved and you shouldn't say anything about It. And yeah, you never should be. And I love Kenneth and he's been on the show, anyone that he's been on the show multiple times, but they had the whole thing a couple of years ago because again, the United Football Players Association is Kenneth and them kind of the leftovers from the XFL. Okay people when that league went belly up and you're stuck in hotels and we're trying to get home and they kind of helped not at the time, but not unionize, but form a grouping of hey, let's help these guys figure out what's going on. And when the bankruptcy and all that stuff happened, like okay, this is where you need to send in your stuff or Hey guys, there's a deadline this day to make sure you submit to get all the paperwork together. So that was that. Then they were down getting a part of this UFL pa, but now, yeah, it seems like they don't want to be involved in that and I don't, oh, the other thing was Kenneth, they're quick to react when they were saying that the CFL players weren't going to play back in the delayed season in 2021. So can this been known to hop at stuff before and put out things without necessarily thinking all the way through it? I don't know if that's part of it, but again, there's just further to me, I'm going with the UFL pa. Am I alone in that that that's kind of where the ones that are actually working with the negotiation. I mean I think the problem is the timing of which the statement comes out in a day where so much information was just flying around from so many different sources and players and media and all kinds of different people. I think for Kenneth to kind of jump in here and say give his piece and say what was going on, the timing of it is very odd as if it's like he's kind of trying to, I don't want to put words in his mouth or really speak too much to him. I think him coming on your show, he's been very insightful and I really have a lot of respect for Ken Farrell and what he tries to accomplish as a union president and as somebody who wants to represent players who in the space don't have a lot of rights. But it did seem to be a bit of a forward statement in anticipation of what other people might be saying about the union's involvement here. And I think maybe that was in response to what was being put out by Jeff Bed earlier perhaps. I mean there's just so much information. I think the problem here is that, again, I don't know if this is really based on real interactions that Kenneth has had or a lack of interactions if he's not had any of those but the USFL PA here, I think it's just trying to not have someone else try to start a fire and whether or not Kenneth Ferrell is starting it for the right reasons or not. Again, I don't think his intentions are misguided, but perhaps what information is being coming out here is not really getting across in the way that it's supposed to in terms of actually informing anybody or enlightening anybody of what's going to happen going forward. And I think the USL PA is maybe kind of saying, Hey, hold your horses here, let's not jump the gun and try to say what's happening. It may or may not happen at the negotiating table. So I think that's why it comes off as sort of almost pulling back the reins a little bit on Pharaoh and the other players union. So then we finally had this and Pat had tweeted this out and I had just felt like, what's going on here? No idea. So then this is from the vice president of the UFL pa, right, and this was just to get all this on here, Devin Gray wish to formally clarify certain matters. It's imperative to note Kenneth, Nick and any U-F-L-P-A were never affiliated with the union, nor did they represent any players during the CBA negotiations. The roles were exclusively as organizers hired by the steelworkers tasked with the United Unions rather than participating in one, it is essential to recognize their internal objection of assuming leadership within the union evident in the timing of this official statement. Notably their exclusion from CEA negotiations has led them to seize this opportunity to undermine the dedicated efforts of the board. The board has tirelessly worked to secure optimal outcome for players, a commitment that should not be overshadowed by misleading information up. P'S intentions and statements appear self-serving and misleading, contributing the unnecessary chaos and confusion to an already complex situation. I'm steadfast in my stance against UPS claim of inaccurate salary information are some of the things that came out already are those misleading with the salary? This is where I lose the narrative. I mean I think it's this one is just completely disregarding it altogether and just saying this is misinformation that's just causing the waters to become more muddy than they already are. So it seems to me this is a lot more aggressive than the US LPA statement. Obviously Devin Gray is very much putting a stamp on the ground and saying, no, this is not what's happening and Kenneth Ferrell does not have any sense of what the situation is whatsoever. So at least that's how I read it. I mean it seems to be a lot more aggressive in that way. I am interested in the part of the last paragraph saying that their intentions and statement appear self-serving and misleading and contributing unnecessary chaos and confusion to our complex situation. I'd argue that's the case for a lot of people in this space. Honestly in the past 24 hours that was abundantly clear that that is happening from a lot of different angles. So I think I at least sympathize with Devin Gray in that way that I think that's going on in general. That's something that's been kind of swirling around anyway, so I think again, I want to see, I would like to get Mr Farrow's comments further and see what he was really saying and obviously he's probably going to have a lot to say about this. I don't know if he'll say a lot about it in the next week, but at least it seems to me that he was under the impression that his involvement, he wasn't as involved as I think he wanted to be and I think the other statements are saying that there's really no involvement to be had here or that he ever thought or if he thought he was ever involved that he really wasn't. Yeah, so this is why and we'll get some if you have questions here, I have some star and if you have any other questions we'll kind of get to it before we get out of here. I appreciate it. We've had great 75 people. I think we had as much as 80 people watching at one point here, so thumbs up, leave your questions here. We tackle anything before we get out. Yeah, there's been, and again I partially blame this December 21st. I partially blame the delay from September and any meaningful announcements I partially blame just I think people being home and having time on their hands right now, but there's been a lot of kind of jocking for positions right now and that's why sometimes and I get and we got to put the things up right away and we got to just do and I do, we do the shorts and they trademark the United Football League or whatever, I get all this stuff, but sometimes you really got to take a second and hopefully we've at least done a little bit of this today of at least walking through where everything came from, the different motivations with all that stuff. I have no motivation honestly except just kind of informing and having fun and communicating with the people that I do. We talked at the top, this certainly isn't a money rich endeavor here, but the people I get to interact with and being able to talk with Andy, that's kind of my thing and making sure everyone's on the same page thoughts on this and then we'll get to questions, but we're really prone to this. We got to run online and post the second anything comes out and I want to make sure that if anything, this was a kind of step back from that. I mean that's the thing, people are just drawing the cart before the horse and they're also just trying to get ahead of it because again, I don't think a lot of people know what's going on and they want to I guess supply some sort of reassurance, but I think that just causes more chaos and it just creates a lot more confusion at the end of the day. Like Devin Gray was saying about the UFPA statement, I mean I felt the same way about any news that's really been coming out about this. It doesn't help people and it really doesn't help people who again are really in the know of what's going on, not like you and I and the group chat are really so tied into, I mean we're trying to be as involved as possible, know what's going on even for us to keep up. How do you think people feel that their livelihoods are here at stake as far as what are they trying to get out of this league and what's their future going to be? They don't know. So I think putting out that kind of information is reckless and it's harmful and it really hurts people who actually need the correct information and you're just causing mean more headaches really for people to deal with and trying to figure out what's next and it really just causes a lot more stress in this situation. I think you've made a great point where it's my life is fine, your life you're professor and I'm weather videography in here, say for the industry collapsing, my life's good. We're kind of blessed at this point to be able to do this and I'm glad that your work is picked up as well that we're able to kind of do this for fun, but it's the people that need to know it's the people that are involved either on the league level as a player or as staff. And I talked with Mike today, I'm like, are people feel like they're being lied to or people feeling like they're getting the full picture? This kind of stuff helps really muddy that like you said, even more and I promise you here, if I pull up Scooby's, the 19,000 impressions that Scooby got on us and then whatever stories that's not worth the clout, bro. Again, if this ends up being great and that's awesome and if you're trying to do, but when the tweet is how's this for a source gi, that to me does not read as I'm trying to educate the masses because there's a lot of confusion. This is like I'm trying to one up everybody and post what I have again, could be accurate to me. The intention there feels very odd and that's kind of where I'll leave that. And also just like I have this information no one else does. Well again, we've seen this information changes very quickly, so one, it may not be that accurate in a manner of moments. Two, it's just sort of flexing and saying that you have a source that other people don't have, which if You're you're a player, I hope you do. I would hope you have it. Yes, I hope so too. But again, I don't know if a lot of players do in this situation. I don't think a lot of them have it. If you're holding that and just posting it out there, why aren't you communicating that within your own, I don't know your own group first unless you have that sort of level of self inflation doesn't really serve anyone besides the person who's posting. Which again, haha, I know it's Twitter, a lot of people do that, but I think the intention maybe that Scoo Wright was going for in terms of informing the public, again, I don't think that really it had the intended effect that he wanted it to and even though I know it was sort of tongue in cheek, again, I do not believe that actually served the narrative and actually created any sort of clarity for anybody going forward. No questions here. We'll get out here. Question GJP is Danny and the Rock even. So part of this league, from what I'm told, they're part of the rollout, a big rollout coming and I certainly given any indication Danny's off of Twitter, which has been interesting and I don't know if that coincided with all of that, but she's no longer on there, still busy. I mean she's the only one that's posted anything about this finalization of the merger. Well, she had that really quick thought on Instagram that she sent out as far as, oh yeah, you have kind of a merger league coming on and yeah, sounds great. Didn't really go into it very any further than she already needed to. I think she's already trying to prepare her PR statement as far as the rock goes, I mean look, the Rock is kind of a really nice action figure that some person almost, you almost treat it as like a collector's item. You put it in the box and you don't want take it out until you want show it off to your friends. And I feel like that's kind of how it is with this leak where they're going to tell 'em like, Hey, you know what? Don't say anything. We'll let you know what statement you have to put out or what you need to say and they're going to use him when they have everything figured out. He's not going to be at the forefront of this. Of course he's involved, he is part of the ownership group, but he's not going to say anything until he's prompted on it. Russ, Brandon's the guy who's in the weeds right now trying to figure out what's going on. And so I don't think there's going to be any words from Danny in the Rock until this is really solidified. I think people assume that when you don't talk you're not involved. I mean that's not necessarily the case. I mean if that were the case then people would say Roger Goodell isn't the commissioner of the NFL anymore, but that's not true. He just doesn't talk as much because the owners do a lot more of the talking than he does in some ways. So I don't think that should be confused with them not being involved anymore. Just they have their own way of communicating the message once the message is solidified, which again, we've gone on for the last hour saying it probably isn't. And again, this just speaks and I was trying to kind of explain to Dorothy last night. Like I said, I was thankful to actually have to go work yesterday. I'm like, I'm so glad to get out of the house, but I'm like every single time, the point of this merger is it's the United Football League, so now this, I'll call this third halftime. There was the initial thing of hey, we're intending to merge. There was that we're in the finalizing merger and then there's this, which is not official, but this as an asterisk. The first time there was eight different messages that were sent out. The union had a different message. The US FL season ticket holders had a different message. The XFL season ticket holders, the XFL, the official statement from XFL. It should not be that. And we have a lot of comments here, Scott and everyone asking, do you think March 30th? It seems like they're not ready to go. There's too much going on. You got to get this unified message together and to me it feels like BDE, we got too many egos in the room and trying to figure this out. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm reading this totally wrong, but you got to get at least the communications figured out here that if anything should not be the challenge. There's a lot of other things. Well, I mean that was my fear going into the mergers. Can you really combine these ideologies? And that was my argument months ago saying that I didn't think it would ever happen as I told on your show before is I didn't think it was going to happen because I never thought they would be able to come to the table and agree on anything because they operated so differently. And I still think there's shreds of that going on here in that they don't really know what the consistent messaging is. Which again leads me to my next point in that I know this is a bit retrospective and this is kind of a would've showed a could have moment, but I still just can't help but sit here thinking, what if after covid, after what happened after that when the Rock and Danny decided to buy the league and they got it out of bankruptcy, I don't understand why Fox specifically was so adamant about not coming to them and saying, Hey, we see that you're trying to get this leak back up and running. We really enjoyed the of spring football. Let's work on maybe bringing back some other entities or ideas and instead they decided to just go gungho and say, well, we're going to start the USFL. I mean that to me, out of all the announcements, Reed, and I know it's sort of a retrospective moment and it's not really on topic, but I can't help but just trace this exact moment the day I woke up and I read the news that the USFL was coming back to me out of all the information and all the news out of all the leagues that we have covered and talked about in the last three years. To me that is still the most random thing that happened. I just literally woke up and thought why? And I'm sorry to all the people who enjoy USFL and everybody who's had fun watching it. I've had fun watching it. I've enjoyed the players and I've enjoyed getting acquainted and really learning about the history of the USFL too. I mean that's the thing, it's been a history lesson for me really getting antiquated with the people. I mean we've talked to players from back in the eighties, which is awesome. That's so cool, but I literally could not understand at that moment why now what's going on with this? And I can't help but think what if Fox had turned heel in like an alternative universe if they decided instead to try and collaborate with Danny and the Rock at that time and try to bring it into spring leak instead of now where both of their backs were up against the walls financially, and you can argue all you want about the USFL, they're not doing this, they're not doing this. If they think they're thriving, they would've waited for the other leak to die and it didn't happen. And so I can't help but think what would happen if they actually just came together in the first place and done this. That really is just going to be the biggest what if. I'm always going to think about instead of where we are right now, Some comments here, Christine, that like I said, new member today, be a member of that. That's fun. I like you get that little thing next year there. So that's cool. We talked about off the top, but I think one of the most strange things I've heard is the roughneck players get let go. Gamblers take over the roughneck name. She says that to me. The roughneck team will obviously be known as the Great Defenders or sorry, great pretenders that's like Mike with the Fugazi guardians, the Fugazi Orlando guardians. David Fox saw the USF Lup. They got super copyright. Hey David, if you want a journey, go back. We chronicled. That was my favorite time ever podcasting ever was talking with Michael Cohen, our Beverly Hills IP attorney and then when he couldn't do it, when Tim, I got that Tim guy and he was on vacation in Hawaii and he's talking to me about copyright law. Dave, go back. You enjoy that. Just Google Mark cast the law and order of all the XFL stuff. Some other comments here. God, I have so many stars on here, we'll do this. Zach, longtime listeners. Zach. Hey Zach, remember what you said? Hey, are you doing a show on Thursday? I said, you know how rumors go? Do these guys even know what they want to do? It seems like they would've had an announcement right after the government approved the merger. What is the reason for the holdup things were going to be terribly messy, but this is another level and then they think we have a lot of these. Do you think that March 30th, Andy, what's your over under March 30th today? Because I've been asked that a lot Over under, I'm going to be honest, I think it's going to happen on March 30th, but it's just going to be really discombobulated and all over the place because that's kind of how they've been running this whole thing the entire time. Like I said, they're going to operate it. I feel like at the pace that they're going at, they're going to operate it as if they just are going to do it not on a shoestring budget, but kind of a fly by night proposition, which is I've said in the past, they're just going to say, Hey, here's our announcement. We're doing this draft in about two days. Okay, now we're going to have training camp about a week or maybe two weeks. I feel like everything's just going to come out matter of factly as if it had been there the entire time and it had been in the know the entire time and it's just going to be really quick information and it's going to be force fed in that way. I do believe in that date despite everything else that we've discussed in the past hour and a half, but I just think it's going to be so last moment and to me, again, that's a disservice to trying to bring back people into the fold. I do believe if you're talking about it over under, I think the betting terminology would be pushed because I think it's literally going to be at March 30th. Yeah, Tanner here. Do you think there was the play all along USFL starting that? No, I think XFL did really well for Fox regardless of everything that happened with covid and it went away and I think Fox rightfully thought if we can run this league and own it outright that there's a lot more of a benefit there than there is to Payne another league the operating, if we can do everything in house. I was going to say it is like Scooby do and I would've got away with it too if it wasn't for having to have fans in the arena in the stadiums and having to market in cities and all that stuff. I think if Fox had rolled out XFL business plan, either do the eight cities or the hub with the eight cities, I don't know if we would've been in this, but it was the hub and it was the disaster of that that led into XF Ls changing of their original plan of doing the hubs. But no, I mean I think Fox could have got to play with it too, but things change. Well, really the monkey wrench here I still think is the Brian Woods involvement, especially with the TSL because the TSL is something that did not have to be played in front of fans. As strange as it was, I mean at first I just chalked it up when the TSL was going on at the end of 2020 and 2021, I just chalked it up as well, you can't have fans in the stands, so this is fine for now, just play in front of nobody. But as time went on, I started to really recollect on it and especially in the past season and thought I get the idea of the TSL. It was really just a player development league and it's most truest form and it really was just that for people like you and I and Evan and people who work at player development, that's really what it was. And I think that's great as far as just getting people reps and tape and being able to get people to know coaches and connections in its purest form for a football enthusiast, that's a great league. That terms of an entertainment and enterprising capitalistic venture, that's not something that really works. And I think the problem is that the SFL, this iteration of the SFL really tried to tread water and do both and I don't think they could try to do both because that's not how it works. People want to be entertained whether you like it or not. People have to have excitement, they have to have noise, they have to have involvement, they have to have people sitting in the seats watching the game. That's just how it is. I think they tried to kill two birds with one stone and it didn't work. They tried to they middle ground it, have your cake needed to way too much. Exactly, and I don't think that is the right approach and it clearly showed just based on the metrics of what they were trying to accomplish. So for me, I think that was its biggest mistake in trying to placate both. You can talk all you want about how it doesn't matter who caress if there's people there, well, guess what? It does matter. When it's a TV product, it matters. And if you're selling it as a real authentic football league that's not just predicated on player development, then yes, you need to have some sort of entertainment aspect with it. That's the end of the day. You have to have that and I think that that was really its biggest mistake and so that's why not either A just go full board with the Spring football league and just be like, Hey, let's just do this and have a product on TV just to sell that and sell the advertisers fine. Great. Then you save a lot of money that way. Awesome. Then you're really saving money that way or go the other direction with the XFL and say, Hey, that was really fun. I think we should really try to have eight teams in eight cities and try to do that again because that really seemed to be a viable thing and we really want to try and do that. Choose one or the other. Don't try to choose both. I think that's what they tried to do and this is kind of what's happening right now is they're trying to choose both and I don't think it's going to work. And it's both sides, right? It's FOX and XFL Redbird, neither one, we don't really want to devote a lot to this. What can we get by? I said that for a year and a half with all the USFL stuff. It's the least amount of effort all the time and XFL. Similarly with money and things, I think they put in maybe more creative with their resources in terms of utilizing the social and all that, but this always felt to me like USL and XL both the least amount of energy I will say. I will say, oh, what is this? Oh, this is a good comment. I'll bring up in a second. I'll say I was mocked Andy. I was publicly mocked when I said the US L the whole time should just call them the stars, the stallions, the generals. It wasn't the sters of anything. No city names. And then now we wouldn't have had that big of an issue. You could have had whatever doing that. YG has been putting a lot of stuff here, but I love Duncan when I can. US Fellow's goal was to get into home Margarets, they had four last year. I don't know which of the Canton teams was a home team. Do you know Andy? Do you know which to know? I think they had three home teams and then I think they had a hub team, Which I mean you tell me, which I guess whatever the closest state would be or city, which would be Pittsburgh. It was 90 minutes from, yeah, it was 90 minutes from Pittsburghs And I live in Olympia. I live in Olympia. Again, cool idea, but why do you have to assign cities immediately when they were created's? I still, to this day, I think they should have done just the eight. Just eight teams. Yeah. I think they should do 18 and then after the fact say, Hey, here's Your city. We're awarding New Orleans a team. We're rewarding Birmingham a team. We're rewarding all That. Yeah, the idea of selling a team with a city name and not actually playing in the city is just bizarre. It doesn't sell, and I've had friends tell me this. I've had casual friends who I asked them, you want to watch this or are you watching this or are you looking at this team? And they just said, it's really weird. It's really weird not having that team in my city playing at this time. Jacob has a question here. Do you guys think the league is stupid enough not to rebrand the gamblers or the rednecks? Just run with the gamblers? I think that we talked off the top. I think he placate the four and four and you want to keep it on there, but I don't know. Mike tweeted yesterday, it's not decided. Jason Canella, the lead XFL VP of ticketing and operations retweeted it, so obviously that's something the XFL wants out there. I don't know. I think that's quite the smoke job if you try to do that. Well, again, it's pulling a fast one, right? It it's like removing the rug under from underneath your feet. If you're doing that, if you're just going to either swap names or what we talked about earlier is just having the same name but completely different players and coaching staff. Again, it is just selling something completely different than what you advertised just even months ago. So I don't really, don't get the wishy washyness of this. Just pick a team, pick somebody, just send them over. Just do it. But don't try to sell it as if one team is exactly the same as it was before or they had been here before. If you're going to replace the rough next coaching staff with the gamblers coaching staff and sell it as the roughnecks, that just doesn't make sense. Let me know. Any other comments here? We'll wind down. I think we've done pretty good talking through all of this stuff. This, I could go through some of these comments and just, I don't want to be too mean. I am kind of in the mood right now. Yeah, Canton was going to have a team eventually In the year 2035, I guess. Sure, I guess, but They can't. Again, I'm sorry. This has been this week and all of this whole thing has just been a disaster. But if I always said that I wanted to say I would get in trouble. I think I tow the line. I think I tow the line pretty well most of the time. What was the name? Was it Pat or Mike that threw out the name? He said something along the lines of Canton Legends. Yeah, Can legends. Canton Gold, Canton, Texas Speed says here the Canton Ant Eaters. Sure, Sure. That's Cool. Yeah, I mean, again, why can't we just create mascots? I think the SFL would add a lot more fun just staying with the mascots. Remember how much of a big deal that was when they came out with the mascot and the personnel, the blob, and the guy from the Breakers who still to me looks like he's out of a toothpaste ad. I still can't get over that, but they just Need Dave the wave, right? Dave? The Wave. Yeah, Dave, the wave. I still can't get over that one, but don't again, the stallion's cool. I like the stallion, the mascots. I like the camaraderie around. It's fun. Have fun with the camaraderie of the players and the coaches and the personality of the team and the team names. That's fine, but do you have to give them city names? I mean, again, Tampa, what was the whole exercise out of Tampa Bay? The whole Bandits thing. I mean couldn't, what if it was just the Bandits? You kept the brand and then you say, okay, well we're sending them to Memphis. Yes, fine, whatever. They're the Memphis Bandits Because then you award. That's the whole difference of it is you're not moving, you're awarding. You rewarding the community because you are awarding them a team and you go, man, we've had great support out of New Jersey and we want to give, we're sending the generals there. Or God forbid, yeah, you have the New Jersey breakers. Oh, that wasn't what it was in 1983. Nobody cares. It would've been cool. We did have here, oh, first off, where was it Scott? We have another new member. This is cool. I have my little dollar membership now. If you want to be part of the Cool Kids Club, always put your comments up here. And then we also had, someone was saying they should do the Canton Aviators because it would've been nice to you. So TSL, there's no aviators. It was the Hughes Damnit, it was the Howard Hughes and then people weren't smart enough and they made them the aviators. It should be the Canton Howard Hughes Damnit. That is my last, I mean, wouldn't it be cool if we got your Ousters back in there and then you had your team again, you had the same jersey and then I mean, what if Luis Perez got back on there and then all of a sudden they just said, okay, well now we're putting this team in Kansas or something like that. And it's like, okay, cool. I have my city, but who cares about that? First, let's talk about the actual brand of the Ousters and let's talk about, I love that jersey. Honestly, I love the purple checkerboard. It's unique. It's really nothing like any other jersey I've seen. If my hands weren't so sweaty and I didn't have stuff hanging in the way, I would go grab it. Right now my favorite thing was when I interviewed when, back in the day when Brian Scott was going to come on the show and then remember all that was going on with the Vipers, and so then they set up Luise Perez and so then I put on my Jotter jersey and I was so excited to talk to Louise Perez, the Jotter quarterback, right, because did they win the Mega Bowl? They beat the Lineman. They lost. They lost The lineman, but I had my thing and Luis was like, oh yeah, that's cool. I'm like, no. I'm like, I was so excited to talk about this Luis nicest guy, but certainly not the, He's very even keel even in terms of his excitement. It's pretty amazing. That guy's just unflappable. Yeah. Max, where have you been today, max? They were talking about dude, the Canton Bulldogs. I'm sure they have retro rich on that, so yeah. No Canton Bulldogs. Oh, I'm sure they would, but then it's okay if the Tennessee Titans wear Oilers uniforms right in front of Houston and that's totally fine. I don't want to be putting out calling the kettle black statements, but some of the hypocrisy in team names in sports, I swear. Yeah. Here I finally agree with something, Andy, anything else my water is full of and my body is full out of water here thinking about we still got 70 people. It always seems like it's dipping and it's like, but anything else? Any other questions? Anything else? This will probably be it unless there's the miraculous super supplemental dispersal draft next week. We'll see. I mean, I'm around to do any of this stuff except yesterday I thought I had to work or I did have to work, but I was like, I don't believe this 21st if this happens, but I'm around if anything happens, I don't foresee a dispersal draft next week. Here's my question, Reed. Let's have a little exercise here. I want you to tell me your spring football or AL football New Year's resolution. What do you hope to see out of it can be this league or any other league in the next year since we've done a full calendar year of this. Again, going through this by the way, and I want to know what you are looking forward to or hoping for in the next calendar year with all of this league, the entire thing that we deal with, this realm that we deal with A couple of things Now I do have one more question before we get out of here and I might we'll see how my bladder does here. We might have, people are still joining here. You get addicted to the numbers. I'm really excited for the Vancouver Gray Cup and all of that stuff. CFL aside because they were, and hopefully they're good to us again next year as well. We have the media day coming up, so I really hope that all works out. I want this to work. I don't not want this to work and I want this to work more so now because the rumor of the Arlington and playing in the cities, I want that to work because obviously I want all of these people with the jobs and all of that stuff when it was coming down, when it was we're doing the hubs and we're going to do the four and aid or whatever it's going to be and all that. That's where I got really worrisome because I needed to be able to buy in that at some point you're going to have home field, kind of home stadium, all of that stuff, so I don't know. I mean I wanted to succeed. Like I said, I think of Birmingham Stallions versus Battle Hawks Championship game is probably the highlight that we could hope for. I mean, what's your thing? That's great. Yeah. Well, last year I think I met my resolutions. I wanted to go to an XL game because I wanted to see the league survive and they did and I got to go to two games. I went to an Arlington game and then I saw 'em again, the XL championship game and that was awesome. Going to this year, I would love to go to the St. Louis. I'd love to go to the battle do. I'd love to see a combination of A-U-S-F-L and an XFL team play. That's just a cool concept. Again, this should be a cool concept. I know we've had a lot of negative comments over the last hour and a half, but in reality that would be a really cool thing for that to happen. My other resolution would be to meet you in Vancouver for the Great Cup and willingly enough, hopefully you get your BC lion there. I think they're about due for that. They need to be in that game. Sorry, Winnipeg fans and sorry, fans of the entire rest of the West. It'd be really cool to see BC host that great cup and just to see also to see Vernon Adams Jr. That's also another of my resolutions. I haven't seen him since college and I was enamored with him at that time. I would love to see him again playing in the CFL game, and actually that would be another big one is just going to Canada. Going back to Canada would be really, really cool. So that would be part of my overall resolution for next Year. Yeah, I mean whatever this takes over the course of the year, this podcast and everything, we will be in Vancouver for that game, whether it's his media or a fan that is in stone, whatever that ends up being. If we just buy a ticket and go and kind of hang out with people that will be involved with all of that, put your New Year's hopes in here we have Ken put stability. Ken's New Year's resolution is stability. Jared says, hoping the leagues can actually let fans know what's going on. Zach here says, thank you for everyone involved in this whole thing, all of your hard work. Can't say I've keep up the one, the hard work for everyone that wants to. We get a lot of critics on here. We did however many weeks of XFL overlapped with USFL and then USFL and then overlapped with C-F-L-C-F-L all the way through November. So I don't know if there was anyone else that did weekly football recaps from the XFL kickoff all the way through the Gray Cup, so I'm very proud of that. That was everyone involved with you and Pat and Evan and Jason and kind of everyone else. My last question for you, and I actually thought about this earlier, I wanted to talk to, so the Texas thing got a lot of gripe anyway, right? With the XFL. I'm like, oh my God, all this Texas stuff, but at least you had the Vegas and Seattle to kind of justify it, right? Well, we're here with this league with the Texas, I mean there's no west, there's no north no any of that. To me, that's a tougher selling point at this point, right? Because selling these SFL markets, like spoiler alert, like Birmingham, I know this isn't the Mecca, right, of even Vegas with Cashman Field was or whatever. So what do you make of that? To me that is an interesting point where you don't have that benefit of the West Coast teams, the XFL had. Yeah, they're centralizing the interest and the exposure and that is a bit of a tough sell, especially to a West coast audience and look, I'm no stranger to the West Coast audience being stiff armed by bigger media properties. I mean, ESPN famously just does not really show any regard for any Western properties and especially the PAC 12, which is now going under. I know that's just part of the game. I think it's unfortunate because of the West coast crowd has a lot to offer and it should be appealed to more, in my opinion. It really should be. So for that, that's a tough sell. That was the whole reason why I think the SFL had a harder time really appealing to anybody west of the Mississippi, because guess what? Weren't a lot of teams west of the Mississippi. So proximity is important for the XFL. Yeah, you have Texas teams and that's a big part of your market, but now, like you said, no Seattle, no Las Vegas, you're taking on an entire, just a giant, enormous amount of geographic location that doesn't really pertain to this entire league now. So I mean, the short answer is you add teams, but the long-term answer is, is that viable? Because I don't know if that's going to happen if you're going to try and cut costs and save money. I mean, again, we've downsized from 16 to eight. Do you think it's going back to 10 anytime soon? I certainly don't, and that to me it is going to be treading water, but also it's going to be fighting uphill as well as far as are they going to be able to keep their finances where they want to and keep their core audience around and be able to make money enough to be able to progress forward with expansion? If that's even the thought process in the future without the West Coast market, it seems it's another challenge. It's another task they have to deal with now. Yeah, I think it's tough. I think, and I talked a lot with listener, Seth, my commanders found a lot about this and he had talked going into the season cas, Seth does a lot of research and working with TV markets and kind of viewership, and it was tough enough last year where you're cutting out New York and LA and now you're not that Seattle. But I mean, yeah, you're really just centralizing and to me that was always the problem with the USFL. It's like some of these markets that you're in, Canton is not a large selling market. Michigan, even if they're NFL markets, they're not. So you're further reducing that. I guess this will be our last question and because this goes along with one, someone asked earlier if we think that the ratings are going to be up this year going in with half the teams getting acts, and theoretically a big portion of fans being tuned off or going away, what's the chances the league makes less? And the similar question was like, do you think viewership is down going into this year? Which I do. I think, I don't think that this, well, it was this thing and however you want to sell it. I don't think that you go into this as a boost of twofold versus what it was last year, but what do you make of either of these points? I think the viewership stagnates, first of all, I agree with you. I think it just stays status quo with what it was with both leagues. You peak at a million probably for a good game, and that's about it. Depending on what channel it's going to be on, obviously just wait until the TV ratings thing comes back. We'll have to reive into that whole debacle this year. But as far as the chances of it making less, I think that's a two-sided question. Are we talking about them making less money or are we talking about them losing less money? Because the whole shtick about the XFL losing $50 million and all the operating costs and all that was made such due, but then USFL didn't show their books, so it was like, well, how much money did they lose or how much money did they really make? Because the XFL, I think that's the net cost here, and I think that's something that people don't really take into account is how much money is really being put into it, how much money is being made, and then how much money is being lost. I think there's just the financial realm of it. I think it's going to be reduced. Obviously, I think there's going to be less money spent from the new league that the XFL spent, but I think there's going to be more spent from the SFL side, so when those two parts come together, can they make up enough money to be able to balance that out? I don't know if it's going to make less, I think it'll make less money. I just wonder if it's going to lose more or less money. That's really the biggest question. How much is the operating cost and how much of a detriment is it going to be as a net venture? Well, there you go. Yeah, I think it's a tough battle, but I think that this is kind of it. I think this is the last stand here, and I think you get one, two years of this, and I think this is a merger like we've talked about before, necessity. Like I said, appreciate everyone tuning almost two hours here. Good viewership. Appreciate that. Please give the thumbs up. Always good to see. Helps the YouTube algorithm and all of that. I'm sure you're subscribed, but please subscribe. I've changed it. Now, if we get to 3,500 by the kickoff, that's a big tall order by March 30th, but with two, I'll give you two free tickets. We were either going to do two free tickets to the XFL kickoff or the USFL kickoff. Well, now it could be that you could get to the Merge League kickoff, so we'll do that. But the subscribe, give Andy, lots of kudos, a lot of work here coming home from work and doing all this stuff, so I appreciate it. I hope everyone merry Christmas, whatever holidays you celebrate and if we do not talk next week, I hope everyone has a new year and we'll be back, but just follow along. If you hear people talking about dates and you don't have me talking about stuff coming, we will roll through this together. I hope everyone feels informed today. Andy, anything else? No, Reed, thank you so much as always, a tremendous amount of work put in by you and another great calendar year of doing this whole thing, and I just wanted to say thank you for having me participate. I wish you and Dorothy a very merry Christmas, happy new year, all of the above. Happy holidays, whatever you choose to celebrate and can't wait to do this again. Yeah, Merry Christmas. Go Kraken. Good thoughts here. We got the winter class coming up January 1st, so just give some kudos there. We could use that T-Mobile field taking on the Vegas golden night, so appreciate it everyone. We'll see you next time. Thanks.

CFL 2024 Schedule Released: What You Need to Know!

Well happy Markcast Friday here. Welcome back in the studio here, revamp studio. Don't adjust your sets, can talk through that, but did some adulting and got some things framed and I cleaned out a lot of the other office here kind of during the off season, but we're coming back here today. Yeah, new revamp guys. Do you like the look here? A little different. Got rid of the clutter. Yeah, it looks fantastic to me. Evan's like, I don't care. Let's get on with this. It's clean. It's clean, I like it. Well it was one of those things that kind of rocked it for a couple years and then Dorothy's like that really looks messy. And my friend Michael's like that really looks messy. And I'm like, you just tell me and the brother will clean it up. So we have our Defend the deep here. I got framed. Kraken went through the entire losing streak. I ate game while I was waiting for that to come in. And then this is from, I have my media badges and then when we did our pit bull cruises many years ago, we met pit bull and did shots with pit bull and everything else. So they put together a kind of smorgasbord of all of that. So I thought that was fun. A couple of programming notes. So we're here today. We're going to talk CFL schedule, we're going to talk negotiations list, all of that stuff. Amazingly we have a CFL schedule to talk about while still waiting on an XFL 2024 schedules and that's always fun. We had similar feelings last year for that, but we'll talk through all that today. I don't know how in the interest of avoiding burnout, this might be a little bit more how the podcast is. Things happen. We'll do it. I don't know if Reed is a Friday every week kind of guy right now with everything. We took a couple weeks off obviously after the C ffl and I don't know, I posted on the YouTube the other week. I just don't feel good right now posting, people are waiting to find out about their jobs and lives and careers. So kind waiting that out. But it's 170 whatever weeks of this now and if we want to get to 250 whatever, I think we need to go through this. So we'll wade through all of that. And then if you are trying to get ahold of, I have a lot of people that message me on Facebook. I've been locked out of Facebook happened last year as well. My business pages get, it's a whole thing. So if you Fran all these people that message me, Brad, all these people that message me on Facebook, LinkedIn, message me on LinkedIn or yeah, my best made video is Instagram works, but my Mark has Instagram down, mark has Facebook down, personal Facebook down. So it's kind a whole pain in the butt that way. So Jason, I dunno if you deal with that stuff in Canada, but it really is kind of a pain in the butt. Yeah, I think I'm actually locked out of my Facebook thing for hussies huddle. So yeah, I'm dealing with the same thing. I'm glad I tag you on that all the time. I do tag you, but yeah, this one I'm not able to post online. So Evan, I'm going to open my window here. Evan, how have you been since kind of the CFL buy that we've been going on? Yeah, I've been good. I mean still waiting on news here I think on the XFL and USFL side of things, but at this point I'm not holding my breath, so just been looking at some CFL stuff. There's been some transactions the necklace came out. We can talk about that for a bit along with some of the coaching changes. So yeah, I've just been looking at that taking care of business and I guess life's been good. That's good. Yeah, so I figured we'll talk schedule today, we'll go week by week. That'll give us a good excuse to talk about the Toronto Argonauts coaching moving around in the Cory Maces of the world and BC Lions bringing everyone back, CFL, PA here, Chapman in. So that's always good to see. So I guess first off, talk about the schedule. Let me get it pulled up here. Thank goodness we have people and when I tweeted this yesterday a, I meant this kind of tongue in cheek, but it seemed like the CFL listened. There was the big hubba last year and we didn't get a meaningful great cup rematch until it was way into the season and Argonauts had already locked everything out. Jason, here we go. We have Montreal and who the heck was in the Great Cup here? Montreal and Winnipeg here. What did you make of this year kicking off the season? I think it's great that we have a great cup rematch. I mean it's only been a couple of years since we've previously done this. I think Hamilton and Winnipeg played a couple of years ago when they had played in 2019 in the Great Cup. So they have done this before. But my one critique would be that I think the team that wins the Great Cup should have the home game to host this. I think that this big Winnipeg, I think it should really be in Montreal, but I mean I think I'm not really going to complain about having the Great Cup rematch as the first game of the season. Well actually I think that's a fair point and I have my bookmarks here I got to pull up as well. I know that Tim Capper with the ALW flight deck, he was upset. They have a bunch of, I got some bookmarks saved of people because there's all these complaints and then complaints and everything about everything. But Montreal has a bunch of Thursday games and they're more than they've ever had and they've had historically more than everyone else. But it is a good point. Yeah, I feel like especially where the Gray Cup is a neutral site, I feel like we've won the Gray Cup. We should be able to host that. Evan, what do you make having the game back here, at least getting the rematch out of the way? Yeah, I agree with Jason. I think it's good that we finally are getting a rematch and that was one of the things that people were talking a lot about scheduling wise was not having the Gray Cup rematch last year in week one between Toronto and Winnipeg. And then when game did happen, it was pretty much meaningless because Toronto was sitting, A lot of their guys really just didn't have the same feel to it. But I agree with Jason. I feel like not having the game in Montreal is a significant critique or something that would not negate, not negate the matchup, right? Because I feel like it'll still be a good game. There'll still be a lot of hype around that, but yeah, I think it was Darnell Sankey who put it up and he said typically I think if the team wins the game, they're the one who gets to host the game in the following season, but the CFL schedule when it's 21 week season with only nine teams, you're just going to have to make do with some things and I think in this case that's one of 'em. I'm just glad that we're getting the rematch. I don't really care where it's being played. I know that maybe some Montreal fans might find that disrespectful, but I think this will be a good way to start the CFL season. Definitely. Well as someone that presumably here will go live for the kickoff at least feels like a really hot game to me. It was like BC at Calgary last year or something. It was a really innocuous game. It just didn't have and I think they tried to say, well this is whatever and historically, but I think this is cool. It sells itself. I mean we have graphics built already in terms of any other Gray Cup fallout, Jason, anything from this? I know Cody's been talking a lot and he was on ride show. Anything else following out with Winnipeg and it seems like the band is ready to stick back in there where this is going to be. We're still going to go through free agency and all that, but it feels like this is going to be a complete team again next year. Yeah, I think that for the most part the core of that team is still intact, but there are a few guys that I think Mike Oshe, the head coach said that are still considering retirement. So I'm looking at guys like Stanley Bryant and Oja, Marcus Hardrick guys that Evan brought up on the Great Cup show. So still waiting on those guys, but I think in terms of the quarterback, the receivers, those kind of guys will be back and if those guys are intact, they're going to be a threatening team again. So the other highlights they had here, and they had talked about this I think when Ambros had his, either both the state of the medium, the fan or either, but return to the balance schedule. Jason, we've and Evan and I have entered the CFL through all this kind of covid world where this used to be, this wasn't the differentiation, this was the norm and then Covid cutting down costs and stuff. But going back to a balanced schedule, is that the thought process here? We're cutting back money for a few years, we're not flying people from BC to Montreal or whatever. Yeah, I mean I think that some people kind of complained that the East division teams would play more games against the west than they would against other eastern teams, so I think people said that was the reason why the CFL did that, but I think at the end of the day, like you said, I think it's about cost and why they cut out some of those long distance cross country trips to save a little money the last couple of years when the CFO is a little lean in that regard. So good to see them go back to a balanced schedule. I think the biggest thing what I'm looking at is do we get a crossover team this year? Because the last time that we did have a balanced schedule back in 2019, we did have a crossover team and that was the last time a team's crossed over into the East division. So looking forward to seeing if that's the case this year. Yeah, we always talk about that. I feel like when you're watching NFL right now and they're like Chicago Bear is still alive, we always talk about it, but I would like to actually see this, the crossover I talk about consistency is key. I like the CFL summer schedule this Thursday through Sunday. It seemed like that worked a lot the Sunday night games and then obviously going back into the Friday, Saturday here in the fall and we have not had any meaningful updates involved with the CFL plus or the CBS Sports Network or anything for US American viewers. But Evan, in terms of that, obviously shifting things away from the NFL when we hit the fall but the Thursday through Sunday, that all works. Yeah, I mean I feel like it was very equally distributed this summer over those four days and I would like to see it continue that way and the CFL here has clearly stated that. Yeah, I think that works out well just because there's not as much going on in the summer in terms of sports. You're probably going to get more US viewers during that time period because I mean it was the NFL, but really college football started that shift and I noticed that because the second that the college football season started, there weren't a lot of games CFL games on CBS SportsNet anymore just because they had to take those slots for college games and then obviously once the NFL gets into full swing a couple weeks later, whatever, that also takes away. So yeah, the schedule changes pretty quickly in the fall, but I like the summer one. I like having those couple days and I know not everybody likes having four days of games or whatever, even three days, but I don't mind. I think if you distribute it equally, it's just a longer week of football in general and it feels like you get to take in more. I know maybe if you're doing a recap or something and you're doing it on Monday, it's harder to remember what happened on Thursday or Friday. We've obviously dealt with that before, but other than that I think it's good. To me it keeps the CFL and they don't have as much a problem. This is something with the XFL and the USFL have of existing during the week outside of their games. I mean obviously with Nailer and Farhan and all the Kate and everyone involved and the TSN and SportsNet and everything else, and by the way, the SportsNet people, I would've loved to have been in those boardrooms with all the Shhe Tani talks we're taking down the CFL here and then the flight. That was wild. If we had been podcasting, what was that two weeks ago that would've been wild but keeps the CFO more in the zeitgeist. I like it. I agree with Evan sometimes on Monday you're like, what the heck happened on Thursday? But it was so weird to me that when they announced this shift back last year, we're going to have more Sunday games, all these Saskatchewan people complaining and I'm never going to go to games on Sunday because we got to get up in the morning to drive. I mean just Monday here we were watching, what was it, the Titans, Titans and Giants and Green Bay and all that. It's 1130 here in New York if you're watching these games. So don't tell me about that. I mean people make sacrifices that they need hussy thoughts on the Sunday or Thursday through Sunday stuff. Yeah, I agree with Evan that it's good to have them spread out so it keeps the news cycle going throughout the week. I think that at the end of the day, I think it's something to be said about the CFL keeping a consistent schedule aware the fans know when the games are going to be the consistent seven o'clock eastern time slots to start the games every week. I think that's really important. You look at the NFL, you know exactly when those games are on every week. So I think that's very important and that'll help drive some viewership by itself Even for that regard. Using my mother as an example, may not even know what the game is, but knows, Hey and we're West Coast, Hey 10:00 AM I have a game so let me log on, let me pull up my Xfinity at nine and figure out kind of what game I have. So yeah, maybe, I don't know, it's the Red Blacks playing whatever, but at least I know there's going to be a game on at that time and if we have time we'll get into that. I thought some of the schedule reveals with the alliances and the Argos did where they were, the Titans had done it last year where they're showing the logos and trying to figure all that out and I saw Baker getting really chippy with the Winnipeg and there was a Winnipeg, a BC Lions Twitter feud, but I thought that was funny. And then last, and this is weird to me and last year we're doing moving the playoff games to Saturday. I don't think the Cru should be on Saturday, but we're doing the that and after one year it was a resounding success. We're moving forward with that. Evan, any comments on that? I mean it seems like they're at least for the time being really diehard on doing the Saturday day playoffs. Yeah, I mean I really don't mind. Again, it really has to do I think with the time of year your window kind of narrows when you're doing playoffs and what is it, November just because again that's deep into the NFL season. Yeah, I would like to have the Gray Cup on a Saturday just because it's standard alone, you're not playing other playoff games. But I didn't mind it on a Sunday. I went this year obviously with you guys and I mean obviously there's NFL on, there's other stuff next day's Monday, which is kind of tough if you want to go out and do whatever party after the game, but I didn't mind it. I think those are, again, those are all very nitpicky issues maybe and I'm always somebody who focuses more on the grand scale of things in terms of where a league or where a team could improve. So overall I, I'm really happy with the way that this schedule has turned out, whether it's regular season or the playoff structure Has anything else on this? Yeah, I don't mind the Gray cups on Sunday personally because I think it's important for the host city to be able to have that full weekend for the whole festival aspect of it. You think of all the events that were going on Saturday night in Hamilton that you guys attended at the Hamilton Convention Center. So I think it's important for that aspect of things and I think that because the later start time of the Great Cup, it doesn't interfere as much with the NFL side of things. It's more like a Super Bowl time kind of kickoff. So I think at the end of the day, I think breakups on Sunday are here to stay. Yeah, especially like that. I like getting all of our work done on Saturday, being able to just enjoy Sunday. That to me works out. I have a couple of just wide ranging tweets here and then we'll get into the schedule. Tim Cap here, like I said, i's flight deck AL'S opening the season Gray Cup rematch at Blue Bomber's, first time opening season in Winnipeg since 16. It's talking about the three Thursday games the Sunday, Monday at one Saturday, four with preseason. The other one I thought was interesting here I had with Derek Taylor, it appears to Red Blacks because I love Eric for all this nerdy stats stuff, which is great peers, red Blacks have the most restful schedule in total. They'll 14 days more rest than their opponents nine times they'll have had more rest versus six with less. The Elks will only have four times rest versus I don't know how you figure all this stuff out, but Jason does that. I mean Red Blacks here, let's give them any opportunity we can here, let's give them more. I even tweeted because Tim Bains tweeted out like, oh good to see the Red Blacks have a week one by I said, got to get time to round. Need all that time they can get. Yeah, for sure. I mean like you said, I don't know how Derek Taylor calculated this, but I was going to say the same thing about the Red Blacks make a joke about they need all the help that they can get in this scenario. Yeah, look at this bc, BC working on the hardest there and the Edmonton. Let's see, I hope Edmonton maintains all that. So let's get in here. It's like we said, we talked about week one here, Montreal, out Winnipeg, Hamilton going into Calgary has Saskatchewan to Edmonton BC at Toronto and I think this will be a good opportunity to talk BC and Toronto coaching, all that kind of stuff, but what do you make of this hussie your Thai Katz traveling into Calgary? Well, I mean I'm very curious to see the outcome for Bo Levi Mitchell this off season because I mean a lot of people complained last year that they didn't get to go to Calgary and they didn't get the return game. Who knows if he would've been even healthy for that game, but that's just another point altogether. But I think at the end of the day, Calgary and Hamilton playing in the first game of the season, I think that's a pretty good matchup. I think Hamilton will be interesting with the new head coach there and I think Calgary bringing back probably a lot of the same group as last year in terms of the quarterback and the head coach and whatnot. So I think it'll be interesting to see how it plays out. I think a lot of the time the CFL likes to get those western teams to have their home games earlier in the season so they don't have to deal with the weather as much later on in the season. So I think that's big and you see three or four West teams hosting week one here. Yeah. Evan, what did you make talking to Hamilton and the coaching and all of that? It was really weird. It was like last week and they had a press release. Steinhower has a different role now and by the way, we're going to have a head coach later. It was kind of weird how they did that. What did you make of everything that Hamilton did? Well, I actually think it was a good thing and a lot of people I understand the structure was strange. I think they could have just made the announcement at once, whatever, but it's really nice to see that they were able to retain both Scott Milanovich and Orlando Steinhower just because I feel like Orlando Steinhower, he's a very good football mind, but maybe that team ran its course with him at the helm after you go to back-to-back gray cups and you're not able to win those games, especially one that went to overtime and was ultimately a heartbreak. I mean both of them were, but especially the second one there in Hamilton, that was very difficult. So I think having him still in the building and still having some control over certain decisions, I think that's a good thing. I don't think you needed to just get rid of him completely, but at the same time having him be the head coach, it was pretty clear that maybe that wasn't going to be the best thing moving forward and I am really glad to see that Scott Milanovich got the job there in Hamilton. It was kind of unclear where he was going to go. There was some rumblings of him going to Saskatchewan, but that ultimately didn't happen. Those rumors were cleared away pretty quickly. I know we were talking about that at Gray Cup, but really the two finalists for the Saskatchewan job were Buck Pierce from Winnipeg and then Corey Mayes from Toronto obviously. But yeah, I think Milanovich do great things there regardless of who the quarterback is. I know that this game that we're talking about here between Hamilton and Calgary is supposed to be Bo Levi's return of the stampeders, whether or not that actually happens or even if he's there, is he the starting quarterback in that game? A lot of questions around that, but regardless, whoever's the quarterback, there could be Taylor Powell could be somebody else. I think Scott Milanovich will do good things. Again, I keep saying it and well I was saying it during the season, but I'll keep saying it now, even as we move into the 2024 run, what he did with that offense, I think that's why he got the head coaching job. Really just that immediate turnaround. I think that really sparked something and that team went from maybe a situation where you go into a complete rehabil to Hey, we can just do some restructuring here, get Milanovich and as the coach move Orlando to the front office with Ed Hery, who I believe is the new general manager there. And I think ultimately, again, just being able to retain those two guys and not having one leave and not having some form of power structure again. I get it. It might be a bit interesting. You don't see that very often where a coach is removed from his duty but is still with the team. You don't see that very often, but I think in this case it's a really good thing for the tie cats. Yeah, like you said, Jason, it seems like we had every complaint last year. They're like, we're going to figure out everything that everyone complained about week one, we're going to fix, we're going to get Bo Levi into Calgary, we're going to do the Gray Cup rematch, we're going to do bc. I just looking at this, okay guys, even this BC Toronto game closing out Sunday, let's CFL season a marathon here talking to Saskatchewan Edmonton. A good point to talk about Corey Mac and that happened right after we kind of logged out everything for the season. We joked a lot online, the ass kissing that went in and I'm sure Corey Mac is a tremendous gentleman and phenomenal football coach, but my Twitter for about three days was like, Corey Mac is great and he saved 18 children in the war and he did. And you're like, guys, I understand that anyway, but Corey Mays couldn't be worse here in Saskatchewan. Jason, what do you make of this? Them going on the road to going to Edmonton here, but we get the new look rough riders here and he's still saying they want a Trevor Harris I guess, right? Yeah, it seems like they're very committed to Trevor Harris going into next year. I mean, that's one thing that Cory Mace really was adamant about in his opening press conference with the riders, and I think it was a good hire. I think that in general I prefer an offensive head coach if I was running a football team, but I think there's still is value in having these up and coming defensive minds, especially in the CFL where a defensive led team can make a big difference. So I think it's going to be very interesting to see how it works out and about all the hoop law that was going on wrote Corey Mason, all the cheerleading. I think that that just goes to show you there aren't that many new faces that get into head coaching jobs in the CL. So I think whenever that happens, you see a lot of buzz made about it. Yeah, I mean it's great and I'm excited it's something to take away, but I mean you would've thought that now they have flown June Jones up here out of and gotten him involved in all that. I think Evan and I probably would've been leading the cheerleading bandwagon. So Evan, any thoughts here on Cory Mays because we missed talking about all that? Yeah, well I think the one really cool part about Corey Mace is the definition of a player's coach. You could tell people immediately gravitated towards him when he was hired, and I'm not going to carry on whatever you're talking about in terms of the Twitter parade for Corey Mace. I'll be a bit more reserved with my thoughts, but there is no denying he's a good coach and I think the best part, like I said, he is a player's coach, really cares about those guys. And he's young, right? He's only 37, believe it or not. Him and Trevor Harris are the same age and Trevor Harris is probably going to be his starting quarterback next season, which is fascinating to me. You don't see that very often, but again, he's a young coach who brings a fresh philosophy to the team, one that I think they really need. I don't want to say that things got stale over there in Regina, but I feel like he's a guy that can come in and really just almost rebrand the team in a way. You look at what Antonio Pierce is doing with the Raiders, I think it'll be something like that where you really see a significant culture change. So yeah, really happy for Mace. I think that's a good hire. I was honestly surprised that they didn't go in the direction of an offensive guy like Buck Pierce, but I think the money was right in Winnipeg for him to stay. And again, Corey just I think brings a bit more, I keep using the term culture, but I think he brings more of that in. And then in terms of who's going to run the offense, well they just brought in Mark Mueller from Calgary to lead the offense there in Saskatchewan, and I think that was a pretty good hire. Obviously Calgary's offense struggled a bit last year, very up and down, only a few games where they really seemed complete, but I think that there's some potential there. I think Mark Mueller, again, he worked with Jake Mayer, he's worked with a lot of these guys who have been successful. Mark and Michelle, I mean, again, list of names, Reggie Ton. So even if that offense wasn't complete, the players again that he had to work with there in Calgary were some of the better in the league, no doubt. Yeah, and I think you were saying in terms of just that player's coach more than leader of men at that point of there had been, and it was so weird once Dickinson went out and it was like the players didn't respect him and he had totally lost a room and you're like, okay. I mean clearly there was a lot of ill seated kind of things going on there. So I mean a fresh start there, this would be exciting. Yeah, crazy to think that Trevor Harris is my age and still playing football in the Canadian Football League is really remarkable. Jason, anything else on Saskatchewan? Well, I think it's going to be very interesting to see with this Mark Mueller hiring the effects that it has on not only Saskatchewan but Calgary next year, this Calgary's offense all of a sudden get better because I've heard people around the CFL tweet out saying that they were kind of blaming Mark Muell a little bit for Calgary struggles last year, so maybe it could be an addition by subtraction, not saying he's a bad coach or anything, but maybe Calgary's offense does take another step next year and maybe Saskatchewan's offense struggles a little bit. So I'm very interested to see how it works out. Well, I mean especially with mayor, whatever this might be, this is contract year here. We got to kind of figure out what we're doing. Last year we were easy. We went into Calgary, kicked the snot out of em, BC here in Toronto on all the complaints about Toronto home games and everything. You get one opening weekend here BC going in. I had the article here retaining their whole staff, which I think is obviously tremendously exciting. But Jason, are you surprised that we had talked about the Ryan Phillips and the Scotts and everything of the world that they're not that BC was able to retain everyone? Is that, are we paying up? Is that a lack of, I can't imagine it would be a lack of interest in any of the BC staff. Well, I think it came down to the fact that there weren't that many openings around the league this year. You had Saskatchewan, which is obviously a full search and everything like that. They interviewed a bunch of candidates, but Hamilton really wasn't an open head coaching job. We didn't really know that that job was open until they officially announced Milanovich as the head coach there. I think it comes down to the fact that there weren't that many open jobs this particular off season and they'll have to wait another year in terms of Ryan Phillips and Jordan Maxim becoming potential head coaches in the CFL. Yeah, and I met Jordan Scotland, too many cheese and rods for staff. Yeah, Evan, I mean this is exciting BC full on Gray Cup hosting here. I mean, I think this is kind of the window and with Vernon and everything else. Are you thrilled as I am to have them kind keep all their staff together? Absolutely. I mean both the coordinators, Ryan Phillips and Jordan Maxim, both of those guys I think were head coaching candidates in a variety of places. But again, you just don't know the direction in which franchises want to move in and what openings are going to be available like Jason pointed out. So all those guys I think would've been finalists for any openings there would've been interviewed, things of that nature, but that didn't happen and BC gets to keep 'em, and I think that's really significant because I think those two guys did a fantastic job in 2023 and it's very rare to have two coordinators on your staff who again would both be head coaching candidates that could create some significant losses if they were to take other jobs, but again, they didn't. Those opportunities were not available and therefore BC has taken that to their advantage keeping both of those guys. I think that makes them an incredibly strong team next year. Yeah, I mean, what else do you say? Right? I mean it's just the work there has already spoken for itself, so I'm to see what they can do next year and really, I mean if we want to talk about BC here for a minute briefly, I really don't want to say next year's make or break. I could have said that this year, right? I mean being in the West Final with Winnipeg again, which we literally predicted probably six months before it actually happened, just seemed like all signs were pointing in that direction. Very well could happen again next year to be honest. We'll see who Winnipeg retains and who goes. There's still some uncertainty there, but next year with BC hosting the Gray Cup in Vancouver, which I think is going to be fantastic by itself regardless of who's playing in that game, but the fact that BC's hosting next year and the fact again that they were able to retain both of their coordinators, which something tells me that one of those guys is probably going to leave after next year for a job. I'd have to imagine, or again, at least be interviewed, you're going to go through that cycle of uncertainty next year. You really have a chance to make a statement. Things are lined up in the right direction. Vernon clearly is your franchise guy. Again, very good pickup there. I can't underestimate how good it was that they brought him over from Montreal that season in 22 when Rourke got hurt, they brought him in his insurance and that's paid off I think more than anybody could have ever imagined, but we'll see. I really hope that they can pull it off next year. I think we'd all love to see BC at home. I know, I'd love to see that. That would make the experience just a little bit more special for me. But yeah, man, I mean who knows? Just really, I hope BC is reading the room in that regard. I think I'll leave it at that. Well, and I think that Rick had said already and there was the other quote coming out that they're already working to retain a lot of the players and everything. I don't know, I think it was a really stacked deck and to the point where you had that incredible depth. I don't know if Lucky Whitehead isn't back this year if I'm going to have a heartbreak at this point just because of the use of a lot of these players during the year, and obviously you had that doubt where people got hurt and you could cycle through, but to me, I don't know, it almost feels like there's a couple names that maybe are more expendable than it felt like they were going into last season. Jason, some thoughts on BC and then any of the coaching of the player step. Yeah, I think Lucky Whitehead will be one guy that I don't see being back just because of how much he was getting paid previously. I think they're probably going to want to spend that money elsewhere to retain other guys. I think Hollins and Hatcher are both free agents as well, so I think they'll want to retain those guys above Whitehead. So I think it's going to be really important for them to do that. But I will say this, I think I'm more confident we'll see what happens in the off season. I think I'm more confident in BC going into next year than I was going into this year because I think at the beginning of this year, I didn't think that Vernon Adams, I think it was a question that Vernon Adams was a starting caliber franchise level quarterback in this league and I don't have that question anymore. So I think that's really important and obviously the fact that they've able to retain a lot of their coaching staff, the entire coaching staff, and they're probably going to retain a lot of their players. I think I'm pretty confident in BC going into next year. And then in terms of Toronto, Evan, Corey, Mason, all of that, and then they're still working to replace him in Toronto. Any thoughts on that? And I know Mike Mitchell is them the deep dives, but we'll get into some negotiation list here if anyone has any comments on any of those players. But Evan, any thoughts on Toronto here coming back after obviously losing and it was the CFL super late News Twitter account tweeted the other day, like Chad Kelly got picked off again by the Montreal outlets, but I thought was incredibly funny, but thoughts here on Toronto hosting BC and anything with their staff? Yeah, I mean Toronto, I really don't have any doubts about either. I mean that team was so complete this year. Again, we will see, I'm sure Mike would know. I don't know how many free agents they have to resign and I don't have a number on that. We will see who they're able to retain, maybe bring in a couple new guys, but you wouldn't, I mean even if you lose some guys, I really don't think you need to bring in a whole lot there to make up for anything. I think what happened against Montreal in that game, the playoff game, I think that was just a whiff simply, I think again, just one of those games you weren't ready. It sucked again, really sucked to see that because again, that's not a game that really should define anybody's career, especially Chad Kelly's. I think Kelly will come back next year and he'll play just as he played this season. Again, he has shown just like guys like Vernon Adams have and Zach Calleros and even Cody Fido now who just got extended, extended. These guys are franchise quarterbacks. They found a home, they can't be successful and I see Toronto being right back in the Great Cup race without a doubt. Yeah, I think in terms of Cody as well, and we've talked about this, I think Naylor commented about it as well during the season. It should be a lesson quarterbacks in the CFL or commodity it might be worth. Same with Jake Mayer here. It might be worth, okay, let's work through a couple seasons of this versus and the next thing you know send off. Yeah, talking about the ettes in Montreal. Sports are weird. The Kraken just went into Chicago two weeks ago and absolutely got rocked kind of by team that they should have beaten and it spiraled this whole kind of losing streak and all that stuff and then they just beat the same team. Seven won last night in Seattle. Sports are kind of weird that way. Anything else here, like I said, stack, we won't do as deep. Obviously a deep dive here with all the other weeks, but really stacked a week one here. Jason, anything else on that? Well, I'll just build on a point about Toronto. I think that one thing to watch this off season is that Chad Kelly goes from making basically nothing to making $650,000 a year. So there probably will be some losses to this roster, this off season. It just depends where those losses tend to fall. Yeah, the 600 million and that was talking about the Shhe contract in the 700 million and they would be like a billion dollars Canadian. Could you imagine the blue G is paying a billion dollars on that. So coming in here, my only big takeaway with this, I kind of glance in ahead and if anyone has any kind of standout thoughts for all this, we'll scroll through all that, but Ottawa gets the first game. It's the first home game we're hosting on a Thursday against Winnipeg. To me that is kind of a bummer, snooze at that point here where we already have the week one by and then we're coming in and that's probably getting there. I can't imagine Ottawa up against Winnipeg. Jason, thoughts on that? Well, it's worth pointing out that Ottawa beat Winnipeg last year and that one of the games of the year. So I mean I think that's kind of the angle that they're trying to play here. But yeah, it sucks for anybody that gets that first week by, I really feel bad for any fan base that has to go through that. You're excited for the season to start. Oh, my team doesn't play this week. And even with the NFL, it's so weird the commanders didn't have to buy until last week, so it was like, I didn't even know. You're kind of living through and then you're like, wait, what is happening here? What's going on? Montreal going in Saskatchewan. Hamilton who's getting the Toronto's got the week two buy here to kind of figure out stuff With that. Evan, did you have, and I have the negotiation list here pulled up. Did you have any names? I know you tweeted out some of the names, anyone you wanted to talk about in particular on the winner necklace that came out? Yeah, I mean I think if we just go team by team, I didn't write anybody down in particular, but there's certainly a couple guys I can talk about. I mean, starting with the BC Lions here first I got the list pulled up like Devon Harper, he's someone who's very close to me. I interviewed him and I forget the other guy's name. Ty James. I've also talked to him at Mercer. They've been a very good duo in the FCS and I think he's a guy who does have maybe a realistic chance of playing in the CFL because keep in mind, on the EG list, some of these guys that are listed probably aren't going to play in the CFL. Every now and then you'll get one of these really cool stories like the one last year that got brought up constantly was Tommy Lee Lewis, who was on the EG list in Calgary for seven years. They pretty much waited for his entire NFL career to be over, which spanning multiple teams for him to finally come up and he did play, he make an impact. It wasn't anything ridiculous because he's an older guy now. Again, they waited seven years for him or something, but he was there. He did sign on and did play a portion of the season. So yeah, had Devon Harper there from Mercer, Sean Chambers at Montana State, I mean again, one of the top F CSS programs. They always have a lot of guys going down to Edmonton, Holton Nailers, I don't know if he's a free agent right now, but I believe he was with the Seahawks out of East Carolina. Isaiah Davis, again, another really good running back from South Dakota State, another top FCS program. I would expect him to have some NFL interest. KJ Jefferson's an interesting one. I'm not really sure where he stands. I've seen him play before at LSU Live, so I've seen his ability again, I kind of an interesting prospect, again, a guy that I'd really have to dive deeper on. Cam Rising, a bigger name from Utah, didn't play this year I don't think due to injury, but we will see where he's at. He's going back to school for a seventh year. You get all these guys in college now with Covid eligibility going back for year seven. Let's see, BJ Wilson was just picked up by the roughnecks in the XFL. You'll see there's a couple guys here who do have XFL interest, who signed letters of intent were acquired in the rookie drafts over the summer dresser win quarterback from Tennessee Martin. He was actually already with the Elks this season. Signed on for a couple weeks to their practice roster, got an extra few game checks. He's with the Rams now I believe on their practice squad or he might've been released, but he was with the RAM Rams. He went back, was with them in training camp, got cut, signed with Edmonton, couple checks sitting there and then went back to the Rams for a bit and we will see where he's at going into 2024. Also in regards to Edmonton, shout out to Rick Ella, who's been on here before, just took one of the scouting jobs there with the Elks, so Oh Wow, that's exciting The other day. What's that? I said that's exciting. That's awesome, Frank. Yeah, no, it's good. Anyway, just going down the list here. Going to Calgary, Jerome Ka, that's the name that rings the bell from Kutztown Division two School. Believe he was with the Jets at one point. Josh Love former USFL player with the Michigan Panthers there and Pittsburgh Mallers, I believe, quarterback from San Jose State. Auden Tate from Florida State. I believe he was with the Bengals. That was also a name that I was surprised to see on there. Well, maybe not surprised, but one of those names where you're like, oh, it'd be cool to see him in this league. I think Mike had brought him up at one point in regards to the XFL, just going down here to Saskatchewan, Jerry and Ely, I believe just signed from Ole Ms. Chase Garbers from California. I believe he could have a CFL future. Again, another quarterback. These lists are always pretty. Quarterback heavy. Vicarious keys, that one rings a name from Tulane. I've been down there before to do work. Winnipeg Blue Bombers. Let's see. Michael Ayers, I believe from Ashland. He signed, or I don't know if he signed a letter of intent, but he was drafted by the roughnecks in the XFL and had some previous CFL experience before. I don't think it was with Winnipeg. It was maybe with Ottawa, but don't quote me on that. Markowski, another guy from South Dakota State. You always see these top FCS schools on there. The Montanas, the Dakotas, and again, those guys, I mean geographically, those are all pretty close to Canada already, so it'd be fun to see some of those guys up there. Anthony Withers Stone from Merrimack, I believe just signed with maybe the Battle Hawks in the XFL as of yesterday. Signed a letter of intent with one of the XFL teams and I believe was in an NFL training camp going down to Hamilton Shamar Bridges. A name that rings a bell was with the Ravens at one point out of division two. Fort Valley State. Thomas Castellanos from Boston College. Again, another quarterback, but a guy who might not have that NFL interest. He played at Boston College this year was the starter for them. Daquan Finn from Toledo is a guy that's interesting. He'll go back to college. He's in the transfer portal right now I believe. I don't know where he's supposed to go, but again, a guy that I'm looking at there. So again, he won't even have a pro future, I don't think until 2025, but a name to keep an eye on, he's been one of my favorite quarterbacks to watch this year in college. And to kind of follow along, Austin Reed from western Kentucky, probably a guy that'll have NFL interest, I think, but he plays in that one of those wide open air raid type offenses. Again, really liked his stuff. He played a division two school before he came to western Kentucky. I believe it was West Florida. So quick rise for him. And again, a name that I'm familiar with, Talia Taga, brother of Tutu, Otago Valo who played at Maryland, started for them. What we, we'll see, again, these are just names, nothing really here that's concrete. Rayon Wright I believe was, he has a brother who I think is with the Cowboys. I always get him mixed up, but he might've been the guy that was on Last Chance U, I'm not sure. But anyway, going down to Toronto, Mike Mitchell did a deep dive on these guys, so check Out this. Yeah, I was going to say, yeah, if you on news, Mike did right. He was Very fascinated by this list. I mean, I won't talk about too many guys here just for time sake, but John Mocha, the quarterback from Colorado School of Mines just passed Tyson be for the all time passing. I'm not sure if it's all time passing touchdowns or just all time career touchdowns in general at the level. Colorado School of Mines is a division two school and he passed Tyson Bet, who's currently with the Bears and played at Shepherd and Macho will be in the Division two national championship coming up against Harding. So we'll see what happens with him. John Reese Plumley, that's a guy that I've seen before live at UCF. I've actually seen him and Castanos Castellanos was at UCF before he transferred to Boston College. So good to see both of those guys here on CFL neg lists that they're generating some interest. Matt s Luka from Holy Cross is a fascinating one. Very mobile guy. I want to say he has some sort of background in lacrosse, but I could be wrong, but I've watched him plenty. Again, another FCS quarterback, but a guy that can run and throw really well, so interested to see if he latches on. Could definitely see him coming out and signing a CFL contract maybe pretty quickly. Again, some of these guys will have NFL interest go to a camp, some of them won't. You'll see some of these guys sign on pretty quickly just depending on, they gauge their level of interest going down to Ottawa. Tim Dera from Fordham, I believe he was in camp with the Commanders, very good FCS quarterback last year in 22. Khalil Peleton, he was on hard knocks with the lines, if I remember correctly. It's just kind of a fun one. He played it. Yeah, central Michigan. I don't actually know a ton about him in terms of the player. And then you go down to Montreal, there's some names here that I think are returning. Davis Cheek was the USFL guy, I believe, with the New Orleans breakers, the quarterback, Brett Gabbert played at Miami. I think he's coming back Miami of Ohio, not the school in Florida. Dray Jenkins is the guy I'm really hoping to see up there. Signed an undrafted contract with the Jacksonville Jaguars, I believe played at LSU back in 22. So I saw him very familiar with him. He's a great player. Surprised that he didn't latch onto a practice squad or anything like that. Parker McKinney from Eastern Kentucky, another FCS quarterback. It's incredible how many of them there are on this list. Probably a guy that gets an NFL look. And then EJ Perry from Brown, that's A-U-S-F-L guy, also played with the Michigan Panthers. Lindsay Scoot, it's Lindsay Scott. He's a typo there, but played it. Incarnate Ward, obviously planning on joining the Houston rough next to season if they're around round. I believed he signed the letter of intent with them, so he's good to go. And yeah, Darwin Thompson I think is the last guy really worth talking about. I believe he was in the NFL for a bit, maybe has some playing experience. So kind of a veteran in that regard. But yeah, there's your Nicholas Guy, so that shaved off a couple minutes of the stream. No, that's good. Jason. No, and I wanted at least, it's good, it's a little deep diving and God knows how Evan keeps track of all this stuff, but because I posted the other day and Oh, these people are, they're in talks. It's like, no, they're on the list and they go up to Canada. Are you a proponent of the necklace here? What do you make of this Mr. North of the border? I never get excited about the negoti negotiation list personally because one, they only reveal one quarter of it. So I think it's like 40 players long per team. So they only reveal or have to reveal 10 names, which I guess is better than nothing. But I think that the CFL does a very poor job, and I've said this before of introducing the American players to the fans. I think that I would like to see some kind of draft for American players, even if it's just some small thing with just an online live stream or something like that, just to tell us something about these players that are coming into the league. They just show up in training camp and it's just like you just have to figure everything out on your own. So I think at the end of the day, not a huge fan of the negotiation list process in the CFL. Well, I think it could be better. It's one of those things like it takes work. And we did that with the, what was it? Because the USFL did the college draft and the XFL did the rookie draft and we did that and we're same thing. They just dump a list and these teams acquired these people and we're sitting there and I need Evan and four or five other guys on to be able to like, okay, who knows about this guy or who can talk about it? I know we had Coach Craig on, and I know Rick's been on some of those, and Evan was talking about with the Elks, but you need a lot of people because some of these guys, you're not, you're getting a TSM panel together to talk about some of these guys. They're not going to know even half of what Evan is able to SP off even just here on the stream. So it's one of those things challenging, at least to me. I like seeing players that are interested in the XFL and the CFLs interested in them. I like seeing these guys pop up a couple of different places just because it means that God knows what's going to happen with this UFL or whatever. But there are options out there, but the whole secretive and like, okay, we can have this many quarterbacks. It's kind of weird in that way. Yeah, for sure. I think Nailer brought up a great point. The thing about quarterbacks is I wish teams had to narrow down who's their guy. They should have only a maximum amount of quarterbacks allowed on these lists that they have exclusive rights to. Yeah. So let's get in here. We'll kind of scroll through all this. We got 10 minutes or so left on here. Hits keep coming. You're right. Okay. Calgary, bc. BC back in at Winnipeg here. Exciting to me. Let's see here. Ottawa going on the road against Montreal. Anything stand out to you here with this one? Evan? Which game did you say? Sorry. Oh, just week three. And I mean to me the BC Winnipeg is standout and BC's challenging schedule here, going in Toronto, hosting Calgary, and then going back into Winnipeg here. Yeah, I mean, I'd say I think obviously the BC Winnipeg game stands out there more than anything. Yeah, I will say BC going up against Toronto and Winnipeg, all these heavyweights in the east and west, it's again, they're going to be tested early. We just talked about it's a big prove it year for bc. Can they really get it done? Well, they're going to have to open up against some pretty tough competitions. So we might find out pretty early on whether or not, or well, maybe not whether or not, but what the identity of this team is, I think is what I'm trying to say. It's kind of instead of playing the bottom tier of teams first, you kind of go out there and you take on all these teams that had, or that you played very well against to some degree in the previous season, or you had some very good games against, right? Like BC and Winnipeg. There were some, I guess you'd say classic matchups there, some blowouts in both directions, some close games, and then obviously the Toronto game between that and bc. I thought BC and Toronto, I thought that was going to be the great cup this year and I was obviously mistaken, but both of those teams made it to the final and then lost. So we will see. I mean, I wouldn't mind that as the Gray Cup next year either in bc, right? I think that'd be a great matchup. Not that we need to talk about that quite yet because 2024 seasons still quite a ways away. But yeah, no, I think it'll be an interesting start for BC here. Well, Jason, to me, and obviously we've got to go through a lot of free agency here, but identities have changed here, right? We're maybe Montreal last year and we're walking in and maybe we didn't do, I can't remember how the schedule came out last year in terms of whatever else we were doing, but we certainly didn't do this. And you're sitting here and Montreal, we're looking at as worst teams in the league potentially last year we're here. You're like, Iowa's got to go into Montreal. That's really any identities of these teams changed from last year to this year? I mean Hamilton, I still don't really know how to read. Saskatchewan's got a lot of missing kind of question marks here, but Montreal feels good. Edmonton, if they can roll feels good and then we know what Winnipeg and BC and Toronto are. Yeah, I mean one thing I was going to bring up is that Hamilton and Saskatchewan, week two and three, they actually play back to back here. So that's very early in the season, both brand new head coaches. So we always talk about it takes time for a new coach to establish their culture, their systems, and it'll be interesting to see who gets the edge in those if it goes too well either way in that early home and home there between Hamilton, Saskatchewan. But yeah, like you said, I think Montreal looks a lot better than they did at this time a year ago, and that game for Ottawa, I think it'll be interesting to see how they look this year because I think Ottawa and Edmonton, these are going to be very crucial years for both of these teams. I think that it's been far too long without playoffs, it's not good for any team in the CFL to go more than three years without playoffs. So I think it's going to be very important for Ottawa and Edmonton to have big seasons next year. Yeah, I've said already on here, I don't know how Ottawa has a fan base right now. I mean, I understand that they won a great cutback before we got involved in all this stuff, but I really just living through all of this here, Hamilton right here going into Ottawa, if you're looking at this, does Ottawa get their first win week four, like hosting Hamilton? I mean you're, you're asking a lot here at Edmonton going into bc. That'll be good. So not only are we doubling down, well no it's not because in my mind I keep thinking that Toronto isn't a great cup. We have here the east finals here, Montreal at Toronto should be exciting their week for Ed. You certainly have to have that one circled. Oh yeah. I mean Montreal, they're already starting to bring back a lot of their guys. You can tell that they're not wasting any time and Philpot, fdo got extended Sanky, lemon, all those guys are already any questions that people had about the core, I think those have already been answered. So now it's just a matter of can they elevate their game in 2024? Because again, the whole storyline with Montreal was they had a pretty pedestrian, I guess you'd say, regular season. Not that there was anything wrong with that, but again, no one saw them as a great cup contender and suddenly playoffs rolled around and those last three games were nothing short of incredible. So hopefully they can carry some of that momentum into the regular season and make that play more exciting and we will see whether or not they're able to get off to that hot start or maybe they open things up, but it's a bit slow and it still takes time to get acclimated again. But again, when you're bringing back a lot of the same guys, that's a good sign in terms of continued success. So it'd be cool to see them go into Toronto and maybe have more of a back and forth type of game this time as opposed to Montreal just kind of running away with it early and Chad Kelly just struggling not seeing the field correctly. Hopefully all that'll be resolved for that game because again, yeah, that'd be a very fun one. A repeat of the East Final that I guess nobody expected Not to day this podcast too much. It looks like Brandon Staley was officially let go from the LA charger here. So unless there was any surprise, we'll go through here. We got to get out of here pretty soon, but Toronto and Saskatchewan, some of these, we get into the, I say here by July, we're getting a little bit into the minutia of that. You never know BC Hamilton, I mean we had that where Hamilton came in last year, right? They kind of rocked BC's world. I'm going to scroll through. Jason, do you have anything you want to pop up on this? Let me know here. Yeah, I mean BC Hamilton, the second game last year that took place in Hamilton, that was one of the games the year I was there in attendance. I would say as a TCAT season ticket holder, that was my favorite game that I attended last year, even though the TCATs even lost. So I mean really excited for that one for sure. Definitely down here. So we got Toronto back at Montreal, so a week apart, but then they'll be going in here. I don't know, it's just to me, some of these, I know it was predictable last year, but it felt like it was a good season here to get some juice behind some of these teams. I mean this Ottawa, Edmonton week six is a little bit Thursday night here, Toronto at Montreal. I mean that's nothing going on FL in the world. That's a Thursday night live show we have going into that game. I mean, I'm just saying here, some of these games to me seem a little bit more appealing on paper now than they did maybe a year ago. Evan, any thoughts here? I'm just going to kind of keep getting through here. Yeah, I mean just going back to the NAG list for a quick second. I mean I know we've kind moved off that, but there was actually a play I forgot to talk about. James Morgan from Florida International, former NFL Draft pick who also played in the USFL with the Pittsburgh Mall. So you're seeing this common theme. Again, a lot of guys that have XFL interest, a lot of guys that have already been under contract and maybe played in the USFL. I know the Argos already signed a couple of former USFL players I think from the Philadelphia stars. So just something to watch as these, I guess merger, whatever, I don't even know if you can call 'EM talks anymore, continue to unfold. CFL teams, they think are keeping an eye on some of those guys and I'm not going to be blowing anybody's cover, but I don't think that's really a secret at this point that there will be some guys, even maybe before the merger is finalized and certain teams are cut out, as we've been speculating, some of those guys will probably head up to Canada and it'll still be an uphill battle for some of them I think, right? I mean they're going to have to compete for starting jobs and things of that nature that they didn't really, not that they didn't have to compete for them in the XFL, but it was a bit more of a clear path. You've already got a lot of established players up there in the CFL. So we will see, it'll be interesting, some of the names that might head north as we like to say over the next coming weeks and months because there's no denying that there will be a few. There already has been a few. So just something to monitor. I don't think that the number of XFL and USFL names on these lists is a coincidence. I think it's meant to give options to guys that they can kind of weigh and think about because there are some players that would fit well into both leagues. I guess now it's just going to be the CFL and we'll call it the UFL for the time being, but I just wanted to throw that out there. I know that's kind of a little random fact or tidbit, but I felt like it was important to bring up just with everything going on and after all, we are trying to include every form of football into this I guess. And it's been a while since we've actually done anything X-F-L-U-S-F-L-U-F-L related. Again, I don't even know what to call it anymore, but just to tie that into the, that's something that whether you're a CFL fan or one of these American League fans, you maybe want to keep an eye on that. And I agree with you, I think and ER's been on here, I wish the CFL didn't get so like are leagues so difficult? You got to work your ass to get in here. I think if with these s and all this and with these leagues, I think if the CFL did a better job fostering getting some of these, it's like you got to overcome all this. If you got to be an American quarterback, you're like, it's going to take you five years, son, you better put in your time. And you're like, I just don't know. I just think they could change their mentality with that and that's kind of a conversation for a different day in terms of this here Gray Cup last year here, Winnipeg, Toronto, randomly week eight here, Saturday, July 27th. That's got to be exciting, Jason. Yeah, for sure. I mean at least we get it earlier in this season this year. I still think that these two teams are the favorites to finish first place in their respect divisions. With all due respect to Montreal, I think that Toronto probably is still the favorite to have the best regular season next year. So very much interested to see how that one plays out and the fact that we get it earlier and that it'll actually mean something. I think that's huge. And even here BC at Winnipeg, that's an early, we're having a beer on the deck, we're doing a pre-show, live stream there going into that Thursday game. I'm just giving you, I don't know, to me this is an exciting schedule here. Kind going through all this again, you're always going get like, okay, we're Saskatchewan at Ottawa here on August 8th. It's probably not going to be the peak of that. This might be the worst week I've seen thus far, Hamilton and Montreal. Does that do anything for you, Jason? I mean, I am always looking forward to seeing the Thai cats, but that's just the fan and me talking. Yeah, seems it like we frontload, but we got Winnipeg BC here again, closing out Sunday, August 18th here. Some of these Thursday games are rough anytime. I don't know why Ottawa gets so many of these Thursday games. Well, I mean I feel like they, I don't know why they do that. I feel like maybe the Thursday night games, they're not going to do that well anyway, in terms of the rating probably so. I mean they'll just throw the shittiest team, for lack of a better word on there. But I think at the end of the day on the Calgary Ottawa game, I think it's worth throwing. That was one of the better games of last year too, despite the struggles those two teams had. Look At this, we got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. I mean, anyway, it's interesting there. Interesting with all that stuff going through Ottawa at bc. So see then we're jumping to Saturday here, so that's when the NFL starts. We'll get into all of that stuff. Moving Canada Day, labor Day weekend here, August 21st. This is the touchdown, right? The 31st. Thoughts on that Jason? And not we'll round out here, we're almost done with this thoughts on no Touchdown Atlantic beginning the touchdown Pacific and then Evan, you can give your comments. Well, I don't necessarily like the fact that they're not having a touchdown Atlantic this year, but I do like this whole idea of having another touchdown games or having touchdown games at other locations. I think that it's really great what BC's doing in terms of trying to make it the province's team. And I think this is, having a game in Victoria goes a long way to doing that. So I think at the end of the day, I think it's really cool and I think the game's going to sell regardless. So I think putting Ottawa there I think is fine. Yeah, I have a lot of questions like Reed, are you going to go to that game Wedding videographer weekend? The Labor Day weekend in Seattle is challenging, whether it's with an OUR or just in. So in terms of, I do wish that there was both in Atlantic and the Pacific, it very much feels to me like the CFL, like, whoa, whoa, whoa, okay, we're doing the Pacific this year. We can't. God forbid we try to balance both of those, Evan, whether or not we're going to the game, you got to be excited for that. Evan, you're live. Yeah, I think the one thing that I'll say about the touchdown Pacific that no one's really brought up yet, and it's significantly different from Touchdown Atlantic. So the touchdown Atlantic game is typically in Nova Scotia, right? See Victoria, you can take the ferry from Vancouver over to Victoria so you can get a lot of BC fans there. I mean Halifax, that's Nova Scotia, that's way over there on the other side of the country. Pretty far out of the way. You'd have to fly there. It's a way, I guess bigger deal. And I believe the matchup last year for Touchdown Atlantic was Toronto and Saskatchewan Last two years. Yeah, last two years. And not very many people from Saskatchewan are going to be making the trip over to Halifax. I don't think that's a very common path. But with the touchdown Pacific being in Victoria, Victoria is not that far from a lot of things. And it's again, right there on Vancouver Island, it's not terribly far from Vancouver itself. So you can actually get a lot of BC fans there. Ottawa fans, again, other side of the country, probably not. Maybe if it was a team in Alberta or something, you'd maybe have people would fly over and then go to Victoria from there and make it a weekend or something. But I still feel like again, you're going to have a better turnout just because of that, I guess convenience factor, right? Because again, if you're playing a game in Halifax, there's just not, the CFL market again has not been established over there. I get it. Look, we were at Great Cup, the Atlantic scooters had a great setup, but that tee has not been established there yet and maybe never will. So dare I get into that discussion. I am not going to talk about that today. But again, just something to keep in mind, like Victoria, there. It does feel like, again, again, especially being in the province too of British Columbia, touchdown Atlantic is a completely separate thing. It's not really attached to any province. This feels significantly different in my opinion, but again, in a positive way and one that I hope to see continued in future years. Well, and the reason I wish we'll see, I mean I just am presuming I have a wedding that day. If I don't, I'm sure Baker can hook me up with a just stand on the sidelines or something. But we have a direct ferry from the port of Seattle, which is about 15 minutes from my house. That takes you directly there and you can drink. It's like it's a whole thing. And funny enough, when I used to work at Q 13, I came in, I'd work the 8:00 AM to five shift on Sunday and I come in and someone had actually, because they just more 'em down there and then they take off and someone had climbed up over the security fence in and then untied the boat and floated to the middle of Elliot Bay. So then I had to go and we had our cameras with the super long lenses and they literally have kind of like a Michael Bay movie. They boarded the ferry and they have the swap boats come out. They don't know does this guy have bombs on the boat? It gets to be this whole thing and ended up being this drunk woman or something that climbed up over. But yeah, you can directly, you go, you just give me your little, your passport or we have the other your passport card, you can just hop right on there and go up. So exciting that way. Getting out of here BC Montreal, a good Friday game here, getting into September. This is when we start getting the triple headers, which is always tough for me. Just with if you're out at all on a Saturday. Jason, anything here? I'm just kind of scrolling through here. Well before we get out of here. Well, I wanted to bring up something for you guys. CFL plus, I think it's going to be very interesting to see if they add more features to it, to the add the on-demand feature next year. I think that would do a lot to alleviating some of your stress for these triple header, double header kind of games. So Dave, so I'm excited to see what they do with that Just once the game's done. And I don't understand they do that with, if you're a TSN person up, just put the game on and if you want, I get this with the ads and all that, even just screen record the thing. And then if we got to fast forward through where they have the weird ghetto rap, instrumental music, whatever that is, it just would really go a long way I think to just feeling like I can't leave the house from 10:00 AM Saturday on trying to explain to my wife, well, because we've established Sunday, we understand this is what we do, but it's really hard to get both of the weekend days that way. Evan, anything else here? We got another Toronto at bc. It really feels like BC has got a contender schedule here. I mean I know with the CFL it's pretty balanced around and we're doing all the competitive balance this year, but it feels like BC's got a pretty heavy, heavy, heavy hitter schedule. Well, I think we're at the point in the season now, just going down this list where the schedule's starting to be more condensed. You're moving down to one or two days, you're having teams start to go on buys as the season wraps up. We know from you doing all of our work this season, those last couple of weeks really becomes a marathon at that point when it's like there's three games in one day and all these other teams are on a buy. And this year Toronto had the east locked up. So a lot of it for, I don't want to say it became meaningless because there are players who are really making a statement out there and doing their job and providing great entertainment for us. But it was at a point where it's just like we're here in week 21 and it's like who knows? It's just that situation where things might already be again, locked up and you're just kind of playing games for guys to get reps at that point. That's always one of the things that I found interesting about the CFL in particular. Again, with a 21 week season in pro football and only nine teams, you just see obviously there's going to be repetition, but you'll see teams playing each other back to back and just some of the same matchups and it's hard to have diversity again with 21 weeks and only nine teams. So I commend the, I don't know, this might sound bad, I don't know if there's a committee who makes the CFL schedule. I don't know how many that works to be honest. I'm not a schedule guy really, but I commend the league, I guess I'll say, for being able to make a somewhat diverse schedule and adding these things like Touchdown Pacific to just jazz things up a bit. Because again, with the amount of repetition, it's pretty easy I think for some people to just go, oh, well we saw this matchup two weeks ago and it was in Toronto and not Ottawa, whatever. But it's still the same thing. But again, I say that keeping in mind that the CFL changes very quickly and last year I could have said that going into this season, but then even if you did have the same matchup two or three weeks apart from each other, the games could still be very different. And that's one thing, again, just with the flow of the season and the length of it, that's where those variables come into play. So yeah, ultimately I think again, nine teams, 21 weeks going to be difficult to have a schedule that's not interesting but just captivating on a regular basis. But you do get these weekends that are, I'd say more interesting than others. Simply I think anytime there's a rivalry like the Banjo bowl stuff, labor Day, all that jazz, I think that's great. So yeah, I'll leave it at that. Yeah, I actually wanted to see, we have the Victoria game and then this'll be right, and then we go back. So with the Labor Day, I always get it mixed up. So we got the Labor Day classic and then we go back with the banal here. So that'll be exciting. Kind of that week, 13, 14. I always flip those in my head. But yeah, I don't know if it was me, do I do this game a different day to maybe let's spruce up week 10 or something maybe. And obviously there's availability and scheduling and all that. That would be my one comment that way. And like we talked about with the week one stuff, let's put a lot of stuff in and that's great. And I think week one should do tremendous ratings for the CFL and I know some of that stuff, but I think last year that touchdown Atlanta game was kind used as a prop game and the beginning of August, right Jason? It felt like it was more of a standalone where we were building around that versus this is part of the Labor Day weekend, which I think maybe stands on its own would probably be my own thing. And then my last comment we'll throw to Jason and then we'll round this out, you look here this week 21, this might be the loser bracket again in Calgary and Saskatchewan here last game of the year. But hey, the last weekend ended up being tremendously exciting more or less with some of those games coming down the pike. So yeah, the Saskatchewan a Calgary game at 4:00 PM on October 26th, kind of circled that as potentially the loser bracket. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I agree with you guys and I think that the CFL should do more to jazz up some of these matchups and do some of these special event things. And I mean I think it's questionable that they put it on Labor Day, but at the same time, I'm happy that BC gets to be a part of Labor Day weekend for once because they're usually the team that misses out. It's usually Montreal versus Ottawa and BC with the buy that week. So I'm glad from that perspective that they get to be a part of that. Yeah, and I just spoiler alert the prep I do. I haven't looked at the schedule until today, so I like living through it real time. But I think that that works out. Yeah, I mean I think honestly tremendous job. Like I said, the week one feels heavy, but I think there's a lot of moving pieces there with the schedules and who's available and what Toronto. I'd say Tim Capper complaining about the ettes Thursday games talk to if any Redbacks fans existed, they would be very upset with you complaining about that. So that would be my last comments with that. Evan, anything else before we get out of here? Evan's good? I think so. I think so. Okay. Well Jason, I appreciate it. This was fun. And we did necklace, we did coaching hires and all that stuff. We'll get back. Jason and I are figuring out some sort of free agency thing. You keep me posted scheduling wise and with all of that when that makes sense to do. But we'll try to get together a panel or maybe do a live show for that. And then yeah, we're kind of TBD. Like I said, I feel pretty strongly about and Mark can do and Brandon can do kind of what they want with the XFL stuff. I feel pretty weird doing a lot of trying to get clicks and views for stuff when it's people's jobs on the line. So I kind of came to it kind of a conscience of crisis about that a couple of weeks ago. So we'll roll through. Anything else CFL will come out. I know Zach was asking about when's the next, we will see when news breaks, you know where to come. Stay subscribed. We'll get everything on there. But I appreciate Jason getting all this and Evan with his knowledge of all the neg list and everything else, we'll get out of here and we'll see everyone next time. Thanks.

Breaking: XFL-USFL Merger Complete! Here's What We Know!!

Well Max, we tried. I've been standing here in front of my computer, birdie said maybe eight o'clock today. I've been standing here live, ready to go since seven 30. We got to get going on this, so we have reports coming out. Everything else XFL merger official. We're still waiting on the league's announcement but I think we have enough to go on here. How are you doing, max? I'm doing great, but this whole, will we actually say anything on the record through our actual press releases instead of sending things off to reporters for them to say so that we can say, oh, it didn't happen if we want to. Isn't very annoying. Yeah, we're waiting here. Like I said, supposedly waiting on official announcement today we have Ben Fisher who I trust with my life and obviously Mike Mitchell reporting things, so I think we have enough to go on here at least in terms of what we officially know and then kind of what we're expecting in terms of maybe the league name and team members and everything that Mike's reporting. Not official yet. Like I said, I don't think you and I talked, I don't think Mike puts that out unless he's feeling pretty good about it. But we do know that the XFL officially finalized here with, let me get this to the top here with beneficiary reporting that is that kind of your leading news here? I mean at this point we don't have a whole lot else other than what Ben and Mike are giving us and then I mean there's that sport co article, but mostly it's just oh, the merger and then there's a bunch of speculation. Yeah, so Ben reporting here, and let me get this out because it is cleared antitrust Monday, I believe sport co reported leak planning to kick off March 30th. That coincides what I had heard yesterday leading up into this, so that feels all simpatico at this point. I think we were getting close to a February deadline here of what was happening and we all know with April, how do you feel about this? I know Anthony Miller was in our chat saying that's the weekend of the Elite eight ncaa. I mean at least we don't have to deal with being up against as many rounds. The only awkward thing would be week one is usually the biggest audience of the whole year until the title game and you're just sandbagging that during March madness, which is a little unfortunate. Yeah, we have this statement here and this ISCO had this as well. We are pleased we have completed the antitrust process in connection with the proposed merger of the XFL and USL intend to play combined season this spring kicking off Saturday, March 30th. We're now finalizing terms of the definitive agreement and we'll share more about the new league in the coming weeks. We do know and then we'll get into this other thing here, but interesting there. I will say I'm glad my mother wanted to go on vacation, my wife and we had a cruise here planned. Really glad I did kind of plan my February cruise. I said XFL, be the end regardless we're going on the cruise. Seems like my gamble paid off. Yeah, I mean I think we all kind of knew that they were never going to be able to commit to going to one league's timeline the other. Everything's got to be some sort of compromise so you're going to miss out on some training camp stuff, but Yeah, so that'll be good. So we have the March studio here and then this is the interesting thing to me and we obviously if you missed our live stream here Max and I did last Friday and just also note if anything else comes out today, tomorrow, I know Andy Murray standing by here. We can either do something live tomorrow or prerecorded depending on his schedule, but we know very little, but we do know this per source C-X-F-L-C-E-O, Russ brand and will be the top executive of the new entity. That is interesting to me. What do you make of that? I know we talked last week, who's in the photos? Who's in dc? We did the JFK film breakdown on that. It's not a surprise is it? I mean after looking at those photos, it's like what we all thought is that there's a lot of XFL people in this photo. There's not a lot of USFL people in this photo now I still think be below the very top guys. You're going to see a lot of people mixing about between the two leagues with employees and stuff, but I mean aren't a whole lot of the top executives on the USFL, at least a few of them also work for Fox. So do you need them running this new league where you can just bring over a lot of the X L's existing executive staff and then let the other people just be the FOX people? Yeah, I mean this is surprising to me because remember there's been rumors circulating here for weeks of, okay, XFL reached out and they're doing all this and that very well be whatever. But my great fear was always right XFL being absorbed by the USFL. Okay, we're going to add this to the USFL social media interns played and we're going to work through this stuff. Having Russ Brandon involved, does that give you more credence and hopefulness here in terms of what the league's in the look and feel like? I mean I guess it makes me think that there's a greater chance we might have XFL rules and there's a greater chance that the people from the teams that are sticking around are likely to be on the payroll mostly. Although I have a feeling a lot of these local market employees still might get shafted with what sort of jobs pay situation wise they're being shifted because everything feels like it's all about cutting costs. So I have a little bit more faith but not a lot. I really just kind of feel like they need to prove to me why I should believe they're actually going to run a functional football week beyond the actual football. In terms of, and we'll get to Mike's reporting here in terms of the cities and stuff, but do you feel, I don't know, to me we've gone back and forth about this in the USFL, the look and feel of that and it's a little more NFL light in Fox and we kind know what that's going to look through in terms of, I dunno, having that XFL flare to it. Is Russ involved? I am trying to figure out what is his vision with this and what is that going to look like, The vision, your guess, as good as mine with the vision at this point, all we know is that they keep trying to cut costs and me and whatever, but then they don't actually care about building a real fan base. So we'll see. Maybe that changes. So piggybacking off of Ben's, well not piggybacking, just adding on to Ben's report here we have Mike coming out and this is very similar to what I heard yesterday. The growing sense from the sources with the USFL and XFL is that the new league will be branded as a UFL, the United Football League. We've talked about this with only eight teams existing in 2024. The remaining markets being put on pause mode, one core source is indicated. Did I say that right? One core source is indicated the returning markets for the new merge league will be Arlington Houston, San Antonio, St. Louis, dc, Birmingham, Michigan and Memphis eight teams. I know that people aren't going to be happy about that. We had talked last week, what is it? I seen Mike put this out kind of what we've heard and what we've expected. I know there was the back and forth with the government, but what do you make of this? I mean I don't really care that there's going to be more teams from one league or the other because like we talked about last week, it's really just down to which league has more stadium deals. So in the event the Houston team is the XFL team and not the USFL team, whatever, that's semantics at this point outside of social media falling, which we know which one has more and it's not the US L but anyway, the markets that are being kept, I mean these are all the ones you really needed. I mean obviously it would've been nice to keep Seattle, but you're not going to have a team all the way out in an island away from all the rest of the other teams that has a massive expensive NFL stadium contract that they're putting you fourth or fifth in the selection order of events behind field to table and whatever. Well, lumen cost a ton. I remember Sam Schwartzstein when he would come on to talk about the X rules and all of that, I think it was off camera, but telling me the story about how that even came about Mean lumen cost a fortune to run. It wasn't even kind of in the initial plans back in 2020. Yeah, I mean although it would've been even wilder if they went to Husky Stadium instead and they went to an even bigger stadium and then it looked even more empty this time around that would've been worse. I will just say, and I was talking with my wife Dorothy about this last night. I think Seattle is a closed market now for the XFL. I don't care. Right? It is cool having a dog in the fight. We covered the USFL and obviously the CFL and I mean BC is my team but it's still a four hour drive, but to me this would be very challenging to go back into, let's say we do put Seattle on hold in 2025. It's like we're coming back. I feel like this is a closed burn bridge now. I don't see that Happening. The only way they're coming back to Seattle is if the league survives five to 10 years and then people actually believe this thing is serious. I think that's the only way they come back to Seattle and even then I'm like, I feel like the economic model's kind of busted there. You have to be, unless you want to be on a college stadium where it's just way too big, you have to go to this NFL stadium, which is really expensive and that's your only options. We don't have a good, I mean unless you're going down to Tacoma and playing it, we have a couple of nicer high school stadiums, but there's really just nothing around here that We can't play in a high school stadium as a pro league. I know we did the minor league baseball embarrassment. We can't do that again, Dan. We mean. No, it's unfortunate. We have a comment here from John Lewis. We'll pull up questions and comments here in a minute. We'll get through the initial news. What was interesting to me about this is we've heard the back and forth when Mike was originally on and we had the first live stream here of the marriage and now we have the handshake with Houston belonging to the gamblers, not the roughnecks. I have heard, and it seems at least how Mike is listening to the cities here that the Houston team is going to be more aligned with the XFL in terms of team and branding. Thoughts on that and I know I had tweeted out to Mike because it's five versus three here. Interesting breakdown on that. I would think that they would want the four and four like you said, just for a peace of mind and we're agreeing to everything, but it's really hard to get rid of the roughnecks in terms of the gamblers. Yeah, I mean the only logical reason to get rid of the roughnecks for the gamblers is so that some petty USFL executive can feel like aha, we forced it to be even. Listen, nobody should care how many teams are from what league or the other league. The only thing you should care about are how many teams we have in the first place, how many stadiums do we have? So I was sick of all that pettiness of oh, the SFL is going to have more teens. Oh, the XFL is going to have more teens, whatever, let's just have a league that works. I'm tired of bickering about who has more teams and whatever. Well, it is tough too, and I was talking to a couple players last night. I think players are getting informed and this is all kind of coming out and people are kind of, okay, what do you know? And this is what we've heard. I know Mark Thompson who tweets a lot right now is talking about training camp in Texas, which kind of aligns what I've heard. Players are heartbroken about this. I mean if you're a team that's not on this list and you're finding out, do I have a job tomorrow? Do I know what's going on? That to me is the biggest focus on this because these are players that we're told, this is business as usual, we're doing all this and next thing it's kind of like Thanos snap of the finger and half these teams are gone. That to me is the biggest shame of this. It's the coaches, it's the players, it's the staff, the ticket sales. Orlando's not on this list. What does that mean for Corey? I know some of these people can work remote for the XFL, but if you are a local executive, I don't know, what do you do moving on from here? That would be very challenging to me. Well, if I remember right, Corey in particular is one of those exceptions where he was local and somewhat involved in the national stuff, but in general, yeah, I mean obviously there's going to be layoffs. The one thing that we could see for whoever can work remote on these jobs is that, I mean I don't think the USFL had a very strong ticketing infrastructure from what I remember. So you might see some XL people who can either move unlikely or work remote or work in the hub for the ticketing, do that and then they fly out again to the ticketing events like they did in 2023 almost over now. But yeah, I mean it's definitely not going to be ideal is it? To me, and I don't want to be, I dunno, it's hard not to be critical here, but in terms of if you're working for one of these leagues and it feels a little disingenuous where, and this is why I had said from the beginning when they came out, we have the merger announcement and people, it's business as usual, USS L announcing free agency and all that stuff. If you're someone that's worked for one of these leagues and you're told business as usual knowing that the XFL is going to the federal government, the SFL, they're going in wanting to cut down the teams, right? They're the ones we had heard the reports that the government wanted more and the US FL and XL wanted less. To me it just feels very disingenuous like well no stick around, we're going to figure this out but we're actively campaigning. It's like Survivor. We're campaigning to get rid of you but we're also telling you, no, don't worry, you're safe. We'll campaign to get rid of you and then with whatever we're left, we're just going to languish around until we decide we're tired of spending money because we don't actually care about spring football. Now I got a lot of comments on the last stream saying Max, max negative, max negative. So let's look at some positives here. Let's look forward better working together than the apart. I mean what's the silver lining here for people? I know we got Chris in the chat with the dragons. I'm very upset about that. Jose commenting here, let's go Bramos, pull up some comments here in a second too. I mean we won't have the cannibalizing effect so there's that, but the however many like 250,000 people who intersect between the XFL and USFL audience that we're pulling away from each other whenever they're airing direct or on the same weekend. So there's that. There's the chance to have a real marketing message for a league that can actually be promoted fully instead of half-baked halftime commercials during some college football games and Monday night football games and now you have the ability to market across FOX and ESPN, which means your reach marketing on the NFL should massively increase. Although you're running out of time, the regular season is not that far away from being over and you haven't even announced how many teams there's going to be or the name of the league or anything other than the kickoff date. I mean we're four months away from kickoff and there's a lot of things that do not seem put together at all and I am in highly skeptical. I have Mike's post in our group chat, we have a little bit more breaking news and then I want to go through this for the call article as well. There was a couple of quotes on that, but Mike sharing this Russ Brandon's message now I guess president, whatever of the UFL here, Russ Brandon, our lord and Savior. This was out to league staff today. Team, you may have seen stories or social media posts this morning regarding an update on our potential merger with the USFL. We are pleased to have completed the antitrust review process in connection with the proposed merger and intended play combined season this spring kicking off on Saturday, March 30th. We're now finalizing terms definitive agreement share more very similar to the press quote given that to Ben and Sport Co, but interesting now to have that be sent out from RU Brandon here at least at some point so people can know what's going on. It's just funny how I bet the employees found out from Twitter and from reporters before they found out from Russ because that seems to be something that's happening a lot lately with a lot of these leagues and sports in general, but with something as much of a magnitude that's changing their employment like this, not having the heads up of real. Maybe they got a hint but not having the official put it downward until four months out. We are literally 120 maybe give or take one or two days away from March 30th and these guys still don't know what their job is. Are they going to keep their job or not? I mean that's crazy. I was just seeing yeah, how many days until March 30th, 121. We also have a little bit more breaking news. You see, I like doing, this is a good timing coming out here. This is via Pat Rafino. Pat trying to call me this morning. I'm like Pat, I'm standing by. I'm getting ready to go live here. This is for Danny Garcia's Instagram. Very similar on that but Danny Garcia putting that out. Let me see. I had her thing pulled up and I didn't obviously haven't been refreshing it since we came on here, but Danny getting the word out that way because obviously Oh yeah, we have it here because obviously her Twitter account, her ex account is gone. Maybe Danny's anti Elon Musk and all of that, but here, yes, per pad and conglomerate this on here. What do you make of Danny sharing the news this way? I'm glad there's been an official statement by a league personnel that isn't to a reporter and instead is signed that league person on their own accounts, their own place. Now it'd be nice if we had that on the league's social account itself, both of their leagues and their websites. Where's the press release? Come on, we need more than this, but this is something Looking on, I'm looking on the exit all site, still nothing on there so we're slowly trying to get the word out here. Does this give you more or less confidence in terms of the communications of these leagues moving forward, how this has rolled out today? It's hard to say less when you're already at the bottom. I mean the bar is already in heck or whatever. I don't want to, Yeah, no, the last thing we have here is the Billy social media, the Billy social media impressions for 2023 here, so working through that, but this is good, so we have that with Pat, so Danny's put that out. I don't know if the rocks put that out. I don't know if that's the most, again, I shouldn't have to have 18 Google Chrome tabs open to try to figure out who is sharing information about this. Incredibly. Imagine if you're a fan of either of these leagues and you're waking up today and discovering that your team is probably gone. I mean and you still don't know that for sure if you're a Houston Roughneck fan. Yeah, there's a Houston team, but you don't really know whether it's going to be the roughnecks or the gamblers yet, do you? So until they say it, so we're all thinking there's so much uncertainty that just doesn't need to be there. And also the coming weeks, does that mean two weeks? Does that mean four weeks? Does that mean six weeks? How long are they going to string and then there's supposed to be training camp for this. It's going to have to be in February, so if we wait to announce everything until January, I mean is there going to be a dispersal draft behind closed doors in a smoke filled room and we're not going to find out about it until they announce how many teams? I mean there's just so many. How is all this supposed to get put together if you're not even going to tell us what's going on for several more weeks? It's just how am I supposed to believe in this? I just don't. I mean it's clearly happening, but how am I supposed to believe this is going to work? I just, Yeah, I'm seeing a lot of comments here. People, people think you're negative. I think Max and I are at the point where I think there's some realism in this and to me it is not good news that half these teams are going to go away, right? It's not good news of these players. My question, and I was talking with one of the guys last night, it's like what do I do? Am I going to Canada? Am I going here? Am I going there? I mean, do you think that, do we redraft the leftover players to the other eight teams? We're so full now. We've done showcases, we've done all this stuff. What happens to those guys? Well, I mean you'd have to think there'd be a dispersal draft. Yeah, I mean otherwise you're giving up all the top talent from your other teams and just saying, oh, we're just going to keep our teams as they are. That doesn't make any sense. I mean obviously if you want to infuse talent back into the teams that are left, you're going to take the top players from all the teams that are left and then cut out all the bottom guys and that might result in a 10% better football product. But it sure is going to be heartbreaking for those other guys whenever they got nowhere to go and maybe technically maybe they end up in the Arena league, maybe that actually ends up being serious. You never know. I mean I don't know how much it's going to pay. It's still not a deal. Yeah, I saw a tweet about that, so I don't know if that was Mark or someone like, oh, well now this means collectively they're going to have more resources, bigger rosters or more money. I don't think that's necessarily, and I don't dunno if we talked about that on the last stream. I don't see, it was kind like when the a f went away and Vince Mcma XL 2020 was like, I think the quote was, why should we play these players more? There's no competition. I mean I see wages staying the same. Certainly I don't see that increasing. I hope they can give them as much money as the XFL was giving them while a lot, some of the extra benefits coverage the USFL had in a couple small areas and that they can work out something with the union, but yeah, I'm not expecting a pay increase at all or a roster size increase. I'm hoping they stick with the XFL roster size and they don't decide to go down to the USFL roster size because that would be quite upsetting. I have a bigger question here, but first off, in terms of the union and we talked about how are they, one of the players I was talking to said there were US L, excuse me, they said there's protections in place right with our CBA and all of that and obviously the XFL voted not to unionize last year. I'm just curious how that's going to work with where you have these two entities coming together and part have protections. I don't know what that looks like. I don't think you can have it where part of the map of protection, I think they're going to have to decide whether to unionize the whole league or abandon the union. I don't know how you could have a union for three eighths of the league. It doesn't make any sense. That would just create a nightmare for agents and for players and for it would be bad for everyone if it must be either the whole league is unionized or nobody's unionized. There's no other way for this to work. I was thinking about this last night when I was getting the news that this was coming today. So right, we've talked and the XFL lost all this money and we can go into the USFL did make money, they didn't make money. I mean I have my thoughts on that with bookkeeping and we talked about that, but if we're doing this model, so presumably we're doing the XFL, we got the Arlington Mark Thompson's talking about training camp in Texas, we're going to the cities. How does that save a lot of money? Where's the cost savings here from what the L did last time? Is it just Well, we don't have to fly to Seattle and pay Lumen field. We don't have to go to Cashman. That wasn't costing a lot. We can bust the players in Texas. We can do the, where's the cost savings here? The cost savings is going to be in however they can do the wrangling that Fox did where they have, oh, this is someone we already hired and now they're just going to do double duty for the UFL or whatever they named this new league because apparently they don't want to keep an established brand, they just want to start over whatever. Then on top of that, you have the ability for all your fox gains. You can now own your advertising revenue directly. So if half of them are on Fox, that's a significant revenue increase for the newly compared to not owning it at all and then you still get your production costs covered from the ESPN side plus whatever incentives you can hang on to from that deal so you can get a little bit more revenue that way or maybe even a lot of bit I guess because that's probably the main reason the USFL turned a profit from the revenue side is because they were counting Fox's revenue as their own revenue. But I mean outside of that, it's probably really not going to be a massive cost cut down outside of how they confined to have even less employees or have even less office space or whatever. I'm trying to figure that out and obviously we don't have look in the books, but if this is just an XFL business model and getting rid of some of the maybe poor performing teams, I mean Seattle was fine, but we've talked about the cost for that and everything else. I don't know, to me that feels, it just doesn't feel like there's enough to be done there to go through all these hoops to get to that point. The only thing, I mean like I said, the only way this really pays off is if they decide to say, Hey, we're going to cut off the weakest of the bunch and then we're going to put our foot down and actually be serious with whoever we have left. If they do all the local marketing they need to do, if they do the national marketing even on this tight timeline, I mean I don't think the numbers are going to be explosive or anything, but at least we can say, Hey, they tried. They're being respectable. They're building something. I have a comment here from Blake. Is UFL confirmed is 18 is confirmed unless it's directly from the league. I agree with you. Absolutely, and we've got scrutiny on all this. This is the same that I had heard going back to when I landed in Canada, whenever that was for the Gray Cup stuff. I was sitting at the reporter suite that night and got this message and it was conveyed to me that, Hey, look, none of these reports that have gone out, none of the Neil Strat and stuff, none of everything have talked about this. It's because they didn't know what was going on and dah dah, dah, dah. This was echoed again to me yesterday and obviously Mike has his sourcing as well, so this feels as close as we have at this point, but obviously everything's with a grain of salt. We do know the March 30th and we do know the official finalization And I mean it's fair to be skeptical about anything at this point and also skeptical about how much any of this new name nonsense is going to work. I just keep thinking about the Katie Nolan clip from when she talked about the UFL when she did the spring football segment on her always late show like five years ago. Oh yeah, that was hilarious, but I'll have to go fetch that because it's unlisted, but I still have it saved. I knew I was going to want to reference that video again. What else we have? Kyle know that it won't be starting after a week under the Super Bowl march and that's per Russ and everything else. We have everything on that. We had a comment here about, oh, Scott and Scott's been messaging me a lot about this. More teams like to be added in 2025 and beyond. They're on plus. That's where I get, I just have trouble with all of this and you're asking a lot of faith with everybody. I know we don't want to be negative Nancy too much on here, but ask the Tampa Bay Bandits, ask that fan base how that's working when you put things on pause, you're shaking your head here Max. Yeah, I mean I'll believe it when I see it. First off for 2025 in particular, but second off, why would you divert? Your whole goal of the whole time has been cutting costs. You're not going to get profitability with whatever new setup you have out the gate right away, so why are you going to divert your attention from building up the leagues, the teams you're actually playing on, keeping to then add more teams and then add more costs and then you're going to sink yourself in deeper before you've even built up what you already had. I don't think we're getting any more teams until they can prove they can keep 18 league running smoothly and actually making money and all that. I just don't see why you would do that. Yeah, Justin pointing out here, yeah, Seattle's the big savings, but again, this is a lot of hoop jumping to save some stadium leases and stuff. Like you said, there must be more cost savings rolled into them being able to control the content going to the consumer and all of that, but it feels like, I dunno, I guess it feels like it's a little bit wonky at this point. Yeah, I really think the main reason, if they're serious, which I don't think they are, but if they are serious about actually trying to make something real, then it's going to be because they want to start over and they just feel like there's too much of a negative perception around some of the bottom of their teams or the teams that never had stadium leases. So let's just start anew and that's if you're optimistic and you believe they're actually going to be able to Serious football league. Yeah, Elif put on here says 2025 is too early. Give them three to five years, all got one year under their belt here. I mean this is and more comments about expansion and videos about expansion and articles about expansion. We can't even get through one of these things without feeling halfway decent about it. I don't get the point of expanding if you can't even build a league that works with what you already started with. I mean I know MLS did something like that, but they had billions of dollars of capital and belief and funding and also they had the unique advantages of owning the rights to the US national team marketing rights. That was how they got owners in the door. There's no unique special advantage to investing in the XFL. There's no secret back to advantage to that. So I'm not like an expansion anytime soon. We have another comment here. I got some more highlighted, I'm a bit disappointed, but I think it's the best viable option versus the fan dream option. So I'm hopeful that coming together gives them a solid base with more resources and progress moving forward and I agree here mean certainly we saw the opposite of this, so I think that this was bound to happen and we had said obviously originally when all this stuff was reported that we expected this down the road, but certainly not in year two of the XFL. Yeah, I mean I expected it down the road before they all started. I thought one league was just going to decide and we'll just take from the other, but what ended up happening is that both of them were run so poorly in different ways that they just kind of cut off all of their bad parts from each other and give it our best shot with whatever was good. Maybe a little good. I don't know how good some of this is. Some of these teams are still, we're not doing this a lot but better and we'll try again. They had to. We have a comment here where Andy here has got expansion will be based on owners. Does this feel like this but does this feel like a stop gap now we talked about this last time and kind of passing along this baby and now we're getting to this point. We're just hot potato. We need to get to someone to take over some of these expenses. Does this feel like a bridge now to getting people involved in terms of getting ownership on there? I don't know how this merger is going to make people want to be involved. What's going to make people want to be involved is that they can see you're actually getting real traction and real fans. So if you're going to do that and you get them, then you'll get owners. But until then people are just going to look at you like, oh, that's that football league that people only kind of care about and the owners don't even care about. So why would I want to buy into a partner with someone like that? Arthur Hopping on here asking, what's the name of the league? Mike Mitchell reporting going to be the UFL. That's similar to what I've heard that we've seen the trademarks filed and all of that. A lot of people watching right now. Hopefully you can and subscribe if you're not, I imagine most people joining us right now, but we have a hundred people watching Max. Not too bad for him and Han around here for an hour and a half trying to figure out what we wanted to do. So I appreciate everyone joining, but yeah, like and subscribe on that. I did have a funny, this is just funny on here from a coach sipping Jamba Juice. Anyone still remember Doug Lee saying the USFL, we're going to be with the NFL in a few years. I'm still wondering who the hell told him that and then that video was pulled down immediately. It's a clown show. It really is. I mean I think we've known for a long time with these new leagues. Everything's kind of a bit of a clown show with everybody up top, so not surprising anymore. It's all a joke. TP Joseph starting with eight teams will fuel interest and expansion instead of starting with teetering teams and fan bases. It's tough to me. We've lived to this, right? I don't know what the casual, I can tell you my Seattle, I've told you this before, my Seattle season ticket holders, they're just waiting for their money back at this point. They're very over this. I don't know what the casual thinks of like, oh, this is a new exciting venture versus, okay, this is collapse of two into one. I don't know what the casual thing of That. Most of the interest and expansion is not. Well, I mean I'm sure if the XFL or U FFLs viewed as serious, there'd be interest in expansion, but most of the interest and expansion is really just the kind of people that love hypotheticals for all sports. They'll be like, oh, realignment PAC 12 realignment, everything that happened with that disaster or the MLS expansion or NWSL or PLL or NLL or whatever. I think people underestimate how the virality of expansion content has nothing to do with actual interest in your league. It just is all talking about Sports League. They don't actually really care about your league. I had a comment here and then I want to get to something else with the teams. Abdul's got this if it's a US FL, Xavier is the happiest person in the world right now. He wrote it out, he never had to get rid of the handle. That doesn't have to be bothered anymore. Xavier is probably very happy at that. He Survived two XLS and still username and the other funny thing is now everyone's just going to confuse this league for the video game that's coming out. The soccer video game, which by the way has the exact same branding font as the XFL does, except their F is slightly different, which I just think is only going to contribute to the confusion even more. This is such a mess, man. So getting Debbie Downer comments on Max here, that's okay Max. The reason why Max used to be Debbie Downer in here is Max gets to get his butt up at seven 30 Pacific and standby while we figure out going live. So if anyone wants to get up at seven 30 and standby for an hour and a half to go live, you're welcome to come on here and share your opinion. I have a question here in terms of the team alignments and everything. We go back to even the original USL here in 2022 and talking about, well we picked these markets because these were the trademarks that we had and they were the ones that were back from the eighties and we talked at the time. Well that doesn't make sense because 2023 now we have these, it's kind of the leftover, there's no real thought or purpose than just these are the teams that had stadiums that worked out like the three Texas teams, whether it's the roughnecks or whether it's the gamblers, St. Louis, dc Birmingham, you're missing a third of the country here. What do you make of this alignment without Vegas, Seattle, without Orlando? Very south, very east based? I mean you knew it was coming, right? It was kind of a necessity that they had to make it more regional. Imagine having so many teams, having a couple teams separate from literally the entire rest of the country was just not going to be sustainable. So I get it. I'm a little bothered. I mean I understand why, but I'm a little bothered that you're not going to have a Florida team. I mean it's one thing to not have a west coast, but imagine among football diehards. I mean Florida is second to only Texas often like Florida and Ohio I guess, and I mean Ohio is a weird spot sometimes to put a team in. So I get why they're not in Ohio, but not having a Florida team might bike them a little bit in terms of building a fan base of football fans. Although it'd be fair they did such a bad job in Florida with not only 2023, but even 2020 was really struggling in Tampa. So maybe they're just too burned on Florida. They don't want to stick around. I also find it funny, the only of the, remember we were talking about the XFL ownership, how they had their three teams, each one of them was their contribution to the new league and Danny's team is gone and Jerry's team is gone and the only ones that remains of course is the rocks team. To me, again, I talking to the USFL stuff, it just feels like there's thought through of this, right? And the XFL had this already with the three Texas teams and every single person I've talked to, why are there three teams in Texas? Well, it's because they're going to be out based out of there and they can bust people and it's whatever. To me, there's never, I don't know if anything, and I know it's hard and we have a comment here in terms of them keeping the strongest fan bases, where is it here? But I just wish there was more thought process behind that than just like, well these are the ones that worked and no thought of realigning or moving anything. Like we're keeping the healthiest children and we're throwing the rest of them out in the river here. Yeah, the alternative, the only way they could have kept more teens or gone to different markets than what they already had would've been if they decided to start in 2025 because you just don't have enough time to build a completely new fan base right now if you want to launch in four months, I mean you're already already the markets you're keeping, they've been strung along so much, they have no idea what's going on. Nobody in San Antonio. Here's the thing, lemme give you some examples. Houston, no one in Houston has any idea what is going on with this merger. You know why no one in Houston has any idea because they stopped covering this league months ago. First off, second off, there's a head coasting search going on for one of their big local college teams and then on top of that in San Antonio, the big local college team is rumored to be getting hired potentially for the Houston job in college. So that's the main football coverage going on outside of Texas high school playoffs just for example. And then in some of these other markets, you've completely ditched them ever since the end of the football season. So they don't care about covering this merger stuff, they're not going to talk about it. So how are you going to make these markets? You have left care that you're coming back whenever they don't even know that you're coming back. How do you think that Seattle, Vegas, the USFL, how do you think those departments are going to handle the fan bases here? We're going to get an email out saying thank you for your support. How do you think that messaging is going to go to me? I mean I don't think it's a lose lose, but what do you Mean? I think it's emails and maybe a social media posts. I think we might get how we had at the end of 2020 where we had the guy who's Bailey or whatever who BW Carlin, he posted the meme of the guy putting his hand up and turning away. I can't even remember exactly J. Yeah, Chilling off. Yeah, keep chilling off and I don't know if they'll do the Jake, Jill all, but I'm sure they'll do some kind of funny post signing off and then the team will be dead. I mean there's no graceful way to handle this, especially for Vegas. Maybe for Seattle you can come up with some nonsense that makes it seem like maybe you would want to come back, but I don't know if anyone's going to believe you. The other thing that fascinates me, we haven't talked about yet, what coaching staffs are going to be kept in this league? Who's going to be transferred to another team who's going to be cut off? For example, they just hired the Vegas staff. Are you really going to cut off the guy who you just hired away from the NFL? You're going to look so bad to the entire NFL if you hire away one of their boys, one of their coaches, and then you fire him before we ever had a chance to coach, you're going to look bad. Well, yeah, I think that's a really fair point because we've talked about obviously the redrafting of some of the leftover players if you were on one of the teams. But yeah, if you're a coaching staff, if anything, we had talked about having one person doing multiple jobs in our last stream as well. I mean you're certainly not carrying over a lot of those staff. I know the USFL are different contracts and I think there were the reporting that come out, I think it was Mike earlier had said where the XFL is a little more long-term contracts, they can get the USFL guys out a little bit easier. I don't know how you carry that over at this point. Yeah, I'm assuming they just cut off all the old SFL staffs. Maybe they want to keep de Phillipo at New Orleans, maybe they move him somewhere, but I mean Houston staff made the playoffs. You can't cut them off. You can't cut off the Arlington staff. You can't cut off the San Antonio staff even though they didn't do that great because they were one of the better staffs that actually getting out her local market. You definitely can't cut off Reggie Barlow. You definitely can't cut off Anthony Beck. You definitely can't cut off skip pulse. I don't think you can cut off the Memphis staff either and then even Horton and Michigan, I don't know. What are you going to do with Blevins and all these guys that were supposed to have a job in the spring you just hired and you're, this is all depressingly messed up. You got to comment my here because again, you've been riding the negative train. Hey, hey, that's a good point by max. So there it's not all negative on here. Badger, badger, badger. Again, I would rather have an eight team league that works in a 12 team league that doesn't. I absolutely understand that sentiment. It's hard if you're one of it. It's like what was that? Show the leftovers, right? It's hard. If you're the leftovers, you're wandering this path. It's even worse than the PAC 12 stuff that happened where the poor Oregon state and Washington state fans lost their league, but at least they still have their team. Your team has gone, you're done. This is over and it's fine in terms of from a league building perspective to cut off these teams. What's not fine is how they went about this and how slow moving they've been, how inefficient they've been, how poorly communicating they've been. It's been a little bit of a disaster, so maybe they can recover. I got some more comments here. This is good. Good viewers appreciate, like I said, like and subscribe, get all this stuff on here. Another one from Bad 10 and I have a couple of questions on here. They need to listen to us fans, we know what we want. It is been my sentiment from the beginning. I mean I think a lot of this coming in and okay, well we know more and it's our money conversations years ago could have been had that would've negated a lot of this stuff. So yeah, I mean at this point now we're doing the best we can. They're trying to do what I believe they feel like is a way to sustainability. I think at some point you got to take a loss on this. It's challenging. But any other thoughts on that? It'd be fine if they were caring about sustainability, if they also cared about growth. Do they care about growth? You tell me. I mean it doesn't seem like they care. I mean we went through, I wrote up the entire fan's Bill of Rights document that was inspired by a league that did care about growth and still you look at every single professional league that isn't a super established major league, they focus on all of those principles all the time and it works. If you don't, you fail unless you're one of those internet leagues or whatever. But if you want to be a serious professional, big time national broadcast league, you have to focus on building a fan base in markets. Yeah. Let's see here. Pat, given this power field, given this the dollar super chat on here, so I'll tell you, I got on a, I never asked for any of that stuff. I've been watching the Kraken post show recap lately because we've just been terrible and it's good to commiserate. They're getting super chats all the time. Go, thanks for this super chat. I'm like looking, there's only like 10 people watching the stream. I'm like, what the heck guys? I never get anything about stuff on here, but it's fine. Question and then we have one from Mike as well, but Zach, a long time listener of the show. What's the future of the show now that we know that there'll be no Seattle team where you still cover the league the way that you've been with all your expert analysis? My, what is it? My covering the league, my dedication to the league has nothing to do with Seattle team existing or not? Never has been. I mean obviously originally with the fan base with the dragons, it will be how the is operated and moving forward and what access we can get. I know what I've dealt with with the USFL before. I can't spend the next year and a half banging my head against the wall dealing with that. But if the rumors true and some of the XFL staff are shifting over the SFL and kind of doing a lot of that stuff, that is good, but we'll figure it out. I had so much fun in Canada for the Gray Cup. It's really hard to think about pulling back now entirely, but we'll see. I don't know. What do you make next? Yeah, I think the access, as long as I don't think you're going to have Russ involved in this league and then decide, oh, we're going to pull away the access that we were giving. You can clearly see that that aspect gave the XFLA huge boost. I don't think there's any way the USFL is going to win that argument and especially whenever they're not the guy running the league. It's not Daryl Johnston running this guy forsaken league. At least there's one thing I'll give Russ Brandon credit for is that he actually let reporters talk and podcasters talk to players and some executives and coaches and whatever. So yeah. Also this hasn't been said officially or by any reporter, but they're not going to base themselves in the actual markets. There's no way it's still going to be Arlington because they have a contract with Arlington, first off, second off. Well, the XFL side does, but second off because it's just obviously more efficient and effective than trying to do three hubs or four hubs or whatever. I mean, I still don't understand how they ever thought that was supposed to work. No, that's my understanding as well. Yes. I mean that has not been officially put out yet, but my understanding is Arlington, like I said, we already have Mark Thompson tweeting about training camp in Arlington or training camp in Texas, but that is my understanding, the XFL, which again, if you want to circle back to our conversation, what kind of cost savings are we going to have there in terms of that? We had another one from Mike. Did the XFL take the lead in this merger? The XFL teams appear to be five three. We'll see, we talked about the Houston thing a bit. X-F-L-C-E-O is in charge and they go with the XL model of staying based in Arlington and flying out to home cities. It is a weird reversal from kind of what the understanding of the situation was from before, correct? Yeah. I think what they came to realize was that they did the XFL did a better job of running football than the USFL did, which I think was obvious from the jump and then I know shots, whatever. It's the truth. I mean, I don't know what to tell you whenever you can get a better audience with less exposure, even if it's marginal, it's just the truth. And then on top of that, generally the reviews for the quality of play was better for one league than the other. But anyway, it's not that much of a surprise to me to see that the XFL executive side is on top, but I don't think it's because the XFL took the lead. I think it's just the ownership group. We can't maintain two executive teams for one league. You can either pick and choose people from both, which I think they will. I just think you ultimately have to pick someone to run the ship and one did a heck of a lot better running the ship than the other, and there's just no way you can keep the other one also on top of just the way they ran the league. Daryl sometimes said the wrong things to the media and got the leagues in a bunch of fights and whatever and made the PR look bad. And then he would admit how he was embarrassed by the ratings I get. You want someone honest, but you don't want someone putting out a negative picture whenever you want someone saying, Hey, we didn't do good enough. You want them to say, Hey, we think we need to fix what we were doing. Not be like, Hey, I'm shocked and sad that we have lower ratings than the other league. It is basically what Daryl said, he was disappointed. Are you surprised in that, and I guess we'll get an official statement at some point from the USS L, but Daryl seems to be, wasn't like we talked wasn't in those, that was the guy. I mean, are you surprised? Is he just go back to doing Fox commentating? I mean that seems like a weird, he was such the lifeblood of kind the US NL side of it. Like I said, they had to pick somebody and one guy did a better job than the other guy. Not that they think Russ did that great. He did not, but the other guy did worse. That's fired against Russ, Brandon. No, Russ did better. They picked ru. You said you didn't do a great job. Well, obviously that's why we're in this position. I mean, would we be in this position if the XFL was ran so well? No, we're in this position because the XFL was ran poorly. Let's be honest. About this. We don't need to run from that. It's the truth. Mr. Downtown has a question here. It looks like an even four fourteens for the league. What do we do with the Houston? That seems to be the sticking point here, Tell you that the roughneck staff was more successful than the gambler staff and I'll leave it at that. You tell me one reason why you should keep the gambler staff over the roughneck staff whenever they were more successful in every metric, A certain mustache villain would probably disagree with you on Whatever. We have a question here, David. By starting March 30th, four months from now, this ME league doesn't have a lot of lead time. Honestly, I thought they wouldn't merge until 2025. Yeah. Seeing how this has kind of rolled out today, and we talked about this from the very beginning when the official merger intent to merge was put out and we went through, we have eight different messagings from all. We have the US FL season ticket holder messaging and the XFL season ticket holder and the players for the, is there enough time here to get all these knuckleheads to work together? If they announced everything today, I would say yes. They did not announce everything today. They did not announce really almost anything today officially, unofficially. We know they've basically decided they just have to hammer out how they're going to show it, I guess. But waiting three or four or five weeks to handle showing who's sticking around in your league, that's a lot of time when you do not have much. I will say we had a question here to get into this. I imagine we've also interviewed Mike Mitchell. I always like his insights. I'll do my best. Mike, all of us has a lot of personal, everyone's got a lot of personal stuff, so we'll see. I want to give Mike and he's balancing all of this stuff while steely with everything, so we will do our best, but if nothing else, we'll get the professor, whoever on here we'll figure out. But yeah, best working through that. And I know that this isn't even an ideal day today for all this to come down for Mike, and I promise you that when and if anybody gets to talk to Mike on a show, he's not feeling too great about all this either. You've seen what he said so far publicly already. He's been lambasting them too, so don't think this is, oh, I'm just a negative guy. I mean, the people who actually work so hard to cover this league feel the same as I do and I'm just somebody who caress as a fan. Yeah. Let's see here. Oh, well, Dean Blind, I saw a Dean Blind Needle interview today. They were ripping with him with Rich Eisen talking about how NFL officiating has never been to this best Or it never Been at its worst. Yeah, I mean to be fair, they've done some of their changes and interpretations have made it harder in unnecessary ways, but yeah, no, they've definitely been struggling, but yeah, I would think it's he's more charismatic. He understands better how to implement all this stuff. I Do my mic prayer impression. Yeah, and just in general, you can't keep both, right? You have to keep one. You're going to pick the guy who was better than the other guy. It's the same reason why they're keeping Russ over Darrell. They're going to keep Dean over. Mike, you got to pick one and it's pretty obvious which guy was the better guy. Sorry. That's okay. I wanted to make sure here, there wasn't anything else on the Morico article. Was there anything else from that besides the statement that Ben Fisher had as well? Anything else you wanted to get to on the spring article? I mean, there's loads of speculation about what they have to do and whatever, but there's no reporting on what anything else they know, right? It's a whole lot of how do they already did, what factors made them suffer, what things they had to do with the union. It's all opinion after that and speculation. I thought this was interesting regulators. There was obviously the talk about the downsizing of teams and all that. Regulators prefer more opportunities for consumers to enjoy a particular product or service in terms of them reducing. That to me was surprising. I know there was a sticking point on that. Well, I mean it's not surprising to hear them say that they wanted to have more teams, right? It was the whole thing we were hearing about, but I would argue if the leagues got onto either entirely or three-fifths broadcast television and the other two-fifths of ESPN Maine, you've done the job of both providing more opportunities because you've actually made the games accessible and not just in a Oh, I have it way, but in an Oh, I recognize I know where to find that way. Yeah. It says here, it's not clear. We're still waiting on the bracket. Not clear how the new entity themes will be watched. We've talked about that and NBC potentially getting out, I found this likely aided the X LS US L'S proposal to support track record of spring pro football in the us. The XFL started and stopped several times the a f. It was interesting here. They also quoted Mark and then Stefan here with talking about the salaries and all of that. Yeah, curious to be, and we talked about that earlier in the show. How does U-F-L-P-A different pay structures, different bonus structures? There's a lot of different things. I mean we did the whole breakdown about that member back with Andy here last year. Yeah, it is going to be a mess. It's a spider web octopus mess. I have no idea how they're going to handle this, but they're going to have to come to some sort of agreement or if they don't come to an agreement, there's going to be some sort of dispute over whether the union sticks around or not. If they don't come to an agreement either way, this is going to be incredibly difficult and messy and frustrating and confusing. No one's going to have any idea what's going on. Oh, by the way, we're kicking off at 121 days. No big deal. Oh my God. Yeah. I'm looking here we have David. At the end of the day, the purpose of a merger is to create synergy, something greater than the sum of its parts. I'm optimistic that the new product will be bigger and better and then we have Scott on here. I'm glad Birmingham did survive. They'll keep the same team makeup. They had great chemistry going on. I mean, you have to imagine, right? Carrying over the teams redrafting the leftovers. I don't know. I mean if your players do you cut bait at this point to me and Pat was talking in our group chat, pat Rapino. Yeah. The promise is we're adding more teams in 20 24, 20 25. If you're 28 years old, are you sitting around here for another couple of years waiting? Do you just move on? I think if you know for a fact that you are one of the best players on your team that you is getting rid of, you wait around. If you were getting consistent playtime and you were performing well or when you played occasionally, but you were injured a lot, you were really good or you just have a really strong reputation compared to most of the other players in the pool. I think you wait and see if you can get drafted in dispersal draft. If you're not one of those guys, you cut bait or you go to the arena league or the indoor league or NAL or the CFL. If you can get lucky enough to get a training camp spot there or you just go home and I think a lot of these guys will just go home at the bottom of those leftover teams who got cut off PR pickton. There's a reason they went to the trouble of changing the name. Just because the teams have been selected doesn't mean the coaching staffs or the players are safe, at least with Houston. I know we talked about that, but I don't know. You just think there's just a wave of cuts and everyone goes home. I mean I'd imagine for whoever players, they don't keep, yeah, they're basically cut for not special draft, but you can't switch around staffs for most of these markets. Most of these markets had effective coaching staffs. Oh, by the way, speaking of cutoff coaching staffs, Seattle was a top four, top three staff in your league in the XFL. They don't have a team now. So are you going to move them to Detroit maybe and then cutoff Horton. I mean the Seattle staff has a guaranteed contract and the Detroit staff does not. So there's going to be all these sorts of conversations and then obviously there's no guarantees, but for most of these markets that you're keeping, you need to keep the staffs you already have because unless you're transferring staff from another team that you're cutting off, you don't have time to hire a new coaching staff right now. You just don't have the time for this. You only have four months. You can't possibly expect someone to hire a coaching staff from scratch in a couple months, then go and play training camp in February and kick off a league at the end of March. That's unfair. Yeah, Pat's got Pat. I have that ready to pull up here. Just saying here with four months to do a traditional draft at this point we're getting very here the March 30th. No, there's not going to be any drafts at this point. There's no way. I mean maybe they Do the redraft of some of those players. I mean you just let everyone go and say, oh no, You'll do a dispersal draft, but it'll be behind closed doors in a smoke-filled room. They're not going to have time to present a dispersal draft. Also. That would be so grim. Could you imagine broadcasting, oh, here's the players we decided are allowed to survive this contraction while everyone else is like, go home, you're done, son. That would be depressing to watch. I'd rather just get a press release for that. Honestly, it'd be like survivor but depressing because it's serious. I dunno. They made a new Hunger Games movie. I think there's an that's on A movie. It's not real. I know. I know, I know. Well, this goes into this, so Deandre Tory, he's tweeting out, following up on how do I get all this following up on Mark's article to pretend to care so much about the players make a whole 54th man documentary within jump shift after one year when players pass on opportunities to come play. This league is crazy. Eliminating eight teams basically destroyed the entire league. No one cared involved just business. I certainly share those sentiments. I understand the sentiment, but I mean it is it that much better if the league, if they had 16 teams and it just dies immediately, either way, this is bad. Do you want it now or do you want it later? The knife's coming, so how do you want to take it? Well, and I think what's important to me is I think to take the fandom out, we get a lot of comments on here. We got 110 people watching, which I appreciate. I'm just happy there's more football. I'm just happy. Just be happy. I absolutely understand that, but there's hundreds of players in coaching. This is the end of the road for a lot of these people, so it is very hard for me to be positive about this when there's a lot of people going by the wayside right now. Oh no, I'm not positive about it either. It is just Well, but I'm just trying to justify a little bit of the negative sentiment right now. I understand that people are happy and that's awesome and it's going to be cool and certain people aren't going to be happy. There's teams or whatever, but there's a lot of doom and gloom surrounding this right now. It's really hard to kind of avoid That. It's completely earned. The doom and gloom is completely earned. Even if you're a fan of a team that is sticking around, you have to at least feel a little, if not a lot, concerned over the fact that you still don't really know anything at all. What would success look like in 2024 for this merge league? Are we defining success in terms of raw metrics or are we defining success as it actually looks like they're building something? How are we defining? Yeah, in terms of we're moving on to 25, we're getting another year out of this. Okay. If we're talking about actually building something that lasted 2025 and it looks like it's building momentum, like we said last week, local marketing number one has to be serious, has to be now, should have been yesterday, but it's not national marketing more serious and then focus on taking care of your fans whenever you start getting closer to playing the games, attracting fans, maintaining relationships with fans, doing a more serious social media strategy during the season, doing a better job of covering the league with whatever content access you have because it felt like we would get this versus the XFL for the USFL. It felt like they didn't keep united by football in season two, did they? No, no, so that was gone. So on the XFL, you would get these nice patches of content where you got a nice hour long, you had the round tables and training camp, and then Jim has not Jim Haslet, rod Woodson wasn't even there then because he had some other stuff he had to do whatever, and you would not get any serious content for a while and at the end of the season they have one nice eight minute video of XFL to NFL and then nothing. And then they would just keep reposting old games and old highlights. I'm just like, I get that you're making numbers go up, numbers go up the meme stalks, whatever, but you're not actually contributing to building interest in your league. You're just building numbers on a spreadsheet that's not actually serious. That's just noise. You have to understand that that is just noise. I do think it's interesting on here, I'm looking still at the XFL website. We got the Russ email and Danny posting. It's still just amazing to me that we don't have, I dunno if there's anything on the USFL site and I hate this like, oh, here we go. Oh no, I got excited for a minute. No, that was back from the September 28th, so we're still, you can see the UpToDate ness of the USFL on news content cycle rolling out to me. I don't like when they're like, well, you may have heard on social media or you may have heard, we're all in this world here. It would be nice to give out a streamlined message to all these people. Just even a press release, y'all put on a press release, come on. I thought about it at one point about, and obviously now Seattle's gone anyway, but I did think about I could probably do this and just write some press releases from my house and send these on. If I just get out of the game, I don't care about the stuff me, I can respond to emails, I can forward emails, I can do this stuff. I think a lot of people could do this stuff if they wanted to, but the leagues don't care. Prove me wrong, league prove me wrong. Make me believe that you care. So I don't think, Yeah, pat stocking here, we have 118 people watching this right now. This has to be over the, I'm trying to think of what we had on with the first one with Mike Mitchell and kind of all that stuff, but I appreciate it. Like I said, like the video, hopefully there's 118 likes on this video when we get done with it. I really appreciate it. Now people dropping off, I think we put this interesting comment, Abdul and he's had a bunch of good ones. I think we've been to bed that both things lost money, which was confirmed and the XFL made money basically. They wouldn't be doing this if the USFL was in the black. I think that's kind of the sentiment of that. Yeah, like I said, it's manipulating, it's it's lies basically in different ways. It's all lies, But to me, the problem with that, and I try to be pretty levelheaded on here, and I was talking with one of the U USS FL players last night and they go, Hey, re us FL, because you send this out right? With the US FL made money. What's going on here? This podcast makes money because I'd rather off everything on my wedding video business. This podcast technically makes money because every single thing that's used for is paid through best made videos. It's not, but if I had bought this microphone and everything and the stream yard and everything else, that's where I get into Trouble. And then imagine if on top of that you counted your fees or whatever you earned from your wedding business on top of that because, or a small portion of it, like a half a percent of your wedding and now all of a sudden you really look like you're already money off your podcast, which is basically what Fox is doing. They're taking a small percentage of their advertising revenue. That definitely is not just the default on Fox plus a percentage and acting like it's what the USFL earned In reality, it's just what Fox earned. It's All lies. Yeah. David hear a comment. We'll figure out how long we want to go here. I appreciate Max sitting around here. Obviously no one wants to lose their jobs after merger, but the league isn't on solid footing. There are no jobs for anyone, so I do understand that sentiment. I mean we got to keep this going here so at least there's that, right? Yeah, I mean, but I don't think anyone who is keeping their job feel like they're on solid footing right now either. I mean, how can you feel like you're on solid footing whenever? Like I said, it just feels like a clown car. Everything feels like we're in a clown car right now. We're waiting to fall off a cliff. I'm waiting for the moment when it all really goes bad, but I want to believe that there's a light at the end of the tunnel and not just a cliff. David has another comment. Yeah, but Jordan, you all say cutting teams in half loses so many jobs. Opportunities for players coaching Scott, do press release from each city still around. Yeah, I don't know. I think you need to start letting people know if we're selling 60% off Black Friday merch and Cyber Monday and all of that and there's still not people going to be, that to me is the troublesome thing on that point. We're still pushing one narrative and then obviously this is very much going on in the background Because they aren't allowed to push in the other narrative because the league refuses to have their stuff together. Startups lose money. That's kind of how I feel on that. We have a good comment here, Chris, I thank you Ree for the great coverage of spring football. I appreciate that Bishop downtown, I feel bad for the office of staff, social media teams at lots of jobs day. People forget the real people behind that make these teams run. I absolutely share that sentiment and that's even when it used to kill me when I would see people, hey, badgering the XFL or USFL social media teams, it's like there's people that work here. I understand you're upset, whatever. These people lost their jobs or maybe you got to move now or maybe you got to work remote now or maybe you got to travel to a different part of the country now because of all this Stuff. Well, I think from my understanding, most of them already were based in that market, but yeah, you're going to have to find a new job and it's going to have to be much more stable. It's just not good, is it? Yeah, we got here. Yeah, now we know why supply 60% half on Black Friday emerge. Yeah, TP talking about players covering the various arena leagues to me, I don't know. To me the biggest one, of'em mean there's a lot of losses here, but competition always breeds more better rights for players, better pay, better competition. Like we saw the darkest time the WWE had in my lifetime was when WCW went away and they didn't have any competition and they could roll out and I love him now, but let's roll out John Cena every week and beat down, okay, we move on to the next week having a EW. Now whatever people think about that causes WWE to bring back C punk to do all this stuff. You only have one league. I'm curious to see what this looks like. Well, this is good enough versus well actually we got to outspend or out compete against someone else. I mean what I want is to have adequate care for the players and coaches and stuff. I don't necessarily believe in this and we need to outspend stuff, but there needs to be adequate care from the start. As long as you have that, as long as the players don't have to worry about paying their life bill, about feeding their families because they're earning enough to make a living, especially the active players, that needs to be the truth. One thing I would not be surprised to see if they really wanted to get serious about cutting costs is that they cut quarterback salaries even more than they already have just to inch off a little more there. Maybe they cut off, maybe they don't have GMs or player personnel departments anymore or maybe they shift around guys from the xFi side and obviously they're going to cut down assistant staff that's going to cut down costs. It's just this all, it is hard to feel positive about this right now whenever there's so much uncertainty and what has been certain is that both of these leagues have been run quite poorly so far and now they're coming together as one and now it's like how is that going to make it run better? How are you going to be a better operation because of that? We have a couple more comments here. Yeah. If you don't like this video, it means you don't like spring football. I appreciate that. Excuse me. We had a comment here talking about maybe the IFA can pick up some of these flares. The IFA just Gone, isn't it? Isn't that dead? Is it officially dead yet? I dunno. I know that Rick was really, I thought it was because they hired Art Briles, which we're not going to touch about why Art Briles is not someone you want to hire but you don't. And that league I thought was a total disaster and I thought, what was his name? The scout guy? Rick? Yeah. I don't even think he's still there. Is he? I thought he left. I Dunno talking here. At least you have the afl. I mean There's some uncertainty around the AFL too. They were still struggling to get Stadium, stadium arena deals, whatever, and there's some uncertainty about when they're drafting players and how much money they're getting paid and what TV contract these people have. We don't know any of those details about the afl. At least we know with this new merge league that they have TV contracts already, they can fuse together into something. There's no proof of what is actually happening with the afl, so if you really want to talk about uncertainty, AFL is quite deserted right now. We have a comment here. I saw him post a couple of times here. Mark, you guys are babbling talk real informative. There is no Real information. Well Mark, welcome to the hour one and 14 minutes into the stream about the informative part. This is the question and answer portion now of the class. Thank you very much for joining. We did a lot of that stuff. We're getting into comments now. TP Joseph, even the CFL ties with financial stability, we have to start somewhere. Oh no, we are nowhere near where the CFL is. The CFL has built established fan bases and they're out in their communities and they're known and they're beloved. The XFL is so unstable that their fans don't even know. Most of their fans have no idea that this merger thing is happening and then the ones that do know it's happening don't know when their tickets are being transferred to. They don't. They're completely in a dark no CFL fan can say that they're completely in the dark about what is going on with their team about when they should expect to hear things. So we are nowhere near where the CFL is in terms of an operation. We had a comment here from raw A teams doesn't justify the merger, might as well stay separate and take your chances. It's tough. I mean I think it's kind of a lose. I think we've seen how this is Going on. The number of teams is not what matters when justifying a merger. What matters when justifying a merger is you realizing that there are things that are not working and you need to start over and if a merger is the most efficient way to do that, then fine. What's bad about doing this way is that it's so poorly put together in timing and everything. It just feels like it doesn't matter that you're cutting down all these costs. It's just not going to be enough to build something and quite frankly, the excitement was not going to be there even if you did keep all these teams because everyone would be skeptical about what is actually the actual long-term survivability of this league because both of the fan bases that have been in these leagues so far have not been encouraged by how these leagues have been run. There's no way you can be encouraged unless you just want to be optimistic for the sake of it. We have a couple, there's so many comments. I don't think I've ever had to make comments on one of these videos. Junie, what about the people that bought season tickets? I know I tell you, my Seattle people were waiting to get our money back on this front row, a 50 line twice defeated now and I think we got to see maybe four or five games there over the two years. I mean, pretty disheartening Obviously. I mean it's depressing, isn't it? But if I believed the new league would be run with care and with actual attachment to whoever they're keeping, then at least you could sit here as a Seattle fan and say, Hey, they learned their lesson. Do we think, okay, I want to ask you Reid, do you think this ownership group has learned their lesson and that they're going to care now? My opinion? Well, so you used the word care and I don't like to say the people don't care saying No, not the people in the lower levels we're talking about the real executives who we can say with a track record why I believe they don't care. I have a good comment here from Blake. I got started as well will say, I do not believe that anyone involved in this league has learned their lessons yet. I will not say that whether they care or not care, but I do vehemently agree that the people involved in this and the higher up have not learned anything over the course of the last two and a half years. And if you haven't learned anything over the course of the past two and a half years and how can I understand that? You need to be in the position where you're not allowed to say you think they don't care. But if you're those executives trying to justify to a fan why they care, what's the argument that they care from them? What is their argument that is supposed to make us convinced that they care? Which is I think, What do you mean? What is Danny and the Rock? What is their messaging or ru? Yeah, because so far their messaging has been saying the same lines in the same repeated stuff with no delivery. So how are we supposed to believe that as a fan? I share that. I think moving forward, selling season tickets, selling buy-in from people getting buy-in I think is going to be very, very, very challenging. There's no reason to believe that they're going to do it because they haven't, so that's why, well, It's certainly going to be harder now And that's why I say I don't think they care is because every single one of their actions up to this point has shown us that we shouldn't believe that they do. So until they prove me wrong. That's why I say I don't think they care because it's in the pudding, the proves in the pudding. I got a good comment here from Blake, honestly, I think casual fans are encouraged by the merger. Look at any tweets from larger accounts with many fans and I'll say again, I'll give your thoughts here. I think the idea of a merger, the idea of expansion, the idea like you talked about before is a little bit more. It's like I meet in the pop rock and then it's instantly gone and there's not a lot of sustainability there And anyone tweeting about this merger right now is not a casual fan. That's very obvious. If you're a casual fan, you have no idea any of this is happening at all. Let's be real. No one who's a casual fan is paying this hard attention to Danny Garcia's Instagram account. Come on. Anyone who's a casual fan, casual fans. I mean I love Mike Mitchell, I want him to have the audience of a casual fan, but it's so obvious that obviously he does not have the audience of the casual fan. I want him to have that kind of growth, but he does not have that. You don't have the casual fan, you have the hardcores. Anyone who's listening to the stream is the hardcores. Anyone posting about the merger is a hardcore, so the casual fans have no idea what is happening right now. You haven't reached out to them. You're not in their world, you're only in your own bubble. So when we're talking about casual fans being excited, do you know casual fans? Because I think you underestimate how casual a casual fan really is because we're all hardcores here at this point. Well, I think it's always been under underappreciated from them, which has always surprised me in terms of just the rock and being involved in DC and all of that. It's always surprised me the lack of awareness of how hardcore this fan base is. And I certainly didn't intend that at the beginning and I'm getting Facebook messages like Zach and everyone starting off at the beginning like, Hey, what do you think about that? I mean, I'm in that world now, but to me it battles to me that they've never gotten just how hardcore this Is and how unlike a property like dc, there is not a huge well swell of casual fans who are willing to go along with the hardcore is for the movie and then go back home. So you don't just get casual fans by making a product. You have to reach them and then you have to convert some of 'em to Hardcores and you have to convert the nobodies to casuals. That's the only way you're building anything and they just have not done that. Yeah, I agree with the casual fans, especially in the niche world, people talking about we need to hear from the Rock. We're not going to hear from the rock today. I'm sorry, it's not happening y'all. Sorry. Well, we have the Danny thing here and then we can pull that up again. I know the people are, Danny, this is the only official word that we have from the league. I know that SPO Theo and Ben Fisher and God bless them for promoting nothing on the site and I don't think we have anything on the Rocks account, so it's or The US L for the matter and we don't have anything from them either. And I mean we all thought, I mean I don't have to say we all, but we us two were chatting, we're like, nah, there's no way we're getting anything serious. We just have to go now. Yeah, we had been waiting around here. I told coach sipping John, but what's the rock going to say? Well, I just think him sharing this same thing. I think that if nothing else sharing the press release that was put out from the co-owner, I think at a minimum should be done at this Point. No, I know what he's going to do. He always does this two or three or maybe even a week later, two or three days or even a week later, he'll out the Terra and he's in is the bar. It might be the bar in his house or it's the bar next to his gym. He's going to whip out the terra and celebrate the merger. He is going to do something corny like that and talk about how excited he is and for the level football and blah blah blah blah and player 54 and whatever and then not give us any serious information. And it's just like a three minute video of the Rock looking super muscly with sunglasses on and drinking tequila and saying whatever the terra amount of toast bss, We got so many different comments here. This is crazy, max. I appreciate it. I appreciate everyone hanging on here. I mean, max, are you having fun? Are we doing all right? I'm having fun with you. I don't know if this situation is all that fun. I'm trying to, it's managing my grief right now. I don't know what stage of grief I'm in right now. Yeah, this is good here Allison. I'm a casual fan. I'm the one. I just like the show. I appreciate that Al, at least now we found you Have one casual fan read. Congrats. This is fun today. I love when we get so many people in here. We do our CFL stuff and we get a handful of people watching live and then a lot of people watching, but I love all this stuff. Chris, I'll take Jerry Cardinal one sentence please and Jordan here. Straight facts being spoken right now. So I appreciate that. I mean I do my best. I know I'm the villain for being negative, but I was extremely, you remember how I was a year ago? I was gung-ho guns blazing. They earned my negativity. We have a comment here. Yeah, max looks like he's having a great time, but to me this is why it's really been not only just scheduling and him being available, but it's really been important to have Max on here lately because you guys and everyone that Max was the die hard of, Hey Reid, you see this Red Bird's working on this. Hey Reid, you see this XFL? I'm like Danny, I Still am that guy by the way. I Still am. Yeah, but I think that this is a good welfare check of this is what the person that was, if I can do this correctly, that was up here. We we're tracking this down. We're tracking Max's descent into madness at this point. I mean I descended a while ago. The only difference is I thought I should believe when it was just denial. It was denial. And now they've proven why I should not believe in anything clearly. And I mean, yeah, sure you can be skeptical about a private equity company running the league at the same time. It was hard for me to be skeptical out the gate when I was seeing how that same private equity company was running their other sports operations and they took it completely seriously. They did not take this seriously. So it's just like why would you break your own principles that will still confound me for a long time? Why they couldn't just stick to their own principles with how they ran their other stuff. And that's why I'm frustrated so much Football, I appreciate that compliment in my period. I think Dorothy's come around to it. I don't know. There was a point of contention there for a while. This will get you fired up Max. Millennials love the XFL, but ask anyone over 50 and they have no idea what the league is, but ask anyone and they have some sort of memory of the SFLI would echo that sentiment, but I would say, but are they watching? They might know what the XFL or the US FL, but are they watching The numbers? The proof is in the pudding on the numbers first off, but second off, yeah, actually people over 50 definitely do know about the XFL because they were around for the first one and when they were like 30 or 40 or 45 or 50, they were around for that too. So they do know about the XFL and also most of the people who know about the USFL who are younger, a lot of those younger people barely know anything about what the USFL has been over the past two years. They only really know about the original iteration. And the main reason they know about it is because you get these content farm channels that are talking about Donald Trump and how the 1984 USFL draft and stealing players and stuff like that, they don't know about the new league. They don't watch the games, they don't know anything. So sure they know about the USFL, but they don't know about this USFL at all. Yeah, Dov whatever his face is like retweeting got USFL signings, it's because it's to the NFL or whatever US L school for you. It's back and forth. We get a mixture. I know Gregory will be watching this. We got a lot of hardcore USFL fans too, but what's funny to me is the, it's not the hardcore, the older ones, it's all the people on Twitter that I'm like, you're 20 years old, what do you care about the, you're just like diehard Fox Sports stands. That's what I don't get. I'm happy to entertain conversations with the USFL people like, oh, back in my day. Absolutely. But it's all these new kids. I'm like, Especially being a diehard fan of a team that's not even in your city, you know who I'm talking about, the New Orleans types. They're like, oh, we love the breakers. I'm like, what has the breakers done for you? Ask not what you can do for the breakers. Ask what the breakers can do for you. They haven't done a dang thing for your city. I mean I just don't understand how you could be so completely attached to that. Yeah, we have here modern gamblers haven't played it down in football in Houston. I will say they'll be I I'll understand if it is the gamblers, I'll understand the 4 0 4 split as a way to make it every league, all sides get their way. I'll understand that, but from every other aspect of it that does not make sense to me. And also I just want to briefly, whenever obviously everyone in this room mostly is going to care more and know more about this USFL and everyone on the spring football sites and on Twitter posting about it right now is going to know more about the USFL. But we have to understand just like the casuals that is in the casual service that is single digit or less percentages of people of the overall demographic that we're talking about, we are in a bubble. We are all in a bubble. So yes, you and your buddies care about this USFL or we and our buddies care about the XFL or whatever this new league we and our buddies care about spring football, we'll say 75, 80% of this demographic has no idea and does not care so far. They haven't given a reason to care. So You're being called Mad Max now. I like that might be you wanted to be the substitute teacher. You might be mad Max. I can Be all, I can be substitute teacher. I can be mad Max, I can be producer Max. I contain multitudes. David here. I remember watching the XPhone and US FO games back in the day. We will avoid the Trump comment here, but I like Christian, I'm happy for the merger now they can grow without competition and stay steady. We'll see. I mean in the ideal world, this is what we're working at here. So Yeah, if I could only be so optimistic about an ideal world, Let's see here. Millennials, we got all that Zach on here, please stay your number one story, the football. It's funny, after the season I sort of disconnected, Zach missed out on a lot of CFL great content. So we had a football fever here. Do you guys think the hub comp said we'll continue. We touched on that before. The presumption is that CXFL business model with a mixture of the team names and training camp in Arlington and all of that stuff. And then moving forward Because there's just no reason not to do it that way. The news we're hearing basically confirms that no one learned blank. I share that sentiment on That. I also share that sentiment. Let's see here. There is a, yeah, I wonder what the teams are going to be. I guess we had that and we're touching on again here, but we'll probably get out of here pretty soon. Tweet. I had in terms of that, talking about the teams, It was the Texas teams plus St. Louis and DC and then Detroit, Memphis, Birmingham. So I'm assume they're keeping all the team names and then they'll decide whether they want gams roughnecks because otherwise you have to start all over with team names again and just like the thing that will confounded at the end of this day is why they spent all this money on maintaining brand names and league names and they're just going to dump a huge percentage of it just because they don't have the guts to pick one league name over the other. Even though they have the guts to pick an XFL guy over A-U-S-F-L guy to run the league, they don't have the guts to pick the XFL name over the USFL name. And instead they have to come into a compromise with a name of a league which already failed and was a complete disaster and is only going to get them flamed and is not going to provide them any positive momentum at all. And it's just going to be confusing to be like, oh wait, there's another new football league. It's only going to confuse people even more whenever you make a new league with a new name, new name is not helping anybody. Yeah. Are you surprised here? And I know that we obviously talked about that in the stream last week, but that it is, I mean Mike's reporting, it's so weird to me that they're doing the new brand name. I would just, to me, I Can't say I'm surprised whenever I knew that it was always on the table. I can't say I'm surprised. Am I disappointed and confused as to why they could possibly make this decision from a logicals perspective? Yes. I can't be surprised. And we all saw the trademarks. We all thought it was in the realm of not even just possibility but probability. Yeah, I like the RIP of the National Spring Football League. God, that name would've been so bad. I mean at least the UFL is three letters. If you're going to have four letters and it's not us, it's never going to work. Just don't do that. Yeah. David here at the XFL, let me get rid of that. The XFL practice content makes sense. League has to market itself in these cities. You can't do that without the US whole game. I'm worried we're going to have similar sentiments of last year where, and I had talked with Russ brand and then the Arlington event and him saying, we're going to be the first people in the last people out of these markets and not really feeling that way. I don't know, not even close, but to me none of this changes that at that point I don't see this now suddenly making that happen. It's only changing if they show us it's changing until then, we have no reason to believe it's going to change. Yeah, because here I got a comment here I'll start, but yeah, to me that's like, we've talked about this, but the learning concept, the learning is not the number of teams or it's whatever markets you have, you have to embrace that and you have to work towards that. And we saw that to some extent. I think San Antonio did good, but obviously DC and St. Louis are kind of the outliers there. But the ones that need to work, I just don't know what lessons have been learned from some of this And all of that. Embracing of local teams and markets was done by a very tiny amount of local employees while the larger executive base did not seem to care. So I love the small people on the ground, but you need to have the big weights behind it, pushing them and giving them the support they need. They did not have it and that's why it was so hard. You give them what they need, you give them the time they need, the people they need, they will get it done. But they have not been able to do that. They don't it. They don't get that support. I was a casual XFL fan back and I listened to Mark and everyone on the podcast and what's the other, the chalk talk. What was so, because to me what I found successful was engagement with social media. They would interact with me. Ryan was doing this, he did his weekly things as the president. I saw them at trade shows like is there a larger swath I'm missing or what was so successful with the XFL? They Were getting out there in local markets. They were having events, they were promoting themselves, they were on the news stations. And I mean I know the local news in itself doesn't necessarily matter, but just getting involved with the right people matters. If you're getting on the news, then you get attached to the newspaper, you get attached to the newspaper, you get attached to social media, you have to be in the market, you have to be in the know, have, be embedded. And they were not. And that's why all this happened. And while in 2020 except for a couple of markets that struggled because they didn't quite as successful with pushing with the resources they had compared to others, it largely worked in 2020 because they were given all of those opportunities and they took advantage of them. I dunno, I think that it's not a money issue. And is it a not understanding that what is the holdback? The worst thing is we all know it's not even that much of a money issue. Well that's my thing, But it's not the money. It's not why it's too much effort. When you have so few people involved in running this league, you have to get less people to do more because they want everything to be as lean as possible or as the XFL of the 2020 was willing to hire a deeper support staff and deeper employee base. Whereas we're cutting back on employees and support right now. So you have to be willing to have those people who are in those pressure positions to give them the support they need to get the immediate results done without having real employees for them to work with. Which is fine if you give them that support, if you give them a reason to make that happen. Because if you don't give them the resources and allow them to make that push, then they're going to get scolded for wasting effort and time on something that wasn't approved. And that's why all these struggles have happened. This go around compared to 2020 whenever they were embedded those markets and people did care. We have a comment here from Mark. I wonder if getting rid of the hubs was the compromise between the XO USL only won eight teams than the feds won anymore. No more jobs for the players with a few more local staff. I mean all these teams already had stadiums, all the teams are bringing in already had stadiums. So you're not actually adding stadium staff at all other than maybe the USFL will get more ticketing and local staff than what they had in those markets. But the XFL already had a staff. So the only way you can make it work is if you add more. But that's not what we're seeing. The only thing we're seeing is that it seems like they're going to take away. I feel like people also overrate us whole, let's just have the Rocco do it and save us. Listen, I agree. It's a bigger buyin, it's a bigger buy. It's one thing I'm going to go buy zoa, I'm going to go buy Tremont. It's a totally different buy-in to be invested in. Well you Want the rock at is you want the rock at all. The major league benchmark events. That's what you want the rock at on the ground. Having the rock everywhere isn't going to make suddenly people care about a football league. You need to have real people on the ground building real relationships with fans and with business partners and with the media and with the local government. You need to have these tie-ins and they just aren't there outside of St. Louis and dc. Even San Antonio is nowhere near what those other two places have. And then I guess you could say Birmingham, but it's not, those ties in Birmingham haven't translated to establishing a fan base. So maybe you can say Memphis and then Detroit's been struggling too. And then everywhere else in the XFL fandom has been completely struggling, even the ones that are being kept. So it's aggravating. We're doing alright here. We yeah, rock didn't even show up in St. Louis. We'll figure out here. Still getting any comments coming in? We will start winding down here. I think at some point if we were dipped too far below a hundred, I was going to say we got to get out of here, but we're still popping back up. Here is a good comment and I love you. Alright, hustle, I love you. But we talk about the positives matchups. Theoretically we have 121 days To go to what matchup, where's my schedule? We'll get to all that. Where's My schedule? What players are on the teams? Who's coaching these teams? Why should we talk about what matchup? This is the event day. This is event day. We'll get to all that, I promise. Stay subscribed. We'll do all that stuff. We'll get Andy in here, we'll get Mike and Pat. We'll do breakdowns and Rogers, we'll get John Vogel back out. We'll do all that stuff. This is what this day is For and that'll be great to have when we have that. But you don't really have those things right now. Do youre, I mean, what are you going to talk about? It's all in theory. There's not even anything tangible, right? You don't know what's real and what's not right now. Yeah, we know what Mike's reporting and we can put that back up here in the eight teams. And whether it's Houston one way or another, this is what we know these comments are. I have life right now. I have 59 starred comments alone, let alone all the hundreds that are coming in here. We have, where was it? A football fever Max is my spirit animal. There you go. What can I say? I really care about this and I'm just so hurt. Oh, one other thing I was going to mention. How do you feel about the timeline compromise for getting players to the NFL? That's a good point. So we do have, and that is confirmed, right? The March 30th, that is confirmed, the Saturday March 30th Mark killing me with these comments in the chat to me, I wish they would avoid March altogether with the March madness. So if that means April, is that too late? I mean what do you think is March 30th? Is that, what is that month and a half later? March 30th. March 30th is rough already. It's like already late because you're kicking off your league in the middle of, that's like the Elite eight, right? So it's right in the peak of March. Madness interest. So you are losing your week one boom. And then you have to build interest whenever people are distracted by the end of March Madness. And like Pat's saying, yeah, also with the timing, they can't go to communicate now. That's what I was going to try to mention was like, hey, these guys can't go to work mini camp anymore. They're going to miss OTAs. So all the benefit of having the February timeline is gone, the only benefit you have is that for regular camp they can still make it early and on time instead of being not just early on time, they can actually try out for camp instead of it already being into the swing of camp before they even finish their season. And already you might have some roster space left. I wouldn't be surprised if they allow players to try out for the NFL during the XFL or not L the UFL season and then come to some sort of agreement to release the player if they get signed or whatever. Because that way you can have them fly out to a tryout, then come back whenever. They probably don't make it. Otherwise I feel like, I don't know how you're going to keep that support base. That was one of the main arguments for playing the XFL and you just completely threw it head out the window. Interesting as well. And I saw a comment in here, that's the first weekend of a baseball as well, so not that I know people Mark will poo poo baseball, but I'm just saying here, where's the, Well, Mark Perry loves baseball from what I remember, but Just talking about the competition, we have so many comments here just talking about the competition of everything so that, because Thursday I'm looking here on the, let me get this up on here, I'm looking on because that's the kickoff date and I have something else, not funny but interesting to share on Twitter. Just speaking of, we get a lot of comments and negativity and all of that. We have this tweet here, Madison, with the USFL community engagement football ops, just a big upside down. She Don't, sorry, Well don't Probably unfortunately. Sorry, no celebration. That's not a celebration. That's me saying, oh god damn, this league is doing it wrong. But this is, it is tough here. And also imagine finding out this way. Imagine finding out via tweet that you're probably screwed. It's just, it's all so messed up. And that's why I am trying to cope by making jokes because it's all so messed up And I'm not trying to make a joke At her. It's just the situation is so bad anyway for baseball. Here's the thing, baseball is not a broadcasting giant during the regular season. They only have a very limited amount of national exposure and it's all regional. So from a broadcasting perspective, it'll be fine. But if you're from a local market perspective, if your team isn't attached in that market, they're probably going to follow baseball even if they're casuals because they haven't been given a reason to follow the Spring league. So that will be a concern with baseball. I'm just looking on here. So Texas is at home, the rangers are at home, Seattle's at home. Not that matters. Houston's at home. St. Louis is on the road here. Let me get this up. I was just kind of curious and that's on that Saturday. Just kind curious what are we moving Around here? Also, the other thing that's a little interesting, notice how the USFL was in a bunch of markets that didn't have baseball teams and now the two out of three, the ones that kept don't have baseball teams, but the whole league is mostly in baseball markets now. I mean I think it's like five out of eight because you have the two Texas teams with baseball. You got St. Louis, you got Detroit dc Yeah, that's five, right? And then the other three, Birmingham, Memphis San Antonio don't have baseball. Well, MLB baseball, but I'm not too worried about baseball in terms of a TV problem, so at least you won't have that problem. And also MLS is now streaming only except for some fox, even though nobody watches them on tv, but at least that'll be less of an obstacle for scheduling compared to before. This might win the comment for the day. Where's Chris on here? Pat Rafino needs to analyze this and then educate us. I like that, pat, get on this. Go analyze this so you can educate us. The worst part is it's hard to educate somebody when you can't get the facts know. I mean, what are we teaching? It's It's all an idea right now, right? We can't talk about what's actually happening. All what we think is happening. It's so frustrating. Yeah, Texas people, there's always going to be something on to compete against. Bingo. Bingo. And then Max, we share your passion. We care for spring football. I know knowing what's going to happen. We're stressful than what we already know, so we're all in this together today. Yeah, I'm so disillusioned, man. I want to believe again, but it's so far gone. R'S got a comment here for being such good business people. They seem to act like they have no idea what they're doing or how to run a business. Where's Vince? They You did 2020 again. Vince. Vince bled money, but I think Vince understood the Kearney aspect of the WWE e of like we're building the local, we're taking everyone into the, that to me was Vince bled money, but it would've survived. I don't know about forever, but it would've made it two 10 years almost certainly because they had to built that base and I'll believe act my age when I have given a reason to believe. Yeah. Yeah. Roy here, curious about players who signed with teams is not going to be there. Well, it's a lot of letters of intent to sign right now and it's a lot of player rights being acquired, right? Yeah. There'll be a dispersal. Like I said, there will be a dispersal draft because there's no other way to handle it. You need a dispersal draft. God, I need way more than a hug. I need, Is it too early to pop a pop of beer here? Oh yeah. Is that Easter weekend? It's March 30th. Easter weekend. I'll check Here. Well, speaking of this, I just had this popup here. This was just on my Twitter March 30th, that 70 new weekend for baseball. This is terrible. The spring league needs to kick off Thursday night after the Super Bowl. The USFL not even play it. Well. Anyway, that's all that stuff. But yeah, the March 30th thing seems to be a sticking point right now. I mean I'm not a huge fan of, I really don't like the March 30th thing either. I would've been if they wanted to wait until the March 3rd or whatever the first Saturday of marches that I would understand because then you can get your week one in and then you can have March madness for week two through four or five and then kick off the rest of your season with nothing else in your way. And then you still maintain your week one boost, but now you've lost your one boost. What do you got? Oh, I just, Jonathan, you somebody that tagged me in this tweet, so this means I'm a free agent again, actually US LI need more information. This is, Like I said, the players are totally in the dark. I mean I can't imagine they know anything. Well, and it is challenging because I don't have a lot of, I mean Mike and Pat and Evan and Anthony, they have a lot more engagement with players on here and just in terms of building and fostering those and I should do a better job, but when I'm getting people like, Hey, what's going on? It is interesting to me just how in the dark a lot of this is right now And I feel like if you're a player, I mean the only reason I feel like I know what's going on, even though I don't really know is because I'm so closely following everything to my detriment probably. But these players, if you're not following every single small detail, you can feel completely lost right now and you have no idea what's going on. And while, yeah, I mean if he doesn't get picked up in that draft, he probably is going to be a free agent. That's how it's going to be for a lot of these guys and it's just going to be so messed up and there's no communication. I'm throwing my hands up in the air because I don't know what to say to all of it. We'll get out of here. We'll do the two hour mark. We'll get out. We got a lot of comments to get through here and then we'll get out 106 people still watching. We have a lot of people wanting to buy Max a drink right now. I would buy Max a drink. We're all on this together after my age wants get you a date. So we have a lot of people wanting to buy max to alcohol right now, so don't get too crazy. Yeah, I can use something fruity and sweet right now. So if you want to get up to, Yeah, Easter is March. That would be interesting. We dealt with that with the USFL, right? Is that Easter is March. That's so early. Yeah, it is. It's a little early, but I don't think SFL kickoff was during Easter. It was always like second. It was, No, I thought it was like April 15th or Whatever, right? Yeah. Wasn't that Easter? April 15th, 2022 Anyway. Oh yeah. I am getting the wrong Easter. I just, here we go. Chris Mark has is a voice in the wilderness. I just got an email from GoDaddy I guess who just won a bidding amount for the usfl shop.com. This guy, Well there goes their redirect link anyway, I was going to say Easter 2022 was April 17th. Yeah, so it was that weekend, So apparently, yeah, I guess it fluctuates. I don't know. I don't know how Easter dates are determined. I'm Jewish. Yeah, that's okay. That's okay. Anyway, we're talking about kickoffs here and all this stuff. Gregory, I think Gregory would hop on here eventually. The winner of spring football. Welcome all my spring league brothers and sisters. Is spring football winning right now, Gregory, are we It sure doesn't feel like we're winning right now. I'm sorry bro. I want to have your optimism but I feel nothing but a completely loser right now following this league. They say here, and I wanted to get to this before we get that the 18th is the perfect long as they play in terms of the fan viewing on TV perspective, excuse me. With having presumably eight hot markets, is that going to increase the visibility and what they want? Right. Do you think there's going to be better attendant that's going to look better, I guess is my point. I mean I think the ones that you have that were better attended will still be better attended and then the other ones will be how they were or worse potentially. Lemme put it this way. I don't think the interest is going to increase on the national audience from just having fans and stands because the XL already had fans and stands it'll increase compared to the USFL. It'll be closer to the XFL level on the interest in National Broadcast TV where they were getting a considerably better percentage on ratings compared to the USFL from broadcast to broadcast. And then on top of that, there'll be that better cable interest and also being on ESPN instead of FSS one will be really nice. Hopefully they are never on FSS one because FS one is a total disaster. But overall, do I think it's actually going to increase interest in the league just by having this collection of teams versus a different collection of teams? No. It's just going to be the people who were more interested already sticking around and then the people who were less interested being kicked out the door. Correct. I share those elements. We have a couple extra, these comments are killing me, Blake on this. What sucks is Danny's IG Post pretty much confirms we won't learn anything more for a couple of weeks left in the dark with more questions than we have before today. That is also a similar sentiment. I continue checking the US L next L website. It's kind of hard for me to feel like there's more questions whenever I've already asked every question under the sun, but yeah, I mean it certainly just makes me feel more completely confused over what is actually happening. Yeah, Greg, we'll do the last of these comments. Like I said, we'll get out of here at the top of the hour. I love spring football content as a minor developmental league for the NFL, not as a competitor, amazingly the NFL as it willing to help push it for a few for year round exposure. Well, They've already done this before. The NFL has already done the developmental minor league thing. It was not sustainable and also it was weird, it was in Europe, but it wouldn't have been sustainable in the US the way they were doing it either. They don't feel like they need to do that. They feel like they can just let things play out on their own and then maybe what'll happen is if one of these leads can never prove that they can last, then they can establish a more official relationship because now they're not bearing the cost burden. Denzel is chiming in. This feels more like XFL than USFL. We'll see when the official branding comes out. I'm curious to see, do we just roll in? Do you rebrand? I mean not let's say we keep the renegades, right, but do we do any sort of tweaks on that? I mean there's no time, right? The other thing is that the styles of these teams that are being kept are totally different. It'll be completely jarring to watch the Memphis Showboats versus the San Antonio promise. It'll be so jarring to watch on television because the style, I Think it's fun. I mean, but think about the NFL back in the day when they merged and I think about how The style was, there was no massive diversion of styles and uniforms back. I'm not saying it actually matters. It's just going to be so funny to watch how different, it's like watching college football where you have one team. Oregon is so over the top with their uniforms and then they're playing Utah and it's completely generic style of uniforms. Yeah. Mike asking about the game broadcast, I think the rumor was NBC's out. They won't be. Am I hearing, I mean There's no substantive rumor NBC is out. All we know is that NBC was not in Washington. We don't know anything other than that, but I am betting that NBC is seeing the writing on the wall and they're done. We'll see though. Hope they keep the XL kickoff rules. We're talking sea dragons here to San Diego. No. Yeah, not happening. Sorry, move along. Oh, here it is. The comments are coming so quick. I haven't given them up, but I'm much a bigger fan of the XFL in the US L because I'm the defenders fan. Do growing up in the DMV club, the defenders and They had made the cut, right? I mean could you imagine? Yeah, well no, I mean I think you're feeling like you 2024 UFL championship game at Cashton Field. There you go. Cashman, that's your I read that as Canton. Sorry, but either way I think that's funny either way. No, I laughed because it was cash cashman that is, I mean it would be this league wouldn't it? It would be this league if they had to. They just had to go back to Vegas because Jerry just couldn't let go of Vegas. Not yet, but yeah, no, I'm sure it'll be at one of the stadiums they already have. If you could pinpoint, and like I said, we'll get out of here, here as how they're, if you could pinpoint where this went wrong. Was it the Vegas thing? Where did the FL waiver here? Vegas was just a symptom. Like I said, the problem was the local marketing. The problem is the complete lack of communication, the lack of commitment to building a fan base. That's the problem. Everything else is just a symptom. Vegas was delusion, Vegas was embarrassing, but the league would've if everything else was working and Vegas was the only failure, we would've just kept going. But Vegas was a microcosm of everything wrong with this league and you could say the same thing for the USFL with all their empty stadiums that aren't the ones that are the hub teams. Just looking through here, if you have any last comments on here, good man, we will get out guys. Still a hundred people watching You. I would argue by the way that this absolutely can, even though I think the A ffl is currently more uncertain, this new league can absolutely be worse than the new a ffl because if the AFL is run more sustainably and small scale to start, at least you don't have to worry about the AFL immediately going belly up. Whereas it really feels like this new iteration might not last two years and it definitely doesn't feel like it'll last three years. Hang on. We might have one more tweet here to get to before we get SL here. Here we go. Sorry, we'll get out of here I swear. But we got to get on this breaking news before we get out of here. He's got to Handle it. A union statement on collective bargaining agreement and proposed, I haven't read this yet. November 30th yesterday league representatives informed the union that the USL proposed merger completed the antitrust review process with the Department of Justice. While an agreement to merge leagues has not been finalized, there has been significant progress in bargaining. Rest assured the negotiating committee continues to work diligently to towards the agreement on the key issues we received from player feedback including group licensing and union successorship. It's been confirmed the first game of the combined season will be Saturday, March 30th. The overwhelming consensus of the board of players is that we will continue to inform player membership in real time based on the information we have the liberty to openly discuss. The only thing I wish we had from the union we aren't getting is when did those conversations about the merge league bargaining begin? We don't really have a tangible start date and second off what's left. If we could establish what's been done and what's left, that would be helpful for just us understanding where everything's at and maybe you can talk to them and figure that out or someone else, but that communication from their end would just help us understand where the players are at and figure out how can we support them in that issue. I would prefer this new league to be unionized. Of course I am. You know me, I was staunchly at the end of the year last year, even though everything I was more XFL. The one thing I said was that I was so happy that USFL got unionized. Yeah, well and it's good. So there we go. We will put this ship to bed here today. There we go. Thanks for hosting all this and getting through all this. I appreciate everyone. Like I said, a hundred people here winding out. I think we topped out at like 130, something like that. Not too bad considering we kind of hemmed and hawed around here for a while. Be subscribed, please. Thumbs up. 98 people still give a thumbs up, get this video supported. If the world changes, we'll figure out something tomorrow. Otherwise we'll figure out something next week. CFL off season and we got Cory May is getting hired from the Saskatchewan Road, rys, all that stuff. But we'll see. It's a little nebulous right now. I'm not trying to be too locked. I mean I like doing the Friday thing and all of that, but I'm not doing two hours every Friday of, we're not rehashing this tomorrow, if that makes sense. So if anything happens. Yeah. I have one more question before we end. Do you feel comfortable in the notion that there will for sure be a kickoff March 30th, 2024 Merge League? Do you think it's really going to happen or how much of a possibility do you think it still could be that it falls apart? That's a good question. Considering how everything has come right now, it does give me pause because, and I am not in these rooms, I sense that there is still a lot of organizational distress going on right now. And even today, as we've talked about and before, not one instance of any of this coming out from the league has been in what I would deem as a suitably professional manner, right? Getting Danny's IG post whatever. So I don't know. I think that a lot of time and energy has put into this. I certainly think they're going to try, I mean 50 50, 60 40, I don't know Man. I'm like 30, 70 right now because you're telling me it is, but you're not put in any of the commitment. You're not showing me. You're just saying it offhandedly and then going back in a dark room for a month and we're not going to see, it'll be like Christmas and then they'll start talking again and they'll wish Merry Christmas during the bowl games or whatever and then on the Dick Clark or whatever, and then we will get nothing again for several weeks. Next thing you know, if this is really happening, it'll be training camp like wait, training camp is happening. We had no idea this was coming because even though we thought it was supposed to happen, you weren't telling us anything. I don't know. Even the most basic thing I have a hard time believing in right now, which is that there will be a football game played by the Merge league on March 20, 24. And I have faith in that. To me, it feels like, and this will be my last comment, it's kind of like when you used to watch Survivor and you'd have two guy girl, whatever they're waring against or scheming against each other and then you get merged and you're on the merged tribe and you're still working. It just doesn't feel like there's a simpatico of we are working together here. It still very much feels like, and again, this is day one, right? We're putting this out, but it was day one, it's September 28th and here we are going through all this And they certainly aren't working with the fans, which I feel like is a basic rule. So if they're not going to work, the fans, Yeah, alright, feel bad. You make good points, Ken, just feel sad. So I appreciate everyone, like I said, like and subscribe. We will see you soon. Stay tuned, turn on the bells and all that kind stuff. We'll see you next time. Thanks guys.

Why Is the XFL-USFL Merger Taking So LONG? Latest News and Updates!!

Enter text here Well, happy Markcast Friday here. Live episode today, black Friday. Thought I had eliminated going before the New York Jets game and trying all the competition today. Get people getting up, get their shopping. I forgot we're actually going up against the Feast of football here, the XF Ls thing, so we'll see. Hopefully we could do whatever, but this was fun today. I felt like we needed to do something. I had been talking with Max about this listener Max, producer Max here. Been knee deep in CFL content for about a month. I am trying to get away from like, okay, is it four, eight and four? Okay, now it's five and five. Okay, now it's eight. Trying to get through all that, making videos every week, but now we need to stop down that Max. How are you doing? I'm doing great. It feels kind of weird following spring football right now. This kind of feels like a whole lot of nothing really, but at least now for the first time in months really, we had something more substantial than hearsay. That's nice. Yeah, it's been tough and I know and God bless Brandon and everyone trying to do these videos, like I said, doing the Great Cup Show, had a great success with that. Appreciate 66,000 people checking that out, which was pretty cool. The biggest thing that we've seen, so obviously on our channel, so excited for that. But Max said there's enough now with the government we have, I got the photos, all this kind of stuff. Mike Mitchell's recent reporting, there's enough to talk about. We need to stop down. I asked the professor Andrew Murray, who is busy with family obligations, ask Greg Parks and I said, max is important enough. We'll get Max on. We'll run down to all this questions. Everything else today, Philip checking in. Max, first off, what is the welfare check right now? I know there's been a lot of animosity online and a lot of now we've parlayed the XFL US L stuff. Okay, well who's going to win with the numbers and kind of all that stuff. We're sitting here, it's Black Friday, November 24th. How are you feeling? I'm just looking around. I'm like, remember last year when the USFL was all putting their commercials on TV and during NFL games? I mean I haven't been watching H of NFL football, but I don't think that's been happening lately. I sure haven't seen many people posting about it if it has been happening or anyone really and the XFL is like, we'll just re-air stuff we already did on YouTube all off season. Even now it's just more of the same stuff. It really feels like they're just biting time hoping the merger gets improved in time to launch a merge 2024 season and I am a little concerned what's going to happen if they can't do it then are they going to have separate seasons for 2024 or are they just going to cancel it all entirely and start over in 2025 as a merge league? Well that's kind of my fear is we went through this last year we had the Vegas Vipers and the Cashman Field Field of Dreams with all and we have a question here from Brandon. We'll talk about the Vegas Vipers. Do you have any questions, anything post them at all? I'll tag 'em here and we'll get to 'em in a second. We went through all that last year, really delayed. It doesn't feel like either of these leagues have a lot of juice right now. I do think the US FL is doing more, Hey, watch our guys play on Thursday night, watch our guys play on Sunday, kind of watch that stuff. I felt like you said we're doing this Feast of Friday, but it doesn't feel like this is a league with players reporting in a month and a half. No, it certainly does not feel like this is going to be playing football in February and honestly I'm not even sure if the USFL was going to be playing football in April at this point separately either. It just kind of all feels like a bit of a mirage In terms of the back and forth where it felt like at the beginning of the reports were XFL reaching out to USFL kind of being absorbed that way now at least reports I had heard and flying in even this latest Thursday night to Canada, I'm there at the reporter suite getting messages like, Hey, now we're feeling hearing it's going to be more XFLE. What if we stumble where is because it feels like every week kind of the needle bounces one way or another. The main stumbling has just been that they can't get it done really, they can't get this sorted out even though it's taken months upon months. And also that it took them this long to start on this process in the first place. They should have figured out that they wanted to do this if this was something entering their mind in March of this year instead of July, man, instead we waited so long and now the regulators are going to delay it through. I mean we're hoping for the mid-December, but I don't know if this makes it through by the end of the year. I mean I just don't see it honestly. Well, and there's always the end of the year shutdown stuff too where everyone ends up taking off. I remember following with all of when we were going through Covid and all of the small business loans and unemployment and all that stuff and I remember tracking a lot of government processes of, okay, when is this stuff going to to get approved? They're like, okay, now we're taking the next four weeks off. We'll be back. You're like, wait, wait a minute here. What's going on? So yeah, we had John Lewis here who was on a couple of weeks ago, I think the last kind of proper episode talking about the big government meetup. That's kind of what we have the most juice here to get into today. And then we have some questions, Mike reporting that. Let me get the photo up and then what do you make of the reports coming out of Danny the Rock we're meeting in, who do we have here in this photo max? Because Mike did the big breakdown. I mean Mark had the article, but Mike kind of put in this workout. Yeah, I was snooping around trying to figure out who the guy in the middle was. So I did an AI photo recognition search, came back like 87% score Magnus. I was like, oh well I'll ask and see if people who are actually reporting on this can find out if it's him. And sir enough they did find out it was him in the middle there. So everyone else here, you see we have Dwayne and Danny on the ends. Then we have Jerry and Russ, Brandon next to each of them. And then we got Shanks and Mark Dally who is one of the heads of redbird, he is one of the partners I think, and they were in DC And it seems to be the biggest sticking point right now is at least from what I can understand, the XFL wanting eight teams total, whether that's four and four, I've heard five and three, which again, there's this measuring the stick measuring contests here going on, which I don't like don't celebrating victories of any kind of like, well the more US developed teams survives, whatever. But it seems to be that I guess the government concern with the losing of jobs, layoffs of all of that stuff, they want more 10, 12 trees. Am I understanding this correctly Personally in my opinion, I think all the hearsay to this point about which league has more teams is really all about how many home sites So they want to have, and everything else has nothing to do with which league is preferred and honestly the people who are saying, oh, we think it's going to be more teams from this league or the other league are probably just a lot of them. I better coaches and players who are just talking trashed honestly. But I'm definitely concerned about the layoffs too as well and I think they need to come up with some sort of compromise and I've got a couple ideas listed out. Yeah, I mean because the thing, right, and it's never been, people always think like, okay, this merger is going to come together. We're going to have this 16 and Mike Mitchell, I know we talk a lot in the group chat and this mega power league and eight Nate and all that stuff. Clearly this merger is a coming together of we can't compete against this. We need to consolidate a little bit. What are some ideas, I know you have your Google doc here going through what are some of the things that you're concerned about and that you want to talk through? Well the regulators obviously are worried about layoffs, but the league is like, hey, we're not going to be able to run this if we have 12 to 14 teams because we have too many players, too much overhead, whatever. And also on top of that, they're trying to move to the USFL model of cutting off all the full-time pay for all these assistants that aren't coordinators, which is only three of them. So on the bigger problem on the layoffs end for the larger organization, if you can find a way to say, Hey, let's meet in the middle on the number of teams, but then all the teams or all of them, but one or two maybe have home sites and so that way you can say, Hey, we've retained all this staff for selling tickets. We might move 'em around to markets or at least we've retained the numbers of staff. We might have to fire and rehire or whatever. But that way you'll be selling tickets and markets, you'll have ticketing staff, stadium staff vendors, all that. You're still paying those people. That part of the economy is still set and on top of that you're not taking away eight teams, you're taking away six teams. So still a little bit of a compromise there for the player's sake and the coaches' sake and executives of teams I guess, which there aren't really that many. I don't even think the USFL has much scouting infrastructure at all for teams. And then in terms of how to make each coaching staff more efficient in terms of, because they currently, they don't want everybody full time. If they could find a set up how the renegades and some of how the guardians did it where they gave multiple different people like offensive and defensive coordinator roles and then also an assistant head coach role and a special teams head coach role. All those guys also coach their own position group. And then you have six position groups covered, six assistants that are full-time between your offensive and defensive coordinators, special teams, co assistant head coach, and then you have a core that you can maintain a culture every year in your assistants group and then you can rotate some of the other guys in and out like a running back coach or whatever and that way it'll be easier to build a team every year. But does this seem like these conversations of this magnitude in terms of this feels very late to be having here in November, do you anticipate that they thought they would have an easier time getting this pushed through? I know remember when the original reports came out and it said that, oh yeah, they're not going to have any problems with this. This is such small potatoes, but it does seem like they're getting really caught in the weeds here. It kind of feels like they just assumed because the alternative was that they would go bankrupt, that the government would just give them the thumbs up, but they have to realize that the government has to look out for the long-term effects of something like this sticking around while still taking away layoffs instead of as a warning as to say, Hey, this just doesn't work if you try to mess with this and we're not going to allow you to just take away jobs and keep going. I guess they need to maintain their enforcement muscle really, It seems to me, and we've talked about this a lot with the XFL to 60 million and all of that stuff and the US L at some point we're going to need to be okay taking a sustained loss for a couple of years here on this. And the problem to me is we're trying to figure out, well, how can we penny pinch and okay, let's go consolidate offensive and we don't need this many and it's like the CFL model like okay, Chris Jones can be the GM and the head coach and he's calling the defensive plays and we're doing this. It feels to me at some point you're going to need to jump in and I don't know, we've lived through this with the UFL US FL with the hub model now with the XFL. He just doesn't feel like either of these entities is willing and I get it. I mean I don't have hundreds of million of dollars to lose either, but it seems this isn't, it seems like we're just treading water here. We're trying to shed excess weight versus trying to get a life jacket on here And also it really feels like they're not even committing to trying to get people in the door. It just kind of feels like let's just put football out there and we'll see what happens. I mean I wrote up the whole fans Bill of Rights thing and they did not care at all about that even though that was one of your most popular videos and people in the leagues just don't care about actually trying to get fans. They just care about if they can get some minimal profits off the backend by reducing costs to the smallest possible amount. Are you concerned, and I was here when we had John Lewis's episode on and when we had Greg Parks on it, I guess it was a month ago now that the public perception of all this, not only kind of in the casual market, right, okay, we're hearing about all this stuff, but if I'm a fan of either of these leagues here we have Chris, your aviation junction talking, taking away the dragons. I'll tell you my friends here in Seattle, they're just waiting to get their money refunded at this point. They have no, I said, doesn't feel like Seattle is going to be involved in this, but they said, it doesn't matter, we're out. It's been too many herky jerky and we've been part of this since 2018. I mean that's what I think some of these power ups don't get is I understand the people working for the league and the team reps and horrendous, and this is jobs lost and I don't want to see all this, but some of these fans, this is six, seven years going on to this. It's just a huge ask of now of like, well, let's sit tight here, orient through all this, and was it the renegade selling the suites and the Battle Hawk selling suites like, okay, but what's this going to look like here? Is it going to be a February kickoff? Is it going to be March April? It seems like there's still too much in the air even as far as that goes. Yeah, mean obviously I think the West Coast teams are out the door. I just think there's no way, right? But an April kickoff, February kickoff, March kickoff, whatever month kickoff, I mean god forbid a July kickoff, there's no way away. I just don't think anybody, I think everyone who isn't the most diehard, desperate to have spring football survive fan just cannot possibly remain attached to this right now because there's just no security in this team. If you get invested in your team is going to go away in six months, the league might go away in a year and there's no reason to believe it won't because the people who are running it are making seem like it might go away this year. So it's really hard to see the point if you don't believe in the vision and even if you do believe in the vision, can you trust these people? I don't know if you can anymore. I I'm just going to be honest. Well, the sentiments came in. I mean, again, I've said this before. A lot of these people that have been involved in all of this, I don't know, it feels like this is a baby that's been passed on, it's been passed on, it's been passed on and it's gone through so many hands in so many families and foster care and it was in the court system and it was got adopted by the government and then it got adopted out to, so it feels like it's gone through so many different iterations to this point. It's really hard for me to hold on to, we have here from PIP talking if they plan to run separate in 2024, it would be disaster attendance wise. Basically a lame duck season. I feel like we're at a weird sticking point right now where all of this came out. I know we had the Axios reporting and all of that back, but in terms of it feels like it's a lose lose situation right now where either we roll forward, hey, pay no attention to the press release in September. We're working on this later, but then how possibly do you get invested in that or like you said that do we delay, do we do whatever? What do you make of that? If we just continue, this doesn't happen, we go forward in 2020 for a business as usual. I mean it's like danged if you do dinged, if you don't run the season 2024, everyone knows this is completely meaningless and if you do not run the season and you just go to 2025, then people are going to forget you even exist. All the TV is going to be like, oh, spring football is gone. They went bankrupt again. I'm not even going to be on their radar that Emerge League in 2025 is coming because these people are doing such a bad job of raising awareness about their football leagues that I just don't see how people would realize that it's coming back. Well, and I thought it was interesting too because we've talked a lot on here about coaching and staff and competition, right, with the CFL and we're trying to get all this talent, whatever. It was funny to me, we were up in Hamilton for the Gray Cup and Dave Naer was on our stream, but we had, it was that morning that he had just tweeted out, someone was asking about coaching competition and they're like, he goes, well, there's so much uncertainty right now with the spring leagues in America. I'm like, perception changes really quick and here just six, nine months ago, I'm talking with CFL agents and yeah, we're telling people go play in the USFL, go play in the XFL and then here you go. We know the Winnipeg blue bombers are going to be here in 2028. We know, we think we know the Edmonton Elks are going to be, they might be under private ownership, but there's just a lot of, like I said again, shifting water share from what was just even six months ago in terms of how these leagues are viewed. I just think, yeah, it just kind of feels like they don't care really. They're going to do whatever the ownership is going to do whatever they want and if the league fails, whatever, it's a rounding error to them, whatever, they don't want to put in the real commitment to make this work because if they did, they would put in even the same level of commitment that they put into some of their other properties. They put all this care and effort into making sure they can get people out to a soccer game, but then when you buy an entire football league and you just do not reach out to the fans until two months before the season and then the second time around, you don't really reach out to them at all because you don't even know if you're going to have a season. I mean, how are people supposed to take you seriously? I just don't understand. I want to talk here. We have some notes, we'll have some questions we get to as well and I get that. That's why we're not telling anyone. I totally get that right. Better off be silent business as usual, but it's hard. I mean I tweeted out right after everything came out and us L was talking about their fire free agency. I'm like, man, this is really hard to kind of separate these two things. I'm like, okay, we know this is going on in the background, but it's like your parents are squabbling. It's like, well, dad's still got to take me to practice but I know that when I get home it's going to be awkward. There's just a lot of whatever with that. But we've seen the trademarks, we've seen the NFL or what was it? The National League Football League trademark. We've seen the UFL trademark. Now hearing that it could be the XFL or the USS L brand name, which has always made more sense to me just because of the time of money put into that. In terms of it being the XFL, I think the U-S-F-L-I would ride with that. I would ride it with the USS L, absorbing the XFL. Moving on. Where do you make it currently? How you feel on that? I'm going to say is that the XFL is a larger online footprint and has a younger audience and also managed to draw slightly more with way less exposure and also quite frankly, I don't think the USFL brand really connects to anyone who's under the age of 50 and I just don't really get why you would have all these massive 600, 700,000 follower accounts and then pick the one that has 135,000 Followers. I don't know. To me, and I have this hanging, I always have this from our good friend rash Madani, got that at Gray Cup and the Great Cup one, oh wait, wait, you twice failed. Now you're going in. Is it a TH fail? I think there's baggage on that as well. That's why I kind of go back and forth. I don't care which one it is. I think we need to maintain one and move forward And in the USS FL, I mean the XFL might be a failed league and the USS FL might be a twice failed league at this point. Both leagues are failing pretty hard right now. I mean there's no way about it. So I think you have to pick the one that has a larger connection to most society and I don't think that's the one that died 40 years ago and they're trying to revive and that people under the age of 50 just don't care about, but that's just me. But whatever, they'll pick one because the alternative is to bring a whole new name about that doesn't make any sense and try to make that connect with people whenever you've already put so much effort into building these other brands that just does not make any sense to do any other And let me know in the comments we had here FU all US L, like I said, I'm the one saying I would just keep it the US L Fox to put a ton of money into that. I think it's clean. I understand what Max is saying, the residents of all that, but I don't want to be too Homer Reed to be like it's got to be the SFL or bus. I don't know. I guess it depends kind of how the actual league management is going to end up being, but I'm looking here at the comments Pat here saying I would stay with the USFL with the ownership of the XL franchise USFL and XL wants to cease. It appears that's kind where I'm at bringing in the Battle Hawks, bring it. Like I said, market did as an acquisition, the US L bringing in, you call it the merger, whatever, but to me, yeah, branding and acquiring all these new trademarks is going to be a lot interesting in that regard to me. It always baffled me that they would go down that course of like, well, we sued Steve Earhart and all this and we got all these trademarks and Brian Woods bought all this in and now we're going to dump it. I think it probably cost the XFL more to buy the league than it did for them to go through all those lawsuits and those trademarks. So you tell me honestly and whatever, they'll pick one, it doesn't really matter. We can decide which one you want, but at the end of the day it's not up to us. I will say this, there's only one USFL representative in that picture in dc. There's everyone else is basically associated with the XFL or ESPN, which is directly tied to the XFL. John, don't feel like you're too old. I said 50 plus. I'm not pushing too hard on you. You're not that old Wants to know how did we get out of some of these stadium leases? Well, you got Lumen Field and all of that. I don't know. I think are these one year offs at this point? Could we duck it to that point? I'm sure some of them are two or three year leases. They'll pay the whatever it takes to get out and they'll move along. I mean the alternative is to lose even more money staying there. Well, you're going to end up having to give refunds anyway for a lot of this stuff. I mean in terms of Seattle, we're all paid up. I mean it's not a lot, but I mean it's what, 3 85 times four? I mean we're in for 14, whatever that is, 1400 bucks or whatever, so they're going to have to do that at that point. You had the note on here that with losing an NBC presence, not having an NBC presence here in terms of the merger league moving forward, it's Just hard to say. All I know is there's nobody from NBC in that picture and partially that's probably because Fox only sub licenses games to NBC. It's not like NBC is directly involved in the league in any way, but ESPN is technically not directly involved in the ownership of the XFL either and they're right there in the middle of the photo with Burke maintenance. Yeah, I'm a little concerned that NBC is not going to stick around for this new iteration because they can see that the interest in the overall field is kind of dying out and they can see that these leads are not being well run at all. Elaborate on that not being well run. Well, they could see then their audience numbers. I mean they were expecting huge numbers in 2023 for either USFL and it just was not there, so it's just kind of hard to say what sort of other stuff would you really hope for it? Why would you stick around In terms of the, I guess the time to strike on this? Have we missed this window in terms of the competing last year and I just checked, we're currently out drying the feast of football on the XFL channel, so that's exciting just as a personal picture, not that it's a low bar, but I'll take that as a win here. Black Friday we beat the shark seven, won the cracking the other night in this day, see a little victorious in life but because like I said now there's so much uncertainty with this. We're dragging this out. We're going through the same things last year. I mean it has this window already passed, if that makes sense. Well, for 2024, I just mean in general right now, I mean for the short term, I'm talking within the next 10 years here. I mean we had, was it John Lewis on, I don't see this happen here. Was it Paul Reese? When did they, this is kind of the last chance of this for the next decade plus Maybe just I feel like if someone else who was smarter came in and started over and tried to build up from the ground up and didn't try to feel as big and instead started at the roots, they would be able to do a lot better, but they don't all want to go big but then not commit to going big and it just kind of feels like a get rich quick scheme and it's like, no, those never work. This is not cryptocurrency and that didn't work either. In the long run, That's always been, and I've been pretty public about vocal about my USFL of this is more football please watch and I called it back when it was the Brian Woods and it was more caveman football versus the XFL, which was like this is a matrix and we're going to be cross connecting and all these platforms and scaling up and the multilayer and all this stuff. I don't know, did you feel that? Were you that much more inspired from the XF LSS product last year? To me it felt there was lip service and I know the broadcast had a different flare to it, but fundamentally how did you feel now looking back at those? The main thing I appreciated about the XFL more than the USFL would be they did a bit better of a job earlier in connecting compared to when the USFL started and also they didn't let themselves get weighed down by having literally zero fans at games, which was something that I think that perception hurt the USFL so much that even though they brought themselves out to more markets that it was too late, the first impression had already been made and people just didn't want to watch the SFL anymore because they thought no one's going to be there. There's no energy If you're a casual fan who doesn't even really care that much about the football game, you just want to be entertained. The crowd is part of the entertainment. Whether people who are actual football fans like Emory Hunt want to say that people don't care about the crowd. People absolutely do care about the crowd. That's why they watch college football. College people don't watch college football for the football unless it's the very best teams you will watch. I don't know Arkansas, Florida because of the environment, because it's exciting, it's pageantry. Whereas that USFL brand's been so tarnished by these empty stadiums. That's another reason I don't think you want to keep that USFL name. People are going to be able to watch, see the name of like, oh, that's the game with literally zero fans in the building. What's the point of me watching that? That's like watching some people on YouTube. What's the point? It's hard. It is hard to me and I don't know, I kind of go back and forth with both of it to me and I know we, it's been badger to death, this kind of hub thing, but I do agree with you at least in terms of the long-term effects of it. I think it's something where if you need to argue it repeatedly, obviously it's a thing. And so that to me is challenging. And we have John Lewis here, you had so many casual fans ever say they went back because of those empty state objects. It's like if you're in an argument with someone, they it's fine, it's fine. Don't worry. Some point it's going to be, it's something that needs to be taken into account the minimal more than the XL had in some. And I want to get, we had a question here about the Vegas Vipers stadium, but I do agree with you. I think long-term effects of that, it's hard. I think us L fans champion hubs champion saying the no fans is fine because of that business model made sense to me. Merely outlasting your competition does not make a successful business model. It means that you were able to survive longer with the funds that you had. You're not proving growth on that Lasting longer is not going to make people want to watch lasting longer is just going to be a slow death. Do you want it faster? Do you want it slow? I don't really want either. I want these people to actually understand how to connect with the fans. That's what I want. I've had conversations in talking because people think I'm all butt hurt because Seattle, oh, Reed's like I really don't care. I mean it was, and when we went to the games and all of that, I go to one BC Lions game a year, I covered the CFL flying, but to me this promise of like, well no, we're going to take a step back and then in two, three years you're going to figure it. We will get to that point. You haven't proven that yet. So to me it's promising something down the road, but I don't have anything right now to prove that that's something that's going to actually pan out in the future. And as they've ramped up their commitment to more markets and more fans, again, the broader national interest has already turned away. It's already declining and that perception has not changed. It did not increase over the course of the season as people realized that there was more interest around the league in the places they played, it declined because people already gave up. That's going to be a really hard mountain to climb. I think that same problem's going to hit the ex FL now because if they cancel their season in 2024, they're toast and if they don't cancel their season outside of maybe St. Louis, probably still despite it all and DC will probably still show up, but I mean there might not be more than 5,000 fans in any other XFL market. Maybe you'll get 10,000 in San Antonio and I mean sure people will see that at least somebody caress, right? But they're going to see that nobody else really does and how long are people going to be willing to watch that whenever? It just kind of feels like it doesn't matter unless you really care about the sport. We had a question here from Pat. I think at this point it might be better to let 2020 tour play out. I think it'd be better to see them possibly delete the teams from there. Just really the they of guys who were move on to the NFL, et cetera. I dunno, I've gone back and forth. I had said originally, and I'll hide this because we can't see your beautiful face if this merger doesn't happen. At least in my perception, I see much more happening with the USFL right now. Am I reading that wrong? Because you've said that you've been unimpressed with the, because to me s ffl is right, we're doing Birmingham events, we're ready to flip the switch and go if we need to. I mean I think they'll have a season, I'll put it that way. I think the USS FL will have a season if this merger doesn't happen. Do I think people will really care? Nah, I don't think they're doing anything to actually make people care. So sure there will be A-U-S-F-L 2024 season. Do I think the audience numbers are going down despite them trying to ramp up exposure even more on tv? Yes, I do. Do I think that their online following is going to really increase? No, I don't really think it's going to improve, so it'll just be a loss season from the USS FL. Honestly, if it was up to me, I would hope the merger goes through, they cancel 2024 and then they put their foot down on 2024 and they actually commit to connecting to local markets they should have done all along and then at least people will know that they're coming in 2025 and on top of that, they'll feel like this time the league actually caress because currently I don't think either fan base if they were really honest with themselves feels like these leagues really care. I've thought about this and I've talked with Dorothy and not that anyone cares what I think and certainly with the CFL and everything, I mean I think they tolerate it. Let me come up, but I do wish at some point anybody would have a conversation with anybody in terms of the fan bases with these leagues of not coming in with a, we know exactly what we need to do and many of the mistakes that have been made over the last two, three years I think could have been course corrected by some conversations of like, well, we've seen this work before. We haven't seen this work before. This is what you need to do. It just baffles me as though we're at this point now and it feels like it's kind of the same. It's like you're the soldier kind of in battle. I've been through this, I've already seen all of this stuff and could have saved a lot of these casualties along the way. Yeah, if you literally looked into the history of spring football at all, they would just obviously realize that the way they were doing it is just not going to work and now you're at a point where if you have a season, people are not going to be able to connect that to whatever the new league is, even if you maintain the name because you're going to be bringing leagues with totally different teams together, totally different markets. Some markets are going away and also people don't really have any idea it's happening and if you don't have the season, then the only way you're going to be able to get people to know you is if you actually get out there in the markets and you say, Hey, we're coming. We're coming. We have all this together. There's a reason we canceled it. We're going to come back better and stronger and offer you something serious this time instead of just halfway committing. I would rather almost throw away the 2024 history connection and just pretend we're starting a brand new league with the same name just to maintain a brand and push and push and push and say, this time we're for real. We mean this. We're serious. We care about you now. But maybe they don't, but I think they might not care so Well I avoid the goal. I think it puts it in a challenging situation. I put it up already, but dynamite gaming and no season 2024 would kill any interest. No trust that Lee can even play. I will say, and John here that said this well about that, I do not talk to nearly as many players as I know like Mike does, and I know Evan has connections and Pat and kind of everybody else in our circle, but I had a couple of players reach out here over the last week because I think just probably CFL stuff and where our stuff's getting shared more like, Hey, what do you think about all this stuff? And they have no idea what's going on. They're totally left out in the dark and to me that's a challenging as well, if you're a coach or a player and you're at this point, if you're social media people for the XFL or the USFL, if you're selling tickets, it just puts everybody in this hard situation and to me it is hard now to whether it's this year or next year, okay, well now we're serious about this. I know we kind of strung you out for a little bit, but now the alcoholic father, now I'm ready to come to your games, Billy, now I'm going to be here. And if they communicated with, I can't imagine how the union feels right Now. Well, I want to get to that. Yeah, so I mean because that's the other question about that, right? Is the UFLP, right? Didn't they post Evan shared, they posted some timeline of everything coming up that they need to figure out their stuff as well. I mean, how does that even interact with all of this? I mean there's no way to really know. I know what they probably, I mean I'd imagine they hope they could get more communication, more clarity, and they need to know the timing because people got to know whether they're moving out to Arlington or to Detroit or Memphis or whatever. But honestly, if they do end up playing the season, they do communicate with all these guys and they sort it out and then oh yeah, they play it. They get similar, maybe slightly worse numbers than last year and then people have no idea the new league is coming now. Maybe what they do, maybe the only way you could make a 2024 season work is if you use this, say hey, literally the entire time you say, Hey, 2025 new league coming, new combination of teams, maybe then it's worth it because then it's just a three hour infomercial for next season and maybe then it's worth it. But otherwise, I don't think the impact on the new league is going to be held much by having a 2024 season. I mean we've had the CFL cancel seasons and still come back and obviously it's different for them. They've had committed fan bases, but I think as long as you work to connect to the local markets, people will come out because once they see that commitment, what you put in, you get out. But I will say the CFL canceled COVID year this year, now three years later I think was the first, both from a quality of play standpoint and from a fan buy-in attendance standpoint. We saw the great cup rating and stuff. I think it took three years to bounce back from that. So I agree with you, but I wouldn't so quickly say, Hey, let's just take time off or whatever. It took a long time to rebuild that both in terms it Took a long time to build it either way for this. I mean it might take a decade. Are they going to be that committed? Who knows? We have a comment here, shaden as an XFL equipment manager. We've been left in the dark and I think it's going to be hard to even fill staffs for the team if no 20, 24 season. Yeah, I mean in my condolences as well that I just can't imagine. We see an XFL people and I've seen LinkedIn profiles change and people getting different jobs. It is huge to, I'm blessed here in this world where I work from home and I'm able to do all of this stuff. I could not imagine if this was my sole revenue if I was trying to work for one of these leagues, how to navigate all of this. I think you're asking a lot of those people as Well. I can't imagine trying to navigate getting ready for a 2024 season if you only get two weeks notice because the merger doesn't get approved until late January. I mean, it's going to be a nightmare for you if you do have a season at this point as well. It's just which nightmare do you want to have? Make sure you, I have a couple of questions real get to make sure you get your questions, comments in here. We'll go until the bottom of the hour and then I know the jets are coming on here and we can go watch the, is it Tim Boyle now? Are we really living through all this stuff? You can watch the jets and the dolphins. I'm going to watch two lane UTSA roll wave. I need them to play SMU next week and SMU needs to beat them. We had a question here talking about the Vegas Vipers thing. I saw this, I don't know, I have a hard time. We lived through this with some of the job hirings with LinkedIn as well. It's really hard to source, so Wikipedia and LinkedIn articles for things. I don't feel the Vipers are playing in the Vegas ballpark. I think they would've done that before. I don't see the vipers sticking around in any iteration along with the Dragons. I don't even think they're playing in 2024. I think if they do, they'll put 'em in Arlington and just call it a day. I don't think that they're gone. They're long gone. It's hard. So to go through the different current machinations I had heard, okay, we're going to have the eight teams and do the Arlington and then play whatever here, but if we need to do more teams, then we need to hub up. I guess what's the recent, I don't want to get too deep down in the different number of variations, but if we expand from eight, it feels very difficult to replicate the XFL 2023 model of Arlington and then flying out. It feels like we're going to need to hub people if we go more than that. Dallas Arlington's a pretty big city. I don't feel like you'd have any issue finding. I mean, you've seen my dms before about all the quality football facilities in North Texas. If you're going to put a hub anywhere for 10, 12 football teams, you're going to pick North Texas because they will have the facilities for however many teams you need. They will have the hotels for how many teams you need. They'll have the size of airport needed to get you anywhere you need in the country. The real question is, is it going to be too difficult to plan and do the logistics for all of that, having them all from that one place. I tend to feel like the answer is no. I feel like you could still do it with 10 teams and maybe eight of them are teams still based in real markets and the other two are just the permanent road teams or whatever. But it definitely will get more complicated and you will have the nightmare trying to figure out how are we moving the UFL PA union stuff from that one district of the country to the Texas district, whatever. There will be problems obviously, but there will be problems no matter what. So I think you have to have that reduced cost of being in the hub, in one hub and flying out or doing, I mean I guess you could do multiple hubs, but then you don't get some of the benefits you get from having the same consistent quality of facilities and care and travel. What would you say the biggest hurdle is right now? I mean obviously government approval, but in terms of figuring out logistically here, getting the teams ready to go, getting the teams marketed mean. What would be if the government, if we wake up on Monday and it's like, okay, this is all approved and we're doing whatever, what's the next biggest hurdle step Moving forward? Are we assuming a season is happening with the merge league in 2024? Yeah, I think you have can. I don't think either way. I don't think you can play separately or if you have to play together, So I think it's approved and the season's happening in 2024. First off, when in 2024, second off, whose season tickets are you canceling, who's are you keeping? You need to inform those season ticket holders that, hey, your season's going to be not whatever you thought it was. You might have more or less home games than you would expect. Probably more. They're probably going to have a couple teams with no real market and those teams will just, in my opinion, it would be more sustainable just to have a couple extra teams that are always playing away because everyone's flying anyway, so you might as well have a couple extra teams just to increase your game inventory if nothing else, and then so you're going to have that problem figuring out who's staying, who's going, who are we keeping on our customer base? Who are we kicking out? You're going to have the problem of vendor contracts. Who are you cutting off? Who are you keeping? You're going to have the problem of who are we keeping full-time on coaching staffs? Who are we going to have to tell that, hey, we have to let you go if you don't want to be, if you want to be full-time, that's just not going to happen. You're going to have the issue of roster sizes. Heck, obviously. I mean the football is from the business perspective is the least important thing, but at the same time, you do have to decide how are you going to play this football game in this merge league? At the end of the day, you're going to have to pick one rule set, and I will say seeing Russ Brandon there makes me think it will probably be the XF L's rule set, but maybe not. Who knows? Well, I hate, this is publicly. I hate the US FL kickoff. I mean, I'm biased towards the XL rule set, but I think I have good reason to be biased towards the XFL rule says all I'll say In terms of keeping more teams and potentially doing that, why don't we hub? Why don't we, okay, let's move the breakers. Let's hub them with the Orlando team. Let's move the vipers down. Can you keep more teams? But we're needing to shed these costs. We're more concerned if we're the XLSL. We're more concerned with keeping costs down than we are in terms of keeping teams alive. Yeah, I mean all they care about is can they find a way to be even less expensive than they already are and find a way to actually make money because otherwise they wouldn't be merging right now. Not like one league is clearly outdoing the other in terms of any sort of financial advantage outside of the ones that the USFL invents on paper by doing a haha, totally. The money we're making by selling ads on this USFL game is just so much more than the amount of money that we'd be selling for FOX on any other content. Totally, right. Well, to me, it always felt like we're selling these ads, but we're not counting the cost of the league. That to me is always how I've read more of that as we're moving the books where that the MARKAS is profitable because all the equipment is owned and operated by best made videos. The markas in and of itself is not a profitable, I think to me that feels a little bit, but Also it's the same for their income. The income would be coming in at least partially to Fox anyway. In fact, significant. Their primary source of income would be coming to Fox regardless, just maybe a bit less. So it's all sorts of shoddy bookkeeping that's making it allow them to say that they're making a profit. It's not reality, it's a fiction. Well, it's the same way that it was a 4% increase in viewership from season, what was it? Season one, season two of the U USS FL where we took the average of the entire viewership of season one and based it on the season two kickoff, which was down, and the XFL does it too. I mean, I see their digital numbers, they post and kind of all this stuff, At least that it's puffed. It's a hot air, but at least it's real tangible hot air instead of complete fiction. It's the difference between making something out of nothing and then turning nothing into a lie. So it's just two different kinds of manipulation really. So we represent the hardcore. The hardcore in here. We got all these people watching Black Friday, kind of all this different stuff, casual audience. How are they going to react to this? There's a non-zero number of Seattle Sea Dragon fans that do not know any of this is going on at all. Right. The Vegas fiver stance, I mean, yeah, they're going to kind of know how is the public going to respond to, yeah, 4, 6, 8 teams are going away here like Thanos. That might be a good thumbnail for that episode that we, the Thanos cut the universe in half If they kept five of the XFL markets and then three of the USFL markets plus two permanent road teams. However you want to arrange those permanent road teams, I think you would keep enough of the primary stadium audience to be fine, and I don't think the TV audience is all that connected to the stadium audience. I think the TV audience just wants to watch football on a Saturday that has some intrigue and as long as you prove that you're still around and you market hard, you'll keep them. But what I'm worried about is I don't think that's going to happen. I think they're going to do a terrible job of promoting this new league and people are going to, they're not even going to realize that football is coming on on Saturday and they're not going to watch it. They're going to have no idea it's there. I saw a comment earlier. They were talking, I guess Fox is running USL ads during NFL games or whatever. To me, we joke about the real football and all that stuff in the Super Bowl. That is 1% of the marketing that needs to be done on this. I mean, running the ten second TV ad bumper, like I said, back in 2020, I was sponsoring booths at event shows for we were doing, we do weddings and corporate events and kind of stuff. We had XFL staff members there running, they were any sort of thing that you could be at promoting with either a booth or a table. They were outside the games they were doing. It's so much more, I think, than just flipping the switch and running an ad, and that to me has never resonated. I know certain fan bases. I know the bras did a good job locally, right? I know Orlando and Corey, they did a good job locally. Obviously Seattle, there was certain teams that rose above it, but overall as a league, it felt like that none of those lessons were taken from 2020 where Vince was a wrestling promoter and got that on the ground what needed to be done. They never felt like they always have viewed it more as a TV product than Some of the markets did a really good job with the people who were hired, but all of them were hired late. So all the people on the ground who were there when they were there did what they could. I really don't doubt that my beef is with the people running the leagues up top way up top who just don't have the vision to realize you can't just show up a couple months before no matter what you do, and expect people to care. I mean, in the 2020 XFL season, we had events in the summer before the season saying like, Hey, this is coming. They rolled out Bob Stoops and they're like, this is coming football 2020 national television. This is serious. And all of our lux in town. He's going on tours, he's on press radio tours. He's at Super Bowl Radio. He's At the Super Bowl. Yeah, He's everywhere. The people are everywhere. They're there early, they're there often. They're responsive. They're making content. They're appearing on podcasts read. They're appearing on podcasts. They're promoting what they're building from the ground up. That's not happening and it's not because the people don't want to do those things who are at the floor. The people on the floor aren't being given those opportunities because the people up top are only caring about how can we make this as cheap as possible? Well even they would do the Facebook announcements for like, okay, here's going to be the coach or here's going to be whatever. I remember watching and I was very casual at that point, I don't even know who this guy is, but it seems to be a big deal. Let me go Google now and figure out and I mean they did these for all the markets. Remember they were doing those Facebook lives and everything. It is to me. We did our CFL show and I was telling Dorothy about this. Obviously it was exciting. It's a ton of work to go into even that, right? We do the thing and we're posting and we're telling everyone and we're sharing and we're doing the thing. I said, if we just would've showed up and flipped on the switch and went live the morning of the gray cup, you don't get, and that's like you said, they've never gotten that. You can't just show up and put the game on and say, here you go, channel surf your life Away. The 2020 League had Winston Moss and Heather Brooks carrots getting announced at the same time in the parking lot of the stadium with the police cars driving by, but the media came out because they put in the commitment to say, Hey, we're coming. And they were like, Hey, this is interesting and there's clear amount of commitment behind this, whereas now it's like, we'll do do a zoom call. We will do a press release. Maybe the coach will show up a couple months before the season, but we're only post about it three days before the event's actually happening. Maybe we'll have a season ticket holder event, but we're only going to give you 12 hours of public notice for anyone who doesn't already have a season ticket to want to come and visit. It's just like, what's the point? What's the of hiding? All of this, you're not helping anybody. You're only, it's like the rake meme where the guy steps on a rake and it hits them in the face. That's kind of what happened to the USFL and then the XFL is the one where they're riding the rake and it flips in midair and then they step on it as they land and it hits them in the face. It's the same outcome, just different ways. It is just so disturbing that none of them get it yet, especially on the XFL side. When you have an owner who has done all these things I'm talking about overseas and built something there with some of the soccer teams they own and they just don't understand that a lot of those principles apply whenever you're not working with major league sports fans in the US because they aren't just going to come. You have to build it. I remember this feels like a fever dream ago, flying to Arlington with Danny and Russ and all that and they had the Arlington hub and I remember it was funny, everyone wanted to talk to Danny and the Rock and then they left and it was like me and one local person talking to Rus Brandon and I'm like, this is sweet. I thought I was super excited right now and I know Pat got to talk with Russ, I think it was at the showcase here a few months ago, but talking back then and what are you going to do? We see in the US L the quote, we're going to be the first one in last one out. We're going to do all this stuff and never, and I don't know if that was lip service or if they thought that this was an honest effort going in, but I never saw that the dream that was promised. They think they can get away with marketing the XFL, like marketing blackout. Oh, we'll just go on a tour a little bit before the show comes out. We'll have the rock roll up. Everyone will go crazy for him and then he will hold some babies, but it just doesn't work like that. This isn't big ticket stuff. This is the grassroots. This is the people on the ground who are just love football or people who just want to watch football on Saturday and chill and you have to give them some motivation. You have to give them something to get attached to. They're not going to get attached to just a name or a brand. That's just not going to happen. It's all so regrettable. So before we move on, anything else I just want to do you want to talk about the hilarity over people continually trying to predict everything that's going to happen and just continually not knowing anything at all and looking very silly? Sure. Happy to. Okay. Can we talk, what is going on when we're having people who are not involved in reporting on the X? We'll talk about these people first not reporting on the XFL at all. At all or the USFL at all or the We talking about that Howard guy? Howard. Howard, Yeah, but Howard, yes, but also there was Dennis Dodd who reports on college football was involved. There's so many people trying to get in on this and I just don't understand why would you want to get in on this? Have you seen how much disinterest there is in this right now? Why are you trying to get involved in our land get away? To me what it speaks to more and back when we spoke, had conversations with Mark about this when we, I'm a proponent of any of our media and if whoever, Brandon wants support stuff and Stefan wants to, I am a proponent of any of the people that have put in the time and effort to do this and what kills me is when it's anyone that's got at ESPN in their handle or this is some reporter that whatever, oh, they talked about this. Now let's like Mike Mitchell's been reporting this for six months. We've doing this for whatever it was been. All the teams we're going to come out and Mike had been talking and the cities and oh my god, someone else. It's okay to perpetuate all that stuff. So I don't like that just because it's more of that and I just don't like that it's because of someone that's not previously in our circle talking about it that somehow makes it more connected or locked in than anything else. That's my problem with that. It's almost like they just want to cover the whole this league is going to go away thing so that they can be the guy that broke the story about the death of spring football again and then they get clicks for that with the Sports Illustrated writer who wrote about the death of the a couple of years ago. He got huge publicity for that. That's kind of what it feels like. And then on top of that, the people who are involved in the weeds in the XFL and the USFL, who are they getting these reports from that are like, Hey, and even the people like Neil, Neil Stratton. I'm like, oh, he is getting the number of teams and oh, it's going to happen in two weeks. We might get an announcement. I'm like, are you getting that from your player personnel friends? No way that you actually talked to someone in ownership who told you the regulators are going to have it ready for us in two weeks. Well, It was kind of like the Howard thing. It was kind of like he was hearing in retrospect, we had heard Neil had put out whatever and then it had turned into something else and turned into something else and then it was a week later Howard's like, Hey, did you hear it was going to be something that's like buddy, that was a month ago. That to me was always funny about they're here and I will say even this and this was funny, we will round this out here pretty soon if we want. I know you got Gabe, but we got good viewership right now. It's fun. It was so funny to me. We were at, were after our live show. We were back at the BC Lions den and Naylor was there. We hadn't got to talk a lot with Naylor during the week as he was doing hits with Farhan and all the TSM stuff and we're sitting there having a beer and he's like, Hey, do you want to know what I heard about the merger? And I'm like, tell me I'm ready to hear what Dave. And it was the same kind of thing. It was whatever they had come out through and I mean I know Dave's talking to right people and all, no disrespect, but I'm like, yeah. He's like, well, I heard the FL is reaching out to the USFL over. I was like, okay. It just was interesting, but it's all these people hearing it. It's like you're playing telephone and you're hearing that person three or four, They're all talking to the same player, personnel coach people and the players and whatever. I'm just like, none of those people have any idea what's going on. And then on top of that, they're getting all these numbers, all these dates and I'm like, why are we doing this? There's no way you actually know that. It just is silly. Anyway, I have another hour before this game kicks off, so I have nowhere to be so we can, well, we'll See what people want to do here. People want to hang out for a minute and then we'll get going here. I love Gregory Gregory's, a long time listener and comment on this. Why are you guys really Sarah about the merger? The executives at Fox, we're not obligated to call you up until you, what's going on? This will happen when it happens, Gregory, you are absolutely entitled to your opinion. The funny thing is, all I do is come on here and share my opinion and ask other people's opinions. I never tell, but I get a lot of like, well, you are wrong with this and this isn't just a shot just at Gregory. I get this. That's fine if you're, that's awesome. If you're cool with it, if you're ready to go on. I just know I get a lot of dms from, like I said, from players, from staff, from other fans. You were not alone in this thinking or that thinking that everyone has a varied opinions here and everyone's able to have different ways they feel about this. So I respect Gregory if he's cool. Yeah, go for It. Okay, here's my thing. This is not the NFL. This is not Major League baseball. This is not the SEC, this is not the big 10. This is not even the cfl. There is no established fan base. Every single league at the start, the fans are going to be entitled to demand whatever they want to make the league work because otherwise they just won't show up. Do you think if the NFL didn't appeal to the fans they had that the people who were willing to show up early that they would still be here right now? No, those teams died out. That's why the NFL and the NBA and all these teams had teams going in and out within five to 10 years in the first two decades of their existence because they didn't understand how to build up fans or because of some other economic reason. We should be entitled, we absolutely should be entitled as fans to demand that these leagues do better otherwise they won't last. And I don't care that I shouldn't take for granted that spring football is here. I should demand that these leagues do whatever it takes to last and be successful. Otherwise I know that what's going to happen to these players is they're just going to get hurt and the fans are going to get hurt and we're going to have to start all over all over again with some other ownership group who doesn't get it either most likely. So yeah, we're all going to be demanding and you know what we should be. I appreciate that. I don't know. I agree with you this, it's a different world, it's a different landscape and it's never resonated with me that I think that they get it in the collective of like, okay, I don't think they get how niche a lot of this stuff is and now I think surprise alert, I think when they turned on their social medias back a couple of years ago and like, oh my God, what are these dms? What did these comments or what of these whatever? I mean I think that there's a lot of, I don't know. To me I never got it. You do black Adam dc, you know that fan base. This is a very similar mindset of that in terms of you have a super group of hardcore fans wanting to make this work and going to be upset when certain things happen And this time around the problem is that the hardcore fans are not enough to keep this around, whereas you could probably keep DC around on their hardcore fans alone and at least have something, whereas it is just not going to be enough to have hardcore fans too early. You need to get the casuals in the door. You need to get people to become hardcore and need to get the people who aren't in the door at all to become casuals, keep building and building and they just don't care. They think that this is American sports and we can just pretend like we've been around for 50 years and we are an established league and this league got over one and a half million views in 20, 23 years ago before pandemic and so we can just roll out the rock and everything will be fine. Come on, let's be real. Oh absolutely. It was XFL was whatever XFL plus the rock equals this exponential growth on that I showed this year. I just like this comment I call the rumor mill guys haven't had reports for a few weeks. They were like, even Neil and his newsletter was like, I think news is coming at some point I'm like, yeah, he is like, I'm getting off this train right now And he's actually officially partnered with a league I know, but I think he was even because it can change and that's what kills me too. We get a lot of this online of reporting and something and then when something else happens, well that was incorrect. It could have been correct along the way and then that changed. That also happens, right? It's the same thing with players going to get signed with whoever and then you get signed with someone else. Deshaun Watson was probably talking to was in Lancer or whatever and then the Browns came in. That can all be accurate with the final outcome not being what was initially reported. Although I think in this case it's more what people believed was going to happen than ever what was actually going to happen because I don't think anybody who was talking to these rumor mill guys actually knew what was going to happen. They just made something up off of one thing they heard once because there's just no way you legitimately know what's going on with the regulators because if you are someone actually talking to the regulators, you know that if you leak out any information to the public, it's only going to make the process take longer. Yeah, no, I know. So in terms of moving forward here now I have to have this be too much, but people are viewing here not to have this be too much of a complaint session, but moving forward these leagues come together. Are you concerned about the dichotomy of these fan bases or do you think that this is a little world we live in and that they'll be able to move past this and that doesn't matter? I think there will be fights online. I think there will be fights don't there? I think the number of people who actually are involved in the war are not the people going to the stadiums. I think it'll mostly be online. There might be a tailgate parking lot fight here and there Bill style. I'm sure there'll be a few, but I don't think there'll be anything spilling over in that respect. I think there will be a very small percentage of people who are XFL or die, even if they keep the name or USFL or die, even if they keep that name who are just going to be antier completely and drop off. I think that number is not even more than four digits and I think everyone else who isn't somebody who lost a team will stick around and watch and people who wanted to go to games will go to games and the main problem will be the casuals who don't actually have attachments to any league other than, oh, this is the league that has fans in the door and this is the one that doesn't. Outside of that, they're going to be like, I don't even know what this is. Should I watch this? I had no idea who these teams are. Now you've brought in teams from another league, it is just going to be weird. They're going to be like, oh, what happened to the Houston roughnecks because we want to have the gamblers now or whatever. It is going to be confusing and weird and it's going to be hard to maintain those casuals and that's what I'm most worried about. To me, the dream scenario of the eight team conference against each other is tremendously exciting with the Birmingham style, but I'm serious about all that. I think that it's a fever Dream though, Right? Well I know, I know and so realistically, how are you feeling right now about where we're going to land up? Okay, I'm going to sort this into two categories. I'm going to sort this where I want to end up and where we're going to end up where I want to end up. They market whether they have 20, 24 seasons or not, they market the merge league coming. They say, Hey, this is a buildup to something bigger. This is the start of something huge. This is start of something special and build and push and market and get attached to whoever's sticking around and do your best to console whoever you're leaving and try to at least make them say, Hey, at least we're still going to have football on tv. If you would like to enjoy that and we will do whatever we can to see about coming back sometime in the future. We won't entirely go away. We might have some tryouts in your market so you can see some of our players or whatever. What I think is actually going to happen, regardless of when this merger gets approved season's happening or not in 2024, what I expect is going to happen is they're going to absolutely fall flat on their face marketing these leagues, the marketing, this merge league and leagues in the leagues. If they're separate for 2024, they're going to keep failing. They'll retain some level of audience but they're not going to have any real attachment outside of who was already there. Some people would drop off because they're going to realize that it's a lame duck season and then in 2025 they're going to be like, even this feels completely foreign to me. We're going to have some level of audience 20, 25. Some people will watch, maybe it might be a little bit better than it was in 2024 just because you're merging some demographics together. If you can pull some teams together that have fans like Memphis or Birmingham or Detroit and it's just going to be more of the same struggles unless a switch flips in their brain that says, Hey, we need to actually truly attach ourselves these local fans, otherwise it'll be a slow, slow burn and so they run out of gas and they just give up. It's hard and again, I don't want to be too negative on here. We've done this a really long time. I think this is technically episode one 70 today of this, so it is been going, I will say save for the CFL here the last couple of weeks really kind of giving life to this channel. It's hard. It's hard and we'll see and whatever ends up going with this, but this two hour, two and a half hour weekly Friday shows we got to wait out and see if nothing comes next week. It's hard. It is hard to maintain interest in this when like you've said, it feels like this is a side project for a lot of the people involved. They're working on whatever and I think at this point we got to, I am doing the C ffl, we got to work on other stuff. I think it's hard to feel ownership of this or pride in this in terms of the leagues when it doesn't feel like even the people involved in it have a similar way than that. Yeah, I think this is the last shot for this group of people to make spring football work and if they don't put their foot down and try to build something serious and try to market locally and try to build a serious attachment, I think we're starting over with a new ownership sometime next decade and hopefully they figure it out. Yeah. Let's see here. I like this. Gothan has, let's hear some predictions and when we hear something about the merger I've heard next week I've heard, I've heard whatever. I mean to me it is a waiting game at this point. That's why I want to to at least stop down today and do this. We talked off the top where I've tried to avoid this week to week of like, okay, what's the rumor combination this week? But it's been long enough that I think it's fun to get people on here today and no one else has anything do it Black Friday, but when do you think we're going to be hearing something? I'm not a government expert, but you know what? I really don't understand how it could still be happening longer than the end of January. I'm not saying I can say for sure it will still be waiting or not. I don't know how the government works, right? I'm not a political science expert or whatever, but I really don't understand what could possibly take them so long that it would take them past January. At the end of the day, you need to come to some sort of agreement, otherwise this just isn't going to happen. You can only stall for so long. Well, to me it feels like, and so many stupid metaphors David, it's like you got two kids that don't want to clean their room and they're like, well, we don't want to do the XFL and the U US L. They don't want to have X number of teams and it's the government with it. How hard do you dig your heels in here? How hard are you fighting with this? Because it is like they're fighting to shed dead weight at this point, right? The XFL and the SFL are not, it'd be different if they were the ones fighting for more teams or fighting for more. It feels like it's very much the opposite, So I feel like predicting how many teens, that's funny, Philip predicting how many teens predicting when I think all of that is it just feels pointless at this point. I feel like I just want it to be over whatever I want them to make me believe. Again, I want to be how I was in fall 2018, February, 2019 where I was seeing Sam and them make content about the rules and I was seeing Oliver luck doing interviews and I really believed in something and I held onto that belief too long for this iteration and now I've completely lost it and they need to get us back because I don't know how anybody who is contemplating this seriously and not just based on optimism can have hope right now. Make us, give us a reason. I like here, pat has a comment, pat will let me retire from the channel when we hit a thousand episodes, so only 130 more episodes to go. I'll tell you it's so funny and whatever happens this year in terms of a pushback or delay, whatever. I remember when Paul and I started and then it was like three weeks after he started, they pushed it back and then they pushed it back again. I remember sitting there thinking like, man, it's like 70 episodes we got to get through before the, or whatever it was the never was before we got to kick off and it's nuts. Yeah, I agree with you. I've never felt the same as I did that first season. We went to DC and I wept. I wept at the kickoff and I don't know if it was the bottomless mimosas at brunch beforehand that led to that, but I've never sitting here watching the games, watching the Battle of Texas, all that kind of stuff, it never felt the same as it did and not a lot that's been done in my current regime has helped instill any of those feelings of joy. Yeah, I mean I love the players. I love the coaches most of them. Some of them I don't like, but the coaches, I mean of the players, there's no player I really hate, there's some coaches that I don't like that's not my business. Speaking of players I don't like Didn't Ben Holmes just get signed an elf? Wasn't that, isn't he going into Vienna or something? Yeah, you got to speak German buddy. Got to learn German buddy. Yeah, try to get ready to learn. Yeah, the Adam whatever, Adams over it. Yeah, that's funny. German and also, well, they're in a bunch of different countries, but it's mainly Germany, right? I don't think they really I The country as much. I should have invested in Elf back. I should never have done any of this. You might have better luck with the AFL at this point, although even I don't know what broadcast deal they have and all of their organizations seem so sketchy. I just can't even try to get attached to the new AFL right now. Yeah, Tim's invested that. Let's get here at top of the hour. We'll get out here 10 more minutes or so. Anything else? Any other talking points we want to make sure? Does anyone else have any comments? I know we had the Vipers one or the question about that. Oh yeah, pat Juan, are you okay with DRT getting into an NFL contract? He can enjoy sitting on those practice reps while he does absolutely nothing else other than show the playbook to whoever else is in the quarterback room because he can't contribute on the field, so have fun reading a playbook in Cincinnati. I'm sure the pay is quite good. I'll tell you the Bengals, what a season for that. Oh yeah. Who can forget? I think Kevin got another DUI think I saw as well. I was texting and Paul about that in Maryland. Yeah, That was interesting. Leagues will play separate if we have to wait until late January. I mean this is sticking point at this point. I mean what would be the XFL training camp would be what? January 2nd June. They'd have to delay the XFL season by at least two weeks, right? They'd have to start in late February or March one, which in my opinion might be better anyway because then you can get that one season, that one the first weekend where you have that huge audience because there's always a bit more in week one than later on and you get that audience and then you come back in week six after March madness and you have an entire half of the season left to build your audience back up towards the playoffs instead of what happened this time where we were like week three, week four, your audience gets kneecapped for the meat of the season and then you have to come back. We had it here. I have a question from Gotham. We're here. We'll do this first. I like how Chris, why are they running this piece of football on YouTube right now at sad, but I have no interest right now. It feels in limbo. I am glad, like I said, glad that we at least beat the viewership today on this. I know that that's not a lot low bar, but I'm glad that maximized sitting here talking. It's like when we, sorry, but just proud of the CFL staff, but we can go in with a ring light and a cell phone and draw 60,000 viewers. Maybe let's embrace some of these people that are building an audience here. I think that something could be said for that. I saw Bill Macon, what's his name, the content guy, bill retweeting the feast of football and stuff. Maybe let's get on board with some these Max and I sitting here on a Friday morning. I mean the reason they're doing stuff like this is because they don't have anything else they can't do. I mean they don't have anybody at that content house in Arlington, right? I mean do they even still have the content house in Arlington read? Who knows? They barely did anything with it. They shot a couple one minute videos in it and that's it. I don't know. How much money do you think it costs to rent out that house? I don't even want to know. I don't want to know. We have a comment here, Zach, longtime listeners, Zach haven't talked to Zach for a while with the lack of the A to be negative, but at this rate it's going to seem like idea they need to cancel 2024 and come back in 2025 as the big league or go separately. This whole thing will probably die. He says business as usual is not okay. Max. Sorry, Zach and Zach. Zach's a diehard St. Louis BA Hawks fan from the beginning. Yeah, I mean, like I said, danged if you do danged, if you don't, right, but if they completely change the way they operate and they actually try to make a real attachment during this lame duck season and at least say, Hey, this lame duck is not going to nothing, it's going to something bigger and you really make people believe that and you make that through your commitment, not through advertising, through real on the ground work, people's opinions will change. The problem is that they don't want to do that and so that's just why I think, I don't know how you can believe in it. Right. We had a question here, Gotham. Do you guys think it'll be a 50 50 split or not? I've heard every such combination of all the whatever. I think concretely, I think we know that the merged league would ideally like eight and the government does not want that. So whether it's four and four or five and three, I think that that is at least where I am understanding right now, And I mean it doesn't really matter in terms of the business side, which league you pull teams from other than stadium contracts. Yeah, stadiums and yeah, Other than that, it doesn't really matter. So I don't know, man, in my opinion, you hang on to as many stadium markets as you can, especially east of the Pacific time zone because I think it would just be easier to put everybody consolidate in that one region than trying to have two island teams out on an island or even one out on an island way out there. Even though they're not actually living there, it just feels like it'd be harder for them to connect everywhere else with that one market in Seattle, which is unfortunate. They completely wasted that place. They completely did those people wrong. Oh, Seattle was horrendous in terms of scheduling and time and everything Even bigger than that. The league did Seattle wrong, just beyond the football itself, beyond the scheduling, beyond the league. They did the people Seattle wrong. They completely threw that fan base away. Yeah, expand on that Because think about it, DC and St. Louis had earlier events. Seattle came around, first off, second off, Seattle was less connected to the league than St. Louis was or DC was because of how bad the commanders are DC it's almost like they didn't really have an NFL team for a while. Whereas in Seattle you have all these different professional sports and a lot of them are pretty good and the Kraken are exciting and so they just let that fan base drift away by not committing to them, whereas they committed a little earlier to those other places and it's just a shame. But it's not the people in the ground fall, it's the league execs, right? Well, I think they thought it was a really weird spot in 2020 where the Mariners were still kind of on a rebuild. Like you said, the Kraken weren't there. I think it was really ripe, but then they thought back and Mariners are hot and I know it's different time of year for that, but in terms of what I'm spending time and money on and then the Kraken, I mean when you're going literally at the same time back to back with the Kraken that they're playing sold out a mile down the road, that's really Hard. And now you have Gino Smith, he's good kind of now and you have the soccer's hot both leagues. Both teams for soccer are really hot in Seattle. So you just have a lot going for you in Seattle and then you have this team that went away for three years and people just kind of don't care as much anymore because you didn't make that commitment to show why they should care. So it's just a shame. Yeah. Zach has a question here. This is where you're trying to explain why would the government have any say, because the government needs to process, they need to regulate all this, so the XFL and the USS FL can't come in and say we want to cut half of our players, coaching staff, all that other things. The government is stepping in and saying, well, we don't want to approve this by downsizing too Much. It's something to do with the size of the company. And also think about it, there aren't that many professional football leagues in the United States. There's the USFL and XFL and then there's the semipro indoor leagues and whatever other semipro outdoor leagues you have. None of them are very serious really for being honest in terms of actual financial pay. So they're like a leader in, they're like a leader in their industry almost. So when you're merging two people who take up a large market share of that very small industry, which really is just the NFL and other, that's a significant title shift in the economy of that industry. And so that's why the government is getting involved. And you said with just the number of players and everything, it is a shame to me and there's no better way to handle it, but I can't think of any worse ways that this all could have planned out right now, if that makes sense. I mean it would be worse if the only way it could be worse is if they just decided to kill one league and then they just, what would happen instead is that they just killed the XFL or they killed the USFL and Fox just bought into the other league and then they just continued on with eight teams. I mean, theoretically they could do that without merging. So Imagine if the C Ffl talks hadn't to happened and Fox wouldn't have been incentivized to go to the US N fellow a year early and then to do the hub thing and then the XFL found out. Just imagine sliding doors here where we could have been at this point. Yeah, I mean there's so many what ifs. What if the league execs actually cared, right? I'm taking those shots. Those shots are deserved And Max was the diehard of the diehard. I mean it was interesting today, we haven't talked a lot lately just because of all the CFL stuff to be, and it is fine being negative. I mean, I think that everyone has, right? They earned or they earned it. Why should I not be negative? Why should I not be after everything that's happened? Why should I believe in you? I believe in the people on the floor. I believe in the social media people. I believe in the people who are getting paid part-time, having to work overtime, getting paid part-time, money. I believe in the coaches mostly. I believe in the players entirely. I believe in the stadium staff, honestly, I believe in Bill McCulloch and those kinds of people because they know what they're doing. They're just not being allowed to reach their potential by the broader structure of the league. I don't believe in Russ Brandon. I don't believe in Jerry car. I don't believe in the rock. I don't believe in Danny Garcia right now. I definitely don't believe in the USFL side of things. I don't believe in Eric Shanks. I don't believe in Dar Johnston. I don't believe in this entire people who govern the structure. I don't believe in those people. And why should I, after everything that's happened, why should anyone believe in those people right now? It's hard. It's a big ask. And that's what we said. And again, and people I know say, I think it was when Anthony Miller was on and people were saying like, oh, we're so negative and everything, but there was a lot of big words used and a lot of grandiose and a lot of promises, and it's hard and I understand that this isn't where anyone wanted to be, but it's the very nature of what you've led people through here the last two, three years. And I thought it was a big ask going in when the XFL kicked off and after all the delays and everything and the CFL talks and pushing back. I thought that was a big enough already. And now here we are. Okay, this uncertainty of the last three months, I think it's just almost been a nail in the coffin on a lot of this. Just prove us wrong. Please prove me wrong, prove all the doubters wrong. I want you to prove me wrong. You have all the tools it takes to make this work. You are titans of your industries and you're just kind of going along like this doesn't matter to you and you're just wasting this money. And all the while these players and fans are caught in the middle of it. And if they really committed to this, I'm not even talking about putting in tons of money. I'm talking about just putting in the effort because that doesn't actually cost. I mean, how much money does it really cost to do these tiny little events in these markets and get some freelancers out? I mean, how much money does that really cost? Well, I had said from the beginning that if you found a street team in each market, people have people apply, give them free season tickets and give them merch and say you got to do once a month in a fan event and find a bar. And I don't think, don't even think it's a paying thing. I think you could find people that would be happy to do it to help grow. I mean, we have people doing shows and everything already. I don't think it's that big of an ask to get the people involved And yet they just don't. Just don't care. I really don't see why I should believe they care. I just don't. They don't care. They want to make their own little fantasy world where they barely do anything in it. It all just works out and they can go work on their other stuff. Philip has the last question. We'll put this to bed here. Can spring football ever exist and be successful? Yes. Yeah, undisputedly, yes. There is no way you can watch what happened in 2020 with all the investment that was put in and how immediately that paid off despite plenty of hiccups and not think that spring football can't work. The problem is that people don't see the long-term vision, number one. Number two, something really unfortunate happened with that league that no one could have predicted unless you were experts in foreign diseases in December, 2019. And even then, most sports leagues, the only sports league who was prepared for the pandemic was the Wimbledon Tennis Championships. They had pandemic insurance. That was it. So if not for that, maybe we would still have the XFL right now and it would be flourishing and flying. And that's not me saying, oh, 2020 is the best thing ever. They had plenty of mistakes, but they actually committed. No one else since then has committed. All it takes is commitment, patience and listening and understanding and continuing to try to grow and willing to lose money for like five years. And you will have a league that works. It won't be MLS yet. It won't be. It definitely won't be a major sports league, but you will have a committed customer fan base. People will care and it will matter and players will come between that league and the NFL and people will watch it because it's an interesting to watch during the spring when there's no college football on. There's no NFL on, and the only other option is baseball, hockey, MLS and basketball. I agree. No commitment, no reward. You only get out what you put in, and they have not put in the work, In the infamous words of the new radicals. You only get what you give. So never forget that Max, this was good today. We've got a little negative, but that's okay. I appreciate it. And Max on earned Negativity. Agreed. It's earned. It's earned negativity. And again, this was enough today. We haven't done this every week. I think this had been week four. I'm coming on and bitching and complaining about this, but it was a good spot today doing our Friday show, coming off the CFL and all that. So I appreciate Max coming on. Like I said, kind of standby. We'll figure out episodes here, CFL season done, depending on news next week. But keep a fallout, keep an eye out for that, but we'll figure it out. But obviously we're done with our Monday recaps now done with all of that stuff, so stay tuned. I assume everyone's subscribed to this point, but give a thumbs up to the video here. I think we're still up over the XFL fan fest here, whatever at this point. But appreciate Max stepping up today. Like I said, we needed the guests to kind of go through all this. I hope everyone else is good with their families and stuff. Anything else, max, before we get out of here? I'm going to, you know how Andy's the professor. Can I be the substitute teacher? You want to be the substitute too. You're Producer Max. You don't like Producer Max. I'm producer. Well, when I'm off the show, I'm Producer Max when I'm on the show. He's The substitute. I'm the substitute teacher, so I'm both, I have altered egos. That's good. And then secondarily, some part in the back of my head just wants to have hope again, there's a part in the back of my head that is an optimism. That is like, Hey, believe, make all of us have that belief again, please, please cry for help. Let's all, we need to find a way to get the fans to cry for help. We need to make them believe in us. I don't know how you make that happen. We've got to activate the fans. Also really proud of how well the Great Cup coverage went, your CFL coverage and how well your excuse channels grown of the people who are actually podcasts and not larger brands beyond just being a podcast. You're the number one alternative football podcast now on YouTube, which I think is impressive. And every single metrics, all that, it's impressive. I'm happy for You. Well, I appreciate that. Like I said, we've wavered and I'm here, right? This has been a long, and we've done weekly recap since February and all year round football. It's been a lot the XFL stuff, and I appreciate Andy and everyone coming on that. And then Pat through the USFL and then Evan being involved in a lot of that, and then him and Jason with the CFL going up to Gray Cup was great connecting, meeting all those people. I am here a part of this world, kind of whatever happens, but I feel like I'm a hired gun at this point, and I think, I just wish that, like you said, get us excited in this. Get whatever. I think we have a very passionate audience about all this. I appreciate everyone taking the time today on Black Friday to spend time and sharing their comments and concerns as well. So I think there's a place, we'll see what that looks like, but same with the CFL. Let's embrace cell phone and the ring light and outdrew every other piece of coverage that they put out over the weekend. So I appreciate Max, appreciate the listeners, appreciate the viewers today. We'll post this on the podcast channel as well. See if you want to listen to it later. Thanks. As always, please subscribe and all that stuff. Go enjoy the jets now. The zombie jets. Roll Wave, roll wave. Go to lane against UTSA. That's my game. Enjoy all that. Go Kraken and everything else. All right.

CFL 2023 Season in Review, Grey Cup 110 Reactions!!

Well, happy Markcast Wednesday here. Back. Weird week this week. American Thanksgiving coming in tomorrow. Lots of things going on. Maybe, maybe not. Have a Friday show coming up this week. Let me introduce the co-host today. We'll kind of set the stage here. Evan, back on the West Coast flight, made it Jason back home. Easier trip when the great cups in that hamilton. Jason, how are you doing? I'm doing good Read. It was great to see you guys on the weekend and what a time we had, Evan. I've safely made it to San Diego. How are you? I'm doing well. Yeah, it was good to get out to the hammer finally and see all that. I don't have my mic today obviously since I'm on the road, but we'll make it work. But yeah man, it was a time I think we can all agree that was something that we won't be forgetting for a long time. Yeah, so to set the stage, we'll get into everything today. Exciting stuff coming off the CF Cfl 2023 season and review. I didn't want, we will talk a lot Great cup, we'll talk a lot, great Cup Festival, but maybe a little bit more timely than just a three day late old recap of the game. But we'll talk about all that. We have a lot of new viewers, subscribers, we even added new members. I kind of started like a supporter. I think YouTube was incentivizing people to start a supporter thing, but 65,000 or 66,000 views and counting now for our Cfl Great Cup live show. I tweeted about this. Tremendously humbled more than quadrupled what we had last year, which was a tripling of the year before. I think we had done about 3,500 that first year. Paul and I's show was rough as Jason knows from kind of watching out in Hamilton. And then I had about 15, 16,000 last year and have 65,000 is a credit to Evan and Jason obviously coming on every week and doing that. All of our guests, some timely good seo I think with YouTube and Google and the algorithm. But thanks everyone that watched that. I think that as I tweeted out, speaks to kind of the testament of non-traditional media and the importance of that moving forward. And I've had conversations with the Cfl who still doesn't follow, I don't believe any of us back on Twitter. Hey, content creation and relationships and they've said they're always working on that, but maybe in the postseason we can get to that, but we'll put a bow on this today. Like I said, CFL, get through all that. We'll be doing, I presume the Cfl Media Day stuff in the winter, so we'll get all that set up. We had Commissioner Ambrose on and many of the head coaches and Gm, so we'll do all that. But I kind of round the bow out today, Jason, a long time coming here. Back to back with the interim to Hamilton, did the Grey Cub live up to you in the festival and what you guys were expecting? Yeah, it was fantastic. It really was night and day compared to 2021 when it was really a scaled back version of the event. They had so many things going on around the city that there really was something for everybody to enjoy, whether you're a football fan or not, they had the Santa Claus parade, they had a lot of live music, so I thought it was fantastic seeing the city full of people full of colors and it was really a fantastic event As it is. So funny. As I'm tweeting about this, congrats Anthony Miller here just posted in our group chat, CFL, follow him back on Twitter. So at least that did just added that. So that Evan, I know you've been looking forward to a lot here, coming up a lot of excitement for all this. Did this live up to everything you expected? Oh, absolutely. I mean I wasn't there. This was my first Grey Cub, so I wasn't there for the one in Regina obviously. And then I wasn't there for the one previously in Hamilton, but from everybody else that I've heard in terms of their opinion, they said that this was probably the best presented one. This was really the city of Hamilton putting the work in here. I think the one in 2021 with all the Covid regulations, the Cfl just kind of took over and made that their thing, but this felt a lot more, I don't know, it just felt a lot more complete. Everybody was having a good time, really couldn't find anything that was wrong with it maybe besides you having to pay 50 bucks to get into the Team party headquarters because your credential expired after eight P.M. But little things like that, I don't know. I can't be too nitpicky. Right, Yeah, we'll run through all that. I will get to the game and then I want to talk through shenanigans, what we call that got into here. So Jason, this is instant classic, right? All the tweets kind, all of that stuff coming down to the Wire I sent, everybody follows me on Twitter. I sent him a Dm last night. I said, Hey man, I don't even know if you check any of this stuff, but just how proud I was of him and just him and Jason and everything they've gone through over the last year. I know the legacy of Winnipeg and believe me, I talked with a lot of the Winnipeg reporters in the reporter's suite about oh three is going to cement and they've got Mike Shea wearing the old Winnipeg Blue bomber hat. So when they put the statue up at Ig Field and all, I mean there was a lot of presumptions that way and that's understood. And I had even seen friend of the show Derek Taylor doing his radio hits in the hotel lobby before going to the game. So unexpected in that way. But to me, the storyline of Cody getting the redemption on that just really after having a tremendous horrendous last year was kind of worth all that. Jason, what did you make of the game itself? Well, it's just that I think it's Cody that is the story of this game because I said on our show that if this game turned into a back and forth shootout type of game, I didn't think the Alouettes could win, but that's exactly what we got. We got a game that had lots of lead changes and Cody Pajardo really was for the first time this season, the reason that the Alouettes won that game on Sunday. And he really did play like a breakup champion quarterback that day. Yeah, Evan, did you expect that? I know when we saw, it was funny, we had heard the rumors that I think Jamie Nye who was on our live show had come out and said Cody had a really fiery speech that really kind of worked up the locker room, and I think the Cfl account had tried to tweet. It was secondhand. Jamie had heard it, and so then they finally released the video, Cody F you just watch and all that. But what I liked about it was Cody saying, I want the ball in my hands. At the biggest moments. We saw him with the post game with the Rush as well, which I have a comment about that in a minute, but to come down to Cody to have him kind of, that's what every right star athlete wants is the chance to win the game in that moment. Yeah, I mean, look, I said on the pregame show that the unit that I was most worried about on either side of the ball was Montreal's offense, just given everything that we had seen previously and then they turned out to be the best unit of that game, I think at least. I mean, Montreal's Defense continued to play well, kept them alive. But I mean, Cody, his season essentially came down to two throws. There was the third down conversion, third and five to Cole speaker, and then there was the touchdown right after that to Tyson Philpaw with 12, 11 seconds left, whatever, you could not have executed those two throws perfectly. And it's difficult for any quarterback in a crunch situation like that to get the job done. Cody, it almost looked like he was doing that every day. I mean, if you watch the Gray Cup and you didn't watch the Cfl on a regular basis, I mean you'd probably think Cody Fijardo was a top passer in the league and maybe you throw him into that conversation after what he was able to do in the Gray Cup, but that's what I expected Caleros to be doing, making those tight throws and tight windows and crunch time. But Fijardo went out there and their season came down to a couple plays really there at the end, and again, he just executed them perfectly. So yeah, really happy for Cody. Again, continuing to prove all the doubters wrong. I think that's been really the storyline about this game. Al's were very fired up, not just Cody obviously, but the rest of the team go watch speech in French talking about Keep your English and we're bringing the cup back to Quebec. I mean, guys were fired up. So it was really cool to see that. Always a good underdog story, but to be honest, I don't think Alouettes thought that they were the underdogs in that game. I think Sankey, lemon, fijardo, all those guys, they knew going into that game that they were going to win. And I think, I don't know who said it, somebody on Twitter, somebody with the Al's was like Cody's. They heard Cody's speech, they knew they were going to win the game. People were crying and this whole thing, and it's great, man. It's great to see that. It was a phenomenal game all around. And yeah, that Al's offense was really a nice surprise, I guess you could say. Yeah, it was funny. Last year I ran into a rush. He was standing, I don't know, he was doing Hits with Dunk and I saw Rush working a lot, but it was funny, he had the post game that he had tweeted, here's my one-on-one with Cody. And he said, oh, Cody, I didn't think you had it in you and you proved me right. And it was funny, he said there and then he's on Rob Peterson, so yes. Yeah, I, well win a big, totally blew it. Jason, what do you make of that? The win a bit because heard both, and I also want to get more into the al what's kind of underdog of it, but did Montreal win the game or to win a big blow the game? I think you got to give all credit to Montreal. I think that they played way better than any of us really expected going into this game. Offensively, like Evan said, and I think that this game really came down to who had the ball last, and that just happened to be Montreal who scored with 13 seconds left on the clock. If there was a minute left in the game when Montreal scored, that touchdown could have been a completely different result, but at the end of the day, the Alouettes will, he seized the opportunity and they deserve all the credit for it. Yeah, I also, and like I said, I've seen a lot of, well Montreal, you were an 11 win team and you weren't really that big of an underdog. I would vehemently disagree, like I said, with Cody's speech, and you can change your perception during the season, but going in, they very much were the underdogs, obviously making the moves and not resting on the laurels. It's interesting, we are having conversations right now watching the Kansas City Chiefs and stuff in the Nfl and like, well, maybe they should have acquired the wide receiver here before the trade deadline or what's going on here? The things they need to show up where Montreal here and the Cfl took care of that, maybe the holes they needed to, they had kind of that chaos going into the free agency with the new ownership and all of that. Evan, what do you make of that, the underdog underdogness of Montreal and maybe people trying to take away that win now? Yeah, well I think while they were an 11 win team, I mean, I can't get over the fact that they didn't beat Toronto Bc or Winnipeg in the regular season and then they beat two of those three teams in the playoffs you had to take down. I mean, the Hamilton game ended up being a bit easier than we thought. I thought Hamilton was going to win, but really Montreal didn't have any problems there that kind of set the tone for what was to come, but they had to go into Toronto, you had to take down a team who was tied for the best regular season record in Cfl history, and then you have to go into the hammer and play Winnipeg who's again like, well, now we're going to get into this debate about whether or not they're a dynasty. And I don't know if I want to touch on that yet, but just for the purpose of this argument, the team that was, I guess a dynasty, four straight gray cups going back to 2019, you have to go in there and find a way to beat them. But going back to what Jason said, I definitely agree that this was more of a montreal win than a Winnipeg loss. I think that the way Montreal played in that game, they probably would've beaten any team in the league, quite frankly. Just again, that was a complete, they had their miscues, the James Letcher fumble, Cody threw his pick, so it wasn't all perfect, but even with that, I mean they were down 10 at half, they were down multiple possessions multiple times in the game, and were still able to get back in it in the final couple seconds there. So yeah, I definitely think this was more of a montreal win and we'll get into this as the show goes on, but a lot of questions about Winnipeg. I think there's some things with the Bombers that we might've overlooked just because we got used to their greatness and now that they've lost, we're sitting here thinking, well, GM's not under contract. I brought it up on the pre-game street. I've got a lot of guys that are aging. So there's, I think a lot of uncertainty there in Winnipeg and maybe more than some people would like to admit. Yeah. Jason, I'll throw to you on that Winnipeg's Dynasty here. I mean, like I said, they were getting ready, I won't name who, but some of the Winnipeg reporters, they were ready to erect the statue of Michael Shea like today in terms of his legacy and the exact clerics and all that. What do you make of Winnipeg here and the legacy now? Because like I said, I know that you've touched on this a lot during the season of different historical franchises. Yeah, for sure. I mean, the question of whether or not they're a dynasty is definitely up in the air now at this point because depending on what your definition, a lot of people say three championships within a four-year span, and now obviously they're not going to be able to accomplish that if they get to a fifth straight next year. I'm not going to count them out from doing that, but like Evan said, they have a ton of aging players and let's just call it fact to fact Zach Clarus has not been that good in the playoffs the last three years, statistically speaking, that is, and I didn't think he was especially good in this Great Cup game and was definitely, if he had played at the same level of Cody Fajardo in this one, I definitely think that Winnipeg would've won. I think Brady Olivera really was Winnipeg's Mop in this one, or Mvp in this one, whatever you want to call it. So I think at the end of the day, they have a lot of questions going into next season, but I'm not going to count them out. It seems like one of those revisionist things now, I can't remember who it was that put out the tweet, the stats of that and yeah, regular season zach versus playoff Zach is kind of night and day different and feeling like maybe they blew it last year, right, with Toronto and now you have the opportunity to come back. Evan, what do you make of that? Yeah, I mean, I think again, one of the things that was overlooked that was just brought up is yeah, caleros in the playoffs. Statistically, I think he has four touchdowns to eight interceptions through, I don't know how long a stretch is, but he has a one to two touchdown interception ratio, which is, that's not great in the playoffs. And again, that's something that I think a lot of people can just look past because you're so used to Caleros being there in the clutch. He's a veteran, he's poised, but in this game, I'll say this much, I think the most pivotal moment in that game besides Cody in the crunch to converting all those, the third down and the touchdown, I think the most pivotal moment in that game was when Calero's threw the interception, the Kb, and in the back of the end zone. And that just completely shifted, I think the dynamic because I don't know, I wish I remember, but Winnipeg, they would've been up two scores again, had they gotten the ball to Dalton shown in that situation. So I think it was actually, no, it was Lawler. I think it was being covered by Kb Anto. But anyway, they get the ball, so they get the ball into the end zone. And then, I mean, if that happened, it felt like they would've put the game away. And again, there was multiple other times outside of that Kb and Anto interception where I thought that the game was over. The biggest one that not a lot of people have been talking about, because Montreal got the ball back in the second half, but when they got stood up at the goal line after three tries and couldn't get in right before half, I mean, I thought, I'm like, are they going to bounce back from this? This is kind of where Winnipeg would come in and just seal the deal and close it. But I think Winnipeg made just enough mistakes on their end to, in a sense, offset everything that Montreal did wrong early because they were, Montreal was playing really well in that first half. It's just with the fumble, and I think the pick was in the first half from Fijardo. I could be wrong, but anyway, I know the fumble was the goal line stand. I mean, all those could have costed them the game, and I was prepared to come on here and be like, well, Montreal would've had it if they just didn't do this and that. But now it's kind of like maybe if Caleros throw in the direction of Kenny Lawler in that situation, maybe Winnipeg is now in that true Dynasty conversation where they win three out of the last four. So again, very interesting just to see how quickly the dynamic changes going into that game. All the talk is on Winnipeg about what this makes their future look like. I mean, Montreal, I don't know if I met one person that weekend who picked Montreal. I wanted it to be a close game. I favored Winnipeg, but I mean, initially I was sitting with a bunch of Bombers fans and they were all just, they weren't even breaking a sweat. They were just sitting there. We're ready to go out there and drop 30 Autumn and that'll be it. But that didn't happen, and again, now we're sitting here and there's so many more questions about Winnipeg that just weren't even brought up or weren't even thought about over this weekend through the festival and the game and everything like that. So yeah, just interesting to follow the fact that because Montreal wins now Winnipeg, it's not that they're a bad team. I think we can all agree they could easily be back depending on who they bring in, who they resign. I was looking over their free agent list this morning, but yeah, it's a lot different when you win two gray cups against the same team in Hamilton and then you lose back-to-back gray cups in close games too, right? I mean, it combined five points over the past two years. So I don't know, man, it's probably a lot of frustration on the Bombers end, but yeah, I mean it'll definitely, the mood I think has changed now going into the off season. Oh, I totally agree, and I do, like you said, I think Winnipeg kind of expected that and expected to walk in, and I saw a lot of comments from people still getting over this and Am I angry? Am I disappointed, Jason? I've never, the Seahawks won the Super Bowl when I was working in the professional stand, it wasn't really, I mean, it was obviously exciting for Seattle and then the Mariners, we were in the playoffs last year and got very quickly removed after winning the fake playoff spots. Now that the Mlb LB has moved in the last couple of years, so I don't know what it's like a fan base that's lived through a dynasty. We have friends that are New England Patriots fans. They're going through all that now. So I don't know what that feels like. To me, the dynasty is never exciting until after the fact, right? The Patriots now, it's exciting. Looking back, there were many, many years where people go, oh God, this is another whatever. So to me, this is the best storyline coming out, right? We talked same standings as last year, same playoff, whatever. What did we make? Is this exciting? Was this, to me, it totally makes it worth it where if Winnipeg comes out, it's not as exciting to the other eight fan bases. What do you make of that as the overall storyline of the season now looking back? Is Montreal hammering through kind of fighting through everything versus Winnipeg going back and trying to redeem their loss of last year? Well, what I make of it is that it shows how difficult this league is to predict. When you look at the beginning of the season, almost everybody had montreal either third place in the east or a dead last in the east, and I think that was warranted given that their moves during the offseason, they had the brand new head coach, brand new quarterback, a bunch of turmoil throughout the off season, but they really were able to overcome it, and I think it really generated one of the best stories that I've seen since I've started watching the Cfl. This certainly was the best season since I've started covering the Cfl on my channel since 2021. I think that we had so many great games and I think that this was really the best game of the season in its biggest spot. I would have to agree, and I feel, I don't know if it's just obviously doing the weekly recaps, I feel more invested. Last year we did a lot of more previews going into the weekend ride, and then by the time the next Thursday, Friday comes around, what happened last weekend doing the Monday recaps, I think keeping honest in terms of what's happening week, week, evan, what do you make of that kind of the overall storyline it is now, looking back, if you were to write the Cfl, yeah, what was the Cfl 2023 season? It was the reg tag guys from Saskatchewan come in and put together this team, and it's not the Winnipeg dynasty. I mean, they're almost the heels in this, the underdog kind of upset the heel in the end. Yeah, I mean, look, overall the 2023 season, I agree with Jason. I feel like this was the best season that the Cfl has had coming off their covid year. I didn't start covering the Cfl in full until 2021 and that 2021 season, I wouldn't say it was outright rough, but you could tell that this wasn't maybe the standard. I remember there being a lack of offense generally a lot of the games just fell over very quickly. That one wasn't entirely predictable either. I mean, you ended up with the same Gray Cup matchup in the same winter, so maybe you could argue that, but I feel like the Cfl last season, I didn't follow it as much. It was a busy time for me, so well, there was the Nathan Rourke's of the world, and that obviously gave a boost, I think, to what the Cfl was doing, but this year finally felt complete. I mean the amount of close games and shootouts that we had, and you finished the year with a heavy underdog team winning, and this might be the storyline that I want to focus on more, and I said this after the game on Sunday while the Bombers lost the game, you could make the argument that the real losers of the Cfl season were saskatchewan given that, because we all know, right? Jason Moss, Cody Fajardo, the scapegoats, they went with Craig Dickinson instead, and now he's gone after that one last season and then watching those guys win a great cup. I saw there were plenty of Ryder fans at the game. I love Ryderville and all that, but in a way, you kind of feel bad, like the fans obviously don't control that decision, they just have to sit there and watch their old coordinator and coach go out and win with a team. I don't know. I mean, I haven't had time to really do a side-by-side comparison of Montreal and Saskatchewan roster wise, but I don't know. I feel like Saskatchewan still had more weapons and still had more of an opportunity, but once again, had that same slide at the end of the season. And yeah, I mean it's always great to just, I mean, again, it's very repetitive and I'm sure everybody's here on here has heard it a thousand times, but just being the underdog, proving everybody wrong, that's what Montreal did. I mean, you look at, I think it was Sean Lemon who posted on Twitter, but the Tsm SM panel, all of them picked Winnipeg and he was doing stuff like that throughout the playoffs, and I think it was pretty cool. I think when Darnold Senki got there, he said that they weren't going to lose another game and then they were going to go on and win the Great Cup, and I think that was an accurate prediction. I don't know. They won seven or eight straight and he got there in September. So I mean, things like that, I mean, you just can't make that stuff up. I think one of the cool things about Montreal season in particular too, aside from this Gray Cup win, the amount of Playmakers that they had that just, I mean the team itself I don't think had a ton of expectation in the media world, but I think some of the playmakers that they had on both sides of the ball, again, Dornel, Sankey, Sean Lemmon, Reggie, Stubblefield Kb and Anto, Austin Mack, like all those guys, there wasn't really, they were all new. Some of them were rookies, some of them weren't. Obviously Sean Lemmon's a vet, but he came in late after being cut by Bc. A lot of their guys just, it didn't feel like they really, I don't want to say started producing until maybe halfway through the season, but again, these guys really did just come out of nowhere and start making plays, and I think that's really cool because in the Cfl FL, again, you look at Winnipeg, it's the exact opposite. All their guys are veterans. The amount of guys that I could name on the Winnipeg team, even though I'm not necessarily a Winnipeg fan, it is a long list. I was looking out there, we were sitting there at the Great Cup and I recognized everybody on the field for Winnipeg just because a lot of their guys have been around in the league for so long. They have some true all-time, great players, but it's just one of those things, it doesn't really matter, I guess about veteran presence when, I don't know who said it, but someone we know said it like the hottest team always wins when you get in the playoffs, it doesn't matter. All that stuff in the regular season, it doesn't matter. Even in that Gray Cup, nothing that Cody Fagiardo did necessarily in that game mattered until that final drive, those three plays or whatever, where he scrambled and then threw to speak or touch down the field pot because if he doesn't do those things, we're sitting here again talking about Winnipeg being the all-time, great Dynasty and Montreal just kind of caving in, and that would be the storyline that I think everybody or a majority of people expected having talked to, again, a lot of people over the weekend in Hamilton. But again, it all comes back to that idea of the storyline changes so quickly depending on just the results of the game, what happens. And again, like Jason said, it really does, yeah, if Montreal scores with a minute left, I think Winnipeg, maybe they go down there and win the game. I think just with the flow there at the end in the fourth quarter, all that back and forth, you could make the argument, even though Montreal played really well in that game and they deserve to win, I think it does come down in some cases to who has the ball last, who has that juice to get the job done in the final seconds and make a play. But I'll leave it at that. I don't want to get too repetitive. No, but I mean it comes down to if Cody doesn't make that throw, like you said, the narrative is, oh, you can't do it in the big time When the game matters, you can't do it right, and is, it's incredible. It's so stupid because it's sports and it doesn't matter. But I had just rewatched that Moneyball movie with Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill here a couple weeks ago, and we talked about Brad Pitt, how can you not be romantic about baseball when they're talking about the pageantry and the storylines of all? How can you not that literally throwing this stupid ball, forty-five yards down the field, whatever, in the course of twenty-five seconds, Cody's life has changed now and you're a part of the history and the team's part of the history and Moss and everyone else. The circle back on the saskatchewan point, I want to get Jason's thoughts. I think it was Naylor had said during the season, the Cody going to montreal them cutting bait so fast. Maybe you should give in the Cfl, especially were quarterbacking is such a hot commodity, maybe give people some more time than one down year. Here we bench cody and not even, he didn't even make it through the season last year. That's what I was telling Dorothy. Not only did Saskatchewan not want it back, I mean they benched him before the end of the season. What do you make of that? Yeah, I think it said era of caution for teams like say Calgary with Jake Mayer because it takes time in this league to win. I feel like anytime you look at the history of these quarterbacks and the ones that have won great cups, they've had to go through their lumps in this league. Zach Claris is a prime example of it. Look at the time that he spent as a backup in Toronto and then he goes to Hamilton. He actually gets to a great cup in Hamilton and loses in dramatic fashion and then goes through a bit of a down point in his career before he ultimately bounces back in the four straight Great Cups here. So I mean, you look at other guys in the league as well. Anthony Calvillo back in the day, took a long time to be a competent quarterback in this league. He was with the Las Vegas Posse for his first year in the Cfl, then went to Hamilton, was the starter here for three years, and then Hamilton cast him aside, and then he ultimately became one of the greatest cfl quarterbacks of all time with Montreal. So yeah, an era of caution for these teams that move on from their quarterbacks too quickly. It's very difficult to develop quarterbacks in this league and sometimes just giving them another year, I think is the best decision. Evan, what do you make of now, and obviously we'll have many more months to talk about this, but put the bow on the season here at the end of this, Montreal feels like a very sustainable product to go back again next year. This isn't, oh, Hamilton brought in Bo Levi and maybe we got a year out of this and we're hosting, we really got, I mean, Cody's there and the defense is there, and I mean it doesn't seem like they got a lot of young receivers. I mean, what do you make of that as my microphone seems to be breaking here? Absolutely. I mean, I think the benefit of having sort of young and to a degree unproven players in Montreal, those guys can last a long time. They can easily bring all that back and go do the same thing. I agree. I mean, I'm not going to say that it's more sustainable than Winnipeg because Winnipeg's gone to four straight and that's obviously not very common, even if they only won two, but Oh, totally. I mean, Montreal again, they have a lot of guys and even their vets. I mean, hell, Sean Lemon is thirty-five thirty-six years old. He has no signs of slowing down, so bring him back if he wants to be there. I know he's bounced around a lot like Sankey obviously. I think Sankey has a great future in the Cfl, even if he took a detour in the Xfl, I think he enjoys the Canadian game and he's come out and said that. I think, I don't want to say these were his words, but I think he said the CF Cfl was ultimately maybe a more sustainable product. And you can argue that, right? I mean, there's going to be people on both sides of that spectrum, but ultimately, I mean, yeah, it's great to see so many guys come in and do those things. They'll be rewarded, whether it's in Montreal or with another team. There are a lot of Playmakers. You don't win the gray cup without guys that can get the job done. So yeah, I agree. I think there is a bright future in Montreal. It's not just a one-off Cinderella run and then next season they win five games. Now that Cody's Cody rest of the group, they have proven so many people wrong, they're hungry. You could tell that whole team is hungry and they do not want to just leave this as their legacy. They want to continue that. It's all teams should, all teams should have that drive to compete and to be successful and to be honest, if you don't have that drive, then I don't know what you're doing. Right. Jason, do you concur with that where it feels like this is very well put together now moving this, even the mid-season moves smart moves, right, smart acquisitions. This wasn't kind of a panic build. It seems like Danny really took his time coming in and obviously we've well chronicled all the off season drama, but what do you make of just how the team set right now? Well, I'm interested to see how this affects Cody's confidence going into next year. If he's a guy that really puts together a much better regular season than he did this year because of the confidence in how he played in this game this weekend, and I think that is something to watch going into next year. I'm always skeptical about defensive led teams because it feels like it's hard to replicate, harder to replicate defense year over year than offenses. And I think that it'll be interesting to see what guys they lose on the defensive side. Obviously a very talented defense there in Montreal and shout out to them, by the way, John Hodge of three Down Nation tweeted out a stat. They held the opposing quarterbacks to one touchdown pass and seven interceptions in three playoff games. That is pretty remarkable, and they deserve a lot of credit for this victory. Yeah, I was bummed, Evan and I, it's hard, hard to Ms. John Hodge, but Evan and I saw John Hodge at the, we will talk our fun story at the end, but saw him at the Bc Lions party with Jc jc who does not like me was at the after party after the Great Cup, but we got to see, I got to see the one I didn't get to see because I think Hodge actually would've talked to me. I mean, JC, I kind of talked around Jc and at Jc, but not really to Jc, but Evan. Any other thoughts on that? And I'll figure out another question here. No, I don't think so. I mean, yeah, we'll get into some stories because a lot of good stories from that weekend, obviously, but that's what Great Cup is, man. It's a fun time. I guess I'll give you this evan in. Do you share the same concern of defensive led teams here are going into next season? Yeah, I would say that's a fair argument. Again, it really depends on who they're able to bring back and who might test the free agent market. That's the one very interesting thing about the Cfl. I don't know if I've brought it up on the show at all this year, but I'll talk about it now. The turnover in the Cfl, just because so many guys are on one year deals. It's really interesting. You could win the Great Cup and it's not like you just have everybody locked in for another run. You got to put in the work in the off season. I have trust in Danny Machocha. I think he will, regardless of what guys let go, what guys he brings in that he will build another good team. But yeah, I mean it's tough, right? I mean you have a lot of turnover, there's a lot of uncertainty, but the also good thing about the Cfl I think is that guys could go back pretty easily if they go somewhere and they don't like it. I mean, look, Kenny Waller was in that boat, right? Obviously he wasn't a champion on Sunday, but he was a very consistent playmaker for Winnipeg once he got his work Visa situation figured out, and he played in Edmonton last year and didn't enjoy it and then came back to Winnipeg where he had played for four seasons before that, and that was ultimately I think a successful move. So things like that, I mean, there's always, I think a door open for guys that were in the past. There's probably guys looking at that team. I'd love to play there with that culture and what they were able to build and the whole proving everybody wrong mentality. There might be guys that were in Montreal before that say, Hey, you know what? I want to go back here, new coaching staff, new ownership, and just give this another try. So we'll see. Right? I can't guarantee any of that, of course, but it'll be something to follow. One more question about the game and then I want to talk a little off season before we get to stories. Jason, I saw a lot of Marshall had the breakdown of the Big Hill stuff and then Big Hill kind of whatever, but I did see comments maybe Adam Big Hill should not have been in this game, right? There had been, was he going to be a game time decision, all of that stuff. And in terms of them using, I think it was a rush on Rod's show talking about that was maybe a wasted roster spot at that point just given his physical abilities. Questions about that with Winnipeg's defense, should they have made, is it second guessing now for any of that? Yeah, I think it's fair to question that. I think that the Cfl, you have a very small roster, relatively speaking. I think you only get to dress forty-six guys on the game day roster. So every spot counts, especially at the middle linebacker position. That is a very important position and Big Hill, I mean, you can't replicate what he can bring, and I understand if he's able to go in any capacity that temptation to put out there, but I don't think he was a hundred percent out there. He got nicked up early in the game and I don't think he looked like himself out there. I think Dalton Shone looked pretty good. He was the other guy that was kind of a game time decision for them. So I don't have that many questions about that, but I think that at the end of the day, big Hill playing was a bit questionable Going in here, evan to the offseason, Winnipeg, are they going to shore up anything, Montreal, status quo, whatever. What storylines here? Early, early, early storylines are you looking at in the offseason in terms of talent stuff? Yeah, well, I think for Winnipeg, before we even focus on players and that free agent list that I was talking about before, they're three personnel guys. So they've got your general manager, Kyle Walters, you've got the assistant Gms, I think it's Ted Govea and the all-time, great. Danny Mcmanus. None of those guys are under contract, I believe in 2024. So I think step one is making sure that you have a gm in place. I would imagine Walters would be back. I don't know about their assistants, I'm not when it comes to the football ops cap. See, that's not really my expertise, but it'll be interesting to see if they're able to bring all three of those guys back because they all have a very, I'd say significant role in building the roster. I know Mcmanus I think does a lot of the US scouting, so I think that's a priority because if you don't even have the right guy or a guy at all to help construct a team to go to a fifth straight gray cup, that's not going to be a very attractive place for free agents with uncertainty and things like that. Now I think they'll get it figured out. This isn't anything against Winnipeg, but it goes back to, I mean there's a lot of guys, I was talking to Jason after the game, like Stanley Bryant. You have to wonder if that was his last game, big Hill, I imagine he'd be back. I don't see Big Hill. Big Hill can't go out like that, man. I mean big Hill's an all-time, great defender, linebacker. I don't know if that was his last game. That would be very disappointing. And obviously that situation we can, I'm not going to get into that. I think it's just kind of unnecessary controversy. I think they played him because they want to have the best chance to win. Now, I don't know if it was the best idea because I think maybe I feel like he was less ready to go than shown was, but again, I'm not going to get too much into that. Going back to the point about Winnipeg and what their future looks like in 20 twenty-four, I think it's really important more than anything, as much as you have a veteran presence, I'd really like to see them bring in some younger guys because Montreal had a lot of rookies that impressed, but what a peg doesn't really have that all their guys feels like every playmaker that they have on their roster is like 30 years old and above. So I feel like establishing some sort of not, I don't know what the word I'm looking for is, but just getting some fresh new faces in there. Some younger guys where maybe those become the new leaders of the team because you're not going to have Jackson Jeff Cope forever. You're not going to have Willie Jefferson forever. You're not going to have Stanley, Bryan, JaMarcus, Hardrick, etc. Right? There's so many old guys on that team. So I think bringing in some younger new faces, not necessarily change the culture by any means, but just to have some guys where you could really bank on them long-term as opposed to just kind of going year by year and vet minimum stuff. All that I think I would like to see that from would have been more than anything. Hey, Jason, for you, in terms of the offseason stuff, and I think Montreal has to look tremendously more appealing now than it did a year ago here, and I think that team building, I think we'll be even obviously having the gray cup, but I mean there were so many questions going into the offseason for that, what do you make of the offseason moves? Well, I think that the thing I'm watching for is primarily quarterbacks and which teams decide to stick with their guy. I mean, look at Saskatchewan. Does the new coach in Saskatchewan decide to stick with Trevor Harris or go in a different direction? What happens in Hamilton with all the list of quarterbacks that they have here and all the possibilities? What happens with the Cloud Bethel Thompson, if he comes back to the Cfl, what happens in Ottawa? So I'm looking for all of those storylines and like Evan said, I'm really excited to see what happens with Winnipeg and all of those different things that are up in the air with that front office and some of the players there that are reaching that retirement kind of age. Well, I can't imagine anyone on this didn't listen to the pregame show, but if you hadn't, I mean, it really sounds like Mcleod is, at least Farhan was saying it sounds pretty confident here going up to the Cfl and potentially Hamilton. So I want to get quick thoughts, Jason. Sure. Evan will just be like, eh. Do you have any thoughts on the halftime show, the Green Day halftime show? Oh, it was fantastic. Green Day's, one of my favorite bands ever, and I was a little bit thrown off by the first song that they threw out there, but we were talking after the game. They probably negotiated that when they decided to play this show, and I think that they did a really good job. I think that I had no complaints about it really. Evan. Did you enjoy the boulevard of Broken Dreams? I did. I did. Boulevard of Broken Dreams Holiday. Yeah, I know those songs. I'm not completely out of touch. I know I'm younger, but I enjoyed it. I really did think, aside from, I mean, you could say whatever you want about the Song Choice Music, the order, I thought the presentation was really cool. They were shooting flames and fireworks and the whole bit, and I feel like they did a lot with whatever it was, 14 minutes or whatever they had. I mean, it's a very condensed program. They only played four songs. But yeah, ultimately I thought people were saying that that was one of the best halftime shows that they've ever seen. Again, people who are seasoned, great Cup veterans, I guess you would say To me, it excites because I'm really curious to see what the Mara Doman does next year. Obviously we had Matt Baker on the show, and if I didn't say it on here, I did in the tweet. Thanks again to the Bc Lions and everyone for kind of hosting us, and it sounds like they said, Hey, just do it again next year, do the show at the Bc Lions Dead, which anything they can take stress off my plate is nice, but excited to see what the Mara does because it did feel like the Thai Cats and the Hamilton organ is it? They said, we got to do something big here. I thought in retrospect, Saskatchewan totally dropped the ball last year with this half of Florida, the Georgia line and this mishmash of country stuff. This was something marketable you could kind of build around. I liked the marketing of it, even though I know there was some controversy with some of the Green Day merch not being available for sale, and it was only staff stuff, but they're retweeting the videos. I got emails from it. I think I'm signed up for the Green Day when they're coming here. I got 'em signed up on their mailing list. I was getting emails like, Hey, check out our halftime performance links to the video and all of that. So I thought that it was a good legacy band that is still relevant, if that makes sense. I think Green Day, I didn't realize that, but Green Day is still kind of relevant. And Jason, it's the people in Hamilton, but I think that's just an exciting show. We don't get Green Day every day coming in kind of with every retrospect. Am I wrong about that? Well, they have played here in Hamilton before, but I didn't get the chance to go see them. Unfortunately. I was in university a few years ago when they came to Hamilton, so I'm glad I had a chance to make up for it and see 'em this time around and yeah, echo your sentiment. I really excited to see what happens in Bc next year. Obviously they've done a whole lot with the kickoff concerts for their home openers and all the tailgate parties, so I'm really excited to see what they put together for that Great Cup next year. The other thing I forgot to mention was we kind of hung out in the club level just because Dorothy, it gets cold and we're kind of just watching through the glass a lot of the game, and we went out and watched the Green Day concert. But I will say tons and tons of Cat fans there where I know there was a lot last year where, okay, it's a Sketch one. There was a lot of empty seats. Last year we were in Saskatchewan. I don't know what that looked like on the TV broadcast as well, but a lot of empty seats. I had pictures from the flyover and all of that pack this year. I mean, as far as I could see, it seemed like it was a tremendously either a sellout or very, very close to the sellout, but I thought that that was a credit to the Ticat fans for still coming out and enjoying that. I don't know if Green Day helped with that or Ticats just weren't as bitter, but it seemed like there was a lot of controversy last year with Saskatchewan not wanting the Winnipeg people to kind of get their seats or whatever, but this year it felt like they more of embraced that, if that makes sense. Jason, did you know this? Just a lot of Ticat fans. Yeah, for sure. And I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that this was really our first Grey cup since 1996. I mean, yes, we hosted in 2021, but we weren't able to do the full out party and really do everything the city wanted to. So I think that was a huge reason why that it was such a success from that perspective. And I think that we'll never know because Toronto didn't make it, but I always had that in the back of my head. If Toronto was in the game, would we have seen a similar thing where Hamilton fans didn't want to sell their tickets to Toronto fans? But like I said, we'll never know. I like that. Evan, anything else on the game to have time? We'll talk some stories here before we get out. I mean, I agree with Jason on the organ on, it's like if they were playing in Hamilton, I think you would've had a similar situation, although I don't know. I mean, the weather was so nice there in Hamilton. I mean, compared to Regina, it is two different parts of the country. So even if the Argos did play, I feel like there'd be less fans, but I still feel like it'd be more because I watched the broadcast last year of the Great Cup when it was in Regina, Winnipeg, Toronto, and those empty seats showed you could really see it did not feel like that. I felt like it was very packed. There was almost 30,000 in the stadium when we were there in Hamilton. So I feel like it was definitely a better atmosphere. I mean, obviously being there in person, yeah, it's going to be a better atmosphere than was last year when I'm watching at home on my tv. But you could tell, I mean you can hear the crowd noise and everything. I felt like the Hamilton fans were really getting into it, and I feel like a lot of them were happy that Montreal won representing the East, and it's always anybody but Toronto. Right. Yeah, no, I like that. So let's talk a few stories here, kind of Festively set before we get out. Felt last year, the first year we did it, it was kind of a hazard. We didn't know what we were doing and the media stuff and what's going on. Obviously Regina last year getting it fine tune, but I thought it was great. Unfortunately, we didn't all get the credential equally that I don't really understand that. I heard that the Rds, there was a lot of French speaking media there that was kind taking out a lot of that space is what I heard is what Montreal got into it, that there was a lot of that that was taken away. We kind of avoid the press room and like I said, kind of hung out at the club and all of that. But I did appreciate that we got this little tumbler in the media swag bag. So I thought that was cool, and I got to get this hat. I was going to wear it on the podcast, but I might've swept through my pants here, but we got this really cool gray cup. I don't know when I'm going to wear this. I thought maybe this was a wear out hat, but it's a little more over that fun Dorothy had fun as always, seeing a lot of friends and stuff that way. Evan, what stood out to you in terms of the things? I know that we went to the Bc Lions Den Saturday night that was rocking. I mean, we were there until three in the morning, two-thirty in the morning on when that was. So what was your favorite takeaway? Oh, yeah. I mean, I thought the Lions Den was probably the best part experience wise. I mean, other than the game, but being there with the Team Party headquarters and Matt dancing around and we got the little Vip tickets or whatever. I thought that was all great. And I mean, I had a great time. I met James Butler, a couple other players, obviously guys that I've known for a minute. So really good to finally meet up with them, even if it was at one A.m in a dark room with music and everybody's drinking. But I really enjoyed it. I thought that was not what I was expecting in terms of, yeah, team Party headquarters sounds fun, but it really was a party. It was cool to just see so many, I guess like-minded individuals, and by that I mean Cfl fans representing their teams in different places, like Bc was obviously great. Winnipeg's always great. They have an amazing fan base. Shout out to Bombers. I know they lost, but man, their fans are incredible. Same with Saskatchewan, any of those teams in the Prairies, those are all real football communities. I feel like I was really impressed by Saskatchewan and Winnipeg, what they had to show. And then, yeah, I don't think I got around to Hamilton or Calgary or a couple of the other rooms. But yeah, BC, I mean, took the cake. They treated us well, and obviously we got our scars for the festival next year. I don't have that with me right now, but you and me, Reid both got those very nice gift thank you to the people on the lines for that. Seriously, I will definitely be wearing that next year when I'm in Vancouver. But yeah, I mean, just a lot of memories in a short amount of time. So I'm grateful for it As I described my whole set here. Yeah, I tried. I think when I'm full screen, I think you'll be able to see it, but I tried to kind of put it up on this little thing so that you can see it here on the show. But yeah, super ran into the Bc Lions people leaving the Grey Cup there on Sunday. I never really got, and I don't know if it's a Cfl thing, I never really got the team, like Evan said, kind of the team party headquarters to me. You're in Regina, you're in Hamilton, you've got all these different bars and restaurants you can go to, but it's like we're partying crazy at the conventions. I don't know. Jason, what did you make of that just in terms of is that a cfl thing? We met at Merritt Brewing on Friday, but it felt like that really was where the party was, those team headquarters. Yeah, I mean I think like Evan said, I think it's all about like-minded individuals meeting people that share the same passion that you do and I think that, yeah, it was really cool to see what all the different party rooms had going on. I liked checking out the Atlantic Schooners one with my girlfriend Alex. So I think that it was really interesting to see. I'd never seen anything like that before last year or two years ago in Hamilton. We didn't really have anything like that going on, so it was really cool to see. And James Street also was closed off. I know you guys didn't get a chance to go down there very much when things were going on there, but it's closed off there. They had the armory with a bunch of flag football and kicking contests going on. So it was a lot of fun the whole weekend. And I think the highlight for me was just meeting you guys and getting to hang with you guys. And after doing this for twenty-one weeks or whatever it was, it was really cool to just hang out with you guys after the game and really celebrate what a great season it was. Yeah, it was cool. Hamilton works out Regina, the stadium is there, but it's a little bit removed, being able to walk in and out and do all that stuff. I know, like I said, two years ago we stayed way out in the Airbnb and it was easier this year doing it in the city. Always amazed and maybe it's just for me coming from Seattle, I enjoy kind of the small town aspect of the Cfl. I don't know if it would flow the same in Toronto. I'm curious next year in Bc where you're all at that downtown core to take over because the idea was you're walking around Hamilton and anywhere you look, grey Cup signage and yellow and black and yellow for the Thai Cats and the Grey Cup festival stuff. So I enjoyed all of that stuff, but if you're in Toronto, I've heard that would just get kind of lost in the city stuff going on, so cool. Awesome that way. Evan, any other thoughts, stories on that kind of stuff? Not too much. I mean I think it was also just cool seeing Tim Hortons field. I was very impressed. I mean it's only what, 10 years old now or something like that. So yeah, I was very impressed to get to see Tim Hortons field in person. Felt like it was a very good venue for the Cfl in terms of capacity, what they want to do. I really enjoyed the stadium aspect as well and it was nice to see it again full up because I've been to a couple Bc games, they close off the upper bowl and it's fine. It's not a complaint. I mean they got to do what they got to do for game day atmosphere, but really nice to just see multiple sections of Cfl fans. And again, not a lot of empty seats. People turned up, they showed out, people flew in. I mean you could tell that there was a lot of people who were really, I guess committed to this. Yeah, we did the Randy state of the fan address as well. I thought that was really interesting. That was on Friday morning after we flew in late. I think we got into our room about 11 on Thursday night. They had obviously done the media one earlier in the week, but I'll tell you, and I know that Randy gets a lot of kind of flack and oh, and this is his kind of figurehead role ride and it's more of a figurehead than it is. I am really making these constant changes. It is a different dynamic than you would view Roger Goodell, but to me, they had the fans come up, they were asking questions and Randy had this whole thing, well, before you ask a question, I am going to ask you a question. What's your favorite, whatever. And I really like Randy, worked the room for about an hour and I really thought it was tremendous on that and I know he's busy. I know they have to do that, but he doesn't need to me that was him. I'm going to put forth a little extra effort here. Let me engage with some of the fans. I also thought that eats up some of the time that people don't get to ask me questions. If I'm asking you stuff, then I don't have to kind of tab the answer. But I really did Dorothy and I were there and I thought, man, this is like I'd buy a ticket to this and get some popcorn. I thought Randy did a good job with that. I just think he's very gregarious in that way when you kind of get him outside of the commissioner role. I thought he's been good on the show, but we are doing the media one and then the later it felt to me they had some big news coming down this week and nothing really came. It really just seemed like they wanted to kind of do. I don't know, they wanted to top load the week and then it felt like Friday, Saturday there wasn't as much media stuff to do and then you could get ready for the game. But Jason, any of the other activities? I know you said you saw some of the concerts and stuff, any of the other stuff that stood out? Yeah, I mean I got to see a local Hamilton guy, Steve Strongman that I wanted to see for a long time on Thursday during the day there on James Street, so I really enjoyed that. Just to echo Evan's sentiments about Tim Horton's field, I think that it's really the ideal stadium for a Cfl team. It doesn't ever look too empty, even during a regular season game, it doesn't look that empty. So I think that it's really the perfect venue for a Cfl team and I really enjoy having the Ticats play there. Well, and it was cool and I didn't know who all they got. I know Baker was on the field and Nick Kowalski with the Lions, but they had the crowd on the field for the halftime show. They do the Super Bowl. Oh, they got all the people that kind run out around Rihanna, but I thought that was cool. And then yeah, obviously packed with that and like Evan said with the fire and all of that, I don't know. I mean if you're the Cfl, I think ratings came out. I know Dunk was posting, it looks like the TV viewership was up certainly over the last couple years rebounding and you always got to look at that. It was down, so it is good to be up. That doesn't mean it's over where it was before, but obviously our viewership up. I talked about that off the top of the show in terms of I think people looking for non-traditional media that's covering the league. I know that there was a lot of reporters or radio station there, but I like having us be involved in that mix as well. I think if you look at the numbers, we didn't even compared to a lot of the content that the Cfl did, which spoiler we beat everything except the game recap, which makes sense. Here's the recap of the Cfl game, but I dunno, I think this had to feel if you're ambrose, if you're the board of Governors, if you're everyone, this has to feel like a successful season. Evan, any other thoughts on that? Yeah, I mean I'd say not only were we successful with our endeavors over the weekend, but yeah, I feel like it was a win for the league as a whole. Having that, again, I talked about at the top of the show, this was Hamilton's Grey Cup. It wasn't some thing constructed by the Cfl FL to follow Covid protocols. This was for the city of Hamilton. And again, I really enjoyed not just the Grey Cup itself, the festival, the game, but yeah, I mean Hamilton as a whole I think really is a football city and I've been waiting to see that for a long time. I have some old ties to the tie cats and I was always told that Hamilton, I don't want to say it's rare, but there's only maybe Hamilton and Regina I suppose are really the only two maybe true football markets in the Cfl where that is the top sport. Maybe Winnipeg, I don't know how the Jets do, but I think in Hamilton there is a focus on Canadian football and that's really cool to see where, because that's sometimes I think might be an afterthought. I mean I know I have plenty of family in Canada, people that I know up there and when I bring up the Cfl, it's not really something that they're in touch with. They know about the Lions and you read about it in the news occasionally, but it's not something that I think it gets overlooked a lot, right? Because it's a niche sport. Football is not really the top event in Canada. You might say there's hockey and other things that overtake it, but I think the Canadian game all around is great outside of Hamilton and all these markets that we're talking about, just the sport, the way it's played, some of the careers that have been crafted out there. I mean you really felt that. I feel like when you're at Grey Cup weekend and just surrounded by a lot of former and current players and all time greats and some other guys who are making their way up the ranks of the league all around. Again, just very inclusive and I don't know. Very good. That's my final words, I guess. Yeah, I just thought treated well, like I said, in terms of us being kind of brought into the media wing here a couple years ago, just in terms of the interactions and everyone that came on the show and we saw Evan and I saw Naylor after because they were staying downtown. They weren't at the media evan and I saw Naylor take a road dog from the Bc Lions dead party, but Naylor had said because they were coming in between their hits to do our show across the street and he said it was really tight. He's like getting back, you did fine timing and everything, but he is like that was a big ask for us to be able to get over there. And so everyone kind of working towards all that, we certainly appreciate that. And then it always just kind of blows me away. Like Evan said, CFL, if you're in America, this niche kind of whatever, this is the biggest thing of the year. Everybody takes it with such gravitas and Rosh is bringing out his best suit and you got dunk running around and all this stuff. It is just cool to be a part of that experience because I've tried to say this just because in America when you say, oh, we got credential for the cfo, whatever, that might not mean anything here. That is a very big deal, at least to the Cfl people and it means a lot to us and being able to be involved in all of that. But stuff in the offseason here, let's get the cfl plus working and let's get some more relationships formed with some content creators. Jason, any other thoughts from you before we get out of here? No, I just wanted to take the time to say thank you guys for this great season of covering the league together. It sure is a lot more fun covering the league with somebody else than just doing videos by myself. So I really do appreciate the time you guys put in every week and we had a great time in Hamilton. So this will be, like I said, this kind of round out this today. We'll see what's going on. I think listeners slash producer Max and I might try to do a little Friday morning chat about all the Xfl stuff now that it's been really nice to be focused on this football football here for the last couple weeks. I mean that because, and I know Mark's trying to do stuff and there's all the different what's going on with all the mergers stuff been really nice talking to actual football, going to the games and playoffs and all that, but I think we'll do a stop down with that and then we'll see. I was going to do Cfl interviews this week, but then with the parade and with American Thanksgiving on Thursday, not quite sure, but maybe we'll do some stuff here after the holidays and kind of get the Cfl players figured out. But I appreciate all the subscribers joining and all the support we got from all of that. But yeah, look for some Xfl stuff here and then we will have the Cfl Media Day stuff here coming up. I think it's in February, but we will get all that. We had a ton of great interviews last year or maybe end of January. Evan, anything else from you? No, I don't think so. I think we're good. Awesome, Evan. Well, everyone, like I said, enjoy American Thanksgiving. If you're not doing that, let's pray to God the commanders get absolutely killed by the Cowboys. Let's fire Ron Rivera on Black Friday. That would be my Christmas gift, but I appreciate it. Appreciate Jason getting on here every week. I appreciate Evan getting on here and even with travel and everything else, it means a lot. Like I said, it makes it way easier, as Jason said, when you got a couple of people bouncing around stuff. So we'll see you guys next time. Thanks.

LIVE From CFL Grey Cup 2023 in Hamilton! Grey Cup 110 Pre-Show!!!

Well welcome here. Bon Jour. Good day. Welcome to the Gray Cup. We are live here. Hopefully the audio works. Let me know if we have anything, if anyone can't hear, if it sounds weird running this off. We are live here at the BC Lions end. Evan, Jason, how are you guys? Jason Hussey. Evan, what's going on? Oh, Not too much. Really excited for the, really excited for the Great Cup. Not used to holding the bike, but yeah, really excited to be here in Hamilton and yeah. Evan, how's it going? Made it out late last night. Yeah, doing very well, honestly. Just glad to be here. There was a minute where I thought it might not be happening, but we're here doing the show now. Getting ready for Great Cup tomorrow and very exciting time. Yeah, so we are live here today, Saturday at the BC Lions Den. I'm adjusting my microphone a little bit here, running on the fly. Going to have a huge slate of guests. We're going to do an intro. We got Jamie Nye standing by Dorothy's running the floor. We got people shifting sliding, you know how it is, but we'll have lots of guests today, two hours here coming up. First off, Jason, obviously we had Hamilton Gray Cup two years ago, little different than now. What's it like here? We're on the floor, we're here, they got the schooner band playing and everything else. What's it being like on the floor here? Well, it's night and day compared to what it was in 2021 because 2021 was a very scaled back great cup. Obviously you had a lot of Covid protocols still in place, so ultimately at the end of the day it wasn't the great cup that Hamilton really envisioned, but this year they've been able to really pull out all the stops and they have a lot of events going on throughout the city. Evan, what's it like? We're walking around today downtown where the convention center pretty buzzing. What do you make of it? Yeah, I think Hamilton's great. It's a pretty cozy city. I didn't really know what to expect. I've never been out to this part of Canada before. Really only been to Vancouver, but it's a pleasant surprise so far. And the weather's also been great, which I wasn't totally anticipating, so enjoying that as well. Yeah, it's been beautiful. Really a surprise here. Just looking to see if I'm getting any dms from guests. Really beautiful. We want to get into the game here before we get everyone else in exciting. I know this isn't kind of the gray cup maybe we thought we wanted coming in, but obviously here with Montreal the big upset. Jason, first thoughts to you, what are you looking for? I know we did the preview show on Monday or Tuesday, whenever that was, but what are you making of the actual game here? I think all eyes have to be on Winnipeg's offense versus Montreal's defense because I mean I've really seen too much from the Montreal offense to believe that they can win a shootout type game this year and if Winnipeg's offense goods rolling, I don't think that Montreal has the capability to keep up with them, but I think Montreal's defense is playing so well right now. If they can replicate what they did against Toronto last week and ultimately force turnovers, I think they can get an upset in the Great Cup on Sunday. It's so funny, we were talking at breakfast before every Winnipeg reporter that's here, oh, there's not a chance in hell that Winnipeg loses this game. Obviously we have the Montreal guys, they feel this. I think both sides feel pretty confident right now. I don't know, I think Toronto came in last year maybe with more. I feel like Montreal has more questions this year coming in than Toronto did. Evan, what do you make of this from a football perspective? Yeah, well one of the things that I've really been focused on here is while this is Winnipeg's fourth straight Great Cup, there are no strangers here. They've got a lot of guys that are getting older. I mean just going down the list, you've got Zach Calleros, who's 35, Stanley Bryant who's 37 33 was a finalist for most outstanding linemen. Willie, Jefferson, Jackson, Jeff Coat, both 32. And then Adam Big Hill who may or may not play in this game is 35. Still a very pivotal player there in Winnipeg. So this team's getting older even though they've been here many times and they've obviously won twice out of the past three. If they don't get this one, there might be some significant change and obviously still a lot of good players that they recruit very well. Shout out to Danny McManus and all those guys in the front office. But yeah, I mean this definitely feels like almost not end of a run, but it's not youthful anymore. It's weird in terms of the Montreal side of it, and I was talking with Gary Stern, obviously a former owner here over the weekend following it, really weird Montreal's trajectory this year and it seems like they never stopped at working and acquiring talent during the off season. Jason, is that kind of how you look at that? They've kind of continued to ascend here where obviously we saw the bizarreness with Toronto here last weekend, but it really feels like Montreal's peaking at the right time. Yeah, absolutely. I believe they've won six or seven games in a row leading into this game, so they're arguably the most hot team in the CFL going into this great Cup game here. But I think yeah, at the end of the day they were kind of behind the eight ball in the off season with the whole ownership situation being up in the air, but ultimately they got that straightened out. I think that they made a lot of smart agent acquisitions. I always say that on my channel that the quarterback situation could have ended up so much worse for them given that Trevor Harris left during a free agency this year. So I think that Cody Firo has kind of steadied the ship for the ettes in that regard. And Jason Moss deserves a lot of credit as Well. Just tremendous here. I mean Evan and we've talked about this for weeks, this could have been a disaster of a season from Montreal coming in. And obviously you have the ownership change and it was funny, we were at Randy Ambrose's public address yesterday to the fans and he's talking about how Pierre came in and bought the team. I said, how crazy would it be coming in your first year here? A lot to go down from there, kind of a high rise, but I really just incredible how Montreal has really defied the odds this season. Absolutely. I mean I think the expectations were pretty low and the one consistent criticism that they weren't able to overcome during the season was they were unable to beat what would be considered the upper echelon of teams in the CFL, the Torontos, the bcs, the world. And when they came into the playoffs, even against Hamilton who had their struggles, there was a lot of doubt just given again their flow of the season, but they've proved everybody wrong so far. Offense still has some work to do, we can get into that, but the defense has just been incredible and I'm really excited to see that unit in person this weekend or tomorrow I should Say. Yeah, and I want to talk more in broad ranging CFL and we'll get a lot of guests in, but I want to make sure we get enough talk on the game here before we spiral the rest of this today. Jason, you said at breakfast you want just a good game. Is that enough? What are you actually expecting here between these teams? I'm expecting a low scoring game between these two teams because as I said in my game preview this week for this game, they are the top two scoring defenses in the CFL this season. So I'm very much excited to see which defense really shows up to play in this one. Also the top two past defenses in the CFL this season. So it'll be interesting to see which offense really gets going in this game. It is been interesting to me and I was having a conversation last night with a lot of the Winnipeg and other reporters in the suite here talking about the importance of Winnipeg here winning and really cementing Calero and Mike O'Shea and all of that and what that would mean to go win three great cuts, right, four years, all that stuff versus kind of the fluky upset kind of underdog stories. Montreal, is there one that's more appealing to you between the two? Well, it's tough because Winnipeg has gone to four straight great Cups. I've already pointed out they won the first two, but then they lost last year in a very tight contest. And then this year, even though again it's their fourth straight, it's still a big year. I pointed out some of the key players on the roster are older. We'll see, we'll see what happens. But I think, yeah, I mean it's definitely going to be, if Winnipeg wins the game, I think a lot of people will come out and say, well that was expected. They're just a better team all around. Better roster. You could argue better coaching to a degree. I mean Jason Moss is the first he was is the first year coaching, right? But if Montreal wins then yeah, Winnipeg loses back-to-back great cups, that's going to raise some eyes. Is the team getting too old or are you going to have to make some changes? And I think those are all things to consider. Yeah. What do you view the window here, Jason? For Winnipeg? Yeah, I think they still maybe have one or two more years left, but like Evan said, a lot of these guys, especially in the trenches, are getting older for them. You think about the offensive line, left tackle, right tackle, they're both over 33, 34 years old. Stanley Bryan I believe is 36 or something like that. 37, yep. Yeah, 37. So these guys are getting older at premium position. So I mean they'll still have Zach Claris for I think the next five or so years. But I think that at the end of the day, if the offensive line play starts to deteriorate and if Willie Jefferson and Jackson Jeff Coat aren't getting after the quarterback as much as they used to, I think that you could see a really big decline with this team. Is my boy Cody pdo? Is he in trouble tomorrow? Evan, I'm worried for Cody a little bit Here. Well, it's a good question. I mean, again, I've talked about Willie Jefferson being one of my favorite players in the CFL with his length and that pass force that really affected Vernon Adams in that West Final. He couldn't get the ball out and yeah, I definitely think given, I mean Montreal's offense I think is the most concerning unit in this game on all sides of the ball of both teams. Is Cody in trouble? I don't know. He's been a very good game manager this year, but he really needs to step up and make some big plays in this game. There's no doubt. And I think a lot of those big plays are going to have to go to Austin Mack who really roast to the top this year from Ohio State, been with a couple NFL teams, but really roast to the top quickly and that's going to have to be his guy in this one. They're going to have to get it going early because I was saying this morning that breakfast, once Ros gets rolling in that offense, I mean even if they might be down Dalton shone, you've still got Kenny Lawler, you've still got Rasheed Bailey and those guys could go out there and they can make that game a blowout really quickly. It's a frightening offense. Matt's got a question here. Can the owls keep it within 10 points and then everyone wants to know what's Green Dig going to open with? We'll get to that, but can the owls keep, I mean I want Montreal, man, this is a pro Montreal Outlets, this is a pro Cody Peja podcast. Do you think that they're even going to keep it closer? I think it'll be a close game. Like I said, I think it'll be lower scoring, but we have seen some major upsets in the Great Cup game in the last 10 years. Even you look at even last year was a pretty big upset considering Winnipeg went into that game with you. Think about Ottawa playing against Calgary in 2016. Ottawa was an eight nine in one team and they beat the 15 two in one stamp Peter. So anything can happen in the Great Cup game as history Shows. Gem checking in here. Good afternoon from Southern California. Let's talk about this. We have a question. Sandusky, I don't understand why the CL hasn't pushed Asha Mack because of the Ohio State University aspect of it. We've talked to Austin Mack all season. Do you think the CFL needs to be doing more to promote him? Maybe. I mean he came from a big school, right? But at the end of the day he still has to come up here and make a name for himself. I mean one of the misconceptions sometimes in the CFL game is that you have these Americans that come up from big schools and they think that they're automatically going to get a spot. Keep in mind, Austin Mack, no one really expected this from him. He was pretty low in that Montreal depth chart. Again, there just wasn't a lot of expectations. So I think they've done a decent job at promoting him. He's done very well this season. I've talked about him at nauseum, so I'm trying not to talk about him too much here. But yeah, he's a great player and hopefully he can continue to do great things in Montreal, whether they win the Great Cup tomorrow or not. Jason, any other thoughts on the game itself? We'll bring Jamie in here. I see him standing by Anything else on the game itself? We'll circle back here throughout some other stuff. Anything else you want to make sure you get to? Yeah, I think injuries is something I'm looking forward to in this game or not looking forward to, but keeping my eye out for in this game because Montreal very healthy, like barely anybody on the injury report for them. Everybody was practicing this week, but for Winnipeg, a couple of key guys probably out for this game. Adam Big Hill, like we were talking about before we got on here, probably not going to play in this game. Dalton Schone probably not going to play in this game, didn't play last week in the West Final. So if those two guys aren't playing for Winnipeg, I think you're going to see Montreal try to attack the middle of that defense with the Ron William stand back. Could have a big game with a big hill not being there in the middle. And then on the other side of the ball, if Sean's out, I think Kenny Lawler is going to have to play a big role like he did last week in the West Final. Well, and we talked here even before and it keeps saying at breakfast, but talking here this morning about Winnipeg not looking necessarily dominant in the BC win last week, where I want to get into the Chad Kelly concussion syndrome of it all today here we'll do that. But Evan here where Montreal, I mean it feels like a lot of scheme role here going in compare to Winnipeg and obviously, I mean they still took care of VC in kind fashion, but you get what I'm saying, it feels like Montreal's got a little more juice. Sure. Well I'm going to use this time. So we've talked about Darnell Sanky, Sean Lemon, these high impact players that Montreal brought in towards the end of their season that have really given them a boost during in the playoffs. But there's a couple other Montreal defenders that I want to talk about briefly that maybe you can look out for tomorrow in the game if you're watching this show. Kon Anto who played four seasons with the Green Bay Packers, his first year CFL player, he played receiver at Colorado, then switched to db. He's come along very quickly. This CFL season, again, kind of a late bloomer, didn't really start doing much till July. And then the other guy is Reggie Stubblefield who was Montreal's most outstanding working nominee former DC defender in the XFL this season. He didn't catch on until late either. I think he might've been cut and then brought back on the practice roster, but he had an outstanding season. Again, those guys in the secondary really helping out. Mark Antoine de Quois who had a pivotal pick six in that Eastern final last week. Let's bring, Jamie, you ready to come on here? Let's bring Jamie in here. Do you want to come around this way? We'll bring in Jamie and I, green zone everything Saskatchewan. Try not to remember to kill yourself here coming. Come here. Jamie coming in here, Jamie and I appreciate it. We were talking in the FRC suite and all of that hanging out. What is the biggest thing you're tracking this week outside of the game? We've got the Jack Kelly of it all. We've got the logos on the field, we've got the game not being broadcast on TV in America. What are you ready for? Well this week I've been under the heck's the next head coach of the Saskatchewan Ruff Riders investigation on what's going on with the coaching search. And I do know they have started at least the process to start requesting who they're going to talk to for some of the teams that are out of the playoffs right now. That's like Scott Milanovich, Brent Monson out of Calgary as well. Mark Killam out of Calgary is another one. Jordan mc Simmick of the BC Lions, those types of people. And then wait, because they're going to have to wait until after the breakup to go after Buck Pierce and maybe Noel Thorpe of the Montreal Ettes Buck Pierce, of course the offensive coordinator of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. So it's been interesting trying to keep track on who's talking to who. Great Cup Week. Yeah. Jason, we've talked, I mean Saskatchewan and kind of the dumpster fire with all there. I mean what are we looking for? What do you have for Jamie? I was going to ask about Winnipeg. So if Winnipeg wins this game, where do they rank among all time CFL teams Do you think? Well, making four straight. When you look at it outside of you had the Edmonton Eskimos back in the day made it to four straight. Then you had Hamilton in the sixties, early sixties make the four straight and the Regina rough riders when it was rugby, that was the other team that, so just making it to four straight gray cups is unheard of. So you have that and then if they win and they win three of four, you put them as one of the greatest teams of all time. They're not the Edmonton team that won five straight, but they're getting pretty darn close to what they've been able to accomplish. And it's been fascinating to watch this team do it because there was a time when there was some patients running thin on Mike Oche and Kyle Walters way back in the day and then all of a sudden they turned the corner, started winning games, the Dominoes fell the right way with Zach Ros and here we are and the dynasty word is fair and the debate is if they lose, can you still call 'em a dynasty? I think they have to win to be a 3 0 4 rather than 2 0 4. Yeah. Evan, what do you think? And then carry on from there. Well Actually I had a question about the coaching search in Saskatchewan, so I just wanted to get your opinion on who might be the best fit because Scott Milanovich, who I really like has been a name that's been floated around. Obviously you pointed that out. Jordan Maxim here in BC is someone that, I've been a big fan of his work, but who do you think would be the best candidate There? Well, it depends what you want. Do you want the safest hire? That's Scott, he's been there, done that. You know what he can bring to the table or do you want to do a mic oche type person? It was a special teams coordinator, successful and then kind of grow with them as a coach to maybe have something more longer term potentially. And that's where I think you lean over to Buck Pierce because sorry, people playing Django over there if you heard what that was. But it's one of those things where you look at culture, I'm a big believer in finding someone from a winning culture who knows how to grow it. That's why Buck Pierce really appeals to me because of what he's seen in Winnipeg. But Scott Milanovich is the safest, most experienced, but I want the guy who blows Jeremy O'Day away, that's who I really want. And we don't know who that's going to be until the interview process goes down and they present a coaching staff that you go, that's the guy. Understood. But I imagine Scott Melvich will have with all his connections, be able to come up with a heck of a coaching staff for the riders. Well, because I saw a comment even today that they were looking for, it needs to be someone that fits the Saskatchewan culture and they said, no, I think it needs someone to come in here and rebuild a new culture because clearly what they have right now isn't working Well. What's the Saskatchewan culture when you've won four Great Cups in 110 years? Like oh serious, what's, you want the guy who believes in that? No, you want a guy who's going to win three great cups in four years is what you're looking for. That's the culture you want. So I want a guy who can build a culture and not the Saskatchewan Way or the Edmonton Way or the Bomber Way, make it your own and have the group in the room believe in that. So that's where I'd be going. How dysfunctional is the franchise now with all of this? And you were on the show near the end of the season talking and they're even, they're going to lose their way out of the playoffs, fire the coach, kind of all that stuff. What is kind of the welfare check on everything in vagina? Well, everybody's pointing the finger at now, Craig Dickinson, right? It's clear he is the guy you look at even this week talking to Cody Fido, talking to Jason Moss, talking to Darnell Sanky about 2022, not necessarily 2023 of course, but it sounded like it was an absolute gong show in that locker room, especially when they made the decision to bench Cody. And you go, how a do you continue it on forward with Craig for an extra year for 2023 and guess what happened? The exact same thing played out. So that's where I can understand where Ryder Nation is coming back on even questioning bringing Jeremy O'Day back for three years as the general manager to really have faith in that guy to make the right hire. I would like to think he can. He's been around the league forever and when Chris Jones bolted, he was pretty much had to pick Craig Dickinson, then they go to back to West finals. So it's been two up years, two down years for the rough riders and Jeremy, this is the most crucial thing he has to do in his entire career as assistant, general manager. Everything else right now, this is it for Jeremy. He's got to get it right. Jason, we joked a lot meanly kind of joked about Saskatchewan here watching Jason Moss and go to the great up here. I want to get your thoughts on that. And then obviously Jamie about here they were the scapegoats last year kind of sent out of town packing and now obviously everything. What are your thoughts? And then we'll get Jamie. Yeah, it's an incredible story with the Montreal Ettes have gone through this year with obviously Moss and fdo. I think that at the end of the day they've just been just kind of a Cinderella story really. I personally, I had them dead last in the CFL standings at the beginning of the season, so they definitely proved me wrong. I think I've definitely underestimated Jason Moss as a head coach because I think that when you look back in hindsight, he did a pretty good job in Edmonton. You look at what that team's become since he was fired in 2019. Yeah, just quite a difference for that organization. Give credit to Jason Moss. Jason Moss, the one thing I very much appreciate in talking to him was when he was in Edmonton, they were one of the most undisciplined teams in the Canadian Football League and it was because he looked at himself and went, well, how disciplined was I on the sideline throwing headsets, smashing Gatorade bottles? How can I expect my team to play disciplined when I can't even control myself? And he still tips dances on that line pretty close at times, but he's not throwing things anymore. He's looked at himself on how can I grow as a person? And it was interesting talking to Danny Macha this week and said, Danny said, not glad that he went through what he did in Saskatchewan, but watching him go through what he did in Saskatchewan, come through it, grow from it, learn internally from it. He believed in Jason Moss even more to hire him as the head coach of the Montreal Ette. So that's the big credit to Jason on the growth as a head coach and with Cody, it's not like he's blowing the world away in his play. It is a strong, strong defense he's got, but what Cody's doing is he's not trying to be the hero every down. It seemed like he was at times when it was going off the rails in Saskatchewan, trying to be the guy that pushes the team forward. He understands he's just one piece. He's a big piece, but one piece of the puzzle in Montreal and it's paid off in these playoffs. He is made two bad throws. They've both been intercepted. Thankfully he didn't go for pick sixes in Montreal's way, but that's where Cody's at. I expect him in this game to actually lose, use his legs more and not dance around. But if Adam Big Hill doesn't play attack, Shane Goche up the middle on some QB draw stuff to really probably test him early to see where goer's game's at and what's going to be the biggest game of his career. Well Evan, I was having one of the conversations, it could have been with Jamie, someone over the weekend was talking like Jason Moss used to kind of getting the best of Cody now and maybe not making him have long ball down the field, pushing it, be a little bit more dinged duck. What do you make of how Jason's been using Cody here and then obviously will get Well? I think it's good to see Cody kind of step back and being in a bit more reserved role. He's letting other people on the team kind of figured things out. I mean the big story about Montreal has been their defense, not the offense. Now Montreal has several offensive pieces that I like. They've got Austin m, I've talked about it nauseum. They have Kay on Julian Grant, a couple other guys there will stand back in the running game. So I'm just really happy to see he doesn't have to play hero ball. I've kind of used the term game manager this season. I think he's more than that. He brings more to the table, right? Don't think they're in the gray cup for a reason that Cody plays a significant role with that as the quarterback of the team. But yeah, I think him and Jason are a great pairing and Cody's talked about that. He's talked about what a great leader Jason's been for him and it's really nice to see Jason too because as we've already pointed out, those guys were kind of the scapegoats in Saskatchewan. They were made out to be the problem. And then here Jason Moss's in a gray cup against one of the, I guess dynasties you could say in the CFL and Saskatchewan was right back where they were last year where they had an end of the season slide. And I don't want to bring too much of that up, just give you any PTSD, but hey, yeah, I mean that's just what it is. It's one of those things where they proved a lot of people wrong and we'll see if they continue to do that tomorrow. We had a Twitter comment here. Why does this presentation look more professional than CFL on tsn? I appreciate that. I appreciate nothing like an iPhone and a ring light here. What do you make here, Cody? There's been a lot of, I live in the States here, we've got the bronc purdy and what's in the league quarterback and all that kind of stuff here. I mean Cody's in the Gray Cup. I couldn't be more proud. What do you make of his play coming into this year now? Well, Me and Cody, well he blocked me on Twitter so he knew what I was saying about him last year. And I'm not going to say that we were wrong about Cody Fido because as I mentioned, it's not like he's lightened the world on fire. 31 touchdown passes. His numbers are pretty well, basically the same as they were with the Rough Riders last season. He's also got an exceptional defense surrounding him. So Danny Macha has done a great job building that Montreal Allo team and allowing Cody Fido to be, doesn't have to be all world to win football games. And Cody, he's told me he's been off Twitter all year, that really got to him in Saskatchewan. Like I talked about Jason growing, that's a growth point for Cody. It was. Getting to him reading the hitting that mentions button and seeing how many people are down on you, wore him down. So he said, no, I'm not going to do. It's all growth for both of those guys that sometimes you build yourself up even stronger because you went through adversity than if you didn't. And I think that's what happened with Cody and Jason Moss. So I walked up to him at Media Day and I went right up to him and said, Hey man, I was in Saskatchewan saying he's the quarterback who's never going to get a team to a great cup. I was wrong. And he said, I appreciate that man. And he said, thanks for picking us this week. So he's clearly not fully off social media if he knows I'm picking him this week. Yeah, what you needed, well you needed to get on. I didn't wait until he is traded to the team and then go through that and then get him on and use that as a way before we get you out of here. We've talked so much and I want to get Jason's thoughts too, kind of the work, Jason, that Montreal's done this year with Danny. We've talked to Sean Lemon and the Sanky and all that. Jason, what do you make of the offseason work that Montreal has done? And then we'll get Jamie, but because I never giving up here, right? We're all like here, Sean Lemon floated around, all these kind of things. The work that Danny did. Well, I'll even go even further back because a few years ago, Montreal I would say had the worst Canadian talent in the CFL and just the pieces that they've been able to draft over the past couple of years. Look at Mark Antoine Dewa. They found guys on the offensive line like Pier Olivier List Dodge. They got some good Canadian receivers. I think that aspect of their team has really improved over the last couple of years and I think that's a huge reason why they are where they are today. And I think that, yeah, at the end of the day, the Canadian talent is very important in this league. Well, Danny's done just on Canadian talent to build off that. I talked to Danny this week and he said where they've really built their Canadian talent is building from within the borders of Quebec. You have two really good strong programs in Quebec plus the JE programs there too, where there's a lot of Quebec talent and if it's two guys are the same, he's taking the guy from Quebec all the time and even within his coaching staff he's building within Quebec and really believing in that Quebec culture. This is Quebec's team, even though it's a Montreal ette. So I appreciate that from Danny Machos point of view on how he's built. Canadian talent has been great and he's doing it. Think about where they were with all the ownership stuff. He was losing his quarterback, he was losing his star receiver, he was losing Lineback. It was all over the place. A Darius s picket, Eugene Lewis and Trevor Harris right there. It's like, oh my goodness. But he also had extra money to sign Darnell Sanky and Sean Lemon Midseason the work Danny Macha did this year. If there was an executive of the year at the CFL awards, it should be Danny Macha for what he's been able to pull off with the Montreal LOS. Last question for you, as I'm trying to figure out with our stage producer Dorothy here, we'll get her on at the end of the show. We figure out who wants to come on next, how much pressure is there on whoever comes in Saskatchewan now? I mean here they hosted last year, all of that stuff now is, what's the timeline here you're expecting for when someone could potentially get higher and then how much pressures are now coming in the next year For Coach people coming in to Saskatchewan? Oh my goodness, you better win. You better win. This is a situation where the fan base is, they're not showing up to games anymore. Like 16,000 is back when the dog days of the Saskatchewan Rough riders. When I was a season ticket holder, when I was a teenager, and you could sit anywhere, you could put your feet over the seats, you can relax, you can walk around, get the mini yellow footballs, all that stuff ate a game, nobody else chasing 'em around when they got a field goal. So the pressure is immense on Craig Reynolds, the president, Jeremy O'Day, the general manager, the new coach I think can come in there and understand, yeah, it's win now. But I think there'd be more pressure on those above this head coach than there will be on the head coach. But I think there's a good base of talent there you can build around. But Jeremy's already there doing it. It's just a matter of figuring out is Trevor Harris coming back a quarterback? And if not, who's going to throw the football around? You need a good one to win in this league. There's no doubt about that. Well, a lot here. I think you have an exciting off season to head, Jamie. I appreciate it. Thanks for coming on. I'll see you later. We appreciate it. We'll bring Darryl in here. We got Daryl Davis coming in. He is drinking some water. We got Darryl. I had a comment here. Joe, you can come around that way. Thanks Jimmy. I did see a comment here and I want to talk more about this with Farhan and Naylor as well, about the CFL plus the gray cup and kind of all of that stuff. I do think that that is quite the miss here, that you have not an option with the biggest game of the CFL season here to be on broadcast TV in any way. Evan and I were talking even before the stream about, God forbid I'm channel surfing and I stumble upon it in my thing. But we'll get to that. No philip cfl plus.ca. It's on there. It's free to watch. I just think there needs to be a better way, a better way to get more people on. Daryl here. We've spent the last couple nights in the FRC suite. Are you enjoying your Jordan Everly Bobblehead? Well, thanks for the Jordan Everly Bobblehead. He's my former neighbor, right? So yeah, thank you for that. There was a really nice treat. I'll let you stay up until like three or four in the morning and hang out in the suite with me and keep me awake really late again, as always. Reed, good to see you. Daryl, what are you tracking this week? I guess let's get your thoughts on that. We got the CFL plus. It's weird. Araj tweets it out. I'm like, this has been known since May that the game wasn't going to be on American db. What do you make of that? I understand the CL plus and everyone. I saw Dave Campbell sand, don't worry about it and Rob Peterson, but I think you need to have an option somewhere on broadcast tv. Go forbid. But what do you make of CFL? The Gray Cup not being available on the American tv. Well, you Need to have access for people who want to watch it Didn't. It used to be on ES, ESPN that you could watch it somewhere. And I know that everybody's going streaming these days where evolving, right? But how can you not have it on even a basic cable somewhere? It's probably not going to be on a broadcast. Of course not. But people want to watch it and there are Canadians all over the world who'd like to pick it up and it's going to be tough if you're just streaming things. Not everybody gets great reception on their stream. So I think that's a misstep on the C l's part, but it's something hopefully they can fix. What's the biggest storyline you're tracking this week? What do you want to talk about? It could be the game. It could be the non bilingual stuff on the field. What are you tracking? And then we'll get some questions figured out. Well, I'm really local because I'm from Regina Saskatchewan, home of the Saskatchewan Ruff Riders and what's going on there? They need a coach, right? So here I am following guys. Scott Milanovich was Ottawa Hamilton's offensive coordinator. Obviously I believe the number one choice to become Saskatchewan's new head coach after they dumped Craig Dickinson. Noel Thorpe, the defense coordinator, Montreal might be considered. Buck Pierce I'm sure is being considered as he's an offensive coordinator with Winnipeg. So those are the stories I am working on. Mostly I try to keep my stuff local. I know there's a lot of national stories international that the French language thing is always something they have to be very careful of. It's not is noteworthy in Saskatchewan, but it certainly is in Montreal and in Quebec and especially with the Montreal Ettes participating in the Great Cup game. You can't mess up things like that. You can't mess up like they did in the East Final and not have a bilingual singer singing the national Anthem. That's just not the way it worked in Canada. Jason, did you, we've talked Scott Milanovich and all of this stuff, him with Hamilton. Do you think he's done enough with the tie Kats, even though may get to the playoffs not winning, but did he do enough here with his resume? I think that he did an okay job. I think the offense for Hamilton definitely did improve when he took over from Tommy Condell midway through this season. But I think the most important thing is the CFL teams. They value experience and previous experience being a head coach. And I think that more often than not, you see them rehire guys that have been head coaches before, they don't see, you don't really see guys that haven't been a head coach before, get an opportunity that often. So I think that is working in his favor more than anything. What do you make of that, Darryl? The recycling of CFL Here we saw Jason Moscow and get fired out of and getting the head, but now hey, he's in the Great Cup. Yeah, there are only nine jobs and makes a good point because Jeremy O'Day, the rough riders general manager is in a precarious spot. He got stuck with Craig Dickinson four years ago, five years ago because Chris Jones bolted for the NFL. So Craig Dickinson was the best coach on their staff, best coaching candidate on their staff for two years. They made the Western final and then missed the playoffs the last two years. So he needs to find somebody. I've, I realized that Saskatchewan Ruff Rider fans are furious that Jeremy O'Day got a three-year contract extension, but they needed to give him three years so he can hire a good coach Milanovich. And the reason they don't recycle a lot of times, especially now, Jeremy O'Day can't afford to take a chance on somebody. He needs to find somebody who's proven. Scott Milanovich has proven he is won a great cup. I know that he faltered a little bit at the end of his time in Toronto, but he's won a great cup and he can put a coaching staff together on short notice, which is a really important thing right now. You have to have people who can coach and will fit within the salary cap. And since he's done that before, that gives him a real advantage in any competition for the head coaching Job. Evan, thoughts on that kind of the recycled talent coaching, and we've talked about this for weeks and the salary cap and we went through the whole Chris Jones of it all kind of everything else. Your thoughts on this? Well, the CFL's a tight-knit community and there's going to be guys that maybe stepped down and then go back up. I think that's perfectly normal. I mean, if we want to talk about Scott Milanovich, again, I was a very big fan of what he did in Hamilton. I think that turnaround was quite significant. I understand that they still had some things to figure out. Bo Levi came back late in the season, put him in the mix. You had Taylor Powell, you had Matt, you had a lot of guys, right? There was still, I don't want to say a lack of identity, but it wasn't perfect. But Hamilton became competitive when Milanovich came in there. It was significantly more competitive than they were with Tommy Condell. And yeah, they faltered in the playoffs. It's not what we expected. I think there'd be even more talk about this right now if Hamilton was able to beat Montreal. But I really like Milanovich and like Jamie was saying, I think he's probably the best candidate. I know he's getting talked about a lot. I know it's the one that's brought up the most. But yeah, I mean you look at his resume, it kind of speaks for itself. And he was, again, the switch when they made that in Hamilton, I don't think that can be overlooked. I know it wasn't perfect, but they really, I mean that's what put them, I think into playoffs. Not that the east was outside of Toronto, not that the East was extremely competitive, but In terms of, I want to get your thoughts because Hamilton here, it seems it was a dumpster fire for a lot of the season, the bow and kind of all that stuff. It just seems like we made the playoffs. It's business as usual. Now moving on to next year, what do you make of the Hamilton then we'll get Jason's thoughts, but just in terms of, okay, we were here again and we fell short and then okay, but now we roll it back next year. Well, I was actually at Hamilton's last Great Cup victory in 1999, which seems like a generation ago. And I know there are fewer and fewer people every year who were there. They haven't put it back together. We all think Orlando Sauer is a pretty good coach and quite popular, but is he a president? He's the president of football operations. Is he capable of that job? Well, he's taken over and the team hasn't really gotten better. You'll find the teams that are having more success now are the teams that seem to divide those two jobs. So Orlando, if he moved up, we thought might happen and then he could hire Scott Milanovich as the head guy. This team is in a little bit of trouble boldly by Mitchell, the Calgary stamp. Peters dumped him because they knew he was done. He's done. He's going to be a great football commentator on TSN. Let him go do that. I know it's tough for a player of his ilk to walk away, but he can't play anymore. They obviously decided that as they were talking about that Milanovich didn't use boldly by Mitchell as a quarterback in the playoffs. Matthew Shilts probably isn't a great quarterback to do that. I thought Taylor Powell showed a lot of potential, but are you going to start him in the playoffs? That's a tough thing for a team to do. They love, as you guys were talking about, love to have coaches, love to have experienced quarterbacks, so that's why you put those guys in. And I thought that Bo Levi Mitchell was probably their best chance. Give him one more chance for a big explosion, but it just doesn't seem like they know exactly what they're doing in Hamilton at the moment. And I think they're a team and a little bit of turmoil at the moment. And Scott Milanovich might actually want to leave right at the moment because there's more opportunity somewhere else. Jason, we've obviously, and you can talk, Ty Katz is a fan and obviously as the CFL kind of media member here, what do you see them doing next to me? It doesn't. Okay. It was successful. You made it to the playoffs, but it doesn't feel successful. Yeah, I think that it just seems like they've kind of flatlined under Steinhower. I think that look at the first year, 15 and three, they start out hot, they get to the Gray Cup best record in franchise history in the regular season, and then they're eight and four or eight and six in 2021 and then eight and 10 last year, eight and 10 this year. So they've just kind of been regressing throughout the last few years here. And I think the main common denominator is they can't get the quarterback situation. Even when they had Mian Evans, they couldn't really decide on who to play really when it worked out for them, they got to the gray Cup, but ultimately they haven't been able to identify who is the guy. And I think that's the biggest problem. And what do you do for next year? Do you bring Bo back and just roll with him and Taylor Powell? Do you go with Shilts and Powell or do you go with, I'm going to throw a possibility out there, McLeod, Bethel Thompson. Do you bring him in and go with him and Taylor Powell as the combo there? I'm glad you reminded me of that. Let's get Evan Sauce because yeah, we hear Bose coming back, not Bose, you see him, cloud's coming back. It's not a lot of negative comments like, oh, we found out that you can't whatever, $50,000 this space. God forbid he tries to go do his family and all these other things. But what do you make of Bo and then we'll get you. Well, I mean, I think just in Hamilton in general, I really like Orlando Steinhower as much as I credit Scott Milanovich for the turnaround in Hamilton. I think Steinhower also, I was saying at the beginning of the season, if someone's going to pull him out of the hole with Steinhower with his experience. But I agree with Jason, I think that they've reached a point now where they've done what they can. They went to the Great Cups, they didn't win. It was a very fast acceleration under him, but it's gone down now. And if you want to talk about hypotheticals, you just mentioned McLeod, Bethel Thompson, and we'll obviously have Dave Nailer on here later, but he floated the idea of having June Jones coming back and I don't know if that's accurate or not. We'll see, he expressed interest in coming back, but I really liked June obviously from the XFL, followed that closely. I love his run and shoot offense. I think that would be great in the Canadian football league. Might spark something in Hamilton again, especially if Milanovich leaves talking about the offense. I love offensive football. I'm not going to rebel on for too much about that. But yeah, I mean there's a lot of different ways Hamilton could go. It's just when a season like this happens where it's really a mixed bag, ultimately you have to switch some things in the middle of the season, you lose in the playoffs. There's going to be a lot of questions and they have to answer those too. Not as many as Saskatchewan maybe, but they've definitely got some questions. You laughed. You said Jim Jones McLeod, all this made me pretty crazy. What do you think of this? Well, it would be kind of a couple steps backwards in terms of history anyway, but there aren't that many guys around who are proven CFL coaches. June Jones has done a good job in this league. He hasn't forgotten how to coach. Does it look like we're talking about moving forward and trying to find the next new coaches? And that's kind of why the CFL gets laughed at sometimes and it would take that step backwards and do it. McLeod, Bethel Thompson coming back. Well, he's not. He's a functional quarterback. He could help a lot of teams might Saskatchewan, I don't know what they're doing with Taylor. Trevor Harris, I'm sorry, as a quarterback, he's coming off. He's 37 years old, he's getting half a million dollars. He broken knee in five places. Is he worth paying the highest salary to ever in the history of the Saskatchewan operators? Probably not. So McLeod, Bethel Thompson might have some options. So it's interesting. This is what we love about Gray Cop. There's so many people hanging around and we all have these stories and I've talked to this guy, I've talked to that guy. He wants to come back. How it all resolves itself. That's what the off season's for. It's going to be a lot of fun to keep watching. That's why we love this league. Well, no, it is interesting. And similarly in terms of the coaching, throwing that ideas, it was the same to circle back with the ruff rider, head coachee, and it was kind of like here, hey, I want to be the head coach. We had John Ryan throwing this name in the Seattle Seahawk legend, right? Super Bowl winning. But rounding out here, before we get out, I want to get your thoughts on the shellacking that Montreal gave to Toronto. I'm going to ask Naylor and all this. I want to know about this Chad Kelly situation. We've talked about this. Was Chad Kelly under duress here playing in the Gray Cup or was he a full strength In the East Final? He wasn't the Chad Kelly that we're used to seeing no confidence. He's thrown off his back foot. He just didn't look like the guy who had led the Argonauts to a 16 and two season. So something was amiss for him to come out and say it was a concussion without medical. Somebody from the doctor's side saying he had a concussion. That's kind of a touchy situation. He wasn't the right guy. Was he concussed perhaps. But there are a lot of reasons. Maybe there are other reasons for why he didn't play very well. And a lot of them are the Montreal. That was an amazing defensive performance by Noel Thorpe and his troops. So there's always other reasons why he don't play very well, but he wasn't the same guy. And if we hadn't done the voting for Outstanding player after that game, I think Brady Oliveira would've won the voting as opposed to Chad Kelly as being the outstanding player in the league. Yeah. Final thoughts on that? I'll get our next guest ready here. Final thoughts on the MOP thing? I was on the plane flying in and I thought we'll get more thoughts on this as well as I'm sure we will get through the two hours here. But I mean, I was stunned. Yeah, quarterbacks always get the advantage, but they could win all the time. They are the most valuable player. They're obviously the most outstanding player because of their statistics reed. So that's who gets the votes quite often. But to me, Oliveira had an amazing season, 2000 yards. He's a running back and Zach Laris had, okay, but Zach Laris numbers are probably even better than Chad Kelly's in terms of the quarterback rankings. So what does that tell you? That everybody decided that Oliveira was a more important player, a more outstanding player to his team. That's who I would've voted for. And it was a surprise to me. I don't know if you guys think the same thing, who would you have voted for Personally? I would've voted for Olive era, but I do understand what you're saying. It's usually the best player on the best team that wins these awards. Yeah, I think would've, it's two criteria. Usually a quarterback award, right? Someone who's a leader and it's usually a regular season award, so you take away that performance by Chad Kelly in the East Final. But yeah, I wasn't too surprised about Chad Kelly, I think more than anything while he, yeah, Calero maybe had better numbers RA with this 2000 scrimmage yards. I get that. I just think while there wasn't a whole lot of expectation for Chad Kelly, in my opinion, I mean he played in the Gray Cup, right? He came in there a couple drives, but outside of that, I mean there wasn't a whole lot like McLeod Bethel Thompson was their guy. He goes to the New Orleans breakers in the SFL and then Chad is suddenly thrusted into this role and then Toronto goes on to Tide for the most wins in the CFL season of all time. It's nothing. And that isn't taken lightly. So yeah, I think Chad, I think Chad earned it. We have a small child here crying over her following Jenga. I appreciate it, Daryl. I appreciate it. Anything else from you, we'll get Jim in here. Anything else before I see you tonight? Just have a good night in the suite and go to bed early. Okay. Thanks guys. Daryl, thank you very much. We'll get Jim Mullen in here next. Thank you Daryl. Appreciate it. Don't trip yourself on the mark and we'll get Jim Mullen in here, president Football Canada, everything else. He saying his condolences here. Were you guys surprised? I mean, I truly was with the Olive RA thing. I just think of any year that you're going to make a statement to me. This is it. Yeah, I definitely think so because I think everybody that I talked to thought Oliveira was going to win this award. But like I said, at the end of the day, best player on the best team, it's not like Chad Kelly was an undeserving winner of this award. I mean, he led the league, led the team to the best regular season in CFL history. So at the end of the day, yeah, I was surprised. But yeah, Ted Kelly was deserving of the award still. Well, here we go back now. He was at the top of the show last year in Regina. Let Off. We got you on. You come in hot, you see, you text me, you say I'll be there. Of course we fit you in. I take My $20 in parking to be here. Well, we Appreciate it Because it's such an honor. After All, it is I think the most Canadian on here, I will say, I think you're filling it. Jeff Hamilton completely dropped the ball and I'll throw him under the bus. Jeff Hamilton missing the show today. Jim Mullen coming in. Jim, I was at Randy's state of the, because of course the media one was Tuesday. God forbid that we covered that. Talking about the question from the audience, youth sports, do you guys were permanently supposedly moving CFL playoff games to Saturday? Did you have any consideration about youth sports? And Randy said, I think the quote was like, we need to look out best for our business. I knew tweeting that out. That will get you riled up. So what is your thoughts on that? We'll get into everything else. Well, to one degree is right they to do what's best for their business and I think in terms of what we've seen at the gate and what we started to see in terms of television numbers, I think he's been doing the best for his business here. That being said, part of what's good for business is alignment with the rest of the football community. And I don't think that piece has been worked on yet. However, I will say this about youth sports, about Canadian Junior Football League. Guys do yourself a favor. Know what time these games are being played. Play around them was, I pointed it out on Gridiron Nation this week that there was one point last Saturday where the BC Lions, the Canadian bull in Victoria and the UBC Thunderbirds were all playing at the same time for an hour. That can't happen again. And so for something like junior football, like the Canadian bull played on Sunday, NFL fans are going to be NFL fans. They're not showing up for junior football in Canada. Right. True football fans are going to be showing up for that live event in university football in Western Canada. They play on Friday nights. I know that. Then that may create some discomfort for the high school football community that could have a cascading effect there. I play one game on Friday, move a game earlier with time zones. There's a way to do this if you actually plan and you actually align. And quite frankly, my panelists said, well that's kind of a job for you Football Canada guy. So I opened up my big YAP and now people are looking at me thinking that I'm going to direct the traffic. I'm not sure if I want to take that on, but we'll see. Jason, what do you make of the Saturday playoffs here? And to me it was surprising that it was one year and now it's like, oh, this feels pretty permanent. I mean I was surprised. Yeah, well I think they want to be more consistent this time around because I think it was 2008 that they did it on Saturday just for the one year and then they changed it right back to Sunday. So I think they want to at least give it some runway and give them some more of a sample size for it. My one tweak, because they liked the Saturday games, my one tweak would be to just play it at one o'clock Eastern and four o'clock eastern and avoid the hockey night in Canada audience because hockey night in Canada is really the big player in Canadian sports television. Yeah, I mean this isn't exactly my wheelhouse in terms of football scheduling, but I did enjoy having the games on Saturdays. I think from the US perspective when you're not, I'm streaming the games off CFL Plus, right? So it's a bit different because you're not actively browsing through channels and I know on Saturdays, I mean that's a big college football day, so you can't, yeah, you're trying to maybe get away from the NFL, but you can't get away from everything. There's going to have to be some overlap and then in terms of youth sports and that kind of overlap, that's not really my wheelhouse either, but I think it is important to keep growing and developing the Canadian game and to make sure that these schedules are somewhat separated. I think that's also important too, so there's a lot to consider. I was just going to say hockey night in Canada is going to be hockey night in Canada. This is like the NFL piece here too. Play those two CFL games, follow it up with a sport playoff game that goes up against hockey night in Canada because hockey eyes are going to go to hockey, football eyes are going to go to football. They're starting at a very, very low foundation in terms of their numbers because they've been off TV for so long. If they just get on tv, there will be numbers that migrate to it. That'll be a plus because 70,000, 140,000, 200,000 plus zero is still those numbers and that's what they're getting right now in that CDC gem world. They're, in Terms of the relationships right now, relationships with all the football, and I know we went through all the CBA stuff last year and everything. How are you feeling in terms of the CFL working and communication with eSports and everything else in general? Well, to put the eSports thing aside, I think from the football Canada perspective with FLAG going into the Olympics, I think that's opened up a lot of opportunities not just for ourselves putting two teams into the Olympic games, but an opportunity for the CFL to find ways to work with us so we can evaluate athletes. Because right now we send a club team that wins a club competition into global competition and most nations don't do that. And in a country as vast as Canada, we need to find these points where we can run combine activities and have numbers that we can start evaluating athletes with. I think the CFL is a potential partner in that there's a program that's also going to be announced very soon about officials development. CFL is going to be a part of that. So whatever turbulence was in the past, that's in the past right now and at the end of the day, I think the CFL has assessed what's going on at the grassroots level, assess the role of football Canada and is willing to step up big time in a way they haven't before and that's a real change in direction from some of the previous conversations we've had. What do you attribute that to? I think it's a refocus on their part. I think they went down a certain path, some of it was working, some of it wasn't working, and I think in addition to that, there's probably new owners around the table that have connections to grassroots football. Pierre Carl Pedo from Quebec City knows the effect of the Laval Rouge or in that market, right? Amar Doman. I've had discussions with him, especially on the SFU piece. He's committed to grassroots football. I mean he coaches his son's flag teams and has made investments in those flag programs. So when you have that change in ownership and those new voices around that table of essentially Randy's bosses, they're going to take a look at different ways to approach grassroots football and see a value in not just developing football players, but also developing the next generation of fans. And that's something the CFL needs in those nine markets. Jason thoughts? Oh yeah, for sure. I think that getting the grassroots involved, I think even if you look at the festival this week, they're doing a lot of things with, they have a flag football field set up in the armory here in Hamilton. They're doing a bunch of stuff for kids to get involved and just be exposed to the CFL game or just be around the league. So I think that's really important for the C ffo going forward. Jim, I want to talk about the ownership and all of that now, like you said, getting these new voices in. How important is that here in 2023 because Randy came out, okay, we're up this and the demos are good and everything's rosey. What do you attribute that growth to? Is it getting these new owners in? We're seeing success in Toronto on the field that helps and then you have Amar Pierre, it feels like certain markets that maybe weren't healthy before or healthy now. What do you attribute that to? Well, I think there is some new energy with those new owners and the new energy came in just in time after the pandemic. I think the CFL really paid the price for not even having some sort of bubble competition for six weeks or six games, and a lot of those fans discovered that there were other things to do that there was that 20% drop off of people that just didn't return. So a lot of that construction back is now giving them momentum. I think I feel momentum around the league right now, guys. I really do. I think there are some things that are getting traction, some things they're doing right. They're certainly not out of the woods yet, but at least the direction is positive. I sure hope that it's not just talk around Halifax though. I sure hope that there's that focus on that 10th team because that would be a game changer for this league. Are you viewing Evan kind of positive energy right now in the CFL? Absolutely, and I think all this discussion has actually brought up a point that I haven't thought about in a while, and that would be sort of the global development of the CFL and maybe just Canadian football in general. I think it was back in 2019, the CFL had a joint draft with the LFA league in Mexico and now you're seeing a lot more guys. I mean besides Australian punters obviously, right? I mean Toronto just had a kicker come in that last game against Saskatchewan in the regular season, who was the Spanish descent who played in the LFA. Now he struggled in that game, but they're bringing these guys in and they're giving them playing time. And I think what's really important too is again, not just specialists but guys from overseas at other positions, maybe defensive end for example. That's something that I'm really interested to see continue to develop because I think the CFL is a very diverse league. Yes, there's only nine teams. Yes, there's work that needs to be done, but this game can grow and I take great pride in being at least some part of that. Jim, as someone that we talk a lot of Mariners, a lot of American sports as well, and we get into all that and oh, what was it, the article that came out, but I want to get your thoughts, sell The team, sell the team. I want to get your thoughts on the CFL plus and all of this. We talked a little bit before with Daryl and Gray Cup only available online, not streaming. The CBS Sports Network package carried a lot more of the summer games. What do you make of that? Of trying to, and it's not just America, it's international. If you're outside of Canada, the only way to watch the Great Cup is online, which it's great that it's available, but that's still cutting out of the large demo people that aren't able to figure out as easy as it might be, figure out how to access that. That's right. You don't get collisions if you're not on standard linear television and you're missing out on still on a lot of people that are out there that could be consuming your product. That being said, I think the league and the league office was in a position where they wanted to get revenue for whatever games they had, so this was the path for them to bring in revenue and fund the things that they need to do through their front office in Toronto. At the end of the day, I think that they would like something that's a little more comprehensive and accessible to the American and international fan, but I think that they needed the cash in through the front door and by doing it this way, they got the cash in through the front door. Let's see what CBS Sports Network does in future years? So we don't get AVMI, what is it? BMI, Arizona Basketball game preempting the gray cup. I mean that is kind of embarrassing, but we also need to remember when this deal came together, it came together really late in the game. So some of these contracts that CBS has in place, they have to realize these contracts. So even though it feels like right now this week that this isn't the greatest deal, at least it's available on CFL plus. My feeling though with it is when Randy comes out at the fan state of the union and says, yeah, in 2026, we'll reevaluate that. I mean, that's eternity from, I mean that's when the deal, that's forever. Yeah. Yeah, that's a long ways off, isn't it? Well, hopefully within the deal that they have, they can find that path to that to Great Cup Sunday. Hopefully they can find that path to games later in the season that aren't being picked up in that package, or hopefully they can find a path to splitting their contract in the United States. I'm keeping an eye out here. I think Farhan and Nail are supposed to come soon. We'll keep you, if you need to go, Dorothy can pop in here and fill in. Before we go, thoughts on the game itself here and we'll get some comments from Evan and Jason, but thoughts on are we excited? What do you make of the actual Gray Cup game? Well, I saw the simulation that was played out. It was played out 10,000 times, which said that bombers would win 27 24. I think the gap is going to be much broader and it's going to be lower scoring. I like what Montreal can do on their defense in many different ways. Got great speed out of the defensive backfield. Mike Hogan of the Argos pointed out to me says, how many times times did Montreal's quarterback get sacked in that last game? Was it seven or eight, Something like That? I think it was eight times and he threw for 200 yards. Yet the scoreboard was the way it was. If you give me those two stats, I'm saying the Argos are winning that game 19 times out of 20, this just happened to be the 20th game. I don't see Montreal scoring a lot of points in this game. I see them in the 11 to 14 range. I see Winnipeg scraping something out in the low twenties to mid twenties. I think it's going to be a bit of a wet firecracker on Sunday. Evan, what do you, let's get your response to that. I mean, I think I agree with it being low scoring, but Montreal, I didn't pick Montreal. I haven't made my official prediction yet, but I do like Winnipeg. I just think Montreal just keeps finding away. I think their offense, I said earlier before you were here that that was probably the most concerning unit on any side of the football, whether you're Winnipeg or Montreal. They really need to get moving and you got to get a couple big plays down the field to Austin Mack, and if they can do that, I think they have a chance. But I think it'll be all around a defensive game. I don't know if there's going to be, I'm hoping it's close, right? I don't know how big the gap will be in scoring. I hope that Montreal is able to keep it close whether they score on offense or score on defense. But yeah, it's an interesting one for sure. I think we can all agree. This maybe wasn't the quote sexiest great cut matchup. I was saying maybe last week that this was not, I could have gone through so many different matchups before I would've landed on a Winnipeg, Montreal, especially given Montreal the fact that they didn't beat Toronto B or Winnipeg in the regular season, but now none of that matters. They're here and we'll see where it goes. Jason, I want to get your thoughts on that. We were talking to turnover, my mic here talking the turnover battle, and it felt like Saskatchewan, it was Winnipeg turned the ball over six times to Saskatchewan and they still, it was the other way here obviously, and the Argos lost, but Winnipeg looked incredibly strong that year in terms of we can turn the ball over this many times and still beat you Montreal. They got a lot of free balls on that. Yeah, for sure. I think that really the formula for Montreal to win this game, and it's been working for them the whole year is non-offensive touchdowns. I think they had 12 of them this year or something like that. They had a lot of return touchdowns and a lot of defensive touchdowns. If they get one or more of those in this game, I think they have a shot to win. Jim, thoughts on the MOP debate here. We have had a lot of discussion about the Chad Kelly of it all versus Brady Oliver. I want to get your thoughts on that. There's no debate for me. Chad Kelly is the MOP of the Canadian Football League, and even saying that we know about the imbalance schedule between the west and the east. We know how Toronto only played certain teams one time, but this is a team that went 16 and two, wasn't active in all of those games, but most of those games. And yes, he had a tremendous supporting cast. But in terms of MOP, there's also a star power piece attached to it too. There's the ability to sell the game. I'm reminded of the 1980 NBA final when everyone thought Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was supposed to be the winner, and Sport Magazine actually voted him the MVP of the NBA finals and he didn't play in game seven and the NBA quietly said, magic Johnson, you are going to be the star of this league. You are the MVP of the final. Because they went after star power and they went after someone that could sell the game. And it's important to have somebody that's going to sell the game in Canada's biggest media center period. And for those reasons, in addition to his play on the field, that's why he's the most outstanding player in the league now then against Brady Oliveira, by the way, who I went down and saw a play in a sophomore year in North Dakota. This guy's got a lot to give. He had a fantastic year and outstanding year, but he's not as important to this league as Chad Kelly is. I got one last question, Farhan and Nailor just texted, they're on their way up, so we got Dan standing by. We'll get to everyone here. I appreciate it. In terms of going back to the balance schedule here, why was it, I mean, I'm not as smart enough to they say, and everyone hoos in the holler is like, what was the deal here and why did we ever deviate away from that? There you go. There's your answer. You take a look at the travel train, travel bus travel, shorter travel in Western Canada. It was a money consideration, just like the consideration with CVS Sports Network. It's about getting money in the door after having a couple of bad seasons and coming off a pandemic season. So how can you argue when you're financially challenged not to do something where you're addressing some of your business model? I'm glad to see that the business model is stabilized enough that we can run a real balanced schedule. And it's kind of imbalance too. You get a couple of teams playing each other three times a year instead of twice a year. But for the most part, everybody gets to play each other twice and you'll get a tour test of the Argos next year. The Argos will not be a 16 and two team if they have to play home and homes with everybody across the, And I guess I didn't realize that Jason, that Toronto was getting flack that they didn't play as balanced the schedule. Well, they Didn't play BC N BBC and they didn't play Winnipeg at home, so they played only those two top two teams from the west only once each. And obviously that Winnipeg game didn't matter at that point of the season. So yeah, I'm very interested to see how it works out next year when it goes back to the balance schedule. One thing I'm looking forward to is seeing if there's a crossover team next year, because the last three years we haven't seen a crossover team, but the last time there was a balanced schedule in 2019 Edmonton crossover. So perfect. Evan, any comments from you? I see in our next guest? Come in here, Jim, I appreciate it. Anything else from you first? Then we'll go to Evan. I just saw them just pass right by here, right? I'm getting a back ache from carrying them, so if you can get me some Advil from to address my backache from carrying those two clouds, that would be Appreciated. Yeah, we have the investigative drills here. Well, hey Dorothy, could she go track that? Jim, thank you so much. Maybe you can pass along the message to Dorothy here. Thank you so much. There we go. Okay. They found it. They found it. We'll get 'em on here. We'll get 'em on here whenever we're waiting for you guys here. Get on here. We come on the other side please. We got Dave Naylor Farhan coming on here. A little moving chairs here. Evan sitting taking a seat here. We got Naylor. We'll give that one here. Good to see you guys walking the big investigative journalists of the CFL walk right on by via the mark as Booth here. I got a question first. We'll get both of you. I have heard a lot this week. I know that there's a lot of media politicking and all that. Did Chad Kelly have a concussion when he played the east finals? I mean in our conversations with people around the Toronto Argonauts and the Canadian Football League, there is nothing to indicate that he had a concussion during that game. And that is just from those sources and those people that were around, I mean the league's, concussion spotter, various people on the Toronto, Oregon on staff and in that organization, we cannot find no evidence that he had a concussion during that game. People looking at it after the fact and they're trying to look for that moment in game where they might've missed it. And look, it's a tricky topic because it's easy to say that Chad Kelly's looking for an excuse because he had a poor game or what have you, and that narrative is out there, but at the end of the day, you don't know when concussions do or don't occur in a game and it's not always the obvious. So we're not sitting here saying he didn't have one, but certainly the people around the team and around the league that are looking at it are, I don't want to say skeptical, but there's still a little bit of confusion on the topic For sure. What do we make of this, the bilingualness of the stadium and everything going on here? I've seen a lot of reports coming out about the league Embarrassed. Is this true? Is it with having the CFL logo and all of that on the field and everything in French? Is that accurate? I have heard about this issue. This is not one I've had a chance to dig into and when I was asked about it, I was at the armory where the festival is, where our TSN stage is, and I looked out across the signage at the Armory and I did not see anything in French. And so that is only what I can tell you. I was at the Armory when this issue was brought to my attention, but given the nature of our day today, it has not been something we have had a lot of time to dig into. Is that a big deal to you, Vic? Yeah, it is in this country. I mean this is a bilingual country. It's a bilingual league. You've got a team from Quebec in it. I don't know that it's necessarily on Hamilton to do all of that throughout the city, but certainly as far as being in the stadium, you want to make sure that that's reflective of the Great Cup game and what's going on in the field. And it was an issue that was brought to the attention of the commissioner during the state of the league address on Tuesday that, oh, Canada, when it was performed at the East Division final in Toronto with Montreal there, it was performed lingly in English. The commissioner explained that the Anthem singer that was selected by the Argonauts was not capable of singing it in French. What is going on with McLeod? Bethel Thompson, that's His, I think McLeod's going to be back in the Canadian football next year. Now I don't think that's a slam dunk. I have spoken to his agent who's here in Hamilton this week, and McLeod wants to keep playing. He's going to be 36 next January. Spring football is still an option for him. He was in the USFL, he had a lot of success there. He could potentially go back there, but I get the sense that if somebody could offer him a starting job and everything that goes with that, my sense is he probably would lean to coming back here. We'll see if that fit is there. Talking to people around the league, I think a lot of people are going to kick the tires on McLeod who's going to dive right in and say it's your job. Maybe Ottawa. And that's not something that we've heard from Ottawa. That's just us evaluating the situations and who's available at quarterback league-wide. But yeah, I think there's a real possibility that he comes back and this is kind of reflective of what's going on. I mean obviously about what's going on in the XFL in the US FL more than we do, but is a little bit of, there are some players that are a little nervous. I talked to some executives and they have said we've been able to sign a couple of players earlier than we would've at this time last year when everybody wanted to wait. Now there's some guys that are a little nervous just because the timing and schedules haven't been set yet. I don't know if McLeod necessarily fits into that category, but interesting that he has got eyes wide open in terms of possibly coming back. I'll go to you in a second, Evan. And I got one more for Dave because it reminded me of that. I saw your tweet this morning. Little change in tune of like the CFL doesn't have to worry about the Spring league now. There's so much uncertainty there. I just thought it was funny. No, that's What said. He just said they've fought off many challengers. Yeah, we've conquered all those here. Well, no, I think what we're saying is that the direction of things, look, when the X-F-L-C-F-L merger was happening, let's remember what was going on. The Canadian Football League hadn't played in a year. There were teams that didn't have money. There was a league that was basically the coffers were empty. And the consideration of that possibility, let's be honest about it, was brought about by desperation. And as reporters on that and were asked for our opinions, all Farhan and I ever did was advocate that they needed to explore it thoroughly, which they did. Okay. We never said they need to do this or die or those things that have been put in our mouth. That is not what we said at the time. Now I think what was happening, and it is our understanding that in the new league, the coach's salary structure will be more like the USFL than the XFL, and that's going to reduce competition for the Canadian Football League in terms of coaches. So that is one sort of challenger on the coaching front that's going to be, I think, diminished. And I just think the general uncertainty about these leagues, I mean what's the schedule of this league? Where are the city, all these kind of questions that still remain unanswered by the time you get to November. We know football, professional football is an uncertain enough business as it is. If I was a player, I guess I could look north and say, well, I know where the teams are and I know when the season starts and I know who the coaches and the GMs are. I mean, there's just a lot more stability north of the border than South right now when it comes to what we still term alternative professional Football. And you know me, I'm not a spring football hater. I've always been that guy that says more football is good football. You know that. So I'm happy to come hang out with you to see Dragons game at any point. I hate to hate the boy, first of all. Well, so like I said, so for us, there's certainly no celebration or glee. I think more football is good, but just what's happened from everything we've heard is that I think initially the XFL wanted or the USFL wanted to stay on their later timeline relative to the XFL. So we will see what happens there in terms of when they start, did they want to move earlier? Could they pull that off at this stage of the game or stage of the calendar? I think it's tough, but me for one, I hope there's a spring football lead, right? I mean, I've always said to you, I didn't think both were going to survive, but I was hopeful that one would and I still am. Yeah, we're talking challenge. We're talking about challenges for players and coaches. I mean, that's where the competition exists and I think the CFL seems to be coming out on the high side of that. And if you want me to go do sidelines for A-U-S-F-L game, I promise you I won't lie. That's good on any information that I get from coaches. Oh, who's lying? Oh, Come on. Really? Oh, I it get it. I get it. I got that. Took me a minute. That joke's never going to die now. I mean she's ruined. I'm just telling you that I can do ASFL game and I'll be truthful about it though. Evan, what do you got? You got Dave and the bar on here. What do you want to know? Yeah, Well, I mean a couple things. I'm not sure I'm going to ask too many questions, but just a couple of clarifying points. I think McLeod, Bethel Thompson, I'm not sure he's a veteran, right? So I don't know where he sits on all the merger talks. I don't know if he reads much into that. I think McLeod, Bethel Thompson probably feels more at home in Canada now. He went to the USFL because he wanted to be close to his family. That's understandable. But I think because he was in the CFL for so many years and look, he didn't perform poorly in the USFL. No. Okay. But it didn't seem to me at least it didn't really, I don't know. The fit to me didn't seem like it was a long-term future. That's just me. I could see him coming back to the Canadian Football League in a starting role. He's a veteran. People respect that. Talking about the merger stuff, I think one of the more unique storylines coming out of the Gray Cup here is Darnell Sanky who played with the Arlington Renegades, won the 2023 XFL championship, signed late with Montreal and him and Sean Lemon have obviously been wrecking the game. And now Sanky has an opportunity here to win two pro football championships in a year. And that's all great. The question that I had, the one question that I had, because I don't want to keep you for too long, we've been talking a lot about it already. I don't want to overuse it with our previous guests, but the MOP debate, you've got Chad Kelly, you've got Brady ra, it's a hot topic. I know, I thought Kelly was the right decision. There were a lot of people that thought RA was the right decision. Where do you guys sit on that? I'm very interested to hear. Well, look, I am a huge, huge Chad Kelly fan. Huge. And I mean weak number two of the season I wrote a column saying Chad Kelly is the most important player in the Canadian Football League. And I was ridiculed for it and I will stand up right now and tell you the most important player in the Canadian Football League is Chad Kelly. But when it came to the MOV vote, I think Brady Oliveira did his job better than any player in the league this season. And on that basis, I think Brady Oliveira was the most deserving to be the MOP and I congratulated Chad after the show for his attitude, for his presence, for what he's meant for the city of Toronto. This is not to take away from Chad Kelly. I just think overall Brady Oliveira fulfilled his assignment, did what his team asked him to do better than anybody else. Yeah, his most outstanding players, not most valuable player. And certainly Chad had value to the franchise. He had value to the league. Vernon Adams, we talk about what he was asked to do in BC relative to guys like Kelly and Zach Calis. We've got great o lines and great run games. But to Dave's point, when you stack up Brady Oliveira's season on the H history of what a Runback does in history, both, it's been 10 years since the guy's had 2000 all purpose yards and 1500 rushing yards, 4,100 yards, that's a Tuesday. You know what I mean? That's any season for a quarterback. So Chad Kelly was good. I think you can overplay wins because wins are not a quarterback stat. They are not so as great as that is, and he didn't play that game against Winnipeg, there's a number of other things that put it into context. I would take Brady all day in that debate. Alright, last question for you guys. We got Dan, stand by. I know you guys are busy. I appreciate they're going live TSN making. Have you had Mullen on? Yeah, Mullin's already been on. Okay, so I hope you talked Mariners with him. Yeah, we did. Okay, good. We talked to and all that stuff, but I just wanted to point out that our location was so good two years ago that George Hamilton, I guess TSN now rented out the whole damn building. I just point that out there. Last question for you guys, Randy, it's foofy, but the state fan one that they did Friday, he is talking a lot of growth in the league and demos and everything's up and whatever. What's your understanding of the health of everything right now? It seems like people, Ambrose is the greatest thing in the world right now. Well, I don't know if everyone's jumped on Randy's bandwagon, but certainly in terms of the metrics around the league, both in terms of attendance, in terms of where the television ratings are, and not just overall ratings, but ratings in the right demo, I think it is going in the right direction. So it took some time and there's still ways for it to go. We were coming down here and we talked about it that boy the league is sure improved in specific areas, but in terms of actual diversity, crowds at events here in Hamilton and even at games quite often look like what the league did 40 years ago. I'd love for the look of the league and its fan base and its supporters to get a little bit more diverse and things like that because certainly the players, the On-field product is very diverse in terms of what that looks like. And you see the league with its global initiative trying to go there. But in terms of where they're at, the quality of play, all of it, I think it's headed in the right Direction. I think it's been a very positive year for the cfl. And I would echo Farhan sentiments. I mean it's vital from a business interest and Canada's population is so diverse now and that diversity is not reflected in the stands. They are not by and large new Canadians and people who are first generations of new Canadians are not Canadian football league customers. And if this league is going to be vital into the future, that has to change. But overall, I think what the league has been talking about with the three biggest markets, I mean I can't tell you the number of years we've shown up at the Great Cup and the biggest concerns are in order Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver mix the order anywhere you want. But those are the soft spots and it's been I think very gratifying for the league to see the improvement in those places. Some of it goes with the success of the teams, but I think overall there's been a business improvement and hey, it's not that long ago. This league was in some very desperate straits and I think people are walking around right now feeling pretty good about the present and the future of the Canadian Football League. Awesome. Well thanks you guys. Get out of here. Get bad to work. I haven't seen you at the suite yet. We've been hanging out waiting the couple. We were there Two nights ago. You obviously were late arriving. We Flew in Thursday. Well there you go. We'll catch up here. I appreciate it. I'm watching the Huskies in Oregon State tonight, so I'm not sure. I'm making the Visit to the, you can put it on in the sweet far. We got to make an appearance tonight with Reed. You got it. You got it. Come on. Alright, We'll see out you guys get out here. Thanks so much. Thanks. Bye. Thanks so much guys. Alright, we'll get Jason back in here. We'll get Dan Ralph back in. Thank you. I got it. You're good, you're good. Thank you. Alright, thanks guys. We'll get the swap out here. They're back to work. Making time coming in here. Let's get Jason and then can we get Jason, can you get Dan, Ralph, can you pinging him? We'll get them back in. Evan. Thoughts on that? Thoughts on nailer and Farhan? Yeah, I thought it was great. I think their point about the progress that's been made in the Canadian Football League, definitely from a on-field perspective, I think it improved this year overall it feels like we've really been building coming off that Covid comeback, this is what season three really the only second full season because you only played 14 games in 2021. But overall I thought that was a great way to end it off. Dan, welcome here, Dan Ralph Canadian Press. We've been talking with Nathan Wright, whether the photographers Canadian Press been hanging out in the suite a lot with him, been fun. What are you tracking this week? A lot of different things to talk about. What's on your mind? I just want to get through the week. It's been great. Cup's funny, you get here and you're excited and then all the work starts and then by last night I'm ready for the game to be played. So I'll be honest, I mean we're tracking a bunch of things. I mean you've got the game, the two teams in the game, you've got the commissioner having his news conference on Tuesday telling you one thing and then you've got the PA having theirs and telling you another about, we talk about revenue sharing and the players association are saying they haven't got the numbers from the league yet for 2022. They filed the grievance to get those numbers so that you can actually start figuring out the revenue sharing formula. And then you've got the injury situation in BC with Dalton Schone and Adam Big Hill, which you start following Tuesday and you got to check every day and now they're game time decisions. So we'll be checking at 5 55 tomorrow night right before the game. So myriad of things, but hey, it's great cup week, it's a blast. And you know what? I wouldn't have it any other way. Revenue share. Walk us through a little bit more of that. We haven't touched on this as much Yet. It was something that was collectively bargained in the last CBA and so that was two years ago and there was a formula in place by where the league would tell you this is what we took in and the PA would verify it and there would be a formula where they could share some of that revenue with the players. At the time of the CBA signing, it was the first time that the two sides had agreed to revenue share. So you sort of assume that, okay, well that's a good thing. And then this year commissioner arose talked about all the positives going on. You've got an increased in attendance in Toronto, you've got the Montreal Ettes here after uncertainty with their franchise, you've got continued growth in bc. So the economics part of it look good and then all of a sudden you go into the of the union and they go, yeah, we haven't got our numbers from the league from 2022. We've had to file a grievance to get them. We want to get the numbers because we want to check them and verify. And so you begin to think that, okay, well things maybe aren't as rosy as we're led to believe, so excuse me. So there's that and I was surprised. I was quite surprised, but one of many things happening this week, Jason, I thought your eyes go Up. Oh, just, yeah, I can't believe that the CFL hasn't even gotten the numbers to them for the 2022 season yet. So yeah, that whole fact just fall With my mind. Me took me for a loop obviously. So what's the timeline of that? When are we going to find out with the grievance? That's a really good question. If they filed a grievance, then it has to go to an arbitrator. Then you've got to get that all taken care of. So I mean that takes a bit of time. Arbitration can be quick, arbitration can be tedious. That's something we'll keep our eye on moving forward. I asked the same question to you I did with Farhan and Nailor about Chad Kelly and all of this Toronto and thoughts, and then we'll get Evan comments. Okay. Do I think he had had trauma? Yes, until he Unequivocably said that he had been suffered a concussion or diagnosed with a concussion. I'm a little skeptical because the story that went out there initially, the word concussion was in the headline, the word concussion was in a bracket in a quote, and that's the only attribution to it. So I don't know, I'm not a hundred percent sure that there was a concussion levied. I'm a little perplexed that if he did suffer something that he didn't let the medical staff or his coaches know, and if he did suffer it, I'm not sure it had any bearing on the first pick six he threw because it was in the first quarter, but he was off. There was no if and or buts, but I'm not a doctor. But I felt a little surprised when that came out because it brought the league into question. It brought the medical staff of the Argos into question and I don't know, I didn't see anything. I was at the game. I didn't see any hit that he was particularly woozy or had difficulty getting off the field. But like I said, I'm not a doctor. Evan, I won't make you a comment on the concussion part, but does it take away, it feels like it takes place. Some of the Montreal win here of like, well, Chad was so banged up or I mean, you know what I mean, now they're here in the gray cup and like, well maybe you didn't be this as true an opponent. I don't know. Well, I just think it goes two ways because on the one end, if Chad really did have a concussion that looks bad on the team and the medical staff and all that, but if he didn't have a concussion, it's a very interesting scapegoat to use for what was just an outright poor performance. I see both sides to it rather. Does it take away from the Montreal win? I don't know. I mean I was focused on Montreal that whole game. It got to a point even a half where it was only I think ten three. I just had a really good feeling with the way Montreal was playing in their defense led by Noel Thorpe. I thought that they were going to pull that one out even if it was a one score game. So I don't know mean, at least for me, it doesn't take away too much from it, but that situation is, yeah, it's certainly one that I did not expect to be hearing about for so long. Dan, are you surprised? And we had conversations all season. It was ever since Toronto and Rest First Rust and all this stuff and then they really did just come in and crap the bat, for lack of a better word. I mean, are you surprised of all this? I was Very, I mean I thought Toronto was going win and I thought if the game was going to get out of hand, it was going to be the other way. I didn't see nine turnovers coming. You're talking about a team that turned the ball over 27 times the entire year and a third of that comes in one playoff game, 26,000 at home. If you're going to pick a time to play your worst game of the year, that's not it. I really thought, I thought Montreal did a nice job defensively against Hamilton and not allowing a touchdown, but I also thought you were talking about two different offenses and Toronto's defense, seven Sacks and they did their part, but you're not going to win a game when you turn the ball over nine times. So while there's question about was Kelly right? Was he on his game? Hell, nine turnovers. That to me is dominant. Whether Chad was on or off, I mean it was dominant. Tim Cappers messaging, they're running into traffic. Our next guest, we'll get a couple more with Dan and then maybe we'll get at Dorothy in here and you can go do your other work here. I appreciate it. In terms of the ettes here, what do you make, I guess, of the game itself in terms of, we've heard low scoring the defensive and they're going to get killed and everything else. What do you make of the actual game? I think it's close. I really do. I just think that Winnipeg is very balanced and I mean they've got the quarterback who I think is the most proven and is the most battle-tested quarterback in the CFL and he's at this game for the fourth time in a row. He's won it. He's been the MVP, but I think they're balanced. I mean, Grady Oliveira ran for over a hundred yards both times against Montreal this year. They like to establish the run, they're dedicated to the run and if they get the run going, I think that makes Zach even more dangerous. There's some questions about whether or not Dalton Schone will play. He's a big part of their pass offense, but he's not the only part. And if I had Kenny Lawler as my number two receiver, I'd be pretty good. So I think they're good offensively. I think they're multifaceted and that defense, I mean that defense is better than Toronto's on paper and Toronto, in my mind, their defense controlled Montreal's offense. So if Winnipeg doesn't turn the ball over and there's no indication that they will, then I think they win by seven. I think it's close, but I'd still go with the team that's been here for the fourth time. I have another question about the Toronto stuff, but Jason, in terms of that, just in terms of the pedigree of Winnipeg, does that do anything for you? And we'll get Evan's thoughts also In terms of the Ability to win? Yeah, hold your mic up just a little bit there in terms the pedigree. I think so. I think that you look at the other side of Montreal, they don't have a lot of experience in that regard. Obviously none of these guys were around the last time they made it back to the Great Cup and in 2010. But yeah, I think Winnipeg just has so much experience. Like Dan said, they're just such a well, well-balanced team. I think that Montreal, it just comes down to it. I don't think they have the explosiveness. If this turns into kind of a shootout, higher scoring game, which I don't think it will be. I think it'll be a lower scoring game. I think the two, number one and number two scoring defenses in the CFL this season. But I think at the end of the day, Winnipeg's experience will play a big role. Oh, absolutely. I mean look, this team's been in the Great Cup since 2019. I understand there wasn't a season in 2020, but it's still four straight. Like I was saying earlier, the only thing that'll be really interesting is if the outlook of Winnipeg from here on out in the future could be very different depending on whether or not they win this game. Because a lot of those guys on that team, and again, I don't want to be repetitive, but since we've got a new guest, I'm going to bring it up again. A lot of guys on that team are getting older and I don't want to say this is the end of anything, but they lost a very close game last year. Very tough. When you work your entire season to get to that point, you lose by one very tough. I mean it's a good game for us on the entertainment side. Really enjoyed watching that. But if they lose this game, it's a bit different because Montreal, no one expected them to be here and they don't have, again, that pedigree that we're talking about. They don't have that experience. It really is. Two, the only guy on Montreal that I can think of that really is a well not true veteran leader, but Christian, Matt. Yeah, hopefully I'm saying his name right. I always butcher these pronunciations even if they're simple, but he's really the only guy that's been there in that spot for so many years and we will see what happens. But yeah, I mean Winnipeg's experience, I think that's a no brainer when it comes to their odds in terms of winning this game. The one thing I wanted to add too, win or lose, we're going to be watching the bombers in December because their GM and their two assistant GMs are in the last years of contracts and neither of those three have resigned for 2024. And there's some question about whether they can keep one, two or all three. And Kyle Walters, the GMs, the architect of this team, his fingerprints are all over it and I'm really, really surprised he's not under contract for next year. But you know what, to your point, if they lose and all of a sudden they're two and two in this thing, in this realm of four and they lose their GM in the off season and they're a year older and maybe guys start to see that this is starting to maybe unravel a little bit, they start taking the money to go to other teams and get the opportunity rather than coming back and playing for five if they don't win. Well, Jason, you've done a lot of videos about, and I know you had the one talking about the dynasties and the Toronto and all that, but where do you view that the legacy, if there are two and two? Well, there's a lot of teams in the last 20 years, the CFL that have won two championships. Not many teams have won three in, I guess the Ettes won one 2002 and then won back to back 2009, 2010. But there was such a gap between those two teams that those championships that I wouldn't really consider that kind of the same team. I guess he still had Calvio and Brian Chu on that team. But yeah, it was kind of a different team. But in terms of winning three gray cups in a five-year period, it hasn't been done since Edmonton in the 1980s and late 1970s and before that, Hamilton in the sixties and Winnipeg in the fifties and early sixties. So it's some teams have gotten close Calgary in the 2010s. They had what, four great cups in a row or three Great Cup appearances in a row, and they got upset in a couple of them. So we've seen some massive upsets in this game. So nothing would just surprise me with this game on Sunday. Dan, another question for you. I joked in the thing during the Toronto loss, we saw the biggest attendance ever at BMO field told they lay an egg and now we've killed another generation of Toronto or CFL fans. But how do you view, with the success that they've had now, and obviously not dynasty like Winnipeg yet, but the success found, is the table, the pendulum swinging I guess in Toronto or I mean, what do you view? Well, that's a really good question. I think if they come back next year, I mean they were 16 and two this year, but let's not forget this is the third straight year that they've finished first in the East, so the third straight year that they've hosted the east finals. So they've sort of set some expectation of winning there. If they come back next year and put a good season together, they better go and finish the deal because I mean, 16 and two is as dominant as you can be in CFL, but it means nothing given what happened. So if they go four straight into the finish first in the east and they should, and if they host the East final again, and they should, and heaven forbid if they get back into the Gray Cup again and win it, then we can start talking about that they've turned the corner. Right. But right now, I mean it's nice. It's a nice feel good story, but invariably we're always saying, but right, so I think they have to go next year and build on that. I mean, you're not going to go 1701, but win the gray cup and then we'll start talking about that. They avenge that the same scenario next year if they get in and win. We talked to Brady, Oliver and the bombers again this year about being one point short and how that had a motivating factor in their off season because we'd be talking about a team that could win four straight and so to me, three straight in four years, I'm not ready to call it a dynasty. Four straight in four years. Yeah. Then you're forced to. I got one last question, Tim and Cliff here getting set up here. We'll get 'em on and maybe Jason can stay in Evan Hub. I forgot we had two person guests on here. Last question for you. With Toronto, we made all this and resting on their laurels or resting players, all that, were they prepared enough going into the East Final? Did you view that the Chad Kelly aside, I mean the team as a whole, I did not think they were rusty. I did not think there was. I thought that Coach Dinwoody did a very, very good job of not only managing his team after they clinched the East Division in mid-September, but he also had them, they had a winning record from that point on, and I think they were in every game except for the one against Winnipeg. And even then they only lost by 10 and they were leading in the second half. So I did not think that there was any ring rust. I did not think that they benefited negatively about having clinched the East so far so early. No, I thought they went into the final in good shape. They played 10 straight weeks. They needed a week off. They got that. You would've thought they would've been rested, you would've thought they'd have been rejuvenated. They just ran into a buzz saw and you know what? It was Chad's first playoff game and maybe he'll learn something from it. There wasn't a game this year that he was pressured. Was pressured last weekend. It's for the first time this year. I really thought I saw a guy who was a little shell-shocked. Alright, well thank you Dan. I appreciate it. It's good seeing you as always. There we go. Thank you for sitting around. Appreciate it. We'll bring in Tim and Cliffy. Jason, you stick around. Evan, maybe you can give Cliffy the mic. You, Jason, you stick around and we'll bring them in here. Come on guys. We got our guests and then we got Baker standing by. We'll talk that coming out at the end. Appreciate it. Moving. Cheers here. Cliffy. How are you doing sir? Get in here Tim. Get in here. Tim, you can take that one. Cliffy you and I'll share here. How are you guys doing? I mean I've seen Cliffy in person before unless I forget. I don't think we've ever, you got to be on top of the world right now. How are you guys feeling? This is incredible. I mean the vibe here this week has been nothing short of electric. You get a chance to spend some time with the players, the coaches, everything like that. Doing media stuff with them has been an absolute blast. It's been exciting. I mean all of Valley West Nation is excited for this game. It's been incredible And you guys have been working your tail off. I see you posting all the post-game interviews, going to practice Tim, and obviously you've covered stuff forever. I mean you're not new to, but it's got to be exciting here knowing it's your guys' team here. I mean I couldn't imagine if the lions were here on the other side, Right? Oh no, no, that's for sure. I think it's giving us a very unique opportunity where we can cover the owls the way that we want to cover the owls. I mean, yeah, it's true. If it were the BC Lions or somebody else, it's truly, I mean we still put the effort into the effort into it so to speak, but no, no, it's just fun. I mean just seeing the players today, even though it was just a walkthrough, just the fun that they were having and the pictures that they were taking, I don't know how many of those pictures will be seen by everybody out there, but I mean it was just so much fun. What did you think on a scale of one to 10 that the ettes, we'd be here right now, what was your confidence level at the beginning of the season? Confidence level at the beginning of the season, I'm very much a wait and see kind of type. So I mean I know a lot of people, it was all doom and gloom and this team was going to be 10th at ranked out of a 19 league. How bad they were going to be. But listen, let's see what happens. New ownership, new head coach, a lot of new players. I mean you just never know. You got to play the games and that's exactly what the litz did. It was a couple little rough patches here and there, but this team by and large got galvanized, especially once they're adding key pieces like Sean Lemon, Darnell Sanky, those are major, major game changers and the play of those guys has really put this team on another level. So I mean I'm blown away just how well this team has come together and how pretty much this entire season has galvanized them. Now be honest, how confident Were you? Well, with all honesty, cliff and I were talking about this a few episodes ago. We rarely try to make predictions on the pod, but we honestly said that the owls at best we felt could make it a 99 season. We really did. But then especially coming off this off season that we had ownership issues. Not being able to sign free agents and stuff like that mean you can only be as so much of a homeowner as you can for your home team, but you got to look at it in the right way. We weren't sure, so a very pleasant surprise and as I said, the owls were able to get some pieces that I think was said today that really completed the puzzle so to speak, but obviously we'll see what happens tomorrow. I saw because I don't do a lot of the other media stuff because we're hanging out, but I saw, like you were saying, the OW outlets walkthrough and Moss was doing press today and doing press all week. I've been very impressed with him. I had my beanie on over my ball cap during the, because I watched that whole game. I was transfixed that entire East Final on CFL plus. What is his mindset right now and how does he feel going into this because it's got to to be exciting for him. I think initially there was a lot of gratitude, just the feeling that okay, we are glad to be here, but I think that's been gone. I think now it's a matter of like, yes, we deserve to be here. We are focused. This is what we want to do, this is what we meant to do. And you talk about even just starting a training camp, that was the focus was they talk about it called the Great Eight as if they're trying to go for their eighth Great Cup championship. So it's a matter of just go do your job, be great, and this is a result Now we're less than 24 hours away from the Great Cup being played and the Montreal allots are in it and nobody saw this coming. I mean we had an inkling, okay, this team's going to do well, this team, there's a potential here. They just got to do the work. Guess what? They did the work and they shocked a lot of people and I think Jason Moss has to be as focused and as internalized as he's been over the past couple of weeks inside he's got to be like, hell yeah, this is exactly what I said was going to happen and it's come to fruition. I think also that we noticed today too is that he was trying to take a lot of the emphasis off of him today in the Postgame post practice media scrum. He's trying to make sure that get it across that it's one team. One team made it this far. One team will continue. He even said, I mean he's technically, he's going out for, he's going to go out and be the head coach for 60 full minutes or as he said, or forever how long it takes to finish the game. I mean he was just talking about when it comes to the culture, he's there for the culture of Quebec, for the Quebecers, for all of the province, for the 5 1 4. It's just so much emphasis and he's just showing so much gratitude not only to the organization but to the city itself. I'll get you, do You have a question now or I got a question? Yeah. First of all, big fan of the podcast guys, like the work you guys do over there. I was going to ask, what is the formula for Montreal Ettes Win tomorrow? Defense say that would help if I did my job. I'm listening defense. I mean the defense has to play the exact same game they played last week where they just basically punched Chad Kelly and the Argos in the mouth and did it again and again and again. I think you're going to have to do that. You're going to have to contain Brady, olive, olive, there's no question about that. This guy is an absolute beast, but they were able to contain AJ Ette for the most part. So why couldn't you do that to Brady Oliveira? You got to get into Zach Clare's cage, you got to rattle him. He is been stunned before. Let's not forget the ELs at one point LED 22, nothing earlier this season over the blue bombers. So there's definitely a lot that can go down and I think this Ettes team, if they could stay focused, if Cody Fudo doesn't try to be the hero too much and he just does the right things, I hate using the term game manager, but sometimes you can game manage your way to things. Now can you game manage your way to a great cup? I highly doubt it. But if Cody just stays as we've called them, consistently consistent, Cody and this defense plays its tears on fire, I think Montreal could definitely make this a game and come out with a win. I think for me too, it is looking at there were some improvements that needed to be done with Cody leading the team in rushing last week. I don't see the team making a game of it, but I get stanback involved, ant involved if those guys get going. We've seen what William Stanback can do, especially last year versus Toronto. He's fully healthy this year. Who knows, man. I mean, as I said, just a matter of just getting the running game going to and as Cliff and I have been saying all year, even though Coach Moss has had a history of going away from it, I don't think there's going to be any worry of that this year and on Sunday, Dorothy's tracking down Baker here, our last guest and then she'll hop on. Before we get out, I got a question. We've had a lot of debate about people saying Cody Fido isn't a number one quarterback, right, and he's fine replacement level. How do you view him now and obviously you guys were excited to get him in the off season. I know we talked about that, but what have you made of him and is he going to help elevate them going into the Great Cup? I think he realizes what he has in front of him. He's already won a great cup when he was a member of the Argos, but this is his first chance to lead a team in the Great Cup. I think even talking with him earlier today, he realizes this moment and it's something that he's been looking forward to for years and something that he's ready for and quite frankly it's going to be exciting to see what he can do because I think he realizes how important this moment is and he's ready for it. This is something that he's been working towards for a long time. There's the redemption level of things when it comes to his time in Saskatchewan and I don't think it's necessarily about so much proving them wrong as it's proving himself as far as I can do this. I can lead this team to the promise plan. So I expect Cody to be able to go out and do that. He doesn't have to be the hero, he just has to play the game that we expect him to, and I truly think with him under center, good things are going to happen for this Montreal team. He wants to be one of the misfit toys. That's one of the things he keeps on saying. They're all misfit toys based off of what everybody thought they weren't going to do this year. So I mean I think I said Cliff just mentioned consistently consistent. Cody, as long as he is that I think the owls will be fine. Final thoughts from you? Anything else you want to share? We got Matt ready to come on. Anything else you want to talk about? Well, like I say, it's been an exciting week here at Gray Cup. I know Ettes Nation is excited about the Allo West. I feel like the rest of Canada too. Everybody outside of Winnipeg apparently is pulling for the ettes, which is pretty cool, especially since, like I said, everybody had talked about all this team's going to be garbage, they got no hope, blah, blah, blah. All that noise that's clearly in the past, just like what Thews did this season, it's clearly in the past. Right now, all that matters is what happens tomorrow and I think this team is really going to shock a lot of people. I'm not guaranteeing a win by any stretch, but I think this game is going to be very competitive, very entertaining, and I truly think Montreal can get the job done. Yeah, no, I said it's going to be a very interesting game. I'm not into predictions either, but I think it's going to be a fun game. I really do. Who knows what can set off either of these two teams tomorrow because if it starts off with another qua, pick six, who knows? Well, and you got boy James Letcher Jr now here, right? Superstar of the postseason. I will say I think there's a very strong, whether it's pro Montreal or anti Winnipeg, I mean I think that there was a lot of people that wanted to see Montreal win this for a myriad of reasons. I think that's exciting. Oh definitely and that's incredible. I mean it's so funny, the last time Yitz were in the Great Cup was 2010 and it was I'd say seven to one rider fans versus Alouettes fans in attendance. And once again, Montreal just had to play their game. They knew that they could beat Saskatchewan and they went out and did it. It was a lot more competitive, a lot more exciting, but that was 13 years ago now this is a new team, a new era. This is a whole lot of new stuff that really truly nobody saw coming and it's going to be exciting. I said I can't help but be just a little bit excited. I know we're less than 24 hours away from kickoff. This is going to be an absolute gem of a game Win loser draw And how to finish off their potential first season for our new owner. I mean, pier car must be Nice. Must be nice. Yeah, for Pier Car Pedo. I mean I can only imagine what he's feeling right now, so I mean if he's feeling as much as we are in Allic Nation, it's hype. Just going to be so much hype tomorrow. Well Bone Chance, thank you both for coming and I appreciate it. We'll get Matt Baker in here last one. Dorothy Baker before we get out of here. Thank you guys so much. Appreciate it, man. Yes sir. Good to see you, man. See. All right, let's get in. Matt Baker, the man that maybe we'll get Evan back in. Evan can hop in. We'll do the musical chairs one last time here. We killed him with the mic cables, the man that made this all possible here. Matt, get over here. That's in the hot seat. Get over here Matt. We're here at the Lion Center first up. There we go. Jacob, thank you so much for setting all this up. Yeah, I was going to say I got you this nice location. The least I could do is get a prime seat, so this is awesome. That's good. I like your gray cup scarf for next year. I assume one of these is coming to Mark cast direction I assume, right? Yeah, I am going to have to talk to the person who handles the merchandise and I might have to put in a special request, but yeah, we can maybe find 'em for you. Yeah, for those watching a big part of my role this week if I did my job and help Mike. Yeah, a big part of my role this week, now that we're not in the game, I'm sure we'll talk about that, is Vancouver 2024. We had a cool little launch in the Lion's den here last night. Commissioner Ambros was here and those watching supporters of this podcast, supporters of this league get to Vancouver next year. It's going to be a party. Evan, what are you expecting next year? BC Grub? No, I mean I think it's tremendous. Part of my family is obviously from Vancouver on my mom's side. Great city, spent a lot of time there BC place being a fantastic venue in the Canadian Football League. I think it's going to be a really fun time. Obviously this is my first great cup so it's been so far, but next Drug kind of get to weigh against this one and hopefully more in the future. But yeah, ultimately I think it's going to be fun. Jason Amar's got a lot of Hamilton's sound good here, but Amar's got a lot to live up to. Well you look what They've done with the kickoff concerts for the home openers, all the tailgate parties, so I'm really excited to see what they put together for next Year. Yeah, Matt, we see what Amar does on a normal Saturday game or normal, but what do we have expectation levels going into next year? Yeah, I mean I don't really have anything to say other than that. I expect something special. I expect them to try to knock it out of the park. I mean talking here, yeah, precedent set with LL Cool J one Republic Home opener concerts. By all accounts, that's going to be an annual thing, so you see Green Day and Carrie Underwood and given Ammar Dolmans connections and his experience with landing some big ticket guests so to speak, I have to think I'd expect something pretty good. Halftime weekend performances zero insight info at all, but I'm just expecting it to be topped. If people have asked me all day, I keep forgetting to tell you what's Green Day's first song predictions for, we'll go around here first on Green Day plays tomorrow. I didn't think Dan Ralph's getting into the green base set list debate, but what do you want Green Day to play? Well, my prediction, someone else asked me this, I think holiday starts it off. It just seems like a natural, I want basket case. That's what I want first, but I figured they play American Idiot just because they like hey and just make a Canadian idiot for this occasion. Yeah, Yeah, I agree with Matt. I think it's going to be a holiday that opens up, but I do think they're going to play American idiot. It's too perfect not to Evan. Yeah, I'd agree. I mean I'm no Green Day superfan, so some of that might be above my pay grade, but no, I think that's a good choice, Matt, in a different world, this is a different Gray Cup team festival here with a BC N, what did you make of the season and thoughts now that we spend, I mean obviously we're still in whatever but post more than from the finals. Yeah, very good season that just had a bad ending. That's simple as that. I mean considering all the questions, remember we were talking at the start of the season and the question from a lot of your guests that you've had on today already, how are they going to replace Nathan Rourke? How are they going to overcome that? Well, I think it's safe to say the quarterback position is of no concern. I mean I know if we're in Adams, Jr didn't have his best game last week, but he was obviously a little banged up different environment outside. I know I try to downplay it, but the cold weather, the noise that plays a role for a team that does its best damage inside on a faster track, but I think the pieces are in place of hey, there's always going to be change. But talking to Neil McAvoy on our podcast today inside here first and now it's clear they've prioritized a list of potential guys that they have to get resigned. Matthew Betts is one of those. But yeah, exciting season, had some exciting moments, some great individual performances, but at the end of the day it was Billy Bean and Moneyball who said if you lose your last game of the season, nobody gives a, you know what, I'm not going to go that extreme, but I think with time people will realize it was another special year, but have to get over that hump. No, yeah, we had talked and Vernon and it is of any issue that could have been an issue all season amazing that Vernon was not that. Talk about bets taking home some hardware here. How's exciting Was that for him? Yeah, very well, very well earned and was up against some good competition in a Darius picket as well. Keep in mind when you have a team like Toronto 16 and two, a lot of times those guys clean up the awards and yeah, they got their fair share, Chad Kelly, MOP, much to the chagrin of some of those Winnipeg guys, but it is what it is. But yeah, great player, even better person. And it's funny, he was downplaying it when we kept asking about it on pace to break that sack record, but that's a special accomplishment and for that he should be commended and that's the type of guy dating back to, and I remember him going through the combine and the draft process third overall pick, I think it was in 2019, but remember what happened with Edmonton coaching change? They prioritized different guys and right from the moment he got here, he was a player we knew had a high motor. That's a saying. You hear about him and yeah, he's become a cornerstone. Jason, any questions? Well, just to build off the point of thats I think that a couple of years ago, I mean he have zero sack with that zero sack with Edmonton and a starting role, so he kind of got written off a bit and then he got a big contract in free agency and he's more than limped up to it. It's crazy if I were to sit there a couple years ago and see where his career has gone and very highly teed guy coming out of the CFL draft, second overall pick, I do believe so. Yeah, I'm just really impressed with what he's done in his career. Evan Post more than thoughts on BC and then we'll get back to Matt. Well, I'm going to stand by this statement. I think BC was the most fun football team to watch in the CFL this year, especially offensively. I think with Vernon, the way he was able to distribute the ball, I've been talking about that all season. I think the amount of weapons that they had, it'll be interesting to see in the off season how the front offices manages bringing back some of those guys. But ultimately I think this was an incredibly fun team to watch. It's a shame that they ended up losing to the same team in the same position in the playoffs being in Winnipeg and having all that. But we can't change that. We can only look at what's happened and obviously I'm biased like BC that there's a connection there for me. But yeah, I mean this team was great and there's a lot to build off of. Again, I know it was already brought up, but yeah, the biggest question I think more than anything was how do you replace Nathan Rourke and they hats off again to Beast's front office for not only bringing in Vernon Adams but bringing them in. When they did, they traded for him at the end that 22 season and that's paid dividends for him. That looks like another franchise quarterback. And the thing about Vernon is he's found a home there. He played well. He's got Washington ties, so he's found a home there. He's not going to pack up and leave like Rourke did to the NFL, which is fine. We're not going to get into that. Well, Just to sort of follow up on the geographical aspect of it, I mean I know you saw it. Kudos to Nick Kowalski and Liam Thompson or video guys. They chronicled this in the off season. Vernon had basically all the receivers and all the dbs, the skill guys. He hosted them down in Tacoma, Washington for a little bit of a sort of an impromptu mini camp. He did the same thing when he was in Montreal. He flew out a bunch of Allos and he called it Lion. Lion Kings was the name of it. So he's all in with this franchise. I mean he understands the importance of a starting quarterback on the field, but off the field too, you have to be an ambassador. You have to sell the game. And he's done a great job of all that his teammates have bought in really, and it wasn't an easy situation coming in, right. Nathan Rourke doing what he was doing goes down with the injury. Yeah, nothing but good things to say about him. Evan, anything else on that? I don't think so. Matt, Rodney and I here the conversation, we're going to bring Dorothy in here and then we're going to put this show to bed. Final thoughts here. Gray Cup this year. Looking forward to next year. Anything else you want to share about this game specifically? I'm intrigued by it. I mean, it is an intriguing thing when you have a situation like the Allos getting better. And I know the knock on Montreal was, oh, they can't beat the good teams, but they just made a major statement. Say what you want. Did the Argos maybe contribute to their demise? Possibly, but I'm intrigued for this tomorrow. I have a feeling the blue bombers, that whole motivation thing for them, they knew they let one slip last year. I think Winnipeg wins it, but it's going to come down to the three minute warning. But hey, I would not be surprised if Montreal shocked the world, but I'm excited to see this, see if that AOE defense, what they can do against Brady Oliveira in that Winnipeg attack. Well Matt, I appreciate it. Like I said, thanks again giving us a good spot here, the Lion Center. I appreciate it. Made our life easy, so I appreciate it, sir. Well, yeah, third time's the charm. Remember two years ago we were trying to figure out the George Hamilton Pub across the street. There was no internet. It was all like rotary phones. It was really bad. And last year, casino, Regina, okay, not bad. It was good, but lion's dead. Let's make this the new tradition then. Yeah, Carolyn said, I have a home here anytime, so she's already promised that, so I appreciate it. Your castle is our castle or whatever the seeing is. Awesome. Appreciate it, Matt. Thank you. Let's getting Dorothy here real quick before the end and then we'll put this show to bed. Matt, see if you can get my wife over there, guys, winding down here. We're getting about the two hour mark. How are we doing? Doing good. I mean longer show than what we usually do, but this is a lot of Fun. A lot of the moving pieces here. Dorothy, you've been chatting. What's the sideline report? Yeah, people are excited. I met some Lions fans and they're having a good time. So they had an interesting stat. They said whenever the Canucks lose, then that means that the lions win the gray cup. Apparently. It's like, Okay, I don't know. Well, the Canucks are playing the Kraken tonight, so I hope they lose tonight. They were banking on them losing. So yeah. What have you made of Hamilton so far? Jason's wonderful home city. Yes, I think it's awesome. We went out last night with Jason and had a beer at that Merit brewing, which was really fun. And yeah, it's been awesome. It's kind of fun to be back in a city that we were at two years ago, so we know some of the same old Johnsons places that we've been, so yeah, and I got some recommends from Alex about places to go. I guess the Something Park, it's by the Beach Boardwalk Park or something anyway, and there's a brewery there, so yeah, it's good If they're a gray cup here. Your team have yet to watch a Gray Cup without the Winnipeg in there. Are you excited to see them? Are you hoping for the Cody fja, the redemption story here? Wow. Nope. Nope. It's not delivery. No, I'm kidding. No, I am definitely go Winnipeg and everything, so yeah, I'm excited. I'm just excited to see the game and yeah, it's going to be good. It's not as cold as last year. Regina was freezing and snowing and it's been beautiful. Are you excited for Green Day? Yes, I'm very excited for Green Day. Yeah, we just bought much more expensive tickets to see Green Day in Seattle here next year, so certainly cheaper here. Yes, yes, that's true. Green Day and Weezer. Well, we'll wind it down here. Jason, anything else from you? And I'll give Evan last year. We'll get out of here. We got a band starting Evan here, so it might be a good time to get out of here. Anyway, yeah, Nothing much for me. Just a great show today and really looking forward to the game tomorrow. Yeah, James here, great, great list of guests. Mark has better than to us and I appreciate it. I appreciate everyone watching live today. I know we'll get viewers tomorrow and stuff as well. I appreciate it, Evan, thoughts from you? I mean, yeah, a lot of great guests, a lot of great opinions, very interesting to see. Everyone's takes, not everybody's on the same page, even in the league where there's only nine teams and there's only so many players in awards and things of that nature. But that's what makes the CFL great. It's unique and I'm sure we'll see that on display tomorrow with the actual Great Cup. If you guys are watching this, give it a thumbs up. Like I said, ton of work. Dorothy managing the guests and Jason's spending the time. Evan coming up and Evan had missed flights and sat at the Houston airport and then flew overnight to come up. A lot goes Into, don't get me Started. I saw comments and talking about obviously TSN and all that, but this is a lot of work coming in and this is unpaid labor and I just appreciate everyone watching it and all the guests obviously, and Farhan and Tim and Cliffy there, still here talking to Dan, Ralph and everyone else. So like I said, make sure you like and subscribe. I'll play this year. We're going to go, I'll probably go take a shower here and then we'll get out of here and go party in Hamilton tonight. But I appreciate everyone's time and we'll see you next time. Go or is that where we're sitting? Here? Go Winnipeg. Go Winnipeg. I just want a good game. Yeah, I'm in the same boat. I'm not going to get too controversial. All right, thanks guys. We'll see you next time.

LIVE CFL 2023 Grey Cup Playoffs Results/Recap Show + CFL 2023 Grey Cup Preview!!!

Well here we are. Happy Markcast Monday later in the day here. Getting ready, coming off of the Gray Cup playoffs. Getting ready for the Gray Cup here this weekend. Reed, here we got Evan. Jason's resetting his router having a little bit of just potato. We webcam. We'll get it figured out. We'll make our big announcement about our show here coming up. I had told Evan, I said, if the BC Lions make it to the gray cup, well I was going to drink mimosas because we were going to do this earlier in the day, then I was going to drink a shiner. None of that happened. So we're here. I got a Zicam in my mouth right now fighting off a cold eye. Evan, how are you? I'm doing well. Yeah, lots to talk about from this weekend. Very interesting matchup that we'll be, I guess participating in, well not playing in obviously, but being around next weekend. Very interesting. Not a scenario that I predicted to say the least. I know and I want to get people's opinions on this. Leave your comments, whatever. Certainly not the sexiest matchup here. We have Montreal going into Winnipeg. Obviously Montreal looked really good against Argos. We'll talk through all that. To me that's exciting. I love Cody and friend of the show and we've had a lot of the Ettes guys on over the years and I'll tell you even just to drop a name here, I really enjoy that DMing with Gary Stern about Danny and all the work the ettes were doing here Sunday morning while I was watching Mac Jones. So very Chad Kelly, like interceptions in Germany, so that was fun getting Gary Slots. Gary's excited for all of this, so we're doing good. Jason, how are you? I'm doing good, Reid. Thanks for having me as always and looking forward to the live show on Saturday. Yeah, so we're getting a lot of questions about that. So this is all confirmed now getting it all in would've been better under different circumstances, but Saturday in Hamilton we are going to be live at the BC Lions Lions den as part of all the team headquarters and all of that stuff. It's at the convention center. You do need a ticket for that, but it's like whatever Canadian, I think it's like 30 bucks but we're going to be there. Baker, Matt, baker and Jordan getting all that set up. They said we're going to be in the high traffic area. I'm getting a banner printed out here, so we're going to be live three to five local times, so feel free to come by, say hi. I guess I'm going to have a sign already getting guests. Guests lined up. All the emails have been sent, but we have confirms Dan Ralph's going to be on the show. Ted Wyman's going to be on the show. The guys from the Alphabet Flight Deck podcast, I'll post an official list. Matt Baker, of course you want Jamie Nye, we got him. Darryll Davis is going to be on and then of course Naer and Farhan as well. They normally do a tag team whenever they can come in, but should be fun. It'll be Evan, Jason and I and then kind of a rotating cast. Jason, what do you make of that? We were going to do the anchor bar. I think this is good team headquarters, get a lot more of the CFL people and like I said, I'm getting a little sign printed. That'll be fancy. Yeah, I think it'll be better this way. I think that we'll for sure have some traffic going through that area and whatnot, so I think it'll be good. Evan, are you excited? First taste here of the Canadian Hamilton live here for Great Cup Weekend? Oh absolutely. I think we're going to have a great time, So that'll be good. Yeah, so we post it Saturday, we go live Saturday at three. That way you can watch it Saturday, you can watch it Sunday morning kind of all the way up through and then usually knock on will we kind of get a good boost when people are looking for the gray cup and something to watch for that. So live Saturday, easier to do just obviously with all the different locations coordinated with all of that, reporters are done, team practices and all that kind of stuff. So that Saturday evening's kind of a good dead period do that and then we'll be hanging out Sunday and then I just seeing the game Sunday, so I don't like to do all the other, you got the Ted, the lineman's of the world running around trying to do post-game interviews. I like being able just to hang out, have a beer and kind of watch that. So yeah, James says, great list of guests. I'm waiting to hear back, but presumably Darren Balian is going to be on. I think Tim Bains is going to get back to me, so we'll be good. It should be about 10 guests or so. We'll roll for two hours, 10, 15 minutes of guest and then we'll ask questions and do everything else. But yeah, come by because we got a baker and everyone, they're putting a lot of work in here getting us set up in their area, so let's make sure we get some Maras people coming out. Jason, I don't know if this is the gray cup that we wanted or dessert, but this is the gray cup that we want or that we're getting here. Montreal in Winnipeg. Initial thoughts because this the first time ever, 110 years we've ever had Winnipeg in Montreal. Yeah, I think a lot of that is due to Winnipeg being in the east for a lot of its recent history, at least when Montreal was good in the two thousands. So I think that explains why we haven't seen this matchup in the Great Cup before. And like you said, I think it's a totally unexpected matchup. I thought that Toronto was going to roll on Saturday. Unfortunately for my prediction it didn't happen, but I'm happy for the fans in Montreal that they get to see their team in the Great Cup for the first time since 2010. It's been a while. Yeah, Evan, we were talking obviously all throughout the group chat, lively group chat on Saturday, but here we got Andrew Murray, I'm sure he is going to watch this year. He is like, I'm out. Montreal is boring. I don't care about that. I've had a lot of the guys on the show here this year, especially this year, but the last couple, and Cody, what do you make of this? I think we all expected Winnipeg with the Toronto things. That certainly threw us for a loop here. Well look, it's certainly interesting, right? I said at the top of the show it's not something that we predicted to happen. Definitely not. I mean I could have gone through several other scenarios in regards of gray cut matchups at the beginning of the season and I probably wouldn't have landed on Winnipeg, Montreal, despite there only being nine teams in the CFL, right? So it's an interesting matchup to say the least. And I know there's some people like Andrew, obviously some guys might not be excited about it, but I'm remaining optimistic. Obviously we're going to dive into the games from this weekend here, but after seeing Montreal, the way their defense played obviously, and then Winnipeg's offense slowing down a bit against bc. Now obviously Winnipeg was still able to win the game, but I mean these teams are in the Great Cup for a reason. You can't forget about that. Montreal is obviously the wild card here, right? That's going to be the story when we go to Hamilton next week. The team that no one really expected to do anything is here competing for a championship. And then you've got Winnipeg on the other side, which is the experienced group of veterans. Their guys are aging, but they're still going strong. Fourth grade cup in a row going back to 2019. So really a five year stretch even though there wasn't a season in 2020 due to Covid. So definitely two unique ends of the spectrum there. But I'm still excited and I'm still optimistic. And last year a similar situation happened where it was Winnipeg versus Toronto and I remember watching the Gray Cup, your Great Cup show Reed when you were in Regina and I think there were some people on there who were saying, well, Winnipeg's going to blow 'em out. And a lot of people this time around, again, I'm not going to get into too many details here, we're going to save that for next weekend, but you're going to have a lot of people saying the same thing. Oh, Winnipeg will just blow 'em out, but we'll see. Right? I think Jason, I think you were the one that said it, man, it's an interesting league. Some funny things can happen. So again, keeping my eyes out for that. I'm really bullish right now, at least on the Montreal side of it. I get all sides of it and I absolutely get, okay, last year it's these two juggernauts and Toronto barely s it out. And it is kind of like when we did Scene the Rock and then they did Scene the Rock again the following year and the first year, what was it? I guess the Rock won the first year and then he put over Cena the second year. I kind of get that and hey, we're seeing these teams again. Obviously Toronto, I want to get, I'm very excited to get into this. Toronto did not play like a team that wants to be in the Gray Cup. It certainly doesn't feel like, it doesn't feel like Jack Kelly wants to, but I'm excited just having talked with Cody, having him been on the show, Jason Moss, all of that stuff. I've talked a lot with Rod Peterson over the weekend as well. Obviously with him being in the whole Saskatchewan market and here's these guys, they were the total scapegoat sent out kick to the curb, you're the problem, we're going to rebuild this whole thing. Obviously we've chronicled Saskatchewan's problems all season and to see I just could not be more happy for Cody and his wife and baby and their whole family. And obviously there's many, many more players on the team and they all have their individual stories, but having lived through a lot of that with these guys this year, I am excited for that. Winnipeg's been here and we're trying to make oh Calleros four time in a row and this has never been happened. There's a lot of other stories and everyone's getting their flowers on both sides of it, but I just am really proud for all of that. Jason, any other thoughts on the Montreal or Winnipeg of it before we get into the game For Winnipeg? You have a chance to be one of the true CFL dynasties and just before I got on here, I released a video on the history of dynasties since 1958 and the CFL and how few of them there have been. So Winnipeg has a chance to etch their place in history. They had a chance last year. Obviously we're heavily favored against Toronto like Evan said, and they didn't get the job done, so they kind of have a chance to make amends this year. And for Montreal, I mean I'm just really happy. Again, like I said, they have not been in the Great Cup game since 2010. They had such a rough patch after Anthony Calvio retired. I think they missed the playoffs four or five years in a row. So I'm really happy for them from that perspective and the fact that they've gotten so far And obviously would've liked BC to be in this. Obviously we'd like to be at the Lion's den for our live show under different circumstances. Obviously it's going to be exciting. We're promoting Gray Cup next year in Vancouver and we'll be involved in all of that. But I've said on here when BC lost that game at home against Winnipeg, was it October 4th, that night process kind of the end of the BC Alliance season. I mean it's been happy to kind of follow along and obviously everything here through the playoffs, I've kind of resigned myself to that. So even watching the game, the Montreal win was far more exciting for me than kind of anything with bc. And honestly, I'm happy if we can't have the lions in there. I'm happy that Tim and Cliffy and all the work that they put in with the Alwis Flight Tech podcast, I'm really happy that I feel like, okay, we'll die this year so you can live on and they can enjoy that. I mean they've certainly been following this much longer than I have. So we'll start with Evan in terms of this Argonauts loss, and I was talking with Dorothy about this. I am not the longest sports historian in my life and really got into this football stuff with the mark has, but to me this was the biggest egg I've ever seen laid in any sport I've ever followed. The Mariners and the Kraken. I've never seen a bigger just complete falling apart here. Collapse. Evan, is that how you took it and what did you look at the last year of the Argonauts? Definitely, I mean, I will say this, Mike Mitchell obviously who covers the Argos, he predicted that the Allos would win this game, but I don't think anybody predicted it would happen in that fashion where it was a complete domination. Everybody thought that if Montreal had a chance, it would be this close fought battle where somebody wins in the fourth quarter and has that big play. That wasn't the case. I'm sure Argos fans will probably be saying this for a while, but Chad Kelly chose to have his worst game on probably the worst day of the year or the worst time that it could have happened. Rather, I was stunned to say the least, it raises in my head at least it raises some questions about, I think it was 57 days was the number I heard on TSN from the last time that the Argonauts actually played a meaningful game because then they won the east and just after that it became more about the moral victories and obviously they were able to get the 16 wins, which has tied the CFL record. But people were saying the one team that I think had 16 wins before this Toronto team was the 1989 Edmonton, then Eskimos now Elks, but they didn't make it to the Gray Cup either, I don't think, or they lost right along the way. And I really couldn't, I mean as much as you want to, you want cancel out history or whatever and you might not want to think about that. I was very certain that Toronto was going to win this game. I didn't know. It was kind of hard to predict whether it would be by 10 points or by 30 points, but just Toronto was obviously the Winmore complete team on paper. And look, Montreal put up a great performance against Hamilton in the semifinal. I think I talked about that and I said that Montreal did have a chance in this game, but it was a slim chance really, this game, I think more than anything it falls on the shoulders of Chad Kelly because in my opinion, both defenses obviously played very well. Now, Noel Thorpe's unit in Montreal clearly was from that Mark Wan de Quad pick six at the beginning of the game where Toronto because they looked like they had all the momentum. I mean, I don't want to get too carried away or lost here, but really you saw how quick Toronto was moving the ball on their first drive. It was like four plays and they were already down there by the goal line ready to go, and then Mark Antoine picks off. Chad Kelly runs it all the way back, however many yards and Montreal never looked back after that. But my thing here is I feel like both defenses played well. Montreal is obviously they really stepped up. I mean, seven turnovers or whatever, some ridiculous number. I mean it's impossible to win a game when you have seven turnovers, but they really stepped up. But more than anything, I just think Chad Kelly, the blame really has to be pointed towards him because if you go back and you look at this game, several not even look, he had four interceptions, but even on some plays that weren't turnovers, he just wasn't seeing the field well that day. And I don't know the case was, I can't explain that right. I'm not Chad Kelly, I'm not in his head. I don't know what's going on. And I'm sure he knows obviously that this is incredibly disappointing and that he's a much better player than that. But yeah, I mean you have to point the finger at Chad Kelly, his two pick sixes. I mean, I hate to be critical, but those were some of the maybe worst throws that I've seen in a game, given that everything that's on the line, I mean it would be bad in a regular season game to make those mistakes. But when you're doing it in the playoffs, keep in mind in front of a sellout crowd or the biggest Argos crowd, I think that there's been maybe ever BMO field, right? Jason wasn't, it was the biggest one they've had since moving to BMO, right? Yeah. It broke the 2017 East final when Saskatche one played there as the crossover team. But the bottom line here is this game obviously very surprising result. Montreal, I think it's safe to say the reason they scored 38 points was because of their defense to two pick sixes. Next week when we're actually in Hamilton, I'll get into more of a deep dive about the offense and where that might, let's just say that Montreal's offense is going to have to step up a bit more even than they did in that game if they want to have a chance against Winnipeg. But in this situation it didn't matter, right? Argos just made mistakes quickly and that was it. That was all she wrote. I mean, at halftime it was only a ten three game at halftime. Argos could have easily gotten back into it. It was one score, but you just felt like it wasn't going to happen. You just saw the way that Chad was distributing the ball and you just had a feeling, or at least I had a feeling that by that point it was kind of a lost cause. So very unfortunate for Toronto, very surprising. I'm still, again watching that game, it was just like you're saying, oh my God, every 10 seconds because there's another turnover and Montreal keeps putting these points on the board. But ultimately, yeah, definitely an upset of the year. And the last thing that I'll say about this before I hand it back, this game proves more than anything, and I love stories like this, but what was really nice to see was, and this includes myself, but all year we said, well, Montreal is good, but they don't have a win against Toronto or Winnipeg and bc. But you watch this game and then you realize none of that matters if you can just win that one game. I think about, look, I'm a Rams fan in the NFL and we lose to the 49 ERs every year. That's like the one kind of thing that you can't get off your back, but we played the 49 ERs in the playoffs and the NFC championship won and then won the Super Bowl. So it doesn't as much as we sit here and we have to have something to go off of, and one of the storylines that Montreal had throughout the season was that they couldn't beat the team with a winning record. It doesn't matter. I mean, none of that, all of that goes out the door because once you get into the playoffs, I mean, you want to know every week, and I give credit to Montreal for that because that's what everybody was saying, they just can't be the good teams. And had they lost to Toronto, that trend would've continued. That would've been something that people would've still talked about. It would've proved a point. But instead of just letting them have that, they went out there and proved a lot of people wrong. I mean a lot of people. Yeah, I mean, it was just crazy. I'm sitting there watching and even though like you said, well first off, so you see they're showing all the pre-game and Chad Kelly's doing this interview and he's got the bugeye. They're like, oh man, Chad is locked in, locked in. And like you said, the further the game went along, you could see in his eyes and you just would see him scan in the field and try to find someone making really terrible throws. Like you said, the first drive down, I joked yesterday on Twitter when Mac Jones had this horrendous interception against the cults. I said, oh, I think Chad Kelly got on a plane and went to Germany to go play for the Patriots Today, someone that's been so ice cold all season, and I want to get into kind of the rest versus rest of it, but to watch Toronto go the whole way down the field, I'm thinking, this is going to be a long day for the outlets. I mean, this is brutal. And then that pick six, and you're like, okay, maybe they got a little reprieve here, maybe it's going to be, and then it kept happening and it happening, and it got to the point where it was almost comical where it's like, oh, they tried to go for it on third down and then they got stopped and then Chad Keller threw another pick six. It just seemed like it was Chad's no good, horrible, very bad day or whatever that book is. It was really just a complete collapse. First off, Jason, what did you make just of that, of the evolution of Chad Kelly here over the last whatever it was, 48 hours? Well, the craziest thing is this was really the first game that he lost this year. He was, what, 15 and one, technically they credited that Calgary lost that they had against him, but he didn't even finish that game. So this was literally a perfect season for him up until this point. And then it just all unraveled all at once. And I think that in terms of the biggest egg langs that I've ever seen, if you want to use that phrase, I would go back to the 2019 Great Cup with the Hamilton, that 15 and three team, how excited I was for that team and how they were favored in a great cup for once and then they just come out and just get destroyed by a Winnipeg team that we didn't know how good they were at that point in time. They were a third seed in the West division coming into the playoffs that year. And then I go back to 2013 in the Super Bowl where the Denver Broncos led by Peyton Manning in that record setting offense, just getting destroyed by that Seahawks defense. And it really was a defensive story for Montreal in this game. I mean, the offense offense for Montreal really cashed in when they needed to. And I think that is really the key with their team is when they do get those takeaways, that's when they score their points. And they've just been a very complimentary team in that regard all year long. And I think that one thing with this group this year, and I think it's really key for this entire organization is that midway through the season, obviously they had the turmoil in the off season, but midway through the season they bring in Darnell Sankey and Sean Lemon, and they signify to the rest of that unit that we're going to go for. We're going to try all out to win the Great Cup this year. And ultimately those signings have paid off in a huge way. What did Darnell Sanky have? Eight tackles, two sacks interception or something like that. Maybe that was last week, but he had a gigantic game in this one, and Sean Lemon had a huge impact as well. Yeah, you saw that. Now you saw a lot of Johnny come lately on that. I was like, well, we've tracked during osa, why wasn't he there at the beginning of the season? He was winning the championship for the L roughnecks or renegades, excuse me. We've talked about that a lot. I thought that was interesting on that. Ken has a comment here and talking about the Chad. Chad feels bad, biggest responsible for 5,000 more tickets and the big jump in the TSN audience, I did see that just before I got on here. I dunno when it was posted, I assume earlier today, but good ratings for the east and we were talking, oh, the Saturday playoffs versus all that I did that I humored myself, maybe not everybody with the joke that we finally get the biggest audience in BMO history for the Argos and they completely crowd the bed now. We've lost the Argos for another generation, but it was a good crowd. I mean it has to be. I've never been a fan of, I've never, my team has never been a favorite in anything. I mean even the Kraken last year, and we were the underdog going into the playoffs and God knows the Mariners and everything else, but I guess maybe the Seahawks when they were playing the bro was, I've just never had that of having the dominant team go in and have the rug pulled out from under you. Jason, what did you make just of that with the, we've done this grassroots effort. Toronto's had a great year kind of seeing this collapse now, it was kind of a beautiful disaster, if that makes sense. Yeah, I kind of joked in the group chat that they're not used to playing in front of this many fans. And I think that when you actually think about it, that's like 10,000 more people watching you in your home games than what you usually get in BMO field. And if you've ever been to BMO Field, it gets really loud in there even when there is only 13,000 people or whatever there. So I mean, I can't even imagine how loud it got and how silent it got when the game started going sideways for them. And it was just shocking because it just kept on going downhill for them. I think that it kind of reminded me as the game was on of a couple years ago when Saskatchewan and Winnipeg played in the West Final and Saskatchewan had a six to one turnover edge and Winnipeg still won. I still thought through the majority of this game that Toronto had a chance to get it together, but it just continued to keep on sliding for them. And that third quarter really was the exclamation part point when, wasn't it like three interceptions in a row or something like that from Chad Kelly. So it just completely unraveled for them. Yeah, we had your Marks putting in the comments. Chad's only got 19 starts, obviously with last year and the gray cup and all coming in and relief and all that. Yeah, Evan, I mean, I think Chad's going to bounce back. I mean this is obviously, and I saw he posted, I think it was Instagram that got shared on Twitter whatever today and the whole, Hey, this wasn't what we wanted, but I'll just kind of wind it up. I mean Chad will be fine, but just overall, I guess just thoughts on that and just the unraveling I guess to round out that before we talk about the rest of the game. Well, Chad will be fine. I mean he's in the MOP conversation for a reason. We don't forget what he did during the regular season, but more so than just Chad, I think the Argos will be fine. In general, that entire team, the one thing that a lot of people brought up is that this team, I mean, they haven't faced any kind of adversity or any issues really this year. They've just won everything that they never really had a situation where there was too much on the line. It was kind of like we just go out and win football games and that's that. And then here they come into the playoffs, they find themselves in a sticky situation where they're facing a very good defense. And that's just one of those things you have to learn. As somebody said it, Chad only has 19 starts or whatever. He's very, as much as we've praised him this year, he's not Zach. I mean Calleros has been doing this forever, or at least, well, he hasn't started his entire duration, but he's been in the CFL for a long time, and of course now he's going to be going four straight great cups. Chad hasn't had that. Chad, the conversation around Chad Kelly started last year only because he played what a half in the gray cup and then it was Quite part of a quarter, right? I mean it wasn't even half spoiler. I was drinking on the concourse. It was like the end of the fourth. It wasn't even that half Quarter, maybe like three drives at most. Yeah, Okay. But my point is the whole conversation around Chad Kelly started because of a couple drives and the fact that he came into this season as the starter with MBT off to the USFL and exceeded everybody's expectations. I mean, that's not easy to do and what's good. I think more than anything, the Argos now have found a franchise quarterback. That's what's really important. It's a difficult loss in the playoffs and it's not what you want to see, but that was really his first bad game. Like Jason said, that's the first game he's ever lost in the CFL. So as much as we could sit here, and like I said earlier, you have to put the blame on his shoulders because he made some not so great throws and they really did have an opportunity to get back into it, but because of his third quarter, that opportunity kind of went away. I will say the other thing that I want to touch on besides Chad Kelly and the Argos positioning and what the future looks like, just, I lost my train of thought, but let's think It's okay. We'll start. Yeah, Circle back because it's going to come back to me. It's okay. I did see a comment where I think it was Derek Dennis posted that only having two losses during the season is not enough adversity to be able to, not only for Chad, but for the team kind in general. We saw that obviously with the Patriots and the Giants back whatever year that was. You need to be able to go through a little bit of adversity to be able to figure that out and it's too hard in the middle of the game. Jason, I know you did your video talking about how the dynasty, how the dynasty, however you phrased it, right? The dynasty, not the dynasty, the video I'm talking about, right? Talking about the, in terms of them not facing enough adversity going down the pike. What did you make of that with 16 and two or whatever? Yeah, for sure. And Derek Dennis is referring to that 2016 stamps team that lost to Thewell Red Blacks in a great game where the Ottawa Red Blacks actually had a losing record going into that great cup. So I mean really shows you what can happen in this league and really in sports in general, I believe I saw that all of the teams in all the major sports that have the regular season best records didn't win the championship. So you look at the Warriors team that went 73 and nine or whatever it was, you look at the Patriots team that went 16 and oh, these are great regular season teams and great teams overall, but it really just takes that one game in the playoffs to trip up. And like Derek Dennis said, the adversity throughout the season, you don't really face it if you have that easy of a stretch throughout the season. So I think that we have seen that trend throughout CFL history, particularly in recent years. I mean, you look back to those ALOT teams with Calvio, they took a long time to really be a successful team in the Gray Cup specifically, even though they've had so many great regular seasons, those Calgary teams, they had many years where they had disappointing finishes in the playoffs. And ultimately Winnipeg really can't be caught off guard by this when they play Montreal because I mean, Winnipeg was a 14 win team this year and didn't go through a ton of adversity either. I was texting Rod, I used to Rod Peterson a little bit. I said, those Argo fans that like to have a cloud Bethel Thompson back right about now, like, oh, we're all good with Jack Kelly and all that. Evan, did you remember what your point was? No, I didn't. I don't know what happened. It really slipped away. It's going to bother me for a while, but I'm going to do my best to move on. So here, let's get to, so obviously, and I want to make sure we obviously get to BC and Winnipeg and all this kind of stuff. Okay, Chad Kelly, collapse, Argonauts, all of that stuff, Montreal here, things that they did well, we've talked about Darnell Sanky. Cody had the interception, kind of the Cody game, 18 to 25, almost 200 yards. Is this enough? There was not a lot of offense for the first half of this game from Montreal. Is there enough offense here for them to go up against Winnipeg If their defense plays like this, they have a shot to beat anybody. They're on an all time heater in terms of their defense right now, and this is what this game really showed that the importance of defense in the CFL when a defense can really take control of a game and force that many turnovers, because really the key to the ette season this year has been scoring non-offensive touchdowns, and they got three of them in this game. Obviously the two pick sixes, the qua one like you guys mentioned, but also that James Letcher kick return when Toronto looked like they were mounting a comeback in the fourth quarter, that was huge. I think you got to put James lecture in the Mark cast Hall of Fame after that one, especially if he wins the Great Cup on Sunday. So I think at the end of the day, that's just kind of been Montreal's formula all season long. Play ball control type offense, make the timely plays when they get the takeaways. And they did exactly that in this game. That's so funny because spoiler alert, I watched both these games. I had the BC game on, I'm getting ready for my bat mitzvah, I'm unloading there, but I watched about 18 football games yesterday or whatever. So yeah, I completely forgot. And I will tell you, so we had James Letcher on whatever it was going into the last week it against Hamilton and total nothing Burger game because it's the game before the playoffs. And I remember sitting there and I'm interviewing him and he's like, I'm just trying to get my spot, and I'm thinking, Montreal's going to get killed by Toronto. This isn't even right. Oh yeah. So proud of him. That was the thing. Any momentum here, Toronto? Okay, this is the 16 and two team that we know they're battling back. We've seen Winnipeg do so many times and it was like just like that James Fletcher's back down the field and totally negates the touchdown. Evan, to you about Montreal strengths here going in and what they can carry over to the Great Cup. Well, actually I did remember what I was going to say earlier, and it does tie into this conversation because Jason brought up James Letcher. Now, I was going to say that besides the Argos and what their future looks like, there was a point in that game, and even though I knew still that they weren't going to win, there was a point in that game in the fourth quarter where I think Toronto scored 14 in the fourth quarter. They had some quick offense where Chad finally found a rhythm. It ended up being too little too late. But that's the one thing that I was going to talk about was James Letcher put the nail in the coffin on the Argo season because at one point, I think it was a one possession game, and then he scored on that ensuing kickoff from the touchdown, and that was when we were all like, okay, well that's going to be it. I mean, I kind of knew by that point, even if Toronto does some cool things here at the end, I think Montreal still hang on, but James Ledger, man, what a cool, again, it's one of these things where you might not hear about a guy until very late in the season sometimes in playoffs. I think about Chris Matthews, what he did in that run with the Seahawks all those years back when, I think that was the year they lost to the Patriots, but he had a couple big playoff games, and I believe he's ACFL alumni as well, if I'm not mistaken. So yeah, some guy, James Letcher, he had people maybe won't talk about this as much, but James Letcher had some pretty big shoes to fill because Chandler worthy their normal return guy. I would say. I mean, look, we always talk about, I think, well, this season at least, we've talked a lot about Jevon Lee and Mario Alford in terms of great specialists in the CFL, but Chandler Worley deserves his flowers too, man. And he's had some very big, I think he's had a couple touchdowns called back because I feel like he's done a lot more than maybe stats would indicate. But my point being James Ledger had some big shoes to fill, and he pretty much put the icing on the cake to that game just as people, because I think there was a couple of people that were getting excited like, oh, maybe Toronto's going to do something and Montreal's offense has been slow all day. But to get back to what we were talking about in terms of Montreal's strengths, I mean in this game, their strength was regardless of how Toronto was feeling, whether they were stalling or whether they were mounting a comeback, they kept putting points on the board one way or another. Offense, defense, special teams, they were able to put points on the board when it mattered most. And I hope that's something that they can continue against Winnipeg. Now, obviously Winnipeg with their veteran experience might not be making as many mistakes. Again, that was the big difference to me between Toronto and Winnipeg this season. When you're talking about top teams in the CFL, Toronto's kind of like the hot new up and comer they have, I mean obviously, well, they beat Winnipeg in the Great Cup last year, but you got a new quarterback, it feels a bit different. You really don't know how things are going to go. But Winnipeg and this, I mean, it goes the same against Montreal. They're kind of the new hot and up and comers now after what they've done in the playoffs with their defense. But Winnipeg is just that old. It's like that old guy who just sits on his porch and tells you a bunch of stories. They're a veteran team. They know everything. They're always going to have something to do and something to say, and that's going to be a tough task for Montreal. But if we're talking about strength still, I think one other thing, I mean it goes without saying, but their defense particularly upfront. I mean next week I want to get more into, we've been talking so much about Darnell Sanky and Sean Lemon. I'm going to start talking about a couple other guys on that defense next week once I sit down and really get a better gist of things. But I'll throw in some, I'll elaborate next week on Darnell Sankey possibly. I mean, he has the opportunity to win two pro football championships in a year, which I think Ken here pointed out in the chat earlier. But that defense, I mean, when you talk about, and I'll cry, I was giving credit to Noel Thorpe too, their defensive coordinator, but one storyline, I think more than anything going into this game, the one major strength is that while their offense look, their offense didn't have to do a lot that game. But I mean, their offense didn't have to do much against Hamilton either. I mean, they had their moments, but none of these Montreal offensive performances have been anything to write home about. But when you have a defense playing that strongly and can force seven turnovers against one of the best teams in the league, there's no telling what could happen. And I understand Winnipeg's a different breed. I understand. Again, they've got all the experience, they've got all the tools, they've got all the weapons, it just never ends with them. But Sean Lemon said before that game in Toronto, he says, we're going to shock the world. And sometimes those quotes backfire on you, but they really lived up to it. And again, I'm not going to talk too much about Lemon and Sanky here right now because we've talked about those guys at nauseum, and I'll be bringing them up again next week when we're on the longer show, and I've got time to really do a breakdown of every player individually. But man, I mean really if they win this game against Winnipeg and that defense plays the same way they did against Toronto, that will be one of the most impressive things that I've ever seen across any sport. I'm young, right? I wasn't around for some of the great dynasties or great runs even that we've seen because I guess Winnipeg is more the dynasty here, but that would be extremely impressive. And you can tell that they found something special here. They found the secret recipe, the secret sauce or whatever. So that's definitely a strength that goes without saying. Yeah, I liked the mustache Cody Fido here. We had talked last year when Nathaniel Hackett grew the goatee and it was Raul Hackett, and I thought, this is like Raul Fdo here coming in. I like this. And we had Cody Fdo was the man in black here a couple years ago when he was healing on the rough rider. So I like to see that. And then I just wanted to shout out before we move on to the other game, before we get out of here, I like just giving Andrew Murray a shout out here, Saskatchewan refer Refresh fans watching their former QB and ooc lead Montreal to the Greg up here. So sad Squidward. Jason, any other thoughts? Obviously we'll hear Live Saturday. Will do all the other stuff. Anything else on this game? Anything else from the east before we move on? Yeah, I just wanted to shout out Jason Moss, head coach for the Ettes and gm, Danny Macha. I think they've done an excellent job this season. Danny Macha having the foresight to, because he was the head coach of this team last year and the general manager, a lot of those guys want to keep both jobs, but he ultimately decided, I'm going to take a step back and I'm going to hire a head coach. And he brought in a guy that he's very familiar with in Jason Moss. Jason Moss actually was a quarterback of a team that he, or of Edmonton and Eskimos that won the Great Cup in the early two thousands. So Macho is pretty familiar with him. So I think at the end of the day, those two guys have been a big part of their success this year. Last thought here, and I have this tweet up. Well, I liked the beanie and the hat. Look, I like, and I've noticed not a couple games here, the beanie and the Hat look that Jason Mooz has. I tried pulling that out. Very awkward look here, but we talked here all season about the games and all that. I don't know, and I don't know when we would ever deep dive this or not, but I don't know if it was the rest versus Rust more than, like we've said before, I don't know if two losses is enough to figure out what is our identity when our back is up against the wall. That to me is a little bit more of what that is. Do you guys have any breaking thoughts on that before we get to the Lions game? No, not really. I mean, I would compare it to almost like I was a big Peyton Manning fan back in the day with the Indianapolis Colts and you saw us so many times. They get out to those 13 and one 14 in oh starts and then they'd rest their guys the last few weeks of the season. Toronto I feel like played a lot more down the stretch and they tried to keep their guys active, but at the end of the day, when you're not playing meaningful games for such a long time, it can come back to bite you. All right, let's get here. We got 20 minutes. Let's get to, I want to make sure that we got Monday Night Football coming up here. I wasn't even disappointed, like I said in the Lions because I really feel like we all saw this coming, I guess, which makes it even more heartbreaking of like, well, they're going to go in Winnipeg. They're not going to be able to run the ball. Or hopefully Vernon doesn't play horribly. But we had three interceptions. I felt like we had predicted this, not that we're Nostradamus on this, think a lot of people could have seen this coming, but frustrating, I guess. Evan, what were your initial thoughts on this? Like I said, I kind of resigned already October 4th. This is probably the fate for the lions this year, and obviously I held that hope, but what was your initial thoughts? Yeah, well, this was the matchup that we predicted would happen all the way back in June or whenever the season started. This seemed like a very likely situation. And unfortunately the real thing for me about this game that's really disappointing is without that Vernon Adams Hail Mary to Justin McInnis, before half BC wouldn't have been in this. And that's really after everything that they've accomplished this season and everything that they were able to do, it just felt like they fell flat really quickly. And I point that out, not because, I mean, I don't want to add insult to injury. I mean the team lost. It's very disappointing. A lot of guys on that team that have been there through thick and thin. And again, when you lose back to back years to the same team in the same situation at the same place, I mean that's going to leave a mark for a long time because I mean, your entire season really comes down to that. But I bring up that they came out flat in particular because, well, first of all, it's the opposite of what we've seen from this team this year. They have been the most explosive team in the CFL big plays across the board, throwing the ball to just a spread of receivers. But Winnipeg wasn't exactly dynamic in this game either. It wasn't like Winnipeg just completely ran them over. This was a very, for these teams at least low scoring, relatively defensive affair. And I just thought BC was going to capitalize on that, but they didn't. And a lot of the problems that we've seen from this team throughout the season that we've talked about came up. I mean, once again, you've got Taquan myself, five carriers for 37 yards. Great. It's efficient. You're averaging 7.4 yards per carry. You're only touching the ball five times, so it doesn't really matter. And the problem is because they got down so early in that game, they had to keep throwing the ball. And then Keon Hatcher goes out and first of all, thoughts before I say anything else? Oh my God, yeah, thoughts. He might have the Achilles tear according to Farhan, and that obviously extends in the next season. So really a painful, not only do you lose the game, but you lose somebody that's been so consistent for you all year. And that was really disappointing. That took away, I think from Vernon's options, he still was able to distribute the balls somewhat effectively. Like Lucky Whitehead stepped up a bit, Alexander Hollins, only two catches, but over 20 yards of catch McInnis, the leading receiver in this game, which I think was a surprise maybe to myself. Obviously Keon went down, but there was a couple other guys where I thought, obviously white header Hollins might be the next one up. Well, really, McInnis only had that maybe because of the hail Mary before half. But really just, I mean, I don't want to just keep saying the word disappointment from bc, but there was a time, look, I think the most frustrating part for me was it was 18 to 13 at one point BC Really, they came back somehow in some way, it was 18 to 10 and a half, then they got the field goal. I think Winnipeg had a miss. I might've missed that part, But it never felt, like you said to me, it never felt like it was, even if it was 1813, and it could have been 40 to 12, it never felt like it was close Enough. Right? I mean, look, the only time in that game where I felt like there might be some hope was when it was 18 to 13, the lines were driving, but then Vernon throws a pick. And then once that happened, I mean, I knew the riding was kind of on the wall at that point, that Winnipeg, even with that point, they just got two field goals after that, and that's all it took. They really didn't need to do that much. So very quiet ending to the lion season. And also TJ Lee, very unfortunate injury as well. They lost Hatcher Lee. I mean some key departures there in that game. And it just sucks because like I said earlier, you lose a game like that, it wears heavily. But those injuries that were suffered in that game, those are significant. That could wear into next year and it might affect your future plans and all around just an incredibly sad outing. But on the Winnipeg side of it, Winnipeg, again, I will credit BC to a degree, their defense, I mean, they really slowed the Winnipeg offense down this offense. Again, I know I just said BC was the most explosive offense, but Winnipeg's right there with them and obviously well Toronto before they went out, but Winnipeg, they can put up 40 points no problem if you're not careful. But BC didn't let that happen. Zach Callero 14 of 21 for 158 yards, no touchdowns, no interceptions. I mean, again, not characteristic from him. And look, I'm not going to, I know BC's defense is different, and obviously it'll be a different game next week, different mindset. You're in the Great Cup. But I mean, if BC's defense can limit Winnipeg's offense like that, and you see how Montreal's defense has been playing lately, I'm not going to give away too much, but that'll be one of the points I'm expanding on in our discussion next week. So for Winnipeg, look, I think for them, they got their run game going 109 yards in a touchdown from Brady Ola there. That to me was one of the differences. Again, BC has no run game. Winnipeg has one. I got a lot. You've got, I mean, pretty Oliveira, their MOP nominee for a reason, rightfully. And the thing is too very interesting with Winnipeg, but it's not surprising. They had a couple guys on their injury report, Nick Demsky being the most notable one going into this game, and Dalton s Schone was out. He was ruled out prior to this game, but because they just have so many options. I know BC had some options too, and they obviously Keon was out, but it just never matters with that team. I mean, someone's always going to step up this game. It was Kenny Waller, and it's funny with Kenny Lawler because he got to Winnipeg in 2018, was there through 2021, so he saw the first two Great Cups left for Edmonton last year for a year. Winnipeg still went to the Great Cups and lost. How funny would it be if he came back to Winnipeg this year? They win the Great Cup and he just played in, he didn't play in every Great Cup, but he played in everyone that Winnipeg won, which is kind of a, that's random, but I was thinking about that when they did the post game interview with him. I thought he timed that up well, and he came in late too. He had the issue with his work visa, I believe. So they obviously got a boost from him. But yeah, all around, I don't want to say this was an expected result, but I think to some people was I thought this might be a more high scoring affair, right? I didn't see, I mean, there was a lot of defensive football this weekend, the CFL, I'll tell you that much. But yeah, ultimately Winnipeg's experience and their just ability to gut things out. Again, this wasn't a very fast game for him, but it didn't matter because when Vernon, if he throws three interceptions, which he did, he had one of his, I guess you'd say, off days. I mean, he's still throwing for 200 plus yards, still an off day for him, but it is what it is. And congrats to Winnipeg, what we are witnessing a dynasty. And I put out on Twitter, I said, I would've loved to have seen BC in the Great Cup, but at the same time, even if we're used to Winnipeg being in this position now, I'm really excited to get to witness that team in person and be a part of what could be a legendary run if they go out and win this game on Sunday. Well, it's frustrating to me, and I want to get Jason's thoughts. There was a lot made, and I had my tweet here because Don was going crazy about earlier in the week and BC they're practicing the dome and the youth, sports teams outside and who's going to be more prepared. And obviously the conditions weren't part of it, but I do think it goes into this narrative that BC is not a strong team, just a physically strong, and Gord, a friend of the show, he put out, and I'm certainly not going, I mean Gord's a football guy so he can use words, but he said he does not believe the BC is coached to a high enough level to be able to go in and compete with Michael Shea and them kind of pound for pound physicality wise that way. And I trust Gordon's opinion on that. Like I said, I don't feel like I would read the wedding videographer, but to me, when you have someone like Brady Oliveira and shame on anybody in the world that's like, oh, should he be the MOP candidate and all that? I mean literally with the entire first drive with the entire way down the field, but you have every single BC defender trying to stop this man rushing down the field and they can't do it. And it's because Winnipeg is stronger and they can have physical, and you got Brady Olive Oliveira that can take on Adrian and I, these guys and that to me, that's where it is. And Intel BC can get to that level, and we've seen this year and they come out, like you said, they come out slow or they come out, they lose at home. I'm living with that right now with the Kraken, and we have Dave Haskell stopping practice and screaming obscenities at them because they're not, I guess, practicing and playing to the level that they watch. I can tell watching from the stands, it's the same way with BC when everything's going good and they can zip and fly around and the dome is not the cause of it, but it kind of symbolizes all of that. They're just a soft team. I hate to say that they're my team, but they're not. It's kind of like the Rams I don't view the Rams as being all that physicality team like I do. Maybe the Titans running it down your throat or the Browns or whatever. Jason, what did you make of this? A lot of time without you talking here. Yeah, no worries. I think this game was, like you said, won and lost in the trenches. And I think the biggest thing that stood out to me was Winnipeg's defensive line won this game for them. They were just relentless. Vernon Adams had no time to throw the ball, felt like instantly he always had a defender right in his face. Even the times that he did get protection, I thought that Vernon held the ball too long and took some unnecessary hits. And Vernon, obviously throughout this game, he was really a warrior. And I think that he wasn't that a hundred percent clearly, but I think a lot of it has to do with that Winnipeg defensive line. Willie Jefferson, I thought was the best player on the field on Saturday night, and I think that he is as good as any player in this league when he's playing his best. And he's still proved that on Saturday afternoon. So I think at the end of the day, BC has to get a lot tougher. I think a guy like James Butler would've made a big impact in this game. They had that element last year that they really didn't have this year. So I think that maybe they go out and they add a running back or they add some more beef to that offensive line, really change their mentality and not be ranked dead last in terms of rushing next year. I think that's a big component. Maybe get a little bit heavier on defense, but at the end of the day, you don't have to be this dominant running team, but you have to be able to run the ball a bit when you want to. And BC just wasn't capable of that this year. Yeah, maybe not soft, it is not meant to be offending, but more of a finesse team. I don't know. It's like when we use lucky to do kick returns and I'm like, God, you got someone that's, I'm just worried these guys are going to break. And obviously there were field conditions and Keon got hurt and tj and I know we saw Big Hill go down for Winnipeg and I think we're still, I don't know if with all the travel and stuff, if any of that stuff is coming out yet. I'll off the track with Darren's reports Darren bought me, but I dunno, it just feels to me when you have Brady Vera that can literally pick up the entire BC team and Karen down the field. But yeah, my final kind of thoughts on this, we will round this out here pretty soon. You're the top of the hour. When we had the second turnover before half, it really just felt like to me, Winnipeg a team that you have to play a perfect football game against and you can't have those turnovers. And obviously Vernon had the picks, the interceptions at the end of the game as well trying to go, but Winnipeg's just too good that way. You just can't, you got to really play mistake free football when it comes to that. Evan, any other thoughts on BC's kind of season here as we've kind prognosticate but now kind of seeing it come out? Well, I mean I don't think you can call it a success because they didn't, I mean, they didn't really prove too many people wrong. They just kind of ended up back in the same spot that they were last year. But I will say you do have to give them credit for, I mean, they had one of the most electric quarterbacks that we, I mean Nathan Rourke last year was, I mean we talked about Chad Kelly being the kind of fun guy that everybody was looking at this year. I mean, Nathan Rourke was better than that. And had he not gotten injured in the middle of that season, I think he would've really done some great things. And I know he came back for that playoff game and all, but what I really credit BC more for than anything is just they took a chance on Vernon Adams. They brought him in from Montreal at the end of that 2022 season because they knew that Rourke probably wasn't going to be there next year. They took a chance on him. They didn't wait, they didn't mess around their entire front office staff. They just brought him in and they gave him a shot. And he really, that entire, I mean they were just fun. They were a fun team. It's a shame that things had to end the way they did, but they were very exciting and I think they should be proud of that. I will say, I mean, you didn't get to the Great Cup, you didn't achieve the ultimate goal, but I got to see that team in person this year. I got to see 'em last year and it was just a great time and obviously still very happy for Vernon and all those guys who I think maybe proved some people wrong. I expected to be good this year, but they were good in a way that, I mean, they played just fast fun football and that's something that I'll always be a fan of. I will say, just going back to Winnipeg for a quick minute, I know Jason brought up Willie Jefferson and I haven't talked about Willie Jefferson this season, but that's the guy I'm really looking forward to watching in the Gray Cup just because I think he's one of the better all around athletes that you'll find in pro football. I understand that he was in the NFL and had to come to the Canadian Football League for one reason or another, but man, I mean even at 32 years old, you're watching that guy, he still has so much juice and I got to give him some credit because he is one of my favorite players to watch. So hats off to Willie and obviously like Jason said, that defensive line, I mean just had constant pressure on Vernon. I mean, even if they did have a good running game, who knows with the way that those guys were playing up front, if they would've been able to get something going. So obviously that's more hypothetical. But yeah, man, Willie Jefferson, I've been waiting all season to kind of bring his name up and I feel like now is a good time to do that because you don't see a lot of guys, I mean, he's got, he's six seven, that's like basketball. I mean, you're talking, he's a power forward in basketball. You just don't see a lot of guys like that that are that effective maybe. I mean, you get these freak athletes in a lot of sports, but Willie's been doing this for a long time now. CFL most outstanding defensive player in, I think it was 2019, first year they went to the Gray Cup. So he's been doing that for a long time, doing the dirty work in the trenches and hats off to him. Yeah, no, I hate Willie Jefferson and him. He's the strum as someone that's had to play against him here. I hate Willie Jefferson. I don't even know if I could talk to him on the podcast. I would be so angry at that. My last thoughts, we'll get to Jason, we'll get out of here. I had tweeted, like I said, I got my phone mounted. I'm at my bat mitzvah watching this up. I just said quoting. I think it's TS Elliot. This is not the way the world end. This is the way the world ends, not with the bang by the whimper. That's kind of what I felt like the end of this game. Just kind of a little bit of a wet fart a little bit, hoping for a little bit more there and just not really working out that way. Jason, any final thoughts from you? No, not really. I mean, I just wanted to kind of point to a couple of key moments of this game. I do think, unlike you guys that BC did have a shot to come back in this game, it felt like they actually caught some breaks, obviously with the McKinnis touchdown before the half that went in their favor. Sergio Castillo missed a couple of field goals for Winnipeg, but the two moments I'm talking about are the blocked punt touchdown by Winnipeg. I mean, that doesn't happen in every game. That was a huge swing in this game, and who knows where this game would've been if that didn't happen. And then when BC was down 18 to 13, they got the ball back. They were in Winnipeg territory and then Deir Houston got a pick off of Vernon Adams that really, I thought sealed the game at that point, even though it was just a five point game. Houston's been doing that all year long. I think he had nine interceptions on the season, so yeah, great job by him. And Winnipeg's just showing that championship pedigree once again. Well, here we go. We set at the top, but we will be live Saturday, three to five at the BC Lions den here at the team headquarters at the convention center. Should be easy to find. Main convention center there. They said we'll be kind of front and center. I will be in Hamilton Thursday night, late their Friday. We'll probably stop by the media state of the unions tomorrow, but I guess Randy will talk to the public Friday, so we'll probably meander around that. And then if people are around, Jason, I know we'll meet up and I know there is a tweet up at the gown and gavel that Dorothy and I have been invited to make an appearance that we did the one last year too. So we'll be doing that Friday night, Jason. We'll get together, Evan's getting in, we'll figure out all that stuff. And then Saturday live show before the gray cup, so if anyone's around and we'll do all that stuff. But send dms and we'll figure out where everyone in the area, send me a dmm, we'll meet up. So Jason, Evan, appreciate it. Evan, anything else from you? I don't think so, man. Just looking forward to doing this in person next week. It's crazy that, I mean CFL season's long and I mean, it's crazy that we've already made it to this point. We've been doing this since what, beginning of June. That's a long time Weekly recap every day or every week since the XFL season kicked off here. Jason, anything else from you? No, just Dko Evan's sentiment. I'm just really excited to see what this live show looks like on Saturday. Yeah, it should be good. Like I said, a lot of marque guess and nailer and Farhan and everyone else. It should be good. Appreciate everyone, go enjoy this should be good tonight. Let's go watch Russell Wilson, just get his teeth kicked in by the Buffalo Bills. So Jason, well wishes for your team tonight. I know you echo that sentiment as well. So we'll see everyone Saturday XFL stuff. We were talking to 13th. I told Evan maybe next week, so we'll see what ends up with that. But we'll see you guys. Stay tuned to any of that stuff happens, so thanks.

LIVE CFL 2023 Grey Cup Playoff Finals Preview Show + CFL 2023 Grey Cup Playoff Semi-Finals Recap!!!

Well here we are. Happy. Mark has Monday coming off the Gray Cup playoffs, semifinals here a little later in the day. Working around Evan, one of our co-hosts had a doctor's appointment working around his schedule and then Evan's second traffic getting back, but that'll be good. We'll vamp a little bit. Evan can hop on. I have ACFL plus rant that I think we'll wait, we'll wait to get into with Evan because I'm sure he has some thoughts as well. But doing this here, we'll kind of recap obviously the games over the weekend and then we'll preview everything depending on XFL news or not this week. This might be the podcast for the week, so we'll see. It was like last week. I'm like, do I bring on Dave Naer the preview? What? We've already previewed too many previews. So Jason, how are you doing sir? I'm doing good, Reid. Thanks for having me as always and definitely got my football fixed this weekend with some great games in the NFL and my teams didn't do so well, but what are you going to do? Yeah, I posted in the group chat the Drake meme, getting up at nine or whatever to do the mark cast livestream is like no. But yeah, I was up at six 30 watching the Dolphins and Chiefs game. Dorothy came down and she's like, what are you doing here? What is going on? So all of that, yeah, very exciting all the way through. Coming off of a Portugal demand show last night. We have Kiss Tonight in town, the final goodbye tour for that. So hopefully, luckily we're doing the show now and not after that. My voice will hold up here real quick. Couple notes off the back. Jason's waiting to hear back. Did hear our credential for myself and I assume Dorothy's email came in as well here credential third year in a row here covering the gray Cup. Really appreciate that. I feel privileged and honored. I spelled it with OU because we're Canadian doing all that stuff, but I'm really excited we're going to have a really good show. We either have a location we mentioned at the end of the podcast last week, but it's either going to be at the anchor bar there by the convention center or else working to see if we can get in the kind of the Gray Cup, the fan access, all that stuff. But either way we'll be there. Jason will be there, Evan, and then you know the names Days Farhan and Nailor. I'm sure we'll stop by. We got the Gerald Davis of the world. I know Jamie Nye wants to come on Jeff Hamilton if he's around. So we'll get all that kind. Tim Bains will be there. Jason, are you excited for the Great Cop live show here coming up in two weeks? Yeah, I've been looking forward to it for a long time now and I'm really excited for all the guests that we'll have on and just to do it in person will be cool. Yeah, it should be a good vibe. So we will post all that stuff, but you can stop by obviously or watch and we got really good viewership last year so hopefully we'll kind of do that as well. But anyway, moving on here. Let me see, we have a couple comments, like I said vamping a little bit today and then we'll get in Evan and everything else. James can't wait for the east West finals, win the big BC if I could speak, it's going to be the game of the year and Montreal is going to upset the oh, got a little curse word there. I didn't see that. And then Kyle is exciting. Kyle's a big Montreal ette spam. Jason, we will do a further deep dive here, but t Kat's peaking at the right time. How would you grade the tie cat season now? All said and done. Well, it's definitely a failing grade I think because they changed so many players in the off season. I mean they said the players are the problem. They changed all these players in the off season, made all these personnel decisions and yet they ended up with the exact same record in the exact same situation losing to Montreal in the east semifinal and it didn't really look close just like last year I will say. And we had a couple of weeks ago with the din witty playing Chad Kelly and do we need to play Chad Kelly and is that coaching malpractice to see Chad Kelly here in the game? I think it was coaching malpractice to say Bo Levi Mitchell. Tell six minutes left and I guess we can talk about that Benjamin out. The comment here already, I tweeted out and I was kind of surprised. It was one of those things where I got home, I was watching the BC Lions game on my phone, we were getting ready for the cracking game. I had it on and then went to the game and then I came back after, saw the comments on, and I guess I'll present this my little tweet and then I want to get Jason's thoughts as well. Bo saying, if you're not paying your highest paid player on the team and the player, I don't see myself being here again Bo Levi and I just said I appreciate his honesty. I think this is a huge story. So much of the offseason was built. I'm like where's Bo going to go? And he's going to Saskatchewan and you had the Michael Balls of the world yelling at people and I think Naylor was kind of in on that scuffle of where's he going? And then he's going to Hamilton and we've got the billboards and everything and it was like Aaron Rogers going to the Jets. I mean we kind of talked about that on the preview show for the whole season and I don't get this, what do you make of this to not only I get maybe even the first half but to go to it was six minutes left and you're down. It was two scores when he finally came in. Yeah, I think that I was one of those people that said start Matthew Schultz for the game because I do think he was the best quarterback option for the tie Kats this season. Definitely better than what Bow had shown this season, but at the end of the day Schultz was not playing a very good game at all. So many passes batted down at the line of scrimmage. We'll get into it more when we talk about the game specifically, but Shilts just did not have a good first half and I thought that immediately starting the second half Bo was going to be put in there. But like you said, malpractice not putting your highest paid player on the field in that situation because it becomes indefensible because you made this move in the off season to not just sign this guy but trade for his rights months ahead of time and bring him in as this big off season splash that you sold these season ticket holders on and ultimately at the end of the day you didn't even play him in the most important games a game of the season. And for Bo Levi, I understand his frustration because this very well could be his last game in the CFL. I mean who's really bringing Levi Mitchell in as a backup quarterback next year even if he wants to do that. So I mean I understand his frustration with it because I was very frustrated watching the game on Saturday. To me it's kind of like the trade forward thing when we were getting to that point in the season where even if you're Chris Jones, you are alando and I know better. You're getting to the point where you're going to have to answer those questions later. Those receipts are coming in. I know the tie cat's, right? Caretaker Bob the owns, but they got the whole conglomerate there in terms of the power structure. I'm sure a couple hands there, but to me there would be major questions coming out today of what are we doing here? I mean even if you didn't think that this was a game changing whatever situation at that point we've spent all this money and time and equity and all the media stories around when is he coming back and is he going to make it to the playoffs and then to not even play him. That to me the aesthetic of it more than anything, even if you don't think it's going to matter on the gameplay, I think would help solidify saving your job if that was in jeopardy or saving, just answering a lot of those difficult questions after the fact, if that makes sense. Yeah, I totally agree. I mean at least go down swinging with the guys that you've invested in and that's where you put your resources. Don't go down swinging with Matthew Schultz or we didn't get to see Taylor Powell, but don't go to those guys in that situation. Go to your veteran quarterback that's won ops, won Gray Cups, you never know what's going to happen, but the way that they put 'em in with what six minutes left in the game, they're down by 15 points, never really had a shot to really get his footing in the game. And I definitely understand Beau's frustration as well as the fans. Yeah, so just round that out. I do potentially see that being beau's last. I don't see anyone else going in at this point. Are you of a similar elk here? Yeah, I agree. I think that maybe if he has a kind of a mindset change, maybe not necessarily mindset change, I can't really read his mind but I can't see Boli I Mitchell with the pride he's had throughout his career and the confidence that he's played with wanting to accept the backup job going into the season where he's for sure going to be the backup because I don't see any team bringing him in to compete for a starting job next season, even in Ottawa or some other team like that or Edmonton or whatever. But I think at the end of the day this could be it for Bo. We're talking here, Kyle's like I said, obviously Montreal fan, Montreal defense showed up today a tough game and then Jeff here saying Montreal threw a wild card here and they have a chance to upset the Argos. Let's get into that a little bit here. In terms of the game, I guess we'll go that one first just because we're talking about it. Normally we go in reverse chronological order here, but let's get in on this tie Katz 1227 Montreal, if I can get this going here, what general thoughts of the game and then we can do a little more deep dive. Well, not an overly surprising result. This is kind of what I expected given that the ettes won all three games against the TCATs in the regular season and that the tie cats offense couldn't really find a breakthrough against that ettes defense. And that's really the story here. The Ettes really shut down the TCATs really from the opening snap and I feel like that first drive for Hamilton was very promising, but then they go down and Keandre Smith fumbles, that's the second big fumble he's had in as many years against the ettes in a key situation. So I mean I think that really took a lot of wind out of the Tcat sails. If they had gone down and punched it in the end zone on that first drive, we could be talking about a completely different game. But ultimately the Ettes defense kept the TCATs out of the end zone for yet another time this season. There was a game earlier this year, the first meeting I believe where it was 38 to 12 and a similar story, the TCATs just continued to settle for field goals could not get into the end zone. And really that's the problem in football, if you cannot get into the end zone, you're not going to win many games. This was a slow beginning. We had a flash rain flood here. I was up on my roof as the game was starting and I'm like, okay, we got at one point whenever came in, was able to settle down while just certainly picked up momentum. But yeah, I mean Montreal and like we said, Kyle's comments really the defense here really kind of putting their work in. I had the tweet from Evan that we were talking former XFL renegades at Champion here, Darnell Sanky, the big offseason move coming in there. How impressed you, would you credit the Ettes defense or the lack of offense on Hamilton's for the low scoring fair starting out? At least I would credit the Ettes defense for the most part because they've been a very consistent unit throughout the entire season. They've been a defensive led team throughout most of the season. Their offense really doesn't do anything too flashy, but they're complimentary. And I think, yeah, those off-season editions or mid-season editions I should say of Darnell Sanky at the middle linebacker position, what he have eight tackles, two sacks and interception. He really showed up on the stat sheet and this one made some big impact plays. And then Sean Lemon at the defensive end position two sacks in this one really being that closer that the Allos defense really needed because I really didn't think they had that premium edge rusher, but when they brought in lemon, they really build that role and ultimately at the end of the day, this defense is a story in the CFL. This season is the story of their season I should say. Their secondary is really good as well. They completely took away Tim White in this game, zero catches for Tim White in this game who was the league's leading receiver this season. So I mean just great defensive game plan from the Alouettes. Yeah, that's one of those things when they say that because listening I got it and we can the CFL plus up it all day. I got on my phone, I'm walking around, they say that obviously Tim White, which that surprised me in and of itself that he was kind of the leading receiver in the league and then to have zero targets on that. It seems wild to me at that point. And like you said, the Sean Lemon thing, I know Mike Mitchell's commented in our group chat that it was like the league didn't want Sean, it was just to be able to pick him up that it wasn't like anyone wanted to resign him. A weird situation there. Why do you think there was that? I don't even know if stigma's the right word, but oh, he's out to pasture and then here he comes in and makes a huge effort. Well that's so weird. With his career, he is had one of the strangest CFL career as I can remember and the fact that he's never really settled down anywhere. I really thought the last couple years in Calgary he had found a home, but ultimately at the end of the day, I think their whole philosophy really kept them from retaining him this off season. It came back to bite the stampeders as well and that was to the benefit obviously of the Montreal. And yeah, just the pressure on the quarterback is just so important in these playoff games. I felt like the Hamilton didn't generate nearly as much pressure on Cody Fudo on the other side of the ball. So I think that was a big difference in this game and obviously the turnovers. Welcome Evan here. Hopefully everything went well getting back through traffic. Evan, we were talking, I had showed your tweet already, Darnell Sankey here standing out for the Montreal Owlettes defense. What impressed you the most with this game? I mean to me really dominant, I'm excited to see Montreal go in here to Toronto and could be a real low scoring fair just and both of these defenses step up, but what did you make of the game? Absolutely, I mean I think we can start obviously talking about Darnell Sanky, but not just Sanky. Sean Lemon is the other guy. I think really the entire TZ defense I believe won this game, but obviously special shout out to Darnell Sanky and Sean Lemon. Great job by the Montreal Personnel Department. Adding those guys in the middle of the season. I mean that, I don't want to say it won them the game outright, but two high impact players, some people had written them off. It's really incredible to me to be honest. They were able to get both Sanky and lemon considering that those were two pretty, I guess highly respected free agents. But lemon went unsigned and I think it's pretty clear he was unsigned for too long and should have been on a roster at the beginning of the season. And then obviously as I pointed out in my tweet, you've got Darnell Sanky who as much as we talk about XFL guys going to the NFL, Darnell Sanky was a guy who played with the Arlington Renegades, won the XFL championship this year and then signed with Montreal I believe at the beginning of September and has been there ever since. So you got to give him credit, he's playing two different seasons of football in two different countries. That's not easy to manage. It's honestly great that we can even see that given the current state of football or pro football, alternate football, whatever you want to call it. But yeah, Sanky and Lemon definitely stood out in this game to me more than really anybody. Yeah, really remarkable I think. And depending if they were to make it to the Gray Cup and we will get kind of our predictions here coming up, but truly remarkable. I just think that's a cool story. And I mean we saw the McLeod of it all kind of go into the US FL last year. We will see with the merged league and all that coming up and how that goes in terms of timelines and everything. But I don't know, I like seeing these players interact in both of that. Jason from a little bit more of an outsider, just obviously you're not doing XFL day in and day out thought this transition here and other players being able to do that, obviously coming into the season late like Darnell did, but timing works out if you're done in April. I mean you could transition into ACFL camp in the summer anyway. Yeah, for sure. And I think that it's way more plausible. Obviously it's going to be a merged league, but with the way that USFL had, their schedule is much less likely for a player to join the CFL midway through the season than it is for an XL player like Sanky to join the CFL through the season. But obviously that's a mute point with the merge league coming up, but I think at the end of the day, I think it's pretty cool how players can bounce back and forth. They think that at the end of the day, I love the CFL, but I also love all types of football and I think that I just want more opportunities for players to live out their dream. And I think Sankey has really got the best of both worlds the last year or so here in the CFL and the XFL. We talked before you hopped on about Levi and coming in late and all that thoughts on him. Is this the end of the road for Beau obviously upset in the comments and if you're not playing your highest paid penalty air, what did you make of that situation? Well, it was a very strange decision, I believe because last week when we were previewing this game, excuse me, we talked about sort of Hamilton's two quarterback system and how they were very likely to play Matt Shilts and Bo Levi Mitchell in this game, but they did so in the way that I didn't think was going to happen and that was first of all, they gave Shilts the start, which to some people was a bit controversial to me personally. I understand. He ultimately I think is, well, I don't have the numbers with me, but he played a good amount this season before his injury. And then Taylor Powell came in. I mean Bo Levi up until the end of the season here had barely seen the field due to his injuries. So to some people it was a bit controversial that they started Shilts, but in my opinion it took them way too long to get Bo Levi into that game. And I have a lot of respect for Matt Shilts and what he's done as a sort of journeyman now in the CFL really only between well Montreal and Hamilton, but he's been around in a backup role for several seasons now. Someone that I would call a friend and that I highly respect, but this wasn't his best day, let's be honest. He was not seeing the field as well. And Levi, the fact that he didn't come in until, I mean I think it must've been less than Six minutes Halfway through the less or more than halfway, excuse me, through the fourth quarter that's on, that's on Orlando and he was questioned about that. I think one of the TSN guys asked him at halftime when they came out for the third quarter, would there be a change at quarterback? And he just said, oh well we'll see. But yeah, the fact that they didn't even bother putting Bo to some degree before halftime is kind of its own thing and it was a very puzzling decision and it was even more, well maybe not surprising, but you could definitely fail that Levi was not happy about that decision when he was interviewed after the game and came out saying that he doesn't anticipate seeing himself being there in the future despite his love for the team. And obviously this season didn't go as planned, but it was very questionable in my opinion. Again, going into that game, the idea of playing two quarterbacks and having Shilts kind of be your guy that leads it out that I understand, but given Schultz's struggles early on and the fact that Montreal's defense was able to establish themselves for them to not make a change and put Bo Levi in who to be honest, I mean again, not the way we thought the season would go for him, but somebody who has shown a lot of promise here in these last couple games and has shown us that he could still maybe be a starter in this league, the fact that they didn't make that change that goes on coaching and that's going to be a decision that I think affects the team for a long time when you lose a game like that. Jason, at this point, and I want to transition here that the ettes going into Toronto, but as a TCAs fan it come down the last couple of years, you're in the gray cup, you lose and there was all that stuff and then the last year and kind of be on the outside. How do you view this now? Is there enough here, the salvage beau's not coming back. Do you ride with Shilts? Is Steinhower there? I mean do you blow up? How would you like to see them move it forward? Well, they're kind of in no man's land. It really feels like it. I feel like, like I said last year, they kind of just blamed it all on the players. They're like, it was a disappointing season. We've got eight and 10, let's change a bunch of the players. I think they flipped over at least half of their starters on both sides of the ball and they hope that that would make the difference. And ultimately it was the same result this season and I don't know what they do going forward. I don't think anybody on the roster at the quarterback position is necessarily the answer. Maybe Taylor Powell if he gets a little bit more seasoning, but I don't think you trust that going into next year with him being your number one quarterback. So I mean maybe they look around the league, I think that maybe Drew Brown and Winnipeg is a guy they look to bring in. I remember years ago I was surprised when the TCAs brought in Zach Calis from the Toronto Argonauts who was little known backup, who played pretty well in limited action there. So maybe they bring in Drew Brown or somebody else from around the league, maybe they bring back Dane Evans. I think that bridge is probably burned, but I think at the end of the day they have to make a change yet again at the quarterback position. Like I said, I don't see Bo being back. I don't think Matthew Schultz is an answer at any capacity as a starting quarterback. So I mean, yeah, it's just back to the drawing board and a lot of this points to the head coaching position. I think that Orlando Steinhower for as much success as he is had as a tie Kat's head coach, obviously Gray Cup's appearances in the first couple of years of his coaching tenure. I think that he's just really struggled to manage the quarterback position, even going back to his time when he had Ole and Evans. So I think at the end of the day they need to pick a guy commit to one guy, but I'm losing faith in the whole coaching staff here in Hamilton. Yeah, it feels like that was kind of the peak of all this, at least obviously in the time that we've covered the league, but you kind of had that strong one A and one B, and I remember even going into that gray coach who's going to play or what's going to a little bit more where now this the Schultz and I don't know, it feels like a lesser version of that. In terms of Montreal here going in Evan, do you think that Montreal has a chance here? I mean Toronto historic run here and what is it, 16 and two and kind of all that stuff? What are your thoughts here previewing going into the weekend? Well, I'll say this, they look better than I expected playing against Hamilton. And you can argue maybe Hamilton kind of dug their grave a bit too early, but on Montreal's side of the ball like William stand back in this game. I think one thing that they did very effectively, and that might be more difficult to do against Toronto, but it certainly worked for them here, was establishing the wrong game. You had William stand back 18 carries for 95 yards. They didn't have to do a ton on offense. I mean I'm still a bit concerned obviously about Cody Fido very respectable performance here, but his one critical mistake was an interception in the red zone, and I think he's had a couple of those this year that was at a point in the game where had Hamilton's offense not stalled out, I guess you would say that could have easily been a situation where he throws that interception, Hamilton gains the momentum, they go and score and the game is tied. But besides that, Montreal, do I think that they have a shot against Toronto? I don't know. I mean from what I saw in this game, clearly their defense, maybe I haven't talked about them enough this year, but they had a great outing against Hamilton and it's hard to say, well obviously Toronto's offense is going to be much more of a juggernaut than Hamilton's offense, which has been as much as I've again praised the season under their change with Scott Milanovich. I feel like it's still been pretty up and down at times a lot of different quarterbacks as Jason has pointed out. But Montreal, I think if their defense stays stout, they'll at least make the game competitive. I really don't think that they have a chance at winning unfortunately, but maybe they prove me wrong. This to be honest, is a team that, I mean going into this Toronto game, if they win that game, if they even have a chance, that would prove a lot of people wrong, including myself, because let's be honest, while Montreal has defied the odds this season, a lot of people thought that they were going to be the worst team in the league. They still have a lot to prove. As much as I've talked about this defense being strong and this offense throughout the year, having several different pieces, excuse me, that have made this team watchable, the fact that they haven't beaten Toronto or BC or Winnipeg, that's incredibly alarming and a great, you get a playoff win first year under Jason Moss and Cody Fido, even if they do lose that game in Toronto, I feel like you walk away from this season feeling good about yourself and feeling good going into the next year knowing that you have a lot to build off of. But I just see Toronto is too strong unfortunately, going into this one, I am happy for the outlets and I know that the TV announcer was talking a lot about it too. Obviously we, including even James Letcher here, he had at least one big run when I kind had tuned it on and I always get excited to, oh, is he going to make a break again? But we have a lot of outlets, players on the show. They've been tremendously good for me to work with and to get players on. And so I obviously have a lot of friends and good warm feelings towards the team and this really could have been a dumpster fire this year coming in and just everything Cody's gone through with Jason Moss and everything, and we've talked about that with Darrell Davis on about Saskatchewan and their problems now we're like, Hey, Cody and Jason, they were the scapegoats. It was, Hey, that's the problem and you get rid of them and now they're excelling here and obviously there's a lot of more moving parts and just two individuals moving back and forth, but just excited for Cody, like Evan said, to get a playoff win, you're still playing meaningful football, you're going to be in the finals. I don't think anyone had them penciled in for that. Jason, in terms of your expectations for the year, I mean had to exceed anything for the ettes? Oh, absolutely. I mean I had them, like I said a couple weeks ago on the show that I had them last place in the CFL. A lot of people did going into the season. I really didn't believe in the playmakers that they had. I thought their defense was kind of middle of the road, but obviously that proved to be false and I think that yeah, they have to be proud of the season that they've had, especially considering they had new ownership as well. It really gives them something to build off of regardless of what happens in Toronto on Saturday. But yeah, I think that it's been a very good season for the Alouettes and they have to be proud of what they've done and exceeding a lot of people's expectations. I mean obviously no, you don't get flowers for at the end of the day, you want to win and make it all the way. There's no half measures, but just it really could have been a nightmare and I feel good for them. Toronto's really good. I don't know, I kind of worry there afraid that this could be a little bit of a blow. Evan, do you at least see Montreal keeping this, I guess keeping this close? Because the thing during this game, like he said, Cody's got the interception and I kind of felt that way yesterday watching the commanders play against the Patriots. We won the game, didn't play our best game, but I'm like, man, the Patriots were even remotely good team at all. We would be having trouble right now. To me it felt the same way. Yeah, Owlettes won. I mean obviously doubled up the score, but if Hamilton even had a modicum of any sort of momentum going there, it maybe would've been a little bit closer. So what do you make here of at least the Alouettes, keeping it close in Toronto? Well, I think another big thing that I didn't talk about is as much as I've praised Montreal's defense, and again they've got all these different offensive playmakers which has contributed to their success this season, Cody Fido has a very, very difficult task ahead of him when it comes to that Argo's defense, both the upfront and in their secondary. I mean, you look at the amount of all-star talent that they have on that defense. I mean Hamilton's defense, they have pieces that I like, but I mean going, this is a whole nother level. I mean, what he faced against Hamilton I really don't think is comparable and that it'll be interesting to see just within a week if he can handle or manage that difference. So we'll see. Cody, look, Cody's been up and down. Cody is one of those quarterbacks where it always feels like he's got something to prove. And we know that in the past, I mean there's a reason that he's here in Montreal, and I guess you could say his career has been well up and down like I already said to this point. But there's a reason he's in Montreal, and to be honest, this year I was ready to count him out pretty early and while he's proved me wrong, there's still, Montreal is kind of, there's just so many question marks with that team. Some of them were answered in this game against Hamilton. They really took advantage of that home playoff game, and that was great to see. It wasn't a fluke. They were able to go, well, of course they had home field advantage, so that was a bit of a benefit, but they were able to win a playoff game and a lot of people would've never thought that we would've even been at this point. So yeah, I mean in terms of Cody specifically, like I said, he's proved me wrong this season for a majority of it, but watching his game just last week and obviously a couple games into the regular season, there's still some things that he needs to clean up if he wants to again have a chance against a defense of that caliber. And that's going to be a new challenge for him. Now, fortunately, Toronto and Montreal have had some very entertaining matchups this season. I go back to, I think it was the game in July that was that big back and forth battle, and obviously Toronto got the better of 'em, but we'll see, given that Toronto's had a week off, you want to see how they're able to respond to that as any team does in a situation where they have a bye week. So all of that's kind of interesting to follow. But to answer your question, like I said, I mean after this playoff game, I feel a bit more comfortable about Montreal going into ABMO and not suffering a complete blowout at the hands of Chad Kelly. I'm just trying to figure out, and I am biggest Cody Gerardo fan and a hundred percent support. I'm just trying to figure out if Montreal is constructed in a way where we got a pretty good defense, we have enough guys that can catch the ball. We've seen what happened with BC when Vernon's out and Dane has kind of been up and down this year and hasn't played up to that level. Are the outlets winning because of Cody Jason or could you plug and play maybe another quarterback in there, or is Cody good enough to elevate and raise them over? I think that Cody Ro, like I was saying last week on the show, is kind of like that league average starting quarterback that he doesn't really hinder the team around him or he doesn't really raise the play of the players around him. And I think that at the end of the day, he's a guy that skillset wise, not really the best deep ball thrower, doesn't really push the ball down field. He didn't have to do that in this game. And I think that's going to be the big determining factor against Toronto because I think the alouettes are going to have to score 30 plus points in order to beat the Argos at BMO field. And I get to see that Alouettes team this season. So I'm interested to see how that matchup plays out. I think that they have some Playmakers on that side of the ball. Austin Mack has been excellent this season. One of my favorite players to watch in the CFL this season had a huge play in this one, really the touchdown that really decided this game. So really interested to see how he plays in this one. And Toronto's had some weaknesses in the secondary this year. They have given up a lot of big plays. I think there was one game against Ottawa that they really, Ottawa was moving up and down the field with the passing game, so they've had some moments where they haven't looked the best in the secondary. This year it's going to be all about if Montreal can exploit that weakness and keep up offensively with the Argos. Evan, any other thoughts here on this game? We'll transition over to BC and all of that. I want to make sure you get any other thoughts on this. Yeah, I think we'll just touch on Hamilton to wrap this up because we've obviously been focused on Montreal since they won this game and they did it in an impressive fashion. But yeah, I was just really surprised by Hamilton. Like I said, I thought they had a really good chance in this game and they came out and to me it was pretty clear after the first quarter that, I don't want to say it was a lost cause because they did keep it somewhat close, but it just felt like every time they were within reach, Montreal kept pulling away and there was nothing really they could do about it. The only bright spot I'd say for Hamilton in this game, at least on offense, was James Butler establishing the run with him. But that didn't really feel like it happened until later. He averaged 6.4 yards to carry on 13 touch, which is great. But man, I had so much hope for this Hamilton team after what I've seen here in the past couple games to end the season they finished so strong and for them to come into Hamilton like that and really to be honest, I mean I hate to be critical like this, but to put up a rather forgettable performance, it's a shame. But again, you have to credit the opponent. And again, now that I've watched that game and I had an opportunity to really see Montreal again in their at full strength, I should say I feel a bit better about them going to Toronto because like I had said before, I thought Hamilton versus Toronto would've been the much more entertaining matchup, but to be honest, Montreal demonstrated that they have enough to at least make things interesting in another playoff game. So I'd say that's a win-win situation. Jason, we were talking to what's the state of the tie Kats, and it's just hard because in the CFL it's hard not to be a playoff team kind of, right? You really got to be Edmonton and so this whole, well, Hamilton made it to the playoffs, what do you want? We're going to do it to be third in the east and get knocked out. And Evans a pretty forgettable game. It seems to be a low bar here to go through and get that. So I'm just worried about that. And obviously Cat fans moving forward. Do you have anything else on this game that we can move on? Yeah, I'm kind of afraid that the TCATs management won't be open to making changes this off season because oh, we're a playoff team this year. Again, we've been in the playoffs four years with Orlando Steinhower as the head coach, so I'm afraid they're just not going to do anything. I mean, they're going to change the quarterback position, but outside of that I'm kind of afraid that they're going to be complacent and not make the changes necessary to really get this team back into the conversation as one of the best teams in the league. So I'm very concerned for the TCATs heading into the off season. We talked last week and you have the same standings in terms of last year and this year and that we have the same result going into both of these going in again. And so you just wonder in that way it's such an easy sell. Oh, we made it in, it is the commander's had a couple of years like, well, we're teetering on the playoff. You're like, to me being a playoff team and getting knocked out the first round is not, there's nothing to celebrate about that. You want to have sustained success for that. Evan, anything else? We'll get onto the other one. Alright, so we had this, and like I said, I think I have this right here. I was at the bar watching this, Evan, we will do our CFL plus ran at the end of the show for anyone's interested in that. We'll get into football first year. My fear, right? BC kind of whatever, BC took care of business split up point. It's still the donut boys still giving up 30. And I saw, I've got to pull the tweet up here that Ryan Phillips had said, yeah, most of my guys played pretty good. I'm like, oh, okay. That's interesting. I kind of like that. Let's go first and Jason for this BC took care of business score looks a little bit more misleading than the game felt, but what did you make of this game? This game was all about Vernon Adams. Vernon Adams was the best player in the CFL this weekend. And it really showed, I mean this was one of the best quarterback performances I think we've seen in the playoffs since the league came back from the canceled 2020 season. So I think that he was just lights out and the Calgary defense had no answers for them. And the funny thing is Calgary goes right down the field on the opening drive scores the touchdown. I'm like, Reed's getting really nervous right now. He's probably sweating right now. But Emmy Texted me, I was walking the dock, I go, the game has been on for three minutes. I'm not even back from walking the dock yet. Yeah, it's like crazy how this game started and then how quickly BC just flipped that and they just never looked back. And I think the key play in this game was Calgary had the ball in their second possession, they forced a punt on the BC's first possession Calgary had the ball, was driving into BC territory and then Gary Peters, I believe got the interception and then BC just really didn't look back. They got the tying touchdown and then took the lead soon after. And yeah, Bernard, Adam was just basically a flawless game from him and Keon nacho at a massive game as well. Yeah, I was sitting there at the bar, I tweeted out Keon have a day. I mean this was every time I was looking because we had the UDub game on. They were playing who they were playing USC Boohoo, Caleb Williams. That is just ridiculous. I'm sorry, but every time I'm looking at my phone, Kons getting a 23rd yard reception. What was his stat line? Even 1 99 receptions for 1 95. Truly remarkable. Evan, what did you make of this one? Yeah, you were texting me, I'm like the game, I get my notification, the game started. Two minutes later I get a notification. Calgary is up seven zero. Yeah, well look, I predicted that BC would score over 40 points in this game and they did that very interesting start when Jake Mayer came out with a three play 81 yard touchdown drive and what felt like about 30 seconds. I thought, whoa, there is this really, is this what it's going to be or is this just a one-off thing? Because he had the big completion, the ton on the first play. And it was interesting because they did that exact same thing pretty much. I forget if it was to Reggie Bagel Tin or to Tre Odom's Dukes two weeks ago and that pass was dropped, but they came out of the gate with a big play, but this time they hit it and then I think they had a run and then they had the touchdown to Mark and Michelle, which went for over 30 yards. And I mean way to make a statement early, but unfortunately when you're going up against that juggernaut of an offense, and the big question I think going into this game, not that there were many questions for bc, but it really was Vernon Adams, whether or not he's going to come out in the playoffs and really perform as he has in the regular season. I think this was his first playoff game in quite a few years going back to when he was in Montreal obviously. But I mean man, he lit it up. Any doubts that we had about Vernon Adams, if there were any, which to me there weren't, but maybe the other people there were silenced within a couple minutes. Obviously Calgary got off that hard start. You're thinking like, okay, is this going to get interesting? But Vernon kept this cool and they got rolling man. And of course, well BC's defense still giving up 30 points. I mean you could argue that there's still some work that needs to be done there and they had a couple guys that got banged up early. So that will be something to monitor really that entire unit. Obviously going into Winnipeg, I won't get too much into that right now. Obviously we have a lot to talk about with that matchup because that's to us, I think one of the better games of the year or it could be. But anyway, just sticking to this game, I mean Keon Hatcher nearly 22 yards per catch. I mean the fact that he had nearly 200 yards on less than 10 catches, I mean if that doesn't summarize this offense and what they've been able to do opening up that passing game, I don't know. What is Jordan Maxim I think is the offensive coordinator there and what a great job he's done. As much as we've given credit to all the players this season, I think the coordinators and the coaches deserve their credit as well because I mean going out there and I mean man, just the absolute offensive clinic from this team every week. Now, the one thing still, and this has been a theme all season, but the one thing that's still is slightly of concern going into next week is the run game continues to now look, when you're leading rusher, I mean Vernon had, look, Vernon was efficient 54 yards on seven Carries had three rushing touchdowns. Didn't even need Dom Davis for that short yardage stuff. But whenever your quarterback is the leading rusher in a game, that's a sign that you probably haven't established things correctly. So again, and this is something that I pointed out before but I'll reiterate it here now that we're in the playoffs bc, as much as it's fun to watch their offense and they air it out and it's just, it's good football, it's fun, fast paced, high scoring stuff, when you're going up against a team like Winnipeg in the conditions that they could be facing next week, establishing the run I think is something that would be very high on that list. But even in games that didn't matter this season or games against, I guess you'd say lesser opponents, any opportunity that they've had to establish that run game was not successful. And that's something that I really worry about because again, when Vernon slows down or has a setback, it seems to be harder for him to get back into the mind of things. So typically in a situation like that, there's a mistake made quarterback needs time to reset, you're going to lean on your run game and those guys to kind of pound the rock and move things forward. But so far, I mean again, Vernon was the leading rusher in this game, so where do you go? It's kind of all on his shoulders and it has been for this season. I think that's what made this season so impressive for Vernon is it wasn't, look, obviously Winnipeg has a great offense with Zach Calleros, but they could kind of fall back on Brady Oliveira who had a phenomenal season not just by a Canadian rusher, but of any rusher that we've seen in the CFL over the past couple seasons. So that I think really makes Vernon stand out and that's why I've been talking about 'em so much in a positive way this season. But some of these flaws, defense giving up random points late that they don't need to no run game, those are all things that they're going to have to get fixed quickly or adjust too quickly in the game against Winnipeg if they want to have a shot in that or else despite this game being very good and Vernon establishing himself, that could all go away very quickly. Yeah, you have 28 yards rushing inside here. With my myself, I was looking there, next week's going to be freezing, that's Fahrenheit here, it's going to be 33 degrees. What is that do? The matter was going to be one degree, one degree sales year. You got to get the, and especially when you said, not only is Brady Olive Oliveira having a standout season, he's probably going to be the MOP. So you have no run game at all versus a run game that is probably going to win the MOP for the first non quarterback for many, many years to do this in the Canadian Football League. Vernon, a tremendous game, a clean game. Love to see that. I had a comment here at James every time VA has a big game, he falls up at the bad game. I don't believe that at all. I don't think that that's true. Jason, how concerning is the run game here for BC going into Winnipeg? Well, I don't think it's suddenly going to turn around now. I don't think that suddenly they're going to find this great running game in Winnipeg on Saturday. So I think they're going to need Vernon Adams to play lucky he did this weekend again, if they want any shot of beating Winnipeg next weekend. And we have seen that happen. We saw that in the first meeting against BC against Winnipeg where they went into Winnipeg and he had a great game and the defense obviously was playing a lot better back then. I think we have seen that from the BC Lions offense before and Bernard, Adam specifically. So I think they do have a shot, but I think with the running game, I don't expect them to suddenly find it. I think the best thing they can hope for is that they really game plan and shut down Brady all Oliveira and hope that their defense can hold up passing game wise. But I think at the end of the day it's going to be a do or die for their ride and die, I should say, with their passing game against Winnipeg To me. And we'll see, I mean the game hasn't happened yet, but it's just frustrating where none of this will be a surprise if they come out and they can't run and Winnipeg shuts 'em down and this has all been foretold and so I don't know their scheming or otherwise. Is that coaching, I dunno, can we figure this out or I never get this. You see these teams, are the coaches, do they think it's better? Does Rick Campbell think, oh, this is fine. I would love to be in the mindset of like, oh no, we're fine. We're going to go in there. Not the media BS and talking and okay, we're going to give it. I would like some real truth serum here of Campbell and kind of everyone else. And with Ms. Simmons and kind of all that, what are you guys planning here? Do you not realize that this is going to be an issue? Evan Winnipeg, like I said, really good here coming in. Anything else about that matchup in particular? Because kind of talk a little Calgary here post more than as well, Right? Well I think for BC to have a chance in this game against Winnipeg, and now that I've had time to think about this, I've seen obviously a lot from this team. I went to a game in person this year to watch him, which was against Calgary. So I didn't think back then it was going to be a playoff preview. But CFL gets funny sometimes, but I think ultimately what BC is going to have to do, because I agree with Jason as much as I say, well they need to find the wrong game, they need to do this. You've got five days. If it hasn't turned around all season, you're not going to get it in five days. But I mean sometimes miracles happen, but no, realistically it's not going to happen. So what I think BC needs to do in this game is they need to start hot, they need to do what Calgary did to bc. What we saw, and we could talk about that a bit more here in a minute, but this weekend just get Vernon out there. I mean I don't know if they're going to get the ball first, right? You can't predict that. But let's say they start with the ball. I mean you just got to take some shots. I think you just got to get Vernon out there early, get a three, four place scoring drive and that's way easier said than done. And again, I mean they're going to be doing that in some pretty cold weather. We know that Winnipeg is a different beast, not just the team but the environment. But I would really like to see them get out there and just like we know what their strengths are and I mean the best thing that they can do is at this point, it's not really about fixing the holes because I think they've tried to do that this season and it just hasn't worked. Unfortunately, they've still been able to win games just because they have enough power, but at this point you just have to go in there and like we say, you got to go make a statement. You have to go and get that big scoring drive early, get Keon Hatcher involved, Get Alex Hollins involved. Just get everybody going early. And if you don't do that, then I think the writings on the wall is a good saying. They need to do it. I was looking back here, this is what was this week three or four if I can get this up here? When they went in before where they really shut 'em down and held them to field goals really take the crowd out of it. To me that's the biggest thing. It's not only the elements, but it is the hole and it's just everyone's screaming. And I remember watching the game last year and Nathan's coming back and he's still not a hundred percent. And I'm just like, I felt so bad for all of that. You need to, Evan said, score early, get the crowd out of it. Jason, Evan and I on the BC team train, you had texted me, you're pro BC now. What are you making here of their chances going into Winnipeg? Well, they definitely have a shot because this is a team. When they're playing their best, they can beat any team in the CFL, but I think at certain points they get too high on themselves. I feel like we've seen that throughout the year where they've had a big victory, they play excellent, they did this week and then the next week they kind of show up a little bit flat against a team that is better prepared. So I think I'm looking forward to seeing how they start the game. Like you said, if they can get off to a lead, I think that would be huge in this one. And just to add on the running game aspect of things, I think that they did a good job in this game, even though they didn't run the ball well, they did a good job of getting the ball to Tequan, mazel in the screen game and stuff like that kind of substituting for the running game. So I think that could be huge. Kind of slowing down that Winnipeg Pass Rush will be huge. I think Winnipeg six sacks the last time they played at bc, so I think that will be huge slowing down Willie Jefferson and company over there. So I think BC has a shot. They have so many Playmakers on that side of the ball. I think Dominic Rimes who had a quiet game this week is due for a big game next week. So I mean I think they have a lot more firepower left in them this season, so I think they have a shot, but at the end of the day, Winnipeg is going to be very tough to beat a team with a championship pedigree. Yeah, I like seeing, like you said, different kind of uses. I know Mazel and they liked him because he was hurt earlier in the season. He missed a week or two and then they brought him back and they said, well we like him because of his hands and he's able to do more of that reception stuff, not to keep bringing up with commanders, but similarly B Enemy is using a lot of our running backs in different ways now where we're not just pounding in, let's get them in motion, let's get them in the passing game that way. And like you said, do the get the same benefit but maybe it doesn't look like a rushing, whatever kind of thing on paper. I want to talk Calgary here and then we'll do the CFL set before we get out. Evan, I guess first to you, it's been not a great, they've had two pretty good games back to back here and may looking at least halfway decent. What do you make here kind of all said and done for Calgary? Well look, I mean I think this game could have been a lot worse for Calgary and I'm honestly surprised that they were able to, obviously they didn't win, but the fact that they were able to, well I can't even really say competitive, but at least just put points on the board. I mean this team, there's no doubt that they've had their struggles this year. And if you take away those two interceptions, Jake Mayer had one of his better games. You could argue of the entire season here. And I think another thing too that Calgary really benefited from was Kadeem Carey establishing their run game. It was 14, carries for 75 yards, taking a bit of that workload off of mayor even though he's still through for 300 yards. I mean, what are you going to do? You just got to keep firing when you're going against BC's offense. But yeah, I mean ultimately I don't think this was a bad game for Calgary going into the game. I didn't think they had much of a shot, but the fact that they were even able to pull within 11 and it got that high scoring, I mean I'll give him credit for that. I mean that team went through a lot this year, the fact that they're even in playoffs now and it looked impossible that they were going to keep that streak alive. But by the way, a separate note, but pretty sad about Garrett Davis, Greg Streak ending. I Dunno if you guys talk about that before I got on, but no, we, sorry. Yeah, that's a tough one. I was kind of banking on that in the back of my head, but anyway, Calgary. Yeah, I mean look, they're still going to have some questions going into this off season, but to be honest, I mean they came into the playoffs when everybody said they wouldn't and they had a respectable day. And to be honest, I mean are you really going to make significant changes after that? I don't think so. I mean I still believe in Jake Mayer and again, not the season that I expected from him at all really. Yeah, he flashed some stuff, but I thought he was going to be playing at an all-star level and wasn't quite close to that. But do I think that if he puts the time in with the Off-season program, then yes, I think he could get to that level still. Again, we've seen so many flashes from him this year. He just needs to limit some things and polish some things up that I thought might've already been done going into this season. But if he needs an extra year, look, like I said, football in general, not just the CFL is a winning business and whether you like it or not, this team as ugly as it was again, they were in the playoffs, you can't slice that one way or another. So excited to see what the off season brings for this team. It's one of those situations, I mean all the off season situations are very interesting. And the one thing that sets the CFL apart from some other football leagues, I mean mainly the NFL if you want to draw a direct comparison is free agency. A lot of these guys are only going to teams for maybe a year. So you get a lot of turnover and a lot of change. So it's easy for teams to kind of swap players out if they want to. I mean, look at Hamilton, Jason brought it up earlier. They turned over half their roster just because you have so many guys on those shorter contracts. So again, Calgary, it'll be interesting to see what they do with some of their pieces. I love what they already have, to be honest, I wouldn't, I would hope I guess that they would keep a lot of those pieces going into next year because I think that they can win more than six games with the existing roster right now. But again, one of those situations that'll be fun to follow as there is for a lot of teams, not just the playoff teams. Yeah. Jason, same to you here. We talked to Hamilton and all of that. I mean I feel like he can't blow up Calgary, right? I mean I feel like Jake took him to the playoffs here, right? Yeah, for sure. I mean this whole season was a struggle for them. I think their injured list was absolutely huge. I think one injury that really cost them this season was the injury to Malik Henry. I think that with him and Ton, they have a legit one two receiver combo and Chen is the guy that can stretch the field for them. But once they lost that element, this offense was very, very hard to watch. And I mean I was also looking at their free agent list this morning, the three down posted. They have 38 free agents of the 50 something man roster. So they have an opportunity to change a lot of this roster if they want to this off season, it'll be interesting to see who they decide to keep. But Calgary has been a team throughout the years that has been very reluctant to spend money in free agency and bring in players from other teams. And I'm very interested to see now that they've had a season like this, do they change their philosophy at all in that regard, I would bring in a legitimate backup quarterback because as much as we want to talk about how Jake Mayer struggled this season, I think there's no team in the league that has a bigger drop off between the number one and number two quarterback who even is the backup quarterback for the Calgary Stampeders, it's Tommy Stevens, but he wouldn't be getting a start if Jake Neir ever went down. But luckily that didn't happen for the Stampeders this season. We didn't have to watch whoever they had at backup quarterback this year. But I would bring in a legitimate backup quarterback, maybe a Matthew Schultz type would be good for them. But at the end of the day, I would give Jake near another year. Development in this league at quarterback is rarely linear. I think when you look at the great quarterbacks in this league, it takes time to really develop into those guys. And maybe if they move on from Jake near, this is another Dane Evans situation where Calgary's not any better next year if they bring in another guy. So I think at the end of the day I would ride with Jake Mayer and make some tweaks to the roster. Right. Mayer was the only one that started every game this season, right? The only starter for all that. So yeah, we'll see. Should be excited. We'll start rounding down here before we get out. I want to make sure we talk and Evan can chime in as much as he wants to or not, but this is Reed here talking now th Rice credentialed CFL reporter here coming in CFL account, so doesn't follow me on Twitter. That's okay. The CFL plus experience, I would love anybody involved in the league office to have it doesn't have to be with me. Have a conversation with any Americans at all that are watching, not just American, but any non-Canadian watching your product on CFL plus in the off season because it's truly a horrendous experience with the no on demand. You have to do it live. And then this weekend, not only do we don't get the ads, so you get kind of this black and white Canadian football footage and we get this trap, hip hop, whatever music, but then this weekend they felt the need to air the Gray Cup Hamilton commercial, which is really cool. And I showed you this to Dorothy and she's like, oh that Sam. But they've played it every single commercial break the entire, and spoiler alert, the CFL has a lot of commercial breaks and it kills me where if I'm watching CFL plus if I'm watching the playoffs on CFL plus I am not the target demographic for this anyway. I know what the Gray Cup is, I know it's going to Hamilton if I'm watching the CL playoffs on that, but it's such just a wasted opportunity and just a lazy, at least go back to the trap music. But just to have it be repetition by a thousand just nice in my skull. But to me there's a better use of whatever this platform is, there's easy ways to tweak it that would take a little bit of work, having the on demand be able to pull the games up that way, be able to pause the game. I don't understand why we can't put the TSM broadcast up afterward and just be able to kind of scrub through it like you can on the TSM website in Canada. I understand there's rights involved with all that and ads and everything else, but very frustrating. Evan, do you have anything else to add? I mean it definitely needs some work right now. I'm very grateful. I mean look, I can sit here and complain about repetitive Gray Cup ads and a hip hop song that's stuck in my head and the same gray footage or whatever. But to be honest, man, I'm just really happy that they even took the initiative to have that platform in the first place because if you're trying to grow the game, especially amongst maybe the American people, considering how many American players they have up there, I'm not get into that debate, but I think it's really important to make it easily accessible. And they have done that through CFL plus being able to just pull up a website and obviously not all the games are available well in the first half of the season. It's interesting because they had a lot more games on CBS sports with that new partnership obviously switching over from ESPN, but you noticed that when the college football season started, obviously that takes priority for CBS sports and a lot of those slots are filled. So really every game it feels like for the past or the last third of the season I feel like was on CFL plus and a lot more people were probably using it. So it definitely needs some work. I didn't mind all the little things too much. I don't really pay attention to that. I don't worry as much about on demand. Maybe you do Reed, it's not as big of a deal for me. If I know the game's on, I'm just going to set aside the time for the game and I'm not really somebody to go back and rewatch too much unless it's highlights. But I think the one thing that I'd really like to see him do, obviously we're sitting here talking about ad space and repetitiveness. I think with that time in between, well what would be a commercial break on the TSM broadcast, but obviously CFL plus, it's just that same song playing over and over again. I think it would be really cool to see, and I brought this up in our chat, but mean the CFL, they have some great content creators. They've done some cool things with video production and following player stories and it's become, some of the stuff they're doing there is very professional. You could argue that it's better quality than some of the leagues like the other pro leagues X-F-L-U-S-F-L here in the United States. And I'm not going to make this a big media war, but who has the better YouTube account? But my point being, it would be really cool to see, maybe they kind of throw in some clips about certain players or some things from their YouTube. Maybe you could advertise. I mean if you think that CFL plus that's a US and international audience. So obviously you're not going to be advertising like, hey, this is going to be at the game on Sunday. Not really your projected audience, but maybe if you were saying like, Hey, here's what you should look for the game next week. Obviously it's not a broadcast from a specific team, so dunno how you'd work around that. Maybe you just kind of get a general CFL person to break down the games or whatever. But there's a lot that you can do there. I mean there's certainly a lot more than listening to the same soundtrack over and over again. That's been ingrained into my head throughout the season. So we'll see. Do I expect that to happen? I don't know mean are they really willing to put that much time into the CFL plus product, which is really just a couple games here and there that are available to watch and there's not many futures. I don't know. I mean the fact that the games are there already, at least to me kind of feels like enough. And maybe to them feels like enough also. But again, there's a lot you could work with there and hopefully they make an attempt to do something with it. Yeah. My last thing is just, it's clear to me A, that no one in the CFL office uses CFL plus at all to access any of this, which is fine. So you come out and you say words and I had Randy on the show and no, well this is a great service. And it's like, I can tell that you're not using this because little things that would change and make the user experience better. But it also says to me there's probably not a lot of people accessing this because I have to imagine they have access to the analytics involved in this and kind of know, are we getting 5,000 people a week? I don't know what the numbers are, but I have to imagine it's not a super high even though it's free and even though it's easily accessed. Jason, any thoughts on this before we get out? I know this is a little bit of American complaining, but anything else? Yeah, I mean I'm hopeful that this, because it was the first year that they had CFL plus there in the United States, I'm hopeful that they can add more features as the years go on here and we'll see a much improved product next season. I would like to see them do something that you could actually subscribe to and something that even if you had to pay for it to get the games on demand and get all these past games from previous seasons, I'd like to see that because almost every professional sports league kind of has a streaming service like that. I'd even like to see that up here in Canada. But like you said, rights issues kind of come into play with that. But yeah, I'm hopeful that the changes will be made in the future to CFL plus. Well there you go. As we say, when we talk the XL use L stuff like hope in one hand and you can poop in the other and we'll see which one fills up first. No, but I mean, well this was fun. Like I said, depending on XLS of L stuff this week, this could be the previous show. Otherwise we'll do our big recap next week. And then, like I said, a big show there on, it's going to be live on the Saturday before, so we'll be live the Saturday before live on the 18th and then you can enjoy the Gray Cup preview show. It usually spikes in on Sunday, but we'll record that. Probably going to be noon local time if we're going with the anchor bar. Otherwise we'll figure out. But I'll post all that stuff. Evan, anything else from you? Awesome. Thanks guys. We'll see everyone next week if you're subscribed. Not already, but we'll see you guys next time. Thanks.

LIVE CFL 2023 Grey Cup Playoffs Preview Show!!!

Well here we are. Happy Markcast Monday back regularly scheduled a CFL weekend recap, but I thought we would do something fun today. Obviously games for the weekend, a little meaningless unless you're drawing the Argonauts fan going for history here. So we decided to kind of put together a special panel day. Let me bring in the normal, normal folks here. First off, Jason Evan, how are we doing? Doing good. Reid ready to talk Some playoff football. Yeah, talking playoff football. We'll talk games of the weekend. Bob Dice. Reid being renewed here. I saw Tim BA just post out and then I decided here. Let's get Ryan. I think Cliffy still getting set up. We got Ryan Valentine here. Last I spoke with this gentleman, we were sharing a beer together under the Brooklyn Bridge in New York. New York and Vegas. Ryan, how are you doing? Good man. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. It was a good night that night and a great night or a great time in the CFL right now. Yeah, it'll be good. I figured I wanted to get a special guest and then we have both Cliffy and Ryan get back to me back and forth. Cliffy here as well. We can talk both east and West. CFL playoffs. Cliffy, how are you doing sir? Doing good yourself? We're good. So we're here today I guess first breaking news off the bat, we've talked for weeks here about Bob DYS and kind of his future. Jason, are you surprised him being renewed to the Ottawa here, Tim Bain and I saw AJ Jackie close to it as well. Yeah, I'm not completely shocked because of obviously the CFL operations cap, but just generally how teams do it these days, they don't want to deal with the subsequent penalties for having years left on the contract. So not shocked at all even though that wouldn't be the decision I would've made. Evan a question for you. Yeah, I'm not too surprised either. I think Dice, I mean obviously look game management this year was a bit of a problem, but again, I remember when Farhan came on your show and he talked about Ottawa and he was kind of saying, well if you do make changes, who is going to replace the person that is leaving? Are you prepared to make that jump? And ultimately they decided that it's not going to be much change. So yeah, ultimately I think another year with Dice, given his just the level of experience that he has in the CFL, I do think he's deserving of another shot. It might be surprising to some, but yeah, ultimately, like Jason said with the operations cap and just Everything else, I mean it was a trying season for Ottawa as it's been for the past, I guess couple years. So onto the next one. Yeah. Ryan, do you view that as an Ottawa to me kind of feels like a wasted year here. We had the Moz experiment last year and obviously we all know with that, with Marino and everything and then this, you're running back and it feels like they're very stagnant right now. Yeah, I think Ottawa is in a bit of a holding pattern admittedly, but I also think it's shortsighted to fire a coach after one season. Bob DySIS has had one year, let's give him, let's get 'em into a second camp, get him into a second year, let him find a rhythm a little bit. If he's still not doing getting the job done for the team next year, then maybe you look at replacing him. But I think firing a coach after one season is always something that feels good for fans, but I don't know that it's great for the continuity of the team. Obviously Cliffy better for the Ettes, you're having a weaker Ottawa team, but what do you make of that? I know you guys obviously have eyes on everything, but obviously they east a lot. Well, I'm also surprised at the fact that they had Khari Jones and Baron Miles who were both former Ettes coaches go to Ottawa to try and revitalize things there and help out Bob Dice and it didn't work unfortunately. And that's unfortunate to say because they're both excellent coaches, they're both excellent coordinators. But I mean sometimes it's just not the right fit or for whatever reason they just can't keep the room. And I have a feeling besides the injuries, I think that was a lot of the problem was I don't know if Khari was truly able to implement his plan. I mean his coaching style works, definitely you saw what happened with her and Adams, but for some reason with Jeremiah Mo, Dustin Rum and everybody else that played quarterback to the Red Blacks, it just didn't seem to be the right fit. So speaking of Ottawa and everything, and obviously like I said, we'll kind of get through this real quick, the Toronto historic kind of victory here going up over Ottawa. Jason, what did you make of that here at Home Ottawa closing out the season and everything else but kind of the accolades that went along with the Argonauts? Yeah, well I didn't have the chance to watch a lot of these games this weekend, but at the end of the day I congratulations to the Argonauts for obviously pulling off the regular season record. But I mean at the end of the day it doesn't matter unless they ultimately win the Great Cup. But I feel like that's the thing that I'm going to take a look at today in a video I'm going to be doing later on where I'm compare the regular season juggernauts and if they ultimately ended up winning the Great Cup the last 30 years. And a lot of these teams that historically have had great records in the CFL in the regular season, you think back to those Calgary teams, Ryan will attest to that last 10 years or so. They've had a lot of disappointing losses in the Great Cup or before the Great Cup. So ultimately it does not matter the regular season record if Toronto doesn't finish the deal here. Yeah. Ryan, we've had a lot of talk on here and just the game management of Toronto and here Duke's the start again. We didn't see a lot of Brian Scott hoping, see more of him kind down the pike here. What have you made of how Toronto's kind of game is with Dimm Whitty? Well, I think they're trying to keep their players healthy and at the same time trying to keep players fresh. And it becomes difficult when you look at these CFL seasons and having to keep guys from, I mean they've been clinched for what, six games or something. It's not like they've had any kind of worry or time or stress in this last little bit, but they also need to keep their guys on the field. I mean I understand Chad Kelly didn't play against Ottawa this weekend, but now when you look at it, when was the last time Chad Kelly fired a pass that mattered by the time he gets to the East final? It'll been a calendar month and are you able to stay fresh? Are you able to stay ready to go if that's the way you're going? And that's why I think you see a lot of those teams that have these great regular season records end up falling in the playoffs because there is no intention to their game late. So I do think they were chasing the record and that gave them something to go for, but at the same time, I don't know that they really cared if they won or lost these games down the stretch from a consequence standpoint. So it'll be interesting to see if they can manage that and flip that switch in the East final. I dunno, I've heard that and I know and they've had it. We want to go one and oh every week. Evan, do you have any updated thoughts here? Now that we've gone through this whole experiment and everyone that's been on the shows every week, it has kind of gone back and forth about what the right way, but now that we've made it here, Toronto's off next weekend and then going to be facing either Montreal or Hamilton, how have you graded how they've handled this? I mean I think again, it's a tough spot, right? Because you clinch for the playoffs so early you get that spot, you lock up the east, whatever, but if you can't sit Chad Kelly for a month and it's just not play him and then he sits there going into the playoffs and he hasn't played in the month, that's impossible. So we've definitely seen I think maybe a bit more of him. I know last week in that Saskatchewan game, it took a long time for Dinwitty to take him out really until he started hobbling and then had to come off and then Dinwitty said, okay, we'll put Dukes in. And then obviously Dukes played this game in Ottawa. But yeah, I mean right now I don't know, I don't see Toronto. I mean I understand they haven't really the past couple games, it feels like they haven't played a meaningful game in a while, but I still don't really see him given anything up. The only team that has a chance, I know Mike Mitchell who covers the Argos and we were talking about that. He said maybe Hamilton has a shot just because obviously their offense has been reworked under Scott and you've seen the increase there in their production Since he came in and took over for Tommy Condell. That team looks a lot more complete now. So there's a possibility, right? There's always that chance and I mean that'll be an interesting game I think nonetheless. But boy, if Toronto goes down after a 16 win season, I will be very surprised. Yeah. Cliffy, what do you make of this? We had Darryl Davis on last week. I mean he's calling for the tie Kats upset for Montreal. I know that would make Jason happy. Obviously I like the outlets, not just because I like you guys, but what are you making here of the east? Because to me, and we'll get to Ryan and Sam, Peter scare me with bc. I mean I'm very terrified for that game, but what do you make of this in the East? I think this is pretty interesting matchup. Well, I mean Montreal is arguably the hottest team in the east right now, but Hamilton is no slouch either. I mean, as you said, they are built to compete and built to win as is Montreal from what I saw this past Saturday at Molson Stadium. I mean yes, obviously there is, I think both sides were taking it kind of light because the game meant nothing in the standings. I have a feeling Matthew Shilts though is going to be the big factor he didn't play at all this past Saturday and I'm wondering if they're keeping him and Tim White for the Eastern. From what I saw from Bo Levi, he just did not look like the Bo Levi we've all gotten to know over the years. But to me I think Montreal has what it takes to win. I think Cody Fido, Jason Moss, their plan is working. It's not perfect by any stretch, but I think what they've been able to accomplish this year is nothing short of incredible. And truthfully, if Hamilton wins, it's only going to fuel the narrative that because Jager David is playing for them and he's been in every Gray Cup game, win or lose his entire career. And as of now, he still is very much a member of the Hamilton Tiger Cat. So if Hamilton makes to the Gray Cup, it's because they've got Ja Garrett Davis in their lineup. Hui, what are we making here? Beau's back, we had all these question marks here and everything. He's back now and obviously this game isn't a true test. Okay, what do we have going on, but now that we're finally here going into next week and what are you making? Well, I'll piggyback of what Cliff Cliff said. I think that it has to be Matthew Shilts behind center for the majority of the game if they're going to want to win. I think that I really don't like the matchup of Bo Levi Mitchell against that Ettes defense. I think the Ettes have an outstanding defense and I think that the Tigercat against with both Levi Mitchell or Taylor Powell, they just didn't look very good. Obviously a meaningless game. They didn't have Tim White, they didn't have James Butler. But I think in general, the previous matches we saw this season, we saw Mitchell. Actually Mitchell didn't play any of the games other than this past week against the Alouettes, but the previous couple matchups, the Ettes won while visiting Tim Orfield in pretty convincing fashion. So I don't really like the Tiger Kat's chances of going in here and getting a win unless Matthew Shilts is Behind center. Ryan, what have you made of the Hamilton season? You're very odd and we're getting Bo back and we got the quarterbacks that kind of got us to the dance and balancing all that, what have you made of how the TCATs have handled this? Well, the TCATs didn't really come out of the gate in the way we were all expecting. We thought that the tie cats would be a good team. They loaded up in free agency, but then some injury troubles got in the way and they struggled and really had trouble at the quarterback position. But coming down the stretch, if you look at their recent record, I know they lost a BC and I think they fell the Hamilton there or Montreal this past weekend. But again, in a game where you're really not showing anything outside of those two losses, they lost to Toronto in the back to backs, but they've won a lot of games in the back half of the season. So it wouldn't surprise me to see them pull the upset here over Montreal. I think for me a lot of that has to do with Jason Moss and Cody Fido's history of not necessarily performing when the lights are the brightest, whether it be Moss as a head coach or Fido as a quarterback. You think back to the donk off the upright a few years ago that would've sent Saskatchewan into a gray cup, but instead Winnipeg, Winnipeg gets the victory there because Fudo hit the upright. So it's more of a historical context that make me concerned for Montreal, but I think you've either got Garrett Davis making his way towards another great cup, or you've got the resurgence Sean Lemon leading the way on defense for Montreal. So I mean I think this will be probably the more entertaining of the two games this weekend, but I think it really could go either way. I think for me, this one's a coin flip. That's so funny. The upright thing, I think that was a year, that was 2019, right? That was before. And obviously then we got into everything and the XFL and all that, but then yeah, that was the Cody legacy. Totally kind of spaced on that. Montreal's just a weird team to me. We've talked a lot on here and Jason's point out they can beat anyone that's not Toronto and BC and it feels to me like the Chargers last night like, okay, we beat the Chicago Bears. It's like, okay, that's awesome you were able to put up Evan. Now that we're at this point with Montreal, I know that my boy James Letcher had another big kick return here, friend of the show bounce here coming in for the weekend. What do you make of this year? Not going in? I mean, yeah, I've been saying it for a long time. I think Hamilton has what it takes just with the way that they've been playing on the back half of this season to beat Montreal and I think it won't be too difficult for them. Now that being said, a big question for Hamilton that's already been talked about a bit here is the quarterback situation. Obviously in the game this weekend, it was a meaningless game for both teams. They didn't really want to show obviously what they had fully or whatever, don't want to give away all your stuff before the playoffs. So it was a mix of Taylor Powell and Bevi Mitchell and obviously Bevi Mitchell has been playing pretty well I'd say since he came back from that injury. And honestly, there was a time where I wondered if Bevi was ever going to play again this season or maybe even again for the Thai ka. I don't know. There were a lot of questions there, but in this game in particular, Taylor Powell played better and obviously I don't think that's their plan in the playoffs. I think they might go back to they'd love to play two quarterbacks. Hamilton's done that in the past. Jeremiah was solely Dane Evans. I think it would make sense to roll with Shilts and Bo Levi in this game. But yeah, Bo Levi didn't look the best in this game. That was meaningless. So going into playoffs here, you wonder who's going to get a majority of the reps. Do you trust Schultz more because he's obviously been around for a while, a veteran guy now. So there's definitely some questions there, but I like Hamilton and to be honest, like I said, I think they have what it takes to really make a run there and getting past Toronto might be a bit different and I don't know, they're a good team. I don't know if they have enough to get that done, but in this game, I mean I just can't get over the fact. Look, I know Montreal, it's interesting because again, we've talked about all season how they can beat, they can beat anybody that's not as good as them, but they can not beat anybody that's better than them. So they're right in the middle in terms of if it's Toronto, Winnipeg, BC can't do it, but if it's Hamilton, Ottawa, Saskatchewan, whatever, no problem. So I don't know, Hamilton, they've beat Hamilton before they beat them this week, so it's not completely out of the question, but playoff football is a bit different and given it just feels like this team during the regular season, there were certainly some missed opportunities despite them still being an 11 win team, which is a great accomplishment. So there's a lot there and definitely I'd say out of all the games, I think that one could definitely, it might have the most swing I guess you could say, in either direction. I don't see, let's say BC Calgary having that same type of 51 49 or whatever you want to call it, toss up. I think it's a bit more clear cut there. So definitely one of the more interesting games to watch, to say the least. Yeah, like here Tim, we had the early Lions here in Montreal here, two and a half, and then BC Cliffy Tim was on, I had him on, I should have had you on here during the season as well, just kind of in my retrospective life here. But Tim happy this really could have been a disaster here coming on and you got new ownership and Moss coming in and pedo and getting exile from Saskatchewan. What's been your overall, I would think as a Montreal Outlets fan, you have to be pretty thrilled with where we're at right now. Oh, I think Ettes fans absolutely have to be thrilled with what's going on because everybody and their mother pretty much predicted the worst for Montreal after going through the upheaval of ownership and new head coach and bringing in Cody Fajardo and free agency after his lesson Stellar run in Saskatchewan as it ended, I mean there was a lot of question marks and truthfully it hasn't been perfect, but the Ettes really have answered all those questions they've met every time the bell rang, they've met it and they've been able to accomplish quite a bit in spite of all the extracurriculars, if you will, and it's pretty remarkable of what they've been able to do. So I think truly this team has been put together the right way. It's not perfect. And yes, until they beat the top tier teams like the Torontos, the bcs and Winnipegs, they haven't shown anything yet. So I mean I think they're going to be motivated to do so. They're going to show it against Hamilton again, who they've basically swept the season series this year. I mean, I know playoffs is a different animal altogether, but I think right now they've got the momentum, they've got that feeling and speaking with players after the games, they all say the same thing. The goal is to go want to know every week it's to stay focused and they know what they have to do. It's just a matter of going out and executing and by and large, this team has been able to do that. So I do feel confident that Montreal is playing at home in front of their fans and all indications that it's going to be very close to, if not completely sold out for this Saturday's game. I think Montreal takes that momentum and keeps it going. Will it be able to beat Toronto? Possibly, but I mean let's focus one thing at a time. They know they have to beat Hamilton, they know they haven't gotten the best of them this past Saturday, so you're just going to have to leave it all out there. Simply put, both Hamilton and Montreal are going to have to bring everything they've got if they want advance to the Eastern final. Has. It does feel like, I don't know, Montreal's kind of been a little bit of a roller coaster Hamilton here on the upswing. I mean it does feel like both of these powers, it's kind of peak power for both of these teams right now. Am I reading that correctly? I think so. Oh, sorry Cliff. We'll go. You're good. No, you're right. Again, there's always something about the latter part of the season where both of these teams just seemed to know how to click into place. They were struggling for most of the year, especially against the top tier teams, but both teams in their own way have got the momentum. I just think Montreal has a slight edge, especially since they've beaten Hamilton, all three games they've played against each other. So you really can count either team out. I guess part of the beauty of the playoff picture right now is that you look at Hamilton, you look at Montreal and you could easily save, you can make Case for either one of those teams advancing to the Eastern final. Jason, what do you think here? It really feels like, like I said, it is been weird and we talk this every year in the east and everything, but both of these kind of extending right now. Yeah, for sure. I think one thing that I want to point out is that Montreal, obviously they have that thing where they can't beat anybody that's above them or whatever. They can't beat the top three teams in the CFL, so they're 11 zero against everybody else. But Hamilton has not beaten Montreal or Toronto this season. And I mean usually in football I find it's increasingly hard to beat a team the more times that you play them. So if Toronto were to play Hamilton a fifth time, they're going to have to try to go five and no against Hamilton and with Montreal it's going to have to try to go to four no against Hamilton. So I mean it's going to be interesting to see from that perspective if Montreal can get it done again against Hamilton as well. So yeah, I think it's going to be a very interesting game and like you said, I think that you could argue that the east has been stronger than the West this year in general. I think even you look at Ottawa, they were able to win some games against the West division this year. I think that Hamilton has really picked it up over the second half of the season, but when it comes to this matchup, I really do like the ettes in this matchup. Ryan, in terms of Hamilton here, were you getting rid of Bo Levi? How did you sort all this stuff out going into this season? I don't know that I was getting rid of Bo Levi, but Bo is not the bo that he used to be, and I'm not sure that Bo has changed his mentality, his gunslinger mentality of I can get it through triple coverage, I can fire that deep ball, I can have that, I can make that pass. I don't know that his brain and his mindset have matched what his body is capable of doing from a couple seasons of consecutive shoulder surgeries. There was a point in Ricky Ray's career where he went from being the deep ball gunslinger that he was in Edmonton to being the seven eight yard drop offense magician. He became in Toronto and while he could still occasionally hit a deep ball, that wasn't his first thought. I think Bo could be very successful if he went to that mindset. The problem is I don't think he's got that mindset shift yet, so I wasn't necessarily in favor of Bo going in the way that he went, but at the same time I also recognize that he wasn't the quarterback he once was, and so maybe it was time for a fresh start, a new look, and maybe that would give him that mindset shift. I don't know that it has, but that's what Thought was best for him at the time. Well, I think it's also hard because I mean he really hasn't had a lot of opportunity this year. Yeah, he's also been injured most of the year, so that hasn't helped for sure. Jason, is this the bow experiment here? I mean is it Gray Cup or bus year at this point, or how do we kind settle out of this year moving forward? Well, if he goes on to win the Great Cup this year, all will be forgiven with how this whole season's turned out for him because this is what they brought him in to do to bring that better and experience to get them over the hump. Had good teams, they've had teams that have been capable of getting to the Great Cup, but they just cannot get across the finish line and maybe having the experience of Boli by Mitchell can help them get there. But like I said, I think it's an uphill battle having to win both road games to get to the Great Cup and ironically, if they got to the Great Cup, the home game would be the Great Cup, but I think that it's going to be very difficult for the Tigercat because I think I was reading that a third place team in the East Division hasn't made the Great Cup since I believe the Alouettes in 1970 something, so it's going to be an uphill battle for Hamilton. Evan, anything else? We'll start shifting over here to the West, but anything else you're talking that Montreal Hamilton, I mean just on the topic of Levi Mitchell, I mean I think people just with the way this season's gone, the fact that he hasn't played, I mean people are very quick to forget what he used to be and I know it's been a long time maybe since we've seen him in his prime, but Calgary was in the playoffs every year for a reason and this year obviously a bit different. A lot of people didn't expect Calgary to maybe get in or at least I didn't, just with the way things were going obviously. But anyway, yeah, I mean both Levi, I wouldn't count him out yet again, I know it's been kind of up and down. He might not be the same player, obviously this game that he played this week wasn't so great, but he's flashed some stuff here in these past or the last couple games here at the end of the season that do look kind of like vintage Bo Levi for lack of a better term. So if he can show that against Montreal, I think that it doesn't guarantee that Hamilton wins, but it'll certainly make the game a lot more entertaining. Yeah, I don't know. Hey Jason, do you feel, I don't know, we were talking here and Mike Mitchell, like we said in our chat about Hamilton having to go and beat Toronto, whatever. I mean, how do you feel now Whoever Comes out of this game here going into Toronto would happen to face? Well, I feel like it's interesting when you talk about Toronto's perspective in this, I think that they would rather see Montreal than Hamilton just because of the history of Hamilton kind of you look back at the 2021 East Final and how they went in there and upset them. I think that there's a little bit of a fear in the back of Argo's fans' minds when it comes to that, but I think in terms of the business of the people in the Toronto Argonauts organization, they would like to see Hamilton make that game because I think it would maximize the amount of tickets sold and stuff like that. So it'll be interesting to see. I think that regardless Toronto will be a heavy favorite to win that game, but I do think they would rather see the Alouettes. I think that even though the Alouettes have played closer games against the Argos this season than the Tigercat have, I think it's just in the back of their mind that they would have to ask them to do it again a fifth time. So I think it's going to be very interesting to see how it plays out. Cliffy, I'll give you final word here on the outlet, so we'll shift over a little bit. Anything else from you about this? Yeah, I think there is a lot to prove as we keep talking about the narrative of yeah, you're good, but are you good enough to go to the Gray Cup is just lingering overhead with Montreal. I mean, yeah, a lot of people think that they can beat Hamilton and they very well could. As I said, we can make an argument for both teams in the Eastern semi-final, but I truly believe Montreal is they've got what it takes to get to the Eastern final and I definitely think they owe it to themselves to be competitive in the Eastern final because yes, they have played Toronto pretty close at personal Molson Stadium earlier this year though, the Ettes got dog walked essentially by the Argos at BMO field and last year they were a converted touchdown away from going to the Great Cup, beating the Argo nuts. So that's got to be a motivating factor as well. Cody Fedra wants to prove that he is that guy. Jason Moss wants to prove that he is that guy as well for this. There's a lot on the line for the Alouettes and it all starts on Saturday, but to them I think it truly is gray cup or bus. If they do not make it to the Gray Cup, this will be looked at as a lost season and it's unfortunate to think that because given everything that they've gone through this year, they should be extremely proud of where they are and I think deep down they are, but at the same time you want that ring you want to prove to everybody, yeah, I am good enough to be a great cup winning quarterback or head coach or wherever you are within this organization, you want to prove that you are that person. So to me I think that's what's going to be motivating the alouettes and I think that's really going to give them what they need to get past Hamilton and give a great match to Toronto as well. And yeah, I would not be surprised to see Montreal in the Gray Cup if only for those reasons, but you've got to be able to do it. You've got to be able to execute. That's truly the thought right now is yes, you're good, but are you good enough? And it's a question I've been asking all season of this team and so far the answer is they are good, but are they good enough to beat those top tier teams? If you can do that, you know what the reward is. So at the end of the day it's on the allt to show that yes, they are who they say they are. Well I think it too and also would cement Cody. I dunno, to me, at least when we came into the league, it always felt like Cody was kind of in that upper tier at least just in terms of visibility and more than a Nick Arbuckle of that and maybe Nick used to be everyone knows kind our place in covering the league here, but that would to have Cody kind of be in that as kind, they couldn't make or couldn't do or whatever. In terms of Calgary here, Ryan, we had Jamie N on two weeks ago screaming that Saskatchewan, that their fans didn't even want them to make the great Cup and they wanted to lose and make their way out of it. Calgary's in now you're muted. Calgary's in now and are we happy? I mean because this has been not a great season. I mean I don't think there's anybody that's going to say that they're unhappy. The Stampeders made the playoffs as a stamps fan. There's kind of like a sadomasochistic relationship between the riders and their fans that has gone on for generations and so the idea that they didn't make the playoffs and so we can rage accordingly is a Saskatchewan thing. That's definitely not a Calgary thing. Calgary fans have made the Stampeders are now in their 18th consecutive season of making the playoffs. There are now a full generation of fans that have never not seen the playoffs in Calgary, so they definitely wanted to be there. Fans definitely wanted to be there. They know the expectations are not high for this team headed into the playoffs, but just making the playoffs and knowing that that streak continues allows them to rebuild for next year. And there's that kind of anything they do as a bonus at this stage feeling to the team. There's obviously disappointment in how the team went, but if the disappointment in Calgary is still a playoff spot that also matches fans' expectations here in Cowtown, they expect to make the playoffs even if you're a bad team. Yeah. Jason six and 12 here, and I saw a lot of everything about all this stuff. Hey, we're XFL fans here. We're USFL fans. We're used to teams with losing records, making the playoffs here all the time. Jason, what's your overall she thoughts or stamped season now that we're here? Yeah, it's been a really struggling season for them. I feel like they've had so many injuries. I mean their injured list is crazy and really everybody's gotten hurt except for the quarterback and Jake Mayer I think is the only quarterback in the league to start all 18 games this season. So I mean it's disappointing from that perspective to see where the record is considering they've had their quarterback healthy the whole year whereas the rest of the league. But I think that the receivers outside of Reggie Beton have not produced the way that they've wanted to. They've had a lot of injuries in that regard. Jalen, Phil Pot, a guy That they're really counting on coming into the year, but he couldn't stay healthy, wasn't really healthy at the beginning of the season, so I think at the end of the day it's been a really struggling season for Calgary, but like Ryan said, they aren't the team that's going to miss the playoffs that break that playoffs streak, so I think at the end of the day, that's an accomplishment of itself that they're able to just keep that streak alive for another year. Cliffy, it came out last week, we talked about it a little bit. I'll get Evan's updated thoughts on it, but first to you, same standings as last year, same playout, bracketing, what do you make here? Going in here, running it back, how does that feel as ACFL fan? It speaks to just how bad these teams want it and it's kind of funny to see the exact same lineup if you will from 2022 to 2023, but a lot of people, that's why you play the games really is because a lot of people were expecting Hamilton to be this outstanding team with bold Levi leading the charge and Saskatchewan, they were expected too to be gangbusters this year and it just didn't work out. Blame it on injury, blame it on whatever. At the end of the day you got to play the games and you got to win Simply put. And for the team that didn't make it, no doubt they're wondering what the heck happened and I'm sure they've got any number of reasons why it didn't work out for them, but for the teams that are in it again this year, even if it's the exact same lineup as it was in 2022, you still got to play the games and there's still the possibility that we could see the exact same thing happened again this year or we can see completely different. Once again, that's what makes the Canadian Football League so much fun is that it's not so cut and dry. It's not so simple as saying, yeah, it's going to be Winnipeg, Toronto. Again, it could be, you're absolutely right, but it could be completely different. That's what makes this so much fun. Evan, what is the biggest surprise for you this season and how everything maybe preseason perception going on to now and you're muted here? That's a good question. There were a lot of surprises. I think Saskatchewan not getting more wins there and again, a lot that goes into that, but Saskatchewan, I was definitely surprised about. I think once the season got going again, Calgary being in this position, I was really pulling for Saskatchewan. I thought that again, even if they lost a couple guys and even if things weren't perfect that they would still get in the playoffs and have some breathing room, but similar story to last year obviously where they just lose all those games after September 4th or whatever that date is that I'm sure rider fans don't want to talk about. But it's one of those things where obviously now that's cost. Craig Dickinson his job unfortunately. So all those things, I think that was a surprise that Saskatchewan wasn't able to do as well. And then Calgary being in the playoffs now I think is almost equally surprising. The other thing too that isn't brought up a lot or maybe that I haven't brought up a lot is Ottawa. I thought Ottawa was this was going to be the breakthrough year. You get Maoli back, he's healthy, things look good. I had some questions about Bob Dice, obviously now he's been renewed to try and keep that whatever momentum they have going, even if it's little you're coming off a four wind season. But I really thought this was going to be Ottawa's year to piece things together and I feel like I've been saying that ever since I really started covering the CFL in depth, which is over two years ago, it just feels like every year I'm like, this is it. Red Blacks are going to get something going and I'm not even talking about Gray Cup at all. I'm just talking about More than playoff contention not being a four win team at the bottom of the east who is having, once again a plethora of issues. And it's kind of, I think ultimately what's disappointing is you go into the off season with more questions than answers, and that's at the end of the day, sometimes if you're not succeeding on the field, that's what's going to happen. So those, I think Saskatchewan and Ottawa, I would say at least for me, the biggest surprises, I know for a lot of other people it was Montreal. I think a lot of people expected Montreal to be one of the worst teams in the CFL for lack of a better term. I just think that again, everyone viewed Montreal as being in rebuild mode, but they had enough there. I don't know if I expected them to be in playoffs either, but I think they had enough there to certainly do something and well, they won 11 games this year, so clearly they've done a good job and the fact that there's a lot of new faces there, Jason Moss, Cody Fido, et cetera, the fact that they were able to get 11 wins in year one under that, I think that's a good sign. Again, playoffs are a different game. We'll see what happens here on Saturday between them and Hamilton. But yeah, overall I think that's where I'm at with in terms of surprises or at least things that I didn't expect. Brian, same to you going into the season compared to now? What biggest surprise? Well, I think, I mean I'm surprised at the Stampedes records six and 12 isn't exactly what I expected out of the Peters, but I do think that injuries did play a major part in this. I think they made some off season decisions that completely backfired. I think getting rid of Derek Dennis and Sean Lemon definitely didn't help but the loss of James VODs to injury, you had a couple injuries along the offensive line at the tackle position that didn't help. Even with the tackles that they do have and those receiver injuries. I mean just you lose Malik and Jalen Philpott for the year early in the season and then the team's rookie of the year, Clark Barnes goes down in the midway point and they're just trying to find anybody that can catch a ball down the stretch. So I think Calgary's record for me was a big shock. I did not expect Saskatchewan to be good, excuse me this year, nor Edmonton. I think they were right where I thought they would be. I thought Hamilton would be better than they were, especially in the early part of the season. So that was a bit of a shock to me, but it seems like this season was ready for a runback just like last year, every team that was good was good last year and they didn't really lose a lot of players. There wasn't substantial movement from free agency or big off season acquisitions or trades or anything like that. So it didn't surprise me to see this bracket be the same as it was last year. Jason, for you here, we'll go around the horn and then we'll get to the BC Lions game here. Yeah, my most surprising team has to be the ettes who I actually predicted to be the worst team in the CFL this season. I think the biggest thing that we didn't see going into the season is I thought the receiving core was really lacking, but then Austin Mack really came out of nowhere and became this star and one of the best receivers in the league. So I think also another thing that we underrated with them is the ability of Jason Moss as an offensive play caller. I think their offense has been a lot better than what I expected. I thought it was probably going to be the worst offense in the league coming into the year, but they certainly have not been that, and I underrated their defense as well. I think their defense has been one of the top three units in the league this year as well. Now for Calgary, I think as well was disappointing for me as well. I actually had them at second place in the west coming into the year. I thought that Jake Mayer was going to be a guy that continues his ascension as one of the best quarterbacks in the league, but obviously that didn't happen. He's kind of fallen flat this year, but I think there's some external factors and I still think Jake Mayer can be a starting quarterback in this league, but we'll have to see what they decide to do going into the off season. But yeah, I would have to go to those two teams. I'll give mine here and then one that we'll get to the matchup. I'll say really proud, and I've said this before on here, but really proud of Vernon Adams I think last year and he was on preseason talking about how challenging it was for him last year and I'm paying rent in Montreal and I'm paying in Tacoma and I'm here in BC and try to do put him in a really hard position. I wasn't really impressed with him last year. I thought BC had such a huge lead in the standings because of Nathan Rourke. We just basically needed not to fall off a cliff and I was just really concerned this year, what does it look like with Jake Mayer with all the pressure kind of being put on and super just proud of Vernon and I think that except for that one game against Toronto, I think he's really played lights out and just cool to see him playing good meaningful football where if he had never gotten that opportunity or god knows what happens with Montreal and kind of all that other stuff. We'll get to Ryan here with it, but we'll toss to Cliffy first in terms of this BC Calgary matchup, I'm a little scared here. I know that you can talk meaningless games and BC drop to Calgary here a couple of weeks back. What do you make of this western playoff matchup Like you? I'm a big Vernon Adams guy. I definitely think he wasn't given the opportunity to do what he does best in Montreal. And I said even at the start of the year, let Vernon Cook and good things are going to happen for the BC lions and sure enough, that's exactly what's happened. I think truly he's still Vernon Adams though in the sense that he's got that gun slinger mentality and sometimes he takes too many chances, but that's what makes him big play va and I think that's going to be the big factor with him is the way the species offense is a runaway for freight train in a lot of ways, in sense that they get it done, they just barrel over and they score points and I think that's where Calgary is going to be really tested if nothing else is because yeah, they've got offense as well. I mean I will definitely not bet against Reggie Beton as far as offensive production goes for Calgary, but I think BC has all the tools truly kind of like in Montreal, they just got to get it done. They just got to execute because Vernon Adams, when he's on, he is almost unstoppable. Ryan, for you here. Like I said, I was very upset following the BC lions loss here and I understand and to me it felt like we were accepting second place and Winnipeg's going to win anyway. And it doesn't matter if I'm a BC fan trying to build the local fan base here. I would like to see a victory the last couple weeks of the season, but what do you make of this? Because to me I'm very fearful of this matchup. It was interesting to me that before the game, Vernon Adams came out and said, we're preparing to play on November 4th. So it wasn't even during the game where the lions seemed to give up and accept second place. It seemed like they had done that even beforehand, before Calgary came in. And I also wonder if this isn't BC trying to choose their opponent thinking that they would rather play Calgary than play Saskatchewan, and at that point you might get what you paid for in that instance. I think with Kadeem Carey healthy and BC's aversion to stopping the run game, you look in the last game, I think Calgary had 280 somewhat rushing yards between everybody combined. That's a substantial amount of yards on the ground. Peyton Logan can break and score at any time, any given play play. I really like the idea of Calgary coming out of this game and winning it against BC Vernon Adams can be big play va, but he can also have a five interception day and you never know which Vernon you're going to get. Vernon traditionally has played very well against the Stampeders, but they got to him with pressure just three and four man pressure in that last game. So if all of a sudden the Stampeders have been able to put things together and BC doesn't play like BC is capable of playing, Calgary could come out of this game and I do think whichever of the two teams wins does go into bc. It does go into Winnipeg and beat the bombers. I've been standing on that all season. I think the bombers are vulnerable in a playoff matchup even more so because they haven't had anything to play for a month. And I think that all of a sudden this could be the year of that. The dynasty comes to an end in Winnipeg. I'll give you much likely if Montreal last year had made it to the Gray Cup, I think we have a much better live Gray Cup show in Hamilton. If BC is there, I think we could probably pull up a few more connections there. So if nothing else, I am hoping for that. I think we've got a better gray cup If it's Calgary versus Hamilton and somehow you've got Bo Levi Mitchell against his old squad. I think that's the best possible storyline of what's left in these matchups. I think the most fun you might have in a Gray Cup week is the idea of Bo Levi Mitchell going against the stamp Peters because as much as it is to have the stamp Peters east versus the stamp Peters west with Toronto and Calgary in a gray cup, I think it would be much more fun to have that bow versus Calgary great cup and as bad as six and 12 has been in the regular season. And I don't deny that would also be a little what's more CFL than a six and 12 team making it to the championship? Well, we really need the mar hat bowl. We really need the lions versus the tie cats. I think that's what America wants. Hussy updated thoughts on this. I know I was pretty heated here following all the BC stuff now that we've had a little bit. Any updated thoughts here BC hosting in Calgary? Well, I think a lot of it comes down to the game script because if BC can start fast, get out to a lead, I don't think Calgary's a team that's positioned to beat you and come back with the passing game. I think that if Calgary can get a lead early in this game and keep the running game involved and just go downhill on the lions, I think they have a shot to pull off an upset here. But in general, I still think BC is probably going to win this game. I don't think that they really had the true motivation, like you said, to try to win that game the last time these two teams met. So I still think I'm going to go with the Lions to win this game, but at the end of the day, there is a formula for Calgary to go in there and get a win. Interesting here just enough. I'm checking the schedule here, trying to figure this out. So BC hosting in Calgary and then I'll be at the Kraken game later that evening. We're hosting the Calgary Flames, so it could really be a Calgary kicking the snot out of Seattle and Reeds hopes and dreams across the board here. Evan, updated thoughts here, BC Calgary. Yeah, I mean to put it very bluntly, I don't think Calgary, lemme put it this way. I think BC has a greater chance of going into Winnipeg and beating them than Calgary does. Going into BC and beating the lion, and I don't say that with any disrespect, it's just Calgary. I know they've flashed a bit here at the end, right? They beat Saskatchewan to get into the playoff position and then Saskatchewan lost. There was that whole thing. But I don't know, man. I just, even with the flashes and we've seen a lot of those flashes this season. Again, the one thing that I think that's kept Calgary in it, and at least preseason when I was looking at stuff, Calgary has a lot of talent and you could argue that they might have more talent than even some of the, I don't know, upper echelon of teams or at least some of the other playoff teams. I don't know if you're matching Toronto or Winnipeg, but in terms of just high upside, high ceiling guys, Calgary has a lot of those. I've looked at the roster several times, it's very, I like the way it's constructed, but with that being said, BC I understand BC it's very hot or cold and a lot of that that we've seen this year is based on the performance of Vernon Adams. I know I've brought it up before, but since we're going in the playoffs, I'll bring it up again. And this is nothing against Vernon either. Everyone knows how much I love Vernon. This is like a Vernon Adams show. I think we can all agree with that. But anyways, the thing with him is Vernon gets rolling. I mean, he gets rolling, he won't stop, but you'll see these games and it doesn't, we always bring up that Toronto game earlier in the season. I forget exactly when that was, but his six interception game, we always kind of use that as the prime example, but it's happened other times against lesser opponents. For example, when Ottawa played at BC Place a bit more recently, Vernon threw an interception and it was like, okay, it's fine, shake it off. But then just kind of kept doing it and it's, I really think it's a mental kind of roadblock where it's one little mistake that kind of kills all of his momentum and his big plays, which is what he's known for. I think the reason I like Vernon more than anybody, and what I'm excited to see in the playoffs is, and maybe it's just across the CFL in general, but really with him more than anybody, he almost just plays backyard football. I just like him because he can just go out there and sling it like there's no tomorrow, it's just.here, dot there. It doesn't really matter who the receiver is. I'll get it done. Just goes out there and has the time. You can tell he really has fun doing it. So I'm excited to hopefully see that Vernon in the playoffs, but I understand that as much as I'm sitting here saying, well, Calgary doesn't really have a chance, anything's possible. I think the one thing that I'll give Calgary credit for here is they just played each other, just like how we talked about Montreal and Hamilton coming off their game, BC and Calgary played last week, and that game didn't go very well for bc. A lot of people were surprised by that. Vernon, it was this whole, we're going to try and get him to 5,000 yards that he falters early. They pull him for safety reasons. Dana Evans comes in, Dane Evans doesn't look great either. So Calgary, I think with that, again, is that an accurate representation of what BC is going to bring to the table this weekend? I don't think so, but at the same time, Calgary had an opportunity there to kind of exploit some of BC's weaknesses and having the opportunity to do that a couple weeks or whatever before the playoffs, that might give him a bit of an advantage. It certainly might make the game more competitive. I'm very firm on a BC win, and if that does not happen, I will be more surprised than maybe even, like I said, outcomes further down the road. We're talking East West final Gray Cup. I don't know, but it's definitely going to be surprising to me if the stamps go in there and make a statement. Cliffy, do you agree with Ryan's ascertain, whatever the right word is, prognostication, that whoever goes into Winnipeg is going to Deth, throw the bombers. You know what? I can see where Ryan's coming with this and he's not wrong in his assessment. I mean, I think Winnipeg, I know a lot's been made of how well Brady Olivarez played this year and a lot of people were upset that Zach Eros isn't going to get a chance to have that opportunity to be a three-peat winner of the MOP award. And is it coming down to just the style of play that Zach Eros does and how he responds on game day? Once again, it's something that only Zach Eros and Brady Oliver can answer as far as how they prepare for each game, but is the fatigue starting to set in just little bit? I don't want to say Gray Cup hangover because Winnipeg has been absolutely outstanding this year, but how bad do they want it, I guess, and I see where Ryan's coming from when it comes to that. I mean, I won't say they're primed for an upset, but whether there's BC or Calgary that goes into the Western final, they're going to be on a high, they're going to a momentum and will Winnipeg be ready for that? It's easy for them to say, yeah, we've been hosting the Western final now. I think it's the past three seasons they've been hosting the Western final. It's kind of become par for the chorus or status quo. Even for them, The possibility for an up upset is definitely something to consider. I mean, I think Winnipeg's a very good team. There's no question, but I think that, yeah, whoever's got the hot hand is going to win that game and it could very well be the winner of BC in Calgary. Yeah, that whole MOP thing with Zach Claros and three, I'm going crazy about, that's a conversation for another day, but I guess, yeah. Ryan, what's your, I thought Ryan get a reaction to that. Let's get Ryan's sauce on that before he gets, because we'll put this to bed here soon, but I mean dunk was still going crazy about that on Friday night. I saw. Yeah, Doug's a quarterback, so dunk will always say it's the quarterback. Brady Oliveira had 2000 yards from scrimmage and was dominant all season. Zach Eros is suffering from comparisons to himself in this situation because he wasn't the Zach Eros from last year or the year before. He was okay, but not great. Was he outstanding? Not by comparison to other players at his position in the league this year. So that's why for me it was Brady Olivea. That's not a question, but dunk as a quarterback, that's obviously going to be a great topic to generate discussion. And of course dunk as the quarterback is going to root for the quarterback. Yeah, there's, I don't know. I have great respect and I think it's a difference of a Canadian versus American thing too. I put on my self-identity being American a lot lower on how do I identify myself on a day-to-day basis where I think that someone like Dunk or being a Canadian, I just ranks higher and you're like, this is how I personally identify. So I think that goes into it as well. But you would think you'd want Brady on that. Before we get out of here, let's go around the horn. Let's start with Jason predictions for the final two and then whatever. Do your little playout predictions. Jason, however, I know you're going to do a whole video about it too, but we'll go around the horn here. Yeah, like you said, I'll be doing a full video, breaking this all down and also predicting the award winners as well. But as for my great cup matchup, I'm going to go with the boring one. I'm going to go with Winnipeg in Toronto. I think it's going to be a great clash of Titans, and I think that at the end of the day, I'm going to go with Winnipeg to win this time. Toronto historically has had a really good run in Great Cup Games. I believe they haven't lost one since 1980 something, the ones that they've been in. So it would kind of go against the trend of history. But I'm going to go with Winnipeg to get revenge and win it this Evan, we'll go to you. Yeah, I don't know if I have a prediction going all the way to the Great Cup yet. I definitely have some ideas and I'm sure we'll talk about more of those next week depending on how these next two games go, the first round of playoffs here. But I think based on everything that I've said here today, I'll take Hamilton over Montreal in the upset. I think it'll be very close either way. I just think Hamilton again has a tiny bit more momentum right now. They might not be the more complete team, the more full team, but I really like what they've done here in the second half of the season and I really don't think that that can be overlooked. And then, like I've already said with BC and Calgary, I think BC in the right circumstance, I think they could drop 40 on Calgary. Again, I don't mean that in any disrespectful way. I just think that the lions like they, again, once that team gets rolling, they really get rolling. So I'm excited to see what Vernon can do in that game. And obviously the rest of his receivers seems like they have an endless amount of guys that he can throw to. And then I know we don't talk a lot about defense here much, or maybe we should more going forward, but seeing guys like Matthew Betts who broke the Canadian sack record, seeing guys like him take care of business and maybe be the closer in that game, that's equally exciting. So I think I'm going to take BC and Hamilton for the two games coming up here. Ryan, what do you got? I mean, I think Calgary can take it all the way. I don't see why not. All they have to do is hold onto a pass. This team has led the league all season and drop passes, and Jake Mayer's numbers have suffered as a result. He finds open receivers, he hits them in the hands, and if this is the time of year where you're able to catch a ball, then all of a sudden the Stampeders can get it done. They showed just two weeks ago that they can drop 40 on BC and limit their offense to the point where you did Chase Vernon Adams away from chasing a 5,000 yard season and Dane Evans was completely ineffective in his own right. I think BC has the opportunity to get open, but who knows what St. Peters team will show up this week if it's the good version of the Stampedes, then all of a sudden St. They've got themselves the potential of a victory out in the East. Again, if the only thing I wanted to see this season was a Calgary Hamilton Gray Cup, then I'm going to have to continue rooting for Hamilton with apologies to my good buddy Cliff. But I think I'm going to have to keep rooting for Hamilton to get there just so that we can have that storyline that weekend. Because I think Winnipeg, Toronto as a rematch is boring from a storyline perspective. I don't know that there's that kind of hatred there or fuel to the story beyond just, Hey, these are two good teams and the best teams made it, and that's boring to watch. I think it's way more fun if we watch two teams that struggled all season, one of them come away with a champion and why can't it be the Stampeders with the fewest wins to qualify for a playoff spot in the 18 game era accepting the US expansion years, which we ignore Cliffy. Final thoughts, predictions review. Well, again, with respect to everybody else, as I stand on what Darnell Sankey said that he said, we're going to win the next five games and we're going to win the Great Cup. And so far he's kept his word. They've won the last five games, now they've got to do the second part and win the gray cup and it starts against Hamilton. I think it'll be a fun match. I think it'll be very competitive, and I think Montreal has just that much more to get past Hamilton, despite the fact Jager Davis is playing for the Tiger Cats and has made the Gray Cup every year of his career. I think that streak comes to an end on Saturday. My heart is going for a BC Montreal Gray Cup. To me, that's a NOL lose situation for me because like I said, a big burn NAMS guy. So I'd be happy to see him play for and win a great cup. And of course I'd want Montreal to be in a gray cup, but my head is saying though, realistically I'd say it would have to be Toronto versus whoever wins the Western final because any number of those teams can win that game. But when Toronto makes it to the Gray Cup, they don't lose. And until that happens, you have to go with them. So my heart, BC, Montreal, my head will say, you know what, I'll be fine. Calgary, Toronto. And unfortunately as we've seen over the years when Calgary plays Toronto in the Great Cup, Toronto invariably wins. Well, I look, I just want whatever, whatever's the best great cup show, whatever, maybe we get pinball back on if Toronto's in there. I mean there's lots of amalgamations where we could get some good gusts on. Ken did have a question about the location of the Great Cup Show before we get out. I'm working with trying to get us in with one of the team locations there. You could probably guess which team in terms of that whole fan activity. Otherwise there's a bar there across the street from the convention center we're going to be at, right? It's the anchor bar, right? Hussie there. That's our backup. TSN rented out the entire George Hamilton where we were at two years ago. It was such a good location. They said, Hey, we're going to rent that out. So we'll either be an anchor bar, we're kind of TVD schedule there, or else I would like to get in with the teams just because I think more people would be milling around. But either way, we'll be there. It could be convenient for everyone and hopefully the guests and stuff as well. I Ryan and Cliff hopping on here during the day, and obviously Jason and Evan here for doing this every week here for the last 21 weeks. We'll see you guys next week. Look for XFL USFL hopeful news this week. We'll do all that kind of stuff. And then Naylor me an interview last week and he was traveling for the Bills game, so maybe we'll get nailer on this week because he owes me that. So I can subscribe. Thanks everyone, and we'll see you next time. Thank you very much.

The XFL + USFL Merger Is Coming! What Should YOU Expect?!? CFL Week 21 Preview!!

Coming up this week on the markcast well with the finalization of the XFL and USFL merger on the horizon. Countless theories have been floated across the internet about what the makeup of the new merged league will entail, but as we approach the date when the paperwork will actually be finalized, what should you expect from the new merge XFL and USFL League? Dust off your old Edgar Stark impressions. Merger is coming, winter is coming. Exciting show this week. Longtime friend of the program, John Lewis of John Lewis Sports on YouTube. Stopping by first time ever. We're running through all of the latest news this week for the X-F-L-U-S-F-L merger. Latest rumblings, predictions, what do we expect and what you should expect moving forward. It feels like That The XFL is just going to be absorbed by the USFL and I hope that there is some way, and I know you don't want to get into hypotheticals, there's speculation and all that. It's all we got right now, but I hope there is some way for the XFL brand to live on because it would just be a shame for that to be three strikes and out And then lots of CFL stuff to talk about this week as we barrel towards CFL Week 21 and the CFL playoffs. Darryl Davis longtime friend of the program stopping back by getting Darryl's insights into Craig Dickinson's contract not being renewed as the head coach for the Saskatchewan Ruff riders. Who would Darryl Davis like to see take over that role? We get Darryl's thoughts on the CFL team award nominations CFL week 21 and lots more. If the coach can't motivate a team or get them better, then you have to get ripped the coach, they gave 'em a second chance, which maybe they shouldn't have done, but the way the salary cap works now, you probably keep 'em around for one year to finish off his contract. Craig Dickinson's a great guy. We all love Craig Dickinson, but the players took advantage of him. They didn't play for him, they weren't inspired by him. They didn't believe he could be a head coach. They had to fire the head coach. The fact they made no other changes. I'm fine with that And in a great chat with standout kick returner, James Letcher Jr. Of the Montreal Ettes as they prepare for a couple big weekends against the Hamilton Tigercat here approaching the playoffs should be a good one. Like and subscribe. Hey guys, focus with Mark Cast Reed here. What we had lost on the program last week, kind of ill faded after the conclusion show now we have Game of Thrones. Not sure if that's better or worse here, but a merger is coming, winter is coming. You already know the meme. I think next week is going to be the week meetings this week going on in the XFL players be notified of certain things. So I expect news coming out here soon. Kind of final catchall today, John Lewis. Excited to have him on doing the final rundown. What are we hearing? What are we thinking? What would we prefer? All the different rumblings going on here last couple weeks. I know people are getting frustrated, tried to stay out of the kind of hypothetical too much but could be fun today. Kind of organizing, kind of collecting all of the final thoughts and theories here, kind of predictions as we hopefully get the official announcement for the XFL and US L merger league here coming up next week. Really appreciate John Lewis. Like I said for coming on Daryl Davis as always for making time battling through coughing illness there. Really appreciate that. Excited to see Daryl here coming up in a couple of weeks in Hamilton for the Gray Cup. And then James Letcher Jr. Really appreciate that. Really punctual guest. Always appreciate that players coming on. Appreciate Francis and everyone over at the Montreal ettes for setting that up. Should do it for me today. Like I said, hope you guys enjoy here. Let's hope for cross your fingers. Big news coming next week. Make sure you're subscribed. We'll be going live doing shorts and kind of all that stuff. I think I'm working from home all week, so should be available kind of when that news, if and when that news breaks up like and subscribe. We'll see you at the end next. Well, I was literally cutting my hair over the weekend one day a week. Is my hair cutting day and I thought I am so rude. I've never asked this gentleman to come on. I mean that John's had me on and he's asked me to write in stuff about it and I said let's get John Lewis on here, John Lewis Sports YouTube. We'll talk through everything today. But John, how are you doing? I'm doing good Reid. No, I appreciate it man. It wasn't rude at all. You've been so generous with your time. In fact, my first real video, you were the star of the show on that one. So no, I appreciate you having me on. Everything is going well. We're just waiting on news. Yeah, waiting on news. So the theme today is merger is coming, winter is coming and so we will talk through kind of the recent, I've really tried to get outside of a lot of the hypotheticals of everything just because the Facebook groups and everything have been crazy, but I Feel like we're close now. I feel like XFL had a meeting with their players this week said announcement is coming next week. I feel pretty good about that. Still hearing mixed reports obviously about the number of hubs and kind of all that stuff. We'll get into everything. But first off, I appreciate you coming on because I do feel like I'm in my little bubble a little bit in terms of the XFL news sub riders and I hate bringing people on that. I feel like we agree all the time. Would you say you're more pro US FL than Pro XFL, that you're the opposite side of the coin? I Mean, No, I think I'm right in the middle. I mean I really just enjoyed both. I've attended USFL games and XFL games. I just like spring football and alternative football as you can tell back here. But it does feel like, to me reading, I don't know that, I mean this certainly isn't going out on a limb. It feels like that the XFL is just going to be absorbed by the USFL and I hope that there is some way, and I know you don't want to get into hypotheticals or speculation and all that, that's all we got right now. But I hope there is some way for the XFL brand to live on because it would just be a shame for that to be three strikes and out. Especially when obviously there was the original XFL in 2001, that was a disaster 2020, they bring it back and things were going well until Covid and then it just felt like they're going to try to revive this brand and it felt like it was good and it felt like it was a more traditional league than the USFL. I would just hate for all of that to just kind of go by the wayside. But it feels like that the USFL has the upper hand now because the XFL asked for a hand up And I do think, yeah, ban off today in terms of any hypotheticals, anything, I think we're fine because to me this is kind of the last catchall before we get into all this. And speaking of that, I did want to kind of preface on, I know I was trying to take you on Twitter to promote and I saw you're on threads now. Only there was quite the kerfuffle on Twitter this week where I guess Pat McAfee in relation to Jim Erse talking about the Colts and the whole referee and the review process and all of that, the Colts game versus the Browns had come out and said there would've been review. They need more referee reviews and obviously Pat was familiar with XFL 2020 and is familiar with all that and basically made a statement. Yeah, I heard that they're merging and basically the USFL, once the XFL came back, they couldn't do anything and so needless to say, a lot of the USFL fans, you would've thought that they were being told that Santa Claus didn't exist. It was a lot of whatever. And so my preface and I saw a lot of that online this week. Don't worry about what other people think about any of this. We get Anthony Miller on here, we're PPO and stuff and people, you shouldn't be so negative. You should be, I don't tell anyone what to think. That's why I ask your opinion on everything. It is very interesting to me. People get so up in the arms about what other people think about things. I don't particularly care what you think or not, I care about your opinion and wanting you to share it, but I'm not going to get mad at you if you say one thing or the other. So just well, The whole Pat McAfee thing, it's like I get it and he might've poo-pooed this or that, but Pat McAfee is, I mean I think he knows the NFL very well. I don't know that Pat McAfee could name you three teams out of either league, so I don't know that that would be, He Got some traction and because of what he said, but he's paid a lot of money and apparently pays Aaron Rogers some money too to share opinions. So I mean that's what it is. And it's like lists when people get so mad at, oh, rolling Stone has this list of the 100 greatest songs and then there's some crazy thing that'll be in the top 10. There's a reason for that. It's to get traction and to get people to talk. But as we've talked about, Reid, the XFL fans and the USFL fans, they're so tribal and so protective of what they think is their league. I was never in either of those. I just enjoyed it all. But when someone says something bad about what they think is their league, then they get a little mad. So I can imagine the peripheral that was happening on Twitter. Yeah, I was like, who cares? You said you, it's always the fly by night. Hey, I'm just going to passing glance on this and you get a lot of that. We get a lot of that with the CFL people, whatever. I did think when that report came out about Aaron Rogers, I think Farhan L had just come on from CFL and I DMed him. I said, I'm sorry I can't pay as well as Pat Mack basically I'm on the show. But so getting into all this, I'm with you. It feels like it's somewhat of an absorption to me and I've been very open about this. I don't particularly enjoy that. I don't particularly enjoy working with Fox and I think that right or wrong, and whether other people agree or disagree, I think us FL has been far more workable with a lot of the alt football community journalists. I think across the board. To me that's my biggest hesitation, that Fox feeling like even outside of us that they don't need anyone but Fox, right? We don't need to promote anywhere but Colin Coward then maybe Skip Bayliss will give us a shout out. Are you concerned if there is an absorption here of the XFL? Yeah, I mean I see where you're coming from there. You've obviously had a lot more experience dealing with these leagues. I've had a little bit as far as getting on a mailing list, it just seemed like that was a whole thing for me with the X-F-L-U-S-F-L last year. And it's funny that you say that because last year I at this time worked for a FOX affiliate and as a sports reporter and anchor and I was trying to go through and get some of the players that were local to this market to try to talk to them, do interviews. I mean I was going through interns. I mean it was a whole thing and frankly didn't get a lot and had to just kind of DMM some guys and get 'em myself. But I really think, I would hope that the USFL and XFL or whatever this new entity is going to be will understand that when you start to look at the ratings. These were grassroots efforts. These are grassroots fans. This is not the NFL. I mean the NFL is my favorite sport, but I love pro football in general. So it seems to me like if I'm a guy who's a very small YouTube guy, but would love to get somebody on and say, Hey, let me talk to this player and kind of tell their story that USFL or FOX would be pretty open to that. I mean, I understand that you want to protect your ip, you want to protect your brand, but I mean, what kind of big deal would that be to say, Hey, this guy wants to talk to you. If you're whatever player you are, this guy wants to talk to you. Do you want to do their podcast or YouTube channel or whatever. So hopefully they'll be a little more open to that. And what you said is interesting because you say the XL, you had some better luck with that. This merger I think presents a golden opportunity because USFL and XFL were competitors, but now if they're together, they can really say, okay, they can sit down on a table. USFL guys can say, this is what we did and we had success. The XFL guys can say this is what we did and have success and maybe put that together and hopefully part of that would be let's make the YouTube guys and the podcast guys, let's cut them in on the deal too because they speak directly to the fans. So hopefully that would be one positive outcome of this merger. Yeah, I think, and I've been talking with some people in the XFL, there is a thought process there of we certainly bring more to the table together than we do separately and I would say hands down the US F L'S TV exposure now XFL minimally better in the ratings with less broadcasts exposure. I think the XFL, we had debates on this talent, is the high end talent better in one versus the other? Obviously having the teams in the markets, but it seems like if we expected this five years down the road, I mean it seems like it makes sense to get to this point already, to get to this point eventually, but that seems surprising that we got here so quick, and I've asked this over the last couple of weeks. Do you feel like this is a merger of strengths coming together or is this a merger of necessity for survival? I think both things can be true. I think there is the XFL, it seemed to be okay, these are two very different leagues in my opinion. The USFL and some people don't like this and have kind of disagreed with this, but to me the USFL owned by Fox was kind of the pet project of Eric Shanks who was a big deal and Fox Sports, it was a TV show. The XFL tried to create something that was a little bit more like a traditional league. I think you can find success somewhere in the middle and those come together. But the USFL, for instance, if the USFL lost $60 million, that's a rounding error for Fox $60 million to the XFL and capital ventures people. That's a huge loss and I think they didn't want to try that again. So I think there's a little bit of truth in both of those things. There are strengths to both leagues. I think it was a little bit of different ideals of how they wanted to build these things up. It sounds like they still want to do the franchise thing and put these teams in their cities and I think that would be maybe more doable with Fox as more of a backer because again, they can lose $60 million and nobody bats an eye when the XFL with a capital group whose goal is to make money loses $60 million or whatever that figure might actually be. It's a different story. So I think there's success that can come out of here, but I'm like you Reid, I thought that this was going to be in maybe 20, 26, 27, not 20, 23, 24. Are you surprised with all, because there's obviously been the rumors out with the United Football League stuff and the XFL trademarking and the national String Football League stuff, which is so funny. Just time is the flat circle with all of that, that with both of these leagues spending so much money and resources to acquire these things, we've always said Danny and the Rock could have just started the Rock Football League and kind of move forward and was there too much baggage of what people expected from 2020 carried in now and obviously Fox having to go through the lawsuits and stuff, are you surprised that they were so quick on both of these just to say, I think one of these will be true whatever league it is, but they say, Hey, we're getting rid of all this and we're going to start a new Yeah, I mean especially this quickly. Yeah, I just thought it felt like when you listen to the Rock and you listen to Daniel Garcia and the way that they talked about this was a long-term play. This wasn't to come in and just try something and it was financed. I was extremely optimistic. And listen, I'm an old guy. I mean it's always cautious optimism when you're talking about alternative pro football, even from 2001, but you go back before that and a lot of people know the history, but it was interesting that when they started to snap up some of these names, I did wonder, I don't know that it's going to be called the United Football League. Maybe it will, but it just what value does the UFL play as a brand? That's what I didn't understand is was that maybe a preemptive move? Because there is a United Football League out there right now, and I mean it's not a real league. It's the same people that did the national grid iron thing and it just felt kind of scammy, but I think that was that maybe a preemptive move so no one can use that to maybe compete against them. I don't know. There's a lot of business that happens that I'm not privy to and have never had that experience, but I was surprised the NSFL, the UFL got snapped up by Fox and by the XFL. Well, no. And mean I would hope it would still be called the USFL. I just acquired the US FL podcast domain. But to me, if you're spending where we're so cost cutting on all of this and even as conservative as the USFL was the XFL spending so much more money doing the travel and trying to get the people in and the stadium leases and all that stuff, that you would spend any amount of money at all on something like legal fees or any of this stuff just to be, okay, well we're moving on here. It does seem weird to me in terms of that. And like you said, there's no brand recognition for any of this other stuff. Even If you would've called it the US XFL or whatever, I think there's more brand than okay a comment then like, okay, this is a new league now we're combining. To me it always feels weird, but I'm kind of open to any of that stuff. Yeah, I mean you've got to find the right brand and I hope that there's more talk and I'm sure there are because again, Fox is involved and Fox knows marketing and they know sports marketing. So I hope that there's a little bit more talk on what can we brand this. I love the USFL brand. Do you remember when even that came about? Again, I was working at a FOX affiliate and had no idea that this was happening. Then all of a sudden on our Fox sports wire that was internal, it said USFL is coming back and they sent all this old video and they had the promo announcement. This came out of nowhere. And I thought to myself, this is really cool, but what does the USFL brand really mean to maybe the demos that Fox is going to try to reach? I don't think it's going to be old guys, but maybe they're trying to reach a younger audience, but you have that cache maybe of the nostalgia of the USFL. I don't know. But after two seasons that I thought were pretty good and good play, I know they wanted better ratings in the second season, but it seems like the USFL brand, it's got some juice and if you combine that with the XFL somehow you've got to think that there's success there and that there's going to be some brand recognition. Because that to me is what's going to be important not to you and me. That's what's going to be important to some of the fringe fans out there who might just be sampling this for the first time. It's so weird. And I'm obviously not the demo, honestly. I mean for any of these people are saying like, oh, Reed is going to be, so if there's no Seattle team, I don't really care. I mean the USFL thing has never done a lot. I have known nostalgia for the stallions or the breakers or any of that stuff. That was kind of before my time. And then the oh one stuff with the XFL, I remember watching, and I wasn't the biggest football fan, I just knew, okay, this is Vince McMahon, this is something I should try to watch. And I didn't know football even well enough to understand even what the differences were back then. What would that have been, 2000, I was 14 years old or whatever. So kind of living through and then even this 2020 version, I think people are a lot more firm with the battle hawks and maybe the defenders. I don't think that the Dragons has ever been that starring of a brand. So I'm just curious moving forward here, I don't know how much weight there is in any of this stuff. I mean, I'm not the right person to ask, but I've never gotten this obsession with the USFL branding that it seems like a lot of the USFL people have. Yeah, and I am old enough to remember I was 30, thanks for making me feel old when, well, 29 technically when the first XFL kicked off, and I remember the original USFL at that time I was in high school or well, eighth grade or so. But anyway, I really wasn't that huge of a football fan. I liked the NFL, but didn't really understand the whole alternative thing in spring football. But yeah, it was just really surprising to me and they even bring back the logo and everything. So that to me is I hope that pro football and alternative pro football is a thing that's going to be financially stable and we'll get the eyeballs, and maybe this is kind of a secondary thing, but I'm so interested in the branding and what they're going to come up with here, and it feels like they need to come up with it pretty quickly. So that's the thing. Obviously we're here end of October at a minimum. I have heard you expect an April launch for whatever this is going to be. I think I know that the XFL we're signing letters of intent. I think it's very odd to be having players signing letters of intent for teams that we don't know if they're going to exist in a month. That to me feels a little hollow. And I haven't wanted to get too critical on the vs Twitter about all this stuff just because I don't dunno how much good that does. But advertising season tickets and buy this merchandise and do your costume things and we're going to give you 30% off. And it was one thing for me, buying old sea dragon stuff when the XFL was going out of business last year and getting a discount and knowing that, hey, I still have old jerseys that I can plastic somewhere, but to be selling this stuff in earnest now knowing that, and I want to get into some of the different accommodations we've heard, but knowing that this stuff might not exist here in a month, that to me is a little hollow because most of, at least the rumors floating around are at least all or most of the US FL franchises, retaining, and then a various number of XFL ones that are going to stick around. Yeah, it was interesting too, Alan Alford, who he's got a YouTube channel, he was in Orlando for the showcase recently. I heard an interview with him recently where he said, and this was after the showcase, so he didn't say who told him, but he was boots on the ground there. And he said what he had heard or the rumor that was floating around there, because he said a lot of the officials pretty much said, we can't talk about it, but that the XFL would lose three teams and the USFL would lose three teams. So maybe they have come to some kind of compromise. It would be a 10 team league. You can kind of see where the XFL would come from because Las Vegas, that's easy to pitch. One the Houston Teams think, and then, sorry, but maybe Seattle. And then you could look at, and when you look at the XFL, you could probably lose the generals. I mean, they're not going to find a home. I just don't think they're going to find a home in the New York, New Jersey area, Unless you call 'em maybe the Canton Generals or something. If you retain, I think they could probably do that with, my guess is, and this is speculation that they could do that with Pittsburgh maybe and make them the Canton, whatever. Bulldogs would be nice to bring that back. And maybe you jettison Philly and New Orleans, I don't know. But to me that made the most sense because that way you've got five USFL, you've got five XFL and you've got a 10 team league. So there's been so much speculation. And as you know, you follow a lot of these guys and that they're sourced. You're sourced, they have good reporting, you have good reporting. But it did sound like originally that the USFL was, as we talked about before, was just going to absorb the XFL and kind of decide, okay, we're keeping our eight, we'll decide what to do with the XFL team. So maybe there's a compromise in there somewhere. And I guess to set the table for the rumors up to this point. And I will just say, and not that I think anyone tries to go out and lie or spread the misinformation. I do think things change where maybe if you heard something at one point and it does not end up being true, that doesn't necessarily mean that that wasn't true at that point. And we even talking with the NFL trade deadlines and well, this person was talking to this team and they ended up going somewhere else. It doesn't mean that wasn't, it means as Steven A. Smith says, it's a fluid, the list is kind of fluid here going through. But the initial report coming out a couple of weeks ago now, Neil Stratton with inside the league talking, and I do believe in this that there'll be some number of hubs, whether that's, I think he originally said it was going to be six at that point. Mike Mitchell had put in our group today chat today that he's hearing eight hubs. Let me get up to that. He's hearing eight hubs with 12 teams, two divisions, so all this stuff floating around. But I do believe the hubs, I do believe that he had the follow-up report the next week. That was the eight USFL teams and four XFL teams. Since then, you've heard five and five. Mike saying here, 12 teams, so that would be six and six. I've had people from the XFL tell me six and six, at a minimum you're not getting eight and eight. How does that make you feel as someone, if it's almost kind of like the Hunger Games, are you in the, is your district, like I said, it feels disingenuous selling merchants. Not that you can halt everything, but it's a really weird time right now. It is. I did buy an Arlington shirt when it was on sale because I thought this might be the last XFL champion, so I got to get a renegade shirt. And you're right, because it's been almost a month now since they announced the intention to merge. So we're almost a month later where we're still talking about, we still don't know what's going to happen. And I think you're right. I think you make a very good point, Reid, that something could have been true or been discussed in a meeting and it gets out and they're like, okay, well this is what we've talked about. But not necessarily they haven't signed the contract yet. But yeah, it is. If you're A-U-S-F-L or an XFL fan and you don't like the other league, I think you're going to be disappointed either way. I mean, that's the thing. It's like for people like me, and I hope I'm not in the minority. I loved both leagues. I love both leagues. We're not going to have two Houston teams, so we know that we're going to lose a team, and that's going to be kind of sad. And as we talked about when we talked about predictions and I did a video and you were nice enough to send in three predictions, and one of my predictions, and it's not really a prediction, just math, is that there are going to be fewer opportunities. That to me is one of the sad things of it is there are at least there's more than zero, but when you start to lose teams and you start to contract and however many it's going to be, you're lose some opportunities for players. But yeah, you're right. It's kind of funny when you start to see the advertisements on Facebook and things for, oh, 20% off, just put this in and there's always the response, just wait a few weeks and it'll be half off, or it'll be a clearance sale. So that is kind of the sad thing and disingenuous. Yeah, I think that's right because they keep saying we are going on business as usual. We saw just recently that the XFL signed seven more players and one of them was Seattle went to the rights to Seattle with a letter of intent. I don't think we're finding any clues really, when we start to see these releases, those rights, it's going to be one combined league. So those rights could go to any team. Well, and I don't think that in terms of the numbers working out, and I don't think they're going to care if it's eight XFL or four USFL or vice versa, or which leagues fan base feels they're going to say logistically here, what makes the most sense? What are the costs to run these? I mean, Seattle was a flyer in 2020 In and of itself that wasn't going to be there. And Sam Stein had told me the story offline about that, where it was, and I think I remembered hearing this, but it was like the house show and they ran an XFL promo and the crowd attendance, and I was probably at that house show and didn't even realize it and the pop that they got, and Vince McMahon was like, we got to go to Seattle, but lumen costs a lot. So I think that will go into it more than, well, which leagues fan base or which city or, well, the Birmingham stallions have more legacy than whatever. I mean, I think they're going to look into it as what does it cost more to run here and where can we save money and how can we house some of these teams together? Well, and some of the fans are like, well, if they do hubs, I'm not going to watch. Well, then you might as well just get ready to not watch. And I don't know why that's a problem, because if they're doing hubs, it's not because they want to make this a viable thing. So I get that you might not have liked it, especially if you're an XFL fan. I didn't like watching games from Birmingham. No one was there unless it was the stallions game, and even they lost some attendance. So I get that to a point. But you have to remember, especially if you're an XFL fan, they had a hub, they had one hub, and then they would fly to the city the night before. And I get, yeah, they had home crowds. I was at the St. Louis game this past year, the one where they scored, it felt like a thousand points and it was incredible. And the vibe was great. Before the game, during the game, after the game, that was really fun. That was as a fan where there were 30,000 people. You're trying to reach millions of people and hopefully that you'll get more than 600,000 viewers and that you will try to make this a viable thing. So you might have to have hubs and you might get bigger crowds for other games, but it really feels like, and I know we'll get more when we get the announcement read, but it feels like they want to get this going, get these two leads together, and then hopefully try to sell these franchises later. But you can't sell franchises if your league doesn't have value and you're hemorrhaging money. So yeah, do the hubs for a year or two and then start to find the right owners to bring these teams into the cities And see, that's obviously where we disagree. I mean, I am vehemently anti hub and to me it's more than, and I understand, and I thought Conor FO had the best tweet when the original report came out from Neil Stratton and all that saying, I get hubs. I get why every corporate person in the world likes hubs. And I get why the leagues like it, and I understand all the money behind it, but it just sucks. As a fan, that sucks all the life out of it. And to me, you have a lot of onus on the USFL where, okay, we're in Birmingham year one, okay, we're going to try to go to three to four hubs next year and then we're going to go to, you always want to see growth, even if it's we're adding one hub, even if they had just added Memphis or whatever. You want to see growth in that way and by retracting here and going back, I don't believe you now when you say, well next, that's the goal at this point, that's where I have a struggle with that, where now you've seen what that is and now, and maybe you did fly too close to the sun and maybe it was too expensive to do that, but now it is hard to go back, if that makes sense. It's like I've seen, I got to live in, I got to stay in the Airbnb Paradise Villa over the weekend and I got to go back to my condo and I don't know if I want, I can't. Sure. Yeah, I know what this is now. No, I get it. But you also, that's from a fan perspective, When you start to look at it from a Fox perspective, because it sounds like Fox is going to be really the owners of all this from that perspective, then you got to think, okay, we're making a TV product. That's what I thought with the USFL versus the XFL, certainly the XFL got the boost from being on ESPN and AB, C and all that, but they were trying to start a traditional league, whereas the USFL and Fox, that felt like a TV show, and they made Birmingham a studio basically that first year. And so none of their finances were built on ticket sales. It was kind of built on advertising and ratings. So now that it sounds like Fox is going to be, they're going to own this thing, you're probably going to get hubs. And that's from a business perspective, and hopefully we can convert people like you read and say, this is temporary. We'll try to get these into, you're going to just have to live in a condo for a little bit, but eventually this is going to turn into, if all goes well, this will be the beach vacation in a few years. Yeah. The last metaphor it feels like, and I went and saw that new saw movie last night with my brother and his girlfriend, and I'm a big saw guy. I like all the stuff, but she was talking about how they have laid off someone at work and they're like, Hey, you're going to take over these duties here for just until we get someone else, and now it's been five months and oh, well, we don't need to. That to me is if we discover we are viable enough doing the hubs, to me, there's no incentive to expand on that. And obviously I don't think they were totally happy with the hubs because I don't think they would've, as much as the FL needed to reach out and call the USFL for a hand up if all was well with the USFL, you're not answering that call either, right? I mean, I think that is a very good point. And Daryl Johnston was pretty unhappy with the ratings and even said as much and said, we felt like we even had a better presentation than the XFL. So yeah, you're right. It's like, oh, well, if we didn't need, that's a great point. If we didn't need the XFL, you don't answer the phones. You know what, you guys can just go out of business. That's fine. So this has to be a mutual partnership and mutual conversations happening. Yeah, there's no question. Well, I mean, we went through all that with the CFL as well where the xl, maybe they're just really proactive about stuff, you know what I mean? Hey, let's talk about stuff. Maybe they're more, my wife will talk to anyone at the party. I mean, maybe they're more like my wife. Like, Hey, we're just reaching out. We're just not talking networking. Where maybe I like the SFL. You need to call me. I'm sitting here and you let me know what's going on. Don't want this to go forever though. I appreciate your time. Anything else you want to make sure we touch on? Any other topics on your head before we get out? No, I just think you and I have talked about this, and I've said it with some other guests before. It's like we had the golden age of spring football. We had year-round football. It was like the Super Bowl ended and we had the XFL that ended and we had the USFL and then went right into the, seems like the NFL preseason, but it was fun for one year. I'm an old guy. I'm trying to stay cautiously optimistic, and I really hope that this partnership works out. And most of all, Reed, for everyone's sake, I hope we hear something pretty soon. Is that solid? And we can prepare for what's next and we can get on here and pontificate and criticize and be happy about things and all that. But no, it was great joining you. You're one of the reasons that I kind upped my game here to do some YouTube stuff, and you have been generous with your time with me, so I was absolutely glad to be on with you. Well, I appreciate that. No, I mean, as someone that, and I know you didn't put the CFLs on that we've been doing CFL stuff in the summer as well. I know, I see back there. But you didn't mention that. Just saying, where's your ball? There's One here, I promise. But someone, there you go. As someone that covers all of this, I think football fatigue is really a real thing, right? And I don't know if there's a non-zero number of people that could even tell you what is the next develop versus what is US development Case in point, pat McAfee here, rounding back out to the beginning. And so whoever has the upper hand or had the upper hand or had the leverage, there's no doubt that both existing heard each other, both from a player standpoint, a TV standpoint, even having to pay the players and having to be comparable that way. Where Vince McMahon, when the AF went away, he said, well, we don't need to pay our guys as much because what other option they have? That's not a good thing. And that's why I'll always say that the best time that there ever is in wrestling is when WCW is facing WWE F or now with WWE and AEW and have to do all that. So I hope we don't see complacency that way. But yeah, it does feel like this is the necessity more than merging the powers right now, if that makes sense. Yeah, it does. And Mike Mitchell's, he brought that up as well. I talked to him and he said they were cannibalizing each other. And as far as like you said, players ratings fans, and I think the realists of us out here will say, we understand that spring football and alternative pro football, there's a reason they call it alternative or football, is because an alternative to the big thing, that's the NFL. So you're in a bit of a niche when you have niches that are competing against each other. You'll have tribes and you're going to have smaller audiences. So maybe you bring both that, you bring all that together and you're not going to compete with the NFL and that's not what they want to do at all, but you'll be stronger together. And I think that's what hopefully we'll see. They won't cannibalize each other's ratings. And if one of the things that we hear is true, hopefully we'll find out. These games will be on network television over the air. It didn't matter if it was the two worst teams. I mean, there was an Orlando game that I think was on AB, C that got huge ratings because it was on A, B, C. So I think there's opportunities there to put, don't have people trying to go out and find these games. It wasn't as bad as the AF where you had to have apps and everything else to find games, but it was tough for XFL when you're looking for, I don't know what FSS or SFL games, I don't know what FSS one, where is FX here, where it was too much. So if you put these on broadcast networks at a time when broadcast networks need content, especially with the rider strike that kind of wrapping all that up and the actor strike, this is a huge opportunity for these two leagues to come together and make something really viable at least for a year. Yeah, I just hope, just that my last thought, I just hope that, I think you said at the beginning that we still retain some sort of this exit ness to it because I'm not alone in saying some of the Sterileness US L broadcast was a little challenging. And even if I didn't agree with that, was it Ian Fitzsimmons or whatever screaming on the sidelines at Cashman Field? I won my over bet, I won my over bet. It felt like there was more. So I hope that there's a mix. I'm not a homer for any, like I said, any necessary brand. More just the mentality of that where maybe if I don't always agree with the personality of the XFL, I still felt like they had the personality where the USFL, it's NFL light and it is what it is, then that's fine, but it does feel like it is a step down of what the NFL is versus this is something that we're trying to make it be its own thing. And it was a Fox product, and that's what Fox knew how to do is do professional football broadcasts and that's why sterile, I get that. I get that definition of what you're saying there because it felt like they tried to do an NFL broadcast. Now they had the drones and some other things, some innovations, but it did feel like that they were doing an NFL broadcast. And when you see those kinds of things in empty stadiums, you get that sterile feeling. I totally understand where you're coming from there. It didn't bother me as much. I mean, certainly I would love to have seen a big crowd. It was really fun. I was at a Birmingham stallions game last year and when the stallions played, I mean that place was rocking, but the games the next day, I mean I was one of about a hundred people there. So yeah, you do feel like it's different in person and certainly has to be different for the audience and maybe some of that will change if you do have to have hubs of the first year. We'll see. Yeah, I think Mike had said in our thing that there was a modeler's game or something that had like 38 tickets distributed or something. I can't remember. It was something, some funny number that way. Well, John Lewis, I appreciate it, everyone. Like I said, you do a lot of interesting stuff on your YouTube channel and I'm not a big ideas guy. I can go run with something, but I always see the videos you put out, I'm like, God, that's a really good idea. This are really good. Just really creative stuff because I can't do any of that stuff at all once, have something I can drive the truck, but I can't put the truck together. So good job with that. Keep up the work and we'll see you hopefully on here again soon. We'll get you back up. Alright, anytime, Reed, thank you for having me on. I appreciate it. Well, here we are back here. Darrell Davis fighting the cold. I hope we're doing okay. We'll see you in a couple weeks. Lots of Saskatchewan Ruff Rider stuff here and then obviously the CFL awards, but what about our boy Jordan Everly game winning overtime goal against the Red Wings? It was about time he got on the board here. Yeah, he is been a little sluggish getting started, but I'm torn. I'm a Detroit Red Wings fan to be honest. So that one hurt me a little bit less. I was happy for Jordan, but I was a little sad because, but at least the wings got a point in overtime, so it was fun to watch. And once everybody gets going, I think the Kraken will start getting a little bit better too because you're right, he's been a little sluggish to start with and they haven't been scoring the way they did last season. So it was good to see them get going. But unfortunately at the expense of my favorite team, I didn't realize that you and Jason Hussey here are Red Wings fans. Yeah, I'm always Okay. Who's cheering for? Okay, we're cheering for the Leafs, we cheering for whatever. Yeah, cracking slow, slow start. We got seven goals in one game, but otherwise it's been rough. So we had Jamie Naya on the podcast last week, right? Green Zone and he's saying riders, they're going to, whether they get the playoffs or not, they're not. Craig Dickinson is not long for this world and kind of everything else there as predicted here. Monday, right after we got done with our recap, they announced he is not being renewed, but Craig Reynolds is going to be there. What's going on? You were at the press conference. What are you reading into all this? Oh yeah, as Jamie said, and we talked about quite a bit on our show, Reed, that the problems with this football team aren't necessarily talent or organizational. It was bad coaching this year when you look at a team that beats the Winnipeg Blue bombers and the BC Lions back to back, they're six and five earlier in the season, and then for the last two years in a row, totally fell apart. They lost their last seven games of each season. That's bad coaching, plain and simple. If the coach can't motivate a team or get them better, then you have to get rid of the coach. They gave 'em a second chance, which maybe they shouldn't have done, but the way the salary cap works now, you probably keep 'em around for one year to finish off his contract. Craig Dickinson's a great guy. We all love Craig Dickinson, but the players took advantage of him. They didn't play for him. They weren't inspired by him. They didn't believe he could be a head coach. They had to fire the head coach. The fact they made no other changes. I'm fine with that Because that is where the controversy, at least from my reading from the outside is that was the only change that they made. Yeah, it basically is. Well, Jeremy O'Day got a new three-year contract. This the general manager, you have to give him a new contract. If he's going out to find a head coach and you only gave him one year, that's not going to work if you gave him two years while a new head coach who's at worth his salt is going to say, I don't think I want to go somewhere for a two year deal. But if they're going to go get Scott, and I think to me, the conversation begins and ends with Scott Milanovich, the Hamilton Tiger Kat's offensive coordinator. If they're going to get him, they'll need to sign him for a three year deal and Jeremy O'Day as the general manager will have to have that many years on his contract too. So they had to redo it for him, get him a new deal. So he's got job security. To their credit, the riders did it quickly. They made the decision to move on. They didn't keep Craig Dickinson hanging around and saying, oh, I got to get ready for next year. They've done everything. They're ready to move now. So I think that's, that's really a feather in their cap. I know, as you say, there are a lot of people mad that Jeremy O'Day and Craig Reynolds are still in charge. There's really no reason to get rid of them. And you believe that because it's more of a football issue than it is a talent issue. Yeah, well, the talent's not bad. They have a pretty good football team. It was just badly coached. Nobody wanted to be the offensive coordinator this year because Craig Dickinson was on the last year of his contract. They asked a whole bunch of respectable, reputable, reputable offensive coordinators around the league who had come to the Saskatchewan Ruff riders and worked for Craig Dickinson when he's the head coach on a one year contract. So they couldn't find anybody, and it showed their offense wasn't very good with Kelly Jeffrey. The disappointing part this year was how bad their defense got under Jason Shiver. It just totally fell apart as the year went along. And that had a lot to do with veteran cornerback, Nick Marshall, just somewhere along the line saying, that's it. I'm not playing anymore. I'm not going to try. I'm going to give my paycheck and not do anything. But they had a bunch of players like that. So that's coaching. Maybe it's a little bit of personality. You weeded out the bad apples, which they did last year. They weeded out a lot of bad apples. But I think that team is pretty talented. They've got great receivers, they've got a good running game. They've patched together an offensive line. I'm excited to see what happens to Jake. I think they're going to at quarterback, I think they're going to eventually dump their veteran who got Trevor Harris who got hurt. He's 37, 38 years old, getting 500,000 a year after coming off a season with five broken parts in his knee. So they're going to have to make those changes, but the talent's not bad. And Jeremy O'Day put the talent in place. People are arguing with me. They're telling me I'm a she for the rough riders. Now. I've never been called that in 40 years, which is really kind of fun these days, Reid. But those are my thoughts on where the football team sits In terms of, I watched that last game, the Toronto right coming in, and it looked like they had a shot there. Not a lot of people there for the last game of the season in playoff contention, and I have my own gripes about the Calgary St. Peters of BNBC, their pants. Maybe get your thoughts on that too, but like State of Jamie said, it's really bad state of the CFL franchise. The rough riders right now. Yeah, they have, but 24,000 is a bad, that's the announced crowd that they had at the last game. Yeah, they've changed it. They don't have tickets sold, tickets distributed. I don't know, tickets distributed, I think is a word that they use. So I don't know how many of those are bought, but according to us, according to Jamie Nye, that's the smallest regular season crowd they've had in 17 years. So the fans are making a statement, they're staying away, and that's how they speak around here. They speak with their wallets. It's a community owned team. So they like to tell you, we're not buying tickets, we're not buying merchandise. We're mad at the football team. They've stayed away from it because they're angry, but it doesn't last very long. Eventually, if they hire a Scott Milanovich, that rein inspires everybody. They get back on the bandwagon every year. There are fewer tickets sold. Winnipeg's a bit of an anomaly. They're going the other direction. They're filling the place out all the time. Saskatchewan, once they start winning again, we'll sell this place out no matter how mad people are. Follow up questions here for the coaching stuff. So Craig Dickinson, what's next for him? I mean, we saw last year and Jason Moss, right? Go to the Owlettes. Is he taking a year off or what do you see heck next for him? Well, somebody might hire him, right? He's not beholding to the rough riders. His contract expires in the off season. So they're not paying him to do anything to not coach. So somebody will knock on his door, I'm thinking and say, Hey, we could use you as a special teams coach. He's a great special teams coach. He's a great person to have on a team. He's just not capable of being a head coach. He couldn't motivate those guys. So sometimes there are guys throughout the league, Richie Holland in Winnipeg, defensive coordinator, great assistant coach, didn't have any success as a head coach. The league is littered with guys like that, so I think Greg Dickinson could get another chance. Will he come back here? I don't think that because it's always funny when you see, see Mike Betis in bc, A former head coach is now their special teams coordinator and you think, well, I guess guys can go back, but you need a little bit of breathing room afterwards. And it's not the size of the NFL where the coaching staffs are so big that they can hide guys into his coaching staff. So somebody in the league will probably want Craig Dickinson to work for them. It probably won't be in Saskatchewan, but I think that he might go somewhere else. He does like coaching and he gets along with people so you wish him the best. Those are there are guys in this league who you don't like and you cross paths with him. Craig Dickson's somebody, everybody who meets him likes him, so he'll get a job somewhere. I guess I'm just surprised where you come out and you say that the players basically quit on him. I thought he was one of the more temple coaches right now. Yeah, true in that way. But he made a lot of bad coaching decisions, sideline decisions, and that loses a confidence of a team when to gamble, when to go for two points, things like that. Players are really picky about those things when they see that their coach isn't as tight and as they are or they mess up things like that, they start watching for more mistakes and that's what happened to Craig Dickinson over the last couple of years. He was making silly mistakes and none of them ever worked. If you make a bad call and it works out, then you say, oh wow, that's really brave, but if you make a bad call and it doesn't work out, then everybody says what a stupid decision. And that's what happened to Craig Dickinson. They started losing faith in him as a coach. They did last year when, remember Garrett Reno, the defensive tackle went crazy in that game and the rider didn't handle that very well this year. They didn't handle a lot of the sideline decisions very well. The players started saying, we don't have faith in him as the head coach, we liked the guy and you can like the guy, but they just didn't play for him. It's funny, Reid, when you go watch it, a lot of times teams will go from a Craig Dickinson type coach who's a wonderful player's coach, good guy. And then you usually go to a hard ass, right? You go to a real tough task taskmaster and say he's our next coach. And you bounce back and forth because eventually no matter how good a coach you are, eventually the players tune you out. They had tuned out Craig Dickinson. Are they going to bring in a hard ass? Well, maybe if they find one, but I think What's Scott Milanovich? Is he a hard ass or is he a player's coach? We're about to find out. I think So. You talk about him. I've seen, and I know there's politicking involved in who we like and who we don't like. I think it's Rod and Balls here talking about Henry Burris coming in and that scene and that he wants, I don't know any of this stuff. So what does that sit with you? Well, Henry Burris was a pretty good quarterback here for a very short time, became popular until he left to join the Calgary Stampeders and he's been bouncing around the NFLA little bit after his career ended as an up and coming coach. Has he got the pedigree for it? Not yet. Does he have the friendships for it? Yeah, he has friends in the media. Henry's been one of our favorite guys forever and ever. So he sends out a tweet or sends out a text or somebody calls him. You interested in the job, Henry? Oh yes, of course. I'm interested in the job. So his name gets thrown into the mix, but they can say that there's eight, nine guys or 10 guys, however many Jeremy O'Day is going to open up with his initial candidacy. I can't see them going much further than the one name I've mentioned. And do you think that would be a good fit? Do you think that Ryder Nation would be acceptable with that or would they want, because I guess to me Henry Bur seems like the sexier name, if that makes sense. Where Henry Bur, I'm sorry, Henry Burris seems like the sexier name Does that, I mean it seems like at least from my Twitter, Yeah, Carrie Joseph, former quarterbacks with the rough riders, but Milanovich Kinsel, he's been a great successful CFL coach and he's gone down to the NFL to try his hand down there. He's done a really good job wherever he's been. It didn't work. Edmonton, he took over 2020 and disappeared because of the pandemic season. He didn't even have to coach in Edmonton, so he's bopped around a little bit, but I think he's the type of coach who has experience, he's talented, he knows how to develop quarterbacks, which helps them with Jake Dag Gala and I think that he's the type of guy who the fan base here would be enthusiastic about. In terms of the work that he's done with the Thai Kats this season, what do you make of, I guess his resume at least recently? Yeah, when he took over for Tommy Condell, that team got a lot better, didn't it? They were playing with Taylor Powell who became a pretty good quarterback and I think he has a future in the Canadian Football League. What they've been doing back and forth with their two quarterbacks now though, and putting Bo Levi Mitchell in back as the starter, I guess they have faith in him as the veteran. I thought it might blow up in their faces, but they seem to know what's going on. The team is a lot better now. I think Orlando Steinhower, the head coach is concentrating a lot more on coaching, being there for his players and relying on Scott Milanovich to run the offense. Tommy Condell just, it happens, guys tune you out. He'd been there a long time and it wasn't working. So you need to find something. And that's still my complaint with the rough riders. If Jeremy O'Day needed something to say, if you wanted to criticize Jeremy O'Day late in that season this year when the rough riders were on that seven game losing streak, that's when he should have stepped in and just brought in somebody to run that team for a couple of games because you could see they weren't responding to Craig Dickinson. Jeremy O'Day has to, hopefully he's learned that, but he has to step in sometimes and take charge In terms of bigger picture here with the playoffs coming up, I was very upset about BC and the whole Calgary thing and all of that and even giving them an opportunity and then Saskatchewan, all that stuff. What do you make of that game here coming up? I have warning signs both with Calgary and then obviously going into Winnipeg for bc. Oh, you're worried about your BC Lions? I am. I'm worried about American CFL team. Yes, I think the lions are okay. I've never been a huge Vernon Adams fan. He's too mercurial up and down and his confidence level is so fragile sometimes. He goes from this, I'm in charge. I'm the best leader ever to, oh geez, six interceptions, I'm never going to play again. And I think that reflects on the lions. If they get a good game out of him and he's rolling along and he's not trying to get to 5,000 yards passing or something and doesn't forget the basics that he's being taught by Jordan Mc Simmick a very good offensive coordinator, then they've got a chance that defense is really well put together. I think that the lions, there's no way the lions should lose to the stampeders they did in that game, that regular season game. They're not going to in the playoffs. I dunno, to me, I dunno, I feel like there's games where you need to be able to have a level of effort even if it's not this, I dunno, to me it felt like BC very much resigned like, well, Winnipeg's going to win anyway. We're going to be second anyway. And I don't like that mentality here at the end of the season, especially when you're trying to sell the idea of coming to BC Lions games as well. Well, true enough. But you know what? The buy isn't such a great thing in the CFL. Well look at over the past decades and sometimes that buy team just is cold. The team that wins the semifinal is usually the hot one. The fact that the BC Lions had a home game already that maybe you can play possum a little bit with the Calgary Stampeders, that's who you're going to play, use it as a learning experience and a rallying point. You say, look at, they smoked this last time, we got to play a lot better and they're going to play a lot better. They're the better team, they have the better quarterback regardless of how even Vernon Adams on a decent day is better than Jake Mayer. So they're a better football team in that from the offensive point of view and much better on the defensive point of view and talent wise all the way through. So BC's going to win. You don't have to worry about America's football, America's CFL team taking a stumble. Did Calgary making it to the playoffs, does that save any jobs that maybe would've been on the line or any cool, any seats or is it still kind of chaos there? What do you make? Yeah, they're probably okay. You make the playoffs again there and they think they're getting better because they were a stable team. They didn't make many changes. They didn't have a hurt quarterback. I don't know if he's the answer, if mayor's the answer, but they've got enough talent to be a decent team. I think this was the first year for Dave Dickinson to be head coach and general manager and he really struggled with both jobs. I think he's learned something. He's a very smart guy, so I think he's learned something. He'll probably maybe ask for some more help to look after the personnel side of the team. It probably hurt him as a coach, usually one of the better head coaches on the sideline. And you could tell that late in the season when that team really needed to play well and he needed to get a response from his team, he was able to do that with the Stampeders and that's what Dave Dickinson's strengths are. So he Is he going to be safe in both jobs? Yes, I think so. That's the way they want to go forward. It might last a year or two years. Eventually it falls by the wayside, but right now they've saved themselves a bunch of jobs. I saw the post game and Jake Mayer and this is the best game. This is what we've wanted to be all year and it's really been rough for them. I mean, I think mayor has whatever expectations people had, he certainly is below even the most mid expectation. That's true. You could see why the Callier St. Peters let Bo Levi by Mitchell go. You have to make a move on those things before everybody else knows you have to make that move. So letting Bo Levi by Mitchell go was okay. And Jake Mayer had looked pretty good in his stead when he had to play, but after you watch Jake Mayer play for a while, you realize he's not really worthy of being bull Levi by Mitchell's replacement yet. Is he getting better? Not very much. Maybe a little bit, but he hasn't been on a real upswing in terms of becoming a better CFL quarterback. I think I'd much rather have Trey Ford on my list or Taylor Powell than I'd have or Jake Dag gala than have Jake Mayer. Are you surprised? I just saw the tweet come out. Well actually it was sent to me, but Brian Scott, Cameron Dukes maybe getting playing time this weekend. The whole Chad Kelly of it all and playing two and three whatever quarters. And are you surprised without Toronto's handling this coming down the pike? Well, he got hurt. He was limping a little bit after during the Saskatchewan game, so I think you have to be careful with him. He certainly makes them go and if you put him in, he doesn't want to come out. We saw him earlier this season arguing with Ryan Dinwoody, his head coach when they were trying to pull him out. He's the heart and soul of that football team, the competitive leader, if they don't play 'em and they lose and everybody says, okay, well we're not the same team without Chad Kelly. If they put him in and get him hurt, that's a drastic thing. So I don't think it's a bad idea to rest. Chad Kelly. He's really taken over that leadership mantle on that team the way they want to do it. Hey, they've earned the right, they're a 15 and two football team. That's amazing to me. I didn't think they were with basically a first year starting quarterback. Yes, they put together a great team around 'em, an awesome defense and some great receivers and what a running attack they have. It's really impressive. So they've earned that, right? If they want to arrest Chad Kelly, they didn't have to play 'em for the last six games that they wanted to, but you want to get a little bit of playing time so he is at least sharp for the playoffs. It's interesting because I think obviously very drastic different situations here, but we are tracking here with the NFL and you've had the whole Brock Purdy kind of thing of it all. I'm like, okay, what part of it's the quarterback and what part of it's the team and what part of it's whatever? And obviously he's kind of had struggled the last couple weeks. Chad Kelly's never really had a bad, there's been no drop off this season at all. Are you surprised? Just, I mean now looking obviously like you said, and I think right record breaking if they win next week or there's all sorts of accolades here. Are you just surprised how exceptional he's done? Yes. Yeah, everybody said that he would be the guy because in the off season the rough riders were looking for a quarterback and he kept thinking, oh, why don't they go after Chad Kelly? Well, no, the Argonauts think he's their starter after McLeod, Bethel Thompson disappeared. So they knew something that everybody else didn't really realize what a great leader he is. And so has he kept it up? Yes, all the way through. He's not having the world's best statistics and you can argue, should he be the outstanding player in the league? Well, I don't know. He should be the east outstanding player I think. But I still think I'd vote for Brady Olivera being the outstanding player in the league this year because of what he's done for the Winnipeg Lu bombers. But Chad Kelly certainly is in the running for that and it's a bit of a surprise. Yes, he's played pretty well. His stats are pretty good, but they've won. And what do you base the quarterback on? Brock Purdy had his flaws. You could watch him with the 49 ERs and you say, oh, he is not really great at this. Not really great at that, but he's winning. So that's all that matters. And with Kelly, same thing. They're not the best statistics in the league, but he's winning. Do you sense an upset for the Thai cats going into Montreal? Yeah, yeah. I think Hamilton's a team on the upswing, like we talked about with their quarterbacks, how they're doing it is pretty interesting. I wasn't sure that it would work, but their talent was in place. Remember, I think when we talked earlier this season, Reed, there were a couple of things that we had talked about and we said, what are the big surprises of the season? Well, Calgary Edmonton and their bad play and their small crowds are one of them, and Hamilton was certainly one of the teams who said, what the heck has happened to the Tigercat? It's the same personnel while it's even with the new quarterback, it's Orlando Steinhower who you know that the players seem to follow him along as the head coach. So what happened to Hamilton? Well, they seem to have got their mojo back and I think that they're a more consistent team. I think they'll make fewer mistakes around here. You keep seeing Cody Fajardo come playoff time, something goes wrong and he'll blame somebody else. Hey, now I know final grade, I mean obviously we have playoffs here. Final grade of the season for Cody here in Montreal thus far has he exceeded or fallen flat? He's better than we thought he was going to be, right? They've done a pretty good job. Obviously you can laugh about things because they dumped Cody Fajardo in Saskatchewan and they dumped Jason Moss, the offensive coordinator, and everybody thought, oh, that's good. That'll make this team better. Obviously that wasn't the issue, right? The head coach was more of the issue. So they got rid of somebody who's done a pretty good job. Jason Moss, Jason Moss, how he's changed his demeanor and talked about it, what he's learned about how to behave on the sidelines because your players follow your demeanor as a head coach. He's done a terrific job about that. And there's been a bond between which we heard that Fido and Moss had and it seems to still exist. And when they dumped Cody Chardo last year, that was Craig Dickinson the head coach, not Jason Masio offensive coordinator deciding on that. So yes, they've done a pretty good job working together. To me, he's still a bottom third quarterback. He's played pretty well. He's got some pretty good personnel around them that defense has played exceptionally well. Adding Sean Lemon has just been amazing to them, has really sparked them, but I just don't see them as a finalist team. I think Hamilton's a team on the rise and Montreal is one of those teams that sometimes you get a decent performance, sometimes you get a mediocre performance and I think you're probably going to get a mediocre performance out of them in the playoffs. Alright, real quick here before we get out. I appreciate all this rapid fire here today, Gerald. This has been good in terms of, I don't want to deep dive all these awards, but I think obviously the CFL, whatever the nominees came out today and I'm like in my bed like, okay, what the heck's going on here trying to read through all this stuff to me, obviously the most outstanding player surprise Oliveira over Calleros, is that your thoughts on that? Are there any other surprises for that one? Yeah, olive of our, to me has really been the backbone of that football team the entire year. You kept wondering how are they going to survive When Andrew Harris disappeared, and I know it's been a couple of years, olive of our just keeps getting better and better. Yes, CORIs has won it two years in a row. His stats this year aren't as good as the stats he had before. They're still a pretty good team. They've had a couple dips, but Brady Oliveira shows up every single game whenever they need him. He's fast, he's strong. He doesn't seem to make bad plays. That's who I'd vote for as the outstanding player, even against Chad Kelly in the east. I think Brady Olivar wins that race. How far out do you think Vernon Adams is at this point from contention on that? From winning. He has those bad games, which is what Karos had a couple games that were only mediocre and I think that's what hurt him. Vernon Adams win it. Yeah, he probably would've gotten some votes this year or he's probably still going to get some votes, but I think if you watch who means the most to their team? Well you can say Vernon Adams, yes, but they've also gotten some performances out of Dean Evans stepping in on occasion. So as I said, I, I'm not the biggest Vernon Adams fan, so I think that he's a bit of a long shot to win the West. Interesting. And obviously Brady, not a unanimous decision here in terms of the voting on that. The other one, the outstanding Canadian, I saw a lot of kerfuffle about Matthew Betts not being unanimous for bc. We had talked offline, but thoughts on that in terms of him and any of the other outstanding Canadians? Well, the outstanding Canadian, once again, Brady Olivar, if you're going to be the outstanding player in the league and you're Canadian, you probably win both awards, right? That's the way that didn't Andrew Harris that a couple years ago, I believe. So it's rare for it to happen. Canadians don't win the outstanding Player award very often, but I think he will this year. Matthew bet's certainly worthy of consideration and I know that people are saying how could he not be the outstanding, the unanimous choice in BC of the outstanding for the outstanding defensive player After all the sacks. Matthew Betts had I read, was it JC Abbott? I think it was from three Down Nation who said he voted for Gary Peters the corner who is the best corner in the league and did not allow a touchdown all season. So he's got a valid point. That's who he did his studying and his research. And the defensive end is also usually more glitzier position than a cornerback. So betts of stats are kind of eyeopening, but to say he voted for Peters, you can't fault a guy for doing his homework and believing otherwise. Any other standouts here? I know obviously a couple weeks here to go for all this, but anything else stand out from the CFL awards? Not huge ones, no. It's always tough to judge lineman when I'm voting. I go talk to other defensive linemen around the league who they have trouble playing against. I talk to coaches, so it's always tough to get a real feel for it. And our voting panel expands a little bit now, so it's tougher to get a read on how people are voting read. So usually you know who the team reps are going to be because it's a small group. There's four voters in each center and the head coach. But now it starts expanding onto the national states. So I don't know how they're going with it. It's part of the fun of the debate, right? It's like who goes in the hall of Fame? Who makes the all-star team who are the outstanding players? I love the debate. It's part of the fun of this and agree or disagree, whatever you want, just be talking about it. That's great. Well Daryl, I appreciate it working through, like we said, illness here coming on. We'll see you here in a couple weeks getting all our stuff finalized for our show location, all that stuff. So it should be fun. But I got our hotel booked and everything else, so looking forward to seeing everybody here coming up here less than a month. It's almost there. It's getting close, isn't it? Read good to talk to you and I'll see you Hamilton. Have a good trip. Thanks man. Alright, take care buddy. Well, this man has had an exciting last couple weeks. Big I saw kick return here. Touchdown. Everything else. James Leder Jr. How are you doing sir? I'm good, I'm great. I can't be better. Can't complain about anything going on right now. That's good. Owlettes are hot. 10 and seven here. This weekend's kind of weird obviously. And then we've got the playoffs. How's the season going for you? How are you feeling? Me personally, I'm great. I'm four games in about to be four games in. I feel like as far as special teams, we're getting our chemistry down from switching to a new returner, so I can't be any better right now. I'm just waiting to get to the playoffs. Hey, how's it feel getting that opportunity? I was trying to do the where the CFL website doesn't have accurate stats. I'm like, okay, when was he assigned? What's going on? Obviously you're moved up here getting into a spotlight position here at the end of the year. What's it like getting that opportunity? It's a blessing. Honestly, coming up here, I was just excited to be a part of a team. I wasn't really worried about playing as much as far as being on the active roster. I was just happy to be on the team. Coming out of college, I didn't know where I was going to be, what I was going to do. So as far as being on the team practice roster wise, I was very excited just staying patiently, staying patient and waiting for my time and whenever the time come or whenever it came, I did what I was supposed to do. So I really can't complain. What's it take to keep yourself mentally and physically ready for that? Because when you never know when that opportunity is going to arise, right? A good support system. I think that's one of the biggest things. Talking to my family every day, them just telling me to just make sure I'm studying the plays because the time's coming stay working hard. My friends Shedler and Snead, I'm talking to him every day. We're all rookies, so we're all studying the plays at the same time and figuring out our certain positions. So whenever our time comes we make the most of it. So being patient was really the biggest thing for me. It's been a good season for you guys. I think there was a little bit of uncertainty coming into the year just with changes and everything. We've interviewed a lot of the different guys and we've had Cody and everyone else on. How do you view kind of the locker room mentality? Right now We're laser focused. Right now our mentality is we're the best team in the league regardless of our record, we're hitting our strive, we're getting hot at the right time. Coming into playoffs, you got to be playing as good as you can and I feel like we're doing that. So I think we're locked in. I think we're having great practices. We've practiced great all year, but we're having I think our best practices at the end of the year when it matters the most. So we're locked in, we're laser focused and we ready to go all the way. Getting to host one of the playoff games. What's it like playing in Montreal in front of the crowd there? It's amazing. Honestly, the horns, I talk to my dad all the time and they're blasting the horns every play, regardless if offense, defense and special teams, they're blasting the horns. So I know they're going to show out regardless if we were at a winning or a losing record. They're very loyal fans. I'm so happy to be playing for 'em because I know what they do regardless if it's sunny out, if it's raining or snowing, I know they'll be out there. So I'm excited to play in front of 'em for sure. We're a famously anti horn podcast, so good. We'll have to agree to disagree with that. Watching it on tv, I read a lot about you before hopping on here and undersized kind of working through and it just seems like chip on your shoulder I guess, whatever kind of cliche you want to use. But what is your mentality here coming in, like you said, getting to work your way up here, getting into a position of prominence. What do you internalize about all that? It's just something I dealt with my whole life. I've never had anything given to me, especially at my size. So I got to work 10 times or 10 times as harder as the next person based off of my size alone. Regardless of the stats I put up or how much I bench or how fast am or whatever the case may be, I always got to work harder because of my size. So I take that with everything in life, whether it's football or work outside of football or anything like that. I got to work harder because I know at any given moment they could find somebody three inches taller than me and pick him over me. So I try to put my foot down in the place I'm at and make sure I'm noticed enough so for them to want to keep me. So my whole life I've been using that same mentality and it's got me this far, so why not keep using it? We cover all, we do the XFL and USFL, so kind of all that we call alternative football leagues here in the CFL. Do you find maybe there's that similar mentality with other guys on the team just for whatever reason and things don't open up and you're not given those opportunities maybe and so you got to come there and work extra hard. Do you think that everyone on the team feels that way or there's a good portion? Yeah, I definitely think it's a good portion for sure. All the smaller guys, definitely me and Snee because we've had the same problems I feel growing up we've always been undersized, but as far as other people, like a newcomer on the team, he's been on the team for I want to say about a month TD coming into a new team. Mid-season is hard. You got to learn a whole new system, whether it's offensive defense, you got to make sure you're on time and everything. You know where to go, you know how to do this whenever the time comes. So I feel like if you're coming onto a team late, you got to have that same mentality where you got to outwork everybody and let the coaches notice how hard you're going to work and that you actually want to be here. I think those are probably the top two in my opinion. You said you were happy just to be on the team to get the opportunity. What was your preconception of the CFL before coming up? Honestly, I really didn't know too much about it. I was telling people my senior year of college, the Hamilton Tigercat coach ended up coming up there and talking to me. He said he enjoyed watching me play the past few years and they had their eyes on me and whatnot. He said I should study a little bit on the CFL and at the time I brushed it off because growing up in the United States, I'm thinking NFL or nothing. So I kind of brushed it off and after the draft I'm like, okay, what's next? What's next? And my agents tell me, CFL, I know Montreal wants you. They're looking at you and this and that. So I'm like, okay. A week later I got called at midnight like, Hey, we want you to come. So after that I left literally like eight hours after the phone call. I got a flight to Montreal. So it was new to me. The whole game itself, obviously it's still football, but certain rules and tactics throughout the game was definitely, definitely crazy to me. All the running around before the snap was throwing me off when I first got out here, no fair catch. The three downs, the extra player on both sides, it's a bunch of little things like that and my field go return if I'm not back there, they get a point. So every little thing like that matters and that's what makes the game exciting. So I really didn't know too much about it, but we're here now. Do you think, because we hear there's this learning curve, right? Kind of for any position, do you think coaching staff does a good job getting you guys? Because a lot of people, I think it's obviously not their first thought is going to go play, kick, return, whatever for the outlets, Right? No, I think they do a great job. I knew, like you said, my size and everybody else is my size. So I knew at the time when I first got here, if I was going to make the team, I was going to have to make it on special teams first and then show them that I could also play receiver. So coach B, he said he found me right before the season started and he said I was great at special teams. So I took that right on the shoulder as everything else and worked hard on that. And then as we got deeper and deeper into the season, I started learning the offense more and more and they're saying I can make plays on offense as well. So maybe this next game I might get into offense a little bit. As far as the record shows, it really doesn't matter because we already clenched playoffs and home field for the first round. So they might throw me out there and see what they could get next year. Well, it is exciting here. Yeah. Knowing you have everything locked up, having these opportunities. Before I let you go here, I thought it was funny that the 125 yard kick and I was reading a quote, you thought it felt like it was a lot longer. What was it like just having that big, because all you need is a couple of these big standout moments to really get on people's radar, Right? Once again, I'm going to say it again until I forget about it, but I probably won't ever forget about this memory, but I haven't ran that far since track in high school in my opinion. I used to run the 200 a little bit, so it felt like a 200 running from the left and then going back to the right and maneuvering my way. Honestly, the return was built to go to the left and I had a little wall over there, but me making it difficult on myself, I took another turn and made the most of it. But no, I'm very blessed. My teammates were running with me. Even you could tell I was tired because one of our D linemen was keeping up with me for a little bit. So I'm very blessed and I'm excited and I know they were excited for me and throughout that place. So I can't complain about nothing for real. Well, good luck here. I'm rooting for the Owlettes here in the east, so I appreciate it. I appreciate your time today. Good luck this weekend. And then obviously for the playoffs, I hope you get some good opportunities. Yes, sir. Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Huge special thanks to all the guests coming on today. John Lewis. Like I said, finally coming on. I felt so rude. I never asked John to come on. John's had me on his channel and has quoted me where it had me write things, predictions for him to read on his channel. So felt like I didn't owe John the favor, but certainly felt like I owed John the courtesy. I really appreciate him coming on. And then super appreciate Darryl Davis and like I said, everyone over at the Montreal Ettes for setting that up. Always appreciate the help that they helped me with the courtesy they do, allowing their players to come on the program. So really appreciate that. That'll do it for me today. Like I said, hopefully a big week here, coming up next week. Hopefully the internet doesn't blow up here. National Spring Football League, United Football League, whatever. We end up with hearing lots of different things. Still more messages here from Mike Mitchell in our group chat as I record this, lots of speculation out there. Should be excited, excited to finally get everything put to bed and we can focus on what is or what isn't going to be moving into 2024. So a like and subscribe. We'll see you next time. Thanks.

CFL 2023 Week 20 Results: Winners and Losers of CFL Week 20, What Did We Learn?

Well, hopefully we got it there. My headphones started tweaking out there. I was hearing echoing on everything. So there we go. Hopefully this is going happy Markcast Monday here. Disappointing times here. Disappointing times across the NFL here across the cfl, across the NHL. Just really horrible. No good guys. How are we doing today, Jason? Evan, I'm doing good Reed. Besides these guys right behind me. I mean don't ask me about them, but my Red Wings are doing good in the NHL and I think they're playing your cracking tomorrow night. They are. And you have a dinging dong. Daniels sprung. Very sad. Koski is injured. We have Tanas. This is really cracking. They off to the worst drive you could imagine. Evan, how are you doing today? Yeah, not too bad. Sad. Can't partake in any of your hockey stuff as I don't really follow the N H L, but other than that, no. I'm doing well. Yeah, I mean only three games to talk about this week on the cfl slate, so we might have to expand our knowledge on each game a bit to try and get to an hour, but I'm sure we'll figure it out. Yeah, we'll go. Thanks. We're early today. Appreciate it. I got to go work. Yeah, we meant to hit the whole hour. I got to go be at 10 at the arbery, them filming some interviews. I will say though, guys, the important thing unlike our BC lions here over the weekend is we're showing up today. We showed up here week 20 in a row, so more that we can say about the lions taking on the stamps over the weekend. We'll get to that interesting slate of games here. Playoff things finalized, everything. Jason, I guess the first talking point here, Hodge put out the tweet playoff standings the exact same as last year. Did we waste the last 20 weeks of our lives? What are we doing, Jason? Well, I mean, yes, it ended up being the exact same standings as last year, but I did feel like this year has been more exciting. I feel like we've had a lot more surprising results and I think the biggest thing, and I think this is what Farhan was saying weeks ago when we had 'em on the show, that Winnipeg got closer to the rest of the league and it feels like they're not this insurmountable team that they were the last couple of years. So I think that's what's different this year, but at the end of the day, the standings did not change Because that's the thing. We started out the season and we're really excited and let me even get the standings up here so I can look at 'em. But we kind of get excited and we romanticize about all these different things happening and then to have it, it's disappointing. Like I said, I think especially with the lions and things, it felt like there was a little bit of complacency on Friday night. Well, I mean Winnipeg's not going to win or they're not going to lose and I don't know, to me it feels like we're accepting our lot in life here as a little bit less of, hey, maybe we could actually make a run at this. Evan, what did you make? I hear back to back year, same standings here coming into the playoffs. I Mean, to be honest, it doesn't surprise me just with the way the cfl is structured, I feel like the teams that are at the top stay at the top for a while and kind of dominate, and then the teams who are towards the bottom, maybe they have more losses. Those teams tend to struggle for longer, which is very interesting. I think I said something yesterday, given that there's only nine teams in this league, it's fascinating that teams seem to repeat some of the same mistakes again, and I'm not calling anybody out, but sometimes I'm like, well, if you're playing a team three times in a season, you'd think that you'd be able to make adjustments and get a win. But again, some of these teams just end up with these, quite frankly, horrendous streaks. And again, you think in a nine team league, that wouldn't really be a problem because you have so many chances to redeem yourself. But you could argue that maybe because there is only nine teams and there's not the same variety I guess that you get in a league like the N F L, that would explain why some of these teams go on such long losing streaks and can never seem to turn the ship around even when everything looks to be pointing in the right direction. Yeah, we had said in the thing, yeah, the fact that the cfl that you had three teams with, I think it was six plus game home losing streaks going into this season with the rider and the Red Blacks, and then obviously the Elks really remarkable kind of all this, but I don't know, like I said, I felt like coming down the stretch here, I don't know, and we'll get into the BC Lions game and it felt a little bit more of like, well, we're just happy with second place. We'll get to the playoffs and I'll talk more about it. But I don't think that's a great way to build a fan base and have big blackout night and let's get everyone to the stadium and then let's completely delay an egg after we didn't lay an egg against Winnipeg. But heartbreaking loss here, it's the last home game of the season, save for the playoffs and kind of sad that way. Jason, any other general thoughts before we get into this and yet next? I don't know, we might need to get a guess or something next week because looking ahead here and none of these games either next week now this week 21 here, Jason, we'll talk offline, but that could be a little bit scary of a recap next week. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I guess the only thing that's really notable about next week's games is that Toronto could be tying the cfl record for best record in a regular season, but other than that, I mean it's just a wasteland of games next week. So yeah, like you said, we might have to have someone on for that. Yeah, I have a lot to say about the Argos too. It's like we only care about one and oh, but then we definitely want to hit every single record we can and every single legacy, but we're still, we only want to go one and oh. But it seems like there was a lot of, okay, let's make sure this guy gets a thousand rushing yards. Okay, let's make sure this person gets reception. So we'll get into all that. I have less thoughts about this Winnipeg Edmonton game. I'll toss to Jason first on this Winnipeg 40 burger here. I hear notes being pulled out here. That's good. Winnipeg here, the Edmonton. What did we make of this hoping that Edmonton can make a game and kind of really, really fall off the cliff here at the end? Yeah, not too many positives from this game for Edmonton, but I will say one right off the bat, they had their first return touchdown since 2015 in this game, which is just an unbelievable stat, but congratulations to Deonte Alexander for bringing one back for Edmonton finally. But other than that, I mean Winnipeg jumped on them right at the beginning of the game. Winnipeg went right down and scored the first touchdown of the game to make it seven, nothing. Then Jackson Jeff Coat had a strip sack on board, a return for a touchdown by Adam Big Hill was 14. Nothing. Edmonton made it 14, 10, but that's as close as it got. And ultimately Winnipeg was the better team and they played to win despite having nothing to play for with BC's loss on Friday night. Yeah, imagine that. That's the thing with some of these teams, it is just automatic in here. BC will know we don't really have a lot to play for. We don't really know when the pay don't care, when the pay comes out, they'll still put up a 40 burger on you. You round getting some playing time as well here. To me, that's kind of the difference of all this is hey, right, last home game except for the playoffs here, right? Because they're on the road next week, whatever the last schedule is. Evan, what did you make of this Elks year coming in? Yeah, so a couple things. First of all, yeah, Deante Alexander wanted to talk about him briefly, didn't actually know he was on the Elks, but previously in the U Ss F L with the Houston gamblers, I believe a very interesting prospect came from division three Franklin College and was with the Seahawks and Lions at one point. So definitely an interesting guy that when I heard Deante Alexander, I said, oh, that sounds awfully familiar. So did my Google search and then yep, sure enough, it was the guy that I was thinking about. So yeah, good for him. The fact that the Elks haven't had a return touchdown since 2015. Again, you'd think with all of these 18 game seasons and years of building and whatever, you'd think that there maybe would've happened sooner. But anyway, another one that I wanted to point out, Manny Arsano with a 77 yard catch and run, I think last week it was he set, he's now fourth all time in terms of streaks with a game like a catch in each game. So again, congratulations to him for that. Really one of the all time greats, great to see his career still going. And then on the Winnipeg side, the really only thing that I had to point out here was Drew Brown. We had talked about Drew Brown briefly. I think he played briefly, maybe it's been a couple months now, I think. But he came in, it Was when Zach went down, right? Wasn't that the game when Zach went down? Yes, Whenever that was. So I think that was a little less than two months ago or something like that. Yeah. Anyways, drew Brown. So there's a couple guys that I'm looking at and I bring this up because now we're pretty much at the end of, well, some teams like Edmonton, their season's done Saskatchewan and their season's done. We'll get into that, but I bring that up because there's some guys in this league, some quarterbacks that are currently backups that I feel like could start. Dane Evans was a name that's been floated around. I was talking to Derek Dennis this weekend and we had a nice chat about Dane Evans and he came off the bench in BC and we can get to that too. But Drew Brown, I feel like is a guy where he's not brought up enough in those discussions in terms of possible starting caliber quarterbacks because in this game, I mean completed every pass, 94 yards, two touchdowns. I mean, to be honest, if you weren't paying attention to that game closely, you might've not known that Drew Brown was even in, you would've just thought it was calleros and wouldn't have batted an eye. So Drew Brown, I definitely feel like deserves his credit, deserves some recognition, has definitely developed in this league I think, and excited to see where he can go from this point forward. Hey Jason, I mean we talked about this a lot with the Argos. Would you not have just given Drew Brown the game here? I mean I know exactly, I mean they kind of split more or less, but would you have mean, what's the harm here? What are you risking with Claus? Yeah, exactly. I mean, yeah, I would've done that. I would've just gave Drew Brown the entire game to play because like you said, they have nothing to play for standings wise. And Claris is a guy that the last couple of years he's been able to stay relatively healthy, but throughout the course of his career he's had a lot of injury issues. So why leave him vulnerable to that? I think it was pretty questionable in hindsight for Winnipeg, but he got out of this game unscathed and I doubt we'll see him next week. I saw Tweet come out talking and during the game and how basically Winnipeg, it's kind of like the Brock Purdy argument in the N F L right now. How good is Brock and you got all the, we got Debo and Christian, if you put Cody Ferdo in the Winnipeg Blue Bomber system, Zach, basically the argument was like he's an above average quarterback that is just surrounded by a lot of good talent in the lead defense. And like I said, it's basically like the Cody Fido. If you could swap out Jason, what do you make of that? And then we'll get Evan's thoughts. I don't agree with that. I think that Claris is a special quarterback in this league and he was just waiting for this right opportunity for everything to click. I mean, we saw years ago in Hamilton, there was one year that I believe it was 2015 that they started nine and one, and he was the runaway M V P 25 touchdowns, 10 picks best player in the league by far. And then he tore his a c l and we've seen him play at a high level in other places in the cfl. So I mean, I don't agree with that. I think that not every quarterback could have done what Zach's done in Winnipeg. And I mean at the end of the day, I think one thing that separates Zach Claris is his football intelligence and just the general feel he has for the game. I don't think you can replicate that with a guy like Cody Fdo, for example. Yeah, I really don't like that argument, this whole Brock Purdy thing, and we get a lot of it just with Seattle and San. It ends up being in the news cycle here at least a lot. And if anything, I think it is interesting that with the Drew Brees and Sean Peyton here, and obviously with Brady and Belichick, some of these coaches are almost getting exposed after the fact now of like, well, no, this wasn't assistant quarterback, this was kind of an elite talent and obviously Shanahan and all that. But no, I mean think Calleros obviously there's two sides to it that's a really good fit there as well, but you need to have some, I mean, how many years now has he been able to replicate this? Evan, what do you make of that? Yeah, I mean look, I feel like if you put another quarterback there, it's not going to have the same results. Someone even outside of Cody fdo, there's a multitude of options. I just don't think it's the same. I think that a team like Winnipeg is good at building quarterbacks in-house and developing them so that some people might say that's also misleading because then those quarterbacks could go to another team and not perform well. But I don't know. I mean I look at Zach Calleros, we all know what he's capable of. Just talked about Drew Brown personally, I feel like he could start a couple games in this league and be fine. Dakota Proco is another one that they have who came back to Canada after he tried coming down to the US and playing in the usfl with the New Jersey Generals. So they've definitely given some guys some opportunities. Yeah, I mean it's one of those arguments that, I mean you hear about it a lot. Yeah, Reid, you brought up a good example if you want to compare it to the N F L level, A lot of people are saying, well, if you take Brock Purdy out of San Francisco and put him on another team or somebody else, you bring in another quarterback to San Francisco, they had the same results. I'm not so sure about that. I think people they want to say that to just feel more comfortable to try and even the talent plane or whatever you want to call it. But yeah, realistically, I don't know. I feel like Brock Purdy, he might not be completely polished, but he could still go to a multitude of teams I think and perform at a high level. It's not a fluke. And you could say the same about certain situations here in the cfl. Yeah, I mean scouts whiff all the time. I mean even look at that Tyson kid that was playing for the Bears over the weekend and here's someone undrafted and he's coming up there and playing and not that the Raiders are much to beat right now, but any other thoughts on this game? Any other thoughts on the Elks? They got have one more game. So they're done. Winnipeg's going into Calgary, Hamilton is in Montreal, and then Toronto OTT way. Anything else kind of bow tie and we'll probably do a playoff whatever and recap and all that, but any other thoughts kind of bow tie the elk season? We'll go Jason first. Yeah, I mean for the Elks, I mean ultimately they finished with the exact same record as they did last season four and 14. So say what you will about that. And for Winnipeg, Nick Demsky crosses the a thousand yard threshold for the first time in his career, so congratulations to him. For whatever reason, four and 14 for the Elks this year, it feels tremendously better than four and 14 for the Elks last year. Evan, any other bow tie thoughts on the elk season? I don't know. I don't think so. Look, I'm sure there'll probably be some things in the off season. We have to wait for a lot of these situations to pan out and you could say the same. Same about Saskatchewan, right? That's the next game we have to get to. No need to really tear that apart too much until things start happening. But yeah, Elk's, look, I'm happy the Elks turned the corner. I think that's just a nice, considering they started oh and nine or whatever and they were able to kind of finish with a decent, I guess four and five, would that be if I can do math properly, the fact that they were able to at least turn their season around and make things competitive. I like that a lot. Yeah, Tim chiming in. We talked about that first kick return for touchdown, I say, which like I said, for all those when your grocery points and all those other things and the specialty, I always kind of laugh at all that stuff. Yeah, Tim, maybe we'll get Tim on next week. Maybe Tim can serve fill some of this error here. We got there, interesting week here going into week 21. Alright, this is interesting. And so normally my Saturdays are occupied by the wife, but she decided to go pumpkin picking with her friends at nine 30 in the morning. And so I ended up sitting around and was watching Moneyball for a while and then I said, oh, this game starting and I'm going to sit on my cfl plus and watch that. This was a fascinating game. I have lots of thoughts about this game management and Saskatchewan completely the falling apart in Toronto and kind of else. Jason, first off for you, what was this game? We'll get to Calgary, but Saskatchewan is literally playing for their lives here. Showed up, really showed up on fire at the beginning. What did you make? Yeah, that's my first impression was that wow, Saskatchewan came out of the gates hot. They felt like they really wanted to win. It looked like their best effort in weeks, but ultimately they just fell apart right at the end. And I was about to say Calgary wins this weekend. Saskatchewan wins this weekend. That was the best possible outcome for the cfl. And then you still had a meaningful game next week with Calgary, but Saskatchewan blows it at the end to Cameron Dukes and at the end of the day, they have nobody to blame but themselves for the last seven games of their season. I hate tweeted this out, I said that Saskatchewan is really point out their minds dominating the must wing game against Toronto, Sam Peter's pants, the BC lion and the must win game. Imagine having these teams. There's the same thing with Calgary Prep. You can play must win games before they're actually must win at the end of the season here. And like you said, still wasn't enough to get the job done. But Evan, I remember, I think you must've been going to one of the games you were watching and I know you said, Hey, I didn't have service. How the hell did the riders lose this game? Yeah, I mean I watched most of this game up until the middle of the third quarter, so I think I stopped watching when Cameron Dukes came in, but obviously good to see him get some work in. Got to point that out of course. But besides that, yeah, I mean that's heartbreaking to lose a game like that at home in front of your home crowd and especially I think what's really, what really makes this significantly worse is the fact that Saskatchewan had this same scenario happen to him last season where their season ends at the beginning of September and they just don't win after that again when you need to win. I was saying for weeks back in August and even July again when Saskatchewan was still building momentum that this team had a lot of talent and I believed in that playoff race. I figured those last two spots it looked like it was going to be between Saskatchewan and Calgary. Of course it was. I thought Saskatchewan had the advantage. I thought that they would be able to overcome last year's late season struggles, but unfortunately they were unable to do that. And I'm sitting here, I'm very surprised, I think more than anything, that team with all the stuff that they had going on and it just felt like they had enough talent to get it done. I don't know. Look, I'm not going to try and do many comparisons. I don't know if they have more talent than Calgary maybe in certain areas, whatever. I'm not breaking all that down right now. That would be something Jason could do on his channel. I don't know. I've watched this game and sadly that's a game where I don't know, that really kind of shakes up possibly what the future of maybe the franchise looks like in Saskatchewan. You have to start asking about possible changes and things like that. I mean, being a combined, I think it was oh and 13 and back-to-back seasons after September 4th or something like that. Again, just another one of those stats where you want to look away that it just doesn't seem right. And I feel really bad for all the rider fans. I know that's one of the better fan bases in the league out there in Regina. Definitely a very unique spot I would say doesn't get talked about enough, so hats off to everybody there. But yeah, I wasn't, I'm not really a fan of this team, but even I was disappointed because I know when you lose a game like that, that's the one that you think about because you had, I mean obviously they've been on a bit of a slide now, but that's not something that you come back from so easily. And I think it's just more than anything, I think it's fascinating how Calgary, despite everything being against them, everything working against them, everything looking like this was the end, they're still in it. And I think all the players, all the players were kind of saying and thinking the same thing. Well, we're still here. We still had a chance, give us a chance. And they've somehow, once again made the playoffs. And again, that's the other thing about having a nine team league, it's a bit easier to keep those streaks live even in a year where again, this year I thought there was no chance I thought Saskatchewan could lose again. I thought they could lose six of the last seven games and still find a way. But no, they didn't. And that's something again, that's going to sting for a long time. Yeah, 18 consecutive postseason appearances. Congratulations. A friend of the show, Ryan Valentine, he tweeted out, yeah, they're old enough to vote now the cfl congregation because this was just remarkable. And we had on Jamie Nye right last week I said I got to with the Green Zone up there and I love Regina. I mean Dorothy and I really did have the best time up there for the great cop. Really delightful. Beautiful, beautiful. We walked in the park with Rob Vanstone around the lake. I mean really tremendous of their fan base before the riders. But he said if they lose, people don't even want them to even have the opportunity to be in the playoffs. The fan base wants them to lose. And I keep checking my Twitter, he says, come Monday morning when it's official that they're not in heads are going to roll there. And I imagine, I don't know how you can go, oh of seven the last two years like Evan said here following September and that whole regime is gone. I mean this is crazy and I think wholesale changes are coming there. Jason, rod Peterson had tweeted that over the weekend as well. Obviously he long history with the riders, this great franchise and where it's at right now. What do you make of just kind of the downfall of the riders? Well, the first thing you look at is the attendance. I mean, this was the worst at attendant game in Regina, I believe they said since 2006. So that is very alarming and shows you that a lot of these fans have tuned out from this team with what they've gone through the last couple of years. So I think that is very concerning. I think we're bound to see a big house cleaning we saw in Edmonton a years ago when they got rid of the president, the GM and the head coach. So I mean, I expect that to happen in Regina. I don't think that any of those guys survive maybe the president of anything, but I think oday and Craig Dickinson are out as the GM and the head coach in Regina, and I think at the end of the day, yeah, I don't think that you can go forward with those guys in that leadership group there In Regina, I did how it came out afterward because they were doing the Clean out the locker day and it was Brit Gray that does the show with Jamie and they're like, well, Trevor Harris said, well, I was going to be ready to go in the playoffs. I was going be ready for what? It's great. I don't think that Trevor Harris comes in there and lights the world on fire either. I mean, to me there was kind of a fundamental, just something wrong with this team here. I mean, do Gall doing fine. I mean throwing, he had the two picks, 4 29 here, me, he's throwing the bottle all over the field. I don't know if you bring in Trevor Harris, Evan, let's say they eek in here and Trevor Harris comes in, does that make any difference at all? Yeah, I don't know. It's an interesting question. I feel like you almost can't answer it because Trevor Harris didn't play for long enough this season with the riders, to be honest. Look, if you want to take away some positives from this game, if you're a rider's fan, do gal looked pretty good. I understand that he had the interception at the end of the game that kind of really put things away, and I wouldn't count that as good. But other than that, I mean, look, he spread the ball around. He got Samuel Elmos over a thousand yards on the season, I believe, who had a great game. Also shout out to Sam. Sean Bain had another nice game too. He was on a practice roster last year, so that was actually a pretty good, I guess, gem you could say that Saskatchewan was able to capitalize on. Anyway. Yeah, Jake Dala, I feel like there is promise with him moving forward and regardless of who's there next year or if he stays around or whatever, I feel like he had an opportunity this season to prove himself and while he did not win this game, which would've been a significant moment, and we always use the term legacy game, which this could have been one form. I mean, 429 passing yards was pretty impressive. But yeah, I mean, Jake Dole gala, you have something there. I don't know. Again, there's so many questions about the future here. I feel like there's almost more questions now in Saskatchewan than maybe there is in Edmonton just because they, again, they've produced the same result in Back-to-Back seasons and they had so much, it felt like they changed a lot of things significantly this off season to make sure that that wouldn't happen again. But they're just kind of right back where they were. And again, that's extremely unfortunate. It's a tough business. It's a winning business is really what it is. There's no denying that. So yeah, it's one of those things. But there are positives again for Saskatchewan. I mean, again, from the player standpoint, I thought Jareth Sterns was a really good pickup, sung his praises, definitely somebody that I think should have been playing pro football sooner, possibly in the xfl. And then on the Toronto side of things, I mean we've been talking about Saskatchewan for so long and just kind of how this was a fallout for them. I got to give some credit to Toronto here. I mean, again, this team is so deep they can pull anybody and still have a chance. And that's why I'm very confused at why Chad Kelly was in the game for as long as he was. I got to talk about that first, and I know you feel a certain way about that, Reid, but man, I know, look, we brought it up a bit with Calleros too. He maybe could have rode that one out and Drew Brown was obviously fine to just have his moment, but man, I think with Chad Kelly, it just felt so much worse because you saw him getting hit benched or, well, I shouldn't say bench, but they rested a couple, I think, of their starting linemen and you saw Kelly start taking some hits out there, and there was one where in that third quarter where they literally had to bring Dukes in at that point just because he was kind of hobbling off the field. And I'm sitting there, geez. I mean this is just so, it makes me angry when I'm sitting there watching that because it just feels so preventable. And look, I understand, look, Ryan Denwood, he's a great coach. I'm sure he has his reasons for it. Maybe I don't agree with it, but again, that's above me, above my pay grade. So yeah, look, I don't know why Chad Kelly was in the game as long as he was. I thought he had a respectable performance regardless, and then Cam Dukes came in and finished everything out, but I quit the Argos, man, it just feels like every name, at least every time that they bench again, not bench rest, some of their Starters, It just feels like there's another name to talk about because they're so deep this week I'd say give credit to hopefully, I don't butcher this name, but Daniel Aba Boyer man just comes out there and 109 carries on nine yards, ripped off that really big. I believe it was 60 yard run. It looks like it was 59 there based on his long. But yeah, guys like that. Again, someone that you just don't discuss all season and then he comes into an elimination game for one of the teams and almost puts him to bed. And then I think another player that they had that was helpful in this game, if I can find the name, Mason Pierce from the Colorado School of Mines, division two who had the game ceiling interception on Jake Dole Gall. He was somebody that I think is, he's a rookie, I could be wrong, but he came in the season again, somebody that they wanted to develop. I don't know how many reps he's had, but it seemed like he was relatively new, came in there and won the game for Toronto and sent Saskatchewan home. Well, even though they were at home, but you know what I mean? Yeah, I mean, again, Toronto, just incredible depth. I mean when it comes to someone like me who does a lot of scouting and personnel work, it really speaks volumes when your entire second team unit or whatever you want to call it, can come into a game and pretty much replace all the starters. No problem. Again, you could barely tell the difference in production between, again, like Dukes and Kelly or some of the running backs, even some of the receivers who maybe we don't talk about enough who I think some of them I know ette in terms of, again, like the thousand yard milestones, I don't really track those. I think Ette went over a thousand. He went Over and then They Pulled him. Yeah, They pulled him right after that. And then I think one of the receivers maybe went over a thousand too. But yeah, anyway, again, just great depth by Toronto demonstrated. Again, if you're Toronto, I think you feel confident, even if you were to suffer a significant injury at some point in the playoffs, you would at least be able to replicate something in a game. I feel good about that again, in terms of I don't want to get into great cut matchups quite yet. Yeah, we'll get In my opinions. Exactly. Look, I've been talking to some people including yourself, read about that and how I feel, but I won't get into that quite yet, although I will say that that might play a role if you want to pick Toronto and you feel good about that, having that depth. So yeah, that's where I'm at on that game. I think I will say just, and I'll get to the game, I am hearing big news coming out, great Cup Week. I don't know if anyone else is hearing that. I saw a couple of people talking about that and they got Randy's press conference moved up to Tuesday and they're trying to separate that from the actual game of Gray Cup. So I don't know if Randy's going to come out and drop some bombshells on that week of the Gray Cup. I will say that we were talking, we have, well we have a venue secured for our Gray Cup show that should be exciting, but I'm working with one of the teams to see if we can situate it more in kind of the fan section there of the Gray Cup activities. But otherwise we have a great backup plan. We'll announce all that because I'm excited for that and we'll certainly have a lot of that kind of stuff and I appreciate Jason as well putting together and giving me advice about, okay, which ones work or which ones don't. Calling these places like, hey, wait, who are you? I'm like, okay, we're from Seattle, we talk about the cfl. No, we really can't really pay to use anything more just can we be whatever. Anyway, so that should be good. So yeah, so I can subscribe. Should be a big show there. We had 15,000 views last year for Beat, beat the cfl Stream last year for the pre-show, so hopefully we'll do that. But talking the game, yeah, Saskatchewan totally checked out last home game Saturday afternoon there was all this made about the Sunday night games and we hate that and people traveling, no excuses here. Last home game of the season, no one showed up. We talked about that in terms of the Chad Kelly thing and I had tweeted that because watching the game and Glen and Rod, a friend of the show Rod Smith, they're talking going into break and they're like, well, there's no way Chad Kelly plays the second half and I say it is coaching malpractice if this guy comes out and plays. They tried Jack Kelly out again in the third quarter and like Evan said, it was only until he got that he's limping off the field and it's like, okay, let's pull Chad. And they were incredulous about that and I think Rod to me Rod's a pretty pg kind of like, Hey, okay, I kind of tote the league line here and I'll talk a little bit. When he was on the show, he was talking about how he thought it was a mistake that Toronto when Winnipeg didn't play earlier before Toronto had locked everything down, but Rod normally doesn't say, but they were just incredulous playing for a drive playing for a quarter, but the fact he's in the third quarter here, I mean Jason, I don't know, to me you'll never be able to argue playing any guy like that past the first half, if that makes sense. Yeah, I mean I was super surprised. We were talking about on the show last week, I didn't think he was going to play at all these last two weeks, but they taught him out for the first three quarters and the greater part of three quarters in this game. And yeah, it's super unnecessary because like I said, there's no reason to do it because of their situation in the standings. I mean they have a weird situation because it's been such a long time since they've clinched, but regardless, I think that with only two weeks left in the season, I feel like this is the time to completely sit 'em down for the last couple of weeks and give Cameron Dukes a longer look and Brian Scott potentially a longer look at the quarterback position because those guys need reps and they have not had many reps in the cfl as both rookies. And Mike Mitchell has talked about that, Chad, and he's got a lot of incentives based into his contract and I do think we were talking with the AJ Ette and everything, I think that as much as they want to talk about Plan One and oh, I think that is going on a lot or at least it felt like it wasn't this game. Okay, let's get AJ his thing and I get all that. I mean, what was it a couple years ago where Tom Brady was throwing the Antonio Brown, he needed 20 more receptions or whatever to get whatever it was, a hundred thousand dollars or whatever and he was shovel passing to him. I get that. But yeah, Chad going into the third and like I said, to hear one of the faces of the league really questioning that I obviously loved in Witty and Mike and we have tremendous respect for that, but just felt Chad goes down here. I mean this team is not the same with Cameron Dukes in terms of anything else here, Evan, of this game? Any other thoughts? Let me think. Probably not. I don't know, just again, the amount of depth that Toronto team has, it's just this league, I feel like again, in parts of this season they've, they've certain teams struggle I think with depth and you kind of see that some teams might not, even with their starters, they might want to change some things up, whereas in Toronto you just have so much to work with. It's really nice to see. So again, I don't know, I just get that off my mind as much as we've already talked about it. And then yeah, finally like I said, just another disappointing season for the riders where it really felt like they had, to me, I still remember the Labor Day game and sitting there and working and excuse me, I got whatever in my throat listening to the game and them beating the bombers at home and like, oh my God, there's all this momentum and the overtime win and all of that. And then to think that that would be the last game they would win this season is incredible. I mean, Jason, the decline of that, I don't know, to me is unprecedented here to lose the last seven games back to back seasons, especially this year where that to me it was like all the momentum was going in their favor. Yeah, there's some things in this league that simply don't make sense. You were saying with the three teams that had long multi game home losing streaks at the same time in a nine team league. Like I said, there's just some things in this league that don't make sense and I kind of chalk it up to that. Just some weird things happening in the cfl and I mean, yeah, just some strange things have happened in Regina the last couple of years. Yeah, I got the tweet here just talking about how Harris would've been back. Jason, do you see Harris next year in Regina? Are we doing that? Are we going to wait until we get new coaching staff in? I mean Jamie and I seem to think that it was like, Hey, if I can go in and take the head coaching job there, knowing I have someone like Trevor Harris, does that do anything for you or do you want to kind of rebuild? Yeah, absolutely. I think it all comes down to Trevor because Trevor was saying, I think I want to come back, but I'm not a hundred percent certain and I won't say today that I'm coming back next year for sure. You got to remember this guy's 37 years old, but if he wants a job in the CFO as a starting quarterback next year, he's going to have one whether or not that's in Saskatchewan or somewhere else, because I still think he was playing at a top four, top five quarterback level prior to getting hurt this year, remember this team was three in one before he got hurt, and during that game, which he got hurt, I believe they were leading Calgary, so they had a chance to go four and one. They ultimately ended up losing that game. So I mean I think that if they had Trevor the rest of the season, they definitely would've made the playoffs. I don't see them going on this kind of a slide the last six weeks of the season. So I mean I take something away from that perspective, but I think at the end of the day, the age is a concern with him and the fact that Dali showed some promise I think makes you have some thoughts about that. Anything else here? We'll move on. We'll talk Lions here. Evan, you good? Yeah, I think so. I mean just quickly on the Trevor Harris topic, I think yeah, even if you were to bring in new coaches, new management, whatever, I feel like Trevor Harris is a guy you can build around and you could say the same for Jake Al, I mean a young up and coming quarterback who's been at the N F L level at one point, and yeah, Trevor Harris being like the seasoned veteran guy, I'd say Trevor Harris probably has the best chance because look, we've talked about some of the older quarterbacks like Jeremiah Maoli being another one. I was hearing Jeremiah Maoli, even if he were to come back next season, him starting wouldn't be a lock. It would be for a guy like Trevor if he were to just hang around and who knows, maybe it won't be for Trevor either, depending on what the new coaching staff thinks, but I could see him staying in Saskatchewan. I think that's a very plausible option and it feels like there's unfinished business there. I feel like he was brought in to be the guy to kind of turn the franchise around, and as much as they've seen promise from Jake Doga, that was more of an unexpected route. So a couple of different ways you could go with that. But yeah, I mean I'd love to see Trevor play again. Yeah, I mean the talking with Moz, I mean Ole hasn't really played football in two years here. I mean, you want to talk, we attracted the Sean Watson of it all, and even if you get rid of everything off the field, it's really hard to take two, two and a half years off of your play. Especially I think in the N F L, you have a lot more resources around you to kind like, okay, let's get you back up to speed here. I don't know, Mazzola coming off the couch here in Ottawa maybe has as much at his disposal. Alright, this was, and I feel like we've gotten to the point on here and we've talked offline and online and I think Jason is good at being critical too, and Evan, obviously we are kind of getting into the league here and okay, you can't say anything or we get poo-pooed on or whatever. There's 20 weeks now here covering this. We say what we want on here now and I think that we have at least 1% authority to say what we feel. I had tweeted this out Friday following the BC Alliance loss. Super disappointing to me. We'll get into all this, but I just said BC Alliance have had many bad losses this season. I've been told for months that they'll show up when it matters. The culture and mindset of a team always matters even when the win doesn't. This is not a championship team as much as it breaks my heart to say we'll have many thoughts about it, I felt that way, felt the end of the season was really when I was there with the Winnipeg game. I thought if they don't get over that hump, I don't see this turning out any differently than we did last year. We talked at the top of the show about all of that stuff. To me, I don't understand how you can go in and be so flat in your last home game of the year. We just said Winnipeg, they're still putting up 45. The game doesn't matter at all. Dane looked bad, everything looked bad. Jason, I guess I'll go to you first. We were out and then I'm like, okay, we came home, I got to figure out what's going on here. Sat down to watch the last half of this game. What did you make of just, to me, this is a disaster. I dunno how you can give Calgary the momentum here going in now. They're going to be coming back into your building. We already put up 40 points against you guys two weeks ago, the Donut Boys. To me it's a non that you say like, oh, BC whatever. This is a non 0% chance calorie comes back in and runs this up. Yeah, I mean I still think they're going to win that game. Personally, I think there was a lot of things in this game that swung in Calgary's direction because one thing I'll point to is the two dropped interceptions that one of them would've for sure went back for a touchdown by Gary Peters. So I think Calgary didn't really play that well and I don't think the score really reflects that this game was such a large spread. I think that at the end of the day, it was actually a pretty close game in terms of the actual level of play in this game. But I think that it's concerning that BC shows up flat in some of these spots. This reminds me of that game that they lost to Hamilton earlier this year where they just looked like a team that could not match the other team physically and Calgary just kept on running it right down their throats time and time again. I think that's my biggest takeaway from this game is that this finally looked like last year's Calgary team that's very capable of running the football plays some pretty good defense, a capable defense that has some flaws, but a team that really relies on that running game with Kadeem Keri, who really showed up for the first time this season. Peyton Logan was a difference maker as well. I always compare him to kind of Darren Sprouls like I think he's just a really fascinating player to watch and I think he had a big game in this one and I think Calgary's just kind of finding their groove at the right time here after sleepwalking through the whole season. It's weird. And not to get too much back on the hockey about it, but Kraken are weird that way too. We will show up, we'll win seven road games in a row in a streak on the road, and then we'll come back home and completely lay an egg and I don't know if there's something to do with the routine that goes into that, but having lived in Seattle forever with the Seahawks, this feels very similar with bc. The Seahawks will always play down to their opponent. We turned the ball over three times against Arizona yesterday. I mean we won 20 to 10, but Gino had a horrendous day how to fumble these interceptions bc yeah, maybe they'll go in and like, okay, we go toe to toe with Winnipeg and we go to overtime and all that stuff, but we cannot show up here. To me, I'm tired of that and I just wish that we could just come in and approach these games like a team that actually thinks that we can be competitive in the playoffs. I mean, I was talking with people at BC like, oh, it's fine. It's Calgary and I think we'll be fine. It's at some point there needs to be accountability there and I think especially in the league like the cfl, we're trying to rebuild the BC thing. You can't lay eggs at home like this. To me it's infuriating, Evan. I mean look, I think, I don't know, some of this I feel like is a bit exaggerated. Like Jason said, this game, this meant way more for Calgary than it did for bc. So you kind of have to look at it more from the Calgary perspective. I understand. Look, last home game of the season, you want to make a good impression. You come out flat. I understand there were some important milestones on the line. I think Vernon had a chance to go over 5,000 yards. Obviously that doesn't happen. Dane Evans comes into the game, looks subpar, you could say unfortunately. But yeah, I mean to me this game was just Calgary. It was more, I think Calgary being in the must win situation and just saying, you know what? Most of our season we've just been really slow. We haven't really gotten things together. Now is the time where it all kind of comes together because this, to be honest, I mean as much as Jason, I agree when it comes to the on-field play was relatively fair. Both teams I think played at a certain level. It's just BC missed out on some opportunities. I agree with that, but I still feel like this was one of the most complete performances that we've seen from Calgary all year and for once, it didn't take just one player to really, Jake Mayer didn't have to throw for 400 yards or something crazy like that to bail him out. He only had to throw for 123 yards, but was very efficient doing so had two touchdowns. The run game finally got going and it was actually Peyton Logan who got a majority of the work instead of Kadeem Carey, who I don't know. I probably haven't talked about Kadeem Carey as much the season just because, Well, there hasn't been lot. Exactly. They haven't had the same success running the ball. You could say the same for Saskatchewan and even BC to a degree. I will say the one guy in this game, Jaquan Hardy, he's an interesting prospect. It was he bounced, he kind of bounced, I think between the practice roster and active roster for BC this season. I don't really know when he was there the first time or if he was there in training camp. I haven't really been following too much of his recent history, but I do know that he came from a Division II school at Tiffin, played previously for the Dallas Cowboys and scored a touchdown with them. I remember that very well. Again, any small school player like that, I enjoy looking at things like that. So Jaquan Hardy, I mean unfortunately, look, 11 carries 41 yards, one touchdown really wasn't too exciting. I mean, you're averaging under four yards a carry. Still a lot to be desired there, but I feel like that's a piece again, I mean if you're BC going into the playoffs, I'm sure there's a lot of different feelings there. Jaquan Hardy, I feel like is one of those guys where maybe you go into the off season and he's somebody that you evaluate a bit more in depth, especially given you've tried a lot. I feel like in the run game there's been a couple different people, Taquan, mazel, Sean Shiver, that have come in there to try and do something and it just hasn't really worked out. So again, maybe you further evaluate something there and now I'm just kind of getting into players, but we'll roll with it. Justin McInnis, someone we talked about at great length at the beginning of the season, then you had guys like Alex Hollins and Keon Hatcher kind of take over in the receiving game. Again, we all know how diverse that receiving core is, but McInnis stood out in this game, which was good to see. And then on the Calgary side, like I said, we talked about Peyton Logan, we talked about Jake Mayer, Reggie, I'm not sure, I think he was already over the thousand yard, fresh, cold going into this game pretty well over that I think. So not really much on the line there, but again, somebody who through the thick and thin this season for Calgary has been a guy that they can rely on regardless of what's going on. Somebody that you can just always throw to and there's a good chance that the play will be made. So Beton sure is happy given that he's been doing things in Calgary for a couple years now and even had a stick with the Packers kind of in between that. I'm sure he's happy that his team is playoff bound. I mean, they're all happy. Obviously the team is playoff bound. Again, I don't think it just seems like such an unprecedented position, not just to them, but I think to a lot of other people in the league as well. So that's kind of where I'm at on that game. Look, bc unfortunate turn of events there. It wasn't a very entertaining last game at home, but I don't know. Again, I just don't think this is the game to be getting mad about. Yes, you want to have momentum going into the playoffs, but at the same time if you don't have as much to play for or really nothing to play for, given that they were pretty much just in second and that was it. Well, I guess if they won, maybe they could have extended it, but then Winnipeg beat Edmonton anyway. So again, that's where all the interesting scenarios come into play that I don't really know enough about, excuse me to talk about. So I'm not going to go into that. But yeah, ultimately, again, I just feel like the one interesting, this game is so much more interesting now that we know Calgary is going to the playoffs and you're going to turn around in a couple weeks and the same matchup is going to happen at the same place. That's the only thing where I'm like, okay, because again, we kind of all expected Saskatchewan to come in and play BC and again, which team is better to play? I don't really know. BC should be beating either of those teams pretty handedly. But yeah, and you got to ask yourself maybe Calgary again, they're starting to know this team a bit better. They've played them, I feel like so many times now, this season they'll be playing them again in the playoffs. I saw Calgary play at BC going back to beginning of August. I saw that matchup live and yeah, the fact that that's a playoff matchup again, is still a bit beyond me. But again, funny things happen. Yeah. Well, it'll be interesting to see what Calgary does again with that sort of recency bias or familiarity or whatever you want to call it, because they could take advantage of that. Again, BC should definitely be winning that game, but maybe it's more competitive with Calgary ripping this one off. Yeah, I'm looking here at the standings and we've talked all season, like, oh, bc, I mean, they're 12 and six. I mean, outlets are 10 and seven. If they win this weekend, they're 11 and seven. We've talked about the slide and the roller coaster of the outlets all season here, and I mean BC in terms of their record here at 12 and six is not, I don't know. To me there was just a lot of winnable games here that we kind of let go down the slide. And to me, I've already said a lot of complacency of like, well, Winnipeg's going to win anyway, so who caress? We will take a second, the last thing for me. We'll go back to Jason and then we'll probably get out of here soon. Goodbye Vernon, m o p debate. And I know he was kind of banged up, but we're not even bringing him out the second. And I know we talked about the whole Chad Kelly of it all and all of that, but BC at least had something to play for here in terms of trying to at least get first, even if it was kind of a futile point. What did you make Jason to that, I mean, say goodbye to the Vernon m o p debate? Well, it was weird considering what they said going into this game. We want to put pressure on Winnipeg to win those last two games. We're going to go well out to win this game, and then they pull Vernon at halftime. So I mean, that kind of confused me, but I did get it. I think with the way the game was going, he was taking a lot of hits and he didn't necessarily look very good in that first half all. So I mean, I get it. You give Dane some playing time, but Dane didn't look much better either. So I mean, just a weird game for bc. I also thought the penalties went against them a lot in this game. I don't like to blame the refs, but I think there was a lot of calls that swung in Calgary's direction. So I think that played a factor in why the score was so lopsided. But at the end of the day, very disappointing effort from BC in this one positive thing. Matthew Betts set the Canadian sack record with 18 sacks on the season, and I wasn't even sure when I first saw that, that it really was his sack, but ultimately they decided to count it as his sack because there was two guys closing in at the same time. But congratulations to him for breaking that record. And then for Calgary, I mean Reggie Beton that catch near the goal line really was the exclamation mark on that first half and the way that Calgary came out and won that first half. Just amazing catch. And I just like how Jake Mayer was just like he had a bunch of time in the pocket and he's just like, screw it. I'm just going to give my guy a shot. And he came down with it. Yeah, I don't know. Sports are weird just in terms of we talk the big momentum and all that kind of stuff, and we were into the cracking game on Saturday and the game starts out and we're just on fire. I think we had two or three shots on goal in the first 45 seconds, and then they stop the game and we're like, we're there. So we're like, okay, what's going on? And we're trying to pull up the game and listen. And something was wrong with one of the lights and it wasn't even on the ice. And so then they had to do this whole back and forth switching every 10 minutes. We had to switch sides of the ice and it just messed with our heads and the cracking just were never able to get back together with it. And it was just a really weird game. This feels like that. I don't know, with sports and stuff, it is such a swing and I just hope that BC this doesn't weigh on them here. And I know we had Eddie Steele on a few weeks ago and he said, no, when it signed to play, you'll show up for your home playoff game. But that is my last concern about Evan. Anything else? And we'll probably wrap this up here soon. Yeah, I mean, look, it's tough because I mean, you were talking about Vernon, m o p, I mean, that kind of ended after the Winnipeg game. I feel like I just, if you're BC going into these playoffs, the momentum right now, I don't really know where the momentum's at. And you're going to need a lot of momentum. I mean, I think, well, not necessarily to beat Calgary at home again, that should be fine if something happens there. Boy, we're going to be having an interesting show. But anyway, yeah, I mean we just all eyes, it's crazy. Again, just never fails to amaze me how we were talking about this BC Winnipeg matchup in June when the season started. We were like, well, this is probably going to be the West Final again. And I mean East Final, yeah, it'd probably be, well, probably, yeah. I thought maybe back then it be, could still be Hamilton in Toronto. I mean Montreal, we will see, right? But the West Final just felt so kind of locked up early. I just didn't really see any other teams that were going to rise to that level. And sure enough, yeah, here we are again still talking about all these months later. But in terms of a result, I don't know. Yeah, just BC going into Winnipeg, again, we've said it so many times, but now that it's the end of the season in BC is right at the doorstep of the playoffs, it's like, where's this team really at? We will see in that Calgary game, that playoff game, what they're able to do and how that kind of plays a role in the really important, again, that West Final is just like, I mean we've had a couple game of the year candidates, including that last one between BC and Winnipeg and bc. But boy, I mean, if this team can capture some of that momentum again, and I don't want to say they've lost any, but if they can really get back in the swing of things, I mean, who knows what the odds are of them actually going in the Winnipeg and pulling that one out, but at least to make it an entertaining game and not Winnipeg just blowing the wheels off 'em in the snow and having it done by halftime. I think that would be a good, that would definitely, I think help the cfl as a whole more than anything. Like I said, I watched Moneyball over the weekend, the Brad Pitt where he was the GM of the Oakland A's and doing all that, and they won the 20 games in a row and he said at the end of the movie, he goes, unless you win that last game of the series, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how many games we've won or whatever. I don't dunno. I mean, we'll see. It's time to play up or shut up. Jason, anything else? I got to go film here. No, nothing else for me. Just looking over my notes here. I mean, one thing I noticed right away in this game was first couple plays of the game, Calgary draws up these perfect passing plays deep down the field, both drops by the Calgary receivers and that's been a trend for them the entire season. So if they're going to beat BC again, I think they're going to have to have a better effort from the receivers outside of Beton. All right, well I appreciate it. Check out Jason's channel. Like I said, we got our Gray Cup show coming. We'll get all that figured out. Lots of guests and stuff for that. I think it should be a plethora of wonderful people on that. I appreciate everyone and we'll figure out this week xfl stuff coming down maybe, and then I got to figure out who we want to hear from cfl wise. But yeah, we'll figure out next week. It could be a little ugly there, so we'll brainstorm offline. So I'll see everyone next time. Thanks so much.

The Latest XFL-USFL Merger News! Can Merged United Football League Save Spring Football? CFL Week 20!

Coming up this week on the Markcast. Well, the alternative football landscape is kind of like being stranded on a desert island. Lack of supplies or in factions, you name it. But when the xfl and the usfl are coming together with the intent to merge with the new presumed United Football League, is this the last grasp for the current state of alternative football? Without the F L and the U S L working together, will they die alone? Cue your energy, Jack Shepherd. It's time to go back to the island, but if we can't live together, we're going to die alone. Great show this week joined by a longtime friend of the podcast usfl and alternative football historian Paul Reese. We are talking the newly acquired United Football League trademark from the xfl, as well as getting Paul's thoughts on the current landscape of alternative football with the impending merger. I think that this is the attempt for probably a decade that if this doesn't work, that it will be very difficult to have real money jump back into this and Fund an Alternative leak. So yeah, absolutely that this probably Needs to work Or it's just not going to work for a while. Then lots of cfl stuff to talk about this week. Jamie Nye of the Green Zone up in Saskatchewan joining us talking the rider's woes in the cfl 2023 season, as well as sharing his thoughts on everything cfl Week 20, They're done, they're done with this team, they're done with the coaching staff, they're done with the general manager, they're done, they're done. Some people don't even want 'em to make the playoffs. That's how done they are. And this is the second straight year. It's absolutely Groundhog's Day for the rough riders to go six and five and then lose seven straight last year and now could lose seven straight this year if they lose to the Toronto Argonauts on Saturday. And then Gordon Randall of Crown Gridiron Nation. Joining us again, we're talking America's cfl team, the BC Lions, the entire cfl West Division playoff matchups and more. I question whether Chris Jones is going to be able to put it all together because so far as a head coach he hasn't. As a coordinator, he has as a head coach, he has not. And so that's where I wonder about things because his tenure as a head coach, whether in Saskatchewan or here in Edmonton, has been marred by questionable personnel decisions, has been marred by at times controversy. It hasn't been great and I just don't know if he's the guy to get that job done. Should be a good one. Lack and subscribe. Hey guys, welcome to the Marash Reed here. Not too many years ago, lost was literally the biggest thing in the history of the world. Really seemed to fall off. I can't out a bigger drop off from season finale till now, game of Thrones or loss. But we are talking, staying together, living together, not dying alone today. Jack Shepherd, Matthew Fox, star of that program. Big, big part of my life going through college. Always happy to get a throwback with that today. Lots of stuff to get into. We'll keep this short. We're talking with Paul Reese, like I said with our sports Central Paul, notable usfl historian, alternative football historian. Wanted to get Paul's thoughts on kind of the new trademarks this week with the ufl. Does he think we bringing teams from the ufl, which we're not, but get any Paul's thoughts on that? What does he make of the xfl and usfl wanting to work together to merge Lots of good stuff with Paul and then a double trouble cfl guest this week with Jamie Nye. Appreciate him taking time after work up in Saskatchewan and then Gordon Randall making time during work. Really appreciate that talking cfl week 20 and getting into a lot more of the playoffs stuff off season stuff. Lots to get into there. A little bit of a sleepy weekend with the three games, but should be exciting nonetheless. So hope you guys enjoy. I think that will do it for me today. We will see you at the end. Thanks as always, like and subscribe. Well, I appreciate it back here. Trying to remember the last time we had Paul re on. We've had a lot of new subscribers join just kind of during all of this shenanigans with the United Football League, national String Football League kind of merger stuff. Paul is our resident, S F L historian alt football historian runs our Sports Central, written a book about the usfl. Anything else that's kind of set the context, I think you're a unique guest to Kayla on here to talk about this stuff. So for those who aren't familiar with our Sports Central, we cover minor league sports essentially. So everything below the big force professional sports leagues. And so over the years we've kept an eye on all the XLS and the new U SS F L United Football League, all of those. So those have all been in our purview over the years. We've gone through a lot of this and obviously we've shared our qualms about the U SS F L and everything and the xfl to that regard. But when you heard all this xfl reaching out usfl merging together here, intent to merge, what did you make of that here after the first season of the xfl? It's kind of funny. I kind of flash back to a conversation that we had had earlier before the xfl season started and how much I remember having to pull the reins back on, don't talk about merger, don't talk about potential merger because I think so many of us had that kind of out in the distance. We thought eventually this is the way that this is almost going to have to go. It doesn't make a lot of sense for these leagues to be competing against each other for not the largest audience out there. So no surprise at all that it happened. These things tend to be quiet until there's actually a lot of force behind what's going on and that's exactly what we saw happen. Were you surprised that it happened so quickly in terms of the Forbes report comes out, xfl losing money, Daryl Johnston coming out saying we were disappointed with everything season two. I mean to me the quickness of this doesn't speak to both of these leagues. Were tremendously excited with how season two of the US of L season one of the xfl turned out And I looked at that Forbes report a lot differently than a lot of other people did. When I saw $60 million in losses, I thought, oh my goodness, I really thought it was going to be a hundred million for them to have done that. Well, I was a little bit surprised. We saw the erosion of the US NFL's TV rating, so I was not particularly surprised to see that they were looking for a different answer and we will see how much the xfl actually contributed to that or if the usfl had picked up a lot of initial interest just based on curiosity and that wasn't necessarily there in year two anymore. The usfl, I think they put together a better TV product in year two because they had a few more crowds and yet that didn't translate in the ratings, which is what's really important to Fox. So we will see what they do as far as the merger and I do hope that we see the best of both worlds. So the best that each league has to offer, I guess would love to be a fly on the wall here in some of these rooms with these executives of what were your expectations going in? What did you think? Because, and I've told this story before on here, I remember the first time Paul and I xfl episode one, I'm like, we're going to put this on YouTube, man. All these people are going to be watching and you're like, it's not. And I try to talk to people now and they're like, well, okay, what do you do? I'm like, well, it's really niche and we're really good in our space, but it's such a minute thing and I'm just curious because I've heard people talk xfl ticket, people pre all this stuff like, oh yeah, we're going to be a top 5, 6 7 league here in terms of selling tickets. And you're like, okay, well what's realistic? Does it strike you that maybe Redbird got a little bit of cold feet here and that's why we're moving in this direction? I honestly did not really believe that redbird was in it for the long haul. I think that they flip and so they saw an opportunity, they reached out. I had had somebody who is familiar with both organizations, both Redbird and Fox, and he had told me months ago, you better believe he's reached out already to Fox. So it wasn't particularly surprising to me that that was redbird was bankrolling the xfl, the Rock and Danny Garcia had huge management roles to play and so they did a lot of the day-to-day things, but Redbird was the money behind the league and so really it was going to go as far as Redbird was willing to go, and I think as soon as they saw an opportunity to turn this around to maybe make a little bit of money or possibly even just stem the losses, maybe they didn't see an end to the losses as quickly as they had hoped that they took it. Well, we're rehashing a little bit of the conversations we've had the last couple of weeks. I want to get your take on it and then obviously we'll transition here into the trademarks and just kind of the weird repeating history that is all this, but we've had conversations the last couple weeks about dragging the audience outright, asking them for a lot of patients here, you've followed all of these and the xfl O one to 2020. It feels to me like, okay, we're just handing this off now we're kind of done with this moving this on in terms of the alt football fan. How strenuous is this to live through this world like that? This is what we signed up for. We've done this before and I look back at when the usfl was folding, they have this lawsuit going on, okay, we have a lot of hopes on the lawsuit. We have a fall season scheduled and all of it ended up deteriorating and we've seen xfl, they get out of that first year. The TV ratings were relatively horrible in 2001, but everything else is ready to go. We're ready to go, we're ready to go with our cable partners. And all of a sudden N B C pulls the plug league's dead and the N F L Europe, the World League two years in the us, it's dead. Then the World League which commissioners it's dead. So we've seen this, it seems to be a never ending list of things that will kill these leagues or at least fundamentally change. Part of the deal We've talked on here in the theme of the episode this week is die apart or it's from loss, it's live together, die apart or whatever. And we've talked on here at this time where we had two competing leagues. This is kind of the greatest chance for any of these to work where you have Fox owning all this, doing all that, and then redbird like we've talked all the money now them already coming together, is this kind of the last frontier for this time period we're in? If this doesn't work, is there any circumstance you can see where this is actually pans out in the future? It's going to be a while. I think that this is the attempt for probably a decade that if this doesn't work, that it will be very difficult to have real money jump back into this and fund an alternatively so yeah, absolutely that this probably needs to work or it's just not going to work for a while. And you would have to look at some fundamental changes probably in the media landscape and how they're able to monetize viewers behind a television or a screen somewhere. So you'll have to see some continued evolution of how they're able to monetize that. Because to me here, if you're an outsider looking at this, and like I said, Fox is set up for this, it's filler content, they're able to write off a lot of the things like we're the ultimate goal of these and we even had Ben Fisher reporting even last week. The goal is still to sell these franchises off and I think three to four years now, it was originally seven years. If I'm sitting there, why would I ever, you guys can't even get through a season two. This is a huge next step. Well, and I think what makes it particularly challenging from an investment perspective is that as an investor, what kind of say, what kind of input are you going to have? You're always going to be out voted by Fox, so what is your control? What is your influence? Otherwise you're just giving money away in an obvious attempt to look like a local big shot. That's really the only thing that's going to be on the line there. So I think it's a hard sell unless you're willing to give up some control. It feels very much like the cfl in that regard of like, Hey, I own the sports team. I'm going to own it for 15, 20 years until I get tired of it or two to five whatever, and then kind of pass it on. I just, all of this, I don't know. Is this giving you, and I know like you said, we live through all this and you live through this longer than any of us probably listening to the program here, but does this give you pause? Maybe this isn't the right space for these leagues to try to operate. Maybe there does need to be changed here. It's such a weird thing is that we were blessed with two leagues and all these games going on and year-round football for a year, and you do wonder if there was a way for these parties to come together at the very beginning and come into this past season with all of their resources dedicated to one project if maybe we'd be in a better spot. So I'm kind of the eternal optimist here where it's like, okay, well maybe this could still work in some way if the chips fall correctly. So I don't know that I think there'll be somebody else who takes a flyer on it in the future if this doesn't work out and I don't want to sound too fatalistic, we don't know if it'll work out or not. Certainly it's an uphill climb. Not all the details have been worked out or at least announced yet. So there's a lot that we have to see and maybe we'll come out in the next few weeks and we'll say, well, this does look a lot better. They are leveraging their strengths. We'll see, Because we've really tried to avoid on here, okay, is it going to be this or that because there's a million different kind of, it's going to be the xfl conference and whatever, but whatever happens, the idea of having a 16 team, a combination of resources here and everyone in their market seems far from whatever this is actually going to look like. Do you sense for the fan bases? To me it's probably eight to two people negative about it. The positive of, okay, this is a step back no matter what or Hey, I have a team in Seattle. I don't know. How are you viewing kind of this addition by subtraction moving forward with whatever it'll look like? Well, I think you have to look at it from the perspective of both leagues. So I mean obviously we've already talked about Redbird capital and whether it be kind of an opportunity they saw or cold feet, it doesn't look like they were in it for the long haul. So the xfl was going to be out of options sooner rather than later. You look at the usfl, there's only one reason that they even listened to the xfl, and I'll let the audience figure that out. You can believe what's been said online. You can believe the corporate talk or you can look at what's actually happening. They listen to the xfl, why, alright, so they need something and so it's an opportunity for them to work together. I think that this was probably the path forward from day one that this was almost inevitable. Now it's just a lot of push and pull and we'll see which business plan they're going to pursue or if it's a mix or I think that both teams brought some things to the table and I'm hoping that they are able to pick out the best of the bunch. And we've talked many times in the past that we like seeing football in front of crowds. It just brings an extra element to the game and to the entertainment value of the television product. And so I think that the thing that gives most xfl fans pause is talk about continued hubs and games in front of next to nobody. And I guess to a degree I don't understand the love affair with Canton, Ohio. It's a great stadium, but it's not a big market, so you're only going to have a handful of thousand people there at best. It's cheap. Okay, well so is the local high school field here, why aren't we playing there? I'm really hopeful that they will pick out the best no matter who ends up having control of this product. And I've heard mixed stuff coming from inside the league, outside the league of, okay, well you can look and see there are things that we're doing better or things that they're doing better. I mean I think there's an ideal world where that works. I guess to me it's just, and you're an entrepreneur that there has to be some level of risk associated with starting one of these. And to me, I took out a loan when I started my video company and bought cameras and everything and you've lived through the history of this numerous times of this people jumping in, I guess not understanding the risk and not understanding the cost. I mean Vince McMahon was bleeding money back in 2020 even before Covid and everything. Does it surprise you that this we're so willing to jump in and maybe not even realize what the risks that we have with these leagues? To me, that's the heartening thing is that we see people, people of substance corporations of substance who are jumping into this weird alternative football universe when people like Redbird Capital and Fox even make the attempt, there's something that they see, they see that potentially see the value of building an asset. And in Fox's circumstance, you can see how E S P N is struggling with its rights, fees, payments, just like every broadcaster is. They're shelling out billions of dollars in rights fees. Well, Fox looks at that and says, well, if we can develop our own thing, our own thing that can draw ratings and we never have to shell out rights fees for it, we have an incredible cash cow. And so there was this feeling that Fox could be playing the long game here that they see that potential. What's kind of been a hitch in their plan is we saw a real decline in year two in the places that matter and in particular the television ratings for Fox. This is a television program and television programs get canceled all the time and we see that, we saw that happen with the first xfl and it can happen out of the blue, so they've got to do something different and they've got to show some growth in year three. I guess I just wish that any of these, and I don't even know the xfl and the wording behind their branding I think was more than this, but to me a lot of these boil down to a hundred million people watch N F L football or whatever the number is. If we can get 5% of that, 10% of that, this is great and not really I guess understanding the other work that needs to go into that. And I've said on here, the U S L feels lazy to me. It feels like you like football here is more football and not necessarily understanding maybe why these fan bases have people that care about them and that you can't just, okay, Tampa didn't work this year. We're going to shut that down and we're going to bring it back later. Or with the xfl, well, Vegas didn't work. You still had 6,000 people there every week. I mean at some point it needs to matter. It can't just be all about dollars and cents. And you look back at the early years of the American Football League in the 1960s, and if you go back and look at the Oakland Raiders attendances the first couple of years, there were 3000 people in that place and behind the scenes they had no money. They were being bankrolled by the other teams and they weren't the only ones. What's missing I think is that unity of purpose that for instance the American Football League owners had when one stumbles, there was another one there to pick 'em up. And so we are missing that and that's I think a huge missing piece in the spring football landscape. I was just listening to First take yesterday and they had on Adam Silver, right, the N B A commissioner and he's talking, I guess I'm not the biggest N B A fan, but they're starting a new in-season tournament to kind of try to build out interest before the All-star break and all of that. And he's talking, well we got to do this. You can't just do the one year of this and then hey, it's going to matter. You got to build this year in year in year and year and year to give value there. And it doesn't feel like any of these alt leagues are at that point where, hey, you have to got to come back. And it's hard because the N B A has the luxury of time. They could do this for five years and really not impact the bottom line at all of these leagues, these alt spring football leagues, they could lose hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in that time. It's a different deal because they have so much riding on this and because it's so expensive, they don't have the revenue source of the N B A. And we were just talking about if these leagues look at it as if we can even draw this tiny minuscule percentage of the N F L audience will be okay to a degree you really have to say the N F L is irrelevant to these guys. What you have to do is you have to be in there and you have to compete against the N B A, you have to compete against the N H L, you have to compete against March Madness, you get into early season baseball depending on how late you go. So those are what you have to compete against in addition to all the local stuff. So it, it's difficult In terms of kind of transitioning here to the trademark stuff and we'll get out of here. Obviously the nsfl stuff was trademarked, which is funny, right? It was the holding company and we lived through all this and then now obviously this week, the xfl register in the United Football League trademarks. First off, are you surprised that having us even gone through all of these usfl lawsuits and everything that covering all of this the last couple years for the new usfl to acquire all that xfl obviously paying to bring that stuff out of bankruptcy, are you surprised that they would so willingly just, okay, we're going to brand this into something new? I am a little bit surprised because of the efforts that they have put into attaining making peace with the original usfl guys. They've really gone to a lot of lengths to acquire and utilize this. They've leaned into the history now, especially in year two, they were able to do that more. Part of me, I wonder if they've seen that the demographics have skewed a little bit older and that they kind of want to get away from that a little bit. So yeah, it has been a little bit surprising to me. I mean it really derailed all of season one and I think the goal that they wanted to do dealing with these lawsuits coming in this year, it didn't do a lot for me. But again, I'm not the demo for that, but it does just the time and energy and money like you said, and even whatever that settlement was, it just seems weird that they would, especially for the us it L like I get Fox and okay, Danny and the Rock, we bought this thing out. I dunno, to me it felt like Fox was so controlling of this IP and steamrolled so much of that that they would give that up just as very shocking. Oh yes. And there are still things going on where they're trying to protect that IP and that's why it is a little bit surprising that they would change the name. Perhaps that was the most palatable solution for their new partners potentially, or they just see a value in being able to build off a different brand perhaps. In terms of the ufl trademarks, what is the history of that? I know that, what is it, the National Grid Iron League, they were kind of a scammy league. They I think still have an outstanding trademark, but that to me isn't the bigger issue. To me, the nsfl was never going to work because the N F L exists and that's public that they've said anything, but I can imagine. And Josh Gerin who had the report about the ufl basically said as much, what are your thoughts of them? Is this just these are three initials that we could get control of or what do you make of this? We just talked about the usfl and the history there and the length that Fox went through to gain control of that ip. This is a different deal that this is just, I believe it's just a name. There isn't any good feelings that exist about the old United Football League. It was such a flash in the Pan League and even alternative football fans had a hard time finding it. So it does seem like it's just a name. It's kind of close to the last name, which is advantageous. They could do something different with it and it really does reflect kind of a union with the xfl. So it is a good name from that perspective, but as far as the history of it goes, there's really nothing that I believe that Fox would or would want to lean into there. Do you think that there's enough scammy stuff in the past or enough failure there associated with the marks so that people are going through, so what is this? Oh, nine to 12 was the last iteration this was played, Right, and it was such a weird league is that it was owned principally by a guy named Bill Hamrick and he had been a minority owner of the Oakland Invaders of the usfl years before made like a billion dollars in Silicon Valley, but he never funded this league. So it was perpetually playing what looked like a test season for some reason, never had more than five teams in a year, played parts of four different seasons and just stumbled throughout. The last two seasons were abbreviated. They ended up canceling the final weeks holding impromptu championships. They had to get on and they had to beg the players to finish out another week of the 2012 season and then ended up stiffing 'em all. Dennis Green, the former N F L coach, had a lawsuit outstanding for not receiving his pay and it was guy after guy after guy and there was substantial money that could have backed the league, but it was just never really funded. They seem to have been banking on an N F L work stoppage and that they would get a TV contract out of that deal and somehow hold onto the TV contract after the N F L resume playing and they would split this huge TV contract amongst their four teams or something. I don't really understand what they were thinking, but if you're playing in the fall on Wednesday and Friday nights on obscure cable channels, you're probably resigning yourself to anonymity and that's exactly what they did. And just to clarify here, and you can clarify as well, I've seen a lot of people like, oh, does that mean they've acquired all the marks or they've acquired all the teams? I mean they've registered the ufl trademark, the United Football League trademark for a various number of of mediums entertainment and clothing and streaming and kind of all those different things, but in terms of there's no other teams or anything that they're acquiring through all of this? No, and I wouldn't see the value in doing so. They had some kind of flash in the pan short-term success stories in Omaha and Sacramento, maybe Hartford and Virginia Beach to some small degree, but really at the end of the day that IP is probably not worth anything. It's funny you're talking here about obscure TV network. Hey, it's C V s sports network, man, that's the CFL's And that was a huge step up for the ufl. They were on HD net and they were so easy and you had to hunt on a Wednesday or a Friday night to find these guys and especially the first year they had this brilliant idea where every team, all four would wear the league colors. So you had this black, blue and green, everybody was those colors, so you had to really look at the helmet to even figure out who was playing and the crowd was no help because they were minuscule crowds everywhere and they ended up switching venues to try to make it look better and that didn't work at all. So it was a bizarre kind of circus atmosphere. Last thing from me and just obviously there's no connection here now more than just kind of ironic I guess that Vince McMahon, right when he was going to do the 2020 version had mulled around, right with this last owned the trademarks for that. Am I understanding that right Back in 2018 before he settled on the xfl, That was my understanding too that he had looked at the United Football League as a name for his league. Yeah. What's oldest new again and it's weird how time is a flat circle with all of this stuff and whatever someone thinks that they've got the equation figured out, it seems to come back again And there was a prior United Football League in the early sixties, 61 to 64, which was really more of a minor kind of semi-pro outfit. So these names have a way of being recycled over and over. Anything else here? How are you just optimistic moving forward? How are you feeling one to 10 here? So optimistic might be a little bit of a stretch, but I'm probably just with so many fans just waiting to see, hoping that the league will actually strengthen itself and hoping that a lot of the markets get preserved that where there has been some home games played that we're able to preserve as many of those markets as possible. That would be the ideal thing. Interesting times here. Always something new. Just when I was kind of getting bored a little bit of all this and I'm like, man, just when I think I'm out, they pull me back in and we got new drama here. So Paul, I appreciate it. Like I said with our Sports central, everything else usfl historian and all alt football historian here at this point, really appreciate your time. Thank you for having me on. Reid, good to see you again. Well, we have Jamie and I back on here from the green zone. I was going to, we're talking cfl football here. I will say Kraken off to not a good start this season and our boy Regina zone, Jordan Eberly really let me down here at least Saskatchewan zone, so very upset over the weekend. He missed his shootout shot. Yeah, he's a Regina guy. Ebs, former e Janeta. Pat. Is he fighting now? What is happening with Jordan Everly? He's getting in the Fist of Cuffs going on. We were about two minutes into the game. Yeah, we don't like he checked McCann back in the playoffs, but yeah, Everly was going. They said he had some past history. I think they played together, him and the guy he was fighting, but at least Connor Bedard is not the bus. He's putting in goals for the Chicago Blackhawks, so that's good. Yeah. Oh yeah. And it's not like you have a lack of discussion about Connor Bedard in the National Hockey League either there. It's also, you can't avoid it. He is the guy right now in the N H L, check them out when the Blackhawks are in Seattle, check them out. Obviously I did see his teammate was like, I think we're kind of overdoing this a little bit. I feel like that today Perus and Twitter with Nathan Rourke being elevated to the active roster. I'm like, oh my god. Oh my God. It's like It's happening. It's happening. Here We go. Thoughts here. So we're here. I'm really curious because obviously you're really checked in tuned into the Saskatchewan market and everything. What is Rider Nation, what are their thoughts this year because it's been a weird season for the riders. They're done. They're done with this team. They're done with the coaching staff, they're done with the general manager. They're done, they're done. Some people don't even want 'em to make the playoffs. That's how done they are. And this is the second straight year. It's absolutely Groundhogs Day for the rough riders to go six and five and then lose seven straight last year and now could lose seven straight this year if they lose to the Toronto Argonauts on Saturday. So it is a lot of frustration over where the direction of this team has gone. So I'm looking here, I have the playoffs scenario. Calgary wins and Saskatchewan loses Calgary's in Saskatchewan wins Calgary loses Calgary's playing BC and I mean BC has been known to drop. I've had my fair share of frustrating moments here, but that's a weird spot where they don't even want to make the playoffs. I do think you need some sense of accountability here after everything that's gone down. No, yeah, that's exactly, and that's what people are waiting for is pretty much the changes to happen. What's going to happen, when's it going to happen to just move on with what we're calling the stink, the rot of this just to go, okay, let's move on now, of course there's always the chance that you never know if someone catches lightning in a bottle and they have an unbelievable unpredictable playoff run, but there's no way this team's going into BC and going into Winnipeg and winning football games. I just don't see much of it. Just maybe one but not twice. So yeah, In terms of where all this, because obviously the Trevor Harris and everything, I mean, does it all go back to that or are there further deeper issues here going into the season? It's clearly deeper than just losing your quarterback because last year they had a quarterback, they lost seven straight and it was, you go, are they quitting on the coach? I don't know. Maybe they, okay, let's see what happens when they get rid of Vay Leonard and some of the bad boys. I'm trying to remember the term. Craig Dickinson actually had a term he renegades or something like that on the team last year. So that AC Leonard's gone and Mike Adams no longer here and of course the Garrett Marino thing, he's out to Duke Williams bi, Shaq Evans, he's out, Cody Fido, Jason mos. So they do this changeover and you're thinking, okay, that's where they put the blame, the coaching staff, everybody went, that's the problem. It'll be better. They're worse. They are a worse football team than they were last year and some of that is the quarterback, but I think it's preparation, it's emotion, it's a lot of different things that has soured the Saskatchewan Rough riders. Side note, what do you make of Cody's season in Montreal? I mean, I know he was hurt and they're still, they seemed like they were hot. Now they're at least clean to second there, but were you pleasantly surprised or what did you make? I thought Janson Moss has done a pretty darn good job to have that team play to the strengths of an offense led by Cody Fido. They are the second lowest team in offensive touchdowns. It's not like Cody Fido was led this team to second place. Cody Fido has been part of a team that has led them to second place, but I think it's more Jason Moss and Noel Thorpe have done a pretty darn good job on finding what they're good at, finding how to win football games and that's what has had Montreal. But I think Cody Fido definitely, and Jason Moss can definitely flex a little bit saying, yeah, we were the scapegoats in Saskatchewan. There were deeper and you got what you got for Saskatchewan. I mean not to have it be a deep dive Montreal, all podcasts here, but this really could have been a wasted season for them, which is everything and the ownership coming in and all the changes. I mean it's really remarkable here that, I mean they were second last year in the east second this year, and they're one game away from potentially getting to the finals. There could have been a lot worse for them as well. If you look at Saskatchewan, Yeah, I was looking at Montreal as potentially being third or fourth in the east division. When you looked at it on paper, they lost a lot of talent out of that team. A lot of guys left, so that's what I was maybe looking at. But again, no Thorpe's defense has been outstanding. Cody has managed the games very well and now that they're starting to find a little bit of identity on the ground game with Fletcher and when stand back's healthy, that could be a dangerous team if they can run the ball with that core three. With Cody also using his legs come playoff time, although beating Toronto is not going to be easy In terms of Saskatchewan here, like you said, people want the wholesale changes. Farhan was on last week and there's not all the contracts end the same. They're overlapping where it makes it challenging to kind of bring in fresh bread maybe next year you, I mean I know people are asking for people's heads and everything else, but what is realistically possible there? I think it is general. Well, Jeremy O'Day is interesting. I'm not sure the whole coaching staffs could be gassed. It's just go get done just away. You're fired by a lot of them. I think all of them are on the last year their deals, so you can get rid of those contracts. Well, Craig Dickinson's the biggest one. He's up at the end of the year. Jeremy O'Day is up at the end of the year. If you want to go to the general manager spot, a lot of the attention is actually on the President Craig or Craig Reynolds on how far up it goes and does he take anything? Do they change the president? Because when Jim Hobson was here, that was a decade of brilliance. They made it to a bunch of gray cups, four gray cups, sorry, one, two, lost two in pretty well 10 years of Jim Hobson and then since that time they haven't made a great cup. They have hosted some playoff games, but it has been all over the place on good, bad. And there's some fans who feel they're saying they feel taken for granted. That's never a good thing, and they're talking about turning in their season tickets not renewing, and that's what does the talking when it gets to the president and c e o is who's spending the money and who's not. That was my follow up question was we at the point, and I want to compare this to Edmonton, but are we at the point where if they don't do anything, it's demonstrable damage here at the end going into the next season? Oh, they're doing something, they can't do any. It is stuff's happening. It's just a matter of when We could be talking on Sunday if everything goes sideways, if Calgary beats bc, which I don't see happening, but if they do it and Saskatchewan loses and it's over, yeah, we're talking Sunday, Monday and changes are being made and contracts are not going to, it's going to be announced as well. We will not renew the contract. We are beginning the process of finding the new head coach, potentially a new general manager, and even less or so likelihood of a new president and C E O, this is going to be a deep, deep change for the rough riders after this season. Is there and obviously swath of people across the board, whoever, I mean is there realistic because all I hear is, hey, trying to get people coaching the cfl and we've got the caps, everything, is it, do you think there's enough qualified people out there in to rebuild the riders? I think so, and I think with Kyle Walter's contract not being renewed yet in Winnipeg, he'd be the first guy I'd call as if you're changing the general manager and then there's Buck Pierce, et cetera, et cetera. You go down on trying to tie the connections on who can do Jordan mc Simmick would be somebody I'd reach out to the BC lines offensive coordinator. We're seeing young good coordinators and I think Ryan Dinwoody set a good example and it doesn't even have to be a coordinator if you think it's a good young, smart coach, and we're seeing in the National Football League too with Mike McDaniels and some of these guys, Zach Taylor who are younger, who get a year, maybe not even any as a coordinator experience, but going, wow, they are smart. And that's where I go. I would go with an offensive coach to start things off and let a defensive coordinator cook a little bit without being the head coach because this offense, the last three years has been woeful and that's what really needs to, that's what will get people in the stands scoring 30 points that sells tickets. Have you noticed, I mean, attendance wise this year, is it, obviously we were there for Gray Cup and it was a weird situation, Winnipeg's there and we don't want to deal with that, but you're talking people turning in their season tickets, but is that actually happening? Well, it'll be interesting to see. We we're having a hard time giving away our season tickets this weekend. We just can't. I'll be there for my job, but My family can't be there for sports commitments for our kids, and usually it's easy. Other people are texting the show. Is anybody else having a hard time even giving away tickets and they announced, I forget what it was, 27,000 or something for the last home game against Hamilton. There was 18,000 people there. There's people that are definitely not using their tickets, not when people, they're out of towners. They're traveling 2, 3, 4 hours away to games. And I know it's kind of mind boggling. I know different markets are like, what? Hell season ticket holders travel that far consistently? It's like, yeah, in Saskatchewan, a two hour drive is nothing. I'll do a two hour drive there and back in a day and not even blink an eye. So that's the lifestyle here. So people are saying they don't want to spend the gas money to watch, so I'll be very interested to see, and it's unfortunate because it's fan appreciation night, but I'll be interested to see how many green seats are sitting there empty on Saturday. Yeah, that was like the Mariners, or last week of the season had fan appreciation week. It was very apparent at that point. We had played ourselves out of the playoffs. I'm like, I'm not even, no, I listened to that. We were driving back from BC for that fun experience, bc, Winnipeg and BC there on whatever October Friday was listening to Michael Ball and Luke call. That game was an interesting perspective. Having Hamilton come in and just completely pants to riders, rider, it can't happen like that. No, that was bad. That was just when you had ever all the emotion of that week with George Reed, the 2013 team, they inducted the first woman in the writer's plaza of honor, Wendy Kelly. They were honoring the past. They were honoring their legends. They were paying tribute. George Reed's family is there and you lay an absolute egg absolute. Craig Dickenson called it embarrassing and it was completely embarrassing for the organization and head coach Craig Dickinson was bang on with his assessment after the game In terms of, it's weird that talk right now we're talking season ticket holders and everything and health of a franchise where Edmonton here up into a couple months ago was on this Tailspin and Victor Que and everything else and straightforward. I'm like now, I mean Chris Jones could be coach of the year here with kind of this turnaround and everything. Does that surprise you? I think in a different, and obviously we're talking about it, but in a world where Edmonton maybe didn't have this dumpster fire for half the year, there's more of a spotlight on Saskatchewan and Calgary in terms of fundamental issues going on. Am I surprised that Chris Jones has turned it around? Well, Just surprised that at this point they're looking like it is roses over there compared to what's going on in Saskatchewan and Calgary. For me, I'm surprised it took this long. We saw Chris Jones do this in Saskatchewan and he took over in 2016, he gutted the team. He brought in guys, they had a slow start in year two, but they were cooking. They got to, I think 10 wins that year, and that's where it was like, oh, what is going on? Oh and nine. They made a huge error with Trey Ford. It was a huge error on evaluating what he brought to the team and if they would've started Trey Ford, week four, week five, they're in the playoffs. They're a playoff team. I truly believe that. And we're not even having a conversation about the riders and the Calgary stamp. Peters trying to get to the playoffs. I think Edmonton would be a playoff team if they make that move earlier. So there was some sort of personality conflict between the coach and the quarterback, which is unfortunate, but you have to put ego aside sometime and make sure you got the best guys out there. And Trey Ford is definitely that for Edmonton. Thoughts on Calgary and just kind of the state of everything there. I mean, obviously not your direct market, but here in the west because it seems like that's another, there's precariousness coming up there. These are two bad teams, Calgary and Saskatchewan. It's like that game last week was painful to watch the two teams battling for a playoffs spot, and both of them looked like they were at points disinterested in winning the football game and making bad decisions. So I've been calling it a snails race for third between these two sides. So I still think the riders make the playoffs. I do. I think the most likely scenario is Calgary loses both their games. Saskatchewan loses their game and Saskatchewan still gets in the playoffs. Crazy since Labor Day weekend when Calgary and Saskatchewan both won at home. Calgary beat Edmonton, Saskatchewan beats Winnipeg. Their combined records are one in nine for Calgary and Saskatchewan. That is unbelievable how poor these two teams have played down the stretch. I was listening that I was filming because that was Labor Day and I was booked to go film some festival, and so I'm literally outside. I got, it's so hard to watch games in America now, the CS sports. Oh, I thought the CFL plus thing was great. People have told me the CFL plus thing's great. No, Yeah, if I'm available for three hours uninterrupted in the exact time, the game on, it's great. But if you have anything else in your life going on at that specific time, you can never, God forbid I watch a game an hour later or on demand or whatever, but I'm sitting there, I'm listening to the CFL plus, I got my headphone in, I'm filming and I'm listening to Saskatchewan, that crazy game, the crazy, the what they call it, the Labor Day classic game. And just to see, because we're doing our little Monday recap shows now, we're like, man, Saskatchewan's really got some life and DLA Gall this feels like and just completely lost from there. Do you like DLA Gall going forward? I mean, do you think he's a solution going into the next year? I think the quarterback spot is interesting. Clearly it's no longer Mason fine or Mason Fine would be back in because Jake Dole gala has not been that great over the last couple of weeks. So clearly it's Jake Dole gala, what do you do next year with Trevor Harris? If he can play, if he's healthy, and I would think whoever's coming in would want a veteran coach. And then do you have Jake Dole's number two and just change out the quarterbacks behind them. I don't think a rebuild, you go in with Jake Dole gala, or you're running into a potential of a Taylor Cornelius situation where you're oh and nine to start a season. You're in desperation mode, which is no way to start anew. But I still think I would like to see Jake Doga with different coaching. I want to see him with a QB coach and an offensive coordinator who have been there, done that. Kelly, Jeffrey fell into the job because all these other more qualified coaches turned them down, and that's where it's almost, okay, Kelly, it's yours. And it hasn't been a wow at all. And I watch drills. I watch practice drills of the quarterbacks, and I was like, they don't work on footwork really, and stuff like that. I remember watching Jason Moss, I remember watching Kahari Jones watching those guys work quarterbacks and the drills they do and there looks more polished, and that's what I haven't seen in Saskatchewan this year. So I would really like to see who gets brought in and what kind of QB tutelage Jake Doga can get, because I'm not sure he is gotten the full support over the last two years. It's interesting. I mean, I think if it is one of those things, if he was your choice, he would've just started him. You wouldn't have gone down to Trevor Harris and kind of all that stuff because it was right. Going into this season, people didn't want to go to Saskatchewan because you were still having Dickinson and everything, but now you think it'd be, if you could come in make everything our own, Saskatchewan would be a very appealing place for a new head coach. I would think so. I would think if it's like, oh, you got a veteran quarterback under contract, that's a good start because you don't want, you go into a position and you're like, who's the quarterback right now? It's Trevor Harris. If he's healthy and you have some potential behind him, and I think there's a great core of Canadians. I think Jeremy O'Day has done a good job of drafting and bringing in Canadians. There's a good enough group here that you can definitely look at and go, oh yeah, I could make this work and probably do a quicker turnaround than a complete overhaul and have it be a two or three year plan, so to speak. In terms of just kind of rounding out the conversation here before we go about the West, just curious to your thoughts on the BC Winnipeg of it all. I wanted to be at that game. I kind of thought that was BC season and not having the opportunity to be first and having to go into Winnipeg. To me that was, and it was funny, I think they had done a really good job hyping that game up for local people sitting there and people are like, oh, are they out now? What does this mean? I'm like, well, no, but it kind of feels that way. What do you make of that? And just what is likely BC in some regard, going into Winnipeg and playing in the west. I like the BC lines. I like this matchup. Clearly, they match up well against each other. There's when one blowout and then another blowout, and then a really good close game that Winnipeg came back to win, which shows the BC lines can win a football game and they have one in Winnipeg. So they have that belief in them. It's just a whether or not Vernon Adams can keep the ball safe and that BC lines defense needs to get better. They've been allowing a lot of points recently. At the start of the season, you don't remember. It was like they were allowing less than one touchdown a game. They were dominant. Now I think they're averaging almost 30 points per game allowed. So that's the big issue. If BC cleans up their defense and Ryan Phillips gets that crew anywhere close to what they were at the start of the season, I think the BC Lion could be in the gray cup. Yeah, I mean they were the donut boys and then they were giving them 50 burgers and I think made a joke on the thing about it. Last thing for me, and you've done this clearly a lot longer than I've been involved in this space, we talked Saskatchewan Calgary, right? Ottawa's got its own bag of issues over there. How are you feeling just state of the cfl here? I mean, for the most part, 6, 5, 6 teams feeling decent. How do you just rate the space here of everything going on? Well, I like that we've seen increased attendance in Toronto. A bit of an uptick in other markets as well. Of course, Ottawa's going to be down. It's been back to back bad years. They're in the Gray Cup in 2018. It's just gone south since that time. But I think that's a fan base. You can win back with wins, clearly they'll show up. So they'll have some work to do this off season. Saskatchewan fans, if they get to nine and nine next year, they'll have a good group of fans coming back to the stadium. So overall, I think the cfl has improved. The ratings are up or have been up from last year. I think there's growing interest, which I think all culminates from just being around. Again, that last season was, I think it was a bad call. I think you needed to play, even if it was an eight week season, something to exist. A lot of people were turned off by that. So I think it's back to normal, back to 18 weeks, all that stuff for these teams. I'm interested to see how the Saturday playoff games go rather than playing on Sunday. Ratings wise, it's a bit of a change other than the great couples still be played on Sunday, of course. But all in all, I think there's a lot of positive signs. Unfortunately, Edmonton Ottawa have not been good attendance wise, but again, if Trey Ford lights some fire in Edmonton, those fans will come back. I think we did the math that Toronto has more wins this season than OTT has had. Sensor breakup season, I think is what it was with 14 or whatever. If you combined the seasons. Yeah, the Saturday thing. Yeah. I got the schedule for the media stuff for the cfl, and they're like, everything's shifted up. I'm like, well this is lovely for people coming in and trying to, coming from out of town, everything's shifted up. So we'll see. I had complaints about that and then I found out today the dang bar I was going to use to do our show. T S M rented it out the whole weekend. So now I got to pivot on that. So TSMs getting into the biz here, so still stuff to figure out that way. But anything else from you? I appreciate your time. No, it's always fun. I can't wait to see how this all plays out in Saskatchewan off season and do you have any picks? Who are we hanging out in Hamilton again? We're there, so I didn't know if you were in Saskatche. Yeah, no, we'll be there. Tim Bains just told me he's in Green Day. Put him over the top and then we've got our whole, we have our whole little Monday recap show we've been doing coming up there, so it'll be fun. Yeah, you're certainly invited. I think I have a plan of where we're going to go live, so it'll be convenient and yeah, of course you're welcome to be. Well, I can't wait to hang out again. Always nice to see you guys at Gray Cup. And what do you think? I think, do you know, here's my way out. I have the obvious prediction. Toronto, Winnipeg and a rematch. That's boring. My what? More way out there. Prediction is last week's game was a great cup preview BC Lions and the Hamilton Tiger Cats. Well no, I like that. I was just going to say because, so Jason Hussey our co-host on the recount, he's the TCATs fan and I'm obviously America's cfl team here and so I think that that would be truly would unite all, unite both countries and all that. But I would love to see Montreal was so close to getting there, right? And it was like the Miss Field goal, right? I'm like Fever Dream. Now I've had an xfl in the usfl season in between whatever happened with that, but would love to see Cody in there, but I think Toronto, I just, yeah, if it's Toronto, Winnipeg, again, it's just hard but at least Toronto it feels a little fresh because just from last year, Oh if Cody Fido makes it to the Great Cup, Saskatchewan, I don't know what we'll do with ourselves because it was get him out of here last year. He is terrible. Get him out and if he makes a gray cup, he has a lot of bragging rights over the Saskatchewan Rough riders and good on 'em. If he does, I would say whatever the Miss Field go whatever away from Gary Stern would've been live on our show for you. His word would've been there. Gray Cup. I think I could get Cody on Saturday before I think we could get Cody on if this works out. But otherwise, fever Dream Chad Kelly's already unfollowed me on Twitter, so I think that ship has sailed, but Jamie, I appreciate it. Yeah, we'll see you soon. Making time here at night and everything else, that means a lot. Yeah, no problem Reid. Always appreciate it. Can't wait to see you in Hamilton. Well I appreciate it making time today. I'm outside, I'm exporting wedding video edits right now. My neighbor's cutting tiles, so hopefully this works out. We have Gore back here, crown Good, iron Nation, everything else. How are you sir? I'm good. It looks like the weather in your neck of the woods is a heck of a lot better than the weather in mine. Well, we're similar time zone similar to all that going on there. We got West Coast represent this week. Yes, absolutely. I'm in the soggy version of the West coast, so northwest coast. Well I appreciate BC Lions here today. I want to get your thoughts on that. We're talking cfl week 20, everything else, bird's eye view. What do you make of the season thus far? I know we saw you at one of the games, was it last year or earlier? It all kind of blurs together here, but what have you made of cfl 2023? I mean I think it's been a good year. I'm pretty biased out here on the West Coast. The storyline going into the season was how are the lions going to respond to the loss of Nathan Rourke and was Vernon Adams going to be able to steer the ship? And I think that that's been answered with a resounding yes. Adams is squarely in the middle of the M o P conversation. I think he's probably a little bit of an underdog behind Calleros, but he's in that conversation which tells you how the year's gone. So from a bias perspective out here on the West coast, it's been a phenomenal season. What I think has been interesting, Winnipeg and Toronto have been kind of the top of the heap in both conferences for the last couple years. But some of the other traditional powerhouses like Calgary for example is scratching and coin just to make the playoffs right now. Saskatchewan's right on that bar as well. The phenomenal of the Edmonton Elks once they finally started playing Trev Ford. There's been some really great storylines carrying on throughout the year that I think have certainly drawn my interest even more so than they would in a normal year because I think there's been a lot of intrigue and a lot of excitement. What I don't get, and I agree with you, Vernon's been phenomenal. That was kind of my biggest question mark going into this year. So if he's been good except for that Toronto game, right? Everyone kind of lays even Jalen Hertz lay the egg here last weekend for the Eagles. But what is the Lion's issue then? I mean I was there for the Winnipeg game. They've dropped some of these very winnable games against Hamilton. What is their issue right now if it's not Vernon? I mean I think there's a couple of things with regards to the Winnipeg games. I don't want to give them a pass, but that Winnipeg game ends with them losing out on a couple of pretty key crucial breaks. Vernon Adams probably has that critical first down with about two minutes left in that game that would've allowed them to basically ice it and they don't get that call and we don't really need to spend a lot of time getting into the merits of that, but that ends up really being a backbreaker for them. And then the previous two games against Winnipeg as well. And don't forget too that the Lions, I think it was Rimes had Dominique Grimes had the audacity and the wherewithal to hit the ground at the end of regulation. Then the lions almost certainly win that given the season that Sean White has had. Now I don't blame him for that, but again, circumstantially, they caught a couple of pretty bad breaks in that fourth quarter along the way to blowing that big lead against Winnipeg. And then the previous two games, Winnipeg in Winnipeg, don't forget, we're not just in Winnipeg, but the lions in both of them were on the back end of a short week coming off of a Sunday game and a Saturday game with the second one, Winnipeg coming off of a buy these odds were very much stacked against them in that. So they've run into some misfortune with Winnipeg in particular this year in terms of their shortcomings, their issues, their ability to run the football effectively has been an issue all season long. They've been a very one dimensional offense. They lose their left guard early in the season to what's probably a career threatening injury unfortunately, or health condition I guess I should say. So they've been working with backups on the offense line pretty much the entire season, so they do have that as maybe a bit of an excuse working for them. But what has been interesting watching the team is I feel like I have seen some explosion out of the running game, but they just haven't been able to do so consistently. I like Smoke Zel, I liked Sean Shiver when he was in earlier in the season and they've been rotating a couple other names in there as well and you've seen flashes, but they just have not been able to do it consistently and when it has been needed the most in the second half of that Winnipeg game where they needed to try and run the clock salt the game away, they just weren't effectively able to do that. I just don't get, if you're the BC Lions and all roads go through Winnipeg here regardless and home field advantage, otherwise you're going to play Winnipeg. That wouldn't be, obviously we don't hang on to Butler and Maisel, like I said you said has been good, but if you know that that's your hurdle, I guess I'm just surprised that there wasn't more emphasis slinging it. Like the air game is not the problem right now. Yeah, I mean I do think that salary constraints dictated a few of those decisions. I think Butler is a pretty obvious salary constraint decision that you brought in Adams last year part through the year and you kind of had 'em on the cheap and then all of a sudden you now had to pay him like your starting quarterback going into this season that inflates that value significantly. And they've got a couple other big ticket guys as well if you're going to have, let's face it, they've got probably the most talented receiving corps in the entire league, but if you're going to have that intact with established guys across the board, those guys all come at a pretty good ticket. So I think salary constraints have been a part of it. And in terms of bigger issues with the team as well, I have been pretty openly critical of Rick Campbell's game management. His personnel management is outstanding. He's one of the best players coaches in the entire league I would say. But I have been very critical of his game management, his use of challenges, his management of clocks and timeouts and some of his decisions to kick field goals. I do think that at the margins that has hurt this team at times as well. And so I'm hopeful it doesn't come back to bite them when things matter the most. I don't want to look too far ahead here, obviously we're still optimistic for this season BC hosting next year, right? Gray Cup, I feel like we're in a window right now. Are we in the middle of a window? Is the window, where do you view BC right now? Well, I think they're squarely in the middle of the window and that's in large part because of Vernon Adams. Now Adams has his shortcomings, but he's a guy who's in the prime of his career and now you're insulated from if Nathan Mark sticks in the N F L and never comes back. And that is a real change in fortunes from at the outside of the season where it was, man, hopefully Adams can be a decent stop gap, but we don't know how we're going to react to losing the best quarterback that's been in this league in a decade. It's tough to bounce back from that. And so you put that into perspective, I think the Lions have done a phenomenal job of not just bouncing back from that but thriving despite that. This team, it isn't the same as Nathan Rourke's team last year, but it doesn't look that different from Nathan Rourke's team last year. And that's full credit to the players on the field and the staff involved. I do still like the lion's chances, especially given those circumstantial things I talked about when playing Winnipeg. But the reality of the matter is that barring something completely miraculous working in the Lion's favor the last couple of weeks here, you've put yourself in a position where you're going to have to win that game in Winnipeg to get through to the Great Cup. I mean to say that's never easy is an understatement. That's a really, really tall task to ask. And it's Winnipeg, they've cut their teeth, they're not just a good talented team. They know how to win in this league and so the odds are against them to get through to the Great Cup. But that being said, you have as explosive an offense as they have and you can win any game and Ryan Phillips has shown the ability to at least keep the lid on even the best offenses in this league, if not shut them down entirely. And so it very well could all come together for them. It's remarkable. Yeah, Vernon, I don't want to kind of poo poo what he's done in the last couple years, but it certainly feels like a comeback kind of if you could give a comeback player award right now. I do. Vernon has any fear that I had going into the season and believe me, I love Vernon as a person from local here, Northwest Guy. But talk about just a way to kind change the narrative on that. You were talking about him being the underdog in the m o p race. If the Toronto game doesn't happen, is he more up there? I mean, what do you think it is? Is it just because and the bombers are that much more dominant? I mean I think the head-to-head work against him fairly or otherwise in going up against Zach Aeros, he's oh and three. And to be honest, I think for a lot of people that conversation begins and ends there adding in the numbers of that Toronto implosion probably don't help as well, especially given that you can now make the argument that in the games against the two best teams in the league or at least the two other best teams in the league, he's really struggled and he's really made hay against the lesser lights of this league. And so you could make that case if you were making that case against him. And I suspect that's probably what's going to sway a lot of voters at this point. In terms of, we talked the window for BC here in terms of being a championship team, Winnipeg, are you viewing them near the end of that or We've had people on the show for weeks and okay, the defense is getting old, they're not as dominant this year. Yeah, I would agree with that. I think the one guy that really gives you hope for the future and some pause in that take is Brady Vera. Vera still in his mid twenties. He's got a lot of good years ahead of him. It's not fair to anybody to set the bar at Andrew Harris, but if he has anything resembling in Andrew Harris career, you got a lot of years of elite production potentially left in him. And certainly if you set that old 30 year old mark that running backs often get, well, you still got a handful of years before you hit that, so that gives you some hope for the future. Quarterback longevity is as good as ever. I think Calis has a lot of years left in him. I do think they'll have to reload on the defense eventually, but I look at some of the key guys on that defense, Adam Big Hill for example. One of the things that's been a thing with Big Hill since he's been in the league is that he is as notorious of a diligent guy that takes care of his body in every sense of the word as anybody in the league. And so if anybody's going to be set up to have longevity at a position like linebacker, it's a guy like Adam Big Hill who lives to take care of his body and to take best care of himself. So I'm not by any means rushing to bury the Winnipeg Boot bombers yet, but you're right, they are a little bit older and I think the changing of the guard is going to be inevitable eventually. And frankly, the run of success they've had in the Western Conference has been pretty unprecedented for them in the last handful of years. So it hasn't translated into a rash of Great Cup victories like they may have expected, but within the Western conference, they've been as dominant as anybody we've seen in a long time in this league. So I think that era, the lions are very close to challenging them now. I think that era is slowly coming to an end, but they are far from dead yet. It's just frustrating not to do too much here BC, Winnipeg, but you look and I think we stack up pretty well across the board except like you said, kind of that key running back and Mizel not really being fine and that's maybe not even relying too much on that when we need to. It is frustrating because you feel like you could do in that kind of apples to apples comparison right now For sure. And watching the games between the two of them I find really fun because there's two real different personalities on offense, right on offense. Winnipeg just wants to bludgeon you. They just want to keep chipping away at you constantly keep throwing punches and just bit by bit where you down, which is what you kind of saw in that last game between the two of them. BC on the flip side is much more of an explosive offense that's looking for those explosion plays that are going to just rock you to your core. And they are very capable of doing that. And so I find that to be a really fun clash of styles watching the two teams compete. Ultimately, I think the difference between the two of them comes down to whether the pass rushes are effective on either side. The Lions Machu Bets has had obviously an incredible season, but the Lions Pass Rush has been a little hit and miss. And even catching the break with Patty Neufeld being out for the last game against Winnipeg, the Lions when it mattered most, they created a turnover in the second half, huge one, but when it came down to it in the fourth quarter, they weren't able to get Calleros off his spot and off of his reads when they needed to most. And so that I think is going to be one of the keys for the Lions coming down the stretch and against these elite opponents is I'm not worried about their secondary. I'm worried about whether their front seven can consistently harass the opposition and get them out of their game plan. Is there a world where Calgary beats BC here on Friday? I think I got the email, they're doing the blackout blackout game. Talk about this game a bit. Yeah, I think there's a world where Calgary beats bc, but I don't expect them to. But there's definitely a world where Calgary beats bc. Let's not forget Calgary is fighting for their lives here. And while BC theoretically still has a chance at first place, I have a really hard time seeing Winnipeg with a chance to lock down first place, lose to an eliminated Edmonton Elks team. Now stranger things have definitely happened, but that doesn't feel like a likely scenario. So I don't know the lines are going to go into this with that real 110% type edge, whereas Calgary is, and that's kind of an intangible quality that can level the playing field despite the fact that I am not super impressed with Calgary's roster as currently stands. So yeah, I think the lines of the more talented team, it's the last game, the season for them. They want to finish out strong, all that kind of good stuff. But the other thing that looms here too is it's the potential for a rematch in the Western semi as well. And so there's also that added element of the lions maybe potentially being a little bit cagey and playing some things a little closer to the vest, knowing that the downside is pretty minimal for them in losing this game and they may potentially have to have this team again when it matters most. That element is also a play, which I know a lot of people aren't thinking that way, but with the Lions having a buy next week, that's how they're thinking. So I think that's an interesting dynamic to it too. Bigger disappointment this year at Calgary or Saskatchewan, I would say Saskatchewan, I personally did not necessarily have that high of an expectation for Calgary. I know that they'd made the decision that Jake Mayer was their guy and they were moving on from Bo Levi, but Mayer showed competence last year, but he didn't really show more than that. And if you looked at the surrounding cast of characters, I didn't necessarily, as I kind of alluded to before, I didn't necessarily see what I thought was an exceptionally talented roster around him. I don't think it's one of the stronger rosters in the league if we're being honest. Saskatchewan, on the other hand, you can give them the quarterback injury thing and that I think is a fair excuse to give them, but it's Saskatchewan expectations are always high in Saskatchewan. They've gone through a pretty significant, for them at least drought at this point in time in terms of having sustained success. This is not the Saskatchewan rough riders of our father's era that went decades without winning gray cups. And that was just the reality of it. The modern rough riders have an expectation to be competing for great cups every single year. And so for them not to, I mean realistically not to come anywhere near that. This is a below 500 team that's not a great cup contender, and if they back into the playoffs, great for them. But you know that the sea of green is not pleased with not having even a single playoff game to go cheer for. So I would say that they're the bigger disappointment all in In terms of Edmonton here taking on what do we have, right? The Winnipeg, a lot of momentum here coming out and we've joked on here. You started straightforward here, maybe week four and we're in a completely different, but are you excited for the Elks moving forward? Optimistic? What adjective would you use? Well, the big elephant in the room for me is Chris Jones. He's making a ton of money. I don't think you can get rid of him logistically, but I don't know that he's shown the ability. He's a great in-game schemer. I don't know that he's shown the ability. He's kind of the opposite of Rick Campbell in a lot of ways, right? This guy can draw the heck out of a defense. He's a good schemer that way, a great game planner, but the way that he manages personnel is not effective. It's just not he has thrown in the past. He's thrown big money at guys that are over the hill that have made minimal impact. He has stuck with guys that anybody with a working pair of eyes can see or not getting the job done for far too long. I think there's a legitimate argument that his decision at quarterback is the singular reason that they're not in the playoff team this year. So I think that's the looming question for them. Trade Ford, I'm fully bored the trade Ford bandwagon. You see a creator like that so long as he stays healthy. I think that that's a really exciting player in this league and a guy that can get things done. He kind of gives me Damon Allen vibes in the way that he plays. I wouldn't say he has the arm strength that Damon Allen did at his peak, but that's the kind of vibe that I get from him. And I mean, as Edmonton fans know well as anybody, Damon and Allen was an incredibly successful player in this league, so having that piece in place gives you reason for optimism for sure, for sure, for sure. But I question whether Chris Jones is going to be able to put it all together because so far as a head coach, he hasn't, as a coordinator, he has as a head coach, he has not. And so that's where I wonder about things because his tenure as a head coach, whether in Saskatchewan or here in Edmonton, has been marred by questionable personnel decisions, has been marred by at times controversy. It hasn't been great, and I just don't know if he's the guy to get that job done. It's curious, do you give him credit for finally coming around on Trey Ford or do we hold that against him that took him half the season? Where does that line moving forward? A little. Both. A little both, right? I do give him credit and we need to I think, understand his context, which is that he's a guy from Tennessee and his background, his context is he is an American guy through and through and there are some biases to move past. When that's your background, you see a guy like Cornelius, well, Cornelius went to Oklahoma State, and if you're Chris Jones, you're looking at that being like, okay, well I know Oklahoma State, good school, they play some really good ball. This kid must play some really good ball. It defies logic to look at two players and then look at the other player and go, okay, well I got a small kid that went to Waterloo, which I couldn't even point out on a map of Waterloos and start him over Taylor Cornelius who went to Oklahoma State, right? So I do give him a little bit of credit for eventually coming around on that. But that being said, what were you looking at during training camp and in practice and during the first, what was it, seven games, I think that Courtney List started, something like that. Yeah, it was seven. How did it take You seven games to look at this and go, ah, this isn't working. And at some point in time too, when you're owing whatever, oh and eight out of the gate, that's what it took you to finally make a change. Holy smokes, man. You waited until you were already out of the playoffs to make the change. And it felt like for a good month that the only thing keeping Cornelius in the job was your stubbornness and insisting that you got it right initially. And so there's two sides to the coin with that because I don't want to not give him any credit, but at the same time, I don't want to go and praise him and say, oh, well he gave a Canadian quarterback a chance. That's awesome. Well, let's be a little bit more critical about the context around that as well, because I think to be fair, we also need to be fair that way. In terms of just talking Easter real quick before we get out, who do you have for the semis? Ettes, you've been a little bit more of a rollercoaster. Hamilton coming on strong here. What do you make? I like the ceiling for Hamilton better than Montreal, but what I've seen when you see those east on east matchups Montreal has kind of owned, aside from Toronto, has owned the rest of the east, it's been a pretty clear cut second best team in that division and Cody Fido, as long as he can avoid throwing interceptions, which has been a pretty big question around him this year, but as long as he can avoid throwing interceptions, Montreal has spent most of those games kind of in command of it. Hamilton's been kind of an enigma this year. I expected them to be better and pretty squarely in the thick of that race, maybe not quite with the Argonauts, but comfortably right in behind them and it just hasn't quite worked out that way. Orlando Steinhower once one of the rising stars of this league, that star is dimmed pretty significantly at this point in time. The quarterback question is interesting. It appears that they're trying to go with the two quarterback system right now and split time. I don't know how effective that's going to be. It has worked in some cases before, but it's pretty rare where two quarterback systems work effectively for a team. It's usually an indication that you don't love either quarterback and given that you just went out and acquired Bowie by Mitchell this off season to settle that question, that's not really where you want to be, but I was really impressed with the way they hung it against bc. They lost on the last second field goal in that game, but I thought for most of the second half of that game, they were the better team of the two. So that's them playing legitimate playoff caliber football and if they can keep that up, then maybe they can make a go of it. It'll be an interesting matchup. And Montreal I would say too, their venue isn't necessarily the most hostile environment to go into and win in the league either. Yeah, so I think it's a winnable game for the road team, but I also like what Montreal's done this year when they've been challenged within their conference, they've looked pretty in control of those games throughout. I like what they're doing on defense. I really like Austin Mack and I think that if they go in with the right mindset that they should be good. But Hamilton's really come on like you said. And so I think there's a lot more question marks around the Tigercat, but I talked about roster talent before. I do think through and through the Tigercat probably are the more talented roster if they can piece it all together. Last question here from me, Ottawa. Disappointing obviously injury stuff, disappointing last year, obviously injury stuff. What do you make going forward here? We write this season off, what do you do from here? It's been a long time before they've seen any success. I mean I think you write this season off, but I do think that you take a critical review of Bob Dyson, his staff and decide whether he's the guy moving forward. I didn't love, he sounds like he's a very well respected guy and a good players coach and that kind of stuff. But given the way the previous era in Ottawa went, I was a little surprised that they hired from within. There's also been some rumblings that the level of financial investment in this roster has not really been up to par with the rest of the league as well. And that's something that I think O S E G and the ownership group is going to have to take a hard look in the mirror and review. Because I wonder if, and this is purely me spitballing, I don't have insider information here, but I do wonder if there's maybe a little bit of complacency selling in from O S E G and that in the Red Blacks era they've managed to carve out a pretty darn good thing in Ottawa. That venue is excellent. The fan base is really supportive. They have a great atmosphere pretty much all the time and they've tested it with not putting great teams on the field the last couple of years and it's held up reasonably well. But I don't know how much further they can push. I think they really need to buckle down and get things figured out. I think they thought that they were doing that by bringing in a guy like Jeremiah Maoli to kind of carry the load. But that didn't work out. I don't know if he'll be able to come back and help em out next year either. So they kind of have to get back to the drawing board. But the thing that's very clear with Ottawa is that once Olli was out, it was kind of exposed that this roster's without him probably the worst in the league and they really need to address that. And that doesn't have to cost you a lot of money, but you have to invest in things like effective scouting and the amateur draft and stuff like that and squeeze more out of that stone if you're going to make a go of it. They're certainly capable of doing so. But I don't know if that level of desperation seems to be there to the extent that it would be in other markets after consecutive seasons like the red blocks have had the last couple of years. And so I wonder how quickly that'll change. Well I appreciate that. I like that. Good insights there. I get kind of different opinions on that like oh, Sean Burke and so it's good to hear that go. I appreciate it taking time here in the middle of work and everything else and that really makes, I appreciate it and that we'll hope that the lions here, whatever ends up with that, they can go in here. I kind of felt like that was the end of the season here a couple weeks ago, but we'll see. A fingers crossed. Yeah, we'll see that. That was a tough one to lose. But hey, they bounced back and won a tough road game last week. They're still fighting. I'm very confident they'll end up in Winnipeg for that Western final. I'm not super confident they'll get through that, but I'm going to tune in to see. So Gordon, thanks again. Appreciate it. Of course, you take care man. Really appreciate all of our guests for coming on today. Paul Reese as always, making himself available with all the other work he does, tracking all these alternative football leagues, running our Sports Central and his family, everything else means a lot. And then like I said, Jamie Nye taking time after work. Looking forward to seeing him up in Hamilton here for the Gray Cup in just a few weeks. And then go, Randall is always making time. Crown Grid, iron Nation, all of that. Jim Mullen and our friends, Mike Hogan, everyone over there super appreciate Gord with that working on getting our location solidified for our Gray Cup show. Can you believe T S N that we were at the George Hamilton two years ago across the street from the convention center, almost like the perfect location to do a live show. Call them up, T SS n rented the entire venue the entire weekend. So hopefully that means we'll have friends nearby, we can bring them on the program as well. But getting all that figured out for our cfl Great Cup show here coming up on November 18th, just about a month away. Like I said, like and subscribe. Hope you guys enjoy. Should be news coming here soon. Lots of stuff happening swirling, hearing lots of rumors with this xfl USFL ufl United football stuff. So make sure you're subscribed. Like I said, stay tuned and we'll see you next time. Have a good weekend. Thanks.

CFL 2023 Week 19 Results: Winners and Losers of CFL Week 19, What Did We Learn?

Well, the UFL lives here today on a Monday apparently. If you're following Josh Gervin on Twitter, that might be a short for later today. We'll figure all that out. I have a feeling we're going to be having some xfl USFL news coming out this week. Should be excited, but happy Victory Monday unless you are a San Francisco Ford nine ERs fan. Sorry, Matt Baker or Anthony Miller with the Philadelphia Eagles. Hopefully the Cowboys will follow suit tonight. I know a gentleman here that lived through a riveting Sunday night game last night, which I do want to talk about as it relates to the cfl on this with Jason Hussey and then Evan Ram's looking good. Put the Cardinals to bed. How are we doing today, guys? I'm doing good, Reid. Thanks for having me as always. And I mean, yeah, my football teams that I cheer for tried to give me a heart attack this weekend, but ultimately I'm still alive. Yeah, I had tweeted, I think I had put it in the group chat. I said if the Thai cats beat the lions this weekend, I'm not going to Gray Cup. I can't look at Husky, I can't look at Hussy in the face. I can't after all the smack talking crazy weekend to see if o We'll get into that. Evan, I thought N F L was good. It was exciting. Yeah, I mean N F L really we're getting into the thick of things with the N F L, whereas the cfl just wrapped up week 19 really feels like we're in the last bit of things before the playoffs, so it's two different worlds for sure. But no, I enjoyed the N F L this weekend, So I wanted to get into that first because obviously we lived through the bills. Was it the Bills Giants game last night? 14 to nine I think was the final score. I was like, Hey mom, glad us come over. This will be exciting. She loves Josh Allen, this this'll be good. We'll go watch the game, but a really, really slow game, right? Six zero at half and we had all that kerfuffle and all of that. And these are the games that you always have the C F O people. This is the no fun league. This doesn't matters. And I'm curious, Jason, because obviously, and I want to get Evan's thought as well, there's many a time when I get a notification on my phone like Montreal Ettes at Red Black Game start at zero zero and then I'll get the notification like Montreal Ettes whatever second quarter start at zero zero and I'm like, oh God, these are not Jason do. What do you make of that just in terms of, I mean it's still a riveting game last night. Do you view them the same with the cfl when you get some of these slow games? How did you view the game last night? I'm curious, I know you're a Bills fan too, but kind of remove that. Yeah, I mean it was an awful football game, but I just view it as both leagues bad football is bad football and I don't think that, I think the cfl, the bad games are more pointed to because there's only four of them on each week and you have these games not running concurrently with other games. So I think that they kind of stand out a lot more like a sore thumb. But I think at the end of the day, a bad football game is a bad football game and the N F L has had lots of bad prime time games the last couple of years. Yeah, they got to figure that out. And I don't know, I mean the bills were super flat against the Jaguars in London and obviously the bi week or the travel and the Jaguars were there and they didn't have to travel because my mom's sitting there, she's like, I think Josh Allen is jet lagged. I mean, the game was last Sunday. I mean, I can't imagine it was Evan, what did you make of this? I'm kind of curious. I mean in terms of the bills? Well, no, just in Terms of, I mean, it was very much like the, what I say reminds me of the Chief's Broncos from last year and he said no one wants to, I mean, it puts these games on a pedestal, the cfl because you got four games, I mean these primetime N F L games, but I think the N F L benefits from having nine games playing concurrently on a Sunday a lot. Oh, well, absolutely. I mean in the cfl with the number of teams, you're always kind of in prime time you don't, I mean, yeah, you're going to have games on the same day, but usually not at the same time. So that means you're going to have more eyes concentrating on it if you were following that league, just like in the N F L. I mean the contrast between games that are in primetime and aren't in primetime, so take one of the games from the, I guess it's one o'clock Eastern and Slate, those aren't going to be nearly talked about as much as Bill's giants, even if Bill's Giants wasn't one of the better games of the day. So yeah, Just pattied a little bit here. I don't know if we have an hour for the cfl week 19 stuff to talk about, but I will just say Mike Mitchells of the world, we watching the Jets game yesterday and oh, everyone hates the Jetstar. At least they talk about the Jets. No one talks about the commanders. We don't like the commanders. We don't talk at least. At least the Jets are on skip bails and whatever every day. So Jason, let's get into this. Did we learn, so from the standings, lions were able to Hold Up that I got a little worried there. We'll get into all that stuff, but what did we lock in here? Ettes home picture? What was the playoff implications coming out of the weekend? So with Hamilton picking up the loss on Friday night, they are locked into third and the east. So Montreal is going to be hosting that east semifinal against Hamilton. So basically the east is all set and then in the west, Calgary keeps its playoff hopes alive. They're very much alive with two games left in the season. Saskatchewan has one more win right now, but they only have one more game remaining. So Calgary technically controls its own destiny, but they have a couple of really tough games against BC and Winnipeg the last couple of weeks of the season. So we'll have to see how it plays out. So they would have to win out then. Let me get the schedule up here. So Calgary At Bc, but obviously BC wants to maintain, right? They don't want to drop. I Mean Is BC hoping that Edmonton comes in and plays spoiler? Is that kind of where we're at? Yeah, exactly. Winnipeg has to lose the last two games and BC has to win this game on Friday night against Calgary to have any shot at first. And Calgary still could make, even if they lose against BC on Friday night because now with the win on Friday, they have the tiebreaker over Saskatchewan. So if Saskatchewan loses this weekend and Calgary loses as well, Calgary just had to beat Winnipeg the last week of the season in order to make the playoffs. So Calgary big victory on Friday, It just feels like Saskatchewan's really running on fumes right now. How you, Evan, is that how you take it? It seems like the ride to me, this is far more juice here with Tiger Cats going into Montreal here and potentially playing upset. I don't think BC has any issue taking care of either of these teams right now. It seems very lost. Yeah, well, I mean for a long time I was saying Saskatchewan, they had things figured out. They weren't anything special, but at the same time they were able to get the job done and they were six and five at one point. They were above 500 I believe at one time, but now they've lost six games straight and even that going into that Calgary game when they had lost five straight, I suppose I wasn't too concerned still about them. I thought Calgary again is still the slower team and they won't have a problem with that and we will get into that game. To me that was probably the most impactful one of the week without a doubt. But yeah, they didn't, and now you've kind of hit the panic button. I think if you're a Saskatchewan fan, everything was kind of fine. Things were going along as usual, your playoff spot, it didn't look like again, there just wasn't that much competition. But you start racking up these losses late in the season and in a 21 week season that can continue for a long time. Now Saskatchewan's at a point where they really, really got to tighten in here in the past couple games. But I think what's honestly, just in the bigger picture, a bit disappointing is we're talking about the way I'm phrasing this, if you were somebody who didn't know the records, you think that this would be like Bill's chiefs fighting for a playoff spot, but really it's more like, I don't know, I dare bring up examples in the N F L, but it's just like When the Buccaneers, when the Buccaneers was playing the Panthers last year and they were trying to win the N F C South right one. That's a good one. Oh, The Buccaneers one get seven to nine here, they can win the division and go Play. Yeah, I mean it's a pretty tough battle being fought when both of these teams haven't even reached the seven win mark yet. And we've been watching both of these teams all season and I've been saying all along that last playoffs spot was going to come down to Saskatchewan or Calgary. But it's very interesting. Again, we're sitting here this late in the season and you'd never think you would say this given how things were just a couple of weeks ago, but I think a lot of people would rather see Edmonton in the playoffs now over both of those teams. And that's again, very interesting takeaway. I know Matt Dunnigan was talking about that on the panel during halftime of this game on T S N, just talking about Edmonton honestly has more momentum even though they've been eliminated than really either of those teams. He was kind of laying in the Calgary more at the time because that was the must win game for them and they were down at half. But yeah, Saskatchewan clearly is kind of in the same boat now, so it's tough. It's tough because to be honest, it'll be interesting to see who gets the spot at the end of the day. A couple of interesting things now can happen here down the stretch, but let's be honest, either one of those teams, the lions are just kind of sitting there. I mean, I hate to sound disrespectful and again, all due respect to Calgary and Saskatchewan, but to BC for all intensive purposes, it's almost a body week for them in a way. It's just kind of like, well, We're Going to have a home game. Someone's going to come in and I understand anything could happen, right? I mean the second I say that, everybody gets excited and there's a different level of energy. So I certainly hope that if I say something like that, then maybe one of those teams will go in there with a different energy and make the game competitive. I don't know. But yeah, I understand BCS had their struggles and they've lost some games, they should have won whatever, but I don't know man, if BC I'll just say this before we actually get into the games here before, what was I going to say before? I mean, I don't know if BC were to lose this game and we see potentially Saskatchewan or Calgary in the West final, that would be, I don't know. I don't know. That would be something that would be really something, one of those teams against Winnipeg. I mean I feel like Saskatchewan would have the best chance of taking down BC and pulling the, what would be the upset of the year and then going into Winnipeg. But I don't know. I mean, again, I'm 99% certain BC's going to win that game, but you can never leave it off the table. Well, and just especially with no disrespect to Rick Campbell and everything we've talked about, this hasn't always felt like the lions are always showing up to all these games. A hundred percent. I think the bills were a little sleepy last night. Yo, it's the Giants whatever. As I break my microphone here, I hope the commanders don't feel that way next week as well take it on the Giants. But it's interesting you're talking about, yeah, there's one of the Twitter accounts like Jock, Cartier, whatever falls me and he's has advocated, we get Trey Ford and get the Leftovers, we'll do the traveling team and all of that because it did, and we'll talk the Elks here, but Kevin Brown coming on the show last week who I thought delightful man was so on time, I do all these, we've had a lot of player interviews lately where it's like, Hey, it's going to be at noon Pacific. I'm like, okay, so I get on there, nothing. Did I text the people that are trying to set it up, not the player. Okay, let me get in touch with them and then they're like, oh, you want to do that now? Oh, okay, is that video okay? Okay, hang on. Next thing you know, it's like 1 45 and I'm like, I work from home but I've devoted two hours to getting this whatever. Kevin Brown, 1259, he's sitting there one o'clock, log in, he's ready to go. I appreciate that. And he had a day, but he was talking. We have a lot of momentum right now going in and we're playing this. We have a lot to play for next year and a lot to prove. So I like that. I mean, Edmonton and this game where they're coming into Winnipeg next week, I don't take it off the table. I mean Winnipeg is really, really good, but I do feel like Edmonton's got a head of steam right now. At least I know that Records and Sands and all that stuff. But Jason, any other thoughts on that before we get into the games? I know they blew the whatever. I was trying to look up the lead they blew against in Montreal, but overall it feels like they have a little bit more going. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I do think Edmonton in general has looked the best of those three teams, Calgary, Saskatchewan, and Edmonton the last half of the season. But at the end of the day, Edmonton made its own bed with how they started the season and I think that even lately they've had a couple of very disappointing games. I thought that we'll get into it, but the 21 to three blown, I think it was 21 to three lead that they blew in this game and they blew it within one quarter too, so they had to lead at the end of the first quarter and then they blew it by halftime. So I mean I don't feel too bad for Edmonton. I just wish we could have a two game series between BC and Winnipeg to decide first place in the west. Yeah, a bigger blown lead. The 21 to three that Edmonton had or Colorado was it? Was it 29 0? And the qvs that tweeting or posting on Instagram is merchandise links at halftime. I'm like, this is, anyway, so let's get into this Ottawa. Nothing to play for at all. All LED for a good portion of this game. Toronto still putting up the 40 burger. Chad Kelly in the game for a lot of this Duke's looking good. Evan, what did you make of this? Because I'm sitting there watching the score come down, I'm like, this is crazy. I dunno, Ottawa has just looked like Dooo here for a while. What did you make? Yeah, I mean this was a game. I actually expected Ottawa to win, but at the same time I didn't realize Toronto's got this thing going on where it's like they don't pull all their starters, but at the same time they're working other guys in. So you kind of get this mixed bag of the team that we've seen all season and then sort of more like a preseason element where you're just testing depth and all that. But I really expected Ottawa to win this game and it's another, I understand you have nothing to play for, but it would be nice to go into Toronto and play the best team in the league and get a win just for the sort of culture and moral victory more than anything. But they weren't able to do that. Toronto still scored 40 points with only some of their starters really in for a majority of the game, so that was a bit of a red flag. I didn't catch too much of this game. I know on the Ottawa side they had some guys worked in Tyrell Grom at quarterback, they were kind of testing some things out too. From what I heard, a lot of lost fumbles in this game seemed like there was a bit of a ball control issue between Crumb and Gro. I think there might've been three lost fumbles or something like that. So Toronto definitely getting some work in there. One of the interesting storylines for me in this game that's very kind of niche, but I'll bring it up anyway, Elijah McGee whose rights were claiming by the roughnecks in the xfl, this was his first game in Ottawa, I believe he was on the practice roster before this and got called up for this game and registered to tackle. So good to see that could be a, well, I don't even know if I can say xfl guy anymore in the future U F L guy, N Ss f L guy, I don't know, but could be a part of that pool later on. So keep an eye on guys like that and who knows, maybe a couple of these other American guys will be too. I'm sure I'll get some heat for saying that, but Oh well on the Toronto side, yeah, Chad Kelly again, even though you could argue he maybe shouldn't be playing at this point in the season, still went out there and put on a decent game throwing to some different guys like Richie Sani getting worked in there, Tommy Neil, Deontay, McMahon again having a decent scoring, a touchdown he's getting worked in. That's nice to see somebody that I know personally, so obviously always take that to heart. But yeah, other than that, not too much to talk about in terms of this game, just really, yeah, Toronto I think had, Ottawa had a very strong first half, I'll say that I watched a bit of the first half, I think they put up 24 or something like that, and in Toronto just kind of came out swinging in the third quarter, 14 points and then Ottawa didn't score at all in the fourth and then by that point it was just kind of out of reach. So it's too bad a team like that. Again, I know you have nothing to play for and a lot of people don't care about that game, but if I'm an Ottawa fan it's like, well, let's just have a bit of fun in these last couple of weeks. But losing a game like that, I wouldn't necessarily say it's fun, especially when you had a big lead and think you only had three points total in the second half. Yeah, I mean again, as we've said before, a lot of work to be done in Ottawa. We will see what they do in the off season in terms of coaches and some of their key positions. But yeah, I think they've got some work to do for sure In terms of, and I want to get Jason's thoughts on the quarterback stuff here for Toronto. But yeah, just look in Ottawa late by, I've got that week 20 By we're looking forward to and then hosting Toronto again. So I mean clearly not the greatest there in terms of this Chad Kelly thing. Jason, why can't we see, I know Brian came in and didn't play great. Why aren't we giving these backups a little bit more? I just don't understand putting Chad in any harm's way at all right now. I think it's mostly just because this was their last home game of the season. They still, unlike a lot of teams, they still have two games left. So they have a game at Saskatchewan and then at Ottawa as you just said. So I think they're going to have the backups play the vast majority if not all of those games the last two weeks of the season. So I don't think I'm too concerned yet. But yeah, it is kind of confusing that they have played them basically the whole game for a couple of these games the last couple of weeks and we'll have to see how they manage that the last couple of weeks. But I think that's what their plan is. I thought it was interesting and I had on was Eddie Steele two weeks ago. We were talking about, hey, the resting people and all this stuff that's been going on and hey, how do you prepare for this? And Eddie's like they got the first round by, right? You're playing to think that you got to get up for one home game and then be in the playoffs. He's like, that's not an issue at all. He is like, I would've no concern at all. You could rest everybody. You'd have kind of the double buy going into that. I don't think they're playing, you're missing the semifinals you're playing at home against Ottawa the week before that. I just thought it was interesting where he's talking about just from a player point of view, we sit here and talk a lot about that kind of stuff. How did Ottawa look by your eyes, Jason? Like I said, not a lot playing for here. What did you make? Well, it was kind of dejavu to the last game that we saw between these two teams or the previous game between these two teams this season where Ottawa had one of their better offensive showings of the year. But again, they just could not stop anyone defensively and they had a really strong first half offensively Dustin Rum and company, but ultimately they fizzled out in the second half like Evan was saying. And I think at the end of the day, Ottawa just still has a ton to work on if they're going to beat a team like Toronto. They have not beat an Eastern opponent this season and I think that is the most Telling stat about their season so far. I guess we'll go Evan first in terms of when Farhan was on last week and we've talked and Bob D and all that stuff. Farhan doesn't expect Sean Burke to go the GM there or Bob Ds to go. Farhan expects a minimal change there. Does that surprise you Evan, and then we'll get Jason's thoughts? Yes and no. I mean in a league like the cfl, the pool of guys that you can pick from in terms of replacements is very thin. And I listened to this show that you had last week with Farhan and I did agree to an extent about a lot of the things that he was saying with some of these questionable situations, not just with Ottawa but with Edmonton and all the other teams that have struggled Calgary, you could kind of clean house and just do a rebuild, but in Ottawa's position specifically, they've been rebuilding for so long that if you just keep changing things up, you're almost delaying the progress. So I think even if they are dissatisfied with the results from this year, I mean again, if you just bring new guys in, I mean then you're essentially, it takes so long to get that going and it's like, well would next year even count? Because then you got to retool everything. And I don't know, I think they're just trying to stay afloat right now more than anything. And that's tough. It's a difficult spot. I don't think it's what a lot of fans want to see. I mean we often push for change and things like that very quickly. But yeah, I think the cfl, you kind of got to pace yourself because you look around and it's like the amount of experienced guys who could come in and make an immediate impact right away. It's not a very big group because in the N F L they've got 32 teams to pick from in terms of coaching hires and things like that. Who do I want? Who's done a good job this year in the cfl? There's not that many. There's nine teams and let's say only four or five of those teams have actually done well this season, that's even less, right? So I don't know. I understand it should be surprising, but I'm not surprised just because I understand the approach I guess is what I'm trying to Say. And I agree with it. I agree with it. It's hard. The commanders won yesterday against the Falcons and obviously you always want the win, but I almost, I'm like if the commanders just sunk all season and then Ron Rivera gets embarrassed with the new ownership, they're you almost hope because when you're in this kind of perennial, like you said, rebuilding of like, well we're always, I felt like that was the Raiders for years and we're kind of with Derek Carr and we're always kind of going to be in the playoffs, but even if we make it to the playoffs, we're knocking the win. You're talking about the number of people out there eligible to sign. And even just for this, remember we had a Toronto extending Cory Mes this week where I think Jason, I think we were talking in the chat, this is someone that very much could have been a head coach somewhere trying locking him down. Thoughts on that and kind of the question about the Red Blacks coaching stuff. Yeah, I mean I don't think this signing of a defensive coordinator of the extension, I don't think it prevents him from being a head coach next season necessarily. So I think there's always outs to if a team wants to hire him as a head coach. So that's something to keep in mind. But yeah, I don't think with Ottawa that I think they're just kind of lost as an organization right now because they've changed all the players A couple of off seasons ago they've had terrible luck with injuries in terms of the Jeremiah Mazzoli of it all and everything like that. But I think at the end of the day, I don't think that Bob Dicece is it as a head coach, I think Sean Burke has done some good things in terms of replenishing the cupboard there because when he took hold of this job, that roster was so far behind the rest of the cfl back in, what was it, 2021 when he got hired. So I think he's done a good job of making this team more competitive, but ultimately they're not getting the right decisions in order to win the games. And I think that they're still not as talented as a lot of teams around the cfl. I think their skilled position players lag behind the rest of the cfl for the most part. So I think that it's hard to say what the problem is in Ottawa if it's the coaching or is it just the general lack of talent. But they've tried both. They've tried switching up the coaches, they've tried switching up the players and none of it seems to be working. So I'm very interested to see what they do this off season, but as to whether or not they will make a change, I'm with Farhan. I don't think that they're going to make a change in terms of the GM or head coaching spot just because of the coaches operations cap aspects involved. It's just funny, I remember it was going into last year and they were doing that behind the R and they were doing the documentary stuff and we had Mazzoli and hey, we got a big surprise coming and we're signing Mazzoli and all that, and they just to see this kind spiral down. Evan, weren't we talking in the chat? The Argos have more wins this year than the Ottawa has since their gray cup win or some craziness like that. I mean it's just remarkable statistics. What did you make of that? That was a couple days ago. Yeah, well it's tied now. Now that Toronto beat Ottawa, they're 14 and two. Ottawa is now 14 and 53 I think over the past three or four seasons, something like that, which is an incredible stat that is, well it's an incredibly sad stat I should say. I feel really bad. And Ottawa, I was saying going into this season, keep in mind, this is months ago now, half a year ago I was saying, and even last year because the whole behind the are thing, which I thought was great, and I'll just pivot here for a quick moment and say that the cfl has some great content when it comes to media and documentary type. I know BC had one this year, I believe on their YouTube channel. Ottawa had the behind the R stuff, there was a couple others, but things like that I think really I enjoy watching those and that's, they're very well thought out and they do. It's like, I don't know for again considering how many things the cfl could improve on that we all know about the fact that they've done well and at least presenting something to the fans like that I think is good. But anyways, like I was saying with Ottawa this season, even last season, I was saying this has to be the year of change. And I'm not saying that if they do bad in one of those years, whether it was last season or this season that you clean house, I didn't say that, but this franchise has struggled for so long and I feel like a lot of our attention was put on to Edmonton this season just because they had the slower star in Ottawa. There was a moment they beat Winnipeg, they had Dustin Crumb. Things did look really good and I feel like I say that every week. There was a time where it did look promising and I was like, okay, I'm not sure if they're back or whatever you want to say, but I feel like they've at least made some progress. But here we are at the end of the season and I'm like, well, we're kind of just right back to square one another season with four wins and excuse me, I don't know, I just feel if I'm a fan of that team, I would feel lost. I don't know where you go and it kind of feels like you've done everything you can in terms of a rebuild to make things right and really the only thing you could do is get rid of some jobs, but that's not going to help because who are you going to replace 'em with? So you're kind of just sitting there hoping, you're hoping that things are going to turn around. There has to be a lot of hope and that's not a very concrete substance to put all your chips in. We used the term pushing all your chips into the table, you're playing a poker game or something. That's not the best approach, but it's kind of all they have. I mean, you think about, you brought up the behind the R thing and the whole, that documentary was, there was a lot of outlets in that documentary series, but the one thing that they really focused on and built it around was the addition of Jeremiah Meli being our new franchise quarterback. And I don't know how many games specifically Jeremiah Meli has played in an Ottawa Red Blacks uniform, but it's not many. It's not nearly, yeah, five. Okay. Yeah, across two seasons, keep in mind, not even one season across two seasons. And that's a frightening thought given that out of how many, I mean that's five out of if I can do math, 36 regular season games, yeah, that's an abysmal number. So again, really unfortunate, those were things that were out of their control and something this season, I know you have to leave some things in the past, but sometimes I still think about what happened with him and Garrett Marino and Saskatchewan and how that was almost a domino effect for how things have gone up to this point. Because I understand his injuries this season were separate. It was a separate thing. He came back from that but got injured again. However, you can't help but thinking, what if that just never happened last year and they just kept on that trajectory. I mean, I still don't think personally they would've been an elite team, but I feel like they still could have gotten into that sort of where the tie cats are at right now where you're at eight wins, you're almost at 500 looking at the playoffs, I feel like they had enough to do that, but when you don't have the direction and the stability, things fall apart really quickly. So I'll stop rambling on about it. There are a lot of thoughts that I have around that. Ottawa is one of the teams where I've been pulling for 'em for a long time, even more maybe than Edmonton and a couple of these other franchises that would like to turn things around going into this season. Montreal and Saskatchewan I think are two big teams with question marks given the shakeups there, I won't get into those now, but my point being Ottawa, all I can do now is hope. I'm hoping that in 2024 they make the right decisions. I trust, I know people in their personnel department, I trust Sean Burke and all those guys to make the right decisions. You have to hope people don't get injured and you have to hope that maybe your game management and certain decisions gets better from the coaching side and you just have to carry on. I mean, there's nothing much else you can do at a certain point. So it's a tough spot, but you do have to keep hope alive to some degree. Just remember for every Ottawa red black Lasa there, Jenna, a longtime listener of the show is upset. Jenna is Long Time diehard Red Lax. Jason, anything else on this? We'll get to the other game. I think we've done good padding this out a little bit because I'm like, I dunno, we're going to, but we're good now. We're 32 minutes in, we'll knock through these other games. Jason, any other thoughts? Red Blacks or Toronto? Yeah, I just wanted to hammer home the point again that this team has not won a single game against the East Division this year. They've been actually very competitive against the West. They've had wins over Winnipeg, Calgary, Saskatchewan, but other than that, they have not been able to beat the East Division and I think that's the main source of their problems. So let's get into this and I got a couple little tweets here to pull up. Tro I, like we said, Edmonton, dropping the 21 to three. I had a tweet here Dave Campbell talking in the last nine games, the Elks and Feld, a 22 point lead over Winnipeg, 15 point lead in the fourth quarter on Labor Day and 18 point lead over the ettes and blew them all on loss. That seven wins of the Edmonton Elks hang out of winter or two earlier, and that's eight and nine. Really tremendous here. Jason, we'll go to you first. What did you make of this? I know we talked a little bit already, but Edmonton dropping, Montreal rolling back and having the big coming from behind. Yeah, I was really excited for Edmonton in this game. The way it started, and this is great, they could finish their season. Oh, they have one game next week against Winnipeg, but that's on the road. They could finish their home slate with a big win here. They'd have three home wins on the season, but ultimately they just fell apart completely in that second quarter. And I mean Montreal just their pride just kind of kicked in even though Montreal had no need to win this game with Hamilton losing on Friday. I mean, I just think their pride kicked in and they just started playing. We know they can against these losing teams of the cfl this season. So I think at the end of the day, the ettes just showing that they're the better team of these two teams regardless of the situation. Much like Toronto, beating Ottawa. So I mean I don't have too many takeaways from this game. I had a clip here just talking and always I hope the sound doesn't play here. We always get friends of the show on all this and we saw Kevin Brown here coming back just having a tremendous leaping performance on that. I did like to see that even in the loss. I always like to see friends of the show here coming back. I mean, look at this, look at this guy. It's just going wheel over. I dunno, Kevin Brown is a spark plug, a big fan of him and good to see him featured on that. Evan, thoughts on the game? So for me, this game, it was a couple things. Again, I wanted Edmonton to win this game because I know they can do it, but as Dave's pointed out, while this team has had a lot of momentum in the second half of the season, they've looked a lot better, things like that. The one kind of disappointment I think of this resurgence has been the second half. They've blown a lot of big leads and I always think about that one at Edmonton, I think it was Trey Ford's first or second game and starting lineup. Winnipeg, they completely whiffed for lack of a better term. So yeah, it was a bit disappointing and Edmonton came out strong in the first quarter. They had 14 points, it looked good, but I mean Montreal with 23 in the second, I think that's going to be hard for any team to come back from and especially Edmonton who has struggled with sort of these, you jump out to a lead and then you can't really get back in it. In terms of individual performances, I'll start on the Edmonton side. Reforward looked decent, this was a decent game for him, I'd say nothing special. Not one of his games where it was a blow your socks off, kind of how does he do that type of performance, but it was respectable. Again, something that Edmonton can build off of going into the off season. And you pointed out Reid with Kevin Brown, clearly I think that is where the mental focus of his team is right now. Like, Hey, we can't win any games for an actual playoffs, Bob. We can still win games to feel better about ourselves and put points on the board to have something to build off of. So yeah, I think Trey Ford looked good. Kevin Brown had a catch for 22 yards on top of, he didn't do a lot, but 6.8 yards per k, I'll take that. And then Trey Ford got in a bit there on the running action too. Kyron Moore for me in this game stood out with the two receiving touchdowns. He's somebody that I don't know, I mean there's a lot of guys I haven't talked about this season, but Kyron Moore I want to bring up here. Late in the last couple of weeks he came over from Saskatchewan and he's been silently one of the better receivers I think are return guys, at least specialists in the league. I wouldn't say he's elite by any means, but again, another one of those pieces in Edmonton where it's like he's definitely helped a significant amount and maybe part of the reason he hasn't gotten the attention is just because of all the other turmoil that's gone on in Edmonton this season and in a lot of stuff is directed on Trey Ford as we know, especially over the past couple of weeks with him starting. So things like that. Gina Lewis was the leading receiver in this game, who to be honest, I don't know. I expected bigger things from him this year. I thought he was really going to be the difference maker at Edmonton and I think people in their personnel department would probably think the same. Just given his stature and going into this season, I think we sung his praises as being the best receiver in the league and while he is still one of the top options that any team would love to have, I think there's a couple guys this season that have done better and that have proved that he might not have the Crown anymore. Austin Mack, I think being one of them, even if he's slowing down now as well, a couple others, I won't name all of them, but on the Montreal side of the ball, yeah, I mean it was a good game for Montreal. This was a game where for them, again, they've got the home playoff game secured, you're feeling okay, this whole thing about them not being able to beat winning teams, but you can beat all the teams with the losing record. This wasn't any different for them as much as I'm saying Edmonton had a shot winning or whatever, Montreal still beat him, but Edmonton still has the losing records, so he still doesn't really tell anything for anybody, but it was a good game for them. I think for Montreal, this is the game where you're just trying to build momentum going into the playoffs again, you're not really playing for anything either, but you have work that needs to be done later on that the other team, and I feel like this was a pretty complete game for them. All things considered fdo I feel like had, again outside of the turnover, which is what we always seem to point out about him outside of that, if you take that off the board, I think he had a good game in the run department. Walter Fletcher, not somebody that we talk about a lot, but a guy that's getting brought up here late in the season 13 carries for 88 yards close to averaging seven per touch. A lot of the discussion has obviously been around will stand back and as of late, but good to see Fletcher getting worked in there. It's fun at the end of the season when you've got these teams working in other players that you might not have seen as much and even if you're not really playing for something, it could be fun. This is a period evaluation to cfl teams are deciding who do we want to keep going into next year? What does that look like? Talking about the window for practice, roster expansion opens, things like that. So those are evaluation periods or a telltale sign of 'em. I don't know if there's too much else. Austin Mack is getting back. He's been quiet for a couple of weeks I feel like, but five catches for 57 yards in this game. Tyler Snead, again, someone that's really come along in the second half of the season. Personally though, the guy I'm really excited about in the playoff matchup with Hamilton is Tyson Philpot because he's been flashing a lot as of lately, young guy Canadian. I'm really excited to see what he can do. I mean obviously season's nearly over, but that game against Hamilton specifically, I feel like if Montreal really wants to make a statement, I guess he would be the one to kind of come in and that seems to be his time, at least in my mind. So yeah, other than that, not too much about this game. Again, it wasn't really meaningful for either team, but 23 point second quarter by Montreal certainly can't be overlooked. It's funny you're talking Montreal being able to play Jason's side about this can only play winning against the teams. It's like having, I have x-ray vision, but I can only see through wood or something. Not quite. It's kind of like a weird, but you're talking Eugene Lewis and all that, like you said, because I was looking up his contract here, a ton of money onto that and that was what to me, always made the Cornelius thing even weirder on that where it's like, okay, we're going to sign this guy highest non paid quarterback and then sticking with Taylor Cornelius and all of that. My last thought we'll get to Jason. I did, and I'm not the biggest obviously football expert, right? You guys are. That's why we talk about it. But having Kevin Brown say on the show, yeah, I started the season really slow. I felt like I was thinking too much. I finally now more comfortable. I also thought you started, I was like, yeah, I could see that when he was playing. It felt good to have him vocalize that because I remember watching these games and thinking something's not mashing at that point. Jason, any thoughts on that or anything else from this game? Yeah, absolutely. I thought that Kevin Brown, The production the first half of the season did not match his talent and I thought that the way he finished last year, I was like, this guy could be a top three running back in the cfl and that's what he's become by the end of this season as well. So I mean really happy to see that from him. And then just a couple of things from the Montreal perspective, I really think that Danny Macha, the GM over there deserves a lot of credit for restocking the Canadian talent on this roster. I mean you see a lot of impact Canadian players that they drafted really high. Mark Antoine Qua was the second round pick, should have been a first round pick, but he had N F L interest. Tyson Philpot, a really talented receiver, the Wall uac, I probably butchered that name, but he was the first round pick this year, went to T C U, did not play a ton at T C U. It was kind of a backup there, but the Ettes took a chance on him and the high pedigree had playing at a big school and he's paid off so far with he had a big strip sack in this one that led to a touchdown and that really swung the game. So I think the ettes, that's been a big part of the resurgence over the past couple years is their Canadian talent because before the last couple years I thought they had probably the weakest Canadian talent in the league. Well, and this was, remember supposed to be the big come down, okay, everyone left Montreal and we got the new owner here. We've had all the Gary Stern everything. Here they are. I mean it's second in the east. I mean you got to qualify everything but mean, I think this could be a lot worse off for the ettes right now, don't you think, Jason? Yeah, absolutely. I mean still 10 win season chance for 11, right. Anything else on this one? We'll power through the last two games here. Anything else? Nope. Alright, so let's get into this. I'll toss back to Jason first. I'm going to pull up a photo here. Any thought, we've talked a little bit about this Saskatchewan and Calgary and everything else. What did you make of this game specifically? The first half of this game was so, so ugly. And I think, was it you, Evan, that said in the group chat that Calgary just wants their season to be over. It was just like Saskatchewan was playing like that too. I felt like both of these teams did not win the game. I thought that Calgary didn't, they have a two score lead going into halftime, but I think at the end of the day they didn't look too great either. And then really it was just the turnovers in the second half that swung it in Calgary's direction. I think the turnover differential was five to nothing in favor of Calgary. So ultimately that's just your game right there. Saskatchewan, I think outgained them passing yards, rushing yards. But ultimately at the end of the day, that gave Calgary some short fields and Calgary was able to capitalize. I just wanted to give a shout out. We've had our feuds with three out and all that. Got to hang out, covers the stampedes, got to hang out with a little bit of Ryan Valentine down in Vegas, so I had a good time with that. Hooked him up with some good, I guess his son is a big Vegas Golden Knights fan because of, I don't understand. I'm like, okay, well you're obviously Calgary replace huge family. Anyway, we met up for a beer. Really fun to see that. I don't think the stamps season has worked out the way that he probably wanted it to, but they're getting the W here. Like I said, we're keeping it alive. I don't know for what regard, Jason or Evan, you know what I mean? Okay, we got to win out, but then we're still going to just get into the bus stop. Bc what did you make of this? Well, when I brought up the whole thing of it feels like Calgary just wants to lose. I think Farhan was the one that mentioned that on your show last week. That locker room is just kind of out. But regardless of everything that I had heard and everything that I expected, this was kind of my game of the week for lack of a better term. This was the game where I sat down and I'm like, I don't care what happens. I'm going to watch all four quarters. And by halftime I almost regretted that. I was like, oh yeah, this is one of those games. Yeah, it wasn't looking good. But then second half got really interesting. It looked like, I mean I was ready to half and again, the panelists were saying the same thing and Farhan was on the panel that night. It just felt like, I mean, you could have ended the game there. That's what it was, the whole vibe. It was like you could have just ended it there and Saskatchewan would've just closed the door and the west would've been all but locked up. But then the second half rode around and then suddenly all these things started happening. I credit Calgary's defense more than anybody for this win because they really, I think the most pivotal play of the game. There were a couple nice throws here and there by mayor, the one specifically to Luther Kuno, who that was incredible. And I tagged Luther in a tweet and I said, this is good. I'm glad I stuck around for this because that was one hell of a grab. But specifically their defense, I think the most pivotal moment in the game for me was Calgary had scored on an offensive touchdown. Saskatchewan gets the ball back first played Jake Doga throws a pick six. And that tied the game at 19. And I was like, okay, now we're in business. And you can feel like, I'm sure we've all experienced this watching football, but you can feel when there's a momentum shift and when a team The big, Big mo. Exactly. And you feel like that's the moment where if you're Calgary, you're like, okay, now we have to win. We've been gifted all this. We have to win something. It's just, again, it's the feeling you've got season on the line, you're in front of your home crowd. It's just the classic. It's a must win game. And in that moment you can tell that they were going to pull out all the stops for lack of a better term and just go get the job done. And they did. Somehow they did. Watching that first half, you would've never guessed it was even going to be possible. But they did it. And I don't know if that's a good or bad thing. I mean, again, this seems like we're talking about it as if it's some heavyweight matchup, but these teams have a combined 11 wins. So I don't know, it's nothing spectacular. But it was a good, it ended up being a good game and I'm glad that second half in particular, at least if you're a Calgary fan, I think you feel good. That was some of the better football that you've seen all season from a team that we have called Stale and sluggish and really just not exciting. I mean, hell, I know there's other teams in the league that have a worse record take. Ottawa and Edmonton is the two examples. They really are the only other teams in the league that have a worse record to some degree, depending on which point in the season we're talking about. I would prefer to watch those teams over Calgary at any given point in their season just because Calgary, I forget the specific stat, but T S N had some graphic that popped up during the game and it was like Calgary, I don't think they were maybe one in nine during the season at games where they were down at half. And I was like, so it really is a one half type of season for 'em, but not in this one. And this one was the one that mattered. And in football sometimes it really, I mean we were talking about the Bill's giants game. No matter how bad or ugly that game was, it just came down to the final play. That is your game and that's where it's important to capitalize and do the right thing. It all comes down to that one moment. Just like for Calgary, it all comes down to this one game to keep the season alive. Yes, you've had a lot of bad things and it hasn't been pretty and there's been so many ups and downs, but you're sitting there and you still have a chance you maybe shouldn't have a chance. The fact that yeah, we're in week 19 and they're still fighting for a playoff spot is incredible. But that's the cfl sometimes just given the number of teams and the way that the divisions are laid out. But overall, I'm happy for Calgary. I was pulling form in this game just to make it interesting again, whether or not either of those teams should be in the playoffs. I'm sure if you're a rough Riders or stamps fan, you're probably sitting there thinking, yes we are. But even some of their fans I feel like know that it's kind of a fluke to some extent just given what's happened this season in terms of their level of competition, everything like that. But overall, happy for Calgary and yeah, it'll be an interesting couple of weeks now to see who can get that spot. Because I mean now both teams are still in it. Keep in mind, yeah, Saskatchewan lost, but that doesn't necessarily mean Calgary gets the automatic bid. Saskatchewan could still very well be in it and things go on as I thought they would. But we'll see. It keeps it going for another couple of weeks and to be talking about interesting scenarios like that in the final two weeks of the regular season or whatever in the cfl. Don't know If you always get that, so I'm pleased. No, no talking to Giants Bills. If it was the cfl, you could have reviewed that as you could challenge that holding call at the end there. This is my embarrass. We'll get to Jason. This is my impression of Evans to watching at Calgary, Saskatchewan at six 30 Pacific on the Friday. Just like I'm still in this. It's still real to me. Damn it. Jason, thoughts on this? We'll talk to your tie cuts here before we get out of here, any other thoughts on Calgary or any of this? Yeah, I'll say this is that at least we have something to watch for over the last couple of weeks standing wise, because I think this is really, besides the long shot that BC still catches Winnipeg for first place in the West, this is really the only thing left to decide in the cfl standings besides maybe the number one pick for the cfl draft. But yeah, I think that's important for the cfl to have something meaningful the last couple of weeks. So we get that with the result of this game. One thing with Calgary, I thought that our offense looked really, really poor throughout this game. Besides that last final drive, that catch by Luther Avan. That was a nice drive. But besides that, they really didn't generate too many yards. Look at the running statistics, just really pathetic day for them and that's one thing that's really perplexed me about their season. This is a team that was first in rushing in each of the last two seasons in the cfl and they've completely dropped off. I think they're like eighth or ninth in rushing or seventh or eighth or something like that in rushing BC's last. But yeah, at the end of the day, the Calgary offense just continues to frustrate me, but at the end of the day, they're still in it. So let's get here. Last one, hurry up. Offense here before we get out. Nailbiter. I'll just play my heel promo here. Walking. I was in the bathroom at the Mexican restaurant getting ready for Adam Sandler, watching Sean White kick the walk-off field goal on my phone on CFL Plus. That's where we're at on here. Cutting my promo to Jason Hu here because I'm all bold. Once we win then I'm, I'm just sitting there. I get already set at the top of the show. I'm not going to Gray Cup if this doesn't work out the way we need it to. We'll go Jason and then we'll go Evan and then we'll get out of here. Jason, thoughts on this? You feel good about your tie cats? I mean they're still going to be in third. What did you make of this? Yeah, I wasn't too hurt by this loss. I thought that the TCAs in general played pretty well. I mean, there was some stuff I didn't like defensively, but it was good to see the offense move it with both of the quarterbacks in there. I mean, Beau had one of the most ugly pick sixes you'll see in the cfl this season on a screen pass early in this game. But I think he bounced back nicely from that and ultimately it was one of the more enjoyable games to watch in the cfl that season. This season I was in attendance and I thought that this game just had a lot of lead changes and I thought that it was just a really generally clean played game from both sides. Yeah, Vernon obviously, excuse me, had the interception here, but Bo looking good and Shilts kind of a one-two punch there. Interesting. One more question then Jason, we'll go to Evan. What do you make of how they have moved Bo back into the lineup here? It's very confusing to me. If they didn't do this last year, I would be even more confused, but I kind of see what they're doing here. They had Dane Evans and Matthew Shilts last year, and I mean, I think that may be the best way to use Matthew Shilts because clearly he's not a full-time starter in the cfl just because of his injury concerns. But in short dosages, he can be a very effective quarterback. And we've seen that. And I think the big question is how do they deploy it in the playoffs? Do they give Bo the entire game trust or $500,000 man or do they give Schultz the reins? If Bo struggles early in that game, only time will tell. I don't know. I think to take BC here to the wire and have to have that, I mean it was a lengthy field goal to get out because I'm remembering now because I drank a lot, sorry, at the Adam Sandler game, but Vernon got hurt and Dane came in and moving the field and this all coming back to my mind now. But I mean to me, I would feel very good about this. I mean, Montreal came in and kind of whipped Edmonton around a little bit in the second half. Ty Ka took BC a playoff team here to the last second of the game. I feel good about that. Evan, thoughts on this? Yeah, I mean this saw surprisingly ended up being one of the better games of the week in my opinion. I mean, I feel like a lot of people had this game circled. I didn't, I just kind of expected BC to go in there and to do the job, but Hamilton made it very close. Hamilton continues to prove that they are still playing at a high level and they really have come into form as a playoff team in the East. There's no denying that they're playing some of the best football that we've seen all season from really any team in the league, to be honest. It's a very, it's become, I should say, very fun to watch. So yeah, I mean ultimately this one came down to a field goal. Hamilton still kind of has their two quarterback system in place with Bo Levi and Matt Schultz. But yeah, this was a fun game and lot of offense in this one I felt like. I feel like this was too kind of, I don't know. Well Hamilton I feel like wasn't an incredible offense until recently somewhat, but BC we all know has their great pass and game and things of that nature really mean. I could go into detail on some of the players here, but I think we all know who performed well in this game. What I really want to focus on here in the last couple minutes is Dan Evans coming into that game just being called up out of nowhere at the most critical moment of the game. Hey Dane, things are tied. We need to go. You're the guy that's going to have this drive that puts us in position to win. For him to do that, just come right off the bench and complete four passes in a row and then have the game winning field goal. I mean, that's a lot easier said than done. Most quarterbacks come into that situation and I mean I think about Tyson, badge for the Bears played for the first time yesterday, First snap for the game, First Snap fumble, return for a touchdown. Welcome to the N F L and I get it, Dane Evans has played before Tyson Badge has it. So maybe that's not a great comparison, but either way, both guys were kind of suddenly called into action and as the backup quarterback, I've always said at any level of the game, that's one of the more interesting positions like kicker. There's a couple others, but being the backup quarterback is so interesting because it feels like sometimes you're just sitting there to kind of coach and listen and look, I haven't been in those shoes obviously, but in terms of actual playing time, unless there's a significant injury, backups aren't seeing the field much. But in this case, not only Dane Evans didn't have to play a majority of the game, but he had to play the most important part. So the fact for him to go out there and do that and get BC in the position to win, I think that was very, that's a good sign. And hey Dane, I think again, well what made it even more important too is it was his return to Hamilton, the fact that he played snaps in that game against the team that he spent several years with and kind of made, well, I mean he was there for a while. He did some great things there. Unfortunately last season was a bit of a disappointment, therefore why he's not still there now. And they've had all these, I mean they've played three different quarterbacks this season, so they've definitely gotten a bit creative there. But for him to go back to Hamilton and to get some playing time, that was good to see. And I know he was tweeting about emotions were definitely running high. It meant a lot to him. He got to put the dagger into his old team's heart, which is always an interesting storyline to follow. Jason, toss it back to you before we get out of here. Any other thoughts BC Hamilton? Yeah, really happy for Dane. I mean, even though it was against Hamilton, I thought that it was pretty cool that he got to come in there. I was like, as soon as I saw him enter the game, I said to my buddy who I was at the game with, I was like, what's going to happen? He is going to drive down the field and some stories and sports just write themselves like that. So congratulations to Dane. And then I just want to finish off with a couple of shout outs for both of these teams. Matthew Betts just tied the Canadian Sac record in cfl was 17 Sacks tied up. Brent Johnson who played for the BC Lions when he set that record, 17 sacks. And then for Hamilton, Dexter Lawson, who's a defensive back, he had an incredible interception that looked like it was going to be very pivotal towards Baby Hamilton getting a victory in this one in the final three minutes. But ultimately BC was able to regain the lead on that last second field goal. But what an incredible interception. If you guys haven't seen the replay of that, go check that out. Yeah, friends of the show here, you just can't be a quarterback. Any other position you come on the show, you're probably going to be doing. All right, Kevin Brown, even with the loss play. Good. Well, we made it. There you go. cfl week 19 in the books. Got through it. A little N F L should be good. Like I said, like and subscribe. I think stuff's coming down this week. xfl USFL. We'll get through all of that stuff and then I'll reach out. Maybe we'll get a Winnipeg, maybe try this week with them having a home game. And then I think I have a couple ideas for cfl people to come on to talk. So stay tuned for all that. Jason's got his stuff. I was checking out his previews and all your NFL stuff as well. So Evan, thanks as always. We'll see you guys next time.

XFL-USFL Merger, Is an Agreement in Place? Is XFL/USFL Merged League “Dead” on Arrival? CFL Week 19!

Coming up this week on the mar cast, will the xfl and usfl reportedly have an agreement in place in regards to the terms for their upcoming merged league? Both leagues are now entering a quiet period waiting for the paperwork to be finalized but with fans of both leagues the xfl and U SS F L already feeling left out from this process is the new merge league dead on arrival. Grab your deputy hat and do your best Rick Grime's. Carl impression as we ask the question, are we the Walking Dead? We tell ourselves we did. We are the Walking Dead huge show this week. Really excited to bring back Anthony Miller, get his thoughts on the xfl usfl merger agreement as reported by Mike Mitchell last week. What are we hearing timeline wise coming up? What is Anthony expecting? Is Anthony going to be on board with all of this Is done? Excited to hear from him. They have to merge at this point. It's too late now. Like you said, the trust would be broken if they don't merge and they're like, oh yeah, we're just going to keep playing because everyone knows that it means okay, well they're going to die. They're going to die a slow, painful death and why am I going to be involved in this league if I know it's not going to survive after next year? Because that's what it really is, especially for the xfl. If this merger doesn't happen after next year, they're done and the U SS F L, they maybe have one or two more years and then they're done. Then lots of cfl stuff to talk through. Heading into week 19 here we have cfl on TSMs bar ology talking through all of the different teams throughout the cfl, which coaches are on the hot seat, off season changes, Farhan is hearing and also talking cfl playoffs. That's a loss they're going to look back on and regret. I don't know that there's a path to victory for BC in Winnipeg in the Western final and I got a lot of respect for that team, but that team's built a certain way and Winnipeg is built a certain way and if the conditions are what they typically are in mid-November in Winnipeg, I Think the Winnipeg team is built For those conditions. Then longtime friend of the show, Greg Peach coming back on former Edmonton, Hamilton and Winnipeg Blue Bombers player getting his thoughts cfl week 19 exciting matchups this weekend. Obviously I'm rooting for Winnipeg, but Vernon just a top notch, top notch dude and I'm so excited for him and the success that he's having. I mean he's bombing it this year and I'd love to see him break that 5,000 yards for the season. And then speaking of Edmonton, we have Kevin Brown standout running back from the Edmonton Elks joining the show, getting his thoughts on what's been a rocky, but overall a feeling like we're trending in a positive direction that season for the Edmonton Elks, We're building now for next season and we're approaching every game like it's a playoff game. So for us it's to be physical, to hit 'em first and to come out fast. Hope you guys enjoy like and subscribe. Hey guys, welcome to the Mark Cast. Read here. Shout out Greg Parks xfl board on his zombie analogy this week talking on the Ville Insider podcast. I texted Greg the second I saw his tweet. I said thank you very much for helping me figure out the theme for this week. Coming back from Vegas was down there for the cracking game against the Vegas Gold Knight. So appreciate Greg help make my life easy. Trying to figure out was going to go with the quiet place that John Krasinski movie Still might depending on how long this quiet period goes with the xfl, we might be entering the quiet place next week, but for right now we are the Walking Dead. We have Rick, Rick, Carl Grimes, all of that stuff. Really appreciate that good show today. Like I said, appreciate Anthony Miller making time here balancing. We got Thursday night football tonight, Anthony's work schedule, cracking, playing the preds, lots of things going on. Really appreciate that Farhan, always making time. I didn't get to see him but got to correspond with Farhan last week when we were at the BC place for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers game There you can hear my thoughts extended with Evan and Jason on the Monday recap we did following that. Really appreciate Greg Peach coming back on. Always happy to jump on. He hops onto the moment's notice, happy to chat with him and really appreciate his willingness. And then of course Edmonton always a great team to work with getting players on. Really appreciate getting to talk with Kevin Brown with the Edmonton Elks here. Like I said, season probably not what they wanted it to be but certainly feels like things are trending in the right direction. Farhan thinks the same kind of in his interview, you'll hear it coming up. So that should do it for me today. Unless there's any future read updates, I'll check in at the end of the show. But like I said, hope you guys enjoy weird time right now. Quiet play zombie xfl showcases. Didn't seem like that was a big to-do over the weekend. We have a draft coming up that's been delayed so we'll see what's going on. But stay tuned, make sure you're subscribed that we'll keep you updated with the shorts and live shows and everything else as need be. So we'll see you guys at the end. Next. Well Anthony, I'm doing my best Rick Grime's impression today where the walking dead, Carl and I fell off that show I didn't make it to. I did watch that everything that you missed in the Walking dead in 17 minutes or whatever after the season ended. But we are here. We had you on the breaking news day with Mike and the live stream. Now more time to process. We obviously have the agreement that Mike put out last week, the report after our show and then the Ben Fisher's report as well. We'll get into all that. How are you feeling now? Kind of two weeks post removed from all this? I think the feelings have kind of died down. Now I'm at the point where I'm just like, all right, let's get this train rolling, let's try to figure out what's going on. I think just the idea of not knowing how this is going to work out with the merger at this point I've kind of calmed down a bit and I'm just like, we'll just kind see what happens because I mean there's so many possibilities and I think once we have our minds running wild with it, then it's going to drive us nuts. So I'm just going to kind of let the process play out. Yeah, I know. So they have the showcase on Saturday and Greg wasn't at it, but I think he did the writeup because Michael was there with, what is it now, the Player 54 podcast? He was there, Buckley was there. Greg called it the zombie xfl, which I thought very kind of apropos right now. I don't know and I feel similarly about the usfl, like okay, we're tweeting out. Okay, Brandon Aubrey stats today from the Dallas Cowboys, but it doesn't really feel like either League is doing a lot and I don't know if you're a fan of either league, how we're supposed to feel right now. How do you feel? I mean it's hard to say that the xfl is not doing anything because face it, their off season began in May, so all their player signings, their college drafts, all that stuff happened during the summer. So I think we talked about this in our group chat, but I think Mike brought up that pretty much every team is at 70 or more players. So it's like how many more players can you sign? Obviously you want to try to get some of the top players in free agency, anyone who dropped off after training camp, so they probably want to go after those players, but for the most part this is probably going to be the slower part of the off season for the xfl. For the usfl, it's going to be different because their off season began in July, so now they got this October free agency going on right now and they're going to go after players that just got their contracts released from other usfl teams and try to pick up other players. So it seems like they're a little more active, but that's because they need to rebuild their rosters and stuff like that. So I don't think too much into the x FFLs not doing anything. The usfl is doing very little because there's really not much to do right now unless they set up these drafts. But the XFL has already kind of pushed off one of the drafts, so I'm sure there's kind of a holding period, but there's got to be a point where these leagues, I wonder if there's some kind of deadline for them to be like, look, if we don't merge by this date, we're just going to have to move forward with our seasons. Because the one thing I've been thinking about is what are the stadium leases for the xfl? Do they have a certain timeframe that they have the stadiums? Because if they try to move to April start at the same time as the usfl, that's going to mess up all their stadium leases. So honestly at this point I'm not really banking on this leak. No, the two leaks merging for 2024, it doesn't really make sense to you at this point. Just play out the seasons and then make all your changes after the US F L season's done next year. I think timing wise, that makes the most sense because we lived through all this stuff with the Vegas and getting the schedule out and they waited too long and that's why we didn't have the Battle Hawks weren't home for the first three weeks and this isn't like Taylor Swift, I'm booking the tour and okay, we're going to make space here to kind do it. Does that excite the fan bases going into this year and knowing that that's going on next year or is this kind of a monkey on the back? Well, this is kind of a lame duck season. I don't know how to react to that. What do you make? Yeah, it's interesting. I don't really know how to make of it either because especially with the reports coming out about some of the teams that might be on the out, is that going to affect ticket sales? Is that going to affect people's interests in these leagues, especially in Houston, let's just say they choose the gamblers over the roughnecks and the roughnecks don't survive. Are those fans really even going to care about the roughnecks? Are they going to come out for it knowing that this team's going to get swept under our feet after the season? So I think just the uncertainty of that can definitely mess up the interest level. I seriously doubt they're going to do as well in the ratings. I doubt they're going to do as well in attendance. And you just brought up Vegas, that's a great question. What's going to happen with the Vipers? What if the xfl continues? I seriously doubt at this point they can find a home for them unless they already have a stadium agreement already in place for some cities. So are they going to end up playing in Arlington and Arlington's going to have two teams? It's it's a holding period right now and I don't know if the interest is going to quite be there. It could end up being like this season for both leagues is going to be a squash and they're going to rebrand with this N S F L X, whatever the hell is going to be. But it's going to be something and I think they're probably just going to say Forget about this upcoming season. And that's where I get to this difficult position. So if you go in, we make, and we'll talk through Mike's article here, but we're in the holding period they've submitted, which it was like weird timing. We had Kaplan on last week and we're kind of pontificating about that and I messaged Mike, I'm like, is this really weird timing that we were kind of having this debate about whether the agreement was submitted and that Mike's got the article, but that's great. I love the clarity of that. So how do you expect a, yeah, if you're a coach on the Vegas vipers, if the announcement comes out, okay, the Vipers are going away this year, how do you do that or else how do you live through not knowing for a year which teams are going to make it right? And it's the same with the season tickets. I mean I was just in Vegas with my friend Michael and he's like, I'm out. I want my money back from the Sea Dragons tickets. I am moving on because I now have no faith in any of this at all, even if the sea dragons survive, but we're going to a hub. I have no faith in any of this at all. Yeah, I agree. And if I was a fan for somebody like Seattle or the Houston Roughnecks or I would feel the same way, I wouldn't have any loyalty to them and it is going to make this season awash. So I wonder could they start moving into a hub model this year and just start making the transition and get people ready for it? Like what about the coaches for these teams that are going to leave? I think it's just being told, Hey, you're going to go through 2024, then you're going to lose your job. I don't know. What about the staff members? I mean it's probably going to affect them more. I mean coaches, employers can leave and go find other teams and try to go to the N F L or I F L wherever, but what about the staff members who are full-time employees of the xfl and they're told, Hey, I know you work for the Seattle Sea Dragons, but to let you know after 2024 you're done, you're going to be released after the season, people are going to be losing jobs out of it. So I don't know, no matter what happens, this is going to be a debacle for a lot of people's lives. It's going to mess up a lot of people's lives and it's going to be a really bumpy road for these leagues for the next year or two to try to get through the PR part of this. But once they can get everything settled down and get whatever, it's 10, 12 teams rolling and then they can start building off of that, then I think they're going to be fine. But until then for the next year or two, it's going to be a PR nightmare for both leagues. Well, because I was talking with one of the staff members for one of the teams and yeah, they were saying, we kind of need to know now I don't have the luxury of having a month, two months, a year, whatever. I mean we just saw Matt, the communications guy for the Renegades and he's with Rev and that's also in Dallas anyway, so maybe that's a better position and I'm sure it has more stability on that, but you're sitting there, why am I waiting around for this at this point? I feel like it was already a leap to sign on to this league. Hey, it's a startup, whatever, and now it's the first speed bump in the road. They're like, well, we don't even know if people want to do it. I'm like, I'm getting off the ship right now. It was hard for me as someone that's followed this, not even having my livelihood rely on this. I couldn't imagine that stress. Yeah, I mean a lot of these people have families to think about and they can't be a part of something if they don't know. I mean, I can't even imagine what the last two, three weeks have been for a typical staff member of this league because right now they can only think about, am I going to still have a job? We talked this before. We know what happens with mergers, where mergers happen, people end up losing jobs. That's just the reality of it. They need to cut on, they have a budget, they have to cut people out. So it's going to be the harsh reality of it, and again, it's going to be a nightmare wise. A lot of people are going to lose jobs. A lot of people are going to be, excuse my language, they're going to be pissed off because they're losing their jobs. So it's going to be a nightmare regardless, and I can't imagine what the employees are going through right now. So we had Mike's article out here talking about the agreement coming out late Friday because I talked with Dan, and Dan had said there's one thing to say we're intending to merge. It's another thing to kind of proclaim that and you're filing the paperwork. We've seen the P G A and Liv say they want to move into a merger or not gotten to that point yet. So now we have this, it's at least a 30 day kind of waiting period while undergoes a regulatory review. Does that make you feel like at least we have the shot clock now we know what's happening with this. I I guess we kind of have a general idea of what the timeline could be. I think the article said it could be about a month that it could take, but it could also take longer. It also take shorter. So I think we're still in the holding period where we don't, I mean I guess we kind of have a general idea. It could be a month, but with Fox's involvement and stuff like that, is that going to make it a little bit longer? Is there a longer conversation that needs to be had? So I certainly hope that if they can figure this out within 30 days and start getting the ball rolling, but you just never know with these situations. So I still feel like we're still in this waiting period where we don't know what's going to happen. Now we're in mid-October where four months away from the xfl season starting and we still don't know if they're going to truly merge or not. There could be an issue that pops up with it. So it's just one of those where, you know what? I'm taking my mind off of it and I'm just going to wait until the merger actually happens and then we can start talking about what's going to happen from there. In terms of, and we kind of pontificated about this during the live show, the timing of this kind of where Mike had reported they had been talking since after the usfl championship game that I don't know, it almost feels like this took too long to get to this point where it is the same thing with the Vegas thing last year. There's this thing, Hey, you got a hard deadline, you got to hit here. We're kind of messing around. I don't know if you could handle a Mulligan or shift at this point. I don't know. It just feels weird timing to me that we're in mid-October and we're debating this very similarly to last year with the Vegas situation. Yeah, because like I said, I feel like at this point the Vipers, are you going to find a home for them in, I don't know, Arizona, Nashville that they talk? I think it's too late for that. I think you either go back to Cashman Field or you're going to be playing in Arlington. I think we're going to have the Arlington Vipers and the Arlington Renegades. I really think that's what's going to end up happening because I don't know how quickly this merger is going to happen. I mean at this point it's going to be such a rush job if they just go with, all right, 10, 12 teams, we're cutting everybody, we're cutting these four teams and we're moving forward with this in April. I just feel like that's too hectic and there's so many elements to it that they got to think about. So I certainly hope they don't rush this. I hope at this point I think it's just smarter. Let's just get through the 2024 seasons with the xfl and u, SS F L and then just merge from there because right now it's going to be a mess if they try to do it and I'm really worried about how it's going to look on television, how the teams are going to look, it's going to be a mess. Does the fact that, and we tracked all this with the cfl, the fact that the xfl was the one to reach out to the usfl, I guess first off, does that, now that we've lived through that, does that in any way give you hesitancy about the X L's commitment to a long-term path here considering they were the ones one year and a loss, they were the ones that reached out. I think I have longevity questions for both leagues, but probably more for the xfl if I'm being honest. For them to be the ones that reached out and said, Hey, let's merge. That just shows me that yes, we talked about the $60 million losses are not as big as people make it out to be, but still at the same time they did lose money and they went bigger on the picture and got their teams into home markets, so they did spend a lot more money. That is the reality of the situation. And you look at Redbird, you look at Dwayne, the Rock Johnson, Danny Garcia, do they want to spend the money to keep this league running if they're not going to make profit off of it? It just seems like right now, I hate to say it, Dwayne the Rock Johnson has not had the greatest of years over the last year or so with how Black Adam's done and I don't think he's really generated the revenue that he was hoping he was going to get and he's not as involved with DC as he was hoping he was going to be when he got kicked out the door. So does he legitimately have the money? I mean Redbird is so involved in other sports teams and stuff like that that I'm sure they can probably help and pay for it, but what about Dwayne the Rock Johnson and Danny Garcia? It was just interesting how the two of them were just so vague about their statement after the merger where it's just three, four words. That's it. That's all we're tweeting. It just feels to me, I think they're almost kind of creeping out the door and they need to lean on the usfl to save them. So yeah, I think the xfl may end up dying because they're spending too much money and the usfl is going to die because people just don't want to watch football games with no fans. It just takes away from the experience. I know usfl fans don't want to hear that, but that is the reality of the situation. So the merger has to happen, but I feel like the xfl may die quicker if they don't get this done. It seems like, and I can't remember if we talked about on the podcast or but redbird came in, Hey, we get the rock on this, we're going to tweet. He can put out, this is going to be maybe an easier flip than we thought and what I've said online before too is just because the US F L outlasting, the xfl, okay, businesswise safer makes more sense, but that doesn't necessarily make it right, but from a fan viewer perspective, and if the U F L's only way they won was just, well we outlasted the xfl because we weren't spending this much money, to me that's not a victory. I mean I'm kind of getting in with the A E W W W E stuff right now and there's a lot of a pissing contest going back and forth with them and it's interesting to see how these companies work, but purely just, well, we didn't spend as much so we outlasted you. That doesn't to me justify the business model as successful as more of just it has a longevity, but I don't know what that plan is to expand, if that was really terrible way to describe that. No, it makes sense. I mean we heard Darryl Johnson say last year that he was disappointed with the ratings. So what makes the usfl think the ratings are going to get better in season three if they're still in their hub cities and it's the same teams? I just don't see how they're going to do better. I think more likely the xfl has a little bit of a better chance of having better ratings, just more established and hopefully maybe they can get the Vipers into a good home and I think they have a better chance of it. But the usfl can't lose money if they're not making money either. So not having fans and all that, it still is like how are they making money? How are they generating revenue? So at the end of the day, yeah, the xfl may die sooner because they're spending too much money, but the usfl is going to die a slow painful death because they're not spending money either, so it's going to end up hurting them. So that's how both leagues are going to die. They're just going to die in different ways. Last question that I want to talk through, Ben Fisher said before we get out to me talking about this and the xfl reaching out, it is kind of like, I think it's Seinfeld where it's like you don't want to lose face, right? You want to save face and it feels like, and we've talked through the red, they were the ones that was kind of the chicken match and they were the ones that pulled up first. I mean I've lived through the Monday night wars and all of that kind of stuff and it is one thing to go head to head or whatever and the first one to pull for whatever reason and it could just be Red Birds cold feet or whatever, but it doesn't help that, I guess just your messaging the fans as well. It's like, Hey, trust us, we're going to be here for you guys when it was the first sign of challenges here and it's like, wow, okay, we're done. Yeah, I think the difference though is when it was like WWE versus W C W and stuff like that, even though W C W ended up dying, at least the wwe, at least fans knew WWE was going to survive no matter what because they have such a big name brand that there's nothing that's going to really kill them unless it's such a massive issue that ends up killing the loop. But WWE is going to survive in this case U SS F L and xfl are going to die. So it's just a matter of if the US F l wants to celebrate lasting one more season than them, alright, great, but you're probably still going to end up folding. You're not making money either unless you actually go into your team's home markets, which I don't know if they're willing to, it just doesn't seem like they're really in a rush to, they keep hanging out in Kenton, Ohio and it's just like you don't have a team there and it doesn't make any sense. I get why they went slow and it's probably the smarter business decision, but at the same time it's like you're heading to season three, you should be in home markets by now. If you wanted to slow progression, fine, but now we're heading to season three and it doesn't sound like it's going to be six to eight cities. It sounds like they're going to still stick with the four hub cities and that's not encouraging at all. If they were really making money, they would progress a little bit quicker than that. Well, it doesn't excite, I mean, and this is why I've said on here, depending on how this goes, could be hesitant about this. I need to see a path forward here and where I don't see, well, the Sea Dragons are going to play in Arizona for a year, but then don't worry you're going to get it back. You can't guarantee that now. I mean we've lived through canceled season this now, like I said, you're asking so much of the fans, it's just putting 'em in a hard position. I just don't know if executives up in the ivory towers living through this and just kind of what you're asking these fans to do. I mean we've talked before Pat Rafino was saying there's St. Louis people that flat are not buying season tickets and tell there's a season two because they don't have any faith in that. The other thing I just wanted to get to before we get out of here, so Ben Fisher, I'm sitting there Friday, Ben tweets out, Ben's been on the show sports business really. He is like merge xfl and usfl league to play on Fox and they're trying to sell teams and I'm like, I emailed Ben. I'm like, okay, what is the context of this? It was just really weird how he tweeted that. So I guess he was at some symposium at the Columbia University Sports Management Conference and Larry Jones who's a Fox Sports E V P and consultant to the network, just Ben said it was literally 90 seconds of the thing, but they were going to play on Fox, which I said spoiler alert like a TV or a merge league plans to play in the football network and then obviously still looking forward to selling the franchises in three to four years, which I will give my thoughts in a minute. I'll ask yours on that. What do you make of that part of it that it still would be this Merge leagues plan to sell franchises off? Let's see, it's 2023, they start in 2022, so next year will be three years and they're still not in home markets. I just don't see how they can sell the franchises. I mean they're still in the hub model, so are they adding three, four more years now to that timeline and they're hoping to sell it? It's just at some point it's just like, I don't know, I'm just not buying it. I don't think they have the business model to get to that point. This is the conversation that has been talked about where I'm sure both leagues to eventually get to the point where they're having team owners that are running these teams and paying the money for it. But again, we're heading into season three. We have four hub cities with these eight teams in the us F l. It's just like you can't keep adding on to the timeline. It's either you're going to make the push to get in the home market, you're going to make the push to have people. The reason why nobody wants to buy these franchises is just the ratings keep going down. There's not as much interest as I think people would like to have. This is a very niche market. There's a certain fan base that likes watching spring football and I don't know if it has enough to really get people's interest be like, oh, let's go buy a football team in the usfl and hope we can make money off it. They're going to lose so much money if their teams are not even in their home markets or they are in the home markets that fans don't care about in the cities because they haven't been playing those cities for all these years and now all of a sudden they need to care about New Orleans breakers. What if somebody buys New Orleans breakers three, four years down the road and they're like, well, it's been like five, six years. We haven't had them in our city. Why would I care? That's why you want to put them in the home market. So Don, I just don't see it happening. Don't think they're going to self franchise it. I just don't. People, I don't think millionaires and billionaires want to spend the money on a football league where they're guaranteed to lose money. They're not going to make profit off of these teams. It's hard for me unless you have a team in the market for five years, 10 years and you're showing continual growth and revenue model that way. To me it's like here you go, spend the money and we cover the cfl. There's nine teams in the cfl. The CFL collectively loses money every single year and has for its entire lifespan. Some of the community owned teams make money and they can profit and then there's lean years, but collectively, and then that came out during the covid when they were trying to get funding from the Canadian government and they said no, I think it was eight to 10 million a year collectively the cfl. When you balance it all out, and this is a league that this is a national league of candidate, you're asking so much of this and this feels like another step of Redbird reaching out to Fox like, here you take this and now it's well in three or four years here you take this at some point someone's got to take ownership of this and really dive in, invest the money. Fox, like you said, doesn't seem willing to do it. Exit Fell has not, at least one year in does not seem willing to do it and there's no way to do this on the cheap unless you're Brian Woods having players pay doing a hub model TV only. There's no way to do this in-home markets without losing considerable amount of money and it doesn't seem like anybody gets that. There's only two ways that selling franchises could work. One, you get Taylor Swift to come to your games, which I don't think the usfl xfl is going to do. So two, you got to get the N F L involved. I mean at the end of the day, the only way this thing works is you get the N F L to buy into having a spring league. They put money into it and then you'll get interest from people wanting to buy franchisees. I mean look at the W N B A that league, as much as I love the W N B A, they lose millions of dollars a year and the only way it survives is that the N B A has been fronting money for them for years to keep their franchises and keep the league afloat. That's the only way this is going to work too. That's the only reason why the N F L Europe lasted so long. The N F L had to keep it afloat, but they were losing millions off of it and that's why they got rid of it. So it's going to be, you had to make a pitch to the N F L. It's not selling franchises is you have to sell the league to the N F L and make them think, yes, we need a spring league, we need a developmental league for these players. The only way this is going to work, they cannot survive on their own without the N F L getting involved dropping their money to help this league survive. Otherwise all these spring are going to keep dying. Some league has got to step up and make a deal with the N F L, but is the N F L willing to lose millions of dollars a year? I don't know if they are. They made it clear after they cut N F L Europe that they were not willing to lose that much money each year. Are they willing to do it again? I don't know. I mean they've been getting glowing endorsements from Dan Campbell and Bill Belichick, which could help, but at the end of the day, the N F L is all about making money. That's all they care about. And if they see that the usfl and the xfl, if they combine the N S F L, whatever the hell's going to be if see it that could help 'em, then they'll do it. But I don't know. I think the only way this works is if the N F L'S involved. Last point for me here, we'll get out of here and I'll give if you have any other thoughts on this, if I have not made it, I just want to make sure I make it as credibly clear as I can here I see the xfl, they're tweeting out crossword puzzle stuff today. It's great. I mean do social work. That's awesome. We're selling these suites, whatever. I cannot imagine a world where I would ever recommend any xfl USS F L fan to put down money right now on any of this because to me, and I don't mean to be blunt about it, but when it's the chicken match, whatever and you blink and to me it's like they blinked and now I don't have faith in this anymore until I see a long-term plan or an agreement of this is what's happening or this didn't work out, but we're still committed and even at that point it's words. It's so hard to build up the trust for anything in the world, but especially something like this, and I feel like if you're in a relationship with someone and maybe they didn't cheat on you, but they're like, well, I was thinking about it or I was texting, you're like, once you kind of devolve that trust, it is very hard to build that back and I don't know anyone in the world that's buying Hawk Suites right now or Renegade Suites or the Seattle. I got the email, the Seattle Suites to me you've soured this and at least for the xfl, and I don't speak for the usfl fans, but I say as a season ticket holder for the xfl that's bought four tickets front row at 50 yard lines trust is very devolved at dissolved at this point. Yeah, I agree. Look, they opened up the can of worms, so at this point you can't put those worms back in the can, so it's either you go all in on this merger or this thing is pretty much going to be over. I even wonder are they even going to play a season next year? Are they even going to legitimately do it even if they do a merger and they wait until 2025, do they even play this year? To me it's just now we're at a point where you either got to merge so quickly and just get it over with and get it done, or maybe you need to hold off for one more year. Maybe you need to make sure you get this merger. Maybe you need to find a way. Can we save 16 teams and make sure nobody loses their jobs? It's, there's so many elements to this and I mean at the end of the day we've talked about it, they have to merge at this point. It's too late now. Like you said, the trust would be broken if they don't merge and they're like, oh yeah, we're just going to keep playing. Everyone knows that. It means, okay, well they're going to die. They're going to die a slow painful death and why am I going to be involved in this league if I know it's not going to survive after next year? What it really is, especially for the xfl, if this merger doesn't happen after next year, they're done in the usfl, they maybe have one or two more years and then they're done. Yeah, like I said, even if you didn't physically, and I am not saying cheated as there aren't some felonies, the second that you were like, I'm out of this relationship, I just don't think with the fans you can ask them to go back in and like you said, if this doesn't go and even if it does, if it doesn't look in the form that I think a lot of people want, we've already had comments and I think Anthony, I appreciate it. Like I said, kind of keeping an eye. I haven't gotten an update about the Broncos game, so I don't know if they've scored yet. Krakens still holding the Predator zero zero here, so go get to your stars. I appreciate it. Anything else from you? No, I'm good. I appreciate the time, Reid. And I would just say, let's see how many times Taylor Swift have been on camera. It's probably more than the score is, so Yeah, Al Michaels was like, I'm not talking about that. So we'll see. I dunno, Amazon pays your paycheck, so we'll see what Al does here. Yeah, he's definitely going to talk about it. Well, back here today, we were a few hundred feet from each other on Friday at BC place here and now we have Farhan here live. What about those Vancouver Canucks, man really just coming out of the gate, all cylinders, siren. Yeah, they played great and certainly nobody expected them to do that to a team that good. And maybe Edmonton kind of took it for granted because they've had their way with Vancouver over the years and so much anticipation having been around the Conex a decade ago when they had goals and meaningful aspirations here of getting to a cup final. You could see that there were moments early that sometimes you just don't have it when you're looking that far ahead. And maybe the owners didn't have it last night, but you got to give the kuck credit. There was a lot of questions going into the game and a lot of storylines. And for Brock Besser with what he's been through with the illness and eventual passing of his father over the last couple of years, cool to see him get four goals for one day. They were on top of the hockey world. We'll see what it looks like. They play Edmonton again on Saturday. I still think this is a bubble team, but at least that gave them an indication of what they could be if they play the game the right way. Yeah, Well, was I going to say Connor Bedard score the goal? We know he's not a bust, so that'll be it for the hockey talker on the podcast. It was Perfect On Rod show talking cracking. Yeah, it was crazy. I'm like, now I'm the Kraken guy. Anyway, we're here talking cfl week 19. I want to get your thoughts on the Edmonton situation and all of that as well, but to me, and obviously you were in the professional sense, I was in the fan since Friday, but heartbreaking, heartbreaking loss for the lions. What did you read of that? To me, that was the season kind of finale for me. Yeah, it was tough, right? I mean that's a loss they're going to look back on and regret. I don't know that there's a path to victory for BC in Winnipeg in a western final, and I got a lot of respect for that team. But that team is built a certain way and Winnipeg is built a certain way and if the conditions are what they typically are in mid-November in Winnipeg, I think the Winnipeg team is built for those conditions right now. You know me, I know enough people around the league, people think, oh, you live in Vancouver, you're a lions homer. I'm not, but I certainly was hoping they would win that game for the only reason that it would've made for a better West final. I think the Western final N B C would've been a pick them. I don't think the lines would've been favored. I think it just would've been a 50 50. Either team could win, both teams could put their best foot forward and it would've been a lot of fun to watch. I think now it's likely to be a much more one-sided, less entertaining game if you're a neutral observer as opposed to a Winnipeg fan. So I think that's disappointing for them. And BC had it right? They had the lead and people are going to focus on Dominic Rimes and what happened at the end of the game. But there were so many moments during that game, beginning with the kickoff out of bounds after BC took a two score lead that just gave Winnipeg some life to get right back into it. And then so many others, I thought they got a little out coached in the second half. There were a lot of things that I think they're going to regret or wish they had back In terms of, yeah, because we've talked about this. I don't think the lions would be favored at all at home, but it's at least an even playing field where you go in and the conditions were so much, but I went back, obviously we were there and then I went back and listened to your call at the end of the game and rhymes and all of that. How is that just a brain fart? How did you read that and he kept looking back and trying to, how did you process that whole situation? Yeah, look, these things happen fast and Rick Campbell said after the game that he did call the receivers in to explain the situation, rhymes was not in that conversation. The other receivers were, but rhymes himself said after the game that the receivers did talk to me about it and I knew the situation and I made a mistake. And for him, he just saw the end zone. There's no guarantee of a field goal. As good as Sean White is, you might not be a hundred percent sure of where you are in the field or how much time is left, and if you see the end zone, you might want to just take it now. Certainly when he broke the second tackle, I think it was from Evan Hol, he was at about, or sorry, home was the first one, I forget who the second one was. It might've been cram de and then I think it was around the 32 yard line, and it was a couple seconds left on the clock. So if he gives himself up and goes down, it's a very makeable field goal for Sean White, but it's hard to process that in real time. It looks so easy from afar, and if he had caught it and gone down right away, maybe he's too far away. So there were just so many moments in that game and you and I both know how football works that we get so focused on two things, the last plays and the quarterback play. Those are the two things that everybody wants to focus on. But there are so many more other things that the lions could lament. I mean, you just look at the spot. I certainly thought, not so much in the moment, but after the fact when I looked at more replays that Vernon Adams did have the first down and it was a bad spot. There were so many things along the way that BC can look back on, but you know what? Convert on third down why you can't convert on third and one. And we're not talking about rhymes. We're not talking about a bad spot. So give Winnipeg credit, they rallied, they showed what champions do, right? They just kept fighting. Yeah, I don't, and I had tweeted that out following the Packers game Monday where they had the spot against the Raiders. And I don't understand how the CFLs call center isn't there. That, and I understand that we had used the challenges earlier in the game and all of that. The command center could have gotten involved there. They could have, and I haven't heard back yet on whether they did, but it happened so fast it doesn't sound like they did In terms of, I dunno, just reflections for that because I, how do you view, I guess, and I don't want to write the obituary too early, but how do you view the BC Lions this season? I was talking with people in the stands and I think that BC had done a good job, Matt and everyone with the team of this is a really important game. We were talking with people even after the game like, oh, so were they out? I'm like, well, no, that wasn't a playoff game, but it kind of felt that way. Is BC's window are we going into next year in terms of this championship caliber team? How do you view them kind of in the spot now? Yeah, I don't think they're going anywhere, right? Vernon Adams is going to be there. I think Vernon Adams is a quarterback, took a really good step this season and is going to continue to take a step. I'm not willing to write this off yet for the league. I mean, I'm not going to come on any shows and say, oh, don't watch the West Final. Right? That's not how I it, right? Because this is football and the Lions are still a good football team, so there's still a lot of growth to happen, but there was a lot of angst in the marketplace about what's this season going to look like for the Lions without Nathan Rourke, right? And whether you believed or didn't believe in Vernon, you probably thought, ah, this team can't really contend without Nathan. Well, guess what they did? And they are, they're contending. And Vernon's had a great year, and really for me, that game kind of determined my M O P, right? Vernon was right in there trading punches with Zach Calleros and Brady Oliveira was right there. So Vernon's not going anywhere. He's not old. The core of that receiving core is going to be back. I don't know about Lucky Whitehead, but I think the rest of 'em are all going to be back and part of the mix of what's going on. And it was a really good group. And then defensively, most of the pieces are there, so they're still going to have to add, but it's not like you look at Winnipeg and you think they're getting older. Their core, whether they want to admit it or not, their core is appreciably getting older, whether you're Jeff Co, Jefferson, big Hill, they're all getting older, and so the lions aren't in that window now. They need to do a few things to I think get a little bit more physically stout in certain areas so that they can win games different ways. So whether they're one O lineman short or one D lineman short, whatever that looks like, or more physical back and stylistically whatever that looks like, they're not far away and they could still get through this year. But I don't think BC's going anywhere. And I think they did take a step forward because I think if you'd have told me that they'd be in this spot with Vernon as their quarterback and have him play that well, I think you'd feel pretty good about the situation. Yeah, nothing about it. I wouldn't, and I would not have said that going into the year, and I was very nervous and I love Vernon and local guy and all that stuff. In terms of the other, except For that one year at the University of Oregon, that's the only part of Vernon I don't like. Everything else about Vernon's story is good except for the one year at Oregon. Yeah, that's good. The Edmonton thing came out yesterday. They were shutting down the upper stamp, big deal, no big deal. How do you read that? No big deal. I think they've kept them open as long as they have because I think they philosophically feel we're the Edmonton football team and we have the best attendance in the league, and we're not going to do anything artificial to take away from that attendance because we're Edmonton. But it's been a couple of tough seasons. I'm sure they'll open it up from time to time like they're doing out here in BC and they need to create some demand based on how they market and position their inventory. But also obviously in terms of what happens in the field, they've got to get better. But I think Rick Loeser is doing a good job there in terms of regaining the footing in the marketplace. They're going to wind up hiring a new president. They've got some decisions to make at head coach and gm, but not really a big deal. I don't think it's going to affect how that organization is perceived in the marketplace because I do believe that the last month of this season has shown the fans in Edmonton are still there and they'll come back. In terms of moving forward here, obviously we have the Victor Que stuff and everything this year. How are we viewing Edmonton's health or kind of foothold there? I mean, what are they? I don't know, because like you said, the trade forward thing's kind of working out and they haven't fallen off the cliff that I think people thought it was going to this year. Yeah, I mean the trade forward thing is giving the fans a lot of hope, and I think the organization's going to have to decide what's the best way to take advantage of that. And so if you believe that Trey Ford's the guy, then are you better off getting different coaches or trying to keep some stability in the building so he's not having to learn a different system and everything like that. So I don't know what the right answer is there. I think it could go either way, but I don't think it would take a ton to get the fans back. This isn't like Toronto where they've lost a generation or more of fans and you've really got to try to re-explain the language in the league and everything like that. Those fans are there, and we saw them, like I said later in the season, come back and bigger numbers when they had a reason to come back because they were being entertained. So that team's got to get better. They've still got some defensive fixes. They need to make some offensive line fixes they need to make. I don't know whether financially what they're currently doing is the right thing at the receiver position if you want to improve the other areas of your team. So they've still got some fixes, but at least straight forward's given them hope, and they've got to best decide how to capitalize on that hope. But I don't think it's going to take much. I think there are other markets where you're more concerned about getting it fixed, including the one, two and a half hours to the south, right? Because when you look at the apathy and attendance in Calgary, it's not good. And Edmonton's a better sports town than Calgary, but Calgary might be a more cool place to live if you were given a choice. But in terms of a sports town, Edmonton is better. Well, so I want to talk Saskatchewan here, but I mean, do you think Calgary, there's issues here coming in because Mayor hasn't progressed the way they wanted and attendance down, I mean, they're still in it, but it is such a weird playoff situation right now. Yeah, Calgary, I think they need to do more as an organization, similar problems, not as grave, but similar problems to what's going on in Toronto where the organization needs to do more. Because certainly in Toronto, from a football standpoint, they're doing everything possible. That's a really fun football team to watch. They're good. They'll probably be great cup favorites. And then in Calgary, they're taking a step back. Now, the Calgary model and their philosophy has always been, we're not going to overpay for guys. And if we lose some free agents, we lose some free agents. We don't care. We're just going to continue to develop. But they're not identifying and development and it is harder for every team. The spring leagues make it hard for the cfl. There's simply no doubt whether you think the cfl game is better or the spring league game is better. The reality is agents will tell their players, stay here and it's the same game and you're going to get us television and you get a few more eyeballs and that hurts the cfl. The fact that we're losing some spring football, and I know you don't like that, but there'll be a few teams gone and that'll make a few more players available. But how that relates to Calgary is most teams have adapted to a point. It's hard for all of them, but Calgary is behind in terms of adaptation. So they got to figure out, and if you're not going to identify and develop as well, then you better keep your guys and you better decide we're going to pay to keep our guys and not lose selected guys like they did last year, right? So they've got to evolve. I don't think anyone's in trouble there. I don't think Dave Dickinson's going anywhere. And why would you get rid of Jake Mayer? And I say that because who are you going to get? Who are you going to get? Nathan's not coming back. Who are you going to get? So if it was me, I would stick with Jake, build the roster out a little bit more and try to just get this season over with because this is not good over there. I think half that team wants it over with and just reset and charge In terms of the game here at Saskatchewan coming in and if they win, I was just looking at my playoffs scenarios and they're in, I am reading Saskatchewan, terrible year. They're raising season ticket prices. People are unhappy. The whole thing last year was Saskatchewan, like, hey, they're going to host and they don't even make the playoffs. And how are you viewing that? Because it's kind of two troubled franchises you're facing off. Yeah, I think Saskatchewan is in a position where they're setting themselves up for change. And I think they did a year ago too. They made a conscious choice to not eliminate their coaches and general manager at that point because they had one year left on their deal. They didn't want to have to carry those contracts over into this year, but they didn't extend anybody. And this is me speculating. I think a lot would have to happen unexpected in terms of a deep playoff run, maybe getting to a great cup in order for the team to bring back Craig Dickinson as head coach. I'm not advocating for that, I want to be clear, but just reading the tea leaves and the contractual situations around it, a lot would have to happen for them to want to come back because the franchise, the marketplace is hot, the marketplace wants change. Will that change extend to Jeremy O'Day because he's in the same situation contract-wise up at the end of the year. And again, I'm not advocating for O' Day's dismissal, however, not a lot of high-end people wanted to apply for the offensive coordinator job this year. I think Kelly Jeffrey's a good oc, but others specifically chose not to because those guys had one year left on their deals above them. So it's not stable. So if you're Jeremy O'Day, can the club make the decision to extend him for three years? Because if you just roll his contract over for one year, who are you going to get to apply to be the head coach? There are some people that'll do it just because, but ultimately it will affect your talent. Pool of head coach applicants. If you know the guy above you that's doing the hiring only has one year and that creates uncertainty. So will it extend just because of the contractual situations? It could, but there's going to be change there because I don't see a scenario where they're going to pull off a playoff upset or get to a gray cup. So I think the marketplace is upset, right? And they froze their prices coming out of Covid for season tickets. Now they're raising them again, which on the surface isn't wrong. But when you put this kind of product out there where they really slid in the back end of both seasons, that's tough for that market to digest. So there's some upset people, there's no doubt. But my understanding is that corporately and on other levels, they are still doing quite well. So don't let a few angry people on Twitter completely fool you. Well, and it was the whole, I think it was when they have a TV schedule this year right now, all these Sunday or all these games and we're not going and I mean it is funny how quickly all that goes away. In terms of the Ottawa team, I see a lot because it's weird and obviously last year the injuries and Oli and then this year and all that stuff, people seem really upset with Bob Dice and the team and the effort there. And what are you reading with the Ottawa kind of room? No change. Well, no change at the GM or head coaching spots. I'm quite certain those spots are going to be retained and I think you should, right? I mean I think Sean Burke has done a good job to this point. I think you need to give him a little more time and Bob D has only had one year, so I think he's made some mistakes on the game management side. We can point to a number of games and say, if you'd made this decision, which would've been a little more logical, you wouldn't be in this position record wise. But he has built a good culture, they're still playing for him. Even if they're not executing at a high level in that last game, they are still playing for him. They haven't quit on him. And I think that says a lot the room has bought in, might they make some change at the coordinator spots? I think that's possible, but that'll be up to Bob Dice to decide. I don't think people above him are going to micromanage that situation. So I don't think there's going to be wholesale changes and I think they just hope they can get the quarterback situation stabilized, right, because did you see enough in Dustin Crumb? Sounds to me like the marketplace is bought into Dustin Crumb. I think there was kind of a up and then kind of a bit of a plateau and I know he's dealing with some injuries and things like that as well and they could be better at receiver. I think their O line's really good, but I think they could get a little more dynamic at the receiver spot. So is Crumb the guy you're going to hang your hat on? I know Jeremiah Maoli wants to play again next year. I can't imagine they're going to go to Jeremiah after these last two seasons and say, okay, Jeremiah, you're the starter, same money, same situation, you're the starter. I think there'll probably be some sort of discussion there about trying to bring him back in a different role and maybe have a competition in training camp to see who the quarterback is going to be and continue for one more year trying to build it and have some continuity. It was always getting up there, man, it's just hard. The sandwich, Trevor Harris and all that stuff. I mean I say this as someone elder than any of them, but it's challenging. Last thing for me, Beau played a little bit Ty Katz. I was listening to the game driving back from bc. Is that a realistic situation there? They're going in playing Montreal here in the playoffs, however that ends up being. But is that a realistic for the tie Katz fans here after it's been a weird season, But they're playing their best football right now these last two games. So they've got their quarterback situation back to what they were hoping for. I mean, I think Matthew Shills is going to continue to get an opportunity. I understand that both Bo and Matthew are going to play against the Lions on Friday, so it feels like there is a window there for shills to get the ball to run with the rest of the season. He looked really good last week and they just want to win. And the fact is he gives them an element with his legs that Bo can't offer. Even though Bo's got more experience. Do I think that Orlando Steinhower would be afraid to say we're going to let the $500,000 guy be the backup for the next few games and let the other guy run with it? I think they'd be prepared to do that. I'm not telling you that that's what's happening, but if Matthew shows continues to play well this week, I think that door will stay open for him. But either way, I think we're going to see both of them and I absolutely believe they can beat Montreal in a playoff game. Can they beat Toronto? I doubt it, but we will see, right? Because you might get a situation with the Argos where they just take some time to find their mojo again, this is kind of an awkward finish to the season for them. They've still got to make decisions with how they're going to handle Chad Kelly and other parts of their roster. So if they all of a sudden go into the playoffs with a lack of momentum, I don't know that they can just turn it on right away. And if they can't, could Montreal or Hamilton sneak in and upset them maybe. But I would still favor Toronto in either of those games. And I do absolutely believe that Hamilton could beat Montreal the way they're playing right now. Well, I'm scared of BC going in and I don't know, do you rally after the game last week? There will be an emotional hangover for the Lions if the lions win in Hamilton Friday. I'll be surprised. Okay. All right. Shout out. I'm watching the Huskies here. Big game and we'll get you out of here. But big game. Oh Yeah, that's the game I want to talk about. Come on man. I can't believe you live in Seattle. You text me and dmm me about the Mariners Daily, which I like. But come on man. W T F get into the Huskies. They're ranked seventh in the nation. They could be in the playoffs the last year of the PAC 12. Come on Reid Bet. I bet You Dorothy's fan. I bet you Dorothy's into it. No, Dorothy's a fan. Dorothy has her Winnipeg. Washington stuff she wears is Winnipeg. But it is funny to think that we Went purple. Not blue right there. That's not a Bomber's helmet right there. That's a Husky's helmet. Well we got to Get Husky surfboard, We got to get her. It's just funny, I enjoy the first time you came on in your guardian outside talking like F L cfl talks and now we're DMing about Paul Alt doing cannonballs in the hot tub. So I do enjoy that. I enjoy that. I can at least bother you a little bit about the Mariners Farhan. I appreciate it making time today. It means a lot. Alright buddy. We'll talk again soon. Well here we are. We had you on last, I think it was last season. Had a delight here. Greg Peach back again. Former cfl here standout. How is everything going? First off Spokane here. We were talking prerecorded. I went to Gonzaga, spent time over in eastern Washington as well. Yeah, it's been going great over here. I've been able to just kind of plug myself into this community since I retired about seven years ago. Run a training facility, provision Academy out of Spokane and then also Provision Foundation. We help scholarship kids into different club sports and camps out in this area. And then I'm always heavily invested in Eastern Washington football and athletics. I actually got to about three weeks ago, I was the color commentary for our TV game for the first time and that was a really cool experience and it almost felt like another game, which I haven't had that feeling in a while. So it was cool. Yeah, you never get that that I've heard you never get that back, that feeling there. It spent time obviously we'll talk Edmonton and Hamilton and everything else here. I spent time up, I was at BC Place last Friday for the overtime heartbreaker. Probably the most heartbreaking game I've been to. And not that we go to a lot of high stakes games, but what do you make of this bc, Winnipeg, the West, kind of everything else cfl here? Yeah, I've been definitely obviously tracking it. Huge Winnipeg fan and then I'm always obviously Edmonton and Hamilton. Winnipeg was just the last team that I was on that I really had a great experience with. But yeah, I love watching guys that I know that are playing and competing. So I followed BC Lions watching Vernon Adams and TJ Lee doing their thing and that game I actually got to catch that game and wow, what a finish. I, and it's just, it's crazy that Winnipeg, they just keep doing it and they now have that pedigree. They're kind of like Calgary when I was playing and they've turned themselves into that and so they finished those close games or you'll see 'em losing the Labor Day game, but then they come back and put 50 on 'em. It is been fun to watch and I know that who's in that organization and those guys and I'm happy for 'em because they're good dudes and they're doing it the right way. But yeah, that was a crazy, crazy finish. Well to me it felt, and that's kind of why I told my wife we should go to this. It kind of felt like the season, I don't know, I lived through last year and we beat the pants off Calgary and the semis and then we went into IG field last year. The Nathan Roarke wasn't quite up to speed and frozen tundra and kind of all that stuff kind of felt the same way this year. What are your thoughts your BC making a run, I've got Farhan on the show as well here. We're going to talk through, I know he was doing the commentary for that game, the season. How do you feel about the BC Lion season right now? I mean I think they definitely have a shot. They got that receiver. Great weapon I think is white is it? And we saw with Winnipeg in Toronto, there was just, that was not what I thought was going to happen. And so when you get yourself into the playoff race and you get yourself into those games, you can never count out BC coming in and beating Winnipeg. Obviously Winnipeg is going to be the favorite going all the way to the Gray Cup, but I do like what I'm seeing from BC and it's obviously I'm rooting for Winnipeg, but Vernon just a top notch, top notch dude and I'm so excited for him and the success that he's having. I mean he's bombing it this year and I'd love to see him break that 5,000 yards for the season. Well it is cool with Vernon because obviously Eastern Washington guy and he's in Tacoma now and not even really that far from where I'm at. To me that was really the question point going into the season is Vernon, it's a little bit of a, you're on the roller coaster, it's exciting, but it's also a little scary sometimes. I mean say for the Toronto game where he threw the six interceptions really, I mean that's a big out outline, but really like you said, he's played phenomenally well here and finally feeling like he's comfortable and I know he's got a lot of talent around him and so does Zach and so does Jack Kelly. I mean the good teams and the cfl feel like they're really good right now. So I dunno, it's just been really nice to see. I was scared for Vernon going into the season, Man. Everyone was about ready to just get rid of him after that game. This is the real Vernon. I felt bad after that happened, but I know how much he invests in his off seasons and into the teams, which is one thing that will separate you in the cfl is those leaders that take charge when you don't have to be up there. And that's what he's done since he's kind of become that premier guy and you can see obviously that that worked out and he's taken that next step to be that guy and solidifying himself as a top cfl quarterback and it really couldn't happen to a better guy. That's another reason. And I can just from personal insight and knowing him that he deserves this. So it's cool to watch, especially after that six, six pick game. In terms of Edmonton, obviously when your former teams news coming out this week kind of doing the BC place route, we're not going to open the upper bowl anymore and I don't know how that works with how many season tickets are up there, all that stuff. What did you make of that? I, I saw people laughing online and this is a joke, but they also saw people, one, it's going to make more intimate experience, so what do you make of this? As a fan, I look at it and I'd be saying, well if I am in that upper deck, my seats better not cost more if you're moving me and as a player playing, I love when they close that off. I want it to be more personal. I want it to be everyone close to the field. I played in a lot of stadiums like that when you play at a mid-major D one, you're going to Montana and you're playing against 30,000 fans and they're right there on you and it feels like a hundred because I've played in those stadiums too. And sometimes those 30,000 seat stadiums are louder than the big 90 or a hundred thousand stadiums and especially in Edmonton, I think it'd be a way better experience and I think BC's doing a great job of getting excitement over there with those fans and obviously winning helps. But yeah, you can't have stragglers up there. It is just a bad look in my opinion. And honestly, when I was playing at Edmonton, I think there was one game, it was my oh nine rookie season. We had Saskatchewan coming in. It was for first place, middle of the year and they said around 60,000 people there, which is awesome. Okay, open it up, you got 60, open it up. But that's not happening right now. I'm not trying to dog on Edmonton, but four wins, let's close up the upper section there. It was crazy. We were flying back, I was in Vegas for the Kraken game on Tuesday, the opener at Vegas. And we were sitting there at the airport and these guys, they were talking about going up and seeing the Vancouver Connects game and they're like, oh what? Okay, Roger's Center, okay, what's BC place? And so we got into this whole conversation like what I was just there and the lions and all that and we were looking online, huge capacity for BC Lions and some of the numbers they were drawn early on. I was astounded like, oh yeah, the Lions first game there had 53,000 people. I'm like, that's insane. I mean because we were there biggest game of the year on Friday and it was not even less than half that really just remarkable to kind of track some of these and it's a sign of the times and everything else, but a far cry from where kind of BC place was back when it opened up. That's crazy. I don't know if I played a game that was more than 30,000 over there when I was playing it. I don't even know if it touched 30 even in Edmonton, Edmonton was always the highest as far as attendance and it was around 35 was the average. And like I said, you get a one-off in a big game. But yeah, it's definitely tracked down. But I do like being in the states here I can follow, but I don't get to follow as closely as watching every game on the weekend kind of thing. But I do like the excitement that they're bringing. We had this conversation last time about what they could do on social media and I do think they're getting better at that. And like you said, just kind of with the times, but now it's getting people out of their fricking house to go to a game. Then you get all everything online that you can see. I'll just watch the highlight here and oh, that looks cool. And that's what BC has done a good job of. I always watch the president on Twitter and what he's doing to get excitement there. So there are teams that are doing it and the ones on the west and east coast that have to go the hardest with that because Saskatchewan's always going to be Saskatchewan and they're always going to get that crowd. Winnipeg, same thing. But yeah, it's those coast teams that got to set their game up Well and like you said, it's hard TV and for the most part, I think the demos and numbers this year at least with three downs tracking have been good, right? TV ratings have been good, but it's like you said, it's getting people in. I know the xfl, they a myriad of other issues with these alt leagues, but they spend so much time on the broadcast TV broadcast, okay, we've got the microphones everywhere and you can hear everything and we're doing all this stuff. I don't get any of that when I go to the stadium. So you need to figure out, and I know Edmonton was trying to do that with the sweets, you get all you can eat and you're on the field, whatever couches, whatever, you have to do something because if I'm getting a better experience watching on tv, it is really hard to pay and go and I just spent whatever it was to go to Vegas to do all this. You're asking a lot of your fans, like you said, when you can get, I can sit on my phone on Twitter and watch it on TV and get probably a superior experience. Yeah, no doubt. And for me too, I am an Eastern fan and I have season tickets. I'm out here talking about fans, got to get out there, but I don't go to every game that we have. But I will go if there is an opportunity to get on the field or they have the tents with the all you can eat and the drinks and that is the route that you got to go because cfl's always been that way anyway as far as the fan experience with the players. But getting on that field for the warmups, even after Winnipeg does an incredible job of that. I always remembered those games. I was always talking to fans. There was hundreds on the field before and then after, even as brutal as a season we had my last year here out there signing autographs for fans and it doesn't feel great, but I know it is definitely helping those kids out and those parents in it makes 'em want to come back for sure to support the team. So maybe they need to have a chat with Wade Miller and with the playbook. Yeah, I think so. In terms of Edmonton season, it wasn't the greatest. It took a little too long to go to the trade four experience. What would you make of just the overall season this year? I think looking now, it feels like they have momentum going into the next year where people were screaming, fire Chris Jones and all this stuff. Kind of a weird situation where it was a failure this year, but through that maybe we found success, here're moving forward, Man, I was in the same boat and don't really, I'm not putting my opinions out there too much about it. I know how hard it is to make those decisions as GM and a head coach and even for those players, I, you're feeling bad for a lot of those guys and I know a couple of them in Edmonton still. But yeah, the thing about Chris Jones is it's not a situation where everyone's rooting for him. He kind of plays that villain role anyway in the cfl and My Way or the highway. So that's, I think piles on even more from the fans and anyone outside his organization now. People that play for him that I've talked to, absolutely love playing for him. And if you can make his squad, you know, really earned it because he's very cutthroat and he's looking for the best guys and he's got kind of a certain guy that he wants and if you're not that you're probably not going to be there. So when you make his squad, you love playing for him, but that switch obviously needed to be made way sooner and we're seeing the result of it and I've been very impressed with Trey Ford. It's a cool storyline for this year. Well, and I think it's this whole promoting the Canadian talent and everything. To me there's too many good things about the situation where it is just weird. It took so long. I mean we love Cornelius and we tracked him even through the xfl and all that stuff, but it is just amazing that the difference that team seems to look and feel here with Ford and it seems like it's only kind of picking up, I know they haven't had as many wins closing out the year, but it certainly feels like a different team. And it was almost that thing where it's like, I'm not going to do what the fans want. I'm going to do it my way, but at the end of the day, that's what you're going to get out of Chris Jones. That's how he's always been and that's why he's been so successful in the league. So I think he gets him in there earlier. They got a much better shot playoff shot, but now he might've saved his contract at least knowing they got somebody coming in next year that can sling it and win games. So he made the right choice by getting 'em in there just a little too late. Talking about Hamilton here, kind of a weird season for them, obviously with the Bo Levis and all of that. And then they came in and beat Saskatchewan right at home last week, kind of a dominant paning of Saskatchewan. They're going to be in the playoffs. Cody Fido's kind of hot and cold. We're fans of Cody here, but what do you make of that? I do think I, whether it's Saskatchewan or Calgary, I think BC takes care of that and then goes into Winnipeg, but to me the playoffs on the east are a little bit more interesting that way. What do you make of that with it, with the Hamilton, with their season and then kind of going into the outlets? Yeah, I mean Stan and i's got a tough choice. They're going in because I know that B is just coming back and they want him healthy for that run, but it's how much are they going to lean on him? And I've obviously followed Bo as another former Eastern Washington Eagle go Eagles. And so I'm excited that he's back in. He got to play a little bit last week and did well. But in the playoffs too, to be able to have guys that even as a backup that can play and win games. Bo's got just a great resume, obviously everyone understands that. So going into the playoffs I'd be able to have a couple guys that can win. That's huge for them. But yeah, it'll be an interesting decision by the coach. Man. It's funny, you can get to a spot and when you get to the playoffs, man, that's when the pressure just hits on these guys. I've been a part of teams where they make decisions, you're like, what are we doing? We've done it this way the whole time. But yeah, there's so many different things too that we don't understand contractually with these players too. And they're trying to piece together a team for next year as well and keep people happy. So yeah, that'll be interesting. Yeah, because I mean just looking here, BC coming in and that's, BC's got to keep pace here, this coming up this weekend kind of a must win for them. So it's weird, it's a weird timing with just looking at the schedule and then Hamilton having a late bye and then playing Montreal there and what could be a weird preview of the playoffs. It's just weird. You're getting Bo back would've been better off getting it back a couple weeks ago. I mean obviously you can't whatever, but it is late now where it's like we got to use him, Taylor Powell, Matthew Schu have having gotten us to this point. It's a tricky situation there. It seems like it's a crowded space, if that makes sense. Yeah, no, it is. And when I got to Edmonton, the story was always told about Ricky Ray and Jason Moss going into the Great Cup game because Moss had won a couple of the playoff games to get him to the Great Cup. Ricky was hurt and then it was a game time decision and they went with Ricky and then they win the gray cup. Yeah, it's such a tough, tough decision you got to make going into those situations, but that's why that was Danny Macho was calling, that's why he's still in the league, so you can say what you want about him, but he's still got a job in the cfl, so he's made some tough decisions and some of 'em are the right ones. Well Greg, I appreciate coming on today. Anything else? Any other things you're looking forward to this weekend or through the rest of the year? I'm excited for, I was kind of looking at the upcoming schedule and it's funny, we got, there's only three games for the last two weeks, which is a totally different thing than I'm used to seeing. So they really, really made this a long season to get to the playoffs. Like holy crap, it feels like we should be starting next week, but here we go three more weekends. It's tough down here to watch every game, but I'll be checking it out and then when the playoffs starts and that's when I'm on my couch And I've had conversations, I've had conversations, even on this show with the commissioner, a lot was made of the cfl or c b s sports, whatever, sports streaming. And unless you're on that CFL plus for a lot of these games, it's really hard to watch 'em. And I would like this to be revisited a different way for us American viewers to watch these on demand because it is hard. And even on our Monday recaps, I rely a lot on Jason Hussey, one of the guys in Hamilton to really kind of have the in-depth breakdown of all these because it is hard if I'm out on a Saturday for two hours, it's like, well that was it. You can't go back. So Greg, I appreciate it. You best of luck with everything and like I said with everything over in Eastern Washington and everything else, I appreciate you coming on today. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Love talking to cfl man. Well here is someone we've watched every week really and we can talk Edmonton and all of that, but really kind of have a stellar season. Kevin Brown here with the Edmonton Elks, how are you doing sir? I'm doing good, I'm doing good. I was watching some of your post game getting ready for this and everything just seems like a joyous, happy guy. I mean, how do you keep, I don't know, it just seems like you have a great personality about you. Yeah, I do. I mean it's all from my upbringing, you know what I'm saying? So I'm an optimistic kind of person, so I always look at the bras side of things, what I'm with. Something goes wrong, there's always a positive, so I always look for the positive and that keeps me in the uplifting spirit. So yeah, I'm a happy kind of guy. It's funny, it's always the most physical talented people on the field always seem to be like I interview a lot of defensive guys in here and we've had Matthew Betts with the BC alliance and stuff. I'm like, it's always seems like the guys that just will beat you on the field are always the nicest guys. It's just kind of funny. Yeah, definitely though, definitely I ran into a couple of them before. So how's it been like for you this year? I mean, let's talk personally first and then team wise. How has been your 2023 on the football field? Personally I would say there's definitely been some ups and downs, you know what I'm saying? For me, I think in the beginning I wasn't where I wanted to be but getting more comfortable and I was in my head a lot and once I realized just play free, play, relax and play calm, I believe everything came clearer to me. So since I've started doing that, everything's been going good for me. Did you feel like, and we've had on even Coach Jones on last year, we had him on after the season, do you feel like the staff that you guys have in place that helps you, they help you succeed? Oh yeah, definitely. I have some of the coaches come up to me, give me some encouraging words. My running back coach for me, I was questioning myself sometimes and then my coach was like, it's all about confidence. You're the guy, you could do what you do. I've seen it before. You've got to trust in your ability, trust in yourself. And I feel like that helped me a lot On with the team last year, first full season this year being put in a really prominent position. How did that feel and how did you internalize that? Because a lot of pressure on, I feel like don't try to look at it as that way, you know what I'm saying? Try to, for me, I feel like doing the small things can help lead to being greater to things. So that's what I really try to harp on In terms of learning process, going into everything in the cfl. Have it challenging you at all? Like I said, from 2022 into 2023? Oh yeah, when I first got here, definitely because I only had three days to practice and then I was thrown into the game so it came at me fast. And then once during that whole 2022 process, I was still learning the offense. I was still learning all the rules to the game and everything. And then once 20, 23 season came around, I found myself getting comfortable. I knew the offense, I knew the players, I knew the tendencies. So that time really helped me progress into what I'm doing now. Did you have thoughts of the cfl before you came up? I mean, I'm from Seattle, so I have thoughts. Well, I mean did you have thoughts entering the league that maybe lived up or didn't live up to what you thought? Different perspective Really, I thought I was never going to be in the cfl. I had tryouts from the Broncos, had tryouts from the Ravens. I thought I was going to lay in one of those spots, but it didn't happen. So when I got the call I jumped on it right away because an opportunity to show what I can produce. So never thought I had thoughts about going to Canada, but now that I'm here, I'm liking it. I'm getting to a nice feel about it and it is going well for me. Do you like Edmonton? I've never been there. I think it's probably a pretty fri at certain times of the year. Oh, Edmonton is nice. Edmonton is nice. It is a great, I feel like it's called Providence or is Alberta. I'm sorry, I don't even, Yeah, Alberta's the providence. You're good, you're good. Yeah, yeah. But no, it is nice. The people are nice, the food is amazing. I'm a foodie, so the food is amazing. The people are nice. Like I said before, I mean it's a great place to be honestly. In terms of, we've tracked Edmonton here the last couple of years and maybe not the season I think anyone wanted. It's been a little bit of ups and downs. What has it been the mentality through the locker room here during the season? The mentality is focus on the next game. Even if you win or lose, you got to focus on the next game. The mentality in the locker room and the coaching staff has been uplifting, you know what I'm saying? But you have your adversities, you have your ups and downs, but it's all mental so you have to learn to deal with it and to go back and look on what mistakes that you made and try to improve on that. So what I do is I try to get the same, get 1% better every day. I take that to heart so you have a bad game or you mess up, try not to mess up again on the same thing. So you just got to look forward to the next play or to the next game. Do you feel like having the season, and it certainly swung up here more recently, but does that make the locker room closer? Have you guys been able to bond, I could see it being the other way, right, where you're like, hey, we're kind of getting argumentative. Do you feel like you guys have bonded through all this? Oh, definitely. The guys that we have on the team and the staff where everybody came from, what I'm saying, whatever the background people have, you could definitely see it because we definitely came closer, so want to lose. We always going to have each other's backs. We always going to look forward trying to help each other or better each other. Iron sharpens iron, so we definitely have those type of guys in the locker room and that's going to help us get to the next level. In terms of, obviously there was a lot of the story this year with the quarterback and stuff. We had Trey on. I thought Trey is going to be a super, I try to hitch my wagon into these guys like this going to be, we finally get to that position. We love Cornelius and all that other stuff. Having someone like Trey, what does that help you do from your position of where he's a threat, right? Then you're going to be, how has that helped to add into the offense there With Trey in the back, I feel like he's a dual a threat personally for me because he can run it, as you've seen as many people seen before, he, he's dangerous on his feet, but he's also, he has an arm and he has eyes, he has the vision and it helps me because the defense doesn't know if he's going to take it, if we have a play action or whatever, they don't know if he's going to pull it and run off with it or pass it or he's going to give it off. So it gives the defense some honor to where they have to play both of us. So if he gives it, I do what I do and if he pulls it, he does what he does and either way we're going to get some yards off of it. Is he a good leader in terms of the offense of that or where do you guys look to when you're on the play field, who's helping rally the troops there? I feel like it definitely starts with the quarterback and Trey is definitely, he definitely can do it. He's shown it before. He's done it almost every game. So yeah. Yeah, we look for us to be, we look for trade to be the leader and he is. In terms of this weekend, like I said, your season kind of out of it here, chance to play spoiler a little bit to the Montreal coming. They have a really impressive defense. I've had lots of their guys on the show. What are you looking for to that? I do think that this could be kind of a heavy hitting in terms of strengths on both sides of the ball. So what are you looking forward to? Honestly, I don't know, but they have a good defense. They're physical, they play fast. But for us, I feel like we just have to strike fast. We have to be fast, we have to start ahead of them, you know what I'm saying? We have to hit them before they hit us and I feel like that's what we have to do and be physical for us to come on top. For this game Being out of it, what's the message in the locker room? I guess going in just one game at a time still or how are you approaching this? Maybe now that the season's a little out of hand, We're approaching this game and the next game as this is a playoff game and we're looking to capitalize on the next season. We're building now for next season and we're approaching every game like it's a playoff game. So for us it's to be physical, to hit 'em first and to come out fast. That's how we were approaching it. I like that. Well Kevin, I appreciate that. I appreciate you making the time and getting near the end of the season here, but it certainly feels like you guys have the upswing and we're getting everything. It was a little messy there mid, we don't need to get into all that, but it does feel good. Edmonton, I got a lot of friends up there on both sides and calling the games and stuff, so I appreciate it and thanks for making the time today. Oh yes sir, no problem. And being so punctual, I just want to point that out again, Kevin, very punctual and it's always kind of a mixed bag. So Kevin, I appreciate it. We watch and talk about you guys every week, so I appreciate it and good luck this weekend. I appreciate it. Thank you man. Huge special. Thanks again to all of our guests. Really appreciate Anthony Miller hopping on after his work schedule and all his personal life, everything else going on, balancing all of that. Really appreciate that. Super appreciate Farhan making time. Busy guy. And then obviously Greg Peach coming on with all of his commitments and Kevin Brown Edmonton Elks. Really appreciate you guys setting that up. Like I said, Edmonton certainly one of the best teams to work with in terms of providing players and when Victor Qui was involved in all that stuff. So super appreciate that. That will do it for me today. Good luck here to the Kraken over the weekend, back in the hockey season. Should be some good cfl games as well. Hopefully Farhan ISS predicting the Hamilton that upset here with bc so we'll see. But should be excited. Make you're subscribed, keep you up to date on all the xfl usfl merger news, the N S F L whatever. We're on the call when that finally comes about. So make sure you're subscribed. We'll see you next time. Thanks.